by Will Durant
Meanwhile a new force had entered upon the scene. In March 1568 a band of desperate men known as the Wild Beggars turned their ardor to pillaging churches and monasteries and cutting off the noses or ears of priests and monks, as if resolved to rival the barbarities of the Council of Blood.28 In 1569–72 another group, calling themselves Beggars of the Sea, seized control of eighteen vessels, received commissions from William of Orange, raided the Netherland coast, plundered churches and monasteries, preyed upon Spanish shipping, and replenished their provisions in friendly English ports—and even in distant La Rochelle, then held by Huguenots. Wherever a coastal town was left without a Spanish garrison, the Beggars of the Sea rushed in, captured strategic posts, and, by their power to open the dykes, made it dangerous for Spanish forces to approach. Alva could no longer receive supplies by sea. The principal cities of Holland, Zeeland, Gelderland, and Friesland, so protected, gave their allegiance to William of Orange and voted him supplies for war (July 1572). William moved his headquarters to Delft and declared himself “calvus et Calvinista,” bald and Calvinist, which was truer of his head than of his creed. Now Philip van Marnix wrote the song “Wilhelmus van Nassouwen,” which became and still is the national hymn of the Netherlands.
So encouraged, William organized another army and invaded Brabant. At the same time Louis of Nassau, supported by Coligny, raised a force in France, entered Hainaut, and captured Valenciennes and Mons (May 23, 1572). Alva marched to recapture Mons, hoping thereby to discourage further support of Louis by France. William advanced southward to help his brother; he won some minor victories, but too soon exhausted his funds; his troops paid themselves by plundering churches and amused themselves by killing priests.29 Catholic opposition rose; when William’s army neared Brussels it found the gates closed and the citizens armed to resist. Resuming its march, it was but a league from Mons when it was surprised in its sleep by six hundred Spanish soldiers; eight hundred of William’s men were slaughtered before they could organize for defense; William himself barely escaped, fleeing with a remnant of his forces to Mechlin in Brabant. Meanwhile the murder of Coligny and the Massacre of St. Bartholomew ended all hope of aid from France. On September 17 Mons fell to Alva, who allowed Louis and his surviving troops to leave unharmed; but Alva’s general, Philippe de Novarmes, on his own authority, hanged hundreds of the inhabitants, confiscated their property, and bought it in at bargain rates.30
William’s failure in strategy, the excesses of his uncontrollable troops, and the barbarities of the Beggars frustrated his hopes of uniting Catholics, Calvinists, and Lutherans to oppose Alva’s tyranny. The Beggars, who were nearly all ardent Calvinists, showed against Catholics the same ferocity that the Inquisition and the Council of Blood had shown against rebels and heretics. In many instances they gave Catholic captives a choice between Calvinism and death, and they unhesitatingly killed, sometimes after incredible tortures, those who clung to the old faith.31 Both sides in the conflict put to death many prisoners of war. Wrote a Protestant historian:
On more than one occasion men were seen hanging … their own brothers, who had been taken prisoners in the enemy’s ranks…. The islanders found a fierce pleasure in these acts of cruelty. A Spaniard had ceased to be human in their eyes. On one occasion a surgeon at Veer cut the heart from a Spanish prisoner, nailed it on a vessel’s prow, and invited the townsmen to come and fasten their teeth in it, which many did with savage satisfaction.32
It was these merciless Beggars who defeated Alva. Resting from his campaigns, he bequeathed to his son Don Federigo Álvarez de Toledo the task of recovering and punishing the cities that had declared for William or had surrendered to him. Álvarez began with Mechlin, which offered only a few shots of resistance; priests and citizens came out in a penitent procession to beg that the town be spared. But Alva had ordered an exemplary revenge. For three days Don Federigo’s troops sacked homes, monasteries, and churches, stole the jewels and costly robes of religious statuary, trampled consecrated wafers underfoot, butchered men and violated women, Catholic or Protestant. Advancing into Gelderland, his army overcame the feeble defenses of Zutphen, put nearly every man in the town to death, hanging some by the feet, drowning five hundred by tying them in couples back to back and throwing them into the Ijssel. Little Naarden, after a brief resistance, surrendered; it greeted the conquering Spaniards with tables set with feasts; the soldiers ate and drank, then killed every person in the town. They passed on to Haarlem, a Calvinist center which had shown especial enthusiasm for the revolt. A garrison of four thousand troops defended the city so resolutely that Don Federigo proposed to withdraw. Alva threatened to disown him if he desisted from the siege. Barbarities multiplied; each side hanged captives on gibbets facing the enemy, and the defenders infuriated the besiegers by staging on the ramparts parodies of Catholic rites.33 William sent three thousand men to attack Don Federigo’s army; they were destroyed, and all further efforts to relieve Haarlem failed. After a siege of seven months, and after being reduced to eating weeds and leather, the city surrendered (July 11, 1573). Of the garrison only 1,600 survived; most of these were put to death; four hundred leading citizens were executed; the rest were spared on agreeing to pay a fine of 250,000 guilders.
This was the last and most costly victory of Alva’s regime. Over twelve thousand of the besieging army had died of wounds or disease, and hateful taxes had poured their proceeds fruitlessly into the sieve of war. Philip, who counted pennies rather than lives, discovered that Alva was not only unpopular but expensive, and that his general’s methods were uniting the Netherlands against Spain. Alva felt the veering of the wind and asked to be relieved. He boasted that he had executed eighteen thousand rebels;34 but the heretics were as strong as when he came; moreover, they controlled the ports and the sea, and the provinces of Holland and Zeeland were completely lost to the King. The Bishop of Namur estimated that Alva in seven years had done more harm to Catholicism than Luther and Calvinism had done in a generation.35 Alva’s resignation was accepted; he left the Netherlands (December 18, 1573), was well received by Philip, and, aged seventy-two, led the Spanish armies in the conquest of Portugal (1580). Returning from that campaign, he fell into a lingering fever, and was kept alive only by drinking milk from a woman’s breast. He died December 12, 1582, having lived a year on milk and half a century on blood.
IV. REQUESÉNS AND DON JUAN: 1573–78
To replace him Philip sent Don Luis de Requeséns, lately Spanish Viceroy of Milan. The new governor was surprised by the number and the spirit of the rebels. “Before my arrival,” he wrote to the King, “I did not understand how they could maintain such considerable fleets, while your Majesty could not support a single one. It appears, however, that men who are fighting for their lives, their firesides, their property, and their false religion—for their own cause, in short—are contented to receive rations only, without receiving pay.”37 He begged Philip to allow him to grant a general amnesty to all but persisting heretics, to allow these to emigrate, and to abolish the 10 per cent tax on sales. William of Orange saw in these proposals merely a play for time and a new device for extirpating Protestantism from the Netherlands; he would accept peace only on full freedom of worship, the restoration of provincial privileges, and the withdrawal of all Spaniards from civil and military posts. The war continued. In the battle of Mook (April 13, 1574) William’s brothers Louis, aged thirty-six, and Henry, aged twenty-four, lost their lives.
Two events helped the revolt at this point: Philip went bankrupt (1575), and Requeséns died while besieging Zierikzee (March 5, 1576). The King appointed his half-brother, Don Juan of Austria, to the ungrateful post, but Juan did not reach Luxembourg till November. During this interval the representatives of Holland and Zeeland signed at Delft (April 25) an Act of Pacification, which gave William supreme command on land and sea, the power of appointment to all political posts, and even, in emergency, the right to confer the protectorate of the confederation upon a foreign prince. Speakin
g with his new authority, he appealed to the other provinces to join in expelling the Spaniards from the Netherlands. He promised liberty of conscience and worship to Catholics and Protestants alike.
His appeal would probably have met with little response in the southern provinces had not the Spanish soldiery, cheated of pillage at Zierikzee, mutinied (July) and begun a campaign of indiscriminate plunder and violence that terrorized Flanders and Brabant. The Council of State at Brussels reprimanded them; they defied it; the Council declared them outlaws, but had no force to oppose them. William offered to send military protection, and renewed his pledge of religious freedom. The Council hesitated; the people of Brussels overthrew it and set up another Council under Philippe de Croy, who opened negotiations with the Prince. On September 26 Ghent welcomed a body of troops sent by William to protect it from the Spanish mutineers. On October 19 delegates from Brabant, Flanders, and Hainaut met at Ghent; they were reluctant to ally their states with the outlawed Prince; but on the twentieth the mutineers sacked Maastricht; on the twenty-eighth the conferees, to secure the protection of William’s troops, signed the “Pacification of Ghent,” which recognized him as governor of Holland and Zeeland, suspended all persecution for heresy, and agreed to co-operate in expelling all Spanish soldiers from their provinces. The States-General of the southern provinces, meeting at Brussels, refused to sign the Pacification, considering it a declaration of war against the King.
Once more the mutineers reinforced William’s arguments. On November 4, 1576, they seized Antwerp and subjected it to the worst pillage in Netherland history. The citizens resisted, but were overcome; seven thousand of them were killed; a thousand buildings, some of them masterpieces of architecture, were set on fire; men, women, and children were slaughtered in a delirium of blood by soldiers crying, “Santiago! España! A sangre, a carne, a fuego, a sacco!” (Saint James! Spain! To blood, to flesh, to fire, to sack!) All through that night the soldiers plundered the rich city; nearly every house was robbed. To extort confessions of hidden hoards, real or imaginary, parents were tortured in their children’s presence, infants were slain in their mother’s arms, wives were flogged to death before their husbands’ eyes. For two days more this “Spanish Fury” raged on, until the soldiers were sated with gold and jewelry and costly clothing, and began to gamble their gains with one another in streets still littered with the dead. On November 28 the States-General ratified the Pacification of Ghent.
It was a timely victory for the Prince. When Don Juan sent word from Luxembourg that he was about to enter Brussels, the States-General replied that it would not receive him as governor unless he accepted the Pacification, restored the charters of the provinces, and dismissed all Spanish troops from the Netherlands. The Don, brave in battle, muddled in diplomacy, soldierless and penniless, fretted the winter through in Luxembourg, then (February 12, 1577) signed the “Perpetual Edict,” which committed him to the Pacification and the provincial liberties. On March 1 Juan made a ceremonial entry into Brussels, and the city was delighted to have so handsome and powerless a governor. The Spanish troops departed, and peace smiled for a moment upon the ravaged land.
Juan’s dreams were larger than his purse. After his exploits at Lepanto and Tunis this helpless majesty chilled his romantic blood. Nearby, in England, the lovely Mary Stuart was a prisoner of that ogress Elizabeth. Why not collect an army and some ships, cross the water, depose one queen, marry the other, be king of England and Scotland, and bring those benighted regions back to Mother Church? Philip, who feared the gap between ducats and dreams, set his brother down as a fool. Juan proved it by suddenly leaving Brussels (June 11), putting himself at the head of a Catholic Walloon regiment, and repudiating the Pacification. After fruitless negotiations with Juan, the States-General invited William to the capital. On his arrival (September 23) he was welcomed by a large part of the Catholic citizenry as the only man who could lead the Netherlands to freedom. On October 8 the States-General notified Don Juan that it no longer recognized him as governor, but would accept, in his place, a prince of the blood. On December 10, 1577, all the provinces except Namur bound themselves together in the “Union of Brussels.” The Catholic members of the States-General, fearing William’s Calvinism, asked Matthias, Archduke of Austria, to accept the government of the Netherlands. The youth of twenty came and was installed (January 18, 1578), but William’s supporters persuaded the new governor to appoint him as his lieutenant—actually the master of administration and policy.
Only mutual toleration of religious diversity could have preserved this association, and intolerance shattered it. The Calvinists of Holland, like the Catholics of Spain, held that only unbelievers could practice toleration. Many of them openly called William of Orange an atheist.38 The Calvinist preacher Peter Dathenus charged him with making the state his god and changing his religion as others changed their clothes.39 The Calvinists were (and till 1587 remained) only a tenth of the population in the province of Holland, but they were active and ambitious, and they were armed. They won control of the political assemblies; they replaced Catholic with Protestant magistrates; in 1573 the Estates, or provincial council, forbade all Catholic worship in Holland,40 on the ground that every Catholic was a potential servant of Spain. By 1578 Calvinism was almost universal in Zeeland, and was politically—not numerically—dominant in Friesland. Waves of image-breaking swept over Holland and Zeeland in 1572, and after 1576 in other provinces, even in Flanders and Brabant. All association of religion with art was repudiated as idolatrous or profane. Churches were stripped of pictures, statues, crucifixes, and decoration; gold and silver vessels were melted down; bare walls remained. The Beggars tortured Catholic priests and put some to death.41
William condemned these procedures, but connived42 at the seizure of political power by armed Calvinist minorities in Brussels, Ypres, Bruges, and all northern Flanders.43 At Ghent the victorious Calvinists imprisoned the councilors, sacked and gutted churches and monasteries, confiscated ecclesiastical property, prohibited all Catholic services, burned monks in the market place,44 and set up a revolutionary republic (1577). At Amsterdam (May 24, 1578) armed Calvinists entered the town hall, banished the magistrates, replaced them with Calvinists, and gave the denuded churches to the Reformed worship. On the following day a similar uprising transformed Haarlem. At Antwerp, which was now William’s headquarters, the Protestants drove priests and monks from the city (May 28); the Prince berated his followers for their violence and persuaded them to let Catholic services be resumed, but in 1581 all Catholic worship was forbidden in Antwerp and Utrecht. The Calvinists charged that the priests had deceived the people with bogus relics and manipulated miracles—exhibiting fragments of the “true cross,” holding up old bones for adoration as those of saints, and secreting oil in the heads of statues to make them opportunely sweat.45
William mourned to see his years of labor for unity ending in division, chaos, and hate. The Calvinist democracy that had captured several cities was falling into such anarchy that men of property, Protestant as well as Catholic, began to wonder whether the new dispensation was not, for them, worse than the old, placards and all. William met this rising demand for order by negotiating with François, Duke of Anjou, to take over the governorship from the incompetent and negligible Matthias, but Anjou proved treacherous and worthless. As a culminating misfortune for the Prince, a new Spanish army of twenty thousand well-trained men was marching north under the ablest general of the age. In December 1577 Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma, brought his army to Don Juan in Luxembourg. On January 31, 1578, they defeated the undisciplined forces of the States-General at Gembloux. Louvain and a dozen minor towns opened their gates to the new conqueror. The States-General of the Netherlands fled from Brussels to Antwerp. Don Juan, smelling new glory, caught a malignant fever, and died at Namur October 1, 1578, aged thirty-three. Philip appointed Farnese governor general, and a new chapter began.
V. PARMA AND ORANGE: 1578–84
Al
essandro Farnese, now thirty-three, was the son of the former Regent, Margaret of Parma. Brought up in Spain, he swore loyalty to Philip, fought at Lepanto, and gave the last fourteen years of his life to saving the southern Netherlands for the King. In 1586 he was to inherit the duchy of Parma and its title, but he never took the ducal throne. Sharp eyes, dark features, cropped black hair, eagle nose, and bushy beard revealed only a part of his ability, courage, and subtlety. He had all the military art of Alva, less of his cruelty, immeasurably more skill in negotiation and address. The battle for the Netherlands now became a duel between the Duke of Parma’s diplomacy and arms, supported by Catholic funds and hopes, and the heroic perseverance of the Prince of Orange, financed by Dutch merchants and helped and hindered by the fanaticism of his friends.