Ralph Adams Cram

WHEN Philip II came to the throne there was a new king in France, Henry II, who forthwith broke the peace Charles V had engineered, and proceeded to invade both Italy and Flanders. He was promptly beaten, in the north by Egmont at St. Quentin, and after so disastrous a fashion that hardly any one but Nevers and CondÉ escaped. It was in gratitude for the brilliant victory of his Belgian troops that Philip built the palace of the Escorial. Trying again the next year, Henry did indeed, through the Duke de Guise (whose luck was better than that which followed him when he met Alva the year before in Italy), regain Calais, during the absence of the English garrison, who were home on a holiday; but again Egmont came into the breech, crushed the French at Gravelines, and so forced the treaty of CÂteau-CambrÉsis, which obliged France, amongst other penalties, to give up to Philip more than two hundred walled towns, though she was allowed to retain Calais, Mary of England now being dead.

Flemish soldiers, now forming the best trained and most effective army in Europe, had won the war for Philip, but out of the victory came in the end the ruin of their country, for before leaving for Spain, which he loved, he demanded of the Netherlands, which he disliked, three million florins toward the expense of the war. This was granted, but coupled with a request that the Spanish garrison be withdrawn. It happened that this demand was made at the instigation of William, Prince of Orange, who now appears on the scene, for he had discovered that Henry and Philip had secretly agreed to stamp out Protestantism in the Low Countries by introducing the Spanish Inquisition, and that the alien garrison was to be the means of putting this plan into effect. William of Orange was not a Fleming but a German; he had expected to be made regent when the King went back to Spain, and had been disappointed. He was neither a Catholic nor a Protestant, but a cold, silent, far-seeing politician of extremely rationalistic views. He knew that the spirit of independence in the Netherlands was so dominating that Catholics and Protestants alike could be allied against both the Inquisition and a foreign garrison. He cleverly united them on this basis, alienated the last flicker of friendly feeling on the part of Philip, and so precipitated the conflict that raged for almost a century to the ruin and misery of all the seventeen provinces. Philip appeared to yield, went back to Spain, and at once began his scheming for the destruction of the Protestant heresy in his too-independent territories.

So far as the aristocracy, the rich burghers, and the cultivated classes were concerned, Protestantism had made little if any headway in spite of the wide corruption of the Church, but among the peasants and the ignorant, particularly in the great cities, it had taken firm hold. To Philip it was both a damnable heresy and a civil menace; he hated it as his father had hated it, but Charles V was of a different mould and temper. Philip was a Spanish Catholic, and therein (at that time) lay all the difference. To him with his cold mind and pitiless temper there was only one question: how to root out this accursed and poisonous growth. The answer was at hand in the shape of the peculiar type of inquisition which had been invented in Spain for the sole purpose of completing the expulsion of the Moors and Jews from the Peninsula after the final defeat of the Mohammedan invaders. It had proved its efficiency to admiration, and, though it had never been used against Christian heretics, Philip felt (as others have felt after him) that both the righteous State and the Catholic Church were, through the King, fighting for their lives, and that he had no right to balk at any means that offered when it was a question of life or death.

The old “Papal” Inquisition, which came into existence toward the end of the Middle Ages, and was the corollary of the dawning spirit of the Renaissance with which it synchronised, was legitimate enough, if you hold, as every one held then, that spiritual evil is as wicked as material evil, and just as worthy of formal punishment. Trials were conducted according to civil law, they were public, and the secular arm alone inflicted punishment. The “Spanish” Inquisition, which is the form so bitterly condemned to-day, was a creature of the Renaissance in its fulness. It was an engine of the most diabolical efficiency, for its proceedings were secret, its finding irrevocable, its penalties merciless and as cruel as English criminal law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though it lacked certain of the refinements of torture that were first developed under “Good King Hal” when he was waging his war against the monks and monasteries of his own England.

Had Philip been dealing with the Popes of the Middle Ages, he could never have imposed the Spanish Inquisition on the Netherlands, but those of the Renaissance were as different as possible, and he had no trouble in gaining their consent. A few burnings took place, and then the loyal and Catholic but intensely patriotic nobles took matters into their own hands and through the regent, Margaret of Parma, warned the King that unless the thing was stopped the provinces would act in defence of their own rights and in accordance with their solemnly guaranteed privileges. The Protestant mob also began to act after its own fashion, without waiting for an answer from Philip, and week after week carried on a course of destruction that wrecked cathedrals, monasteries, churches, and destroyed more old stained glass, wonderful statues, great pictures, jewelled vestments, and sacred vessels than have escaped to this day. The senseless and sacrilegious fury of this mob of the baser sort not only lashed the King into a cold fury but it even halted some of the Catholic nobles, many of whom, including Egmont himself, began to wonder if, after all, the Inquisition was not permissible in the light of the revelations that were being made in the desecrated churches of Antwerp and Ghent and Tournai. No advantage was taken of this changing sentiment, however, and, ready at last, Philip struck, and the Duke of Alva, with an army of 10,000 picked men, marched up from Genoa, occupied Brussels, seized every disaffected leader, including even those like Egmont and Horn, who were both loyal and devout Catholics (but barring Orange, who had cautiously retreated to Germany), and established the “Council of Blood,” which during the first week of its activities executed more than eight hundred men whose only crime was protesting against the denial of their guaranteed liberties and the maintenance of the Inquisition.

The Prince of Orange organised in Germany a small armed force for the deliverance of the cowed and horrified Netherlanders, but his first victory over Alva’s forces was answered by immediate reprisals in Brussels, a score of nobles being sent to the block, including Horn and

THE DUKE OF ALVA, MORO VAN DASHORST

Egmont, the latter being the most honoured of the nobles and as good a Catholic as he was a soldier. The people remained absolutely crushed, making no effort to rise in support of the Prince of Orange, who, defeated by Alva, sought the aid of the French Protestants, attacked from the sea by means of privateers who preyed on Spanish commerce, and finally, by establishing a base in Holland, raised this portion of the Spanish Netherlands against Alva and made himself actual head of a new state. In the meantime a Huguenot army had laid siege to Mons, but just as victory seemed near the Massacre of St. Bartholomew ended the Protestant party in France for ever, destroyed all the hopes that had been raised through the possibility of assistance from Coligny, and sent Orange back again behind the Rhine, leaving Flanders and Brabant to their fate. Alva saw to it that this was sufficiently awful, and then began operations against Holland, but by this time Philip had become thoroughly tired of the costly war and listened willingly to the enemies of the terrible duke, recalled him, and sent in his place the comparatively mild and accommodating Requesens.

The tale is now one of progressive and finally successful efforts at pacifying the country, the undoing so far as possible of the bloody work of Alva, the winning back to the Church and to the Spanish crown of all those who had not gone over definitely to Protestantism and the Prince of Orange. Both the Pope and the King offered full amnesty, and the southern provinces, those, that is, that now form the kingdom of Belgium, accepted at once and completely, for after all they were solidly Catholic and in principle not averse to Spanish dominion. The northern provinces—i. e., Holland—rejected all overtures, binding themselves completely, implacably, and savagely to Protestantism, and from now on the former Spanish Netherlands became two states: Holland, soon to win its independence, and Belgium, now and for a long time to come, a Spanish province.

Order was still far away. It was in the year 1573 that Requesens came to reverse the policy of Alva, and not until the Peace of Utrecht in 1715, when Spanish rule was finally terminated, that there was any rest or relief for the tortured and ruined provinces of Flanders and Brabant. Requesens died; the Spanish troops mutinied, were joined by the German mercenaries, and began a war on their own account, burning and sacking Antwerp, butchering 6,000 of the population, and harrying the country right and left. Then came Don John of Austria, Philip’s new governor-general, the victor of Lepanto, and a figure out of the pages of mediÆval romance. He came too late; anarchy was firmly fixed in the saddle, riding rough-shod over the desolated garden of Europe. Abandoning his original policy of pacification, he turned to war and was successful, but only to find about every power in Europe represented in the roaring inferno. Orange was fighting from Antwerp as his headquarters, the provincial representatives, with Brussels as their centre, were howling for help from any source; the Protestant faction called John Casimir, Count Palatine, to their assistance, while the Catholics appealed to the Duke d’AlenÇon, and both put in an appearance, the latter seizing Maubeuge and working thence into the interior, while the former defeated Don John in a pitched battle and drove him back to Namur, where in a few months he died of chagrin and a broken heart, after making his nephew Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, his successor in the field.

Hell is the only name that can be applied to the unhappy land, the condition of which was not unlike that of Mexico in this year of enlightenment, 1915. The Renaissance and the Reformation together had extinguished both civilisation and culture over the greater part of Europe; war was everywhere and incessant, all principle had been abandoned and the ethical standards of society had disappeared. Slaughter, civil war, assassination, treason, and sacrilege howled through an ever-widening desolation and the end of the world seemed at hand. Fortunately, in a way, the outrageous career of the Protestants served as an impulse to union; their savagery in Ghent and Brussels somehow pulled the people of Belgium together and enabled Parma to win some small order out of the insane chaos. He began a new campaign, drove out the French, laid siege to the Calvinists in Ghent, and at last (the Prince of Orange having been assassinated at the instigation of Philip) broke down the last Protestant resistance in Brussels and Antwerp and for the moment restored peace over a deserted, ruined, and blood-stained land. And then Philip II died and dying abandoned the country he had received as the richest in Europe and left as the most miserable and poverty-stricken, handing it over to new rulers in the persons of his daughter Isabella and her husband, the Archduke Albert of Austria.

The great and happy and wealthy state created by the House of Burgundy had been utterly destroyed and irretrievably ruined. A new Protestant state had been formed from one fragment in the north, other portions were shortly to be incorporated in France, and the nine provinces that still remained out of the original seventeen were hardly more than a geographical abstraction. Half the great cities had been sacked and burned, the craftsmen and artisans were slaughtered or in exile, the cold and greedy Hollanders had seized (and were to retain by force or fraud) the vast commerce that once was the possession of Flanders and Brabant, agriculture had ceased, famine was universal, religion and mercy and education were memories, while the old civic spirit and the old freedom and independence were things of so long ago they were not even remembered.

To do them justice, the new sovereigns meant well by the exhausted country, but first of all they had set their hearts on the crushing of the Protestant Netherlands, and nine years of war set in which ended at last with the complete victory of the Dutch republic and its acknowledged independence. Then came the anomaly of twelve years of peace with the astonishing outburst of a genuine and brilliant if evanescent culture. Peace is a good foundation for industry, trade, and commerce, but the fact is unavoidable that the black ploughing and the red fertilising of a land by war frequently bring a luxuriant crop of those cultural products that have issue in character as they follow from it. Here in Flanders the years between the Peace of Antwerp in 1609 and the restoration of Spanish rule on the death of Albert in 1624, were opulent with all manner of civic and personal wealth in those lines that are cultural rather than material. It was a time of the restoration of religion through new monastic foundations, of the establishing of houses of mercy, of the building up of great universities, of the development of printing, of the production of great scientists and scholars, of a new era of painting. The University of Louvain dates from this time, the great printing-house of the Plantins and the Moretus, the art of Rubens and Vandyck.

It was all temporary, however, and ephemeral. Spain took charge once more, the Dutch continued their policy of commercial and religious aggression, the Thirty Years’ War drew the unfortunate provinces into its whirlpool; the war between France and Spain was largely fought on their territory, the war of France against the United Netherlands resulted in the seizure by the unsuccessful party—France—of Belgian territory as a salve to its wounded pride. Year after year Belgium was subject to renewed devastations; what the Protestants and Spaniards had left the French despoiled. Brussels, which had now become the richest and most splendid of the cities, was bombarded with red-hot cannon balls and almost wholly destroyed, sixteen churches and four thousand houses being burned, and the great city deprived of almost its last examples of the great art of the Middle Ages.

And so the wretched tale goes on, generation after generation. God alone knows how or why anything was left in Belgium, either of art or culture or character or religion, or even of the rudiments of civilisation. Still something did remain for destruction, as was proved a little later by the revolutionists of France and recently by the Prussians, both of whom have performed the final work quite perfectly. The Heart of Europe had been torn, lacerated, crushed, for one hundred and sixty years, and yet somehow it continued to beat on. A great Christian culture, a great congeries of Christian peoples, product of the splendid centuries from 1000 to 1500 A. D., had been destroyed and superseded by the very different force engendered by Renaissance and Reformation. If there are those who still, despite the blazing enlightenment of the last twelvemonth, retain any illusions as to the comparative beneficence of the two epochs, it would be well for them to consider in detail the annals and the peoples and the personalities of the Heart of Europe during the five centuries of mediÆvalism, and the same during the five centuries of the Renaissance and the Reformation. The contrast is striking, the revision of judgments unescapable, the lesson, immediately to be applied in the present crisis, pregnant of possible benefits.

With the Peace of Utrecht all that is now Belgium passed to the Emperor Charles VI, and Austrian dominion began. In contrast to the preceding horrors it was comparatively uneventful; while Prince Charles of Lorraine was governor the country was quiet and prosperous and a certain advance occurred on cultural lines. This enlightened prince deserves well of history in one respect at least, for, by an imperial decree he caused to be issued, it was solemnly asserted that a gentleman did not lose his status as such if he indulged in the practice of the arts or letters! Joseph II, who followed him, was a pedantic reformer of laudable intentions, who set himself to the perfecting of everything, both religious and secular, to the extreme irritation of his people who simply wanted to govern themselves and apparently cared little whether this were well done or ill. In the end the whole country broke up again in rebellion and disorder, the nobles leagued in one group under the Duke d’Arenberg, the lower classes in a second with a vulgar and noisy demagogue, Van der Noot, as its leader. Somehow or other they managed to get together at Breda, raised an army, defeated the Austrian garrisons, and drove the Emperor Joseph across the Meuse when he forthwith died of sheer discouragement.

Then followed a short-lived “republic” engineered by Van der Noot, who was an adherent of the new French ideas, with an attack on the nobles which was sufficiently successful to bring their party to an end. Next, the powers who looked most askance at the fast-growing revolution—England, Holland, and Prussia—united for the restoration of Austrian authority, on general principles, and the Emperor Leopold II, with their support, asserted, and then established his authority, capturing Namur and within two weeks occupying the whole country (which accepted him contentedly enough), driving the ambitious advocate with the revolutionary tendencies into a well-merited exile. Austria tried honestly enough to conciliate the country, but its temper and inclinations were otherwise, so France was asked to intervene, which she was not loath to do, sending Dumouriez to undertake the task. Badly beaten at first, he succeeded finally at Valmy and Jemappes, and the French Revolution assumed control. The cabal of assassins then in power in Paris decreed that Belgium should be saved, but that first she must be purged, and a choice assortment of thirty ruffians was sent to Brussels to see that this was done. A guillotine was set up at once, and clerics, nobles, and the wealthier merchants became its victims, while the patriot army, supported by the local revolutionists, acted after their kind and sacked the remaining churches, destroyed religious houses, and generally plundered whatever they safely could, i. e., whatever was unable to defend itself. Dumouriez countenanced none of this, but he was playing a double game, acting ostensibly for the cabal in Paris though with the idea always before him that if he could control Belgium and conquer Holland he would be in a good position from which to turn on his employers, crush them, and then restore the monarchy on constitutional lines. Unfortunately for his plans, he was defeated by the allies and again Austria won back her insecure provinces. She was received with the facile enthusiasm which now seemed chronic with the shattered Belgian character, but after a few months was driven out for the last time when France was finally victorious over the half-hearted, selfish, and ineffectual allies, only one of whom, England, was waging war against the republic with anything approaching sincerity and determination.

Again the French—or rather the republican faction—entered into possession, and unhappy Belgium felt the full force of its grinning hypocrisy, its satanic savagery, and its unscrupulous greed. “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” was painted on the walls, and simultaneously the country was robbed of its last coins, its laws and privileges were overthrown, its citizens deprived of even the most fundamental rights of liberty and property, while the few remaining abbeys and castles were sacked, burned, and their ruins razed to the ground. Alva had been an amateur compared with the new apostles of liberty, and when at last Belgium was declared regenerate and was incorporated in the French “republic,” nothing remained for incorporation except a name, a memory, and a huddle of entirely ruined and perfectly hopeless victims of four centuries of cumulative enlightenment and progress.

Of course they rebelled; of course whole groups of desperate men took to the forests and moors, robbing, killing, existing as best they could, and of course they were crushed again and again; at last, however, Bonaparte began to bring some order out of the republican anarchy, and conditions improved. When at last he proclaimed himself Emperor the Belgians accepted him with the same avidity they always had shown for any man who promised some alleviation of their intolerable sufferings. Holland was occupied and given a king of its own, Napoleon’s brother Louis, who was not only the strongest and finest character in the family, but so righteous in his kingship and so whole-heartedly devoted to his Dutch that he soon alienated the sympathies of his imperial brother while failing to gain those of his somewhat difficult subjects.

The dream empire began to dissolve; Holland revolted, and the Prince of Orange was restored; Belgium was occupied by the Allies, who had got to work again, and the scheme of a new state, to be formed of all the old seventeen provinces united under the Prince of Orange, was brought forward against the wishes of the Belgians, who preferred the restoration of Austrian rule. They had lived too close to their Protestant Dutch neighbours and had too keen a memory of their character and habits to desire amalgamation with them on any terms.

Napoleon went to Elba, came back, called on his “loyal Belgians” to support him, advanced into their territories, and at Waterloo lost everything and melted away into history and legend, leaving Belgium in unnatural union with the Dutch provinces, where it remained for some fifteen years, revolting in 1830, making good its rebellion, and establishing itself as an independent state under the sovereignty of Prince Leopold of Saxe-Cobourg, who had been elected King on the refusal of the Duc de Nemours, first chosen by the victorious provisional government.

The long agony was at an end; it had lasted from August 22, 1567, when the Duke of Alva entered Brussels, until July 21, 1831, when Leopold I was crowned King of Belgium, a period of two hundred and sixty-four years. Other peoples and other states have been brought low, time out of mind; have suffered, disintegrated, and disappeared. It would be hard to find another instance, however, where so fabulously rich a people, and so cultivated withal, so supreme in their achievement of a lofty and well-rounded civilisation, have been called upon to submit to so prolonged, varied, and searching an assault, to descend to such depths of misery, poverty, and degradation—and who yet have preserved through two centuries and a half of agony and spoliation a tradition and a habit of righteousness that, when the great test arrived, blazed upward in sudden fierceness of self-revelation to the confusion of new enemies and the wonder of a world. What lies beyond awaits the proof, but for the moment three centuries have dropped away and the old independence, the old fearlessness, the old honour of Bruges and Ghent, of LiÉge and Malines shine again on old battle-fields of new carnage and in new hearts of old righteousness. The new era begins, and the world waits, confident of the issue.