Amsterdam

by Russell Shorto

  Much of his plan was kept secret at first. Philip relied heavily on the Prince of Orange for its implementation. Willem was, by all accounts, a willing vassal, at least as far as he understood the plan. He was now one of the most important figures in the Low Countries, who managed the trick of being a popular figure both at court and among ordinary Dutchmen. In fact, he could come off as a bit of a harmless fop whose good looks and fortune shielded him from serious matters. As he later wrote of this period, “I had nothing so much in my head as the play of arms, the chase, and other exercises suitable to young lords.” Very shortly after the unexpected death of his wife, Anna, he was eagerly in the hunt for a new one. He thought he had found her in the young Princess of Lorraine, but when he approached the girl’s widowed mother, who at thirty-five was nine years older than him, she offered herself instead. He politely declined.

  But he also had serious business to do. At the king’s bidding, Willem talked the English into providing a loan. And he did his best to keep the most prominent Dutch leaders in line, arguing that the future of the provinces lay in working with, not against, the Spanish government.

  Then the scales fell from Willem’s eyes. The war with France had ended, and the king sent the Prince of Orange as part of a delegation of three “royal hostages” to negotiate a peace treaty with Henry, the King of France. Willem rode into Paris in June of 1559 to find the city fully decked out for an elaborate armistice celebration. There were contests and balls, and Willem was briefly distracted by a seventeen-year-old duchess. Then came the royal hunt in the Chantilly forest. Hunting was a serious business for King Henry, and he chose this as the moment to speak of the future. Like everyone else, he had taken a liking to Willem; of all those in King Philip’s delegation, he preferred to discuss the matter with him.

  What had brought the French and Spanish kings to the negotiating table was the foolishness of the situation, in which two Catholic kingdoms were at war with each other while the faith itself was being undermined across Europe. As the king talked, Willem realized he was speaking of ideas that Philip and his closest advisers were in the process of hatching, which had been kept from him but about which Henry assumed he knew. The plan was for a full-scale suppression of Protestantism in the Low Countries—in particular Calvinism, which had overtaken Lutheranism in just a few years to become the main threat to the Catholic faith. Unlike other, more radical Protestant offshoots, Calvinism didn’t abjure wealth; you were allowed to make money and still be a good Christian. And Calvinism had a strong vein of political righteousness in it: it honored obedience but also held that there was a point at which it was appropriate to rebel against unjust rulers, which made it both especially attractive to ordinary Dutchmen and particularly threatening to Philip.

  Under the oak canopy of the forest, the French king prattled on—systematic torture, mass beheadings, an impressive preview of coming attractions—and Willem kept his alarm hidden, pretending he was already aware of the plan, playacting that would result in the nickname history has given him: William the Silent.

  Overnight, Willem changed from satrap to rebel. A revolution was in the offing, a war of independence against an arrogant foreign monarch, and Willem would be its leader.

  At least, that is the standard historical view, which lasted for more than four centuries. In fact, a close reading of the historical record (the scholarly research project www.historici.nl has identified and cataloged more than twelve thousand extant pieces of correspondence associated with Willem) shows that, far from having leapt to the head of the Dutch revolutionaries, Willem was caught more or less right in the middle of two extremes: those who pushed for an all-out war of independence and those who vowed to remain loyal to the Spanish king. As someone who had been raised at the Spanish court he was unable to abandon it with the snap of a finger; for the next few years he would try to appease both sides, try to hold together the world as he knew it. And yet the event in the French forest does seem to have marked a turning point for him: he became convinced that Philip was ready to take measures against the Dutch provinces that could not be tolerated, and he determined to take action.

  He was not alone. As news of Philip’s intentions spread, so did outrage. Going back to the 1400s, as merchants and tradesmen in Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam, and other Dutch cities flourished in their nonfeudal system, they had built up a series of “privileges and liberties” that local governments granted to them in exchange for their avowal of obligations that they had to the community. These privileges and liberties included a principle of free trade, as well as regulations that favored local merchants or tradesmen over outsiders (i.e., protectionism). They also covered quasi-democratic principles, such as a right to have a say in their taxation. The privileges and liberties—which are forerunners of modern political rights and freedoms—extended eventually to the provincial level, so that the governing bodies of the provinces were bound by them as well. Philip’s father had promised, under his signature, that his rule would never violate these principles, which by this time the Dutch considered hallowed. Philip’s new decrees trampled all over the privileges and liberties.

  In late July of 1559, King Philip appeared in Ghent at a meeting of the representatives of all the Dutch provinces to announce that he was leaving the Low Countries, moving his court to Spain, and stationing his soldiers in the provinces for their protection. During an adjournment, the Dutch representatives prepared a response. The king read the response with fury, for in it the Dutch leaders informed him they would suspend payment of the nine years’ tax unless the king withdrew the Spanish soldiers.

  Philip was now in an impossible position. He had recently experienced the greatest military disaster in Spanish history to date—his expedition to retake Tripoli from the Ottomans was ambushed by a Turkish fleet, resulting in the sinking of dozens of Spanish ships and the surrender of ten thousand soldiers—and he was desperately short of funds. He raged at the impertinence of the Dutch, scoffingly asking whether their remonstrance also covered him, considering that he was also, technically at least, a Spanish soldier. But in the end he had to relent. He needed the money and he needed it at once. Shortly after, the Spanish soldiers left Dutch soil—most of them to replace those that were lost off the coast of Africa.

  Among the surprises to Philip in this affair was a signature that stood out prominently in the formal complaint: Willem, Prince of Orange. Some days later, Willem was among the dignitaries who were assembled at the port of Vlissingen to see the king and his entourage off. According to a third-party account, as the king was about to step onboard his ship, he had an encounter with Willem. The king told him in effect that he knew full well the Dutch estates would never have had the gall to treat him this way were they not being led by someone higher, meaning the Prince of Orange. Willem, who was still trying to maintain a middle ground, deflected, saying that the Dutch provincial councils had made their own decisions. Whereupon the king let loose with an angry tirade, which the witness who recounted the story felt reflected the king’s sense of having been personally crossed. It was “not the estates” that had betrayed him, he cried to the younger man, whom he had known since they were children and whom his own father had seemingly favored, “but you, you, you!” Philip boarded the ship and never returned to the Dutch provinces.

  New laws went into effect in Dutch cities shortly thereafter. Protestant worship would be not only a religious offense but a crime against the state. The heresy laws to be enforced by the Spanish Inquisition on the Dutch populace were lampoonably brutal. For example, death was the penalty even if one repented and came back to the Catholic fold. The only difference was the manner: repentent men were beheaded and women buried alive or drowned, whereas those who refused to acknowledge the evil of their ways were burned at the stake. Considering that perhaps half of the three million inhabitants of the Dutch provinces had left the Catholic Church by this point, most of them to join Calvinist congregations, the implications were rather vast.

&
nbsp; These decrees had an explosive and broad impact on the Dutch. Essentially, the Dutch population broke down into three groups: ordinary people, merchants, and the nobility. Calvinism had taken hold especially among farmers, shoemakers, shipwrights, and other workers; their new congregations were forums for both spiritual cleansing and political protest. For many merchants, who had to pay the largest share of the taxes that Spain levied, the heresy laws were added insult to financial injury. The nobility was tiny compared with that of other European countries (it comprised less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the population, and many of these people had no land but rather were businessmen who happened to have titles), but the noblemen played a role in the government and the king’s decision to place his trusted courtier Antoine Perrenot, aka Cardinal Granvelle, in the position of senior minister of state usurped their time-honored right to be led by one of their own. Dutchmen of every class were outraged by portions of the new heresy laws that gave the Inquisition the power to strip someone suspected of anti-Catholicism of his or her property—another violation of their ancient liberties. Philip thus succeeded in bringing, for the first time, a large number of people from each of these three groups of Dutch society into alignment.

  War is always messy, not just in the way it’s fought but in who is fighting and why. Ardent Calvinists used the outrage that the heresy laws stirred up to promote their faith. But many who remained Catholic also joined in the rebellion. One of the first noblemen to openly object to Philip’s plan was Lamoral, the Count of Egmont, who was not only a proud and eminently correct Catholic but a member of Philip’s council of state, which administered the Dutch provinces, and a military hero who had recently won battles against the French in Philip’s service. In 1564, before the council of state, he gave the first airing of what would become a familiar theme of Dutch tolerance—based not on ideals but on practicality. The king should abandon his campaign to crush Protestantism as a heresy, Egmont told the assembly, because the Dutch provinces were geographically different from other parts of Europe. We are not “bounded by oceans and mountains,” his logic went. That is, since the Netherlands was an open landscape, rulers had to expect a free flow of information and ideas and to put up with it, even if some of those ideas were repellent.

  With his this-behavior-is-going-to-happen-anyway-so-we-might-as-well-tolerate-it reasoning, Egmont sounded a refrain that would be repeated in the twentieth century in, for example, the decisions to decriminalize soft drugs and prostitution. No doubt he did not have it in mind to establish a tradition of loosening constraints on personal behavior, but in trying to maintain a balance between duty and liberty, he adopted what would become a uniquely Dutch approach.

  Meanwhile, Philip had his inquisitors working in the provinces. The most infamously efficient was Pieter Titelmans, who operated in Flanders and was particularly skilled in his ability to sniff out information—from booksellers, in markets—then move through the phases of arrest, interrogation, and execution. Over the course of several years, he averaged about two cases per week, each one of which, as was intended, sent out ripples of fear and, as was not intended, built anger and solidarity.

  People got creative with their forms of resistance. Since it wasn’t safe to hold non-Catholic services in towns, “hedge sermons” sprang up, held at locations in the countryside that could be announced at short notice. At first they were small affairs, a dozen or so people listening to a Calvinist preacher, but very quickly they became immensely popular, with thousands at a time crowded together in a field outside the city walls, safely beyond the jurisdiction of the king’s men. (The Flemish artist Pieter Breughel painted his pastoral Sermon of St. John the Baptist at this time as a sly blessing on this activity, a reminder that the first sermons were all in the out of doors.) Pore through some of the original documents of the period, in which local clerks were forced to write out decrees from the inquisitors to city residents, and you find snide little graffiti in the margins, as in one case in Ghent in which the clerk scribbled, beside Titelmans’s name, “Alias Tyranny.”

  In what sounds like a Monty Python strategy, one weapon used by the Dutch rebels was … satire. It was an age in which the divine right of kings was so ingrained that it was nearly impossible for people to imagine directly challenging a monarch, and also a time when ceremony and ritual were so refined that slight changes could be used to make political points. Thus on April 5, 1566, a scene played out at the palace in Brussels that needs some interpreting if it’s to make sense to modern eyes. More than two hundred Dutchmen of the so-called lesser nobility, which is to say merchants who happened to have inherited titles, processed through the archway of the palace and politely demanded an audience with Margaret, the Duchess of Parma, whom Philip had appointed regent of the Dutch provinces. The date they chose for the event—the Friday before Palm Sunday—would have said something in itself, suggesting Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem and thus peace. Then again, Jesus was the righteous Son of God—what did that imply about how these Dutchmen saw themselves?

  They presented themselves as “good and loyal servants and faithful vassals” of King Philip. They were so obsequious in their manner that one of Margaret’s advisers dismissively referred to them as a bunch of beggars. And they were indeed begging—for the relaxation of the onerous heresy laws. But there was also a strong warning—that “a general uprising could break out”—and after their leader read their petition they all executed a graceful little half-turn movement—the “caracole”—which was a battle maneuver that mounted soldiers did in order to fire pistols at an enemy.

  Margaret was bewildered by this mismatch of courtly signals—which was the idea. As the historian Peter Arnade says, the ambiguity allowed the Dutchmen “to imagine—even scheme—revolt while professing allegiance.” The confused duchess acquiesced: she gave the order to suspend the burnings at the stake and the work of the inquisitors. The minor nobles were overjoyed. That night they held a drinking party, at which they decided that they liked being called beggars. Again mimicking courtly refinements, in particular the chivalric orders (the Order of the Fleece, of the Garter, of the Dragon), they—and by extension all the Dutch rebels—would henceforth become the Order of the Beggars. News of the satiric order caught on and spread throughout the provinces. The rebels adopted a mock chivalric fashion: gray cloak (gray was the color associated with the poor), a begging bowl attached to the belt, and, as a topper, a flourishing “Turkish” moustache. Paintings, prints, and medals of handsomely dressed-down Beggars circulated. The look became a fad among young people.

  Until this point the rebellion was largely confined to the southern provinces. Then, two months after the Beggars’ banquet, their leader, Hendrik van Brederode, who had read out the petition to Margaret of Parma, came clattering into Amsterdam at the head of a contingent of mounted rebels, bringing news of events in the south. Van Brederode had been among the earliest and most eager rebels. He was a vigorous, hard-drinking, death-defying sort who was seemingly afraid of no one—“a madman if ever there was one,” a mate of his called him—and after attending several mock banquets, dressed variously as a beggar or a cardinal, he took charge of the effort to spread the rebellion northward.

  As they did wherever he went, crowds turned out in Amsterdam. The city had followed its own trajectory through these turbulent times. Its Catholic leaders, installed by Philip, with their close ties to Rome and to Philip’s court, obeyed the dictates of king and church—sort of. In fact, there were more and more Calvinists in Amsterdam, and Willem Bardes, the man who had taken over the job of schout, or sheriff, in 1542 and kept it until 1566, adopted the look-the-other-way policy in handling religious differences. He chose not to disturb Calvinist services, and, when pressured to make arrests, he gave residents warnings so that they could flee.

  Bardes was smart and well liked—he knew his town and how it worked and how to keep things going in tough times. But he had been forced from office earlier in the year and replaced with a hard-line
r named Pieter Pieterszoon. After a visiting Calvinist minister held the first hedge sermon just outside the city’s Haarlem Gate—which drew a huge but orderly crowd—Pieterszoon decided to go on the offensive. When it came time for the next “secret” sermon, he led one hundred armed men on horseback on a flanking maneuver, apparently intending to attack the gathering. But the Calvinists had protection: the sheriff’s men were met by a large group armed with bows and arrows, who faced them down.

  This was the atmosphere in Amsterdam when Van Brederode appeared. There were lots of restive Calvinists in the city, eager to take some kind of action. But what could people do?

  As it turned out, the suspension of the Inquisition was like the sudden unlocking of doors that had long been barred: all over the provinces, decades of pent-up feeling burst forth in violence—directed not at the king but at the structures of Catholicism. It began in Flanders in the south, when, in the summer heat, a hedge sermon got out of hand and the crowd started attacking a nearby Catholic church. Within three days, more than four hundred churches across the south were ravaged, the “graven imagery” that John Calvin preached against hacked with clubs, angels’ wings and saints’ heads clattering to the marble floors. People tore down holy paintings, ransacked monasteries, raided monks’ cells, put rocks through stained glass windows. The “iconoclastic fury” of 1566 was under way.

  The first attack in the south took place on August 11. Twelve days later, a group of merchants were gathered in the morning along the Warmoesstraat in Amsterdam, exchanging news. The street ran perpendicular to the harbor, along the river. The houses on its western side had their backs to the water. Many of these were the property of merchants, who could have goods delivered right to the back by boat and then hoisted up into their upper floors for storage. The street along the front thus served as the city’s financial center, where men haggled and gossiped. A group appeared, newly returned from Antwerp, and they breathily told of the goings-on in the south. For proof, they had with them some crumbled marble: bits of church altars and holy statues.