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SPAIN AND THE NETHERLANDS [1]

[1]
History of the United Netherlands: from the Death of William the Silent to the Twelve Years’ Truce, 1609. By John Lothrop Motley, D. C. L. In four volumes. Vols. III. and IV. New York. 1868.]

Tandem fit surculus arbor: the twig which Mr. Motley in his earlier volumes has described as slowly putting forth its leaves and rootless, while painfully struggling for existence in a hostile soil, has at last grown into a mighty tree of liberty, drawing sustenance from all lands, and protecting all civilized peoples with its pleasant shade. We congratulate Mr. Motley upon the successful completion of the second portion of his great work; and we think that the Netherlanders of our time have reason to be grateful to the writer who has so faithfully and eloquently told the story of their country’s fearful struggle against civil and ecclesiastical tyranny, and its manifold contributions to the advancement of European civilization.

Mr. Motley has been fortunate in his selection of a subject upon which to write. Probably no century of modern times lends itself to the purposes of the descriptive historian so well as the sixteenth. While on the one hand the problems which it presents are sufficiently near for us to understand them without too great an effort of the imagination, on the other hand they are sufficiently remote for us to study them without passionate and warping prejudice. The contest between Catholicism and the reformed religion–between ecclesiastical autocracy and the right of private investigation–has become a thing of the past, and constitutes a closed chapter in human history. The epoch which begins where Mr. Motley’s history is designed to close–at the peace of Westphalia–is far more complicated. Since the middle of the seventeenth century a double movement has been going on in religion and philosophy, society and politics,–a movement of destruction typified by Voltaire and Rousseau, and a constructive movement represented by Diderot and Lessing. We are still living in the midst of this great epoch: the questions which it presents are liable to disturb our prejudices as well as to stimulate our reason; the results to which it must sooner or later attain can now be only partially foreseen; and even its present tendencies are generally misunderstood, and in many quarters wholly ignored. With the sixteenth century, as we have said, the case is far different. The historical problem is far less complex. The issues at stake are comparatively simple, and the historian has before him a straightforward story.

From the dramatic, or rather from the epic, point of view, the sixteenth century is pre-eminent. The essentially transitional character of modern history since the breaking up of the papal and feudal systems is at no period more distinctly marked. In traversing the sixteenth century we realize that we have fairly got out of one state of things and into another. At the outset, events like the challenge of Barletta may make us doubt whether we have yet quite left behind the Middle Ages. The belief in the central position of the earth is still universal, and the belief in its rotundity not yet, until the voyage of Magellan, generally accepted. We find England–owing partly to the introduction of gunpowder and the consequent disuse of archery, partly to the results of the recent integration of France under Louis XI.–fallen back from the high relative position which it had occupied under the rule of the Plantagenets; and its policy still directed in accordance with reminiscences of Agincourt, and garnet, and Burgundian alliances. We find France just beginning her ill-fated career of intervention in the affairs of Italy; and Spain, with her Moors finally vanquished and a new world beyond the ocean just added to her domain, rapidly developing into the greatest empire which had been seen since the days of the first Caesars. But at the close of the century we find feudal life in castles changed into modern life in towns; chivalric defiances exchanged for over-subtle diplomacy; Maurices instead of Bayards; a Henry IV. instead of a Gaston de Foix. We find the old theory of man’s central position in the universe–the foundation of the doctrine of final causes and of the whole theological method of interpreting nature–finally overthrown by Copernicus. Instead of the circumnavigability of the earth, the discovery of a Northwest passage–as instanced by the heroic voyage of Barendz, so nobly described by Mr. Motley–is now the chief geographical problem. East India Companies, in place of petty guilds of weavers and bakers, bear witness to the vast commercial progress. We find England, fresh from her stupendous victory over the whole power of Spain, again in the front rank of nations; France, under the most astute of modern sovereigns, taking her place for a time as the political leader of the civilized world; Spain, with her evil schemes baffled in every quarter, sinking into that terrible death-like lethargy, from which she has hardly yet awakened, and which must needs call forth our pity, though it is but the deserved retribution for her past behaviour. While the little realm of the Netherlands, filched and cozened from the unfortunate Jacqueline by the “good” Duke of Burgundy, carried over to Austria as the marriage-portion of Lady Mary, sent down to Spain as the personal inheritance of the “prudent” Philip, and by him intolerably tormented with an Inquisition, a Blood-Council, and a Duke of Alva, has after a forty years’ war of independence taken its position for a time as the greatest of commercial nations, with the most formidable navy and one of the best disciplined armies yet seen upon the earth.