XIV. 1859. AEt. 45.
LETTER TO MR. FRANCIS H. UNDERWOOD.—PLAN OF MR. MOTLEY'S HISTORICAL WORKS.—SECOND GREAT WORK, “HISTORY OF THE UNITED NETHERLANDS.”
I am enabled by the kindness of Mr. Francis H. Underwood to avail myself of a letter addressed to him by Mr. Motley in the year before the publication of this second work, which gives us an insight into his mode of working and the plan he proposed to follow. It begins with an allusion which recalls a literary event interesting to many of his American friends.
ROME, March 4, 1859.
F. H. UNDERWOOD, ESQ.
My dear Sir,—. . . I am delighted to hear of the great success
of “The Atlantic Monthly.” In this remote region I have not the
chance of reading it as often as I should like, but from the
specimens which I have seen I am quite sure it deserves its wide
circulation. A serial publication, the contents of which are purely
original and of such remarkable merit, is a novelty in our country,
and I am delighted to find that it has already taken so prominent a
position before the reading world. . .
The whole work [his history], of which the three volumes already
published form a part, will be called “The Eighty Years' War for
Liberty.”
Epoch I. is the Rise of the Dutch Republic.
Epoch II. Independence Achieved. From the Death of William the
Silent till the Twelve Years' Truce. 1584-1609.
Epoch III. Independence Recognized. From the Twelve Years' Truce
to the Peace of Westphalia. 1609-1648.
My subject is a very vast one, for the struggle of the United
Provinces with Spain was one in which all the leading states of
Europe were more or less involved. After the death of William the
Silent, the history assumes world-wide proportions. Thus the volume
which I am just about terminating . . . is almost as much English
history as Dutch. The Earl of Leicester, very soon after the death
of Orange, was appointed governor of the provinces, and the alliance
between the two countries almost amounted to a political union. I
shall try to get the whole of the Leicester administration,
terminating with the grand drama of the Invincible Armada, into one
volume; but I doubt, my materials are so enormous. I have been
personally very hard at work, nearly two years, ransacking the
British State Paper Office, the British Museum, and the Holland
archives, and I have had two copyists constantly engaged in London,
and two others at the Hague. Besides this, I passed the whole of
last winter at Brussels, where, by special favor of the Belgian
Government, I was allowed to read what no one else has ever been
permitted to see,—the great mass of copies taken by that government
from the Simancas archives, a translated epitome of which has been
published by Gachard. This correspondence reaches to the death of
Philip II., and is of immense extent and importance. Had I not
obtained leave to read the invaluable and, for my purpose,
indispensable documents at Brussels, I should have gone to Spain,
for they will not be published these twenty years, and then only in
a translated and excessively abbreviated and unsatisfactory form.
I have read the whole of this correspondence, and made very copious
notes of it. In truth, I devoted three months of last winter to
that purpose alone.
The materials I have collected from the English archives are also
extremely important and curious. I have hundreds of interesting
letters never published or to be published, by Queen Elizabeth,
Burghley, Walsingham, Sidney, Drake, Willoughby, Leicester, and
others. For the whole of that portion of my subject in which
Holland and England were combined into one whole, to resist Spain in
its attempt to obtain the universal empire, I have very abundant
collections. For the history of the United Provinces is not at all
a provincial history. It is the history of European liberty.
Without the struggle of Holland and England against Spain, all
Europe might have been Catholic and Spanish. It was Holland that
saved England in the sixteenth century, and, by so doing, secured
the triumph of the Reformation, and placed the independence of the
various states of Europe upon a sure foundation. Of course, the
materials collected by me at the Hague are of great importance. As
a single specimen, I will state that I found in the archives there
an immense and confused mass of papers, which turned out to be the
autograph letters of Olden Barneveld during the last few years of
his life; during, in short, the whole of that most important period
which preceded his execution. These letters are in such an
intolerable handwriting that no one has ever attempted to read them.
I could read them only imperfectly myself, and it would have taken
me a very long time to have acquired the power to do so; but my
copyist and reader there is the most patient and indefatigable
person alive, and he has quite mastered the handwriting, and he
writes me that they are a mine of historical wealth for me. I shall
have complete copies before I get to that period, one of signal
interest, and which has never been described. I mention these
matters that you may see that my work, whatever its other value may
be, is built upon the only foundation fit for history,—original
contemporary documents. These are all unpublished. Of course, I
use the contemporary historians and pamphleteers,—Dutch, Spanish,
French, Italian, German, and English,—but the most valuable of my
sources are manuscript ones. I have said the little which I have
said in order to vindicate the largeness of the subject. The
kingdom of Holland is a small power now, but the Eighty Years' War,
which secured the civil and religious independence of the Dutch
Commonwealth and of Europe, was the great event of that whole age.
The whole work will therefore cover a most remarkable epoch in human
history, from the abdication of Charles Fifth to the Peace of
Westphalia, at which last point the political and geographical
arrangements of Europe were established on a permanent basis,—in
the main undisturbed until the French Revolution. . . .
I will mention that I received yesterday a letter from the
distinguished M. Guizot, informing me that the first volume of the
French translation, edited by him, with an introduction, has just
been published. The publication was hastened in consequence of the
appearance of a rival translation at Brussels. The German
translation is very elegantly and expensively printed in handsome
octavos; and the Dutch translation, under the editorship of the
archivist general of Holland, Bakhuyzen v. d. Brink, is enriched
with copious notes and comments by that distinguished scholar.
There are also three different piratical reprints of the original
work at Amsterdam, Leipzig, and London. I must add that I had
nothing to do with the translation in any case. In fact, with the
exception of M. Guizot, no one ever obtained permission of me to
publish translations, and I never knew of the existence of them
until I read of it in the journals. . . . I forgot to say that
among the collections already thoroughly examined by me is that
portion of the Simancas archives still retained in the Imperial
archives of France. I spent a considerable time in Paris for the
purpose of reading these documents. There are many letters of
Philip II. there, with apostilles by his own hand. . . . I
would add that I am going to pass this summer at Venice for the
purpose of reading and procuring copies from the very rich archives
of that Republic, of the correspondence of their envoys in Madrid,
London, and Brussels during the epoch of which I am treating.
I am also not without hope of gaining access to the archives of the
Vatican here, although there are some difficulties in the way.
With kind regards . . .
I remain very truly yours,
J. L. MOTLEY.
XV. 1860. AT. 46.
PUBLICATION OF THE FIRST TWO VOLUMES OF THE “HISTORY OF THE UNITED NETHERLANDS.”—THEIR RECEPTION.
We know something of the manner in which Mr. Motley collected his materials. We know the labors, the difficulties, the cost of his toils among the dusty records of the past. What he gained by the years he spent in his researches is so well stated by himself that I shall borrow his own words:—
“Thanks to the liberality of many modern governments of Europe, the
archives where the state secrets of the buried centuries have so
long mouldered are now open to the student of history. To him who
has patience and industry, many mysteries are thus revealed which no
political sagacity or critical acumen could have divined. He leans
over the shoulder of Philip the Second at his writing-table, as the
King spells patiently out, with cipher-key in hand, the most
concealed hieroglyphics of Parma, or Guise, or Mendoza. He reads
the secret thoughts of 'Fabius' [Philip II.] as that cunctative
Roman scrawls his marginal apostilles on each dispatch; he pries
into all the stratagems of Camillus, Hortensius, Mucius, Julius,
Tullius, and the rest of those ancient heroes who lent their names
to the diplomatic masqueraders of the sixteenth century; he enters
the cabinet of the deeply pondering Burghley, and takes from the
most private drawer the memoranda which record that minister's
unutterable doubtings; he pulls from the dressing-gown folds of the
stealthy, soft-gliding Walsingham the last secret which he has
picked from the Emperor's pigeon-holes or the Pope's pocket, and
which not Hatton, nor Buckhurst, nor Leicester, nor the Lord
Treasurer is to see,—nobody but Elizabeth herself; he sits
invisible at the most secret councils of the Nassaus and Barneveld
and Buys, or pores with Farnese over coming victories and vast
schemes of universal conquest; he reads the latest bit of scandal,
the minutest characteristic of king or minister, chronicled by the
gossiping Venetians for the edification of the Forty; and after all
this prying and eavesdropping, having seen the cross-purposes, the
bribings, the windings in the dark, he is not surprised if those who
were systematically deceived did not always arrive at correct
conclusions.”
The fascination of such a quest is readily conceivable. A drama with real characters, and the spectator at liberty to go behind the scenes and look upon and talk with the kings and queens between the acts; to examine the scenery, to handle the properties, to study the “make up” of the imposing personages of full-dress histories; to deal with them all as Thackeray has done with the Grand Monarque in one of his caustic sketches,—this would be as exciting, one might suppose, as to sit through a play one knows by heart at Drury Lane or the Theatre Francais, and might furnish occupation enough to the curious idler who was only in search of entertainment. The mechanical obstacles of half-illegible manuscript, of antiquated forms of speech, to say nothing of the intentional obscurities of diplomatic correspondence, stand, however, in the way of all but the resolute and unwearied scholar. These difficulties, in all their complex obstinacy, had been met and overcome by the heroic efforts, the concentrated devotion, of the new laborer in the unbroken fields of secret history.