When the hapless Winter King was ejected from Bohemia after the fateful Battle of the White Mountain, his choice of a place of exile was a natural one. He fled to the United Provinces of the Netherlands because they were Calvinist and were in conflict with Habsburg Spain, from whose rule they had revolted in the previous century. Spain stood to gain from the Habsburg seizure of Frederick’s Rhine dominions because the Spanish Road, their route to that part of the Low Countries still under their sway, was thereby secured. This was a further reason for the Dutch to back Frederick, in the hope that he could regain his Palatine territories.
The Dutch–Spanish conflict had begun in earnest half a century earlier. In January 1579 the seven Protestant provinces of the northern Netherlands – Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland, Overijssel, Friesland and rural (not urban) Groningen – formed themselves into the Union of Utrecht as a response to the formation by the Catholic southern provinces of the Union of Arras. The latter represented a reaffirmation of the southern provinces’ loyalty to the Spanish Crown and Catholic faith, and was itself a response to increasing tensions between the Catholic and Calvinist sections of the Netherlandish population. These tensions were a direct result of the intransigent hostility of Philip II of Spain to the Reformed sects. He wished to see Catholicism restored to the northern provinces, and was prepared to take harsh measures to succeed. The Protestants of the northern provinces were deeply mistrustful, indeed fearful, of Spanish intentions. They found the cruelty of Spanish activities in the New World, and the Spanish Inquisition’s continuing persecution of Jews and Moors – even those who had converted, or whose ancestors had converted, to Christianity – a legitimate source of anxiety.
Just how legitimate was put beyond doubt by such events as the Beeldenstorm destruction of art and icons in Antwerp’s Cathedral of Our Lady on 20 August 1566. Philip II had sent orders to the Netherlands for enforcement of Catholic observance; an angry Calvinist crowd invaded the cathedral in Antwerp in protest, and set about tearing down that beautiful building’s statuary and artworks, and even the decorative stonework of the pillars and walls. The reserved host was fed to animals, the communion wine was drunk, paintings and tapestries were shredded, stained-glass windows smashed. The only part of the cathedral not wrecked on the first day of rioting was the chapel of the Habsburgs’ principal order of chivalry, the Order of the Golden Fleece. But on the third day, after the iconoclasts had been at churches and chapels elsewhere in the city to destroy and burn, they returned to finish their work in the cathedral. A group of Knights of the Golden Fleece in full armour fought their way into the cathedral to defend their chapel, and killed a number of the rioters, some of whom they hanged outside the cathedral, slashing at their twisting bodies with swords and spears as they died.
Such events, and the ensuing alignment of the two religious camps, did not portend well for Spanish government of the region. Less than two years after forming the Union of Utrecht, in 1581, its members declared themselves independent of Spain by the Oath of Abjuration, and a long and difficult war began. Philip sent the Duke of Alva with an army to reduce the rebellious provinces, but their resistance, and the burden on the Spanish exchequer, saved them.
The outcome was the transformation of the Union of Utrecht into the United Provinces, a new independent state which throughout the seventeenth century flourished mightily because of its maritime successes, overseas trade and Eastern empire. The resulting access of wealth prompted a flowering of culture. It was the superlative age of Dutch painting; as Europe’s most liberal and tolerant country it attracted thinkers, scientists, writers and political exiles to settle there. This part of the Netherlands’ history has aptly been called ‘the Dutch Golden Age’, a phrase that applies both literally and metaphorically.
By contrast, most of the remaining part of the Netherlands continued under Spanish dominion as a Catholic country – and eventually became Belgium. The Low Countries had long been one of the richest parts of Spain’s Empire, and the loss of half of it hastened the demise of Spain as a world power.
Philip II tried hard to recover the United Provinces, but because Spain was a dying force, though dying slowly, he soon understood that the effort was beyond his powers. He came to this view in the late 1590s, by which time the United Provinces had constructed a powerful defensive line along the Maas and Waal rivers, and had inaugurated its lucrative independent trade with the East Indies, Spanish America and the Mediterranean. Hoping at least to limit the United Provinces’ progress, Philip gave the Spanish Netherlands a degree of autonomy under his daughter Isabella and her husband (who was, in the Habsburg way, also her cousin), Archduke Albert of Austria. Albert had for several years already been Governor General at Brussels. The husband-and-wife team came to be known as ‘the Archdukes’, and though always subject to the Spanish Crown, they gradually became more independent, though never wholly so.
The Archdukes hired Ambrogio Spinola to lead their army – an inspired and at the outset apparently eccentric choice, for Spinola was a Genoese banker without military experience. The standing joke about him at the time was that he was a general before he was a soldier. But if he had been a soldier before becoming a general he might not have displayed such military genius, giving the Calvinists of the United Provinces not a few grey hairs before, after a decade of fighting, helping the Archdukes and the United Provinces to agree a twelve-year truce. This occurred in 1609 and was de facto a recognition of the United Provinces’ independence.
This truce infuriated Spain’s Philip III (Philip II’s successor), who loathed the idea of making peace with any Calvinists, and still less with the rebellious Dutch Calvinists. But he was in no position to interfere: his kingdom was bankrupt, unable to negotiate further loans, and moreover was just about to go to war with Venice: a difficult combination of affairs. It did not take long for Philip III to accept that a dozen years of peace in the Low Countries might help with the rebuilding of Spain’s finances. In any case he was soothingly reassured by the Archdukes and Spinola that the Dutch could be vanquished once the truce was over and the Spanish were in better shape to fight.
By the start of the Thirty Years War in 1618, when this truce was nearing its end, the United Provinces had entered a state of some political turmoil. Several years of external peace had given opportunity for disruptions to internal peace, as so often happens. In part this was the result of the way the United Provinces administered themselves. The closest thing to a head of state was Prince Maurice of Nassau, who in that year – 1618 – had just succeeded to the princedom of Orange, having previously been Count Maurice of Nassau. His authority derived from the fact that he was the Captain General of the federal army and Stadthouder of five of the seven provinces, his cousin William-Louis being Stadthouder of the remaining two. Already some inter-provincial government institutions had come into being: a mint for the common currency, a military council of state, the admiralty, and an audit board. But each province had its own assembly, each of which in turn sent delegates to a federal assembly called the States-General. The members of this small body, usually numbering fewer than a dozen, had to refer all its decisions to their home provincial assemblies for discussion and – sometimes – ratification. This was a time-consuming and often fractious business, the more so because each provincial assembly in its turn had to consult the magistrates in its more populous towns and the nobles in their country estates, before any final decision could be made.
This structure would have resulted in paralysis and division far more often had it not been that Holland, the richest province, usually got its way, because it provided two-thirds of the United Provinces’ tax revenue – and power runs alongside money. Indeed it was Holland which, when the truce with the Archdukes was under discussion in 1609, forced the deal through against the intransigence of other provinces, whose hard-line Calvinist clergy were as opposed to a truce as Spain’s Philip III himself.
Another reason why the Provinces’ governance arrangements worked as well as they did was that for a number of years they were astutely, even cunningly, managed by the States-General’s chief permanent official, Johan van Oldenbarnevelt – in effect the United Provinces’ prime minister. Aided by a trusty standing committee, Oldenbarnevelt arranged the agenda for the States-General’s meetings, but only after he had negotiated, wheedled, persuaded and twisted arms, in this way applying Sun Tzu’s excellent advice to go into battle only when victory is already won. Oldenbarnevelt chaired the meetings too, which was a further help.
Nevertheless, with so much potential for upsets to the internal unity of the Provinces, something was sure to provide the occasion for one – and inevitably, one wearily supposes, religion provided it. In 1605 a dispute arose between two theologians at the University of Leiden concerning the question of predestination. One of the two was a strict and enthusiastic Calvinist called Francis Gomarus, the other was a liberal-minded Reformed theologian called Jacob Arminius. Gomarus held to Calvin’s uncompromising line that each individual is saved or damned from the beginning of time, and that the total number of the saved is relatively small. Arminius held that human beings have free will. Faculty and students took sides; eventually so too did the clothworkers of Leiden. Neither the academics nor the clothworkers proved to be above throwing stones and cracking their opponents’ skulls in defence of religious truth as they saw it.
As the unrest grew more serious, so Oldenbarnevelt became more concerned. He called a meeting of the country’s leading clergymen to discuss whether, in hope of quietening matters, there should be a revision of the Reformed Church’s Confession of Faith. The clergy vehemently refused to consider any such thing; they regarded the Confession as sacrosanct, and hotly told Oldenbarnevelt that there could be no question of civil authorities interfering with doctrinal matters.
These events occupied the last years of the first decade of the seventeenth century, at the close of which Arminius died. His followers were however determined to carry on the fight. They presented a ‘Remonstrance’ to the assembly of Holland, in their turn calling for a revision of the Confession of Faith, and iterating the demand that Church and state matters be kept strictly separate. The Gomarists fired back a ‘Counter-Remonstrance’, containing among other things the demand that all Arminians should be sacked from their teaching and preaching positions. The Arminians sought Oldenbarnevelt’s help; they already had the backing of the great jurist Hugo Grotius, then serving as chief magistrate of Rotterdam. Grotius criticised the Gomarists for threatening the state’s safety, the Church’s unity, and – in his view, and rightly, worst of all – the principle of freedom of conscience.
Unless one has a little knowledge of doctrinal affairs, the reason for the bitterness of this dispute might escape notice. The hottest point at issue was the fact that the Arminian position was close to the Roman Catholic view on free will: both Catholics and Arminians believed in it, Calvinists did not. From the Gomarist perspective this put Arminians into the same vile and heretical category as Catholics. One can see the point of the Gomarists’ objections: to be told that you are saved whatever you do, and have been so from the beginning of time, as Calvinists were assured they were by virtue of being Calvinists, is much less hard work than having free will and being required to live your whole life in ways that will secure entry to heaven: which is more than merely an annoying imposition, because it introduced an uncomfortable degree of uncertainty and obligation. As the Gomarists saw it, the Arminians were both insulting them and threatening them by telling them that they were not saved, and that, like Catholics, they had to work for their salvation. The Arminians, for their part, deeply disliked the imputation that the deity created most of humanity in order to destroy it no matter how nice and good it was, saving only the stiff-necked arrogant Gomarist-type Calvinists who regarded themselves as the Elect.
In any case the Calvinist line is hard to reconcile with the salvific message of the Gospels, in which the sacrifice of Christ is portrayed as reuniting the posterity of Adam – all of it; or anyway, all who would believe – with God in the atonement. Indeed St Paul gave hope even to those who had not heard the message but were still good, having God’s law inscribed on their hearts. How, asked the Arminians, could this be consistent with Calvinist teaching?
In the climate of the times the outcome of this extremely deep division of opinion was inevitable. Arminian preachers and their churches were attacked by Gomarist mobs. Riots occurred, disorder increased, both became more frequent, and began to spread to other matters besides, as for example in Delft in 1616 when several days of rioting were prompted by a rise in corn taxes. These riots had troubling extra features in Oldenbarnevelt’s opinion – barricades were erected in the streets, and the houses of wealthy citizens were stoned, these developments suggesting that a more general breakdown of order was imminent.
Maurice of Nassau was not on the same side of the dispute as Oldenbarnevelt and Grotius. He was a Gomarist. He began to say to friends that he did not think the dispute could be settled by anything less than civil war. He disagreed with Oldenbarnevelt not only on the issue itself, but on how its attendant growing unrest should be handled. Eventually the two men quarrelled outright; and the quarrel brought into public view the differences between them, as the two most significant men in the state. As a result the Gomarist cause, with Maurice behind it, began to get the upper hand. In towns with only an Arminian minister, crowds marched away on Sundays to places where they could hear a Gomarist preacher instead. Harassment of Arminian clergy and adherents increased, and Maurice instructed his troops not to intervene – in effect, stripping protection from Arminians.
In this worsening situation Oldenbarnevelt decided that the interests of public order obliged him to act. He persuaded Holland’s assembly to allow each of the province’s towns to raise a militia company of waardgelders, if they thought circumstances warranted it. The waardgelders were to swear loyalty to the town, not the province or the country or the Stadhouder. The mistake made by the Holland assembly’s proclamation was that it stated that soldiers in the federal army whose pay came from Holland had, for that reason, a primary loyalty to Holland rather than to the United Provinces as a whole.
This greatly angered Maurice; he saw it as both an affront to himself personally and a challenge to his authority. He ordered the States-General to issue an order disbanding the waardgelder companies; they voted by five provinces to two to do so, and he instantly put the order into effect. In July 1618 he marched into Utrecht with a large force of troops, disarmed its waardgelders and purged the city’s offices of all Arminians, installing Gomarists in their place. By August all the towns of Holland had submitted to Maurice, who repeated the substitution of Gomarists for Arminians everywhere, and at the same time arrested Oldenbarnevelt and Hugo Grotius.
The whole of Europe watched agog as these events unfolded. Nowhere else, at that moment, were matters of religion so delicately poised, or so important to the fate of Reformation and Counter-Reformation alike; for this was a quarrel within Protestantism – and not even between Calvinists and Lutherans (who, as mentioned, loathed each other anyway: no news there) but within the Calvinist camp itself.
Prince Maurice’s next actions sealed the future course of Dutch history in respect of both its political and its religious character, and thereby helped shape the course of Europe’s history too. He called together an assembly of Calvinist clergy and theologians, including a number from England, Switzerland and Germany, to hold a general synod at Dordrecht (then known as Dort). After six months of debates the Synod of Dort condemned Arminianism and its adherents, calling the latter heretics and ‘disturbers of the peace’ in Church and state alike. On the instant, 200 Dutch Arminian preachers were driven from their churches, half of them going into exile. Maurice dismissed all of Oldenbarnevelt’s followers in official positions in all seven provinces, putting inexperienced men in their place. The obvious disadvantage of this was outweighed for Maurice by a major advantage, namely, that it put more direct power into his own hands. Hugo Grotius was sentenced to life imprisonment (but happily escaped two years later), while Oldenbarnevelt was condemned to death. He went with great dignity to the scaffold the very next day, 13 May 1619. He was seventy-two years old, and had been a great servant to the United Provinces for the majority of those years.
Because the rest of Europe was watching these events intently, and with mixed emotions, Maurice set his propaganda machine to work. It represented Oldenbarnevelt and the Arminians as having attempted a coup d’état, which is how he justified sending the elderly statesman to his death and driving Arminian clergy from their posts. Europe generally accepted his version of the matter. In one respect his version was not inaccurate, for it had truly been a struggle for power, given that Oldenbarnevelt stood in the way of Maurice’s aim of tightening his personal grip on the United Provinces, and furthering his private ambitions to be named king. In the latter respect the republican instincts of the Dutch continued the job that Oldenbarnevelt had been doing; it took an invitation from the English Parliament in 1688 to turn a prince of Orange into a monarch. Nevertheless Dutch painters portrayed the surrender of the waardgelders as a great military victory for Maurice. Within a short few months the English playwrights Fletcher and Massinger brought their ‘Sir John Van Olden Barnevelt’ on to the London stage, such was the universal interest in the affair.
Maurice was not the only one to benefit from Oldenbarnevelt’s fall. Merchants in England and elsewhere in Europe – even in certain other of the United Provinces themselves – were pleased that he had gone, because his canny ways had served the advantage of the merchants specifically of the province of Holland at everyone else’s expense. Calvinists everywhere now saw Maurice as a new champion for their view of Christianity, and believed that Calvinism was poised to triumph. And it was to Maurice that Frederick V and his ejected family turned as they fled from Bohemia.
But with Oldenbarnevelt and all his experience of statecraft and diplomacy gone, leaving the less astute Maurice at the United Provinces’ helm, any satisfaction at the old man’s fall was as premature as it was misplaced. For its real significance was that Spain, and the Habsburg cause in general, had been handed a prime chance to take back the international initiative. The Thirty Years War was beginning in earnest.