to induce man to make it his dwelling, save indeed that nature had strongly fortified it by enclosing it on two of its sides with the broad arms of the disparted river, and on the third and remaining one with the waves of the North Sea. Its earliest inhabitants, it is believed, were Celts. About a century before our era it was left uninhabited; its first settlers being carried away, partly in the rush southward of the first horde of warriors that set out to assail the Roman Empire, and partly by a tremendous inundation of the ocean, which submerged many of the huts which dotted its forlorn surface, and drowned many of its miserable inhabitants. Finding it empty, a German tribe from the Hercynian forest took possession of it, and called it Betauw, that is, the "Good Meadow," a name that has descended to our day in the appellative Batavia.

North and south of the "Good Meadow" the land is similar in character and origin. It owes its place on the surface of the earth to the joint action of two forces-the powerful current of the Rhine on the one side, continually bringing down vast quantities of materials from the mountains and higher plains, and the tides of the restless ocean on the other, casting up sand and mud from its bed. Thus, in the course of ages, slowly rose the land which was destined in the sixteenth century to be the seat of so many proud cities, and the theatre of so many sublime actions.

An expanse of shallows and lagoons, neither land nor water, but a thin consistency, quaking beneath the foot, and liable every spring and winter to the terrible calamities of being drowned by the waves, when the high tides or the fierce tempests heaped up the waters of the North Sea, and to be overflown by the Rhine, when its floods were swollen by the long-continued rains, what, one asks, tempted the first inhabitants to occupy a country whose conditions were so wretched, and which was liable moreover to be overwhelmed by catastrophes so tremendous ? Perhaps they saw in this oozy and herbless expanse the elements of future fertility. Perhaps they deemed it a safe retreat, from which they might issue forth to spoil and ravage, and to which they might retire and defy pursuit. But from whatever cause, both the centre island and the whole adjoining coast soon found inhabitants. The Germans occupied the centre; the Belge took possession of the strip of coast stretching to the south, now known as Belgium. The similar strip running off to the north, Holland namely, was possessed by the Frisians, who formed a population in which the German and Celtic elements were blended without uniting.

The youth of these three tribes was a severe one. Their first struggle was with the soil; for while other nations choose their country, the Netherlanders had to create theirs. They began by converting the swamps and quicksands of which they had taken possession into grazing-lands and corn-fields. Nor could they rest even after this task had been accomplished: they had to be continually on the watch against the two great enemies that were ever ready to spring upon them, and rob them of the country which their industry had enriched and their skill embellished, by rearing and maintaining great dykes to defend themselves on the one side from the sea, and on the other from the river.

Their second great struggle was with the Roman power. The mistress of the world, in her onward march over the West, was embracing within her limits the forests of Germany, and the warlike tribes that dwelt in them. It is the pen of Julius Cæsar, recording his victorious advance, that first touches the darkness that shrouded this land. When the curtain rises, the tribe of the Nervii is seen drawn up on the banks of the Sambre, awaiting the approach of the master of the world. We see them closing in terrific battle with his legions, and maintaining the fight till a ghastly bank of corpses proclaimed that they had been exterminated rather than subdued.1 The tribes of Batavia now passed under the yoke of Rome, to which they submitted with great impatience. When the empire began to totter they rose in revolt, being joined by their neighbours, the Frisians and the Belgæ, in the hope of achieving their liberty; but the Roman power, though in decay, was still too strong to be shaken by the assault of these tribes, however brave; and it was not till the whole German race, moved by an all-pervading impulse, rose and began their march upon Rome, that they were able, in common with all the peoples of the North, to throw off the yoke of the oppressor.

After four centuries of chequered fortunes, during which the Batavian element was inextricably blended with the Frisian, the Belgic, and the Frank, the Netherlanders, for so we may now call the mixed population, in which however the German element predominated, came under the empire of Charlemagne. They continued under his sway and that of his successors for some time. The empire whose greatness had severely taxed the energies of the father was too heavy for the

1 Cæsar, Comment. de Bello Gallico, lib. ii., cap. 15-30. "Hoc prælio facto, et prope ad internecionem gente, ac nomine Nerviorum redacto," are the words of the conqueror (lib. ii., cap. 28). Niebuhr, Lectures on Roman History, vol. iii., pp. 43, 44; Lond. and Edin., 1850.

shoulders of his degenerate sons, and they contrived to lighten the burden by dividing it. Germany was finally severed from France, and in A.D. 922 Charles the Simple, the last of the Carlovingian line, presented to Count Dirk the northern horn of this territory, the portion now known as Holland, which henceforth became the inheritance of his descendants; and about the same time, Henry the Fowler, of Germany, acquired the sovereignty of the southern portion, together with that of Lotharinga, the modern Lorraine, and thus the territory was broken into two, each part remaining connected with the German Empire; but loosely so, its rulers yielding only a nominal homage to the head of the empire, while they exercised sovereign rights in their own special domain.1

The reign of Charlemagne had effaced the last traces of free institutions and government by law which had lingered in Holland and Belgium since the Roman era, and substituted feudalism, or the government of the sword. Commerce began to flow, and from the thirteenth century its elevating influence was felt in the Netherlands. Confederations of trading towns arose, with their charters of freedom and their leagues of mutual defence, which greatly modified the state of society in Europe. These confederated cities were, in fact, free republics flourishing in the heart of despotic empires. The cities which were among the first to rise into eminence were Ghent and Bruges. The latter became a main entrepôt of the trade carried on with the East by way of the Mediter

ranean.

"The wives and daughters of the citizens outvied, in the richness of their dress, that of a queen of France. . . . . . At Mechlin, a single individual possessed counting-houses and commercial establishments at Damascus and Grand Cairo."2 To Bruges the merchants of Lombardy brought the wares of Asia, and thence were they dispersed among the towns of Northern Europe, and along the shores of the German Sea. "A century later, Antwerp, the successful rival of Venice, could, it is said, boast of almost five hundred vessels daily entering her ports, and two thousand carriages laden with merchandise passing through her gates every week." Venice, Verona, Nuremberg, and Bruges were the chief links of the golden chain that united the civilised and fertile East with the comparatively rude and unskilful West. In the former the arts had long flourished. There men were expert in all that is woven on the loom or em

3

broidered by the needle; they were able to engrave on iron, and to set precious jewels in cunningly-wrought frames of gold and silver and brass. There, too, the skilful use of the plough and the pruning-hook, combined with a vigorous soil, produced in abundance all kinds of luxuries ; and along the channel we have indicated were all these various products poured into countries where arts and husbandry were yet in their infancy.*

Such was the condition of Holland and Flanders at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. They had come to rival the East, with which they traded. The surface of their country was richly cultivated. Their cities were numerous; they were enclosed within strong ramparts, and adorned with superb public buildings and sumptuous churches. Their rights and privileges were guaranteed by ancient charters, which they jealously guarded and knew how to defend. They were governed by a senate, which possessed legislative, judicial, and administrative powers, subject to the Supreme Council at Mechlin -as that was to the sovereign authority. population was numerous, skilful, thriving, and equally expert at handling the tool or wielding the sword. These artisans and weavers were divided into guilds, which elected their own deans or rulers. They were brave, and not a little turbulent. When the bell tolled to arms, the inmate of the workshop could, in a few minutes, transform himself into a soldier; and these bands of artificers and weavers would present the appearance as well as the reality of an army. "Nations at the present day scarcely named," says Müller, "supported their struggle against great armies with a heroism that reminds us of the valour of the Swiss."

The

Holland, lying farther to the north, did not so largely share in the benefits of trade and commerce as the cities of Flanders. Giving itself to the development of its internal resources, it clothed its soil with a fertility and beauty which more southern lands might have envied. Turning to its seas, it reared a race of fishermen, who in process of time developed into the most skilful and adventurous seamen in Europe. Thus were laid the foundations of that naval ascendency which Holland for a time enjoyed, and that great colonial empire of which this dyke-encircled territory was the mother and the mistress. "The common opinion is," says Cardinal Bentivoglio, who was sent as Papal nuncio to the Low Countries in the beginning of the seventeenth century-"The common

4 See 66 Historical Introduction" to Rise of the Dutch Republic, by John Lothrop Motley; Edin. and Lond., 1859. • Müller, Univ. Hist., vol. ii., p. 230.

opinion is that the navy of Holland, in the number of vessels, is equal to all the rest of Europe together."1 Others have written that the United Provinces have more ships than houses. And Bentivoglio, speaking of the Exchange of Amsterdam, says that if its harbour was crowded with ships, its piazza was not less so with merchants, "so that the like was not to be seen in all Europe; nay, in all the world."3

By the time the Reformation was on the eve of breaking out, the liberties of the Netherlanders had come to be in great peril. For a century past the Burgundo-Austrian monarchs had been steadily encroaching upon them. The charters under which their cities enjoyed municipal life had become little more than nominal. Their senates were entirely subject to the Supreme Court at Mechlin. The

forms of their ancient liberties remained, but the spirit was fast ebbing. The Netherlanders were fighting a losing battle with the empire, which year after year was growing more powerful, and stretching its shadow over the independence of their towns. They had arrived at a crisis in their history. Commerce, trade, liberty, had done all for them they would ever do. This was becoming every day more clear. Decadence had set in, and

the Netherlanders would have fallen under the power of the empire and been reduced to vassalage, had not a higher principle come in time to save them from this fate. It was at this moment that a celestial fire descended upon the nation: the country shook off the torpor which had begun to weigh upon it, and girding itself for a great fight, it contended for a higher liberty than any it had yet known.

THE great struggle for religion and liberty, of which the Netherlands became the theatre in the middle of the sixteenth century, properly dates from 1555, when the Emperor Charles V. is seen elevating to the throne, from which he himself has just descended, his son Philip II. In order to the right perception of that momentous conflict, it is necessary that we should rapidly survey the three centuries that preceded it. The Church of Rome in the Netherlands is beheld, in the thirteenth century, flourishing in power and riches. The Bishops of Utrecht had become the Popes of the North. Favoured by the emperors, whose quarrel they espoused against the Popes in the Middle Ages, these ambitious prelates were now all but independent of Rome. "They gave place," says Brandt, the historian of the Netherlands' Reformation, "to neither kings nor emperors in the state and magnificence of their court; they reckoned the greatest princes in the Low Countries

1 Relationi del Cardinal Bentivoglio, in Pareigi, 1631; lib. i., cap. 7, p. 32.

2 Misson, Travels, vol. i., p. 4.

3 Relat. Card. Bentiv., lib. i., cap. 7, p. 32: "Che sia non solo in Europa, ma in tutto il mondo."

among their feudatories because they held some land of the bishopric in fee, and because they owed them homage. Accordingly, Baldwin, the second of that name and twenty-ninth bishop of the see, summoned several princes to Utrecht, to receive investiture of the lands that were so holden by them: the Duke of Brabant as first steward; the Count of Flanders as second; the Count of Holland as marshal." The clergy regulated their rank by the spiritual princedom established at Utrecht. They were the grandees of the land. They monopolised all the privileges but bore none of the burdens of the State. They imposed taxes on others, but they themselves paid taxes to no

4 The Papal nuncio, Bentivoglio, willingly acknowledges their great physical and mental qualities, and praises them alike for their skill in arts and their bravery in war. "Gli huomini, che produce il paese, sono ordinariamente di grande statura; di bello, e candido aspetto, e di corpo vigorose, e robusto. Hanno gli animi non men vigorosi de' corpi; e cio s'è veduto in quella si lunga, e si pertinacè resistenza, che da loro s'è fatta all' armi Spagnuole," &c. (Relat. Card. Bentiv., lib. i., cap. 3, pp. 4, 5.)

5 Brandt, History of the Reformation in the Low Countries, vol. i., p. 14; Lond., 1720.

one.

Numberless dues and offerings had already swollen their possessions to an enormous amount, while new and ever-recurring exactions were continually enlarging their territorial domains. Their immoralities were restrained by no sense of shame and by no fear of punishment, seeing that to the opinion of their countrymen they paid no deference, and to the civil and criminal tribunals they owed no accountability. They framed a law, and forced it upon the government, that no charge should be received against a cardinal-bishop, unless supported by seventy-two witnesses; nor against a cardinalpriest, but by forty-four; nor against a cardinaldeacon, but by twenty-seven; nor against the lowest of the clergy, but by seven.' If a voice was raised to hint that these servants of the Church would exalt themselves by being a little more humble, and enrich themselves by being a little less covetous, and that charity and meekness were greater ornaments than sumptuous apparel and gaily-caparisoned mules, instantly the ban of the Church was evoked to crush the audacious complainer; and the anathema in that age had terrors that made even those look pale who had never trembled on the battle-field.

But the power, affluence, and arrogance of the Church of Rome in the Low Countries had reached their height; and in the fourteenth century we find an ebb setting in, in that tide which till now had continued at flood. Numbers of the Waldenses and Albigenses, chased from Southern France or from the valleys of the Alps, sought refuge in the cities of the Netherlands, bringing with them the Romaunt version of the Bible, which was translated into Low Dutch rhymes."

The city of Antwerp occupies a most distinguished place in this great movement. So early as 1106, before the disciples of Peter Waldo had appeared in these parts, we find a celebrated preacher, Tanchelinus by name, endeavouring to purge out the leaven of the Papacy, and spread purer doctrine not only in Antwerp, but in the adjoining parts of Brabant and Flanders; and, although vehemently opposed by the priests and by Norbert, the first founder of the order of Premonstratensians, his opinions took a firm hold of some of the finest minds. In the following century, the thirteenth, William Cornelius, also of Antwerp, taught a purer doctrine than the common one on the Eucharistic Sacrament, which he is said to have received from the disciples of Tanchelinus. Nor must we omit to mention Nicolas, of Lyra, a town in the east of Brabant,

5

who lived about 1322, and who impregnated his Commentary on the Bible with the seeds of Gospel truth. Hence the remark of Julius Pflugius, the celebrated Romish doctor" Si Lyra non lirasset, Lutherus non saltasset."5 In the fourteenth century came another sower of the good seed of the Word in the countries of which we speak, Gerard of Groot. Nowhere, in short, had forerunners of the Reformation been so numerous as on this famous sea-board, a fact doubtless to be accounted for, in part at least, by the commerce, the intelligence, and the freedom which the Low Countries then enjoyed.

2 Ibid.

1 Brandt, vol. i., p. 14.

3

Gerdesius, Hist. Evan.Ren.,tom. iii., p. 3; Groning.,1749.

Voices began to be heard prophetic of greater ones to be raised in after-years. Whence came these voices? From the depth of the convents. The monks became the reprovers and accusers of one another. The veil was lifted upon the darkness that hid the holy places of the Roman Church. In 1290, Henry of Ghent, Archbishop of Tournay, published a book against the Papacy, in which he boldly questioned the Pope's power to transform what was evil into good. Guido, the forty-second Bishop of Utrecht, refused-rare modesty in those times the red hat and scarlet mantle from the Pope. He contrasts with Wevelikhoven, the fiftieth bishop of that see, who in 1380 dug the bones of a Lollard out of the grave, and burned them before the gates of his episcopal palace, and cast the ashes into the town ditch. His successor, the fifty-first Bishop of Utrecht, cast into a dungeon a monk named Matthias Grabo, for writing a book in support of the thesis that "the clergy are subject to the civil powers." The terrified author recanted the doctrine of his book; but the magistrates of several cities esteemed it good and sound notwithstanding. standing. As in the greater Papacy of Rome, so in the lesser Papacy at Utrecht, a schism took place, and rival Popes thundered anathemas at one another; this helped to lower the prestige of the Church in the eyes of the people. Henry Loeder, Prior of the Monastery of Fredesweel, near Northova, wrote to his brother in the following manner

"Dear brother, the love I bear your state, and welfare for the sake of the Blood of Christ, obliges me to take a rod instead of a pen into my hand. I never saw those cloisters flourish and increase in godliness which daily increased in temporal estates and possessions. . . . . The filth of your cloister greatly wants the broom and the mop. . . . Embrace the Cross and the Crucified Jesus; therein ye shall find full content." Near Haarlem was

4 Gerdesius, tom. iii., p. 3.

"If Lyra had not piped, Luther had not danced."

the cloister of "The Visitation of the Blessed Lady," of which John van Kempen was prior. We find him censuring the lives of the monks in these words "We would be humble, but cannot bear contempt; patient, without oppressions or sufferings; obedient, without subjection; poor, without wanting anything, &c. Our Lord said the kingdom of heaven is to be entered by force." Henry Wilde, Prior of the Monastery of Bois le Duc, purged the hymn-books of the wanton songs which the monks had inserted with the anthems. "Let them pray for us," was the same prior wont to say when asked to sing masses for the dead; "our prayers will do them no good." We obtain a glimpse of the rigour of the ecclesiastical laws from the attempts that now began to be made to modify them. In 1434 we find Bishop Rudolph granting power to the Duke of Burgundy to arrest by his bailiffs all drunken and fighting priests, and deliver them up to the bishop, who promises not to discharge them till satisfaction shall have been given to the duke. He promises farther not to grant the protection of churches and churchyards to murder rs and similar malefactors; and that no subject of Holland shall be summoned to appear in the Dishop's court at Utrecht, upon any account whatsoever, if the person so summoned be willing to appear before the spiritual or temporal judge to whose jurisdiction he belongs.1

There follow, as it comes nearer the Reformation, the greater names of Thomas à Kempis and John Wessel. We see them trim their lamp and go onward to show men the Way of Life. It was a feeble light that now began to break over these lands; still it was sufficient to reveal many things which had been unobserved or unthought of during the gross darkness that preceded it. It does not become Churchmen, the barons now began to say, to be so enormously rich, and so effeminately luxurious; these possessions are not less ours than they are theirs, we shall share them with them. These daring barons, moreover, learned to deem the spiritual authority not quite so impregnable as they had once believed it to be, and the consequence of this was that they held the persons of Churchmen in less reverence, and their excommunications in less awe than before. There was planted thus an incipient revolt. The movement received an impulse from the writings of Wicliffe, which began to be circulated in the Low Countries in the end of the fourteenth century." There followed, in the beginning of the next century, the martyrdoms of Huss and Jerome. The

light which these two stakes shed over the plains of Bohemia was reflected as far as to the banks of the Rhine and the shores of the North Sea, and helped to deepen the inquiry which the teachings of the Waldenses and the writings of Wicliffe had awakened among the burghers and artisans of the Low Countries. The execution of Huss and Jerome was followed by the Bohemian campaigns. The victories of Ziska spread the terror of the Hussite arms, and to some extent also the knowledge of the Hussite doctrines, over Western Europe. In the great armaments which were raised by the Pope to extinguish the heresy of Huss, numerous natives of Holland and Belgium enrolled themselves; and of these, some at least returned to their native land converts to the heresy they had gone forth to subdue. Their opinions, quietly disseminated among their countrymen, helped to prepare the way for that great struggle in the Netherlands which we are now to record, and which expanded into so much vaster dimensions than that which had shaken Bohemia in the fifteenth century.

To these causes, which conspired for the awakening of the Netherlands, is to be added the influence of trade and commerce. The tendency of commerce to engender activity of mind, and nourish independence of thought, is too obvious to require that we should dwell upon it. The tiller of the soil seldom permits his thoughts to stray beyond his native acres, the merchant and trader has a whole hemisphere for his mental domain. He is compelled to reflect, and calculate, and compare, otherwise he loses his ventures. He is thus lifted out of the slough in which the agriculturist or the herdsman is content to lie all his days. The Low Countries, as we have said in the previous chapter, were the heart of the commerce of the nations. They were the clearing-house of the world. This vast trade brought with it knowledge as well as riches; for the Fleming could not meet his customers on the wharf, or on the Bourse, without hearing things to him new and strange. He had to do with men of all nations, and he received from them not only foreign coin, but foreign ideas.

The new day was coming apace. Already its signals stood displayed before the eyes of men. One powerful instrumentality after another stood up to give rapid and universal diffusion to the new agencies that were about to be called into existence. Nor have the nations long to wait. A crash is heard, the fall of an ancient empire shakes the earth, and the sacred languages, so long imprisoned within the walls of Constantinople, are liberated,

3 Brandt, vol. i., p. 19.