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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Dutch Republic, Introduction II, by Motley
+#2 in our series by John Lothrop Motley
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+Title: The Rise of the Dutch Republic, Introduction II.
+
+Author: John Lothrop Motley
+
+Release Date: January, 2004  [EBook #4802]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on March 12, 2002]
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DUTCH REPUBLIC, INTRO. II. ***
+
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+
+This etext was produced by David Widger
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+
+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
+file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
+entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+MOTLEY'S HISTORY OF THE NETHERLANDS, PG EDITION, VOLUME 2.
+
+THE RISE OF THE DUTCH REPUBLIC
+
+JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY, D.C.L., LL.D.
+
+1855
+
+
+
+HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION., Part 2.
+
+VII.
+
+Five centuries of isolation succeed.  In the Netherlands, as throughout
+Europe, a thousand obscure and slender rills are slowly preparing the
+great stream of universal culture.  Five dismal centuries of feudalism:
+during which period there is little talk of human right, little obedience
+to divine reason.  Rights there are none, only forces; and, in brief,
+three great forces, gradually arising, developing themselves, acting upon
+each other, and upon the general movement of society.
+
+The sword--the first, for a time the only force: the force of iron.  The
+"land's master," having acquired the property in the territory and in the
+people who feed thereon, distributes to his subalterns, often but a shade
+beneath him in power, portions of his estate, getting the use of their
+faithful swords in return.  Vavasours subdivide again to vassals,
+exchanging land and cattle, human or otherwise, against fealty, and so
+the iron chain of a military hierarchy, forged of mutually interdependent
+links, is stretched over each little province.  Impregnable castles,
+here more numerous than in any other part of Christendom, dot the level
+surface of the country.  Mail-clad knights, with their followers, encamp
+permanently upon the soil.  The fortunate fable of divine right is
+invented to sanction the system; superstition and ignorance give currency
+to the delusion.  Thus the grace of God, having conferred the property in
+a vast portion of Europe upon a certain idiot in France, makes him
+competent to sell large fragments of his estate, and to give a divine,
+and, therefore, most satisfactory title along with them.  A great
+convenience to a man, who had neither power, wit, nor will to keep the
+property in his own hands.  So the Dirks of Holland get a deed from
+Charles the Simple, and, although the grace of God does not prevent the
+royal grantor himself from dying a miserable, discrowned captive, the
+conveyance to Dirk is none the less hallowed by almighty fiat.  So the
+Roberts and Guys, the Johns and Baldwins, become sovereigns in Hainault,
+Brabant, Flanders and other little districts, affecting supernatural
+sanction for the authority which their good swords have won and are ever
+ready to maintain.  Thus organized, the force of iron asserts and exerts
+itself.  Duke, count, seignor and vassal, knight and squire, master and
+man swarm and struggle amain.  A wild, chaotic, sanguinary scene.  Here,
+bishop and baron contend, centuries long, murdering human creatures by
+ten thousands for an acre or two of swampy pasture; there, doughty
+families, hugging old musty quarrels to their heart, buffet each other
+from generation to generation; thus they go on, raging and wrestling
+among themselves, with all the world, shrieking insane war-cries which no
+human soul ever understood--red caps and black, white hoods and grey,
+Hooks and Kabbeljaws, dealing destruction, building castles and burning
+them, tilting at tourneys, stealing bullocks, roasting Jews, robbing the
+highways, crusading--now upon Syrian sands against Paynim dogs, now in
+Frisian quagmires against Albigenses, Stedingers, and other heretics--
+plunging about in blood and fire, repenting, at idle times, and paying
+their passage through, purgatory with large slices of ill-gotten gains
+placed in the ever-extended dead-hand of the Church; acting, on the
+whole, according to their kind, and so getting themselves civilized or
+exterminated, it matters little which.  Thus they play their part, those
+energetic men-at-arms; and thus one great force, the force of iron, spins
+and expands itself, century after century, helping on, as it whirls, the
+great progress of society towards its goal, wherever that may be.
+
+Another force--the force clerical--the power of clerks, arises; the might
+of educated mind measuring itself against brute violence; a force
+embodied, as often before, as priestcraft--the strength of priests: craft
+meaning, simply, strength, in our old mother-tongue.  This great force,
+too, develops itself variously, being sometimes beneficent, sometimes
+malignant.  Priesthood works out its task, age after age: now smoothing
+penitent death-beds, consecrating graves! feeding the hungry, clothing
+the naked, incarnating the Christian precepts, in an, age of rapine and
+homicide, doing a thousand deeds of love and charity among the obscure
+and forsaken--deeds of which there shall never be human chronicle, but a
+leaf or two, perhaps, in the recording angel's book; hiving precious
+honey from the few flowers of gentle, art which bloom upon a howling
+wilderness; holding up the light of science over a stormy sea; treasuring
+in convents and crypts the few fossils of antique learning which become
+visible, as the extinct Megatherium of an elder world reappears after the
+gothic deluge; and now, careering in helm and hauberk with the other
+ruffians, bandying blows in the thickest of the fight, blasting with
+bell, book, and candle its trembling enemies, while sovereigns, at the
+head of armies, grovel in the dust and offer abject submission for the
+kiss of peace; exercising the same conjury over ignorant baron and
+cowardly hind, making the fiction of apostolic authority to bind and
+loose, as prolific in acres as the other divine right to have and hold;
+thus the force of cultivated intellect, wielded by a chosen few and
+sanctioned by supernatural authority, becomes as potent as the sword.
+
+A third force, developing itself more slowly, becomes even more potent
+than the rest: the power of gold.  Even iron yields to the more ductile
+metal.  The importance of municipalities, enriched by trade, begins to be
+felt. Commerce, the mother of Netherland freedom, and, eventually, its
+destroyer--even as in all human history the vivifying becomes afterwards
+the dissolving principle--commerce changes insensibly and miraculously
+the aspect of society.  Clusters of hovels become towered cities; the
+green and gilded Hanse of commercial republicanism coils itself around
+the decaying trunk of feudal despotism.  Cities leagued with cities
+throughout and beyond Christendom-empire within empire-bind themselves
+closer and closer in the electric chain of human sympathy and grow
+stronger and stronger by mutual support.  Fishermen and river raftsmen
+become ocean adventurers and merchant princes.  Commerce plucks up half-
+drowned Holland by the locks and pours gold into her lap.  Gold wrests
+power from iron.  Needy Flemish weavers become mighty manufacturers.
+Armies of workmen, fifty thousand strong, tramp through the swarming
+streets.  Silk-makers, clothiers, brewers become the gossips of kings,
+lend their royal gossips vast sums and burn the royal notes of hand in
+fires of cinnamon wood.  Wealth brings strength, strength confidence.
+Learning to handle cross-bow and dagger, the burghers fear less the
+baronial sword, finding that their own will cut as well, seeing that
+great armies--flowers of chivalry--can ride away before them fast enough
+at battles of spurs and other encounters.  Sudden riches beget insolence,
+tumults, civic broils.  Internecine quarrels, horrible tumults stain the
+streets with blood, but education lifts the citizens more and more out of
+the original slough.  They learn to tremble as little at priestcraft as
+at swordcraft, having acquired something of each.  Gold in the end,
+unsanctioned by right divine, weighs up the other forces, supernatural
+as they are.  And so, struggling along their appointed path, making
+cloth, making money, making treaties with great kingdoms, making war by
+land and sea, ringing great bells, waving great banners, they, too--these
+insolent, boisterous burghers--accomplish their work.  Thus, the mighty
+power of the purse develops itself and municipal liberty becomes a
+substantial fact.  A fact, not a principle; for the old theorem of
+sovereignty remains undisputed as ever.  Neither the nation, in mass,
+nor the citizens, in class, lay claim to human rights.  All upper
+attributes--legislative, judicial, administrative--remain in the land-
+master's breast alone.  It is an absurdity, therefore, to argue with
+Grotius concerning the unknown antiquity of the Batavian republic.
+The republic never existed at all till the sixteenth century, and was
+only born after long years of agony.  The democratic instincts of the
+ancient German savages were to survive in the breasts of their cultivated
+descendants, but an organized, civilized, republican polity had never
+existed.  The cities, as they grew in strength, never claimed the right
+to make the laws or to share in the government.  As a matter of fact,
+they did make the laws, and shared, beside, in most important functions
+of sovereignty, in the treaty-making power, especially.  Sometimes by
+bargains; sometimes by blood, by gold, threats, promises, or good hard
+blows they extorted their charters.  Their codes, statutes, joyful
+entrances, and other constitutions were dictated by the burghers and
+sworn to by the monarch.  They were concessions from above; privileges
+private laws; fragments indeed of a larger liberty, but vastly, better
+than the slavery for which they had been substituted; solid facts instead
+of empty abstractions, which, in those practical and violent days, would
+have yielded little nutriment; but they still rather sought to reconcile
+themselves, by a rough, clumsy fiction, with the hierarchy which they had
+invaded, than to overturn the system.  Thus the cities, not regarding
+themselves as representatives or aggregations of the people, became
+fabulous personages, bodies without souls, corporations which had
+acquired vitality and strength enough to assert their existence.
+As persons, therefore--gigantic individualities--they wheeled into the
+feudal ranks and assumed feudal powers and responsibilities.  The city
+of Dort; of Middelburg, of Ghent, of Louvain, was a living being, doing
+fealty, claiming service, bowing to its lord, struggling with its equals,
+trampling upon its slaves.
+
+Thus, in these obscure provinces, as throughout Europe, in a thousand
+remote and isolated corners, civilization builds itself up, synthetically
+and slowly; yet at last, a whole is likely to get itself constructed.
+Thus, impelled by great and conflicting forces, now obliquely, now
+backward, now upward, yet, upon the whole, onward, the new Society moves
+along its predestined orbit, gathering consistency and strength as it
+goes.  Society, civilization, perhaps, but hardly humanity.  The people
+has hardly begun to extricate itself from the clods in which it lies
+buried.  There are only nobles, priests, and, latterly, cities.  In the
+northern Netherlands, the degraded condition of the mass continued
+longest.  Even in Friesland, liberty, the dearest blessing of the ancient
+Frisians, had been forfeited in a variety of ways.  Slavery was both
+voluntary and compulsory.  Paupers sold themselves that they might escape
+starvation.  The timid sold themselves that they might escape violence.
+These voluntary sales, which were frequent, wore usually made to
+cloisters and ecclesiastical establishments, for the condition of
+Church-slaves was preferable to that of other serfs.  Persons worsted
+in judicial duels, shipwrecked sailors, vagrants, strangers, criminals
+unable to pay the money-bote imposed upon them, were all deprived of
+freedom; but the prolific source of slavery was war.  Prisoners were
+almost universally reduced to servitude.  A free woman who intermarried
+with a slave condemned herself and offspring to perpetual bondage.  Among
+the Ripuarian Franks, a free woman thus disgracing herself, was girt with
+a sword and a distaff.  Choosing the one, she was to strike her husband
+dead; choosing the other, she adopted the symbol of slavery, and became a
+chattel for life.
+
+The ferocious inroads of the Normans scared many weak and timid persons
+into servitude.  They fled, by throngs, to church and monastery, and were
+happy, by enslaving themselves, to escape the more terrible bondage of
+the sea-kings.  During the brief dominion of the Norman Godfrey, every
+free Frisian was forced to wear a halter around his neck.  The lot of a
+Church-slave was freedom in comparison.  To kill him was punishable by a
+heavy fine.  He could give testimony in court, could inherit, could make
+a will, could even plead before the law, if law could be found.  The
+number of slaves throughout the Netherlands was very large; the number
+belonging to the bishopric of Utrecht, enormous.
+
+The condition of those belonging to laymen was much more painful.  The
+Lyf-eigene, or absolute slaves, were the most wretched.  They were mere
+brutes.  They had none of the natural attributes of humanity, their life
+and death were in the master's hands, they had no claim to a fraction of
+their own labor or its fruits, they had no marriage, except under
+condition of the infamous 'jus primoe noctis'.  The villagers, or
+villeins, were the second class and less forlorn.  They could commute the
+labor due to their owner by a fixed sum of money, after annual payment of
+which, the villein worked for himself.  His master, therefore, was not
+his absolute proprietor.  The chattel had a beneficial interest in a
+portion of his own flesh and blood.
+
+The crusades made great improvement in the condition of the serfs.  He
+who became a soldier of the cross was free upon his return, and many were
+adventurous enough to purchase liberty at so honorable a price.  Many
+others were sold or mortgaged by the crusading knights, desirous of
+converting their property into gold, before embarking upon their
+enterprise.  The purchasers or mortgagees were in general churches and
+convents, so that the slaves, thus alienated, obtained at least a
+preferable servitude.  The place of the absent serfs was supplied by free
+labor, so that agricultural and mechanical occupations, now devolving
+upon a more elevated class, became less degrading, and, in process of
+time, opened an ever-widening sphere for the industry and progress of
+freemen.  Thus a people began to exist.  It was, however; a miserable
+people, with personal, but no civil rights whatever.  Their condition,
+although better than servitude, was almost desperate.  They were taxed
+beyond their ability, while priest and noble were exempt.  They had no
+voice in the apportionment of the money thus contributed.  There was no
+redress against the lawless violence to which they were perpetually
+exposed.  In the manorial courts, the criminal sat in judgment upon his
+victim.  The functions of highwayman and magistrate were combined in one
+individual.
+
+By degrees, the class of freemen, artisans, traders, and the like,
+becoming the more numerous, built stronger and better houses outside the
+castle gates of the "land's master" or the burghs of the more powerful
+nobles.  The superiors, anxious to increase their own importance, favored
+the progress of the little boroughs.  The population, thus collected,
+began to divide themselves into guilds.  These were soon afterwards
+erected by the community into bodies corporate; the establishment of the
+community, of course, preceding, the incorporation of the guilds.  Those
+communities were created by charters or Keuren, granted by the sovereign.
+Unless the earliest concessions of this nature have perished, the town
+charters of Holland or Zeland are nearly a century later than those of
+Flanders, France, and England.
+
+The oldest Keur, or act of municipal incorporation, in the provinces
+afterwards constituting the republic, was that granted by Count William
+the First of Holland and Countess Joanna of Flanders, as joint
+proprietors of Walcheren, to the town of Middelburg.  It will be seen
+that its main purport is to promise, as a special privilege to this
+community, law, in place of the arbitrary violence by which mankind, in
+general, were governed by their betters.
+
+"The inhabitants," ran the Charter, "are taken into protection by both
+counts.  Upon fighting, maiming, wounding, striking, scolding; upon
+peace-breaking, upon resistance to peace-makers and to the judgment of
+Schepens; upon contemning the Ban, upon selling spoiled wine, and upon
+other misdeeds fines are imposed for behoof of the Count, the city, and
+sometimes of the Schepens.......To all Middelburgers one kind of law is
+guaranteed.  Every man must go to law before the Schepens.  If any one
+being summoned and present in Walcheren does not appear, or refuses
+submission to sentence, he shall be banished with confiscation of
+property.  Schout or Schepen denying justice to a complainant, shall,
+until reparation, hold no tribunal again.......A burgher having a dispute
+with an outsider (buiten mann) must summon him before the Schepens.  An
+appeal lies from the Schepens to the Count.  No one can testify but a
+householder.  All alienation of real estate must take place before the
+Schepens.  If an outsider has a complaint against a burgher, the Schepens
+and Schout must arrange it.  If either party refuses submission to them,
+they must ring the town bell and summon an assembly of all the burghers
+to compel him.  Any one ringing the town bell, except by general consent,
+and any one not appearing when it tolls, are liable to a fine.  No
+Middelburger can be arrested or held in durance within Flanders or
+Holland, except for crime."
+
+This document was signed, sealed, and sworn to by the two sovereigns in
+the year 1217.  It was the model upon which many other communities,
+cradles of great cities, in Holland and Zeland, were afterwards created.
+
+These charters are certainly not very extensive, even for the privileged
+municipalities which obtained them, when viewed from an abstract stand-
+point.  They constituted, however, a very great advance from the stand-
+point at which humanity actually found itself.  They created, not for all
+inhabitants, but for great numbers of them, the right, not to govern them
+selves but to be governed by law: They furnished a local administration
+of justice.  They provided against arbitrary imprisonment.  They set up
+tribunals, where men of burgher class were to sit in judgment.  They held
+up a shield against arbitrary violence from above and sedition from
+within.  They encouraged peace-makers, punished peace-breakers.  They
+guarded the fundamental principle, 'ut sua tanerent', to the verge of
+absurdity; forbidding a freeman, without a freehold, from testifying--
+a capacity not denied even to a country slave.  Certainly all this was
+better than fist-law and courts manorial.  For the commencement of the
+thirteenth century, it was progress.
+
+The Schout and Schepens, or chief magistrate and aldermen, were
+originally appointed by the sovereign.  In process of time, the election
+of these municipal authorities was conceded to the communities.  This
+inestimable privilege, however, after having been exercised during a
+certain period by the whole body of citizens, was eventually monopolized
+by the municipal government itself, acting in common with the deans of
+the various guilds.
+
+Thus organized and inspired with the breath of civic life, the
+communities of Flanders and Holland began to move rapidly forward.
+More and more they assumed the appearance of prosperous little republics.
+For this prosperity they were indebted to commerce, particularly with
+England and the Baltic nations, and to manufactures, especially of wool.
+
+The trade between England and the Netherlands had existed for ages,
+and was still extending itself, to the great advantage of both countries.
+A dispute, however, between the merchants of Holland and England, towards
+the year 12l5, caused a privateering warfare, and a ten years' suspension
+of intercourse.  A reconciliation afterwards led to the establishment of
+the English wool staple, at Dort.  A subsequent quarrel deprived Holland
+of this great advantage.  King Edward refused to assist Count Florence in
+a war with the Flemings, and transferred the staple from Dort to Bruges
+and Mechlin.
+
+The trade of the Netherlands with the Mediterranean and the East was
+mainly through this favored city of Bruges, which, already in the
+thirteenth century, had risen to the first rank in the commercial world.
+It was the resting-place for the Lombards and other Italians, the great
+entrepot for their merchandise.  It now became, in addition, the great
+marketplace for English wool, and the woollen fabrics of all the
+Netherlands, as well as for the drugs and spices of the East.  It had,
+however, by no means reached its apogee, but was to culminate with
+Venice, and to sink with her decline.  When the overland Indian trade
+fell off with the discovery of the Cape passage, both cities withered.
+Grass grew in the fair and pleasant streets of Bruges, and sea-weed
+clustered about the marble halls of Venice.  At this epoch, however, both
+were in a state of rapid and insolent prosperity.
+
+The cities, thus advancing in wealth and importance, were no longer
+satisfied with being governed according to law, and began to participate,
+not only in their own, but in the general government.  Under Guy of
+Flanders, the towns appeared regularly, as well as the nobles, in the
+assembly of the provincial estates.  (1386-1389, A.D.) In the course of
+the following century, the six chief cities, or capitals, of Holland
+(Dort, Harlem, Delft, Leyden, Goads, and Amsterdam) acquired the right
+of sending their deputies regularly to the estates of the provinces.
+These towns, therefore, with the nobles, constituted the parliamentary
+power of the nation.  They also acquired letters patent from the count,
+allowing them to choose their burgomasters and a limited number of
+councillors or senators (Vroedschappen).
+
+Thus the liberties of Holland and Flanders waxed, daily, stronger.
+A great physical convulsion in the course of the thirteenth century came
+to add its influence to the slower process of political revolution.
+Hitherto there had been but one Friesland, including Holland, and nearly
+all the territory of the future republic.  A slender stream alone
+separated the two great districts.  The low lands along the Vlie, often
+threatened, at last sank in the waves.  The German Ocean rolled in upon
+the inland Lake of Flevo.  The stormy Zuyder Zee began its existence by
+engulfing thousands of Frisian villages, with all their population, and
+by spreading a chasm between kindred peoples.  The political, as well as
+the geographical, continuity of the land was obliterated by this
+tremendous deluge.  The Hollanders were cut off from their relatives in
+the east by as dangerous a sea as that which divided them from their
+Anglo-Saxon brethren in Britain.  The deputies to the general assemblies
+at Aurich could no longer undertake a journey grown so perilous.  West
+Friesland became absorbed in Holland.  East Friesland remained a
+federation of rude but self-governed maritime provinces, until the brief
+and bloody dominion of the Saxon dukes led to the establishment of
+Charles the Fifth's authority.  Whatever the nominal sovereignty over
+them, this most republican tribe of Netherlanders, or of Europeans, had
+never accepted feudalism.  There was an annual congress of the whole
+confederacy.  Each of the seven little states, on the other hand,
+regulated its own internal affairs.  Each state was subdivided into
+districts, each district governed by a Griet-mann (greatman, selectman)
+and assistants.  Above all these district officers was a Podesta, a
+magistrate identical, in name and functions, with the chief officer of
+the Italian republics.  There was sometimes but one Podesta; sometimes
+one for each province.  He was chosen by the people, took oath of
+fidelity to the separate estates, or, if Podesta-general, to the federal
+diet, and was generally elected for a limited term, although sometimes
+for life.  He was assisted by a board of eighteen or twenty councillors.
+The deputies to the general congress were chosen by popular suffrage in
+Easter-week.  The clergy were not recognized as a political estate.
+
+Thus, in those lands which a niggard nature had apparently condemned to
+perpetual poverty and obscurity, the principle of reasonable human
+freedom, without which there is no national prosperity or glory worth
+contending for, was taking deepest and strongest root.  Already in the
+thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Friesland was a republic, except in
+name; Holland, Flanders, Brabant, had acquired a large share of self-
+government.  The powerful commonwealth, at a later period to be evolved
+out of the great combat between centralized tyranny and the spirit of
+civil and religious liberty, was already foreshadowed.  The elements,
+of which that important republic was to be compounded, were germinating
+for centuries.  Love of freedom, readiness to strike and bleed at any
+moment in her cause, manly resistance to despotism, however
+overshadowing, were the leading characteristics of the race in all
+regions or periods, whether among Frisian swamps, Dutch dykes, the
+gentle hills and dales of England, or the pathless forests of America.
+Doubtless, the history of human liberty in Holland and Flanders, as every
+where else upon earth where there has been such a history, unrolls many
+scenes of turbulence and bloodshed; although these features have been
+exaggerated by prejudiced historians.  Still, if there were luxury and
+insolence, sedition and uproar, at any rate there was life.  Those
+violent little commonwealths had blood in their veins.  They were compact
+of proud, self-helping, muscular vigor.  The most sanguinary tumults
+which they ever enacted in the face of day, were better than the order
+and silence born of the midnight darkness of despotism.  That very
+unruliness was educating the people for their future work.  Those
+merchants, manufacturers, country squires, and hard-fighting barons, all
+pent up in a narrow corner of the earth, quarrelling with each other and
+with all the world for centuries, were keeping alive a national pugnacity
+of character, for which there was to be a heavy demand in the sixteenth
+century, and without which the fatherland had perhaps succumbed in the
+most unequal conflict ever waged by man against oppression.
+
+To sketch the special history of even the leading Netherland provinces,
+during the five centuries which we have thus rapidly sought to
+characterize, is foreign to our purpose.  By holding the clue of
+Holland's history, the general maze of dynastic transformations
+throughout the country may, however, be swiftly threaded.  From the time
+of the first Dirk to the close of the thirteenth century there were
+nearly four hundred years of unbroken male descent, a long line of Dirks
+and Florences.  This iron-handed, hot-headed, adventurous race, placed as
+sovereign upon its little sandy hook, making ferocious exertions to swell
+into larger consequence, conquering a mile or two of morass or barren
+furze, after harder blows and bloodier encounters than might have
+established an empire under more favorable circumstances, at last dies
+out.  The courtship falls to the house of Avennes, Counts of Hainault.
+Holland, together with Zeland, which it had annexed, is thus joined to
+the province of Hainault.  At the end of another half century the
+Hainault line expires.  William the Fourth died childless in 1355.  His
+death is the signal for the outbreak of an almost interminable series of
+civil commotions.  Those two great, parties, known by the uncouth names
+of Hook and Kabbeljaw, come into existence, dividing noble against noble,
+city against city, father against son, for some hundred and fifty years,
+without foundation upon any abstract or intelligible principle.  It may
+be observed, however, that, in the sequel, and as a general rule, the
+Kabbeljaw, or cod-fish party, represented the city or municipal faction,
+while the Hooks (fish-hooks), that were to catch and control them, were
+the nobles; iron and audacity against brute number and weight.
+
+Duke William of Bavaria, sister's son--of William the Fourth, gets
+himself established in 1354.  He is succeeded by his brother Albert;
+Albert by his son William.  William, who had married Margaret of
+Burgundy, daughter of Philip the Bold, dies in 1417.  The goodly heritage
+of these three Netherland provinces descends to his daughter Jacqueline,
+a damsel of seventeen.  Little need to trace the career of the fair and
+ill-starred Jacqueline.  Few chapters of historical romance have drawn
+more frequent tears.  The favorite heroine of ballad and drama, to
+Netherlanders she is endued with the palpable form and perpetual
+existence of the Iphigenias, Mary Stuarts, Joans of Arc, or other
+consecrated individualities.  Exhausted and broken-hearted, after
+thirteen years of conflict with her own kinsmen, consoled for the
+cowardice and brutality of three husbands by the gentle and knightly
+spirit of the fourth, dispossessed of her father's broad domains,
+degraded from the rank of sovereign to be lady forester of her own
+provinces by her cousin, the bad Duke of Burgundy, Philip surnamed "the
+Good," she dies at last, and the good cousin takes undisputed dominion of
+the land. (1437.)
+
+The five centuries of isolation are at end.  The many obscure streams of
+Netherland history are merged in one broad current.  Burgundy has
+absorbed all the provinces which, once more, are forced to recognize a
+single master.  A century and a few years more succeed, during which this
+house and its heirs are undisputed sovereigns of the soil.
+
+Philip the Good had already acquired the principal Netherlands, before
+dispossessing Jacqueline.  He had inherited, beside the two Burgundies,
+the counties of Flanders and Artois.  He had purchased the county of
+Namur, and had usurped the duchy of Brabant, to which the duchy of
+Limburg, the marquisate of Antwerp, and the barony of Mechlin, had
+already been annexed.  By his assumption of Jacqueline's dominions, he
+was now lord of Holland, Zeland, and Hainault, and titular master of
+Friesland.  He acquired Luxemburg a few years later.
+
+Lord of so many opulent cities and fruitful provinces, he felt himself
+equal to the kings of Europe.  Upon his marriage with Isabella of
+Portugal, he founded, at Bruges, the celebrated order of the Golden
+Fleece.  What could be more practical or more devout than the conception?
+Did not the Lamb of God, suspended at each knightly breast, symbolize at
+once the woollen fabrics to which so much of Flemish wealth and
+Burgundian power was owing, and the gentle humility of Christ, which was
+ever to characterize the order?  Twenty-five was the limited number,
+including Philip himself, as grand master.  The chevaliers were emperors,
+kings, princes, and the most illustrious nobles of Christendom; while a
+leading provision, at the outset, forbade the brethren, crowned heads
+excepted, to accept or retain the companionship of any other order.
+
+The accession of so potent and ambitious a prince as the good Philip
+boded evil to the cause of freedom in the Netherlands.  The spirit of
+liberty seemed to have been typified in the fair form of the benignant
+and unhappy Jacqueline, and to be buried in her grave.  The usurper, who
+had crushed her out of existence, now strode forward to trample upon all
+the laws and privileges of the provinces which had formed her heritage.
+
+At his advent, the municipal power had already reached an advanced stage
+of development.  The burgher class controlled the government, not only of
+the cities, but often of the provinces, through its influence in the
+estates.  Industry and wealth had produced their natural results.  The
+supreme authority of the sovereign and the power of the nobles were
+balanced by the municipal principle which had even begun to preponderate
+over both.  All three exercised a constant and salutary check upon each
+other.  Commerce had converted slaves into freemen, freemen into
+burghers, and the burghers were acquiring daily, a larger practical hold
+upon the government.  The town councils were becoming almost omnipotent.
+Although with an oligarchical tendency, which at a later period was to
+be more fully developed, they were now composed of large numbers of
+individuals, who had raised themselves, by industry and intelligence,
+out of the popular masses.  There was an unquestionably republican tone
+to the institutions.  Power, actually, if not nominally, was in the hands
+of many who had achieved the greatness to which they had not been born.
+
+The assemblies of the estates were rather diplomatic than representative.
+They consisted, generally, of the nobles and of the deputations from the
+cities.  In Holland, the clergy had neither influence nor seats in the
+parliamentary body.  Measures were proposed by the stadholder, who
+represented the sovereign.  A request, for example, of pecuniary,
+accommodation, was made by that functionary or by the count himself in
+person.  The nobles then voted upon the demand, generally as one body,
+but sometimes by heads.  The measure was then laid before the burghers.
+If they had been specially commissioned to act upon the matter; they
+voted, each city as a city, not each deputy, individually.  If they had
+received no instructions, they took back the proposition to lay before
+the councils of their respective cities, in order to return a decision
+at an adjourned session, or at a subsequent diet.  It will be seen,
+therefore, that the principle of national, popular representation was
+but imperfectly developed.  The municipal deputies acted only under
+instructions.  Each city was a little independent state, suspicious not
+only of the sovereign and nobles, but of its sister cities.  This mutual
+jealousy hastened the general humiliation now impending.  The centre of
+the system waging daily more powerful, it more easily unsphered these
+feebler and mutually repulsive bodies.
+
+Philip's first step, upon assuming the government, was to issue a
+declaration, through the council of Holland, that the privileges and
+constitutions, which he had sworn to as Ruward, or guardian, during
+the period in which Jacqueline had still retained a nominal sovereignty,
+were to be considered null and void, unless afterwards confirmed by him
+as count.  At a single blow he thus severed the whole knot of pledges,
+oaths and other political complications, by which he had entangled
+himself during his cautious advance to power.  He was now untrammelled
+again.  As the conscience of the smooth usurper was, thenceforth, the
+measure of provincial liberty, his subjects soon found it meted to them
+more sparingly than they wished.  From this point, then, through the
+Burgundian period, and until the rise of the republic, the liberty of the
+Netherlands, notwithstanding several brilliant but brief laminations,
+occurring at irregular intervals, seemed to remain in almost perpetual
+eclipse.
+
+The material prosperity of the country had, however, vastly increased.
+The fisheries of Holland had become of enormous importance.  The
+invention of the humble Beukelzoon of Biervliet, had expanded into a mine
+of wealth.  The fisheries, too, were most useful as a nursery of seamen,
+and were already indicating Holland's future naval supremacy.  The
+fishermen were the militia of the ocean, their prowess attested in the
+war with the Hanseatic cities, which the provinces of Holland and Zeland,
+in Philip's name, but by their own unassisted exertions, carried on
+triumphantly at this epoch.  Then came into existence that race of cool
+and daring mariners, who, in after times, were to make the Dutch name
+illustrious throughout the world, the men, whose fierce descendants, the
+"beggars of the sea," were to make the Spanish empire tremble, the men,
+whose later successors swept the seas with brooms at the mast-head, and
+whose ocean-battles with their equally fearless English brethren often
+lasted four uninterrupted days and nights.
+
+The main strength of Holland was derived from the ocean, from whose
+destructive grasp she had wrested herself, but in whose friendly embrace
+she remained.  She was already placing securely the foundations of
+commercial wealth and civil liberty upon those shifting quicksands which
+the Roman doubted whether to call land or water.  Her submerged
+deformity, as she floated, mermaid-like, upon the waves was to be
+forgotten in her material splendor.  Enriched with the spoils of
+every clime, crowned with the divine jewels of science and art, she was,
+one day, to sing a siren song of freedom, luxury, and power.
+
+As with Holland, so with Flanders, Brabant, and the other leading
+provinces.  Industry and wealth, agriculture, commerce, and manufactures,
+were constantly augmenting.  The natural sources of power were full to
+overflowing, while the hand of despotism was deliberately sealing the
+fountain.
+
+For the house of Burgundy was rapidly culminating and as rapidly
+curtailing the political privileges of the Netherlands.  The contest was,
+at first, favorable to the cause of arbitrary power; but little seeds
+were silently germinating, which, in the progress of their gigantic
+development, were, one day, to undermine the foundations of Tyranny and
+to overshadow the world.  The early progress of the religious reformation
+in the Netherlands will be outlined in a separate chapter.  Another great
+principle was likewise at work at this period.  At the very epoch when
+the greatness of Burgundy was most swiftly ripening, another weapon was
+secretly forging, more potent in the great struggle for freedom than any
+which the wit or hand of man has ever devised or wielded.  When Philip
+the Good, in the full blaze of his power, and flushed with the triumphs
+of territorial aggrandizement, was instituting at Bruges the order of the
+Golden Fleece, "to the glory of God, of the blessed Virgin, and of the
+holy Andrew, patron saint of the Burgundian family," and enrolling the
+names of the kings and princes who were to be honored with its symbols,
+at that very moment, an obscure citizen of Harlem, one Lorenz Coster, or
+Lawrence the Sexton, succeeded in printing a little grammar, by means of
+movable types.  The invention of printing was accomplished, but it was
+not ushered in with such a blaze of glory as heralded the contemporaneous
+erection of the Golden Fleece.  The humble setter of types did not deem
+emperors and princes alone worthy his companionship.  His invention sent
+no thrill of admiration throughout Christendom; and yet, what was the
+good Philip of Burgundy, with his Knights of the Golden Fleece, and all
+their effulgent trumpery, in the eye of humanity and civilization,
+compared with the poor sexton and his wooden types?
+
+     [The question of the time and place to which the invention of
+     printing should be referred, has been often discussed.  It is not
+     probable that it will ever be settled to the entire satisfaction of
+     Holland and Germany.  The Dutch claim that movable types were first
+     used at Harlem, fixing the time variously between the years 1423 and
+     1440.  The first and very faulty editions of Lorenz are religiously
+     preserved at Harlem.]
+
+Philip died in February, 1467.  The details of his life and career do not
+belong to our purpose.  The practical tendency of his government was to
+repress the spirit of liberty, while especial privileges, extensive in
+nature, but limited in time, were frequently granted to corporations.
+Philip, in one day, conferred thirty charters upon as many different
+bodies of citizens.  These were, however, grants of monopoly not
+concessions of rights.  He also fixed the number of city councils or
+Vroedschappen in many Netherland cities, giving them permission to
+present a double list of candidates for burgomasters and judges, from
+which he himself made the appointments.  He was certainly neither a good
+nor great prince, but he possessed much administrative ability.  His
+military talents were considerable, and he was successful in his wars.
+He was an adroit dissembler, a practical politician.  He had the sense to
+comprehend that the power of a prince, however absolute, must depend upon
+the prosperity of his subjects.  He taxed severely the wealth, but he
+protected the commerce and the manufactures of Holland and Flanders.
+He encouraged art, science, and literature.  The brothers, John and
+Hubert Van Eyck, were attracted by his generosity to Bruges, where they
+painted many pictures.  John was even a member of the duke's council.
+The art of oil-painting was carried to great perfection by Hubert's
+scholar, John of Bruges.  An incredible number of painters, of greater or
+less merit, flourished at this epoch in the Netherlands, heralds of that
+great school, which, at a subsequent period, was to astonish the world
+with brilliant colors; profound science, startling effects, and vigorous
+reproductions of Nature.  Authors, too, like Olivier de la Marche and
+Philippe de Comines, who, in the words of the latter, "wrote, not for the
+amusement of brutes, and people of low degree, but for princes and other
+persons of quality," these and other writers, with aims as lofty,
+flourished at the court of Burgundy, and were rewarded by the Duke with
+princely generosity.  Philip remodelled and befriended the university of
+Louvain.  He founded at Brussels the Burgundian library, which became
+celebrated throughout Europe.  He levied largely, spent profusely, but
+was yet so thrifty a housekeeper, as to leave four hundred thousand
+crowns of gold, a vast amount in those days, besides three million marks'
+worth of plate and furniture, to be wasted like water in the insane
+career of his son.
+
+The exploits of that son require but few words of illustration.  Hardly a
+chapter of European history or romance is more familiar to the world than
+the one which records the meteoric course of Charles the Bold.  The
+propriety of his title was never doubtful.  No prince was ever bolder,
+but it is certain that no quality could be less desirable, at that
+particular moment in the history of his house.  It was not the quality
+to confirm a usurping family in its ill-gotten possessions.  Renewed
+aggressions upon the rights of others justified retaliation and invited
+attack.  Justice, prudence, firmness, wisdom of internal administration
+were desirable in the son of Philip and the rival of Louis.  These
+attributes the gladiator lacked entirely.  His career might have been a
+brilliant one in the old days of chivalry.  His image might have appeared
+as imposing as the romantic forms of Baldwin Bras de Fer or Godfrey of
+Bouillon, had he not been misplaced in history.  Nevertheless, he
+imagined himself governed by a profound policy.  He had one dominant
+idea, to make Burgundy a kingdom.  From the moment when, with almost the
+first standing army known to history, and with coffers well filled by his
+cautious father's economy, he threw himself into the lists against the
+crafty Louis, down to the day when he was found dead, naked, deserted,
+and with his face frozen into a pool of blood and water, he faithfully
+pursued this thought.  His ducal cap was to be exchanged for a kingly
+crown, while all the provinces which lay beneath the Mediterranean and
+the North Sea, and between France and Germany, were to be united under
+his sceptre.  The Netherlands, with their wealth, had been already
+appropriated, and their freedom crushed.  Another land of liberty
+remained; physically, the reverse of Holland, but stamped with the same
+courageous nationality, the same ardent love of human rights.
+Switzerland was to be conquered.  Her eternal battlements of ice and
+granite were to constitute the great bulwark of his realm.  The world
+knows well the result of the struggle between the lord of so many duchies
+and earldoms, and the Alpine mountaineers.  With all his boldness,
+Charles was but an indifferent soldier.  His only merit was physical
+courage.  He imagined himself a consummate commander, and, in
+conversation with his jester, was fond of comparing himself to Hannibal.
+"We are getting well Hannibalized to-day, my lord," said the bitter fool,
+as they rode off together from the disastrous defeat of Gransen.  Well
+"Hannibalized" he was, too, at Gransen, at Murten, and at Nancy.  He
+followed in the track of his prototype only to the base of the mountains.
+
+As a conqueror, he was signally unsuccessful; as a politician, he could
+out-wit none but himself; it was only as a tyrant within his own ground,
+that he could sustain the character which he chose to enact.  He lost the
+crown, which he might have secured, because he thought the emperor's son
+unworthy the heiress of Burgundy; and yet, after his father's death, her
+marriage with that very Maximilian alone secured the possession of her
+paternal inheritance.  Unsuccessful in schemes of conquest, and in
+political intrigue, as an oppressor of the Netherlands, he nearly carried
+out his plans.  Those provinces he regarded merely as a bank to draw
+upon.  His immediate intercourse with the country was confined to the
+extortion of vast requests.  These were granted with ever-increasing
+reluctance, by the estates.  The new taxes and excises, which the
+sanguinary extravagance of the duke rendered necessary, could seldom be
+collected in the various cities without tumults, sedition, and bloodshed.
+Few princes were ever a greater curse to the people whom they were
+allowed to hold as property.  He nearly succeeded in establishing a
+centralized despotism upon the ruins of the provincial institutions.
+His sudden death alone deferred the catastrophe.  His removal of the
+supreme court of Holland from the Hague to Mechlin, and his maintenance
+of a standing army, were the two great measures by which he prostrated
+the Netherlands.  The tribunal had been remodelled by his father; the
+expanded authority which Philip had given to a bench of judges dependent
+upon himself, was an infraction of the rights of Holland.  The court,
+however, still held its sessions in the country; and the sacred
+privilege--de non evocando--the right of every Hollander to be tried in
+his own land, was, at least, retained.  Charles threw off the mask; he
+proclaimed that this council--composed of his creatures, holding office
+at his pleasure--should have supreme jurisdiction over all the charters
+of the provinces; that it was to follow his person, and derive all
+authority from his will.  The usual seat of the court he transferred to
+Mechlin.  It will be seen, in the sequel, that the attempt, under Philip
+the Second, to enforce its supreme authority was a collateral cause of
+the great revolution of the Netherlands.
+
+Charles, like his father, administered the country by stadholders.  From
+the condition of flourishing self-ruled little republics, which they had,
+for a moment, almost attained, they became departments of an ill-
+assorted, ill-conditioned, ill-governed realm, which was neither
+commonwealth nor empire, neither kingdom nor duchy; and which had no
+homogeneousness of population, no affection between ruler and people,
+small sympathies of lineage or of language.
+
+His triumphs were but few, his fall ignominious.  His father's treasure
+was squandered, the curse of a standing army fixed upon his people, the
+trade and manufactures of the country paralyzed by his extortions, and he
+accomplished nothing.  He lost his life in the forty-fourth year of his
+age (1477), leaving all the provinces, duchies, and lordships, which
+formed the miscellaneous realm of Burgundy, to his only child, the Lady
+Mary.  Thus already the countries which Philip had wrested from the
+feeble hand of Jacqueline, had fallen to another female.  Philip's own
+granddaughter, as young, fair, and unprotected as Jacqueline, was now
+sole mistress of those broad domains.
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+A crisis, both for Burgundy and the Netherlands, succeeds.  Within the
+provinces there is an elastic rebound, as soon as the pressure is removed
+from them by the tyrant's death.  A sudden spasm of liberty gives the
+whole people gigantic strength.  In an instant they recover all, and more
+than all, the rights which they had lost.  The cities of Holland,
+Flanders, and other provinces call a convention at Ghent.  Laying aside
+their musty feuds, men of all parties-Hooks and Kabbeljaws, patricians
+and people, move forward in phalanx to recover their national
+constitutions.  On the other hand, Louis the Eleventh seizes Burgundy,
+claiming the territory for his crown, the heiress for his son.  The
+situation is critical for the Lady Mary.  As usual in such cases, appeals
+are made to the faithful commons.  A prodigality of oaths and pledges is
+showered upon the people, that their loyalty may be refreshed and grow
+green.  The congress meets at Ghent.  The Lady Mary professes much,
+but she will keep her vow.  The deputies are called upon to rally the
+country around the duchess, and to resist the fraud and force of Louis.
+The congress is willing to maintain the cause of its young mistress.
+The members declare, at the same time, very roundly, "that the provinces
+have been much impoverished and oppressed by the enormous taxation
+imposed upon them by the ruinous wars waged by Duke Charles from the
+beginning to the end of his life."  They rather require "to be relieved
+than additionally encumbered."  They add that, "for many years past,
+there has been a constant violation of the provincial and municipal
+charters, and that they should be happy to see them restored."
+
+The result of the deliberations is the formal grant by Duchess Mary of
+the "Groot Privilegie," or Great Privilege, the Magna Charta of Holland.
+Although this instrument was afterwards violated, and indeed abolished,
+it became the foundation of the republic.  It was a recapitulation and
+recognition of ancient rights, not an acquisition of new privileges.
+It was a restoration, not a revolution.  Its principal points deserve
+attention from those interested in the political progress of mankind.
+
+"The duchess shall not marry without consent of the estates of her
+provinces.  All offices in her gift shall be conferred on natives only.
+No man shall fill two offices.  No office shall be farmed.  The 'Great
+Council and Supreme Court of Holland' is re-established.  Causes shall be
+brought before it on appeal from the ordinary courts.  It shall have no
+original jurisdiction of matters within the cognizance of the provincial
+and municipal tribunals.  The estates and cities are guaranteed in their
+right not to be summoned to justice beyond the limits of their territory.
+The cities, in common with all the provinces of the Netherlands, may hold
+diets as often ten and at such places as they choose.  No new taxes shall
+be imposed but by consent of the provincial estates.  Neither the duchess
+nor her descendants shall begin either an offensive or defensive war
+without consent of the estates.  In case a war be illegally undertaken,
+the estates are not bound to contribute to its maintenance.  In all
+public and legal documents, the Netherland language shall be employed.
+The commands of the duchess shall be invalid, if conflicting with the
+privileges of a city.
+
+"The seat of the Supreme Council is transferred from Mechlin to the
+Hague.  No money shall be coined, nor its value raised or lowered, but by
+consent of the estates.  Cities are not to be compelled to contribute to
+requests which they have not voted.  The sovereign shall come in person
+before the estates, to make his request for supplies."
+
+Here was good work.  The land was rescued at a blow from the helpless
+condition to which it had been reduced.  This summary annihilation of all
+the despotic arrangements of Charles was enough to raise him from his
+tomb.  The law, the sword, the purse, were all taken from the hand of the
+sovereign and placed within the control of parliament.  Such sweeping
+reforms, if maintained, would restore health to the body politic.  They
+gave, moreover, an earnest of what was one day to arrive.  Certainly, for
+the fifteenth century, the "Great Privilege" was a reasonably liberal
+constitution.  Where else upon earth, at that day, was there half so much
+liberty as was thus guaranteed?  The congress of the Netherlands,
+according to their Magna Charta, had power to levy all taxes, to regulate
+commerce and manufactures, to declare war, to coin money, to raise armies
+and navies.  The executive was required to ask for money in person, could
+appoint only natives to office, recognized the right of disobedience in
+his subjects, if his commands should conflict with law, and acknowledged
+himself bound by decisions of courts of justice.  The cities appointed
+their own magistrates, held diets at their own pleasure, made their local
+by-laws and saw to their execution.  Original cognizance of legal matters
+belonged to the municipal courts, appellate jurisdiction to the supreme
+tribunal, in which the judges were appointed by the sovereign.  The
+liberty of the citizen against arbitrary imprisonment was amply provided
+for.  The 'jus de non evocando', the habeas corpus of Holland,
+was re-established.
+
+Truly, here was a fundamental law which largely, roundly, and reasonably
+recognized the existence of a people with hearts, heads, and hands of
+their own.  It was a vast step in advance of natural servitude, the dogma
+of the dark ages.  It was a noble and temperate vindication of natural
+liberty, the doctrine of more enlightened days.  To no people in the
+world more than to the stout burghers of Flanders and Holland belongs the
+honor of having battled audaciously and perennially in behalf of human
+rights.
+
+Similar privileges to the great charter of Holland are granted to many
+other provinces; especially to Flanders, ever ready to stand forward in
+fierce vindication of freedom.  For a season all is peace and joy; but
+the duchess is young, weak, and a woman.  There is no lack of intriguing
+politicians, reactionary councillors.  There is a cunning old king in the
+distance, lying in wait; seeking what he can devour.  A mission goes from
+the estates to France.  The well-known tragedy of Imbrecourt and Hugonet
+occurs.  Envoys from the states, they dare to accept secret instructions
+from the duchess to enter into private negotiations with the French
+monarch, against their colleagues--against the great charter--against
+their country.  Sly Louis betrays them, thinking that policy the more
+expedient.  They are seized in Ghent, rapidly tried, and as rapidly
+beheaded by the enraged burghers.  All the entreaties of the Lady Mary,
+who, dressed in mourning garments, with dishevelled hair, unloosed
+girdle, and streaming eyes; appears at the town-house and afterwards in
+the market place, humbly to intercede for her servants, are fruitless
+There is no help for the juggling diplomatists.  The punishment was
+sharp.  Was it more severe and sudden than that which betrayed monarchs
+usually inflict?  Would the Flemings, at that critical moment, have
+deserved their freedom had they not taken swift and signal vengeance for
+this first infraction of their newly recognized rights?  Had it not been
+weakness to spare the traitors who had thus stained the childhood of the
+national joy at liberty regained?
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+Another step, and a wide one, into the great stream of European history.
+The Lady Mary espouses the Archduke Maximilian.  The Netherlands are
+about to become Habsburg property.  The Ghenters reject the pretensions
+of the dauphin, and select for husband of their duchess the very man whom
+her father had so stupidly rejected.  It had been a wiser choice for
+Charles the Bold than for the Netherlanders.  The marriage takes place on
+the 18th of August, 1477.  Mary of Burgundy passes from the guardianship
+of Ghent burghers into that of the emperor's son.  The crafty husband
+allies himself with the city party, feeling where the strength lies.
+He knows that the voracious Kabbeljaws have at last swallowed the Hooks,
+and run away with them.  Promising himself future rights of
+reconsideration, he is liberal in promises to the municipal party.
+In the mean time he is governor and guardian of his wife and her
+provinces.  His children are to inherit the Netherlands and all that
+therein is.  What can be more consistent than laws of descent,
+regulated by right divine?  At the beginning of the century, good Philip
+dispossesses Jacqueline, because females can not inherit.  At its close,
+his granddaughter succeeds to the property, and transmits it to her
+children.  Pope and emperor maintain both positions with equal logic.
+The policy and promptness of Maximilian are as effective as the force and
+fraud of Philip.  The Lady Mary falls from her horse and dies.  Her son,
+Philip, four years of age, is recognized as successor.  Thus the house of
+Burgundy is followed by that of Austria, the fifth and last family which
+governed Holland, previously to the erection of the republic.  Maximilian
+is recognized by the provinces as governor and guardian, during the
+minority of his children.  Flanders alone refuses.  The burghers, ever
+prompt in action, take personal possession of the child Philip, and carry
+on the government in his name.  A commission of citizens and nobles thus
+maintain their authority against Maximilian for several years.  In 1488,
+the archduke, now King of the Romans, with a small force of cavalry,
+attempts to take the city of Bruges, but the result is a mortifying one
+to the Roman king.  The citizens of Bruges take him.  Maximilian, with
+several councillors, is kept a prisoner in a house on the market-place.
+The magistrates are all changed, the affairs of government conducted in
+the name of the young Philip alone.  Meantime, the estates of the other
+Netherlands assemble at Ghent; anxious, unfortunately, not for the
+national liberty, but for that of the Roman king.  Already Holland, torn
+again by civil feuds, and blinded by the artifices of Maximilian, has
+deserted, for a season, the great cause to which Flanders has remained so
+true.  At last, a treaty is made between the archduke and the Flemings.
+Maximilian is to be regent of the other provinces; Philip, under
+guardianship of a council, is to govern Flanders.  Moreover, a congress
+of all the provinces is to be summoned annually, to provide for the
+general welfare.  Maximilian signs and swears to the treaty on the 16th
+May, 1488.  He swears, also, to dismiss all foreign troops within four
+days.  Giving hostages for his fidelity, he is set at liberty.  What are
+oaths and hostages when prerogative, and the people are contending?
+Emperor Frederic sends to his son an army under the Duke of Saxony.
+The oaths are broken, the hostages left to their fate.  The struggle
+lasts a year, but, at the end of it, the Flemings are subdued.  What
+could a single province effect, when its sister states, even liberty-
+loving Holland, had basely abandoned the common cause?  A new treaty is
+made, (Oct.1489).  Maximilian obtains uncontrolled guardianship of his
+son, absolute dominion over Flanders and the other provinces.  The
+insolent burghers are severely punished for remembering that they had
+been freemen.  The magistrates of Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres, in black
+garments, ungirdled, bare-headed, and kneeling, are compelled to implore
+the despot's forgiveness, and to pay three hundred thousand crowns of
+gold as its price.  After this, for a brief season, order reigns in
+Flanders.
+
+The course of Maximilian had been stealthy, but decided.  Allying himself
+with the city party, he had crushed the nobles.  The power thus obtained,
+he then turned against the burghers.  Step by step he had trampled out
+the liberties which his wife and himself had sworn to protect.  He had
+spurned the authority of the "Great Privilege," and all other charters.
+Burgomasters and other citizens had been beheaded in great numbers for
+appealing to their statutes against the edicts of the regent, for voting
+in favor of a general congress according to the unquestionable law.  He
+had proclaimed that all landed estates should, in lack of heirs male,
+escheat to his own exchequer.  He had debased the coin of the country,
+and thereby authorized unlimited swindling on the part of all his agents,
+from stadholders down to the meanest official.  If such oppression and
+knavery did not justify the resistance of the Flemings to the
+guardianship of Maximilian, it would be difficult to find any reasonable
+course in political affairs save abject submission to authority.
+
+In 1493, Maximilian succeeds to the imperial throne, at the death of his
+father.  In the following year his son, Philip the Fair, now seventeen
+years of age, receives the homage of the different states of the
+Netherlands.  He swears to maintain only the privileges granted by Philip
+and Charles of Burgundy, or their ancestors, proclaiming null and void
+all those which might have been acquired since the death of Charles.
+Holland, Zeland, and the other provinces accept him upon these
+conditions, thus ignominiously, and without a struggle, relinquishing
+the Great Privilege, and all similar charters.
+
+Friesland is, for a brief season, politically separated from the rest of
+the country.  Harassed and exhausted by centuries of warfare, foreign,
+and domestic, the free Frisians, at the suggestion or command of Emperor
+Maximilian, elect the Duke of Saxony as their Podesta.  The sovereign
+prince, naturally proving a chief magistrate far from democratic, gets
+himself acknowledged, or submitted to, soon afterwards, as legitimate
+sovereign of Friesland.  Seventeen years afterward Saxony sells the
+sovereignty to the Austrian house for 350,000 crowns.  This little
+country, whose statutes proclaimed her to be "free as the wind, as long
+as it blew," whose institutions Charlemagne had honored and left
+unmolested, who had freed herself with ready poniard from Norman tyranny,
+who never bowed her neck to feudal chieftain, nor to the papal yoke, now
+driven to madness and suicide by the dissensions of her wild children,
+forfeits at last her independent existence.  All the provinces are thus
+united in a common servitude, and regret, too late, their supineness at
+a moment when their liberties might yet have been vindicated.  Their
+ancient and cherished charters, which their bold ancestors had earned
+with the sweat of their brows and the blood of their hearts, are at the
+mercy of an autocrat, and liable to be superseded by his edicts.
+
+In 1496, the momentous marriage of Philip the Fair with Joanna, daughter
+of Ferdinand and Isabella of Castile and Aragon, is solemnized.  Of this
+union, in the first year of the century, is born the second Charlemagne,
+who is to unite Spain and the Netherlands, together with so many vast and
+distant realms, under a single sceptre.  Six years afterwards (Sept.  25,
+1506), Philip dies at Burgos.  A handsome profligate, devoted to his
+pleasures, and leaving the cares of state to his ministers, Philip,
+"croit-conseil," is the bridge over which the house of Habsburg passes to
+almost universal monarchy, but, in himself, is nothing.
+
+
+
+X.
+
+Two prudent marriages, made by Austrian archdukes within twenty years,
+have altered the face of the earth.  The stream, which we have been
+tracing from its source, empties itself at last into the ocean of a
+world-empire.  Count Dirk the First, lord of a half-submerged corner of
+Europe, is succeeded by Count Charles the Second of Holland, better known
+as Charles the Fifth, King of Spain, Sicily, and Jerusalem, Duke of
+Milan, Emperor of Germany, Dominator in Asia and Africa, autocrat of half
+the world.  The leading events of his brilliant reign are familiar to
+every child.  The Netherlands now share the fate of so large a group of
+nations, a fate, to these provinces, most miserable.  The weddings of
+Austria Felix were not so prolific of happiness to her subjects as to
+herself.  It can never seem just or reasonable that the destiny of many
+millions of human beings should depend upon the marriage-settlements of
+one man with one woman, and a permanent, prosperous empire can never be
+reared upon so frail a foundation.  The leading thought of the first
+Charlemagne was a noble and a useful one, nor did his imperial scheme
+seem chimerical, even although time, wiser than monarchs or lawgivers,
+was to prove it impracticable.  To weld into one great whole the various
+tribes of Franks, Frisians, Saxons, Lombards, Burgundians, and others,
+still in their turbulent youth, and still composing one great Teutonic
+family; to enforce the mutual adhesion of naturally coherent masses, all
+of one lineage, one language, one history, and which were only beginning
+to exhibit their tendencies to insulation, to acquiesce in a variety of
+local laws and customs, while an iron will was to concentrate a vast, but
+homogeneous, people into a single nation; to raise up from the grave of
+corrupt and buried Rome a fresh, vigorous, German, Christian empire; this
+was a reasonable and manly thought.  Far different the conception of the
+second Charlemagne.  To force into discordant union, tribes which, for
+seven centuries, had developed themselves into hostile nations, separated
+by geography and history, customs and laws, to combine many millions
+under one sceptre, not because of natural identity, but for the sake of
+composing one splendid family property, to establish unity by
+annihilating local institutions, to supersede popular and liberal
+charters by the edicts of a central despotism, to do battle with the
+whole spirit of an age, to regard the souls as well as the bodies of vast
+multitudes as the personal property of one individual, to strive for the
+perpetuation in a single house of many crowns, which accident had
+blended, and to imagine the consecration of the whole system by placing
+the pope's triple diadem forever upon the imperial head of the
+Habsburgs;--all this was not the effort of a great, constructive genius,
+but the selfish scheme of an autocrat.
+
+The union of no two countries could be less likely to prove advantageous
+or agreeable than that of the Netherlands and Spain.  They were widely
+separated geographically, while in history, manners, and politics, they
+were utterly opposed to each other.  Spain, which had but just assumed
+the form of a single state by the combination of all its kingdoms, with
+its haughty nobles descended from petty kings, and arrogating almost
+sovereign power within their domains, with its fierce enthusiasm for the
+Catholic religion, which, in the course of long warfare with the
+Saracens, had become the absorbing characteristic of a whole nation,
+with its sparse population scattered over a wide and stern country,
+with a military spirit which led nearly all classes to prefer poverty
+to the wealth attendant upon degrading pursuits of trade;--Spain, with
+her gloomy, martial, and exaggerated character, was the absolute contrast
+of the Netherlands.
+
+These provinces had been rarely combined into a whole, but there was
+natural affinity in their character, history, and position.  There was
+life, movement, bustling activity every where.  An energetic population
+swarmed in all the flourishing cities which dotted the surface of a
+contracted and highly cultivated country.  Their ships were the carriers
+for the world;--their merchants, if invaded in their rights, engaged in
+vigorous warfare with their own funds and their own frigates; their
+fabrics were prized over the whole earth; their burghers possessed the
+wealth of princes, lived with royal luxury, and exercised vast political
+influence; their love of liberty was their predominant passion.  Their
+religious ardor had not been fully awakened; but the events of the next
+generation were to prove that in no respect more than in the religious
+sentiment, were the two races opposed to each other.  It was as certain
+that the Netherlanders would be fierce reformers as that the Spaniards
+would be uncompromising persecutors.  Unhallowed was the union between
+nations thus utterly contrasted.
+
+Philip the Fair and Ferdinand had detested and quarrelled with each other
+from the beginning.  The Spaniards and Flemings participated in the
+mutual antipathy, and hated each other cordially at first sight.  The
+unscrupulous avarice of the Netherland nobles in Spain, their grasping
+and venal ambition, enraged and disgusted the haughty Spaniards.  This
+international malignity furnishes one of the keys to a proper
+understanding of the great revolt in the next reign.
+
+The provinces, now all united again under an emperor, were treated,
+opulent and powerful as they were, as obscure dependencies.  The regency
+over them was entrusted by Charles to his near relatives, who governed in
+the interest of his house, not of the country.  His course towards them
+upon the religious question will be hereafter indicated.  The political
+character of his administration was typified, and, as it were,
+dramatized, on the occasion of the memorable insurrection at Ghent.
+For this reason, a few interior details concerning that remarkable event,
+seem requisite.
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+Ghent was, in all respects, one of the most important cities in Europe.
+Erasmus, who, as a Hollander and a courtier, was not likely to be partial
+to the turbulent Flemings, asserted that there was no town in all
+Christendom to be compared to it for size, power, political constitution,
+or the culture of its inhabitants.  It was, said one of its inhabitants
+at the epoch of the insurrection, rather a country than a city.  The
+activity and wealth of its burghers were proverbial.  The bells were rung
+daily, and the drawbridges over the many arms of the river intersecting
+the streets were raised, in order that all business might be suspended,
+while the armies of workmen were going to or returning from their labors.
+As early as the fourteenth century, the age of the Arteveldes, Froissart
+estimated the number of fighting men whom Ghent could bring into the
+field at eighty thousand.  The city, by its jurisdiction over many large
+but subordinate towns, disposed of more than its own immediate
+population, which has been reckoned as high as two hundred thousand.
+
+Placed in the midst of well cultivated plains, Ghent was surrounded by
+strong walls, the external circuit of which measured nine miles.  Its
+streets and squares were spacious and elegant, its churches and other
+public buildings numerous and splendid.  The sumptuous church of Saint
+John or Saint Bavon, where Charles the Fifth had been baptized, the
+ancient castle whither Baldwin Bras de Fer had brought the daughter of
+Charles the Bald, the city hall with its graceful Moorish front, the
+well-known belfry, where for three centuries had perched the dragon sent
+by the Emperor Baldwin of Flanders from Constantinople, and where swung
+the famous Roland, whose iron tongue had called the citizens, generation
+after generation, to arms, whether to win battles over foreign kings at
+the head of their chivalry, or to plunge their swords in each others'
+breasts, were all conspicuous in the city and celebrated in the land.
+Especially the great bell was the object of the burghers' affection, and,
+generally, of the sovereign's hatred; while to all it seemed, as it were,
+a living historical personage, endowed with the human powers and passions
+which it had so long directed and inflamed.
+
+The constitution of the city was very free.  It was a little republic in
+all but name.  Its population was divided into fifty-two guilds of
+manufacturers and into thirty-two tribes of weavers; each fraternity
+electing annually or biennally its own deans and subordinate officers.
+The senate, which exercised functions legislative, judicial, and
+administrative, subject of course to the grand council of Mechlin and to
+the sovereign authority, consisted of twenty-six members.  These were
+appointed partly from the upper class, or the men who lived upon their
+means, partly from the manufacturers in general, and partly from the
+weavers.  They were chosen by a college of eight electors, who were
+appointed by the sovereign on nomination by the citizens.  The whole
+city, in its collective capacity, constituted one of the four estates
+(Membra) of the province of Flanders.  It is obvious that so much liberty
+of form and of fact, added to the stormy character by which its citizens
+were distinguished, would be most offensive in the eyes of Charles, and
+that the delinquencies of the little commonwealth would be represented
+in the most glaring colors by all those quiet souls, who preferred the
+tranquillity of despotism to the turbulence of freedom.  The city
+claimed, moreover, the general provisions of the "Great Privilege" of the
+Lady Mary, the Magna Charta, which, according to the monarchical party,
+had been legally abrogated by Maximilian.  The liberties of the town had
+also been nominally curtailed by the "calf-skin" (Kalf Vel).  By this
+celebrated document, Charles the Fifth, then fifteen years of age, had
+been made to threaten with condign punishment all persons who should
+maintain that he had sworn at his inauguration to observe any privileges
+or charters claimed by the Ghenters before the peace of Cadsand.
+
+The immediate cause of the discontent, the attempt to force from Flanders
+a subsidy of four hundred thousand caroli, as the third part of the
+twelve hundred thousand granted by the states of the Netherlands, and
+the resistance of Ghent in opposition to the other three members of the
+province, will, of course, be judged differently, according as the
+sympathies are stronger with popular rights or with prerogative.  The
+citizens claimed that the subsidy could only be granted by the unanimous
+consent of the four estates of the province.  Among other proofs of this
+their unquestionable right, they appealed to a muniment, which had never
+existed, save in the imagination of the credulous populace.  At a certain
+remote epoch, one of the Counts of Flanders, it was contended, had
+gambled away his countship to the Earl of Holland, but had been
+extricated from his dilemma by the generosity of Ghent.  The burghers of
+the town had paid the debts and redeemed the sovereignty of their lord,
+and had thereby gained, in return, a charter, called the Bargain of
+Flanders (Koop van Flandern).  Among the privileges granted by this
+document, was an express stipulation that no subsidy should ever be
+granted by the province without the consent of Ghent.  This charter would
+have been conclusive in the present emergency, had it not labored under
+the disadvantage of never having existed.  It was supposed by many that
+the magistrates, some of whom were favorable to government, had hidden
+the document.  Lieven Pyl, an ex-senator, was supposed to be privy to its
+concealment.  He was also, with more justice, charged with an act of
+great baseness and effrontery.  Reputed by the citizens to carry to the
+Queen Regent their positive refusal to grant the subsidy, he had, on the
+contrary, given an answer, in their name, in the affirmative.  For these
+delinquencies, the imaginary and the real, he was inhumanly tortured and
+afterwards beheaded.  "I know, my children," said he upon the scaffold,
+"that you will be grieved when you have seen my blood flow, and that you
+will regret me when it is too late."  It does not appear, however, that
+there was any especial reason to regret him, however sanguinary the
+punishment which had requited his broken faith.
+
+The mischief being thus afoot, the tongue of Roland, and the easily-
+excited spirits of the citizens, soon did the rest.  Ghent broke forth
+into open insurrection.  They had been willing to enlist and pay troops
+under their own banners, but they had felt outraged at the enormous
+contribution demanded of them for a foreign war, undertaken in the family
+interests of their distant master.  They could not find the "Bargain of
+Flanders," but they got possession of the odious "calf skin," which was
+solemnly cut in two by the dean of the weavers.  It was then torn in
+shreds by the angry citizens, many of whom paraded the streets with
+pieces of the hated document stuck in their caps, like plumes.  From
+these demonstrations they proceeded to intrigues with Francis the First.
+He rejected them, and gave notice of their overtures to Charles, who now
+resolved to quell the insurrection, at once.  Francis wrote, begging that
+the Emperor would honor him by coming through France; "wishing to assure
+you," said he, "my lord and good brother, by this letter, written and
+signed by my hand, upon my honor, and on the faith of a prince, and of
+the best brother you have, that in passing through my kingdom every
+possible honor and hospitality will be offered you, even as they could be
+to myself."  Certainly, the French king, after such profuse and voluntary
+pledges, to confirm which he, moreover, offered his two sons and other
+great individuals as hostages, could not, without utterly disgracing
+himself, have taken any unhandsome advantage of the Emperor's presence in
+his dominions.  The reflections often made concerning the high-minded
+chivalry of Francis, and the subtle knowledge of human nature displayed
+by Charles upon the occasion, seem, therefore, entirely superfluous.  The
+Emperor came to Paris.  "Here," says a citizen of Ghent, at the time, who
+has left a minute account of the transaction upon record, but whose
+sympathies were ludicrously with the despot and against his own
+townspeople, "here the Emperor was received as if the God of Paradise had
+descended."  On the 9th of February, 1540, he left Brussels; on the 14th
+he came to Ghent.  His entrance into the city lasted more than six hours.
+Four thousand lancers, one thousand archers, five thousand halberdmen and
+musqueteers composed his bodyguard, all armed to the teeth and ready for
+combat.  The Emperor rode in their midst, surrounded by "cardinals,
+archbishops, bishops, and other great ecclesiastical lords," so that the
+terrors of the Church were combined with the panoply of war to affright
+the souls of the turbulent burghers.  A brilliant train of "dukes,
+princes, earls, barons, grand masters, and seignors, together with most
+of the Knights of the Fleece," were, according to the testimony of the
+same eyewitness, in attendance upon his Majesty.  This unworthy son of
+Ghent was in ecstasies with the magnificence displayed upon the occasion.
+There was such a number of "grand lords, members of sovereign houses,
+bishops, and other ecclesiastical dignitaries going about the streets,
+that," as the poor soul protested with delight, "there was nobody else to
+be met with."  Especially the fine clothes of these distinguished guests
+excited his warmest admiration.  It was wonderful to behold, he said,
+"the nobility and great richness of the princes and seignors, displayed
+as well in their beautiful furs, martins and sables, as in the great
+chains of fine gold which they wore twisted round their necks, and the
+pearls and precious stones in their bonnets and otherwise, which they
+displayed in great abundance.  It was a very triumphant thing to see them
+so richly dressed and accoutred."
+
+An idea may be formed of the size and wealth of the city at this period,
+from the fact that it received and accommodated sixty thousand strangers,
+with their fifteen thousand horses, upon the occasion of the Emperor's
+visit.  Charles allowed a month of awful suspense to intervene between
+his arrival and his vengeance.  Despair and hope alternated during the
+interval.  On the 17th of March, the spell was broken by the execution of
+nineteen persons, who were beheaded as ringleaders.  On the 29th of
+April, he pronounced sentence upon the city.  The hall where it was
+rendered was open to all comers, and graced by the presence of the
+Emperor, the Queen Regent, and the great functionaries of Court, Church,
+and State.  The decree, now matured, was read at length.  It annulled all
+the charters, privileges, and laws of Ghent.  It confiscated all its
+public property, rents, revenues, houses, artillery, munitions of war,
+and in general every thing which the corporation, or the traders, each
+and all, possessed in common.  In particular, the great bell--Roland was
+condemned and sentenced to immediate removal.  It was decreed that the
+four hundred thousand florins, which had caused the revolt, should
+forthwith be paid, together with an additional fine by Ghent of one
+hundred and fifty thousand, besides six thousand a year, forever after.
+In place of their ancient and beloved constitution, thus annihilated at a
+blow, was promulgated a new form of municipal government of the simplest
+kind, according to which all officers were in future to be appointed by
+himself and the guilds, to be reduced to half their number; shorn of all
+political power, and deprived entirely of self-government.  It was,
+moreover, decreed, that the senators, their pensionaries, clerks and
+secretaries, thirty notable burghers, to be named by the Emperor, with
+the great dean and second dean of the weavers, all dressed in black
+robes, without their chains, and bareheaded, should appear upon an
+appointed day, in company with fifty persons from the guilds, and fifty
+others, to be arbitrarily named, in their shirts, with halters upon their
+necks.  This large number of deputies, as representatives of the city,
+were then to fall upon their knees before the Emperor, say in a loud and
+intelligible voice, by the mouth of one of their clerks, that they were
+extremely sorry for the disloyalty, disobedience, infraction of laws,
+commotions, rebellion, and high treason, of which they had been guilty,
+promise that they would never do the like again, and humbly implore him,
+for the sake of the Passion of Jesus Christ, to grant them mercy and
+forgiveness.
+
+The third day of May was appointed for the execution of the sentence.
+Charles, who was fond of imposing exhibitions and prided himself upon
+arranging them with skill, was determined that this occasion should be
+long remembered by all burghers throughout his dominions who might be
+disposed to insist strongly upon their municipal rights.  The streets
+were alive with troops: cavalry and infantry in great numbers keeping
+strict guard at every point throughout the whole extent of the city; for
+it was known that the hatred produced by the sentence was most deadly,
+and that nothing but an array of invincible force could keep those
+hostile sentiments in check.  The senators in their black mourning robes,
+the other deputies in linen shirts, bareheaded, with halters on their
+necks, proceeded, at the appointed hour, from the senate house to the
+imperial residence.  High on his throne, with the Queen Regent at his
+side, surrounded by princes, prelates and nobles, guarded by his archers
+and halberdiers, his crown on his head and his sceptre in his hand, the
+Emperor, exalted, sat.  The senators and burghers, in their robes cf
+humiliation, knelt in the dust at his feet.  The prescribed words of
+contrition and of supplication for mercy were then read by the
+pensionary, all the deputies remaining upon their knees, and many of them
+crying bitterly with rage and shame.  "What principally distressed them,"
+said the honest citizen, whose admiration for the brilliant accoutrement
+of the princes and prelates has been recorded, "was to have the halter on
+their necks, which they found hard to bear, and, if they had not been
+compelled, they would rather have died than submit to it."
+
+As soon as the words had been all spoken by the pensionary, the Emperor,
+whose cue was now to appear struggling with mingled emotions of
+reasonable wrath and of natural benignity, performed his part with much
+dramatic effect.  "He held himself coyly for a little time," says the
+eye-witness, "without saying a word; deporting himself as though he were
+considering whether or not he would grant the pardon for which the
+culprits had prayed."  Then the Queen Regent enacted her share in the
+show.  Turning to his Majesty "with all reverence, honor and humility,
+she begged that he would concede forgiveness, in honor of his nativity,
+which had occurred in that city."
+
+Upon this the Emperor "made a fine show of benignity," and replied "very
+sweetly" that in consequence of his "fraternal love for her, by reason of
+his being a gentle and virtuous prince, who preferred mercy to the rigor
+of justice, and in view of their repentance, he would accord his pardon
+to the citizens."
+
+The Netherlands, after this issue to the struggle of Ghent, were reduced,
+practically, to a very degraded condition.  The form of local self-
+government remained, but its spirit, when invoked, only arose to be
+derided.  The supreme court of Mechlin, as in the days of Charles the
+Bold, was again placed in despotic authority above the ancient charters.
+Was it probable that the lethargy of provinces, which had reached so high
+a point of freedom only to be deprived of it at last, could endure
+forever?  Was it to be hoped that the stern spirit of religious
+enthusiasm, allying itself with the--keen instinct of civil liberty,
+would endue the provinces with strength to throw off the Spanish yoke?
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+It is impossible to comprehend the character of the great Netherland
+revolt in the sixteenth century without taking a rapid retrospective
+survey of the religious phenomena exhibited in the provinces.  The
+introduction of Christianity has been already indicated.  From the
+earliest times, neither prince, people, nor even prelates were very
+dutiful to the pope.  As the papal authority made progress, strong
+resistance was often made to its decrees.  The bishops of Utrecht were
+dependent for their wealth and territory upon the good will of the
+Emperor.  They were the determined opponents of Hildebrand, warm
+adherents of the Hohenstaufers-Ghibelline rather than Guelph.  Heresy was
+a plant of early growth in the Netherlands.  As early as the beginning of
+the 12th century, the notorious Tanchelyn preached at Antwerp, attacking
+the authority of the pope and of all other ecclesiastics; scoffing at the
+ceremonies and sacraments of the Church.  Unless his character and career
+have been grossly misrepresented, he was the most infamous of the many
+impostors who have so often disgraced the cause of religious reformation.
+By more than four centuries, he anticipated the licentiousness and
+greediness manifested by a series of false prophets, and was the first to
+turn both the stupidity of a populace and the viciousness of a priesthood
+to his own advancement; an ambition which afterwards reached its most
+signal expression in the celebrated John of Leyden.
+
+The impudence of Tanchelyn and the superstition of his followers seem
+alike incredible.  All Antwerp was his harem.  He levied, likewise, vast
+sums upon his converts, and whenever he appeared in public, his apparel
+and pomp were befitting an emperor.  Three thousand armed satellites
+escorted his steps and put to death all who resisted his commands.  So
+groveling became the superstition of his followers that they drank of the
+water in which, he had washed, and treasured it as a divine elixir.
+Advancing still further in his experiments upon human credulity, he
+announced his approaching marriage with the Virgin Mary, bade all his
+disciples to the wedding, and exhibited himself before an immense crowd
+in company with an image of his holy bride.  He then ordered the people
+to provide for the expenses of the nuptials and the dowry of his wife,
+placing a coffer upon each side of the image, to receive the
+contributions of either sex.  Which is the most wonderful manifestation
+in the history of this personage--the audacity of the impostor, or the
+bestiality of his victims?  His career was so successful in the
+Netherlands that he had the effrontery to proceed to Rome, promulgating
+what he called his doctrines as he went.  He seems to have been
+assassinated by a priest in an obscure brawl, about the year 1115.
+
+By the middle of the 12th century, other and purer heresiarchs had
+arisen.  Many Netherlanders became converts to the doctrines of Waldo.
+From that period until the appearance of Luther, a succession of sects--
+Waldenses, Albigenses, Perfectists, Lollards, Poplicans, Arnaldists,
+Bohemian Brothers--waged perpetual but unequal warfare with the power and
+depravity of the Church, fertilizing with their blood the future field of
+the Reformation.  Nowhere was the persecution of heretics more relentless
+than in the Netherlands.  Suspected persons were subjected to various
+torturing but ridiculous ordeals.  After such trial, death by fire was
+the usual but, perhaps, not the most severe form of execution.  In
+Flanders, monastic ingenuity had invented another most painful punishment
+for Waldenses and similar malefactors.  A criminal whose guilt had been
+established by the hot iron, hot ploughshare, boiling kettle, or other
+logical proof, was stripped and bound to the stake:--he was then flayed,
+from the neck to the navel, while swarms of bees were let loose to fasten
+upon his bleeding flesh and torture him to a death of exquisite agony.
+
+Nevertheless heresy increased in the face of oppression The Scriptures,
+translated by Waldo into French, were rendered into Netherland rhyme, and
+the converts to the Vaudois doctrine increased in numbers and boldness.
+At the same time the power and luxury of the clergy was waxing daily.
+The bishops of Utrecht, no longer the defenders of the people against
+arbitrary power, conducted themselves like little popes.  Yielding in
+dignity neither to king nor kaiser, they exacted homage from the most
+powerful princes of the Netherlands.  The clerical order became the most
+privileged of all.  The accused priest refused to acknowledge the
+temporal tribunals.  The protection of ecclesiastical edifices was
+extended over all criminals and fugitives from justice--a beneficent
+result in those sanguinary ages, even if its roots were sacerdotal pride.
+To establish an accusation against a bishop, seventy-two witnesses were
+necessary; against a deacon, twenty-seven; against an inferior dignitary,
+seven; while two were sufficient to convict a layman.  The power to read
+and write helped the clergy to much wealth.  Privileges and charters from
+petty princes, gifts and devises from private persons, were documents
+which few, save ecclesiastics, could draw or dispute.  Not content,
+moreover, with their territories and their tithings, the churchmen
+perpetually devised new burthens upon the peasantry.  Ploughs, sickles,
+horses, oxen, all implements of husbandry, were taxed for the benefit of
+those who toiled not, but who gathered into barns.  In the course of the
+twelfth century, many religious houses, richly endowed with lands and
+other property, were founded in the Netherlands.  Was hand or voice
+raised against clerical encroachment--the priests held ever in readiness
+a deadly weapon of defence: a blasting anathema was thundered against
+their antagonist, and smote him into submission.  The disciples of Him
+who ordered his followers to bless their persecutors, and to love their
+enemies, invented such Christian formulas as these:--"In the name of the
+Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, the blessed Virgin Mary, John the
+Baptist, Peter and Paul, and all other Saints in Heaven, do we curse and
+cut off from our Communion him who has thus rebelled against us.  May the
+curse strike him in his house, barn, bed, field, path, city, castle.  May
+he be cursed in battle, accursed in praying, in speaking, in silence, in
+eating, in drinking, in sleeping.  May he be accursed in his taste,
+hearing, smell, and all his senses.  May the curse blast his eyes, head,
+and his body, from his crown to the soles of his feet.  I conjure you,
+Devil, and all your imps, that you take no rest till you have brought him
+to eternal shame; till he is destroyed by drowning or hanging, till he is
+torn to pieces by wild beasts, or consumed by fire.  Let his children
+become orphans, his wife a widow.  I command you, Devil, and all your
+imps, that even as I now blow out these torches, you do immediately
+extinguish the light from his eyes.  So be it--so be it.  Amen. Amen."
+So speaking, the curser was wont to blow out two waxen torches which he
+held in his hands, and, with this practical illustration, the anathema
+was complete.
+
+Such insane ravings, even in the mouth of some impotent beldame, were
+enough to excite a shudder, but in that dreary epoch, these curses from
+the lips of clergymen were deemed sufficient to draw down celestial
+lightning upon the head, not of the blasphemer, but of his victim.  Men,
+who trembled neither at sword nor fire, cowered like slaves before such
+horrid imprecations, uttered by tongues gifted, as it seemed, with
+superhuman power.  Their fellow-men shrank from the wretches thus
+blasted, and refused communication with them as unclean and abhorred.
+
+By the end of the thirteenth century, however, the clerical power was
+already beginning to decline.  It was not the corruption of the Church,
+but its enormous wealth which engendered the hatred, with which it was by
+many regarded.  Temporal princes and haughty barons began to dispute the
+right of ecclesiastics to enjoy vast estates, while refusing the burthen
+of taxation, and unable to draw a sword for the common defence.  At this
+period, the Counts of Flanders, of Holland, and other Netherland
+sovereigns, issued decrees, forbidding clerical institutions from
+acquiring property, by devise, gift, purchase, or any other mode.
+The downfall of the rapacious and licentious knights-templar in the
+provinces and throughout Europe, was another severe blow administered
+at the same time.  The attacks upon Church abuses redoubled in boldness,
+as its authority declined.  Towards the end of the fourteenth century,
+the doctrines of Wicklif had made great progress in the land.  Early in
+the fifteenth, the executions of Huss and Jerome of Prague, produce the
+Bohemian rebellion.  The Pope proclaims a crusade against the Hussites.
+Knights and prelates, esquires and citizens, enlist in the sacred cause,
+throughout Holland and its sister provinces; but many Netherlanders, who
+had felt the might of Ziska's arm, come back, feeling more sympathy with
+the heresy which they had attacked, than with the Church for which they
+had battled.
+
+Meantime, the restrictions imposed by Netherland sovereigns upon clerical
+rights to hold or acquire property, become more stern and more general.
+On the other hand, with the invention of printing, the cause of
+Reformation takes a colossal stride in advance.  A Bible, which, before,
+had cost five hundred crowns, now costs but five.  The people acquire the
+power of reading God's Word, or of hearing it read, for themselves.
+The light of truth dispels the clouds of superstition, as by a new
+revelation.  The Pope and his monks are found to bear, very often, but
+faint resemblance to Jesus and his apostles.  Moreover, the instinct of
+self-interest sharpens the eye of the public.  Many greedy priests, of
+lower rank, had turned shop-keepers in the Netherlands, and were growing
+rich by selling their wares, exempt from taxation, at a lower rate than
+lay hucksters could afford.  The benefit of clergy, thus taking the bread
+from the mouths of many, excites jealousy; the more so, as, besides their
+miscellaneous business, the reverend traders have a most lucrative branch
+of commerce from which other merchants are excluded.  The sale of
+absolutions was the source of large fortunes to the priests.  The
+enormous impudence of this traffic almost exceeds belief.  Throughout
+the Netherlands, the price current of the wares thus offered for sale,
+was published in every town and village.  God's pardon for crimes already
+committed, or about to be committed, was advertised according to a
+graduated tariff.  Thus, poisoning, for example, was absolved for eleven
+ducats, six livres tournois.  Absolution for incest was afforded at
+thirty-six livres, three ducats.  Perjury came to seven livres and three
+carlines.  Pardon for murder, if not by poison, was cheaper.  Even a
+parricide could buy forgiveness at God's tribunal at one ducat; four
+livres, eight carlines.  Henry de Montfort, in the year 1448, purchased
+absolution for that crime at that price.  Was it strange that a century
+or so of this kind of work should produce a Luther?  Was it unnatural
+that plain people, who loved the ancient Church, should rather desire to
+see her purged of such blasphemous abuses, than to hear of St. Peter's
+dome rising a little nearer to the clouds on these proceeds of commuted
+crime?
+
+At the same time, while ecclesiastical abuses are thus augmenting,
+ecclesiastical power is diminishing in the Netherlands.  The Church is no
+longer able to protect itself against the secular aim.  The halcyon days
+of ban, book and candle, are gone.  In 1459, Duke Philip of Burgundy
+prohibits the churches from affording protection to fugitives.  Charles
+the Bold, in whose eyes nothing is sacred save war and the means of
+making it, lays a heavy impost upon all clerical property.  Upon being
+resisted, he enforces collection with the armed hand.  The sword and the
+pen, strength and intellect, no longer the exclusive servants or
+instruments of priestcraft, are both in open revolt.  Charles the Bold
+storms one fortress, Doctor Grandfort, of Groningen, batters another.
+This learned Frisian, called "the light of the world," friend and
+compatriot of the great Rudolph Agricola, preaches throughout the
+provinces, uttering bold denunciations of ecclesiastical error.  He even
+disputes the infallibility of the Pope, denies the utility of prayers for
+the dead, and inveighs against the whole doctrine of purgatory and
+absolution.
+
+With the beginning of the 16th century, the great Reformation was
+actually alive.  The name of Erasmus of Rotterdam was already celebrated;
+the man, who, according to Grotius, "so well showed the road to a
+reasonable reformation."  But if Erasmus showed the road, he certainly
+did not travel far upon it himself.  Perpetual type of the quietist, the
+moderate man, he censured the errors of the Church with discrimination
+and gentleness, as if Borgianism had not been too long rampant at Rome,
+as if men's minds throughout Christendom were not too deeply stirred to
+be satisfied with mild rebukes against sin, especially when the mild
+rebuker was in receipt of livings and salaries from the sinner.  Instead
+of rebukes, the age wanted reforms.  The Sage of Rotterdam was a keen
+observer, a shrewd satirist, but a moderate moralist.  He loved ease,
+good company, the soft repose of princely palaces, better than a life of
+martyrdom and a death at the stake.  He was not of the stuff of which
+martyrs are made, as he handsomely confessed on more than one occasion.
+"Let others affect martyrdom," he said, "for myself I am unworthy of the
+honor;" and, at another time, "I am not of a mind," he observed
+"to venture my life for the truth's sake; all men have not strength to
+endure the martyr's death.  For myself, if it came to the point, I should
+do no better than Simon Peter."  Moderate in all things, he would have
+liked, he said, to live without eating and drinking, although he never
+found it convenient to do so, and he rejoiced when advancing age
+diminished his tendency to other carnal pleasures in which he had
+moderately indulged.  Although awake to the abuses of the Church, he
+thought Luther going too fast and too far.  He began by applauding ended
+by censuring the monk of Wittemberg.  The Reformation might have been
+delayed for centuries had Erasmus and other moderate men been the only
+reformers.  He will long be honored for his elegant, Latinity.  In the
+republic of letters, his efforts to infuse a pure taste, a sound
+criticism, a love for the beautiful and the classic, in place of the
+owlish pedantry which had so long flapped and hooted through mediveval
+cloisters, will always be held in grateful reverence.  In the history of
+the religious Reformation, his name seems hardly to deserve the
+commendations of Grotius.
+
+As the schism yawns, more and more ominously, throughout Christendom, the
+Emperor naturally trembles.  Anxious to save the state, but being no
+antique Roman, he wishes to close the gulf, but with more convenience to
+himself: He conceives the highly original plan of combining Church and
+Empire under one crown.  This is Maximilian's scheme for Church
+reformation.  An hereditary papacy, a perpetual pope-emperor, the
+Charlemagne and Hildebrand systems united and simplified--thus the world
+may yet be saved.  "Nothing more honorable, nobler, better, could happen
+to us," writes Maximilian to Paul Lichtenstein (16th Sept. 1511), "than
+to re-annex the said popedom--which properly belongs to us--to our
+Empire.  Cardinal Adrian approves our reasons and encourages us to
+proceed, being of opinion that we should not have much trouble with the
+cardinals.  It is much to be feared that the Pope may die of his present
+sickness.  He has lost his appetite, and fills himself with so much drink
+that his health is destroyed.  As such matters can not be arranged
+without money, we have promised the cardinals, whom we expect to bring
+over, 300,000 ducats, [Recall that the fine for redemption and pardon for
+the sin of murder was at that time one ducat.  D.W.] which we shall raise
+from the Fuggers, and make payable in Rome upon the appointed day."
+
+These business-like arrangements he communicates, two days afterwards,
+in a secret letter to his daughter Margaret, and already exults at his
+future eminence, both in this world and the next.  "We are sending
+Monsieur de Gurce," he says; "to make an agreement with the Pope, that we
+may be taken as coadjutor, in order that, upon his death, we may be sure
+of the papacy, and, afterwards, of becoming a saint.  After my decease,
+therefore, you will be constrained to adore me, of which I shall be very
+proud.  I am beginning to work upon the cardinals, in which affair two or
+three hundred thousand ducats will be of great service."  The letter was
+signed, "From the hand of your good father, Maximilian, future Pope."
+
+These intrigues are not destined, however, to be successful.  Pope Julius
+lives two years longer; Leo the Tenth succeeds; and, as Medici are not
+much prone to Church reformation some other scheme, and perhaps some
+other reformer, may be wanted.  Meantime, the traffic in bulls of
+absolution becomes more horrible than ever.  Money must be raised to
+supply the magnificent extravagance of Rome.  Accordingly, Christians,
+throughout Europe, are offered by papal authority, guarantees of
+forgiveness for every imaginable sin, "even for the rape of God's mother,
+if that were possible," together with a promise of life eternal in
+Paradise, all upon payment of the price affixed to each crime.  The
+Netherlands, like other countries, are districted and farmed for the
+collection of this papal revenue.  Much of the money thus raised, remains
+in the hands of the vile collectors.  Sincere Catholics, who love and
+honor the ancient religion, shrink with horror at the spectacle offered
+on every side.  Criminals buying Paradise for money, monks spending the
+money thus paid in gaming houses, taverns, and brothels; this seems, to
+those who have studied their Testaments, a different scheme of salvation
+from the one promulgated by Christ.  There has evidently been a departure
+from the system of earlier apostles.  Innocent conservative souls are
+much perplexed; but, at last, all these infamies arouse a giant to do
+battle with the giant wrong.  Martin Luther enters the lists, all alone,
+armed only with a quiver filled with ninety-five propositions, and a bow
+which can send them all over Christendom with incredible swiftness.
+Within a few weeks the ninety-five propositions have flown through
+Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and are found in Jerusalem.
+
+At the beginning, Erasmus encourages the bold friar.  So long as the axe
+is not laid at the foot of the tree, which bears the poisonous but golden
+fruit, the moderate man applauds the blows.  "Luther's cause is
+considered odious," writes Erasmus to the Elector of Saxony, "because he
+has, at the same time, attacked the bellies of the monks and the bulls of
+the Pope."  He complains that the zealous man had been attacked with
+roiling, but not with arguments.  He foresees that the work will have a
+bloody and turbulent result, but imputes the principal blame to the
+clergy.  "The priests talk," said he, "of absolution in such terms, that
+laymen can not stomach it.  Luther has been for nothing more censured
+than for making little of Thomas Aquinas; for wishing to diminish the
+absolution traffic; for having a low opinion of mendicant orders, and for
+respecting scholastic opinions less than the gospels.  All this is
+considered intolerable heresy."
+
+Erasmus, however, was offending both parties.  A swarm of monks were
+already buzzing about him for the bold language of his Commentaries and
+Dialogues.  He was called Erasmus for his errors--Arasmus because he
+would plough up sacred things--Erasinus because he had written himself an
+ass--Behemoth, Antichrist, and many other names of similar import.
+Luther was said to have bought the deadly seed in his barn.  The egg had
+been laid by Erasmus, hatched by Luther.  On the other hand, he was
+reviled for not taking side manfully with the reformer.  The moderate man
+received much denunciation from zealots on either side.  He soon clears
+himself, however, from all suspicions of Lutheranism.  He is appalled at
+the fierce conflict which rages far and wide.  He becomes querulous as
+the mighty besom sweeps away sacred dust and consecrated cobwebs.  "Men
+should not attempt every thing at once," he writes, "but rather step by
+step.  That which men can not improve they must look at through the
+fingers.  If the godlessness of mankind requires such fierce physicians
+as Luther, if man can not be healed with soothing ointments and cooling
+drinks, let us hope that God will comfort, as repentant, those whom he
+has punished as rebellious.  If the dove of Christ--not the owl of
+Minerva--would only fly to us, some measure might be put to the madness
+of mankind."
+
+Meantime the man, whose talk is not of doves and owls, the fierce
+physician, who deals not with ointments and cooling draughts, strides
+past the crowd of gentle quacks to smite the foul disease.  Devils,
+thicker than tiles on house-tops, scare him not from his work.  Bans and
+bulls, excommunications and decrees, are rained upon his head.  The
+paternal Emperor sends down dire edicts, thicker than hail upon the
+earth.  The Holy Father blasts and raves from Rome.  Louvain doctors
+denounce, Louvain hangmen burn, the bitter, blasphemous books.  The
+immoderate man stands firm in the storm, demanding argument instead of
+illogical thunder; shows the hangmen and the people too, outside the
+Elster gate at Wittenberg, that papal bulls will blaze as merrily as
+heretic scrolls.  What need of allusion to events which changed the
+world--which every child has learned--to the war of Titans, uprooting of
+hoary trees and rock-ribbed hills, to the Worms diet, Peasant wars, the
+Patmos of Eisenach, and huge wrestlings with the Devil?
+
+Imperial edicts are soon employed to suppress the Reformation in the
+Netherlands by force.  The provinces, unfortunately; are the private
+property of Charles, his paternal inheritance; and most paternally,
+according to his view of the matter, does he deal with them.  Germany can
+not be treated thus summarily, not being his heritage.  "As it appears,"
+says the edict of 1521, "that the aforesaid Martin is not a man, but a
+devil under the form of a man, and clothed in the dress of a priest, the
+better to bring the human race to hell and damnation, therefore all his
+disciples and converts are to be punished with death and forfeiture of
+all their goods."  This was succinct and intelligible.  The bloody edict,
+issued at Worms, without even a pretence of sanction by the estates, was
+carried into immediate effect.  The papal inquisition was introduced into
+the provinces to assist its operations.  The bloody work, for which the
+reign of Charles is mainly distinguished in the Netherlands, now began.
+In 1523, July 1st, two Augustine monks were burned at Brussels, the first
+victims to Lutheranism in the provinces.  Erasmus observed, with a sigh,
+that "two had been burned at Brussels, and that the city now began
+strenuously to favor Lutheranism."
+
+Pope Adrian the Sixth, the Netherland boat-maker's son and the Emperor's
+ancient tutor, was sufficiently alive to the sins of churchmen.  The
+humble scholar of Utrecht was, at least, no Borgia.  At the diet of
+Nuremberg, summoned to put down Luther, the honest Pope declared roundly,
+through the Bishop of Fabriane, that "these disorders had sprung from the
+Sins of men, more especially from the sins of priests and prelates.  Even
+in the holy chair," said he, "many horrible crimes have been committed.
+Many abuses have grown up in the ecclesiastical state.  The contagious
+disease, spreading from the head to the members--from the Pope to lesser
+prelates--has spread far and wide, so that scarcely any one is to be
+found who does right, and who is free from infection.  Nevertheless, the
+evils have become so ancient and manifold, that it will be necessary to
+go step by step."
+
+In those passionate days, the ardent reformers were as much outraged by
+this pregnant confession as the ecclesiastics.  It would indeed be a slow
+process, they thought, to move step by step in the Reformation, if
+between each step, a whole century was to intervene.  In vain did the
+gentle pontiff call upon Erasmus to assuage the stormy sea with his
+smooth rhetoric.  The Sage of Rotterdam was old and sickly; his day was
+over.  Adrian's head; too; languishes beneath the triple crown but twenty
+months.  He dies 13th Sept., 1523, having arrived at the conviction,
+according to his epitaph, that the greatest misfortune of his life was
+to have reigned.
+
+Another edict, published in the Netherlands, forbids all private
+assemblies for devotion; all reading of the scriptures; all discussions
+within one's own doors concerning faith, the sacraments, the papal
+authority, or other religious matter, under penalty of death.  The edicts
+were no dead letter.  The fires were kept constantly supplied with human
+fuel by monks, who knew the art of burning reformers better than that of
+arguing with them.  The scaffold was the most conclusive of syllogisms,
+and used upon all occasions.  Still the people remained unconvinced.
+Thousands of burned heretics had not made a single convert.
+
+A fresh edict renewed and sharpened the punishment for reading the
+scriptures in private or public.  At the same time, the violent personal
+altercation between Luther and Erasmus, upon predestination, together
+with the bitter dispute between Luther and Zwingli concerning the real
+presence, did more to impede the progress of the Reformation than ban or
+edict, sword or fire.  The spirit of humanity hung her head, finding that
+the bold reformer had only a new dogma in place of the old ones, seeing
+that dissenters, in their turn, were sometimes as ready as papists, with
+age, fagot, and excommunication.  In 1526, Felix Mants, the anabaptist,
+is drowned at Zurich, in obedience to Zwingli's pithy formula--'Qui
+iterum mergit mergatur'.  Thus the anabaptists, upon their first
+appearance, were exposed to the fires of the Church and the water of the
+Zwinglians.
+
+There is no doubt that the anabaptist delusion was so ridiculous and so
+loathsome, as to palliate or at least render intelligible the wrath with
+which they were regarded by all parties.  The turbulence of the sect was
+alarming to constituted authorities, its bestiality disgraceful to the
+cause of religious reformation.  The leaders were among the most depraved
+of human creatures, as much distinguished for licentiousness, blasphemy
+and cruelty as their followers for grovelling superstition.  The evil
+spirit, driven out of Luther, seemed, in orthodox eyes, to have taken
+possession of a herd of swine.  The Germans, Muncer and Hoffmann, had
+been succeeded, as chief prophets, by a Dutch baker, named Matthiszoon,
+of Harlem; who announced himself as Enoch.  Chief of this man's disciples
+was the notorious John Boccold, of Leyden.  Under the government of this
+prophet, the anabaptists mastered the city of Munster.  Here they
+confiscated property, plundered churches, violated females, murdered men
+who refused to join the gang, and, in briefs practised all the enormities
+which humanity alone can conceive or perpetrate.  The prophet proclaimed
+himself King of Sion, and sent out apostles to preach his doctrines in
+Germany and the Netherlands.  Polygamy being a leading article of the
+system, he exemplified the principle by marrying fourteen wives.  Of
+these, the beautiful widow of Matthiszoon was chief, was called the Queen
+of Sion, and wore a golden crown.  The prophet made many fruitless
+efforts to seize Amsterdam and Leyden.  The armed invasion of the
+anabaptists was repelled, but their contagious madness spread.  The
+plague broke forth in Amsterdam.  On a cold winter's night, (February,
+1535), seven men and five women, inspired by the Holy Ghost, threw off
+their clothes and rushed naked and raving through the streets, shrieking
+"Wo, wo, wo! the wrath of God, the wrath of God!"  When arrested, they
+obstinately refused to put on clothing.  "We are," they observed, "the
+naked truth."  In a day or two, these furious lunatics, who certainly
+deserved a madhouse rather than the scaffold, were all executed.  The
+numbers of the sect increased with the martyrdom to which they were
+exposed, and the disorder spread to every part of the Netherlands.  Many
+were put to death in lingering torments, but no perceptible effect was
+produced by the chastisement.  Meantime the great chief of the sect, the
+prophet John, was defeated by the forces of the Bishop of Munster, who
+recovered his city and caused the "King of Zion" to be pinched to death
+with red-hot tongs.
+
+Unfortunately the severity of government was not wreaked alone upon the
+prophet and his mischievous crew.  Thousands and ten-thousands of
+virtuous, well-disposed men and women, who had as little sympathy with
+anabaptistical as with Roman depravity; were butchered in cold blood,
+under the sanguinary rule of Charles, in the Netherlands.  In 1533, Queen
+Dowager Mary of Hungary, sister of the Emperor, Regent of the provinces,
+the "Christian widow" admired by Erasmus, wrote to her brother that "in
+her opinion all heretics, whether repentant or not, should be prosecuted
+with such severity as that error might be, at once, extinguished, care
+being only taken that the provinces were not entirely depopulated."  With
+this humane limitation, the "Christian Widow" cheerfully set herself to
+superintend as foul and wholesale a system of murder as was ever
+organized.  In 1535, an imperial edict was issued at Brussels, condemning
+all heretics to death; repentant males to be executed with the sword,
+repentant females to be buried alive, the obstinate, of both sexes, to be
+burned.  This and similar edicts were the law of the land for twenty
+years, and rigidly enforced.  Imperial and papal persecution continued
+its daily deadly work with such diligence as to make it doubtful whether
+the limits set by the Regent Mary might not be overstepped.  In the midst
+of the carnage, the Emperor sent for his son Philip, that he might
+receive the fealty of the Netherlands as their future lord and master.
+Contemporaneously, a new edict was published at Brussels (29th April,
+1549), confirming and reenacting all previous decrees in their most
+severe provisions.  Thus stood religious matters in the Netherlands at
+the epoch of the imperial abdication.
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+The civil institutions of the country had assumed their last provincial
+form, in the Burgundo-Austrian epoch.  As already stated, their tendency,
+at a later period a vicious one, was to substitute fictitious personages
+for men.  A chain of corporations was wound about the liberty of the
+Netherlands; yet that liberty had been originally sustained by the system
+in which it, one day, might be strangled.  The spirit of local self-
+government, always the life-blood of liberty, was often excessive in its
+manifestations.  The centrifugal force had been too much developed, and,
+combining with the mutual jealousy of corporations, had often made the
+nation weak against a common foe.  Instead of popular rights there were
+state rights, for the large cities, with extensive districts and villages
+under their government, were rather petty states than municipalities.
+Although the supreme legislative and executive functions belonged to the
+sovereign, yet each city made its by-laws, and possessed, beside, a body
+of statutes and regulations, made from time to time by its own authority
+and confirmed by the prince.  Thus a large portion, at least, of the
+nation shared practically in the legislative functions, which,
+technically, it did not claim; nor had the requirements of society made
+constant legislation so necessary, as that to exclude the people from the
+work was to enslave the country.  There was popular power enough to
+effect much good, but it was widely scattered, and, at the same time,
+confined in artificial forms.  The guilds were vassals of the towns, the
+towns, vassals of the feudal lord.  The guild voted in the "broad
+council" of the city as one person; the city voted in the estates as one
+person.  The people of the United Netherlands was the personage yet to be
+invented, It was a privilege, not a right, to exercise a handiwork, or to
+participate in the action of government.  Yet the mass of privileges was
+so large, the shareholders so numerous, that practically the towns were
+republics.  The government was in the hands of a large number of the
+people.  Industry and intelligence led to wealth and power.  This was
+great progress from the general servitude of the 11th and 12th centuries,
+an immense barrier against arbitrary rule.  Loftier ideas of human
+rights, larger conceptions of commerce, have taught mankind, in later
+days, the difference between liberties and liberty, between guilds and
+free competition.  At the same time it was the principle of mercantile
+association, in the middle ages, which protected the infant steps of
+human freedom and human industry against violence and wrong.  Moreover,
+at this period, the tree of municipal life was still green and vigorous.
+The healthful flow of sap from the humblest roots to the most verdurous
+branches indicated the internal soundness of the core, and provided for
+the constant development of exterior strength.  The road to political
+influence was open to all, not by right of birth, but through honorable
+exertion of heads and hands.
+
+The chief city of the Netherlands, the commercial capital of the world,
+was Antwerp.  In the North and East of Europe, the Hanseatic league had
+withered with the revolution in commerce.  At the South, the splendid
+marble channels, through which the overland India trade had been
+conducted from the Mediterranean by a few stately cities, were now dry,
+the great aqueducts ruinous and deserted.  Verona, Venice, Nuremberg,
+Augsburg, Bruges, were sinking, but Antwerp, with its deep and convenient
+river, stretched its arm to the ocean and caught the golden prize, as it
+fell from its sister cities' grasp.  The city was so ancient that its
+genealogists, with ridiculous gravity, ascended to a period two centuries
+before the Trojan war, and discovered a giant, rejoicing in the classic
+name of Antigonus, established on the Scheld.  This patriarch exacted one
+half the merchandise of all navigators who passed his castle, and was
+accustomed to amputate and cast into the river the right hands of those
+who infringed this simple tariff.  Thus Hand-werpen, hand-throwing,
+became Antwerp, and hence, two hands, in the escutcheon of the city, were
+ever held up in heraldic attestation of the truth.  The giant was, in his
+turn, thrown into the Scheld by a hero, named Brabo, from whose exploits
+Brabant derived its name; "de quo Brabonica tellus."  But for these
+antiquarian researches, a simpler derivation of the name would seem
+an t' werf, "on the wharf."  It had now become the principal entrepot and
+exchange of Europe.  The Huggers, Velsens, Ostetts, of Germany, the
+Gualterotti and Bonvisi of Italy, and many other great mercantile houses
+were there established.  No city, except Paris, surpassed it in
+population, none approached it in commercial splendor.  Its government
+was very free.  The sovereign, as Marquis of Antwerp, was solemnly sworn
+to govern according to the ancient charters and laws.  The stadholder, as
+his representative, shared his authority with the four estates of the
+city.  The Senate of eighteen members was appointed by the stadholder out
+of a quadruple number nominated by the Senate itself and by the fourth
+body, called the Borgery.  Half the board was thus renewed annually.  It
+exercised executive and appellate judicial functions, appointed two
+burgomasters, and two pensionaries or legal councillors, and also
+selected the lesser magistrates and officials of the city.  The board of
+ancients or ex-senators, held their seats ex officio.  The twenty-six
+ward-masters, appointed, two from each ward, by the Senate on nomination
+by tie wards, formed the third estate.  Their especial business was to
+enrol the militia and to attend to its mustering and training.  The deans
+of the guilds, fifty-four in number, two from each guild, selected by the
+Senate, from a triple list of candidates presented by the guilds,
+composed the fourth estate.  This influential body was always assembled
+in the broad-council of the city.  Their duty was likewise to conduct the
+examination of candidates claiming admittance to any guild and offering
+specimens of art or handiwork, to superintend the general affairs of the
+guilds and to regulate disputes.
+
+There were also two important functionaries, representing the king in
+criminal and civil matters.  The Vicarius capitalis, Scultetus, Schout,
+Sheriff, or Margrave, took precedence of all magistrates.  His business
+was to superintend criminal arrests, trials, and executions.  The
+Vicarius civilis was called the Amman, and his office corresponded with
+that of the Podesta in the Frisian and Italian republics.  His duties
+were nearly similar, in civil, to those of his colleague, in criminal
+matters.
+
+These four branches, with their functionaries and dependents, composed
+the commonwealth of Antwerp.  Assembled together in council, they
+constituted the great and general court.  No tax could be imposed by the
+sovereign, except with consent of the four branches, all voting
+separately.
+
+The personal and domiciliary rights of the citizen were scrupulously
+guarded.  The Schout could only make arrests with the Burgomaster's
+warrant, and was obliged to bring the accused, within three days, before
+the judges, whose courts were open to the public.
+
+The condition of the population was prosperous.  There were but few poor,
+and those did not seek but were sought by the almoners: The schools were
+excellent and cheap.  It was difficult to find a child of sufficient age
+who could not read, write, and speak, at least, two languages.  The sons
+of the wealthier citizens completed their education at Louvain, Douay,
+Paris, or Padua.
+
+The city itself was one of the most beautiful in Europe.  Placed upon a
+plain along the banks of the Scheld, shaped like a bent bow with the
+river for its string, it enclosed within it walls some of the most
+splendid edifices in Christendom.  The world-renowned church of Notre
+Dame, the stately Exchange where five thousand merchants daily
+congregated, prototype of all similar establishments throughout the
+world, the capacious mole and port where twenty-five hundred vessels were
+often seen at once, and where five hundred made their daily entrance or
+departure, were all establishments which it would have been difficult to
+rival in any other part of the world.
+
+From what has already been said of the municipal institutions of the
+country, it may be inferred that the powers of the Estates-general were
+limited.  The members of that congress were not representatives chosen by
+the people, but merely a few ambassadors from individual provinces.  This
+individuality was not always composed of the same ingredients.  Thus,
+Holland consisted of two members, or branches--the nobles and the six
+chief cities; Flanders of four branches--the cities, namely, of Ghent,
+Bruges, Ypres, and the "freedom of Bruges;" Brabant of Louvain, Brussels,
+Bois le Due, and Antwerp, four great cities, without representation of
+nobility or clergy; Zeland, of one clerical person, the abbot of
+Middelburg, one noble, the Marquis of Veer and Vliessingen, and six chief
+cities; Utrecht, of three branches--the nobility, the clergy, and five
+cities.  These, and other provinces, constituted in similar manner, were
+supposed to be actually present at the diet when assembled.  The chief
+business of the states-general was financial; the sovereign, or his
+stadholder, only obtaining supplies by making a request in person, while
+any single city, as branch of a province, had a right to refuse the
+grant.
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+Education had felt the onward movement of the country and the times.  The
+whole system was, however, pervaded by the monastic spirit, which had
+originally preserved all learning from annihilation, but which now kept
+it wrapped in the ancient cerecloths, and stiffening in the stony
+sarcophagus of a bygone age.  The university of Louvain was the chief
+literary institution in the provinces.  It had been established in 1423
+by Duke John IV. of Brabant.  Its government consisted of a President and
+Senate, forming a close corporation, which had received from the founder
+all his own authority, and the right to supply their own vacancies.  The
+five faculties of law, canon law, medicine, theology, and the arts, were
+cultivated at the institution.  There was, besides, a high school for
+under graduates, divided into four classes.  The place reeked with
+pedantry, and the character of the university naturally diffused itself
+through other scholastic establishments.  Nevertheless, it had done and
+was doing much to preserve the love for profound learning, while the
+rapidly advancing spirit of commerce was attended by an ever increasing
+train of humanizing arts.
+
+The standard of culture in those flourishing cities was elevated,
+compared with that observed in many parts of Europe.  The children of the
+wealthier classes enjoyed great facilities for education in all the great
+capitals.  The classics, music, and the modern languages, particularly
+the French, were universally cultivated.  Nor was intellectual
+cultivation confined to the higher orders.  On the contrary, it was
+diffused to a remarkable degree among the hard-working artisans and
+handicraftsmen of the great cities.
+
+For the principle of association had not confined itself exclusively to
+politics and trade.  Besides the numerous guilds by which citizenship was
+acquired in the various cities, were many other societies for mutual
+improvement, support, or recreation.  The great secret, architectural or
+masonic brotherhood of Germany, that league to which the artistic and
+patient completion of the magnificent works of Gothic architecture in the
+middle ages is mainly to be attributed, had its branches in nether
+Germany, and explains the presence of so many splendid and elaborately
+finished churches in the provinces.  There were also military sodalities
+of musketeers, cross-bowmen, archers, swordsmen in every town.  Once a
+year these clubs kept holiday, choosing a king, who was selected for his
+prowess and skill in the use of various weapons.  These festivals, always
+held with great solemnity and rejoicing, were accompanied bye many
+exhibitions of archery and swordsmanship.  The people were not likely,
+therefore, voluntarily to abandon that privilege and duty of freemen, the
+right to bear arms, and the power to handle them.
+
+Another and most important collection of brotherhoods were the so-called
+guilds of Rhetoric, which existed, in greater or less number, in all the
+principal cities.  These were associations of mechanics, for the purpose
+of amusing their leisure with poetical effusions, dramatic and musical
+exhibitions, theatrical processions, and other harmless and not inelegant
+recreations.  Such chambers of rhetoric came originally in the fifteenth
+century from France.  The fact that in their very title they confounded
+rhetoric with poetry and the drama indicates the meagre attainments of
+these early "Rederykers."  In the outset of their career they gave
+theatrical exhibitions.  "King Herod and his Deeds" was enacted in the
+cathedral at Utrecht in 1418.  The associations spread with great
+celerity throughout the Netherlands, and, as they were all connected with
+each other, and in habits of periodical intercourse, these humble links
+of literature were of great value in drawing the people of the provinces
+into closer union.  They became, likewise, important political engines.
+As early as the time of Philip the Good, their songs and lampoons became
+so offensive to the arbitrary notions of the Burgundian government, as to
+cause the societies to be prohibited.  It was, however, out of the
+sovereign's power permanently to suppress institutions, which already
+partook of the character of the modern periodical press combined with
+functions resembling the show and licence of the Athenian drama.  Viewed
+from the stand-point of literary criticism their productions were not
+very commendable in taste, conception, or execution.  To torture the
+Muses to madness, to wire-draw poetry through inextricable coils of
+difficult rhymes and impossible measures; to hammer one golden grain of
+wit into a sheet of infinite platitude, with frightful ingenuity to
+construct ponderous anagrams and preternatural acrostics, to dazzle the
+vulgar eye with tawdry costumes, and to tickle the vulgar ear with
+virulent personalities, were tendencies which perhaps smacked of the
+hammer, the yard-stick and the pincers, and gave sufficient proof, had
+proof been necessary, that literature is not one of the mechanical arts,
+and that poetry can not be manufactured to a profit by joint stock
+companies.  Yet, if the style of these lucubrations was often depraved,
+the artisans rarely received a better example from the literary
+institutions above them.  It was not for guilds of mechanics to give the
+tone to literature, nor were their efforts in more execrable taste than
+the emanations from the pedants of Louvain.  The "Rhetoricians" are not
+responsible for all the bad taste of their generation.  The gravest
+historians of the Netherlands often relieved their elephantine labors by
+the most asinine gambols, and it was not to be expected that these
+bustling weavers and cutlers should excel their literary superiors in
+taste or elegance.
+
+Philip the Fair enrolled himself as a member in one of these societies.
+It may easily be inferred, therefore, that they had already become bodies
+of recognized importance.  The rhetorical chambers existed in the most
+obscure villages.  The number of yards of Flemish poetry annually
+manufactured and consumed throughout the provinces almost exceed belief.
+The societies had regular constitutions.  Their presiding officers were
+called kings, princes, captains, archdeacons, or rejoiced in similar
+high-sounding names.  Each chamber had its treasurer, its buffoon, and
+its standard-bearer for public processions.  Each had its peculiar title
+or blazon, as the Lily, the Marigold, or the Violet, with an appropriate
+motto.  By the year 1493, the associations had become so important, that
+Philip the Fair summoned them all to a general assembly at Mechlin.  Here
+they were organized, and formally incorporated under the general
+supervision of an upper or mother-society of Rhetoric, consisting of
+fifteen members, and called by the title of "Jesus with the balsam
+flower."
+
+The sovereigns were always anxious to conciliate these influential guilds
+by becoming members of them in person.  Like the players, the
+Rhetoricians were the brief abstract and chronicle of the time, and
+neither prince nor private person desired their ill report.  It had,
+indeed, been Philip's intention to convert them into engines for the
+arbitrary purposes of his house, but fortunately the publicly organized
+societies were not the only chambers.  On the contrary, the unchartered
+guilds were the moat numerous and influential.  They exercised a vast
+influence upon the progress of the religious reformation, and the
+subsequent revolt of the Netherlands.  They ridiculed, with their farces
+and their satires, the vices of the clergy.  They dramatized tyranny for
+public execration.  It was also not surprising, that among the leaders of
+the wild anabaptists who disgraced the great revolution in church and
+state by their hideous antics, should be found many who, like David of
+Delft, John of Leyden, and others, had been members of rhetorical
+chambers.  The genius for mummery and theatrical exhibitions,
+transplanted from its sphere, and exerting itself for purposes of fraud
+and licentiousness, was as baleful in its effects as it was healthy in
+its original manifestations.  Such exhibitions were but the excrescences
+of a system which had borne good fruit.  These literary guilds befitted
+and denoted a people which was alive, a people which had neither sunk to
+sleep in the lap of material prosperity, nor abased itself in the sty of
+ignorance and political servitude.  The spirit of liberty pervaded these
+rude but not illiterate assemblies, and her fair proportions were
+distinctly visible, even through the somewhat grotesque garb which she
+thus assumed.
+
+The great leading recreations which these chambers afforded to themselves
+and the public, were the periodic jubilees which they celebrated in
+various capital cities.  All the guilds of rhetoric throughout the
+Netherlands were then invited to partake and to compete in magnificent
+processions, brilliant costumes, living pictures, charades, and other
+animated, glittering groups, and in trials of dramatic and poetic skill,
+all arranged under the superintendence of the particular association
+which, in the preceding year, had borne away the prize.  Such jubilees
+were called "Land jewels."
+
+From the amusements of a people may be gathered much that is necessary
+for a proper estimation of its character.  No unfavorable opinion can be
+formed as to the culture of a nation, whose weavers, smiths, gardeners,
+and traders, found the favorite amusement of their holidays in composing
+and enacting tragedies or farces, reciting their own verses, or in
+personifying moral and esthetic sentiments by ingeniously-arranged
+groups, or gorgeous habiliments.  The cramoisy velvets and yellow satin
+doublets of the court, the gold-brocaded mantles of priests and princes
+are often but vulgar drapery of little historic worth.  Such costumes
+thrown around the swart figures of hard-working artisans, for literary
+and artistic purposes, have a real significance, and are worthy of a
+closer examination.  Were not these amusements of the Netherlanders as
+elevated and humanizing as the contemporary bull-fights and autos-da-fe
+of Spain?  What place in history does the gloomy bigot merit who, for the
+love of Christ, converted all these gay cities into shambles, and changed
+the glittering processions of their Land jewels into fettered marches to
+the scaffold?
+
+Thus fifteen ages have passed away, and in the place of a horde of
+savages, living among swamps and thickets, swarm three millions of
+people, the most industrious, the most prosperous, perhaps the most
+intelligent under the sun.  Their cattle, grazing on the bottom of the
+sea, are the finest in Europe, their agricultural products of more
+exchangeable value than if nature had made their land to overflow with
+wine and oil.  Their navigators are the boldest, their mercantile marine
+the most powerful, their merchants the most enterprising in the world.
+Holland and Flanders, peopled by one race, vie with each other in the
+pursuits of civilization.  The Flemish skill in the mechanical and in the
+fine arts is unrivalled.  Belgian musicians delight and instruct other
+nations, Belgian pencils have, for a century, caused the canvas to glow
+with colors and combinations never seen before.  Flemish fabrics are
+exported to all parts of Europe, to the East and West Indies, to Africa.
+The splendid tapestries, silks, linens, as well as the more homely and
+useful manufactures of the Netherlands, are prized throughout the world.
+Most ingenious, as they had already been described by the keen-eyed
+Caesar, in imitating the arts of other nations, the skillful artificers
+of the country at Louvain, Ghent, and other places, reproduce the shawls
+and silks of India with admirable accuracy.
+
+Their national industry was untiring; their prosperity unexampled; their
+love of liberty indomitable; their pugnacity proverbial.  Peaceful in
+their pursuits, phlegmatic by temperament, the Netherlands were yet the
+most belligerent and excitable population of Europe.  Two centuries of
+civil war had but thinned the ranks of each generation without quenching
+the hot spirit of the nation.
+
+The women were distinguished by beauty of form and vigor of constitution.
+Accustomed from childhood to converse freely with all classes and sexes
+in the daily walks of life, and to travel on foot or horseback from one
+town to another, without escort and without fear, they had acquired
+manners more frank and independent than those of women in other lands,
+while their morals were pure and their decorum undoubted.  The prominent
+part to be sustained by the women of Holland in many dramas of the
+revolution would thus fitly devolve upon a class, enabled by nature and
+education to conduct themselves with courage.
+
+Within the little circle which encloses the seventeen provinces are 208
+walled cities, many of them among the most stately in Christendom, 150
+chartered towns, 6,300 villages, with their watch-towers and steeples,
+besides numerous other more insignificant hamlets; the whole guarded by a
+belt of sixty fortresses of surpassing strength.
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+Thus in this rapid sketch of the course and development of the Netherland
+nation during sixteen centuries, we have seen it ever marked by one
+prevailing characteristic, one master passion--the love of liberty, the
+instinct of self-government.  Largely compounded of the bravest Teutonic
+elements, Batavian and Frisian, the race ever battles to the death with
+tyranny, organizes extensive revolts in the age of Vespasian, maintains a
+partial independence even against the sagacious dominion of Charlemagne,
+refuses in Friesland to accept the papal yoke or feudal chain, and,
+throughout the dark ages, struggles resolutely towards the light,
+wresting from a series of petty sovereigns a gradual and practical
+recognition of the claims of humanity.  With the advent of the Burgundian
+family, the power of the commons has reached so high a point, that it is
+able to measure itself, undaunted, with the spirit of arbitrary rule, of
+which that engrossing and tyrannical house is the embodiment.  For more
+than a century the struggle for freedom, for civic life, goes on; Philip
+the Good, Charles the Bold, Mary's husband Maximilian, Charles V., in
+turn, assailing or undermining the bulwarks raised, age after age,
+against the despotic principle.  The combat is ever renewed.  Liberty,
+often crushed, rises again and again from her native earth with redoubled
+energy.  At last, in the 16th century, a new and more powerful spirit,
+the genius of religious freedom, comes to participate in the great
+conflict.  Arbitrary power, incarnated in the second Charlemagne, assails
+the new combination with unscrupulous, unforgiving fierceness.  Venerable
+civic magistrates; haltered, grovel in sackcloth and ashes; innocent,
+religious reformers burn in holocausts.  By the middle of the century,
+the battle rages more fiercely than ever.  In the little Netherland
+territory, Humanity, bleeding but not killed, still stands at bay and
+defies the hunters.  The two great powers have been gathering strength
+for centuries.  They are soon to be matched in a longer and more
+determined combat than the world had ever seen.  The emperor is about to
+leave the stage.  The provinces, so passionate for nationality, for
+municipal freedom, for religious reformation, are to become the property
+of an utter stranger; a prince foreign to their blood, their tongue,
+their religion, their whole habits of life and thought.
+
+Such was the political, religious, and social condition of a nation who
+were now to witness a new and momentous spectacle.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Absolution for incest was afforded at thirty-six livres
+Achieved the greatness to which they had not been born
+Advancing age diminished his tendency to other carnal pleasures
+All his disciples and converts are to be punished with death
+All reading of the scriptures (forbidden)
+Altercation between Luther and Erasmus, upon predestination
+An hereditary papacy, a perpetual pope-emperor
+Announced his approaching marriage with the Virgin Mary
+As ready as papists, with age, fagot, and excommunication
+Attacking the authority of the pope
+Bold reformer had only a new dogma in place of the old ones
+Charles the Fifth autocrat of half the world
+Condemning all heretics to death
+Craft meaning, simply, strength
+Criminal whose guilt had been established by the hot iron
+Criminals buying Paradise for money
+Crusades made great improvement in the condition of the serfs
+Democratic instincts of the ancient German savages
+Denies the utility of prayers for the dead
+Difference between liberties and liberty
+Dispute between Luther and Zwingli concerning the real presence
+Divine right
+Drank of the water in which, he had washed
+Enormous wealth (of the Church) which engendered the hatred
+Erasmus encourages the bold friar
+Erasmus of Rotterdam
+Even for the rape of God's mother, if that were possible
+Executions of Huss and Jerome of Prague
+Fable of divine right is invented to sanction the system
+Felix Mants, the anabaptist, is drowned at Zurich
+Few, even prelates were very dutiful to the pope
+Fiction of apostolic authority to bind and loose
+Fishermen and river raftsmen become ocean adventurers
+For myself I am unworthy of the honor (of martyrdom)
+Forbids all private assemblies for devotion
+Force clerical--the power of clerks
+Great Privilege, the Magna Charta of Holland
+Guarantees of forgiveness for every imaginable sin
+Halcyon days of ban, book and candle
+Heresy was a plant of early growth in the Netherlands
+In Holland, the clergy had neither influence nor seats
+Invented such Christian formulas as these (a curse)
+July 1st, two Augustine monks were burned at Brussels
+King of Zion to be pinched to death with red-hot tongs
+Labored under the disadvantage of never having existed
+Learn to tremble as little at priestcraft as at swordcraft
+Many greedy priests, of lower rank, had turned shop-keepers
+No one can testify but a householder
+Not of the stuff of which martyrs are made (Erasmus)
+Nowhere was the persecution of heretics more relentless
+Obstinate, of both sexes, to be burned
+One golden grain of wit into a sheet of infinite platitude
+Pardon for crimes already committed, or about to be committed
+Pardon for murder, if not by poison, was cheaper
+Paying their passage through, purgatory
+Poisoning, for example, was absolved for eleven ducats
+Pope and emperor maintain both positions with equal logic
+Power to read and write helped the clergy to much wealth
+Readiness to strike and bleed at any moment in her cause
+Repentant females to be buried alive
+Repentant males to be executed with the sword
+Sale of absolutions was the source of large fortunes to the priests
+Same conjury over ignorant baron and cowardly hind
+Scoffing at the ceremonies and sacraments of the Church
+Sharpened the punishment for reading the scriptures in private
+Slavery was both voluntary and compulsory
+Soldier of the cross was free upon his return
+St. Peter's dome rising a little nearer to the clouds
+Tanchelyn
+The bad Duke of Burgundy, Philip surnamed "the Good,"
+The egg had been laid by Erasmus, hatched by Luther
+The vivifying becomes afterwards the dissolving principle
+Thousands of burned heretics had not made a single convert
+Thus Hand-werpen, hand-throwing, became Antwerp
+To prefer poverty  to the wealth attendant upon trade
+Tranquillity of despotism to the turbulence of freedom
+Villagers, or villeins
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DUTCH REPUBLIC, INTRO. II. ***
+********** This file should be named 4802.txt or 4802.zip *********
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