History of the United Netherlands, 1592

by John Lothrop Motley

It was impossible that the courtiers of Elizabeth and the burgher- statesmen of Holland and Friesland should sympathize with each other in sentiment or in manner. The republicans in their exuberant consciousness of having at last got rid of kings and kingly paraphernalia in their own, land—for since the rejection of the sovereignty offered to France and England in 1585 this feeling had become so predominant as to make it difficult to believe that those offers had been in reality so recent— were insensibly adopting a frankness, perhaps a roughness, of political and social demeanour which was far from palatable to the euphuistic formalists of other, countries.

Especially the English statesmen, trained to approach their sovereign with almost Oriental humility, and accustomed to exact for themselves a large amount of deference, could ill brook the free and easy tone occasionally adopted in diplomatic and official intercourse by these upstart republicans.

[The Venetian ambassador Contarin relates that in the reign of James I. the great nobles of England were served at table by lackeys on they knees.]

A queen, who to loose morals, imperious disposition, and violent temper united as inordinate a personal vanity as was ever vouchsafed to woman, and who up to the verge of decrepitude was addressed by her courtiers in the language of love-torn swain to blooming shepherdess, could naturally find but little to her taste in the hierarchy of Hans Brewer and Hans Baker. Thus her Majesty and her courtiers, accustomed to the faded gallantries with which the serious affairs of State were so grotesquely intermingled, took it ill when they were bluntly informed, for instance, that the State council of the Netherlands, negotiating on Netherland affairs, could not permit a veto to the representatives of the queen, and that this same body of Dutchmen discussing their own business insisted upon talking Dutch and not Latin.

It was impossible to deny that the young Stadholder was a gentleman of a good house, but how could the insolence of a common citizen like John of Olden-Barneveld be digested? It was certain that behind those shaggy, overhanging brows there was a powerful brain stored with legal and historic lore, which supplied eloquence to an ever-ready tongue and pen. Yet these facts, difficult to gainsay, did not make the demands so frequently urged by the States-General upon the English Government for the enforcement of Dutch rights and the redress of English wrongs the more acceptable.

Bodley, Gilpin, and the rest were in a chronic state of exasperation with the Hollanders, not only because of their perpetual complaints, but because their complaints were perpetually just.

The States-General were dissatisfied, all the Netherlanders were dissatisfied—and not entirely without reason—that the English, with whom the republic was on terms not only of friendship but of alliance, should burn their ships on the high seas, plunder their merchants, and torture their sea-captains in order to extort information as to the most precious portions of their cargoes. Sharp language against such malpractices was considered but proof of democratic vulgarity. Yet it would be hard to maintain that Martin Frobisher, Mansfield, Grenfell, and the rest of the sea-kings, with all their dash and daring and patriotism, were not as unscrupulous pirates as ever sailed blue water, or that they were not apt to commit their depredations upon friend and foe alike.

On the other hand; by a liberality of commerce in extraordinary contrast with the practice of modern times, the Netherlanders were in the habit of trading directly with the arch-enemy of both Holland and England, even in the midst of their conflict with him, and it was complained of that even the munitions of war and the implements of navigation by which Spain had been enabled to effect its foot-hold in Brittany, and thus to threaten the English coast, were derived from this very traffic.

The Hollanders replied, that, according to their contract with England, they were at liberty to send as many as forty or fifty vessels at a time to Spain and Portugal, that they had never exceeded the stipulated number, that England freely engaged in the same traffic herself with the common enemy, that it was not reasonable to consider cordage or dried fish or shooks and staves, butter, eggs, and corn as contraband of war, that if they were illegitimate the English trade was vitiated to the same degree, and that it would be utterly hopeless for the provinces to attempt to carry on the war, except by enabling themselves, through the widest and most unrestricted foreign commerce, even including the enemy's realms, to provide their nation with the necessary wealth to sustain so gigantic a conflict.

Here were ever flowing fountains of bitterest discussion and recrimination. It must be admitted however that there was occasionally an advantage in the despotic and summary manner in which the queen took matters into her own hands. It was refreshing to see this great sovereign—who was so well able to grapple with questions of State, and whose very imperiousness of temper impelled her to trample on shallow sophistries and specious technicalities—dealing directly with cases of piracy and turning a deaf ear to the counsellors, who in that, as in every age, were too prone to shove by international justice in order to fulfil municipal forms.