Great Men as Prophets of a New Era

by Newell Dwight Hillis

We can never forget that Holland gave the founders of our Republic their shelter, with safety and leisure for working out their dreams and visions of self-government. But a full century before the Pilgrim Fathers set foot in Leyden, Holland had become a shelter to foreign exiles, and her citizens had pledged themselves to a deathless hatred of all forms of tyranny. To the cities of Holland had fled those men who were denied liberty of thought in Paris and Nuremburg. To Holland had come the victims of oppression in Venice and Florence. It was in Holland that the great Humanist had lived and died, that scholar and philosopher Erasmus, who wrought as powerfully for reform in religion as Huss and Savonarola. It was Erasmus who forged the intellectual weapons used by Luther in Germany, and Calvin in Geneva. It was Erasmus who first made a correct text for the Greek Testament. It was Erasmus who put the Bible into the common languages of Europe. And it was a group of Dutchmen who first demanded the separation of Church and State. Two generations before William Bradford gathered his little band in Leyden, William the Silent stood forth to challenge the divine right of kings.

John Ruskin once called attention to the fact that as every great art-age has been a reaction from an era of unendurable ugliness, so every movement for liberty has been a reaction precipitated by unwonted tyranny. Certain it is that as Oliver Cromwell represented a rebound from feudalism, and Abraham Lincoln a reaction from the cruelty of slavery, so William the Silent represented a thrilling protest against the crime of a foreign usurper. His career is as romantic and many-coloured as the career of David, the fugitive, fleeing from Saul, or that of Robert Bruce, hiding in caves and dens from the pursuers who threatened his life. In youth he was the companion of kings, but he became the champion of the people against their king, the idol of his followers, and the hero of a lost cause. Like David, he knew the weariness and painfulness of the exile's lot. Like Lincoln, he had a face furrowed with anxiety, and fell a victim to the assassin's bullet. Reared in luxury, the heir to titles and vast estates, the head of a dynasty, whose blood still flows in the veins of Europe's rulers, for the cause of liberty he resigned his rank, that he might serve the poor and oppressed. He was a statesman, and had the foresight that organizes out of defeat, and is unconquerable because it never knows when it is defeated. He was a reformer, and attacked injustice and despotism in an era when of necessity his labours were fruitless. He was a soldier, and had the personal daring and the strong arm that count for more than strategic skill. He was a hero, and though daily the hired poisoners sought entrance to his palace, and assassins ever dogged his steps upon the streets, despite the six attempts upon his life, he maintained his courage and his boundless hope. In an age when society had not yet doubted the divine right of kings, William of Orange fronted Philip II with a denial of this citadel of tyranny and injustice, affirmed the principle that the creed of a nation and the creed of individuals is a matter of their own choice and their own conscience.

Our libraries hold no more instructive volumes than Motley's story of the Netherlands, their rise to material prosperity and their struggle for liberty under the leadership of this man known as William the Silent. The tale of their slow growth as a maritime nation is an epic of indomitable courage in the face of every conceivable form of obstacle. We see these people for the sake of liberty retreating from the rich plains of central Europe into the morass that the Roman historian said was "neither land nor water." With infinite labour they built barriers and dikes against the North Sea, developed a system of veins and arteries through which they compelled the ocean to fertilize their fields, and constructed watery highways for carrying their commerce into distant lands. At length a region outcast of earth and ocean alike "wrestled from both domains their richest treasure." Brave cities floated mermaid-like upon the bosom of the sea. Standing upon the canal boats, travellers looked down upon cattle grazing below the level of the ocean, beheld orchards and gardens whose tree-tops scarcely reached the level of the waves. Unconsciously this race that had struggled so long and victoriously over storms and seas was educating itself of the struggle with the still more savage despotism of man.

With intelligence and enterprise came the development of trade, and in the fifteenth century the Hollanders became the carriers of the world's commerce. Their ships and their sailors made their way around into the Baltic, to the ports of all northern Europe, to the ports of France and Spain, of Genoa and Naples and Venice, to Constantinople and Alexandria, and from thence south into all countries and continents. As bees flitting from orchard to orchard fertilize the fruit, so these ships passing from port to port and continent to continent fertilized the minds of men. Returning home they brought bulbs, roots and seeds that soon made Holland the gayest flower-garden in Europe and the home of modern floriculture and horticulture. From the Far East they brought the suggestion of movable types. The bleached linens, the tapestries and woollen goods of Holland won fame throughout the world. The homes of her burghers were models of comfort and even luxury. Small merchants of Amsterdam and Leyden and Rotterdam became merchant princes. Weavers and spinners of linen and silk, workers in iron, as well as silver and gold, left the other lands of Europe and settled in the Dutch seaports.

In that little strip of land were inclosed 208 walled cities and 6,300 villages guarded by a belt of sixty fortresses. Little wonder that Spain looked longingly toward this people and meditated plans for breaking down its fortresses, subjugating its peoples and transferring its accumulated treasure from the chests of the burghers to the vaults of the Spanish dons and cavaliers. And when at length it began to look as if the scepter of the sea might pass from Spain to Holland, King Philip and his soldiers, under Bloody Alva, resolved to draw a circle of fire around little Holland and rob her of the treasure she had so slowly earned.

Fully to understand the heroic struggle of the Hollanders under William of Orange, we must know the immediate cause of the controversy and the source of the tyranny they opposed. That cause was the Inquisition and the tyranny was that of Spain's ambitious rulers. At the moment of the outbreak, Spain was the richest and the most powerful nation in Europe. Victorious in Africa and Italy, her emperor had carried war into France and now reigned over Germany as well as those provinces now known as Belgium and Holland. If we ask from whence Spain derived the money for these wars of conquest the answer is found in the vast treasure she acquired in the New World. Prescott tells us that when the Spanish soldiers captured the capital of Peru, the soldiers spent days in melting down the golden vessels which they found in the vaults of temples and palaces. In that era, when the yellow metal was worth so much, a single ship carried to Spain $15,500,000 in gold, besides vast treasures of silver and jewels. When Cortez approached the palace of Montezuma the king's messengers met the general bearing gifts from their lord. These gifts included 200 pounds (avoirdupois) of gold for the leader and two pounds of gold for each soldier. The full value of the treasure that Spain carried from the cities and states of the New World will, doubtless, never be known.

But it must be remembered that the Spanish soldiers who went into Mexico and Peru turned those two countries into a wilderness. For a full half-century these brutal soldiers, burning with avarice, went everywhither, looting towns, pillaging cities, butchering the people, lifting the torch upon cottage and palace alike. The awful anguish and suffering that Spain wrought upon the helpless people of Mexico and Peru is one of the bloodiest chapters in history. The eagle pouncing upon the dove, the panther leaping upon the young fawn, but faintly interpret to us the savage cruelty of the Spaniard as he raged through the new world. And when the Spanish ships came home, laden with gold and silver the Emperor found means to prosecute his plans for military conquest. Spanish armies were soon marching into northern Italy, into Austria and Germany, into France and finally into Holland. Flushed with victory and greedy of Holland's treasures, Philip determined to punish these people for their refusal to vote supplies to his army, by establishing there the Inquisition by the sword.

The Inquisition, that mediæval instrument for the detection of punishment of disbelievers in the established Church, had existed in all its horrible malignity for two hundred and fifty years. But it remained for Philip of Spain to make its name forever a byword and a hissing in the mouth of history. He had begun by employing it against the wealthy Jews and Moors, who made up the richest, the most intelligent and prosperous classes in Spain. During the first few years after its institution the Spanish population fell from 10,000,000 to 7,000,000. In eighteen years Torquemada burned 10,220 persons and confiscated the property of 97,321 others. Primarily, the Inquisition was a machine to search men's secret thoughts. It arrested on suspicion, "tortured for confession and then punished with fire." One witness brought a victim to the rack, and two to the flames.

The trial took place at midnight in a gloomy dungeon dimly lighted by torches. Lea tells us "the Grand Inquisitor was enveloped in a black robe with eyes glaring at his victim through holes cut in the hood." Preparatory to examination, the victim, whether man, maiden or matron, was stripped and stretched upon a bench, after which all the weights, pulleys, and screws by which "tendons could be strained without cracking, bones crushed without breaking, body tortured without dying, were put into operation." When condemnation was pronounced the tongue was mutilated so that the victim could neither speak nor swallow. When the morning came, a breakfast with rare delicacies was placed before the sufferer and with ironical invitation he was urged to satisfy his hunger. Then a procession was formed, headed by the magistrates, prelates and nobility, and the prisoner was led to the public square, where an address was given, lauding the Inquisition, condemning heresy and warning the people against want of subjection to the Pope and the Emperor. Then while hymns were sung, blazing fagots were piled about the prisoner until his body was reduced to a heap of ashes.

Such was the devilish institution Philip of Spain determined to set up in Holland as a means of accomplishing his twofold aim, the punishment of "disbelievers" and the despoiling of the Dutch burghers' treasure-chests. Little wonder that even this sturdy folk drew back from the thought in horror. They were not a people to submit to such barbarities as they had already proved, by giving shelter to foreign exiles. When the Inquisition was first inaugurated in Spain, and men first stretched upon the rack as heretics, Holland had opened her doors to the fugitives, who fled alike from the wrath of kings and priests. All over the world, with its darkness and superstition, its cruelty, its flames, its racks and thumbscrews, men of independent minds had secretly turned their thoughts toward little Holland, and their steps toward the seaports where the Dutch merchants bought and sold the treasures of the sea. So, now, there developed in the Netherlands a united protest, representing tens of thousands of people, who deserted the churches ruled by the officials of the Inquisition. These protestors went into the open air beyond the city walls where they sang songs, and listened to the preaching of the reformed ministers. Soon the Roman Catholics under the guidance of the Spanish army, and the Protestants under William of Orange, stood over against one another like two castles with cannon shotted to the muzzle. And finally the storm broke, and the protestors went into the churches their own hands had built, and covered the floor with rubbish of broken statues, effigies, and images, cleansing the walls with axe and hammer and broom, and leaving only the pulpit for the teacher, and the plain pews for the worshippers.