Amsterdam

by Russell Shorto

  Locke admired the depth of Van Limborch’s perspective as well as his conclusions. He also read Le Clerc’s newest work, Sentimens de quelque théologiens, which he found overly aggressive in tone. With these examples in his mind, Locke wrote, in the months of November and December 1685, his own statement of tolerance. He put it in the form of a letter addressed to Van Limborch, and it was published as A Letter concerning Toleration. He began by setting the concept of tolerance in a Christian context: “I esteem that toleration to be the chief characteristic mark of the true Church.” But where Van Limborch’s concern was tolerance between Christian denominations, Locke’s main interest was in advancing an argument for the separation of church and state. It was almost universally held at the time that a state religion was an essential part of the stability of a society, but Locke declared, “The commonwealth seems to me to be a society of men constituted only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing their own civil interests,” so that “it neither can nor ought in any manner to be extended to the salvation of souls.” Locke—who was writing in a country that tolerated a plurality of faiths—argued that a mixture of religions was healthy for society and that the “magistrate ought not to forbid the preaching or professing of any speculative opinion in any church.”

  The fact that the Letter concerning Toleration was written by a man who was on the run from the authorities over his connections to a plot to assassinate a leader because of that leader’s own faith may fairly be seen as a bit ironic. The ire against King James was due in part to his royal intolerance of Protestantism, but the plotters, many of them, were equally intolerant of Catholics. But such is the nature of the concept of tolerance. It evolves. Every generation puts its own limitations on it, and the clashes that define a given generation seem in many respects to be over the question of who and what that generation tolerates. Locke imposes limits when it comes to Catholics and atheists, arguing that the former would always be beholden to Roman authority and thus a danger to English society while the latter would be beholden to no authority. Put in a modern context, Locke’s fears about Catholics and atheists might be analogous to the fears of those who, in the debate about immigration, argue that Muslims are by definition enemies of secular Western civilization and thus should not be allowed to settle in Western countries.

  That said, Locke’s overall approach in the Letter is one of moderation. He has no interest in a radical, anti-Christian rendering of the new philosophy. He stays firmly within a Christian value system, and, following on writers like his friend Van Limborch, he maintains that tolerance is part of that Christian ethic. His moderate perspective helped to give his work wide influence, especially in England and among the founders of the American republic, while at the same time it is precisely what caused French radicals to reject him.

  The atmosphere could hardly have been a more dramatic one in which to craft what became a watershed statement of tolerance. Especially after James’s wife, Mary of Modena, gave birth to a son, ensuring a Catholic dynasty on the English throne, English rebels began to gather in Dutch cities and plot a takeover of the government. Locke may have helped raise funds for an invasion; James’s government ordered him to be “seized and banished.” Locke now had to keep on the move. He lodged with different Dutch friends and took to using pseudonyms. Somehow during this period he found time to write his grand work of epistemology, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, in which he argued that the mind begins as a blank slate on which experience is written. The work has held a place in the syllabi of philosophy courses ever since.

  Locke’s writings on politics and tolerance sprang from a common notion: the fundamental value of the individual. There has been a lively debate in recent years about whether Thomas Jefferson relied on exact phrasings from Locke in writing the American Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” While there may be echoes of phrases Locke used a century earlier (“life, liberty, and estate,” “pursuit of true and solid happiness”), more to the point is that Jefferson considered Locke’s overall grounding of society on the individual and individual rights to be his starting point—that coupled with the fact that, in contrast to the more radical Enlightenment figures, the American founding fathers, like Locke, considered the “Creator” to be the ultimate ground. Jefferson acknowledged his debt when he asserted that he considered Locke “one of the three greatest men that ever lived, without any exception” (the other two being Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon).

  Locke had begun working on many of his ideas while he was still in England, but it was in Amsterdam that they caught fire. As one scholar puts it, “in the vigorous and capable hands of Le Clerc and Limborch, in the city of Amsterdam where writing and printing were so natural to all good minds, Locke began to become Locke, and the obscure political exile turned into the philosopher par excellence of a new regime of thought.”

  Fifteen years before John Locke set foot in Amsterdam, a man named William Temple arrived in the Dutch Republic to serve as English ambassador. He took advantage of the posting to become a kind of official snoop in an effort to try to understand how the place worked. He roamed the polders, poked into canal houses, studied institutions and architecture, talked to soldiers, sailors, traders, preachers, farmers, and housewives. And he took careful notes. Such as this, recorded in 1668:

  In this city of Amsterdam is the famous Bank, which is the greatest Treasure either real or imaginary, that is known any where in the World. The place of it is a great Vault under the Stadthouse, made strong with all the circumstances of Doors and Locks.… And ’tis certain, that whoever is carried to see the Bank, shall never fail to find the appearance of a mighty real Treasure, in Barrs of Gold and Silver, Plate and infinite Bags of Metals.… The security of the Bank lies not only in the effects that are in it, but in the Credit of the whole Town or State of Amsterdam, whose Stock and Revenue is equal to that of some Kingdoms.… This Bank is properly a general Cash, where every man lodges his money, because he esteems it safer, and easier paid in and out, than if it were in his Coffers at home.

  Amsterdam, Holland, and the Dutch provinces as a whole were a source of fascination for the English during much of the seventeenth century. The English couldn’t get over the fact that the inhabitants of the tiny, water-logged strip of land across the Channel had done battle with the great Spanish empire, formed themselves into a nation, and risen to become the dominant financial power of Europe. Repeatedly the fascination boiled up into hatred. Competition between the two small Protestant countries on Europe’s northwestern shoulder erupted into three trade wars during the course of the century. The rivalry was so intense that English pamphleteers competed with one another to come up with ever more lurid headlines about the Dutch. (My favorite of these: The Dutch-mens Pedigree; Or, A Relation Shewing How They Were First Bred and Descended from a Horse-Turd Which Was Enclosed in a Butter-Box.) The vestiges of the rivalry are embedded in the English language. “Dutch treat,” “Dutch courage” (that is, alcohol: needing to get drunk to summon the nerve to take a difficult step), “Dutch uncle,” “going Dutch”: all are derogatory, and all date from the pamphlet wars of the time.

  As much as they detested the Dutch, the English copied them. William Temple’s observations gave his countrymen a glimpse of the mechanism that fueled the Dutch economic miracle—and in time the English set about copying the Amsterdam Exchange Bank. While the English monarchy was in exile in The Hague during Oliver Cromwell’s reign, Dutch art came into vogue among English courtiers, who brought it, as well as the artists themselves, back to England with them during the Restoration. Amsterdam’s lens grinders were Europe’s best: by midcentury their methods had been perfected by the English. English scientists went to Amsterdam to attend public anatomy lessons. Architects brought innovations in gables, windmills, and water management
back from their Dutch excursions.

  Of course, the exchanges went both ways. But because the Dutch Republic was the more advanced culture, it was the English who benefited most. Beginning roughly at the time the English Pilgrims went to Amsterdam and Leiden for religious refuge in 1608 and continuing through the century, English refugees and visitors imbibed Dutchness, and England slowly and steadily took on features of its neighbor. This, according to one theory, helps to explain one of history’s most stupendous examples of whitewashing: the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688.

  A plot against King James II—which English Protestants and antiabsolutists so longed for during John Locke’s time in the Dutch provinces—finally coalesced, but in a way that none of the English rebels gathered in Dutch cities, Locke included, could have foreseen. It brought to a climax a range of events going back decades. As we saw earlier, back in 1654, Johan de Witt, at the height of his diplomatic powers as the leader of the Dutch Republic, had negotiated a treaty with Oliver Cromwell to end the Anglo-Dutch trade war. The treaty contained a secret annex in which De Witt, and the States of Holland, promised that the toddler Willem of Orange would never be made stadholder. Both De Witt and Cromwell had antimonarchic reasons for wanting this—in Cromwell’s case, the fact that little Willem was the grandson of Charles I and thus could one day conceivably claim title to the English throne. In the disaster year of 1672, as his power was collapsing, De Witt capitulated to monarchist forces within the republic and gave the now twenty-two-year-old Willem an honorary title; shortly after that, the States of Holland, facing invasion on multiple fronts, strengthened that by naming Willem to the position of stadholder in the hope that he would perform a miracle and save the country from ruin.

  Willem took the title, and control of the country. Under him, the nation stepped back from republicanism toward autocracy. Willem was never loved, but he turned out to be a shrewd leader. He understood power. For one thing, he learned that he needed to treat the city of Amsterdam, which controlled the country’s commerce, almost as a state within the state. By the mid-1680s, more than a decade after the disaster year, the VOC’s business was booming again, which meant that Amsterdam had regained some of its former power. Willem tried to negotiate with the city regents for a buildup of the military, because he understood that under Louis XIV France had expanded ambitions. But the Amsterdam regents—who didn’t like diverting their hard-earned cash to the military and knew that expanding the military meant expanding Willem’s power—resisted. Meanwhile Willem set about forming alliances with other European powers to block the French king. One of these alliances took the form of marriage to Mary Stuart, daughter of James. Since Mary had been raised in the Anglican faith, Willem hoped that making her his wife would cement a Protestant alliance between England and the Dutch nation. But he had other designs as well. Once James became king, Willem knew the English monarchy was unstable. The fact that he was grandson of Charles I gave him some grounds for claiming title to the English throne. His marriage strengthened that case.

  That would probably have been an unrealistic dream but for the fact that France—which had suffered severe economic hardship with the flight of Huguenots—unleashed a series of drastic trade restrictions that crippled Dutch business in everything from herring to tobacco. As tensions escalated, France and England showed signs of joining forces against the Dutch. The thought of reliving war on two fronts, when the disaster year was still a vivid memory, was harrowing enough that the Amsterdam burgemeesters came around to Willem’s wishes. A rapid military buildup began. And now that Amsterdam’s merchant leaders and the politicians in the States General were scared, Willem pushed onto them one of the boldest military plans of the era: not to go directly at France but to pivot and take advantage of the confusion in England and James’s increasingly weak power base.

  Observers of the massing of troops and ships in Dutch ports in late summer of 1688 assumed it was for an attack on Louis. But in October the English ambassador realized what was about to unfold: “an absolute conquest” not of France but of England, and he wrote, “such a preparation was never heard of in these parts of the world.”

  On November 1, 1688, a veritable ocean of sails put in to the North Sea and made south for the Strait of Dover. Those who saw the spectacle considered it the sight of their lives: the fleet Willem had assembled was four times the size of the great Spanish Armada that had been infamously defeated exactly a century earlier. The ships raced across the Channel thanks to what some called a “Protestant wind” and landed on the Devon coast without incident. The vast army—nearly twenty thousand soldiers and another twenty thousand support crew—then began to move on London. People lined the roads to watch and greet; there was little opposition. In fact, the invaders were cheered in places. People cried, “God bless you!” Peasants offered apples.

  Willem sent troops into London ahead of his main army. They found no opposition and secured the city, so that Willem was able to ride in in state, dressed in white to signify the purity of his intentions. James, who had at first refused to believe an invasion was afoot, did not order troops to attack. He eventually fled to France.

  History has called Willem’s ascension to the English throne the result of an “invitation.” There is truth in this, but it’s misleading. It was Willem who had arranged for a group of English rebels—none of whom had any real power—to issue him an invitation to take over the country, as part of a spin campaign. For it was important to him that, facts notwithstanding, the takeover seem like a friendly helping hand. There was collusion on the part of some English rebels, but the events of November and December 1688 were, pure and simple, a Dutch invasion of England, involving one of the largest invasion forces Europe had ever witnessed. Its result was the naming of the Dutch stadholder, Willem, as King William III of England.

  The bizarre turn of events—England’s longtime foe marching straight into the capital unopposed, and even being cheered by ordinary people—succeeded partly as a result of the state of crisis that had built up in English society under James, whom people had feared was in the process of instituting a Catholic autocracy. It was also a result of the agitation of the antimonarchic rebel leaders whom John Locke had supported. But there was a broader reason, which had to do with the whole long century of English borrowing of Dutch culture, everything from grandfather clocks to religious tolerance to the development of a market for cheap genre paintings to decorate ordinary homes. As the British historian Lisa Jardine argues, “By 1688 England and Holland were already so closely intertwined, culturally, intellectually, dynastically and politically that the invasion was more like a merger.”

  The final step in this merger, prior to the invasion itself, was the careful groundwork Willem’s people did in the months leading up to it. Willem laid in an elaborate propaganda campaign. The centerpiece was a document that Willem’s agents spread in an unprecedented clandestine effort that consisted of tens of thousands of copies being printed in Amsterdam, London, Hamburg, York, and several other cities, shipped throughout England, and distributed en masse and on cue. The title set up clearly what was about to occur: The Declaration of His Highness William Henry, By the Grace of God Prince of Orange, etc. Of the Reasons Inducing him to appear in Armes in the kingdome of England. The surprise that the English leaders felt once the Dutchman actually did appear “in Armes in the kingdome of England,” even after having thus been warned of it, speaks to the boldness of the plan and to the blinkered state of the English rulers.

  In the Declaration, Willem seems to have followed self-consciously the model of his great-grandfather William the Silent, who blanketed the Dutch countryside with texts in which he communicated to his countrymen his own perspective on the ravages being done by the Duke of Alba on historic Dutch freedoms and liberties. Now, the great-grandson, pulling together Dutch and English notions of tolerance and liberty, wrote to the people of England: “It is both certain and evident to all Men, that the publick Peace and Happiness of any St
ate or Kingdom cannot be preserved, where the Laws, Liberties and Customs, established by the lawful Authority in it, are openly transgressed and annulled.” The declaration went on to enumerate James’s abuses of power, highlighting especially the threat of a Catholic takeover in violation of the principle of religious toleration, and then got down to the real business: “since our dearest and most entirely beloved Consort the Princess, and likewise ourselves, have so great an Interest in this Matter, and such a Right, as all the World knows, to the Succession to the Crown …” It only makes all the sense in the world, Willem was telling the people of England, that he, the leader of the rival Dutch nation, should sweep in with an army of tens of thousands and take over their monarchy and state.

  Whether it made sense or not, he did it. And ordinary English people swallowed it. The Declaration was read out in town squares all over England. William and Mary were crowned. John Locke (who played no part in the invasion but returned to England on the same ship that carried Princess Mary across the Channel to take up her new royal position) expediently (one might say cravenly) chose, when he published his Two Treatises of Government less than two years later, to preface it with the bold remark that his grand statement of the social contract theory of government—a work that many consider to be part of the political framework of the modern world—was little more than a justification for Willem’s power grab: