Dutch Society

1588-1713

John Price

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317889847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This fascinating new interpretation of Dutch society in the Golden Age is a major contribution to early modern history. Dutch society in this period was to a significant extent different from that of the rest of Europe. A high proportion of the population lived in the numerous towns and market forces had penetrated the whole economy and transformed every level of society. The heart of this book is a discussion of the processes by which this unique society was produced and an analysis of its character. These social changes are set against the late sixteenth century background and in the context of international, political and economic circumstances of the seventeenth century. In the final chapters the effects of the strains of war and a stagnant and faltering economy on Dutch society are outlined.

Part One
The Dutch Republic, 1588–1648

1
The Emergence of a New State

WHEN THE earl of Leicester left the Netherlands, his ambitions thwarted and his hopes disappointed, in the autumn of 1587 never to return, the situation of the rebels seemed if not hopeless then certainly extremely precarious. Since the peace with the Ottomans, effectively from 1578, and the absorption of Portugal at the beginning of the following decade, the Spanish monarchía had been able to concentrate its resources on the campaign in the Netherlands, and the advance of Parma’s army had come to seem virtually unstoppable. The inexperienced and poorly supplied English troops who had arrived in the Netherlands as a result of the treaty of Nonsuch (August 1585) had proved an ineffective foil to the veterans – regularly paid for once – of the Spanish Army of Flanders. The chances of survival for the rebel provinces were further weakened by internal divisions and political uncertainty. Although Willem of Orange’s grip had perhaps been slipping in his final years, his assassination nevertheless deprived the provinces of what little leadership they had. The sovereignty had been offered to Henri III of France and then to Elizabeth of England in vain, and Leicester’s period as governor-general seemed only to have further undermined the fragile political structure of the embryo state. The earl’s authority in the Netherlands had been fatally weakened from the start by Elizabeth’s angry disavowal of the quasi-sovereign powers he had accepted from the States General on his arrival, and his later attempts to strengthen his position, culminating in a failed coup in September 1587, only led to more confusion. Yet in little over a decade, the situation of the provinces had been transformed both internally and externally, and within another ten years the truce of 1609 was negotiated on the basis of almost complete equality between the Dutch and the Spanish. Just over twenty years after Leicester’s departure, the Dutch Republic had effectively achieved its independence.

1589–1609: Foundation

One of the initial reasons for Dutch survival, if not for the degree of its success, was the diversion of the Spanish military effort. Financial support for the army of Flanders had perhaps not been over-generous in the 1580s but it had been regular,¹ and this had been the prime basis of Parma’s success. From 1588 onwards, however, Philip II felt compelled to adopt other priorities. Firstly, the Armada campaign against England not only swallowed up an enormous amount of resources, but also the need to keep a force ready for transport to England hamstrung Parma’s military actions in 1588. Spanish impetus was regained somewhat in the following year, notably with the taking of Geertruidenberg, but in 1590 the army was diverted to intervention in France and this remained its main task until the peace of Vervins in 1598. By the time the Spanish were again able to concentrate on the situation in the Netherlands they found that they had to face an altogether more formidable opponent.

The slackening of Spanish pressure from 1588 onwards gave the Dutch a breathing space in which to turn a collection of squabbling rebel provinces into a viable new state. In these ten years, first highlighted by the eminent Dutch historian Fruin in the last century,² a way was found of making the political system work and, which was in the circumstances equally necessary, the army of the States was turned into one of the most effective military organisations of the time. The chief architect of the Dutch state was Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, who had been appointed Advocaat van den Lande of Holland in 1585 and used this basis to become the effective leader of the Dutch Republic until his fall in 1618.³ The key to his success was that he went with the grain of provincial particularism rather than trying to override it. As Advocaat he was formally only an appointed official of the States of Holland, its legal adviser, but in fact he became the political leader of the province, and the system he created established the predominance of this province in the Republic as a whole.

The States General, where Holland could make its economic strength felt, became effectively the centre of government, taking the place of the Council of State ([Raad van State) through which Leicester had tried to govern the country. Seven provinces – Gelderland, Holland, Zeeland, Friesland, Utrecht, Overijssel and Groningen – were represented in the States General and each had only one vote in the assembly. However, unanimity was necessary on important matters and so a majority vote in the States General could not force Holland to accept any policy it did not want to support, while the financial strength of this province ensured that nothing could be done without its backing. Holland’s nominal share in the budget of the state was nearly 60 per cent, but in these early years – with Gelderland, Groningen and Overijssel in the front line of the war and able to contribute little to the central treasury – its real contribution was even greater. Working through the States General enabled Holland to use its fiscal superiority to establish its political leadership and prevented it from being outvoted by the lesser provinces. As one of Holland’s representatives in the States General and especially on the various committees which effectively took most of the decisions, Oldenbarnevelt was able to gain invaluable experience and expertise, which helped him in time to achieve unrivalled political authority in the new state. This system of government seems to have been acceptable to the other provinces as they knew they needed Holland to survive and, while the insistence on provincial autonomy ensured that the politics of the Republic were dominated by Holland, the same principle provided the other provinces with some protection against their powerful ally. They too had their vetos, though in practice these were not as effective as Holland’s, and they could run their own internal affairs very largely without interference, and this effective provincial autonomy was quite possibly a more important point for most of their regents.

As far as the war effort, and thus the survival of the new state, was concerned the construction of a fiscal system which could provide enough money to pay for the armed forces was an indispensable part of the creation of a workable state. Although money remained short, and squaring the fiscal circle required extreme ingenuity at times, Oldenbarnevelt and his collaborators managed to bring order and a degree of efficiency to the Republic’s finances despite the insatiable demands of the war. That this was possible was only in part the result of skilful administration, more fundamental was the resurgence of the Dutch economy in these years: it has been argued that it was just in this period that the take-off to economic dominance in Europe occurred.⁴ While it might be doubted that such a precise timing of Dutch economic development is possible, it is nevertheless reasonably clear that the economic growth of the pre-Revolt years was renewed with increasing vigour from the 1580s onwards, particularly in Holland. The consequent increase in prosperity provided not only a sound tax-base, but helped to ensure the success of the loans floated by the States of Holland to finance the war. A combination of a plentiful supply of capital and confidence in the soundness of Holland’s finances meant that these loans could be floated at relatively modest rates of interest. At this stage, even more than later, the capacity of the Dutch Republic to continue to fight the war against Spain depended on Holland: on its tax payers, its ability to borrow relatively cheaply, and thus fundamentally on the health of its economy. The political dominance of the leading province in these years was a more or less just reflection of its economic and hence fiscal importance.

The political and fiscal consolidation of the new state was the necessary precondition for the vital task of reorganisation and modernisation of the Army of the Republic which was carried out by Willem of Orange’s son, count Maurits, and his cousin, the stadhouder of Friesland, Willem Lodewijk. By the beginning of the new century, the Dutch army had become one of the most efficient military organisations in Europe, and was able to match in quality even the veterans of the Army of Flanders.⁵ Besides the introduction of smaller units of manoeuvre, the improved training in tactics and weapon-handling, and deployment of the infantry in line to maximise fire-power, perhaps the most important development was the improvement in military discipline. In the main, the Dutch army did not fight battles – Nieuwpoort (1600) and perhaps Turnhout (1597) are the only notable ones in the whole period up to 1609 – but skirmishes and above all sieges, and here detailed and methodical planning by the leadership and disciplined conduct by the troops were of central importance. Underlying all this, however, was pay; what distinguished the Dutch army from all others of the period, and particularly from its Spanish opponent, was the regularity of its pay Whereas mutinies over lack of pay were frequent in the Army of Flanders,⁶ the Dutch, although sorely tried at times, were in the main able to pay their troops more or less in full and on time. Without this financial support, the strategic and tactical innovations would have been able to achieve little. The number of troops in the pay of the States General increased rapidly in the decade after 1588, and continued to grow in the first years of the new century from over 30,000 in 1595 to a peak of around 51,000 at the time of the cease-fire in 1607.⁷ If local defence forces and the continuing naval effort are also taken into account, it is clear that by this time the Republic was able to sustain formidable armed forces.

With the Spanish army diverted into France, the Dutch began to consolidate the territorial base of their new state. The first important success came in 1590 with the taking of Breda, and in the following year Deventer, Zutphen and Nijmegen followed. In 1593 Geertruidenberg in the far south of Holland was retaken – it had been betrayed to the Spanish in 1589 – and in 1594 the fall of Groningen secured the northeast of the country. The eastern border was strengthened in 1597 by the taking of Ootmarsum, Enschedé and Groenlo, and by the end of the decade not only Holland and Zeeland but also Friesland, Groningen, Utrecht and substantial parts of Overijssel and Gelderland were firmly under Dutch control. The Hollandse tuin (the garden of Holland) was indeed firmly fenced in, but more importantly the territory of the new state as a whole had been very largely cleared of Spanish troops and the geographical shape of the Republic was at last becoming evident. After the peace of Vervins in 1598 which brought the war in France to an end, the Spanish were able to mount a new effort in the Netherlands but, despite some spectacular successes, such as the taking of Ostend in 1604 and the surprise of Groenlo in 1606, all the skill of the new Spanish general Spinola could do little more than dent the position which the Dutch had built up in the 1590s, and the cease-fire of 1607 marked a recognition on both sides that something like a stalemate had developed.

In these years the conflict between Spain and the new Dutch state also began to spread outside Europe. Up to this point merchants in the Netherlands had been happy to buy their spices and other Asian goods on the Lisbon market, but the Spanish embargoes of 1585–90 and 1598–1608 on trade with the rebel provinces also closed Portuguese ports to the Dutch. Consequently Dutch merchants had an incentive to open up direct trade with Asia, and the later Dutch colonial empire had its origins in the first expeditions of Dutch traders to the East Indies in the 1590s. Within a few years the Dutch presence in the East was so considerable – and the competition between rival Dutch companies so fierce – that it became expedient to found a chartered monopoly company to control trade with the region. The aim of the VOC (Vereenigde Oost-indische Compagnie, i.e. United East India Company), which was given its charter by the States General in 1602, was to give direction to the overall Dutch effort in the Indies, and to ensure that internecine rivalry did not force prices up in the East or down in Europe. The company needed a monopoly because of the expense of building up an infrastructure in the Indies and also because of the costs involved in undermining the established position of the Portuguese. The latter were a particular target, not only because of their dominance of the sea-borne spice trade to Europe, but also because they had become a part of the Spanish monarchía when Philip II enforced his claim to the Portuguese crown in 1580. The struggle for trade in the Indies thus came to have considerable strategic significance as part of the war against Spain: the VOC’s campaign in Indonesia especially began to divert the profits of the spice trade away from Iberia and towards the Republic, and ensured that the already over-stretched Spanish military and naval resources would be further drained by attempting to protect the Portuguese position in the East. These developments also began to build up a powerful vested interest in the continued progress of the VOC, and thus made an overall settlement with Spain even more difficult to achieve. Dutch traders and privateers were also beginning to make an impact on the Caribbean and the Americas in general, which necessarily brought them into conflict with Spanish interests. These activities, too, created problems in the negotiations with Spain.

The inconclusive warfare of the first years of the new century strengthened the case of those on both sides who favoured a negotiated settlement. For the Spanish, confidence in an ultimate victory was waning, and the strains of the long years of warfare on this and other fronts was beginning to tell. The monarchía was in what seemed at times to be a permanent fiscal crisis, and the military organisation was beginning to collapse under the weight of the demands made upon it, leading to what might be called a devolution of responsibility or a privatisation of various aspects of the military effort by the end of the sixteenth century.⁸ After the death of Philip II in 1598, the Spanish-controlled Netherlands had been granted a considerable degree of autonomy under the archduke Albert and here the desire to end what was seen as a futile and yet damaging war was particularly strong. On the Dutch side, the arguments of those who stressed the inordinate cost of the war and claimed that it was blocking the full development of the Dutch economy became more persuasive. This was particularly true for Holland: this province was the economic power-house of the Republic, had to pay for most of the costs of the war, and yet the conflict seemed to be getting nowhere at very great expense. Many leading politicians, and merchants as well, began to ask themselves what was the purpose of the war. For some, undoubtedly, the urge to free the South from Spanish occupation was still strong, but probably most inhabitants of the new state had lost interest in further conquests once their own province had been secured – or, at most, when the North as a whole had been freed of Spanish troops. In the end, Oldenbarnevelt took the lead in the movement working for peace and pushed through first the cease-fire of 1607 and then the Twelve Years Truce of 1609.

There was opposition to this peace policy from various quarters, however, most importantly from the ranks of orthodox calvinists and from count Maurits, both of them crucial foreshadowings of the future pattern of Dutch politics under the Republic. The motives of Maurits are difficult to assess. He clearly had a strong personal interest both in the continuation of the war and in opposing Oldenbarnevelt: as leader of the Republic’s army, his importance would undoubtedly be diminished in peace-time; and as stadhouder of most of the provinces he may have come to resent the enormous authority which the Advocaat had acquired by this time. What had been tolerable to the younger and inexperienced Maurits was no longer, perhaps, acceptable now he had a long series of military successes behind him, and was beginning to be aware of the political potential of the combination of offices and positions which he held in the army and the various provinces. On the other hand, he may well have been perfectly sincere in his distrust of the peace and of the Spanish; he would not have been the only one to fear that a truce would only give Spain the opportunity to recuperate, with the intention of attacking the Republic at a later and more opportune moment. The Spanish were still regarded as the greatest power in Europe and thus an ever present and formidable threat; the Republic, it was argued, could not afford any let up in the pressure it was putting on them – after all, if they were ready to enter serious negotiations for peace, they must be weakening and thus vulnerable to a final Dutch effort.

Such attitudes had their emotional side, but were essentially based on practical considerations; the other main element in the campaign against the truce was ideological in nature and considerably more emotion-driven. For many of the calvinists in the country – still in all probability a minority of the population as a whole, but a highly influential one – the war against Spain was part of the apocalyptic struggle between the forc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction The Northern Netherlands in the late Sixteenth Century
• Part One The Dutch Republic, 1588–1648
• Part Two Apogee and the Portents of Decline, 1648–1713
• Bibliography
• Index