Thus dissident, and with feudal wars breaking out in every generation, the cities and provinces could win concessions from their feudal chiefs when the latter were in straits, as in the famous case of the "Great Privilege" extorted from the Duchess Mary, daughter of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, after her father's overthrow by the Swiss; again in the case of her husband Maximilian after her death; and previously in the reaffirmation of the ill-observed Laws of Cortenberg, secured from the Duke of Brabant by the Louvainers in 1372; but they could never deliver themselves from the feudal superstition, never evolve the republican ideal. When the rich citizens exploited the poor, it was the local sovereign's cue, as of old, to win the populace; whereupon the patricians leant to the over-lord, were he even the King of France; or it might be that the local lord himself sought the intervention of his suzerain, who again was at times the first to meddle, and against whom, as against rival potentates, the cities would at times fight desperately for their recognised head, when he was not overtaxing or thwarting them, or endangering their commerce.[754] It was a medley of clashing interests, always in unstable equilibrium. And so when sovereign powers on a great scale, as the Dukes of Burgundy, followed by the Archduke Maximilian, and later by the Emperor Charles, came into the inheritance of feudal prestige, the Dutch and Flemish cities became by degrees nearly as subordinate as those of France and Germany, losing one by one their municipal privileges.[755] The monarchic superstition overbore the passions of independence and primary interest; and a strong feudal ruler could count on a more general and durable loyalty than was ever given to any citizen-statesman. James van Arteveldt, who guided Ghent in the fourteenth century, and whose policy was one of alliance with the English king against the French, the feudal over-lord, was "the greatest personality Flanders ever produced."[756] But though Arteveldt's policy was maintained even by his murderers, murdered he was by his fellow-citizens, as the great De Witt was to be murdered in Holland three hundred years later. The monarchised Netherlanders were republicans only in the last resort, as against insupportable tyranny. Philip of Burgundy, who heavily oppressed them, they called "The Good." At the end of the fifteenth century Maximilian was able, even before he became Emperor, not only to crush the "bread-and-cheese" rebellion of the exasperated peasantry in Friesland and Guelderland,[757] but to put down all the oligarchs who had rebelled against him, and finally to behead them by the dozen,[758] leaving the land to his son as a virtually subject State.
In the sixteenth century, under Charles V, the men of Ghent, grown once again a great commercial community,[759] exhibited again the fatal instability of the undeveloped democracy of all ages. Called upon to pay their third of a huge subsidy of 1,200,000 caroli voted by the Flemish States to the Emperor, they rang their bell of revolt and defied him, offering their allegiance to the King of France. That monarch, by way of a bargain, promptly betrayed the intrigue to his "brother," who thereupon marched in force through France to the rebel city, now paralysed by terror; and without meeting a shadow of resistance, penalised it to the uttermost, beheading a score of leading citizens, banishing many more, annulling its remaining municipal rights, and exacting an increased tribute.[760] It needed an extremity of grievance to drive such communities to an enduring rebellion. When Charles V abdicated at Brussels in favour of his son Philip in 1555, he had already caused to be put to death Netherlanders to the number at least of thousands for religious heresy;[761] and still the provinces were absolutely submissive, and the people capable of weeping collectively out of sympathy with the despot's infirmities.[762] He, on his part, born and educated among them, and knowing them well, was wont to say of them that there was not a nation under the sun which more detested the name of slavery, or that bore the reality more patiently when managed with discretion.[763] He spoke whereof he knew.
That the people who endured so much at the hands of a despot should have revolted unsubduably against his son is to be explained in terms of certain circumstances little stressed in popular historiography. In the narratives of the rhetorical historians, no real explanation arises. The revolt figures as a stand for personal and religious freedom. But when Charles abdicated, after slaying his thousands, the Reformation had been in full tide for over thirty years; Calvin had built up Protestant Geneva to the point of burning Servetus; England had been for twenty years depapalised; France, with many scholars and nobles converted to Calvinism, was on the verge of a civil war of Huguenots and Catholics; the Netherlands themselves had been drenched in the blood of heretics; and still no leading man had thought of repudiating either Spain or Rome. Yet within thirteen years they were in full revolt, led by William of Orange, now turned Protestant. Seeing that mere popular Protestantism had spread far and gone fast, religious opinion was clearly not the determining force.
In reality, the conditio sine qua non was the psychological reversal effected by Philip when he elected to rule as a Spaniard, where his father had in effect ruled as a Fleming. Charles had always figured as a native of the Netherlands, at home among his people, friendly to their great men, ready to employ them in his affairs, even to the extent of partly ruling Spain through them. After his punishment of Ghent they were his boon subjects; and in his youth it was the Spaniards who were jealous of the Flemish and Dutch. This state of things had begun under his Flemish-German father, Philip I, who became King of Spain by marriage, and under whom the Netherland nobles showed in Spain a rapacity that infuriated the Spaniards against them. It was a question simply of racial predominance; and had the dynasty chosen to fix its capital in the north rather than in the south, it would have been the lot of the Netherlanders to exploit Spain—a task for which they were perfectly ready.
The gross rapacity of the Flemings in Spain under Philip I is admitted by Motley (Rise, as cited, pp. 31, 75); but on the same score feeling was passionately strong in Spain in the earlier years of the reign of Charles. Cp. Robertson, Charles V, bk. i (Works, ed. 1821, iv, 37, 40, 43, 44, 46, 47, 52, 53, 55, 77 78); and van Kampen, Geschichte der Niederlande, i, 277, 278. It took more than ten years to bring Charles in good relations with the Spaniards. See Mr. E. Armstrong's Introduction to Major Martin Hume's Spain, 1898, pp. 31-37, 57, 76. Even in his latter years they are found protesting against his customary absence from Spain, and his perpetual wars. Robertson, bk. vi, p. 494. Cp. bk. xii, vol. v, p. 417, as to the disregard shown him after his abdication.
While it lasted, the Flemish exploitation of Spain was as shameless as the Spanish exploitation of Italy. The Italian Peter Martyr Angleria, residing at the court of Spain, reckoned that in ten months the Flemings there remitted home over a million ducats (Robertson, bk. i, p. 53). A lad, nephew of Charles's Flemish minister Chievres, was appointed to the archbishopric of Toledo, in defiance of general indignation. The result was a clerico-popular insurrection. Everything goes to show that but for the Emperor's prudence his Flemings would have ruined him in Spain, by getting him to tyrannise for their gain, as Philip II later did for the Church's sake in the Netherlands.
It is not unwarrantable to say that had not Charles had the sagacity to adapt himself to the Spanish situation, learning to speak the language and even to tolerate the pride of the nobles[764] to a degree to which he never yielded before the claims of the burghers of the Netherlands, and had he not in the end identified himself chiefly with his Spanish interests, the history of Spain and the Netherlands might have been entirely reversed. Had he, that is, kept his seat of rule in the Netherlands, drawing thither the unearned revenues of the Americas, and still contrived to keep Spain subject to his rule, the latter country would have been thrown back on her great natural resources, her industry, and her commerce, which, as it was, developed markedly during his reign,[765] despite the heavy burdens of his wars. And in that case Spain might conceivably have become the Protestant and rebellious territory, and the Netherlands on the contrary have remained Catholic and grown commercially decrepit, having in reality the weaker potential economic basis.
The theorem that the two races were vitally opposed in "religious sentiment," and that "it was as certain that the Netherlanders would be fierce reformers as that the Spaniards would be uncompromising persecutors" (Motley, p. 31), is part of the common pre-scientific conception of national development, and proceeds upon flat disregard of the historical evidence. It is well established that there was as much heresy of the more rational Protestant and Unitarian sort in Spain, to begin with, as in Holland. Under Ferdinand and Isabella the Inquisition seems to have struck mainly at Judaic and Moorish monotheistic heresy, which was not uncommon among the upper classes, while the lower were for the most part orthodox (Armstrong, Introd. to Major Hume's Spain, pp. 14, 18). Thus there is good ground for the surmise that Ferdinand's object was primarily the confiscation of the wealth of Jews and other rich heretics. (See U.R. Burke, History of Spain, 1895, ii, 101; Hume's ed. 1900, ii, 74.) In Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia there was general resistance to the Inquisition; in Cordova there was a riot against it; in Saragossa the Inquisitor was murdered before the altar (Armstrong, p. 18; Llorente, Hist. crit. de l'Inquisition d'Espagne, éd. 1818, i, 185-213; M'Crie, Reformation in Spain, ed. 1856, pp. 52-53. Cp. U.R. Burke, as cited, ii, 97, 98, 101, 103, 111; Hume's ed. ii, 66, 70-71, 74-77, 82; as to the general and prolonged resistance of the people). During that reign Torquemada is credited with burning ten thousand persons in eighteen years (Prescott, History of Ferdinand and Isabella, Kirk's ed. 1889, p. 178, citing Llorente. But see p. 746, note, as to possible exaggeration. Cp. Burke, ii, 113; Hume's ed. ii, 84). In the early Lutheran period the spread of scholarly Protestantism in Spain was extremely rapid (La Rigaudière, Histoire des persécutions religieuses en Espagne, 1860, p. 245 sq.), and in the early years of Philip II it needed furious persecution to crush it, thousands leaving the kingdom (Prescott, Philip II, bk. ii, ch. iii; M'Crie, Reformation in Spain, ch. viii; De Castro, History of the Spanish Protestants, Eng. tr. 1851, passim). At the outset, 800 persons were arrested in Seville alone in one day; and the Venetian ambassador in 1562 testifies to the large number of Huguenots in Spain (Ranke, Hist. of the Popes, bk. v, Eng. tr. 1-vol. ed. p. 136).
Had Philip II had Flemish sympathies and chosen to make Brussels his capital, the stress of the Inquisition could have fallen on the Netherlands as successfully as it actually did on Spain. His father's reign had proved as much. According to Motley, not only multitudes of Anabaptists but "thousands and tens of thousands of virtuous and well-disposed men and women" had then been "butchered in cold blood" (Rise, p. 43), without any sign of rebellion on the part of the provinces, whose leading men remained Catholic. In 1600 most of the inhabitants of Groningen were Catholics (Davies, ii, 347). A Protestant historian (Grattan, p. 93) admits that the Protestants "never, and least of all in these days, formed the mass." Another has admitted, as regards those of Germany, that "nothing had contributed more to the undisturbed progress of their opinions than the interregnum after Maximilian's death, the long absence of Charles, and the slackness of the reins of government which these occasioned" (Robertson, Charles V, bk. v, ed. cited of Works, vol. iv, p. 387). "It was only tanners, dyers, and apostate priests who were Protestants at that day in the Netherlands" (Motley, p. 124). The same conditions would have had similar results in Spain, where many Catholics thought Philip much too religious for his age and station (Motley, p. 76).