A History of the Reformation (Vol. 2 of 2)

by Thomas M. Lindsay

Then, and not till they had exhausted every method of passive resistance, the Anabaptists began to strike back. They wished to seize a town already containing a large Anabaptist population, and hold it as a city of refuge. Deventer, which was full of sympathisers, was their first aim. The plot failed, and the burgomaster’s son Willem, one of the conspirators, was seized, and with two companions beheaded in the market-place (Dec. 25th, 1534). Their next attempt was on Leyden. It was called a plot to burn the town. The magistrates got word of it, and, by ordering the great town-clock to be stopped, disconcerted the plotters. Fifteen men and five women were seized; the men were decapitated, and the women drowned (Jan. 1535). Next month (Feb. 28th, 1535), Jan van Geelen, leading a band of three hundred refugees through Friesland, was overtaken by some troops of soldiers. The little company entrenched themselves, fought bravely for some days, until nearly all were killed. The survivors were almost all captured and put to death, the men by the sword, and the women by drowning. One hundred soldiers fell in the attack. A few months later (May 1535), an attempt was made to seize Amsterdam. It was headed by van Geelen, the only survivor of the skirmish in Friesland. He and his companions were able to get possession of the Stadthaus, and held it against the town’s forces until cannon were brought to batter down their defences.

In the early days of the same year an incident occurred which shows how, under the strain of persecution, an hysterical exaltation took possession of some of these poor people. It is variously reported. According to Brandt, seven men and five women having stript off their clothes, as a sign, they said, that they spoke the naked truth, ran through the streets of Amsterdam, crying Woe! Woe! Woe! The Wrath of God! They were apprehended, and slaughtered in the usual way. The woman in whose house they had met was hanged at her own door.

The insurrections were made the pretext for still fiercer persecutions. The Anabaptists were hunted out, tortured and slain without any attempt being made by the authorities to discriminate between those who had and those who had not been sharers in any insurrectionary attempt. It is alleged that over thirty thousand people were put to death in the Netherlands during the reign of Charles V. Many of the victims had no connection with Anabaptism whatsoever; they were quiet followers of Luther or of Calvin. The authorities discriminated between them in their proclamations, but not in the persecution.

§ 4. Philip of Spain and the Netherlands.

How long the Netherlands would have stood the continual drain of money and the severity of the persecution which the foreign and religious policy of Charles enforced upon them, it is impossible to say. The people of the country were strongly attached to him, as he was to them. He had been born and had grown from childhood to manhood among them. Their languages, French and Flemish, were the only speech he could ever use with ease. He had been ruler in the Netherlands before he became King of Spain, and long before he was called to fill the imperial throne. When he resolved to act on his long meditated scheme of abdicating in favour of his son Philip, it was to the Netherlands that he came. Their nobles and people witnessed the scene with hardly less emotion than that which showed itself in the faltering speech of the Emperor.

The ceremony took place in the great Hall of the palace in Brussels (Oct. 25th, 1555), in presence of the delegates of the seventeen provinces. Mary, the widowed Queen of Hungary, who had governed the land for twenty-five years, witnessed the scene which was to end her rule. Philip, who was to ruin the work of consolidation patiently planned and executed by his father and his aunt, was present, summoned from his uncongenial task of eating roast beef and drinking English ale in order to conciliate his new subjects across the Channel, and from the embarrassing endearments of his elderly spouse. The Emperor, aged by toil rather than by years, entered the Hall leaning heavily on his favourite page and trusty counsellor, the youthful William, Prince of Orange, who was to become the leader of the revolt against Philip’s rule, and to create a new Protestant State, the United Provinces.

The new lord of the Netherlands was then twenty-eight. In outward appearance he was a German like his father, but in speech he was a Spaniard. He had none of his father’s external geniality, and could never stoop to win men to his ends. But Philip II. was much liker Charles V. than many historians seem willing to admit. Both had the same slow, patient industry—but in the son it was slower; the same cynical distrust of all men; the same belief in the divine selection of the head of the House of Hapsburg to guide all things in State and Church irrespective of Popes or Kings—only in the son it amounted to a sort of gloomy mystical assurance; the same callousness to human suffering, and the same utter inability to comprehend the force of strong religious conviction. Philip was an inferior edition of his father, succeeding to his father’s ideas, pursuing the same policy, using the same methods, but handicapped by the fact that he had not originated but had inherited both, and with them the troubles brought in their train.

Philip II. spent the first four years of his reign in the Netherlands, and during that short period of personal rule his policy had brought into being all the more important sources of dissatisfaction which ended in the revolt. Yet his policy was the same, and his methods were not different from those of his father. In one respect at least Charles had never spared the Netherlands. That country had to pay, as no other part of his vast possessions was asked to do, the price of his foreign policy, and Charles had wrung unexampled sums from his people.

When Philip summoned the States General (March 12th, 1556) and asked them for a very large grant (Fl. 1,300,000), he was only following his father’s example, and on that occasion was seeking money to liquidate the deficit which his father had bequeathed. Was it that the people of the Netherlands had resolved to end the practice of making them pay for a foreign policy which had hitherto concerned them little, or was it because they could not endure the young Spaniard who could not speak to them in their own language? Would Charles have been refused as well as Philip? Who can say?