• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 906 0

’s half-sister and Regent and acting Governor of the Netherlands, forbade Protestant ritual in the churches and the public speaking of self-appointed Protestant preachers, the prohibitions lit a fire of indignant protest and active resistance. A petition to the King to cancel the edicts only confirmed Philip in his determination to tear heresy out by the roots and erect in its place a pillar of authority based on a firm foundation of royal absolutism. But it takes two—one to impose and one to acquiesce—to make authority function. Philip’s subjects in the Netherlands were not prepared for the second role. In 1566, when their petition to the King went unanswered, they went on a rampage of desecration in the churches, smashing images and relics seen as the symbols of a despised idolatry. Led by a League of Nobles, staunch Protestants, which with unusual solidarity included members from every province although they clung as ever to individual conflicting opinions and separate working classes, the movement ignited agitation in the towns and among the industrial masses raising signals of national rebellion. When a band of 400 nobles marched in a body to the Regent’s palace in Brussels to demand a stop to the Inquisition employed against the resisters, they evoked the sneer of an unsympathetic Count Barlaimont as “a bunch of beggars,” immediately adopted as a proud title. At the League’s banquet, members wore beggars’ gray with beggars’ wooden cups hanging around their necks, and the name thereafter honored their fight for freedom from Spain and afforded seamen the opportunity of calling themselves Beggars of the Sea for the pleasure of rubbing the noses of Spanish and English opponents in the fact that they were anything but that.

More was needed to organize revolt. In 1568, an impetuous and reckless expedition launched by Louis of Nassau against the authorities of the northern city of Groningen thrust into the action a decisive figure. He was Louis’ brother, William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, who was to emerge as one of history’s heroes under the name of William the Silent. Orange was a small principality in the South of France to which the Counts of Nassau held title. William was Stadtholder and Commander-in-Chief of Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht by appointment of the late Emperor. When Louis’ rebellious assault was easily broken and Louis himself later killed, William inherited the movement of revolt. He infused the will and the vigor that would keep the struggle against tyranny going until the goal of an independent Netherlands was won eighty years after Louis of Nassau had lighted the sparks. Before that could happen, both Spanish tyranny and Dutch revolt intensified.

In the first years, King Philip’s answer to the outbreaks was to send the ruthless Duke of Alva with 10,000 men, to compel obedience by a reign of terror. Alva’s method was massacre in the towns, persecution of Protestants for heresy and creation of a special court, called the Council of Blood, which in the course of its operations held 12,000 trials, convicted 9,000 offenders and executed or banished more than 1,000. Nobles who were leaders in the revolt were beheaded, eighteen in one day in the market square of Brussels. Estates were confiscated, scores fled the country and everywhere rose the dread of the Inquisition, as distinct from secular persecution, being established in the Netherlands. To make sure that he made everyone of all classes an insurgent, Alva imposed a tax of a tenth on the sale of every article and a hundredth part of every income. The hated “Tenth Penny” did more to spur the revolt than all the atrocities.

The ruler, Philip II—that “odious personage,” as Motley, classic historian of the revolt, cannot refrain in his Protestant Victorian rectitude from calling him—was himself too narrow and rigid to recognize as rebellion the trouble he was stirring up for himself; Philip could think only in terms of being ordained by God to root out Protestantism, and he rejected any consideration that might suggest an obstacle in the way of this task.