Part 349

The hand of Charles V. had been heavy on the Netherlands; but resistance to such a power as that of Spain in his day was hardly dreamed of. It was not easy for Philip to outdo his father's despotism; less easy to drive the laborious Hollanders and Flemings to desperation and force them into rebellious war. But he accomplished it. He filled the country with Spanish troops. He reorganized and stimulated the Inquisition. He multiplied bishoprics in the Provinces, against the wish of even the Catholic population. He scorned the counsels of the great nobles, and gave foreign advisers to the Regent, his half-sister, Margaret of Parma, illegitimate daughter of Charles V., whom he placed at the head of the government. His oppressions were endured, with increasing signs of hidden passion, for ten years. Then, in 1566, the first movement of patriotic combination appeared. It was a league among certain of the nobles; its objects were peaceful, its plans were legal; but it was not countenanced by the wiser of the patriots, who saw that events were not ripe. The members of the league went in solemn procession to the Regent with a petition; whereupon one of her councillors denounced them as "a troop of beggars." They promptly seized the epithet and appropriated it. A beggar's wallet became their emblem; the idea was caught up and carried through the country, and a visible party rose quickly into existence.

The religious feeling now gained boldness. Enormous field-meetings began to be held, under arms, in every part of the open country, defying edicts and Inquisition. There followed a little later some fanatical and riotous outbreaks in several cities, breaking images and desecrating churches. Upon these occurrences, Philip despatched to the Netherlands, in the summer of 1567, a fresh army of Spanish troops, commanded by a man who was after his own heart—as mean, as false, as merciless, as little in soul and mind, as himself,—the Duke of Alva. Alva brought with him authority which practically superseded that of the Regent, and secret instructions which doomed every man of worth in the Provinces.

At the head of the nobility of the country; by eminence of character, no less than by precedence in rank, stood William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, who derived his higher title from a petty and remote principality, but whose large family possessions were in Flanders, Brabant, Holland and Luxemburg. Associated closely with him, in friendship and in political action, were Count Egmont, and the Admiral Count Horn, the latter of a family related to the Montmorencies of France. These three conspicuous nobles Philip had marked with special malice for the headsman, though their solitary crime had been the giving of advice against his tyrannies. William of Orange-"the Silent," as he came to be known—far-seeing in his wisdom, and well-advised by trusty agents in Spain, withdrew into Germany before Alva arrived. He warned his friends of their danger and implored them to save themselves; but they were blinded and would not listen. The perfidious Spaniard lured them with flatteries to Brussels and thrust them into prison. They were to be the first victims of the appalling sacrifice required to appease the dull rage of the king. Within three months they had eighteen hundred companions, condemned like themselves to the scaffold, by a council in which Alva presided and which the people called "the Council of Blood." In June, 1568, they were brought to the block.

Meantime Prince William and his brother, Louis of Nassau, had raised forces in Germany and attempted the rescue of the terrorized Provinces; but their troops were ill-paid and mutinous and they suffered defeat. For the time being, the Netherlands were crushed. As many of the people as could escape had fled; commerce was at a standstill; workshops were idle; the cities, once so wealthy, were impoverished; death, mourning, and terror, were everywhere. Alva had done very perfectly what he was sent to do.

The first break in the blackness of the clouds appeared in April, 1572, when a fleet, manned by refugee adventurers who called themselves Sea-Beggars, attacked and captured the town of Brill. From that day the revolt had its right footing, on the decks of the ships of the best sailors in the world. It faced Philip from that day as a maritime power, which would grow by the very feeding of its war with him, until it had consumed everything Spanish within its reach. The taking of Brill soon gave the patriots control of so many places in Holland and Zealand that a meeting of deputies was held at Dort, in July, 1572, which declared William of Orange to be "the King's legal Stadtholder in Holland, Zealand, Friesland and Utrecht," and recommended to the other Provinces that he be appointed Protector of all the Netherlands during the King's absence.

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Alva's reign of terror had failed so signally that even he was discouraged and asked to be recalled. It was his boast when he retired that he had put eighteen thousand and six hundred of the Netherlanders to death since they were delivered into his hands, above and beyond the horrible massacres by which he had half depopulated every captured town. Under Alva's successor, Don Louis de Requesens, a man of more justice and humanity, the struggle went on, adversely, upon the whole, to the patriots, though they triumphed gloriously in the famous defense of Leyden. To win help from England, they offered the sovereignty of their country to Queen Elizabeth; but in vain. They made no headway in the southern provinces, where Catholicism prevailed, and where the religious difference drew people more to the Spanish side. But when Requesens died suddenly, in the spring of 1576, and the Spanish soldiery broke into a furious mutiny, sacking Antwerp and other cities, then the nobles of Flanders and Brabant applied to the northern provinces for help. The result was a treaty, called the Pacification of Ghent, which contemplated a general effort to drive the Spaniards from the whole land. But not much came of this confederacy; the Catholic provinces never co-operated with the Protestant provinces, and the latter went their own way to freedom and prosperity, while the former sank back, submissive, to their chains.

For a short time after the death of Requesens, Philip was represented in the Netherlands by his illegitimate half-brother, Don John of Austria; but Don John died in October, 1578, and then came the great general, Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, who was to try the patriots sorely by his military skill. In 1579, the Prince of Orange drew them more closely together, in the Union of Utrecht, which Holland, Zealand, Gelderland, Zutphen, Utrecht, Overyssel, and Groningen, subscribed, and which was practically the foundation of the Dutch republic, though allegiance to Philip was not yet renounced. This followed two years later, in July, 1581, when the States General, assembled at the Hague, passed a solemn Act of Abjuration, which deposed Philip from his sovereignty and transferred it to the Duke of Anjou, a prince of the royal family of France, who did nothing for the Provinces, and who died soon after. At the same time, the immediate sovereignty of Holland and Zealand was conferred on the Prince of Orange.

In March, 1582, Philip made his first deliberate attempt to procure the assassination of the Prince. He had entered into a contract for the purpose, and signed it with his own hand. The assassin employed failed only because the savage pistol wound he inflicted, in the neck and jaw of his victim, did not kill. The master-murderer, at Madrid, was not discouraged. He launched his assassins, one following the other, until six had made their trial in two years. The sixth, one Balthazar Gerard, accomplished that for which he was sent, and William the Silent, wise statesman and admirable patriot, fell under his hand (July 10, 1584). Philip was so immeasurably delighted at this success that he conferred three lordships on the parents of the murderer.

William's son, Maurice, though but eighteen years old, was immediately chosen Stadtholder of Holland, Zealand and Utrecht, and High Admiral of the Union. In the subsequent years of the war, he proved himself a general of great capacity. Of the details of the war it is impossible to speak. Its most notable event was the siege of Antwerp, whose citizens defended themselves against the Duke of Parma, with astonishing courage and obstinacy, for many months. They capitulated in the end on honorable terms; but the prosperity of their city had received a blow from which it never revived.

Once more the sovereignty of the Provinces was offered to Queen Elizabeth of England, and once more declined; but the queen sent her favorite, the Earl of Leicester, with a few thousand men, to help the struggling Hollanders (1585). This was done, not in sympathy with them or their cause, but purely as a self-defensive measure against Spain. The niggardliness and the vacillations of Elizabeth, combined with the incompetency of Leicester, caused troubles to the Provinces nearly equal to the benefit of the forces lent them. Philip of Spain was now involved in his undertakings with the Guises and the League in France, and in his plans against England, and was weakened in the Netherlands for some years. Parma died in 1592, and Count Mansfield took his place, succeeded in his turn by the Marquis Spinola. The latter, at last, made an honest report, that the subjugation of the United Provinces was impracticable, and, Philip II. being now dead, the Spanish government was induced in 1607 to agree to a suspension of arms. A truce for twelve years was arranged; practically it was the termination of the war of independence, and practically it placed the United Provinces among the nations, although the formal acknowledgment of their independence was not yielded by Spain until 1648.

England under Mary.

While the Netherlands had offered to Philip of Spain a special field for his malice, there were others thrown open to him which he did not neglect. He may be said, in fact, to have whetted his appetite for blood and for burned human flesh in England, whither he went, as a young prince, in 1554, to marry his elderly second cousin, Queen Mary. We may be sure that he did not check the ardor of his consort, when she hastened to re-establish the supremacy of the Pope, and to rekindle the fires of religious persecution. The two-hundred and seventy-seven heretics whom she is reckoned to have burned may have seemed to him, even then, an insignificant handful. He quickly tired of her, if not of her congenial work, and left her in 1555. In 1558 she died, and the Church of Rome fell once more, never to regain its old footing of authority.

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England under Elizabeth.

Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn, who now came to the throne, was Protestant by the necessities of her position, whether doctrinally convinced or no. The Catholics denied her legitimacy of birth, and disputed, therefore, her right to the crown. She depended upon the Protestants for her support, and Protestantism, either active or passive, had become, without doubt, the dominant faith of the nation. But the mild schism which formerly took most of its direction from Luther, had now been powerfully acted upon by the influence of Calvin. Geneva had been the refuge of many ministers and teachers who fled from Mary's fires, and they returned to spread and deepen in England the stern, strong, formidable piety which Calvin evoked. These Calvinistic Protestants now made themselves felt as a party in the state, and were known ere long by that name which the next century rendered famous in English and American history—the great name of the Puritans. They were not satisfied with the stately, decorous, ceremonious Church which Elizabeth reconstructed on the pattern of the Church of Edward VI. At the same time, no party could be counted on more surely for the support of the queen, since the hope of Protestantism in England depended upon her, even as she was dependent upon it.

The Catholics, denying legitimacy to Elizabeth, recognized Mary Queen of Scots as the lawful sovereign of England. And Mary was, in fact, the next in succession, tracing her lineage, as stated before, to the elder sister of Henry VIII. If Elizabeth had been willing to frankly acknowledge Mary's heirship, failing heirs of her own body, it seems probable that the partisans of the Scottish queen would have been quieted, to a great extent. But Mary had angered her by assuming, while in France, the arms and style of Queen of England. She distrusted and disliked her Stuart cousin, and, moreover, the whole idea of a settlement of the succession was repugnant to her mind. At the same time, she could not be brought to marry, as her Protestant subjects wished. She coquetted with the notion of marriage through half her reign, but never to any purpose.

Such were the elements of agitation and trouble in England under Elizabeth. The history of well-nigh half-a-century was shaped in almost all its events by the threatening attitude of Catholicism and its supporters, domestic and foreign, toward the English queen. She was supported by the majority of her subjects with staunch loyalty and fidelity, even though she treated them none too well, and troubled them in their very defense of her by her whims and caprices. They identified her cause with themselves, and took such pride in her courage that they shut their eyes to the many weaknesses that went with it. She never grasped the affairs she dealt with in a broadly capable way. She never acted on them with well considered judgment. Her ministers, it is clear, were never able to depend upon a reasonable action of her mind. Her vanity or her jealousy might put reason in eclipse at any moment, and a skilful flatterer could make the queen as foolish as a milkmaid. But she had a royal courage and a royal pride of country, and she did make the good and glory of England her aim. So she won the affection of all Englishmen whose hearts were not in the keeping of the Pope, and no monarch so arbitrary was ever more ardently admired.

Mary, Queen of Scots.

In 1567, Mary Stuart was deposed by her own subjects, or forced to abdicate in favor of her infant son, James. She had alienated the Scottish people, first by her religion, and then by her suspected personal crimes. Having married her second cousin, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, she was accused of being false to him. Darnley revenged his supposed wrongs as a husband by murdering her secretary, David Rizzio. In the next year (1567) Darnley was killed; the hand of the Earl of Bothwell appeared quite plainly in the crime, and the queen's complicity was believed. She confirmed the suspicions against herself by marrying Bothwell soon afterwards. Then her subjects rose against her, imprisoned her in Loch Leven Castle, and made the Earl of Murray regent of the Kingdom. In 1568 Mary escaped from her Scottish prison and entered England. From that time until her death, in 1587, she was a captive in the hands of her rival, Queen Elizabeth, and was treated with slender magnanimity. More than before, she became the focus of intrigues and conspiracies which threatened both the throne and the life of Elizabeth, and a growing feeling of hostility to the wretched woman was inevitable.

In 1570, Pope Pius V. issued against Elizabeth his formal bull of excommunication, absolving her subjects from their allegiance. This quickened, of course, the activity of the plotters against the queen and set treason astir. Priests from the English Catholic Seminary at Douai, afterwards at Rheims, began to make their appearance in the country; a few Jesuits came over; and both were active agents of the schemes on foot which contemplated the seating of Mary Stuart on the throne of Elizabeth Tudor. Some of these emissaries were executed, and they are counted among the martyrs of the Catholic Church, which is a serious mistake. The Protestantism of the sixteenth century was quite capable of religious persecution, even to death; but it has no responsibilities of that nature in these Elizabethan cases. As a matter of fact, the religion of the Jesuit sufferers in the reign of Elizabeth was a mere incident attaching itself to a high political crime, which no nation has ever forgiven.

The plotting went on for twenty years, keeping the nation in unrest; while beyond it there were thickening signs of a great project of invasion in the sinister mind of Philip II. At last, in 1586, the coolest councillors of Elizabeth persuaded her to bring Mary Stuart to trial for alleged complicity in a conspiracy of assassination which had lately come to light. Convicted, and condemned to death, Mary ended her sad life on the scaffold, at Fotheringay, on the 8th of February, 1587. Whether guilty or guiltless of any knowledge of what had been done in her name, against the peace of England and against the life of the English queen, it cannot be thought strange that Protestant England took her life.

The Spanish Armada.

A great burst of wrath in Catholic Europe was caused by the execution of Mary, and Philip of Spain hastened forward his vast preparations for the invasion and conquest of England. In 1588, the "invincible armada," as it was believed to be, sailed out of the harbors of Portugal and Spain, and wrecked itself with clumsy imbecility on the British and Irish coasts. It scarcely did more than give sport to the eager English sailors who scattered its helpless ships and hunted them down. Philip troubled England no more, and conspiracy ceased.

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England at Sea.

But the undeclared, half-piratical warfare which private adventurers had been carrying on against Spanish commerce for many years now acquired fresh energy. Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher, Grenvil, Raleigh, were the heroic spirits of this enterprising warfare; but they had many fellows. It was the school of the future navy of England, and the foundations of the British Empire were laid down by those who carried it on.

Otherwise, Elizabeth had little war upon her hands, except in Ireland, where the state of misery and disorder had already been long chronic. The first really complete conquest of the island was accomplished by Lord Mountjoy between 1600 and 1603.

Intellectual England.

But neither the political troubles nor the naval and military triumphs of England during the reign of Elizabeth are of much importance, after all, compared with the wonderful flowering of the genius of the nation which took place in that age. Shakespeare, Spenser, Bacon, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Hooker, Raleigh, Sidney, are the great facts of Elizabeth's time, and it shines with the luster of their names, the period most glorious in English history.

The Religious Wars in France.

Wherever the stealthy arm of the influence of Philip II. of Spain could reach, there the Catholic reaction of his time took on a malignant form. In France, it is quite probable that the Catholics and the Huguenots, if left to themselves, would have come to blows; but it is certain that the meddling fingers of the Spanish king put fierceness and fury into the wars of religion, which raged from 1562 to 1596, and that they were prolonged by his encouragement and help.

Catherine de' Medici, to strengthen herself against the Guises, after the death of Francis II., offered attentions for a time to the Huguenot nobles, and encouraged them to expect a large and lasting measure of toleration. She went so far that the Huguenot influence at court, surrounding the young king, became very seriously alarming to Catholic onlookers, both at home and abroad. Among the many remonstrances addressed to the queen-regent, the one which appears to have been decisive in its effect came from Philip. He coldly sent her word that he intended to interfere in France and to establish the supremacy of the Catholic Church; that he should give his support for that purpose to any true friend of the Church who might request it. Whether Catherine had entertained an honest purpose or not, in her dealing with the Huguenots, this threat, with what lay behind it, put an end to the hope of justice for them. It is true that an assembly of notables, in January, 1562, did propose a law which the queen put forth, in what is known as the "Edict of January," whereby the Huguenots were given, for the first time, a legal recognition, ceasing to be outlaws, and were permitted to hold meetings, in the daytime, in open places, outside of walled cities; but their churches were taken away from them, they were forbidden to build more, and they could hold no meetings in walled towns. It was a measure of toleration very different from that which they had been led to expect; and even the little meted out by this Edict of January was soon shown to have no guarantee. Within three months, the Duke of Guise had found an opportunity for exhibiting his contempt of the new law, by ordering his armed followers to attack a congregation at Vassy, killing fifty and wounding two hundred of the peaceful worshippers. This outrage drove the Huguenots to arms and the civil wars began.

The frivolous Anthony, King of Navarre, had been won back to the Catholic side. His staunch wife, Jeanne d'Albret, with her young son, the future Henry IV., and his brother, Louis, Prince of Condé, remained true to their faith. Condé was the chief of the party. Next to him in rank, and first in real worth and weight, was the noble Admiral Coligny. The first war was brief, though long enough to end the careers of Anthony of Navarre, killed in battle, and the Duke of Guise, assassinated. Peace was made in 1563 through a compromise, which conceded certain places to the Huguenots, wherein they might worship God in their own way. But it was a hollow peace, and the malicious finger of the great master of assassins at Madrid never ceased picking at it. In 1566, civil war broke out a second time, continuing until 1570. Its principal battles were that of Jarnac, in which Condé was taken prisoner and basely assassinated by his captors, and that of Moncontour. The Huguenots were defeated in both. After the death of Condé, young Henry of Navarre, who had reached his fifteenth year, was chosen to be the chief of the party, with Coligny for his instructor in war.