Revolt of Netherlands, V4

by Friedrich Schiller

  The very next day the Prince of Orange wrote his letter of resignation to the regent, in which he assured her of his perpetual esteem, and once again entreated her to put the best interpretation on his present step. He then set off with his three brothers and his whole family for his own town of Breda, where he remained only as long as was requisite to arrange some private affairs. His eldest son, Prince Philip William, was left behind at the University of Louvain, where he thought him sufficiently secure under the protection of the privileges of Brabant and the immunities of the academy; an imprudence which, if it was really not designed, can hardly be reconciled with the just estimate which, in so many other cases, he had taken of the character of his adversary. In Breda the heads of the Calvinists once more consulted him whether there was still hope for them, or whether all was irretrievably lost. "He had before advised them," replied the prince, "and must now do so again, to accede to the Confession of Augsburg; then they might rely upon aid from Germany. If they would still not consent to this, they must raise six hundred thousand florins, or more, if they could." "The first," they answered, "was at variance with their conviction and their conscience; but means might perhaps be found to raise the money if he would only let them know for what purpose he would use it." "No!" cried he, with the utmost displeasure, "if I must tell you that, it is all over with the use of it." With these words he immediately broke off the conference and dismissed the deputies.

  The Prince of Orange was reproached with having squandered his fortune, and with favoring the innovations on account of his debts; but he asserted that he still enjoyed sixty thousand florins yearly rental. Before his departure he borrowed twenty thousand florins from the states of Holland on the mortgage of some manors. Men could hardly persuade themselves that he would have succumbed to necessity so entirely, and without an effort at resistance given up all his hopes and schemes. But what he secretly meditated no one knew, no one had read in his heart. Being asked how he intended to conduct himself towards the King of Spain, "Quietly," was his answer, "unless he touches my honor or my estates." He left the Netherlands soon afterwards, and betook himself in retirement to the town of Dillenburg, in Nassau, at which place he was born. He was accompanied to Germany by many hundreds, either as his servants or as volunteers, and was soon followed by Counts Hogstraten, Kuilemberg, and Bergen, who preferred to share a voluntary exile with him rather than recklessly involve themselves in an uncertain destiny. In his departure the nation saw the flight of its guardian angel; many had adored, all had honored him. With him the last stay of the Protestants gave way; they, however, had greater hopes from this man in exile than from all the others together who remained behind. Even the Roman Catholics could not witness his departure without regret. Them also had he shielded from tyranny; he had not unfrequently protected them against the oppression of their own church, and he had rescued many of them from the sanguinary jealousy of their religious opponents. A few fanatics among the Calvinists, who were offended with his proposal of an alliance with their brethren, who avowed the Confession of Augsburg, solemnized with secret thanksgivings the day on which the enemy left them. (1567).

  DECAY AND DISPERSION OF THE GEUSEN LEAGUE.

  Immediately after taking leave of his friend, the Prince of Gaure hastened back to Brussels, to receive from the regent the reward of his firmness, and there, in the excitement of the court and in the sunshine of his good fortune, to dispel the light cloud which the earnest warnings of the Prince of Orange had cast over his natural gayety. The flight of the latter now left him in possession of the stage. He had now no longer any rival in the republic to dim his glory. With redoubled zeal he wooed the transient favor of the court, above which he ought to have felt himself far exalted. All Brussels must participate in his joy. He gave splendid banquets and public entertainments, at which, the better to eradicate all suspicion from his mind, the regent herself frequently attended. Not content with having taken the required oath, he outstripped the most devout in devotion; outran the most zealous in zeal to extirpate the Protestant faith, and to reduce by force of arms the refractory towns of Flanders. He declared to his old friend, Count Hogstraten, as also to the rest of the Gueux, that he would withdraw from them his friendship forever if they hesitated any longer to return into the bosom of the church, and reconcile themselves with their king. All the confidential letters which had been exchanged between him and them were returned, and by this last step the breach between them was made public and irreparable. Egmont's secession, and the flight of the Prince of Orange, destroyed the last hope of the Protestants and dissolved the whole league of the Gueux. Its members vied with each other in readiness-nay, they could not soon enough abjure the covenant and take the new oath proposed to them by the government. In vain did the Protestant merchants exclaim at this breach of faith on the part of the nobles; their weak voice was no longer listened to, and all the sums were lost with which they had supplied the league.

  The most important places were quickly reduced and garrisoned; the rebels had fled, or perished by the hand of the executioner; in the provinces no protector was left. All yielded to the fortune of the regent, and her victorious army was advancing against Antwerp. After a long and obstinate contest this town had been cleared of the worst rebels; Hermann and his adherents took to flight; the internal storms had spent their rage. The minds of the people became gradually composed, and no longer excited at will by every furious fanatic, began to listen to better counsels. The wealthier citizens earnestly longed for peace to revive commerce and trade, which had suffered severely from the long reign of anarchy. The dread of Alva's approach worked wonders; in order to prevent the miseries which a Spanish army would inflict upon the country, the people hastened to throw themselves on the gentler mercies of the regent. Of their own accord they despatched plenipotentiaries to Brussels to negotiate for a treaty and to hear her terms. Agreeably as the regent was surprised by this voluntary step, she did not allow herself to be hurried away by her joy. She declared that she neither could nor would listen to any overtures or representations until the town had received a garrison. Even this was no longer opposed, and Count Mansfeld marched in the day after with sixteen squadrons in battle array. A solemn treaty was now made between the town and duchess, by which the former bound itself to prohibit the Calvinistic form of worship, to banish all preachers of that persuasion, to restore the Roman Catholic religion to its former dignity, to decorate the despoiled churches with their former ornaments, to administer the old edicts as before, to take the new oath which the other towns had sworn to, and, lastly, to deliver into the hands of justice all who been guilty of treason, in bearing arms, or taking part in the desecration of the churches. On the other hand, the regent pledged herself to forget all that had passed, and even to intercede for the offenders with the king. All those who, being dubious of obtaining pardon, preferred banishment, were to be allowed a month to convert their property into money, and place themselves in safety. From this grace none were to be excluded but such as had been guilty of a capital offence, and who were excepted by the previous article. Immediately upon the conclusion of this treaty all Calvinist and Lutheran preachers in Antwerp, and the adjoining territory, were warned by the herald to quit the country within twenty-four hours. All the streets and gates were now thronged with fugitives, who for the honor of their God abandoned what was dearest to them, and sought a more peaceful home for their persecuted faith. Here husbands were taking an eternal farewell of their wives, fathers of their children; there whole families were preparing to depart. All Antwerp resembled a house of mourning; wherever the eye turned some affecting spectacle of painful separation presented itself. A seal was set on the doors of the Protestant churches; the whole worship seemed to be extinct. The 10th of April (1567) was the day appointed for the departure of the preachers. In the town hall, where they appeared for the last time to take leave of the magistrate, they could not command their grief; but broke forth into bitter reproaches. They had been sacrificed, they
exclaimed, they had been shamefully betrayed; but a time would come when Antwerp would pay dearly enough for this baseness. Still more bitter were the complaints of the Lutheran clergy, whom the magistrate himself had invited into the country to preach against the Calvinists. Under the delusive representation that the king was not unfavorable to their religion they had been seduced into a combination against the Calvinists, but as soon as the latter had been by their co-operation brought under subjection, and their own services were no longer required, they were left to bewail their folly, which had involved themselves and their enemies in common ruin.

  A few days afterwards the regent entered Antwerp in triumph, accompanied by a thousand Walloon horse, the Knights of the Golden Fleece, all the governors and counsellors, a number of municipal officers, and her whole court. Her first visit was to the cathedral, which still bore lamentable traces of the violence of the Iconoclasts, and drew from her many and bitter tears. Immediately afterwards four of the rebels, who had been overtaken in their flight, were brought in and executed in the public market-place. All the children who had been baptized after the Protestant rites were rebaptized by Roman Catholic priests; all the schools of heretics were closed, and their churches levelled to the ground. Nearly all the towns in the Netherlands followed the example of Antwerp and banished the Protestant preachers. By the end of April the Roman Catholic churches were repaired and embellished more splendidly than ever, while all the Protestant places of worship were pulled down, and every vestige of the proscribed belief obliterated in the seventeen provinces. The populace, whose sympathies are generally with the successful party, was now as active in accelerating the ruin of the unfortunate as a short time before it had been furiously zealous in its cause; in Ghent a large and beautiful church which the Calvinists had erected was attacked, and in less than an hour had wholly disappeared. From the beams of the roofless churches gibbets were erected for those who had profaned the sanctuaries of the Roman Catholics. The places of execution were filled with corpses, the prisons with condemned victims, the high roads with fugitives. Innumerable were the victims of this year of murder; in the smallest towns fifty at least, in several of the larger as many as three hundred, were put to death, while no account was kept of the numbers in the open country who fell into the hands of the provost-marshal and were immediately strung up as miscreants, without trial and without mercy.

  The regent was still in Antwerp when ambassadors presented themselves from the Electors of Brandenburg, Saxony, Hesse, Wurtemberg, and Baden to intercede for their fugitive brethren in the faith. The expelled preachers of the Augsburg Confession had claimed the rights assured to them by the religious peace of the Germans, in which Brabant, as part of the empire, participated, and had thrown themselves on the protection of those princes. The arrival of the foreign ministers alarmed the regent, and she vainly endeavored to prevent their entrance into Antwerp; under the guise, however, of showing them marks of honor, she continued to keep them closely watched lest they should encourage the malcontents in any attempts against the peace of the town. From the high tone which they most unreasonably adopted towards the regent it might almost be inferred that they were little in earnest in their demand. "It was but reasonable," they said, "that the Confession of Augsburg, as the only one which met the spirit of the gospel, should be the ruling faith in the Netherlands; but to persecute it by such cruel edicts as were in force was positively unnatural and could not be allowed. They therefore required of the regent, in the name of religion, not to treat the people entrusted to her rule with such severity." She replied through the Count of Staremberg, her minister for German affairs, that such an exordium deserved no answer at all. From the sympathy which the German princes had shown for the Belgian fugitives it was clear that they gave less credit to the letters of the king, in explanation of his measures, than to the reports of a few worthless wretches who, in the desecrated churches, had left behind them a worthier memorial of their acts and characters. It would far more become them to leave to the King of Spain the care of his own subjects, and abandon the attempt to foster a spirit of rebellion in foreign countries, from which they would reap neither honor nor profit. The ambassadors left Antwerp in a few days without having effected anything. The Saxon minister, indeed, in a private interview with the regent even assured her that his master had most reluctantly taken this step.

  The German ambassadors had not quitted Antwerp when intelligence from Holland completed the triumph of the regent. From fear of Count Megen Count Brederode had deserted his town of Viane, and with the aid of the Protestants inhabitants had succeeded in throwing himself into Amsterdam, where his arrival caused great alarm to the city magistrate, who had previously found difficulty in preventing a revolt, while it revived the courage of the Protestants. Here Brederode's adherents increased daily, and many noblemen flocked to him from Utrecht, Friesland, and Groningen, whence the victorious arms of Megen and Aremberg had driven them. Under various disguises they found means to steal into the city, where they gathered round Brederode, and served him as a strong body-guard. The regent, apprehensive of a new outbreak, sent one of her private secretaries, Jacob de la Torre, to the council of Amsterdam, and ordered them to get rid of Count Brederode on any terms and at any risk. Neither the magistrate nor de la Torre himself, who visited Brederode in person to acquaint him with the will of the duchess, could prevail upon him to depart. The secretary was even surprised in his own chamber by a party of Brederode's followers, and deprived of all his papers, and would, perhaps, have lost his life also if he had not contrived to make his escape. Brederode remained in Amsterdam a full month after this occurrence, a powerless idol of the Protestants, and an oppressive burden to the Roman Catholics; while his fine army, which he had left in Viane, reinforced by many fugitives from the southern provinces, gave Count Megen enough to do without attempting to harass the Protestants in their flight. At last Brederode resolved to follow the example of Orange, and, yielding to necessity, abandon a desperate cause. He informed the town council that he was willing to leave Amsterdam if they would enable him to do so by furnishing him with the pecuniary means. Glad to get quit of him, they hastened to borrow the money on the security of the town council. Brederode quitted Amsterdam the same night, and was conveyed in a gunboat as far as Vlie, from whence he fortunately escaped to Embden. Fate treated him more mildly than the majority of those he had implicated in his foolhardy enterprise; he died the year after, 1568, at one of his castles in Germany, from the effects of drinking, by which he sought ultimately to drown his grief and disappoint ments. His widow, Countess of Moers in her own right, was remarried to the Prince Palatine, Frederick III. The Protestant cause lost but little by his demise; the work which he had commenced, as it had not been kept alive by him, so it did not die with him.

  The little army, which in his disgraceful flight he had deserted, was bold and valiant, and had a few resolute leaders. It disbanded, indeed, as soon as he, to whom it looked for pay, had fled; but hunger and courage kept its parts together some time longer. One body, under command of Dietrich of Battenburgh, marched to Amsterdam in the hope of carrying that town; but Count Megen hastened with thirteen companies of excellent troops to its relief, and compelled the rebels to give up the attempt. Contenting themselves with plundering the neighboring cloisters, among which the abbey of Egmont in particular was hardly dealt with, they turned off towards Waaterland, where they hoped the numerous swamps would protect them from pursuit. But thither Count Megen followed them, and compelled them in all haste to seek safety in the Zuyderzee. The brothers Van Battenburg, and two Friesan nobles, Beima and Galama, with a hundred and twenty men and the booty they had taken from the monasteries, embarked near the town of Hoorne, intending to cross to Friesland, but through the treachery of the steersman, who ran the vessel on a sand-bank near Harlingen, they fell into the hands of one of Aremberg's captains, who took them all prisoners. The Count of Aremberg immediately pronounced sentence upon all the captives of plebeian rank, b
ut sent his noble prisoners to the regent, who caused seven of them to be beheaded. Seven others of the most noble, including the brothers Van Battenburg and some Frieslanders, all in the bloom of youth, were reserved for the Duke of Alva, to enable him to signalize the commencement of his administration by a deed which was in every way worthy of him. The troops in four other vessels which set sail from Medenhlick, and were pursued by Count Megen in small boats, were more successful. A contrary wind had forced them out of their course and driven them ashore on the coast of Gueldres, where they all got safe to land; crossing the Rhine, near Heusen, they fortunately escaped into Cleves, where they tore their flags in pieces and dispersed. In North Holland Count Megen overtook some squadrons who had lingered too long in plundering the cloisters, and completely overpowered them. He afterwards formed a junction with Noircarmes and garrisoned Amsterdam. The Duke Erich of Brunswick also surprised three companies, the last remains of the army of the Gueux, near Viane, where they were endeavoring to take a battery, routed them and captured their leader, Rennesse, who was shortly afterwards beheaded at the castle of Freudenburg, in Utrecht. Subsequently, when Duke Erich entered Viane, he found nothing but deserted streets, the inhabitants having left it with the garrison on the first alarm. He immediately razed the fortifications, and reduced this arsenal of the Gueux to an open town without defences. All the originators of the league were now dispersed; Brederode and Louis of Nassau had fled to Germany, and Counts Hogstraten, Bergen, and Kuilemberg had followed their example. Mansfeld had seceded, the brothers Van Battenburg awaited in prison an ignomonious fate, while Thoulouse alone had found an honorable death on the field of battle. Those of the confederates who had escaped the sword of the enemy and the axe of the executioner had saved nothing but their lives, and thus the title which they had assumed for show became at last a terrible reality.