The Sea Beggars

by Holland, Cecelia;

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  The Sea Beggars

  A Novel

  Cecelia Holland

  For Spike van Cleve,

  and his blue filly

  You can blow out a candle,

  But you can’t blow out a fire,

  Once the flames begin to catch,

  The wind will blow it higher.

  —Peter Gabriel, “Biko”

  Historical Note

  The revolt of the Dutch against the Spanish monarchy in the late sixteenth century was the first of a long series of national revolutions that changed the nature of government and shaped the societies we now live in. Its impact on the English is clearly visible in Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s writings and was obviously an influence on the English revolts of 1648 and 1688, direct forerunners of the American and French revolutions of the next century.

  In a time dominated by the personalities of mighty individuals, the revolt of the Dutch stands out as the action of an entire people. Yet it produced at least one great man, William of Nassau, William the Silent—the Prince of Orange, one of those rare people in history about whom the more I learn the more I admire him. For these reasons, and the deeper one of its being a struggle between freedom and autocracy, tolerance and ideology, the Dutch revolt is the first real modern event.

  The Netherlands—the Low Countries, what we now call Belgium, Luxembourg, and Holland—began in the Middle Ages as a cluster of dozens of autonomous provinces along the banks, swamps, and estuaries of the three great rivers, the Rhine, the Maas, and the Shelde, that empty their waters into the North Sea. In the fourteenth century the dukes of Burgundy, striving to create a separate state between France and Germany, acquired the Provinces one by one, by marriage and conquest. Still the region remained a patchwork of local governments. Here and there great cities sprang up, centers of commerce and finance. Elsewhere the Dutch reclaimed swamp and wasteland and the shallows of their coastline for farms.

  In 1477, with the death of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, the ruling line failed of male issue, and the great duchy of Burgundy in the south reverted to the Crown of France. The daughter of Charles kept title to her father’s other lands, consisting mainly of the Low Countries.

  The heiress of Burgundy married the son of the Hapsburg Emperor of Germany. Their son in turn married the daughter of the great Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, thus uniting under the Spanish Crown the greatest assemblage of real property the world had yet seen. Included in this domain were the Low Countries, the hereditary German lands of the Hapsburgs, Italy and Sicily, Spain, and the Spanish Indies, which people did not then know consisted of two entire continents.

  Thus, in 1555, when Charles V was still Emperor, the Dutch people found themselves under the rule of a foreign prince whose interests spanned the world and whose traditional policy committed him to support of the Catholic Church, newly resurgent against the Protestant Reformation.

  The Dutch have ever been a tolerant people, their prevailing religious attitude better expressed by Erasmus of Rotterdam than Luther, Calvin, or Ignatius Loyola. In this greenhouse atmosphere, a diversity of sects flowered throughout the sixteenth century, some swiftly withering, some taking lasting root. The Emperor Charles, born and reared in Ghent, Flanders, was wise enough not to interfere openly with this climate, but in 1555 Charles relinquished the Netherlands, yielding power to his son, Philip II of Spain.

  Philip spoke only Spanish. A few months after his father’s death, in 1558, he sailed from the Low Countries to Spain, where he remained for the rest of his more than forty years of rule. He was an unimaginative, dedicated, scrupulous man, overmeticulous and rigid, and a fanatic Catholic. His policy of consolidating power in the administration of his property brought him face to face with the great Dutch nobility, who feared for the loss of their hereditary rights and privileges. From the moment of his accession, the tension between him and the Low Countries grew steadily into violence and revolt.

  This book’s story is fiction. The van Cleef family is a product of my imagination; and while the events in which the van Cleefs act are all drawn from actual incidents, I have tampered with some details in the interests of the narrative. The business in Antwerp, where the Spanish garrison fled from three sails on the river thinking they were the Beggars, happened several years later than it does here. Not Alva’s son, but a lesser commander, led the royal army against The Brill. And Willem Lumey de la Marck did not die as I have it; he was bounced from his position as admiral and went back to his native Germany, where the great priest-killer returned to the Catholic Church.

  The revolt of the Dutch has inspired two great classics of history: John Lathrop Motley’s The Rise of the Dutch Republic, and Pieter Geyl’s The Revolt of the Netherlands. One hundred years separates these works; the differences in attitude and style between them splendidly illuminate the intellectual adventure of those hundred years.

  The song on p. 243 is from Tudor Songs and Ballads from M.S. Cotton Vespasian A-25, edited by Peter J. Seng, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1978.

  Finally, I want to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, with whose generous support the novel was finished.

  Prologue

  “Beggars!” exclaimed Count Horn. “They called us beggars for requiring what is ours by right of law and custom!”

  The Prince of Orange said nothing.

  “The King will set all in order,” Count Egmont said, on the Prince’s left. “It’s these Spanish fools advising the King’s sister who think they can remake the Low Countries to their new fashions. They had to accept the petition, after all—that’s what matters. Once it reaches the King, he will restore our place here, and chastise these schemers and plotters.”

  Still the Prince of Orange said nothing. The fresh breezes of early spring in his face, he rode with his friends beneath the elms and linden trees of Brussels, his mind heavy with doubts. He had heard about the petition, although he had kept himself out of it—out of the writing of it, out of the delivery—knowing the Governess mistrusted him already. Margaret would have damned the whole enterprise, had he been attached to it—that gaudy, innocent parade of noblemen and youth who had ridden to the Palais-Royal with their request that the King honor their ancient habits and refrain from installing the Inquisition in the Low Countries.

  “If only the Emperor were still alive!” Egmont said, with a gusty sigh.

  As well pray that all good men might live forever. The Emperor Charles V had been dead for ten years. Egmont and Horn and probably thousands of others in the Low Countries looked back on his reign as a golden age of harmony and prosperity. The Prince of Orange knew they were yielding to delusions when they did.

  Did the past always seem better to men than the present? That was the core of the petition, the request that the King of Spain restore the past of the Netherlands—a past when her rulers had lived here, when the counts of Holland and Flanders, the dukes of Brabant and Burgundy had centered their policy on the good of these provinces, when they had not tried to fit them into some corner of a huge mosaic of states reaching very nearly around the world and having no commonality save the man who governed them all, the King of Spain. So they had ridden to the Palais, the Dutch nobles, with their bit of paper, asking: Please make things as they were before.

  The Governess, the King’s sister, had resorted to tears, her customary refuge in times of stress. Which led one of her advisers to say, “Madame, are you afraid of these beggars?”

  “When the King has our petition,” Egmont said, “we shall see who the beggars are.”

  There was dang
er in such optimism. The Governess had promised to hold off the persecution of heretics in the Low Countries until the King gave her fresh instructions. To take for granted that the King would do as the nobles asked …

  Horn’s gloved hand fell roughly on Orange’s sleeve. “Come, William. Why so quiet? You look as if you’re riding in a funeral train. Seem happier—there are people watching.”

  The Prince of Orange pulled on his smiling public face. “Forgive me, friend.” Turning his hand over, he caught the older man’s brocaded wrist in a brief intimate grasp. “You know I have much on my mind of late.”

  “Well, get her off your mind,” Egmont said, and laughed.

  They were riding abreast down the broad, tree-shaded street; on either side stood the homes of wealthy men, the glass windows shining like gold in the late light of the sun. From an upper story a woman leaned and waved her handkerchief.

  “Vive le Prince! Messieurs les comtes!”

  Egmont and Horn swept off their caps and waved them, and Orange lifted up his hand, smiling. At the shout, half a dozen other doors popped open, and a small crowd poured forth into the street to watch the lords ride by.

  “Vive le Prince!”

  Orange saluted them; his spirits rose at this boisterous greeting. He turned his mind from his gray inward thoughts to the outer world. It was spring, and Brussels, with its palaces and gardens, its courtly people, was dressed in new bloom; fresh young flowers everywhere danced in the sunlight; the leaves of the trees were uncurling like pale green flags. He waved and smiled to the people who called his name, and resolved to be less gloomy.

  After all, the Governess had agreed to cease attacking the Protestants. The King was notoriously slow in his deliberations: it would be months before his answer reached Brussels, perhaps years. And now the street before them was filled with noisy people, in celebration costume, cheering.

  “Vive les gueux! Long live the beggars!”

  To the left of the Prince of Orange, Count Horn murmured, “That word again.”

  “What are they doing?” Orange asked. He twisted in his saddle to look around him at the jubilant crowds; clearly they were celebrating the Governess’s decision to make no more decisions. Many of them had drunk too much, explaining the high degree of their excitement. Their cheers resounded with the French word for beggar. That put him off—to seize on an insult for a rallying cry divided them emphatically from the government. With his friends and their troops of retainers he rode on through the thick and noisy crowd toward the palace where they had been invited to dine.

  The gate was clogged with people, and circles of dancers wheeled and dipped in the courtyard between the two wings of the house. Music boomed forth from the balconies, where musicians sat struggling to keep tune in the wash of echoes from the high walls around them. When Horn and Egmont and Orange rode in, the cheering doubled, and Orange had difficulty dismounting his horse and walking into the great hall of the house.

  There a great banquet was laid out on long tables, and seated all around them the men who had delivered the petition drank and sang and cheered themselves and their friends.

  “Vive les gueux!”

  At the sight of the three newcomers the cry went up like a peal of thunder. “Vive les gueux!” In a single leap, the revelers rose to their feet, hoisting their cups in greeting.

  They were wooden cups—beggars’ cups. Orange frowned, his sense of proper value overturned by such impudence. Around their necks these men wore beggars’ chains. They had taken the insult as an accolade—as a common bond.

  “Long live the beggars!”

  Orange stopped, unready to join this—unwilling to have this salutation pressed on him. It was too late. Forth they rushed, his hosts and friends, his fellows in opposition to the Crown, and carried to him chains and a wooden cup. “Vive les gueux!” The roar shook the rafters. Like a bobbing bit of cork on an ocean wave, he felt himself lifted up and carried away with the rest, his will made nothing. Laughing, they surrounded him, these beggars, and hung the chains around his neck, and pushed the wooden cup into his hand. He knew it was the cup of fate. “Long live the beggars!” they cried, and swelled by their ardor his courage like a rushing wave ran on beyond his reason.

  “Vive les gueux!”

  He raised the cup and drank it to the lees.

  1

  In the heat of the summer, the great Calvinist preachers went into the countryside, into fallow fields and meadows, and there delivered their sermons under the open sky. From all over the Provinces, pious folk came to listen, whole families, with their children by the hand and their dinners in baskets.

  In a barley field near the great city of Antwerp, in Brabant, the preacher Albert van Luys stood up to declare the Word of God. Hundreds of people came to listen; the women sat on the grass in a circle around him, with their little children on their laps, and the men stood behind them in another circle.

  Albert van Luys had the true fire of his calling, but the day was hot and long and some of the men had brought beer with them, and gin, and wine in flasks. Some too had muskets, which they fired off now and again, shouting, “Vive les gueux!”

  Mies van Cleef had no musket, and drank no more beer than necessary to cool his throat and maintain his strength through the heat of the day. Standing in the ring of men facing the preacher, he dwelt with his whole mind on the sermon: The day of the Lord cometh like a thief in the night. Mies had a wonderful power of concentration. Intent on Albert’s words, he noticed neither the occasional bursts of musket fire nor the shouts of the drunkards; and he realized only gradually that his son, Jan, had slipped away into the crowd.

  That annoyed him. He was a merchant, with a large trade and many employees, whom he expected to obey him without flaw. That his son could disobey him pricked his temper like a needle in his flesh. For a while longer, when he was sure Jan was gone, he struggled to keep his interest on the sermon, but the needle pierced ever deeper into his pride and his rectitude, and finally he stepped backward through the ring of men to the empty meadow.

  There he paused and collected himself, a lean man in middle age, balding, his clothes as somber as a monk’s and expensive as a prince’s. He cast a look around him. The grass was trampled to a pulp; a fine gray dust lay over everything, even the shoulders and backs of the men watching the preacher, whose ranks he had just left. He shook a layer of dust off his sleeves.

  At that moment a crackle of gunfire went up on the far side of the crowd. That told him where to find his son. He strode off around the outside of the circle in the direction of the shots.

  The field lay along the Antwerp–Mechlin Canal; boats crowded both banks. On the far side, a gigantic mill creaked and wheeled its arms in the gusty breeze. White clouds streamed across the sky. Mies lengthened his stride, pressed on by these hints of a storm coming up over the horizon: his wife and daughter would not enjoy getting rained on.

  “Long live the beggars!”

  Another musket went off into the air; a man in a flapping black hat waved his weapon over his head. Near him was Mies’ son, Jan, squatting on his heels beside another man with a gun, asking questions. Mies’ jaw tightened. When he took Jan into a factory with him, or out to the shops, Jan never asked questions. Mies stalked across the beaten grass to his son and taking a handful of his collar pulled him to his feet.

  “This is how you value the chance to hear God’s Truth expounded!”

  Jan shook him violently off, blushing to the ears; his sun-bleached hair bristled with bad temper. Although he was only seventeen, he was much taller than Mies, which perversely angered his father as much as Jan’s sinful interest in guns and fighting. He struck Jan on the face with his open hand.

  “Go back to the sermon!”

  “Don’t hit me,” Jan said, between his teeth. Past him, Mies saw the men with their muskets, grinning at them.

  “Go back to the sermon,” Mies said, and wheeling marched away again, toward his place in the circle of men.
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  Jan followed him. Some last shred of filial piety remained in him. It was not enough for Mies; bitterly he wondered why God had sent him this lout for a son, and wasted a keen mind and a heart for truth on his daughter, who would never be anything but someone’s wife.

  The sermon was ending. Albert had them in prayers, many in the crowd, even men, weeping for their sins. Mies stopped to look among the gathering for his wife.

  Jan stood sullenly beside him. With the briefest of looks into his son’s face, the father said, “Be sure your mother does not learn of your truancy.”

  “Yes, sir,” the boy mumbled. His fine white skin still showed the stain of his furious blush.

  Now rain was falling. Quickly Mies collected together his family; the sermon had overcome his wife, in whose large-boned frame he saw the pattern by which his son was cut, and she leaned heavily on his daughter’s shoulder. Hanneke too had their mother’s tawny hair and generous size of bone. She smiled at her father as he lifted her mother’s weight from her arm.

  “Beautiful,” her mother said, and sobbed. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “When Albert speaks of Heaven, he makes me long so for it …” In a flood of weeping she lost the power of speech.

  “What thought you of the sermon, Hanneke?” Mies asked. Supporting his wife on his arm, he led his family toward the canal where their boat waited.

  “His style is very fine,” the girl said, “but I think he is not so strong in his reasoning as he might be. There were moments I thought he tried with a great wind of words to blow me over the gaps in his logic.”

  Mies laughed, delighted with her composed and critical expression. He reached past his wife, to squeeze his daughter’s hand. “Trust you to yield not to his fulsome blasts, my little dear one.”

  Jan burst forward, moving on ahead of them, awkward, as if the size and weight of his limbs outstretched his mastery of them. “I’ll help with the horses.”