The province of Friesland was one of the seven provinces which by the treaty known as the Union of Utrecht bound themselves together to resist the tyranny of Spain. From 1579 to 1795 Friesland remained one of the constituent parts of the republic of the United Provinces, but it always jealously insisted on its sovereign rights, especially against the encroachments of the predominant province of Holland. It maintained throughout the whole of the republican period a certain distinctiveness of nationality, which was marked by the preservation of a different dialect and of a separate stadtholder. Count William Lewis of Nassau-Siegen, nephew and son-in-law of William the Silent, was chosen stadtholder, and through all the vicissitudes of the 17th and 18th centuries the stadtholdership was held by one of his descendants. Frederick Henry of Orange was stadtholder of six provinces, but not of Friesland, and even during the stadtholderless periods which followed the deaths of William II. and William III. of Orange the Frisians remained stanch to the family of Nassau-Siegen. Finally, by the revolution of 1748, William of Nassau-Siegen, stadtholder of Friesland (who, by default of heirs male of the elder line, had become William IV., prince of Orange), was made hereditary stadtholder of all the provinces. His grandson in 1815 took the title of William I., king of the Netherlands. The male line of the “Frisian” Nassaus came to an end with the death of King William III. in 1890.
Bibliography—See Tacitus, Ann. iv. 72 f., xi. 19 f., xiii. 54; Hist. iv. 15 f.; Germ. 34; Ptolemy, Geogr. ii. 11, § 11; Dio Cassius liv. 32; Eumenius, Paneg. iv. 9; the Anglo-Saxon poems, Finn, Beowulf and Widsith; Fredegarii Chronici continuatio and various German Annals; Gesta regum Francorum; Eddius, Vita Wilfridi, cap. 25 f.; Bede, Hist. Eccles, iv. 22, v. 9 f.; Alcuin, Vita Willebrordi; I. Undset, Aarbger for nordisk Oldkyndighed (1880), p. 89 ff. (cf. E. Mogk in Paul’s Grundriss d. germ. Philologie ii. p. 623 ff.); Ubbo Emmius, Rerum Frisicarum historia (Leiden, 1616); Pirius Winsemius, Chronique van Vriesland (Franoker, 1822); C. Scotanus, Beschryvinge end Chronyck van des Heerlickheydt van Frieslandt (1655); Groot Placaat en Charter-boek van Friesland (ed. Baron C. F. zu Schwarzenberg) (5 vols., Leeuwarden, 1768-1793); T. D. Wiarda, Ost-frieschische Gesch. (vols. i.-ix., Aurich, 1791) (vol. x., Bremen, 1817); J. Dirks, Geschiedkundig onderzoek van den Koophandel der Friezen (Utrecht, 1846); O. Klopp, Gesch. Ostfrieslands (3 vols., Hanover, 1854-1858); Hooft van Iddekinge, Friesland en de Friezen in de Middeleeuwen (Leiden, 1881); A. Telting, Het Oudfriesche Stadrecht (The Hague, 1882); P. J. Blok, Friesland im Mittelalter (Leer, 1891).
FRITH (or Fryth), JOHN (c. 1503-1533), English Reformer and Protestant martyr, was born at Westerham, Kent. He was educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, where Gardiner, afterwards bishop of Winchester, was his tutor. At the invitation of Cardinal Wolsey, after taking his degree he migrated (December 1525) to the newly founded college of St Frideswide or Cardinal College (now Christ Church), Oxford. The sympathetic interest which he showed in the Reformation movement in Germany caused him to be suspected as a heretic, and led to his imprisonment for some months. Subsequently he appears to have resided chiefly at the newly founded Protestant university of Marburg, where he became acquainted with several scholars and reformers of note, especially Patrick Hamilton (q.v.). Frith’s first publication was a translation of Hamilton’s Places, made shortly after the martyrdom of its author; and soon afterwards the Revelation of Antichrist, a translation from the German, appeared, along with A Pistle to the Christen Reader, by “Richard Brightwell” (supposed to be Frith), and An Antithesis wherein are compared togeder Christes Actes and our Holye Father the Popes, dated “at Malborow in the lande of Hesse,” 12th July 1529. His Disputacyon of Purgatorye, a treatise in three books, against Rastell, Sir T. More and Fisher (bishop of Rochester) respectively, was published at the same place in 1531. While at Marburg, Frith also assisted Tyndale, whose acquaintance he had made at Oxford (or perhaps in London) in his literary labours. In 1532 he ventured back to England, apparently on some business in connexion with the prior of Reading. Warrants for his arrest were almost immediately issued at the instance of Sir T. More, then lord chancellor. Frith ultimately fell into the hands of the authorities at Milton Shore in Essex, as he was on the point of making his escape to Flanders. The rigour of his imprisonment in the Tower was somewhat abated when Sir T. Audley succeeded to the chancellorship, and it was understood that both Cromwell and Cranmer were disposed to show great leniency. But the treacherous circulation of a manuscript “lytle treatise” on the sacraments, which Frith had written for the information of a friend, and without any view to publication, served further to excite the hostility of his enemies. In consequence of a sermon preached before him against the “sacramentaries,” the king ordered that Frith should be examined; he was afterwards tried and found guilty of having denied, with regard to the doctrines of purgatory and of transubstantiation, that they were necessary articles of faith. On the 23rd of June 1533 he was handed over to the secular arm, and at Smithfield on the 4th of July following he was burnt at the stake. During his captivity he wrote, besides several letters of interest, a reply to More’s letter against Frith’s “lytle treatise”; also two tracts entitled A Mirror or Glass to know thyself, and A Mirror or Looking-glass wherein you may behold the Sacrament of Baptism.
Frith is an interesting and so far important figure in English ecclesiastical history as having been the first to maintain and defend that doctrine regarding the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood, which ultimately came to be incorporated in the English communion office. Twenty-three years after Frith’s death as a martyr to the doctrine of that office, that “Christ’s natural body and blood are in Heaven, not here,” Cranmer, who had been one of his judges, went to the stake for the same belief. Within three years more, it had become the publicly professed faith of the entire English nation.
See A. à Wood, Athenae Oxonienses (ed. P. Bliss, 1813), i. p. 74; John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (ed. G. Townshend, 1843-1849), v. pp. 1-16 (also Index); G. Burnet, Hist. of the Reformation of the Church of England (ed. N. Pocock, 1865), i. p. 273; L. Richmond, The Fathers of the English Church, i. (1807); Life and Martyrdom of John Frith (London, 1824), published by the Church of England Tract Society; Deborah Alcock, Six Heroic Men (1906).
FRITH, WILLIAM POWELL (1819-1909), English painter, was born at Aldfield, in Yorkshire, on the 9th of January 1819. His parents moved in 1826 to Harrogate, where his father became landlord of the Dragon Inn, and it was then that the boy began his general education at a school at Knaresborough. Later he went for about two years to a school at St Margaret’s, near Dover, where he was placed specially under the direction of the drawing-master, as a step towards his preparation for the profession which his father had decided on as the one that he wished him to adopt. In 1835 he was entered as a student in the well-known art school kept by Henry Sass in Bloomsbury, from which he passed after two years to the Royal Academy schools. His first independent experience was gained in 1839, when he went about for some months in Lincolnshire executing several commissions for portraits; but he soon began to attempt compositions, and in 1840 his first picture, “Malvolio, cross-gartered before the Countess Olivia,” appeared at the Royal Academy. During the next few years he produced several notable paintings, among them “Squire Thornhill relating his town adventures to the Vicar’s family,” and “The Village Pastor,” which established his reputation as one of the most promising of the younger men of that time. This last work was exhibited in 1845, and in the autumn of that year he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy. His promotion to the rank of Academician followed in 1853, when he was chosen to fill the vacancy caused by Turner’s death. The chief pictures painted by him during his tenure of Associateship were: “An English Merry-making in the Olden Time,” “Old Woman accused of Witchcraft,” “The Coming of Age,” “Sancho and Don Quixote,” “Hogarth before the Governor of Calais,” and the “Scene from Goldsmith’s ’Good-natured Man,’” which was commissioned in 1850 by Mr Sheepshanks, and bequeathed by him to the South Kensington Museum. Then came a succession of large compositions which gained for the artist an extraordinary popularity. “Life at the Seaside,” better known as “Ramsgate Sands,” was exhibited in 1854, and was bought by Queen Victoria; “The Derby Day,” in 1858; “Claude Duval,” in 1860; “The Railway Station,” in 1862; “The Marriage of the Prince of Wales,” painted for Queen Victoria, in 1865; “The Last Sunday of Charles II.,” in 1867; “The Salon d’Or,” in 1871; “The Road to Ruin,” a series, in 1878; a similar series, “The Race for Wealth,” shown at a gallery in King Street, St James’s, in 1880; “The Private View,” in 1883; and “John Knox at Holyrood,” in 1886. Frith also painted a considerable number of portraits of well-known people. In 1889 he became an honorary retired academician. His “Derby Day” is in the National Gallery of British Art. In his youth, in common with the men by whom he was surrounded, he had leanings towards romance, and he scored many successes as a painter of imaginative subjects. In these he proved himself to be possessed of exceptional qualities as a colourist and manipulator, qualities that promised to earn for him a secure place among the best executants of the British School. But in his middle period he chose a fresh direction. Fascinated by the welcome which the public gave to his first attempts to illustrate the life of his own times, he undertook a considerable series of large canvases, in which he commented on the manners and morals of society as he found it. He became a pictorial preacher, a painter who moralized about the everyday incidents of modern existence; and he sacrificed some of his technical variety. There remained, however, a remarkable sense of characterization, and an acute appreciation of dramatic effect. Frith died on the 2nd of November 1909.
Frith published his Autobiography and Reminiscences in 1887, and Further Reminiscences in 1889.