God is a Capitalist
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Erasmus saw Christendom as an arena in which Christian humanism battled traditional scholasticism. His genius lay in fusing humanist techniques of exegesis with a systematic articulation and a strong commitment to Christianity. At the same time, he saw dangers in scholarship and the humanism of the Italian Renaissance, dangers such as paganism, ceremony and schism. For Erasmus, scholarship should lead the scholar to a deeper commitment to Christ. “I brought it about that humanism, which among the Italians…savored of nothing but pure paganism, began nobly to celebrate Christ,” he wrote according to E. H. Harbison in The Christian Scholar and His Calling in the Age of the Reformation.
In addition to his translation of Scripture that challenged the official Vulgate, Erasmus taught that the ultimate authority for interpreting Scripture resided in the scholar, thus usurping Church authority once again. He held salvation to be an individual matter, between a person and God, as opposed to the traditional Church view that salvation came through the sacraments and membership in the Church. Erasmus did not invent the concept of personal salvation. He stood on the shoulders of many theologians and martyrs who preceded him. But he proved more gifted, eloquent and persuasive, and he preached it at a time in history when dissatisfaction with the Catholic Church flowed deep and wide across the continent. This subversive doctrine of personal salvation would prove as important to economics as to religion, because it would contribute to the rise of a radical individualism.
Erasmus intended to reform the Church from within through sound scholarship, writing and preaching. He advocated outward submission to Church ritual and authority, but personal devotion to Christ and the scholarly study of Scripture. Those in Europe who could read consumed his writings, but his books especially appealed to middle class merchants and manufacturers in spite of his scorn for their profession. Due to Erasmus’ influence many in Europe were already what historian Jonathan Israel calls crypto-Protestants decades before Luther’s rupture with the Church.
Erasmus was one of the most prominent scholars of his age, but his greatest concern was for a pure, personal Christianity that imitated Christ. He considered himself a preacher of righteousness above all else, but he struggled to liberalize Church institutions and free scholarship from the rigidity and formalism of medieval traditions. He corresponded with over 500 men of the highest importance in the world of politics and thought, and rulers sought his advice on all kinds of subjects according to The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy in its “Erasmus” article.
Then, on October 31, 1517, Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to Castle Church door in Wittenberg, Germany, condemning the Church’s sale of indulgences to raise money for the construction of St. Peter’s in Rome. Luther did not write anything that Erasmus had not already published for decades, but he rushed into battle unarmed with Erasmus’ popularity, political contacts, and eloquence. In contrast to the tolerance shown Erasmus, Church authorities demanded that Luther recant. Luther refused and crypto-Protestants throughout Europe burst into flaming Protestants.
Luther and other Protestants appealed to Erasmus to support them, but the scholar refused, fearing schism and the wrath of the authorities. Erasmus thought Luther was wrong to disturb the unity of the Church, but the Church recognized in Erasmus the intellectual power behind the revolt, charging him with having “laid the egg that Luther hatched,” according to The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Erasmus pleaded no contest to the paternity charge, but claimed he had expected a different kind of bird. A Dominican theologian remarked, “Luther is pestilential, but Erasmus more so, for Luther sucked all his poison from Erasmus’ teats,” according to Israel in The Dutch Republic. A papal nuncio reported to the Pope in 1521 that “Luther’s doctrines were being preached publicly in Holland and that ‘all this happens because of the Hollander Erasmus,’” Israel wrote.
The Church pressured Erasmus to break openly with Luther and declare his allegiance to the Church. He resisted as long as he could, but when the pressure became too great, he left the Netherlands in a state of spiritual civil war and migrated to Switzerland where he hoped to reside in peace. He wrote De libero arbitrio (1524) in which he laid down both sides of the argument on freedom of the will, and finished with an easy-going semi-Pelagiansism. Then in 1530, while living in the Protestant city of Basel, he tossed the Church another bone by writing a half-hearted endorsement of the Church’s interpretation of the Eucharist. He also espoused the position that a man may have two opinions on theology, his true opinion that he keeps between intimate friends and the outward one that conforms to official teaching. Erasmus died in Basel in 1536, ten years before Luther’s death and the same year that John Calvin arrived in Geneva.
Erasmus’ legacy continued to energize Protestantism in the Netherlands for a century. Nowhere in Europe did Protestantism and public authority clash more explosively, partly because the government there took a harsher line against rebels. As Luther became increasingly confessional minded in the late 1520’s, the persecuted clandestine Reformation of the Low Lands developed a “non-dogmatic pluriform crypto-Protestantism and this, by its nature, could more easily draw on the biblical humanism of Erasmus than the theology of Luther.”
Erasmus lived to witness the schism he feared. In 1520, Emperor Charles V added Erasmus’ commentaries on the New Testament, Enchiridion, to the list of banned books. The following year he ordered the burning of all Protestant books in the Netherlands and the peasants of Germany revolted against the nobility, citing as justification Luther’s writings. Two years later Charles executed two Augustinian friars for teaching Protestant theology.
The crypto-Protestantism of Erasmus and Luther’s outward manifestation appealed to merchants and nobility, but the task of recruiting uneducated peasants and artisans fell to the Anabaptists whom Lutherans, Calvinists and Catholics all persecuted. Their opponents called them Anabaptists because they denied the validity of infant baptism and insisted that new church members be re-baptized. They adopted a congregational, autonomous form of government, opposed state sponsorship and control of churches, and shunned hierarchy. Some adopted a form of communal living in which they abandoned private property. Anabaptist leader Menno Simons was one of the greatest figures of the Dutch Reformation. His Foundation of Christian Doctrine emphasized practical holiness, discipline and submission to Christ. He encouraged Christians to lead sober lives based on Scripture, but to submit to no ruler other than Christ.
Anabaptists launched the first political rebellion against Spain in 1534 when they stormed the city of Munster and expelled all who refused baptism. They held the city for eighteen months, but the crypto-Protestants in the rest of the country were not ready for open rebellion and refused to join them. The government retook the city and slaughtered the Anabaptist rebels. From 1530 through 1560, Anabaptists led the charge for Protestantism in the Netherlands. The merchants, regents and nobility preferred to hide their Protestant beliefs behind closed doors, but attendance at Catholic services plunged. Those too roused to keep quiet joined the Anabaptists and suffered the wrath of the state. In 1550, Charles V intensified the Inquisition in the Low Lands with his “eternal edict.” Under the edict, a person accused of heresy but refusing to confess was burned alive; men who confessed were beheaded and women buried alive. Between 1523 and 1565, the Spanish king murdered 1,300 people, almost all of them Anabaptists.
Calvinism came to the Netherlands in the late 1550’s, mainly from Dutch refugees living in Germany. From 1565 on, Calvinism began to dominate, but not displace the multi-hued Protestantism of the past. For another century, Protestantism would remain split between radical Calvinists on one side and Erasmian Protestants on the other, which included moderate Calvinists, Lutherans and Anabaptists. The two groups would clash many times politically, with radical Calvinists supporting a monarchy, religious conformity and state control of the economy while the Erasmians pushed for a republican form of government, freedom of religion and free markets.
Birth pains
Calvinists began preaching openly in the countryside of the Netherlands in 1566, but not in the cities. Then, in August, mobs began ransacking Catholic churches all over the Netherlands and destroying statues and paintings. Israel wrote, “Alienation of a society from its own religious culture, on such a scale, was a phenomenon without precedent or parallel.” Historians try to explain the rioting as frustration over the poor economy of the 1560’s, but as Israel wrote, “…the iconoclastic outbreaks of 1566 involved no assaults on government officials or town halls, or against tax-farmers, and no plundering of shops and food-stores. In form the beeldenstorm was purely and simply an attack on the church and not anything else.” Calvinists began to preach openly as they took over some of the Catholic churches.
Protestant nobles took advantage of the situation to lead an armed revolt, but two quick defeats in battle deflated the movement. The state closed Protestant churches and thousands of Protestants converted to Catholicism. William decided that prudence demanded he take his family to visit relatives in Germany. Philip responded to the rebellion by sending his top general, the Duke of Alva to the Netherlands at the head of 10,000 of his best troops. During the five years of Alva’s rule, almost 9,000 people were investigated for heresy or treason with more than a thousand being executed and 60,000 refugees fleeing the country. The Duke took William of Orange’s fifteen year old son prisoner, condemned William as a heretic and confiscated his lands. William gathered an army of German troops and invaded, but Alva’s hardened veterans slaughtered most of them.
William would have to wait until 1572 for the revolt to gain traction. That year, Queen Elizabeth expelled the Sea-Beggars, a small Dutch navy, from England in response to threats from Philip. With no port to call home, the Sea-Beggars decided to capture Brill, a small town on the coast of the Holland. Encouraged by their success, they took the more important cities of Flushing and Veere. Soon, Haarlem and all of North Holland joined the rebel cause. The States of Holland, a congress of representatives from the many states that constituted the province of Holland, met and agreed to fund William’s army from taxes and the sale of confiscated Church property. Without consciously deciding to, “the States of Holland had transformed themselves from being an occasional, chiefly advisory body into an embryonic government endeavouring to organize and finance a war while maintaining order and justice and taking over the reins of administration.”
The revolt spread to Friesland, but a counter attack on Dokkum by Spanish troops caused its fall and the massacre of many of its citizens. Alva launched a new campaign to crush the revolt and retake the rebel cities. After capturing Mechelen, he allowed his troops to sack the city and murder the inhabitants. Next, he massacred hundreds in the city of Zutphen, but at Naarden, he murdered every man woman and child in the city. Alva surrounded Haarlem, but the citizens fought so well that they exacted a high price from the Spanish troops before abandoning the city.
The Spanish laid siege to Leiden in 1574 and by August the defenders’ supplies had run out. William sent a carrier pigeon with a letter promising to relieve the city and had the surrounding dikes cut in hopes of flooding the area and permitting his troops to reach the city by boat. But the water did not rise to a level high enough to force the Spanish out and the rebel forces were stuck short of the city. For weeks they could advance no further. Suddenly heavy rain began to fall; the waters rose and the Spanish retreated. William’s forces entered the city and found the citizens so weak that hardly any could stand.
After Leiden, the Spanish left southern Holland and gave the rebels control of most of the province. Philip replaced Alva with Don Luis de Requesens and authorized him to negotiate a settlement with William. Talks began in 1575 with the rebels insisting that they had not rebelled against the Spanish Crown, but against Alva. They demanded a limited monarchy over their country, tolerance for Protestants, and sharing in the government by the States General, all of which went well beyond what Philip would agree to. The next year, the Spanish troops, which had not been paid for months, mutinied and attacked Antwerp. “For several days Europe’s greatest commercial and financial centre was subjected to slaughter, pillage, and rape.”
Negotiations led to the signing of the Pacification of Ghent in 1576 by most of the states of the Netherlands, but not by the Spanish under Don Juan who withdrew to the south, gathered Spanish troops and launched his re-conquest. The northern states pushed for a closer union and won with the signing of the Union of Utrecht in 1579, which established the Dutch Republic.
That same year, Huguenots (French Protestants) published a tract, Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, that became the most celebrated justification for rebellion of the age, asserting that kings and magistrates were subject to laws and ultimately responsible to the people. Its most likely authors, Languet and Duplessis-Mornay, were close friends of William of Orange in the view of Charles Wilson in The Dutch Republic and the Civilisation of the Seventeenth Century. Two decades later, the Salamancan scholar Juan de Mariana published a similar defense of tyrannicide in his second most popular work, De Rege et Regis Institutione, which appeared in 1599 at Toledo.
William struggled to maintain the unity of the northern and southern states in the rebellion by ensuring toleration for Catholic worship, although he had become a Calvinist. He might have succeeded had not the radical Calvinists in the northern states refused to permit any religion but their own. The predominantly Catholic southern states responded to the northerner’s intolerance by surrendering to Don Juan’s armies as he marched north.
In 1581, the states repudiated Philip II and his heirs as their sovereign with the Act of Abjuration and offered sovereignty to the Duke of Anjou, younger brother of the French king. Until the Acts, the rebels had paid lip service to the King of Spain. But in 1583, Anjou abandoned the Netherlands and William retreated to Delft in Holland to lead the rebellion. The States General, the legislative branch of the Republic, transferred their assembly from Antwerp to The Hague. The following year, William died at the hands of an assassin. His last words were, “My God, my God, have pity on me and these poor people.”
Desperately seeking an ally that could assist them against Spain, the Dutch offered their tiny nation to Henry III of France. But his own country suffered from a civil war in which the Protestant Huguenots fought to save themselves from the genocide at the hands of the French state. The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, in which Catholics murdered an estimated 70,000 Protestants in a week’s time, including William of Orange’s father-in-law, had ignited the war.
Henry declined the offer of sovereignty so the Dutch turned to Queen Elizabeth. She also declined, fearing the wrath of Spain, but she agreed to place the Provinces under her protection and provide military assistance if she could appoint the Republic’s military and political head. The Republic agreed and the queen selected the earl of Leicester as the governor-general, dispatching him with 7,350 troops to defend the Republic. The Leicester regime proved disastrous. At one point, English troops mutinied and fought with the Spanish against the Dutch. The English protectorate ended with the earl attempting a coup and when that failed, sailing for home in 1587.
The golden age
From the beginning of the revolt, William and the Holland regents had thwarted the radical Calvinists’ efforts to determ
ine the political and religious character of the new republic. The Calvinists in the Dutch Reformed Church disliked the freedom that William and the Holland regents, who favored an Erasmian Protestantism, wanted for other faiths. William had fought to give Catholics equal status and the freedom to worship openly. The regents had suppressed Catholic services in public, but tolerated private gatherings of Catholics, Anabaptists, Lutherans, Jews and other groups. But that was not enough for the Calvinists. They wanted to strengthen Calvinist orthodoxy within the church, rid the nation of other forms of Christianity, and increase the influence of the church in affairs of state, society and the economy. This struggle for power between the radical Calvinists and Erasmian Protestants would outline the political battles for the next century.
In the year of William of Orange’s assassination, 1584, Cornelis Hooft, a regent of Amsterdam, urged the Republic not to enthrone William as a monarch, arguing that the people opposed it and that it violated the intent of the revolt to defend their historical freedoms and privileges. But in the power vacuum left by the death of William, radical Calvinists agitated for a strong monarchy and buttressed Leicester’s position, while Erasmian Protestants campaigned for a republic with a weak executive. Thomas Wilkes said of the Hollanders in 1590, “They hate to be subject not only to a Spaniard but, tasting the sweetness of their liberty, to any kingly government.” The struggle between the moderate Hollanders and radical Calvinists weakened the Republic to the point that Thomas Bodley, wrote in 1589, that he “considered the Dutch state ‘weaker at this present than it hath been these many years; and unless by Her majesty’s extraordinary assistance, and counsel, it be presently holpen, there is little appearance that they can hold it out long.’” But they did hold out.