The news spread. At lunchtime, the Catholic officials of Amsterdam hurried through the streets hauling all of the valuables from their various orders to be stashed away for safekeeping. The sight of berobed clergy up to their necks in delicate items of wrought silver and gold inflamed things further. At two o’clock, a children’s baptism in the Old Church—at which it was normal practice to ward off the devil—was interrupted by somebody shouting, “You priests, stop summoning the devil from these children! You’ve deceived the world long enough with your lies!” A woman in a pew took off her slipper and aimed it at the head of a wooden statue of Mary. Some young toughs started hurling stones at the stained glass windows.
One of the city’s mayors happened to be in the church at the time. He flew out the door, headed straight for City Hall, and burst in to a meeting of his colleagues crying, “In the Old Church they’re beating all the saints to pieces!” Whereupon one of the others, of Calvinist inclinations, responded, with dry Protestant pique, that they were in fact statues and not actual saints.
These were unprecedented times, but a familiar sequence of events ensued. After the initial rampage, the city fathers opted not to punish anyone but, instead, to allow Calvinists something they had been pushing for: permission to hold church services. It was gedogen all over again: Yes, this is illegal behavior, but we will allow it. They stipulated that Calvinist worship had to take place outside the city, but they also let Calvinist ministers make home visits to parishioners who were sick.
But this time, gedogen didn’t work. In less than two weeks, the court in Brussels fired off a letter with an order: “Stand up against the church desecrators.” The subsequent crackdown resulted in another, more furious bout of Catholic bashing.
The woman called Margaret of Parma, who was technically governing the Dutch people, had come into the world, forty-four years earlier, as the result of a liaison between Philip’s father, Charles V, and the daughter of a Dutch carpet maker. The Holy Roman Emperor did the manly thing and acknowledged her as his offspring, and she was raised as royalty. At the age of eighteen she was married to another regal personage of nonstandard pedigree: the Duke of Parma, who was the son of Pope Paul III’s illegitimate son—that is to say, the pope’s grandson. When Philip left the Low Countries, he had appointed her his proxy ruler. She had been well educated, but probably no amount of education could have prepared someone to govern in such a tempest. She appeased the Beggars, infuriating her court as well as the Dutch loyalists, then she cracked down on the iconoclasts, leading them further along their path of revolt.
But just when it looked like her rule was dissolving into chaos, the situation changed. She knew there was serious disagreement among the Dutch leaders who wanted change. Van Brederode and his followers pushed for rebellion. Egmont, who had made the geographic argument for why Philip should allow the Dutch their tolerance, was among those of what might be termed a moderate-medieval sensibility: they saw that Protestantism was a fact, but they could not and would not openly oppose their king. Willem of Orange was in between these positions, advocating religious tolerance in a world of hardening intolerance; his letters show him constantly angling, trying to puzzle out a solution.
What shifted the balance was the iconoclasm. Its fury and violence had shocked many of the Dutch themselves, so much that some of the Dutch leaders who had been leaning toward rebellion began to waver. Sensing this, Margaret did some skillful politicking and turned some Beggars into loyalists. At the same time, her soldiers attacked, and easily won back, cities that had gone fully in support of the rebels.
The rebellion began to fragment. Willem traveled ceaselessly during this period, crisscrossing the countryside on two very different missions. He was trying to broker a deal in which the Dutch rebels would desist if the king allowed Protestant worship in the country. But he was also trying to get Dutch cities to contribute to a fund for the general defense, in the event that Philip mounted an all-out attack. Here he was faced with a classic problem that comes from a lack of national identity. Cities were willing to shore up their own defenses, but they did not have the sense of a larger purpose that would enable them to commit funds or arms to be shipped elsewhere.
As the situation grew more dire, Willem got bolder. One reason may have been exposure: as he traveled from town to town, arriving on horseback, erect and serene, with a chiseled visage that seemed made for reproduction in busts and engravings, ordinary people turned out to greet him. The cheers, the expectations evident in the faces: it was a kind of energy. He was becoming the de facto Dutch leader. He spoke out more directly, not for attacking the king but for “religious peace”—tolerance of religious differences. The moment would eventually be seen as a watershed in European history, and the principle would become the foundation of a set of concepts we take for granted today: tolerance, diversity, pluralism, civil rights, the idea that any single person is of equal value to another. Espousing it in the 1560s would turn out to be a little premature. It is all the more remarkable, then, especially given his background, that Willem came to this view and pursued it in the midst of such upheaval.
In September 1566, while in Antwerp, he took the step—which Margaret had not authorized—of allowing Calvinist worship. Soon other cities in the south followed suit. In December, Willem arrived in Amsterdam. Still trying to push for tolerance and hold off war, he wrote to Margaret, warning her that in Amsterdam “distrust, bias, and hostility of the citizens against the magistrate are so great and have been so prolonged, that is to be feared that one day there will arise great difficulties.” Working with the city leaders, he hammered out an agreement that allowed Calvinist worship in the city, with restrictions.
Then came the blackest possible news—precisely what Willem most feared. Philip had finally understood the situation: the iconoclasm had brought him clarity. He had ordered an army into the Low Countries, ten thousand strong. Tolerance was weakness; he would show strength.
Soon two dreaded syllables—“Alba”—were echoing through the provinces, as word spread that the king had called on Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, more commonly known as the Duke of Alba and popularly referred to as the Iron Duke, to take charge.
Alba—a tall, thin, angularly handsome man approaching sixty years of age—had been at war since he was sixteen and was probably the greatest military tactician of the age. He was a rigidly puritanical Castilian nobleman, exacting in his Catholicism and in his indefatigable prosecution of a military campaign. He had developed a reputation for what others considered unnecessary brutality but which he saw as precisely necessary force. In a battle against French troops, for example, he offered them their lives in exchange for surrender. They fought on, only to surrender later. Alba hanged every one of them, reasoning that to do otherwise would render meaningless his initial offer.
Alba was twenty years older than Philip and had known him since he was a small boy. As a child, Philip had studied the campaigns Alba had carried out under his father. They were alike in their religion and conservatism, but Alba was both smarter and narrower than his king. If modern parallels are of use, it might be appropriate to liken the relationship between the two men to that between President George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney.
Alba was profoundly devoted to both his king and the church and, as one of Philip’s closest advisers, had pushed since Charles’s abdication for a crushing military solution to the Dutch problem. Now he had his chance.
Alba’s reputation was so forbidding that people began to flee the country before he had even gotten there. He understood spectacle as well as strategy: he knew how to create a theater of terror. He arranged the travel into the Netherlands of his ten thousand hardened regular soldiers, culled from the top ranks of Spanish, Italian, and German regiments, so as to gain maximum attention. His army moved like a snake, in three sections: its head reached an encampment first, purposely drawing attention, then moved on; the middle section appeared at the same spot the next day, increasing
awe; the final contingent, resplendent with banners and instruments of war (including muskets, a military innovation that bewildered the Flemish who first encountered them), arrived the following day.
As Alba approached Brussels, the leaders of the rebellion were in disarray, deeply divided on what course to follow. Willem of Orange knew that any sort of revolt was impossible, at least for the time being, and beyond that he knew Alba well (they had both served Charles and had traveled together on the expedition to negotiate peace with the King of France) and was convinced that leaders of the Dutch insurrection needed to make a tactical retreat if they wanted to stay alive.
With danger mounting, he arranged a secret meeting with his friend Egmont, to tell him that he himself was leaving the country to regroup, to urge Egmont to do likewise, and to lay out a strategy for future military action. They chose a hunting lodge in the Flemish village of Dendermonde. Willem arrived first. Egmont called for him through the open door. “I’m here in the kitchen, sitting on the meat block!” Willem replied, with comic awareness of the contrast between how much was at stake and how humble the surroundings.
That was the extent of the comedy. Egmont made clear his belief that fleeing was wrong—under the code of chivalry, it would be a sign of dishonor to Philip, who was his king. From the first, Egmont had distinguished between principled disagreement with a policy, which was a just undertaking, and disloyalty to a monarch, which was for him an impossibility. Willem tried in effect to get his friend to lose his medieval shackles. “Cousin, if you take arms, I will join you,” he said. “If not, I must leave you and quit the country. Have you forgotten how the Duke of Alba used to say to Charles V, ‘Dead men make no war’? I won’t wait for their justice or trust to their kindness.” Egmont said that when Alba arrived he would show him respect, and he believed that Alba would do likewise.
When Alba rode into Brussels on an afternoon in August of 1567, he made straight for the palace. Margaret offered him her resignation, for while officially she was still regent it was clear that her stepbrother had put the Spanish soldier above her, and she knew what he planned to do. Alba then set up a commission that he called the Council of Troubles to deal with heretics. It would become known in Dutch history as the Council of Blood. With this official machinery in place, he arrested Egmont and several other Dutch noblemen, including the Count of Hoorn, who like Egmont had been a military hero in the service of Philip II, and imprisoned them in the castle of Ghent. People throughout the provinces were bewildered by the news. Throughout the crisis, both Egmont and Hoorn had made clear their unswerving loyalty to the king, so it was unthinkable that they should be executed.
The following June, in the Grand Place, the central square of Brussels, in an enormous public spectacle that quickly became the subject of story, song, and art, the Dutch nobles were beheaded. “I have satisfied myself over what they deserve,” Alba wrote to Philip. “The example should be made almost immediately, and I consider it more effective if done in cold blood.” Alba was now in charge, as he told the king: “No one dares to ask me if I have authority for what I am doing. I refuse to present my authority, saying only that I have to do what is in Your Majesty’s service.”
Heresy was Alba’s central interest. His Council of Troubles—with a staff of 170 researchers, prosecutors, and soldier/executioners—got to work. According to Dutch sources, by its end the Council of Troubles put eighteen thousand Dutch men and women to death. Other tallies have it at closer to nine thousand. Alba’s own head count was twelve thousand. But killings via the formal proceedings of the Council were only a fraction of the total. At the same time, Alba’s army began its assault on treasonous Dutch cities. Around the country, as the acrid smoke from burning bodies blackened the air, people prayed to heaven. And if they knew where heaven was, they were as clear on the location of hell. An inversion of the Lord’s Prayer that appeared in printed sheets in Dutch cities, twisted to refer to Alba, began:
Our Devil, who art in Brussels,
Cursed be thy name.
An eleven-year-old boy had left these hills and this green valley, with its half-timbered houses and its meandering river. He returned as a thirty-four-year-old man who stood at the center of a vast struggle over religion, power, and the changing meaning of freedom. Willem of Orange chose his German home as the base from which to plan a war against the empire that had raised him. Over the next four years the quiet medieval Castle Dillenburg was transformed into a military headquarters, with soldiers, spies, and diplomats coming and going.
Willem was the only major Dutch nobleman whom Alba had failed to subdue—which put him in the position of singlehandedly being able either to let the Dutch rebellion die a quiet death or to reignite it and turn it into a war of independence. After years in which he himself had struggled over the nature of the rebellion, he had finally embraced revolt and come to terms with the central role that religion played in it. He converted to Calvinism, and the conversion was a calculated political move. At least sixty thousand Calvinists had fled the Low Countries since Alba’s arrival. They were living in exile in Germany, France, and southern England, and they were waiting for a leader. There were also Protestant communities and leaders elsewhere in Europe that could be called on to help. He organized soldiers, borrowed money, and sent spies to commune with merchants and regents in cities throughout the Dutch provinces. And he raised a navy, of sorts, by giving letters of marque to a ragged collection of semipiratical ships of various nationalities that were moored at English ports, whose captains had pledged him their loyalty.
And so battle commenced. Willem brought soldiers into the Dutch provinces from the north and the south. But French forces in Alba’s service were waiting and devastated the Dutch and their French Huguenot allies. With German mercenaries, Willem entered Wallonia, in the south, only to find that the townspeople there had not been prepared and thought he was an enemy. Willem grew more desperate as time passed—his money was running out and mercenaries had to be paid. Knowing this, Alba played a slow, defensive game.
What changed in the meantime was the Dutch people. The human mind doesn’t instantly adjust to embrace new concepts, and the idea of nationhood took some getting used to. One thing that helped the Frisians, Zeelanders, Hollanders, Gelderlanders, and other provincials to begin to think of themselves as one people was Alba’s continued campaign to stamp out Protestantism—every town square was the site of burnings and beheadings as the Council of Blood moved across the landscape.
Another was the sophisticated propaganda campaign that Willem of Orange mounted. Like a modern politician, he gathered into his inner circle men who could spin his version of events. Dutch cities were flooded with pamphlets and posters that portrayed a righteous rebellion, in support of uniquely Dutch ideas about home, property, and individual liberties, against the tyrannical power of the Catholic Church and a foreign monarchy.
The Netherlands have always been ruled, Willem said in the first of these pamphlets, with the principles of respect for the “freedoms, rights, customs, traditions and privileges” that the Dutch developed over the centuries. And the Dutch people “owe obedience to the rulers only on condition that the freedoms are maintained.” But King Philip had shown that his true goal was to “enslave the conscience, persons and possessions of the whole population—nay, to rob them of all their freedoms, rights and privileges.” Willem went on to dissect the misuse of religion by the King of Spain: “Of course, this was all given the appearance of holy zeal and said to be done in the name of religion … but in reality it was greatly to the disservice of God, the king, and the country.”
The language of subsequent pamphlets became progressively more heated. “Awake,” he urged in the next one. “Do not allow yourselves to be further deceived.”
Such a movement required a figurehead, and the propaganda carefully crafted Willem’s image, raising him up to founding father status. Prints were run off by the thousands that showed Willem of Orange, the righteous defender
of liberty, on one side, and Alba, the demonic enslaver, on the other. Songs were written that praised the heroism of Willem and the other leaders of the revolt. The most popular, the “Wilhelmus,” is today the country’s national anthem. Whenever a Dutch athlete wins at the Olympics, the lyrics accompanying the dirgelike melody harken to Willem’s exile in the German castle where he was born and his exhortation to the Dutch to hold fast until he comes to free them.
All of this would not only serve its intended purpose of lighting the fires of patriotism in the Dutch but would later help the Dutch revolt to stand throughout Europe as a model of modern, principled revolt: the beginning of the age of individual liberty. Indeed, John Adams, while he was in the Dutch provinces trying to secure loans to fund the American Revolution, would write (with pushy flattery) that “the Originals of the two Republics are so much alike, that the History of one seems but a Transcript from that of the other; so that every Dutchman instructed in the subject, must pronounce the American revolution just and necessary, or pass a Censure upon the greatest Actions of his immortal Ancestors.”
The parallels are indeed striking. In both the Dutch and the American causes, people had to struggle to expand their identities from the local (Virginians and Hollanders to Americans and Netherlander). Both revolts had economic injustice at their heart. In each there was a foreign monarch whose behavior allowed for him to be easily demonized. And both had a founding father. The reasons for the similarities are fairly clear. Both countries came into being as a result of the unfolding of the concept of individual liberty. The differences between the two situations are partly explained by the two centuries separating them, in which, so to speak, society was able to integrate the longing for liberty.
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