Dissident Identities in the Early Modern Low Countries

Alastair Duke, Andrew Spicer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351943482
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Alastair Duke has long been recognized as one of the leading scholars of the early modern Netherlands, known internationally for his important work on the impact of religious change on political events which was the focus of his Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries (1990). Bringing together an updated selection of his previously published essays - together with one entirely new chapter and two that appear in English here for the first time - this volume explores the emergence of new political and religious identities in the early modern Netherlands. Firstly it analyses the emergence of a common identity amongst the amorphous collection of states in north-western Europe that were united first under the rule of the Valois Dukes of Burgundy and later the Habsburg princes, and traces the fortunes of this notion during the political and religious conflicts that divided the Low Countries during the second half of the sixteenth century. A second group of essays considers the emergence of dissidence and opposition to the regime, and explores how this was expressed and disseminated through popular culture. Finally, the volume shows how in the age of confessionalisation and civil war, challenging issues of identity presented themselves to both dissenting groups and individuals. Taken together these essays demonstrate how these dissident identities shaped and contributed to the development of the Netherlands during the early modern period.

Chapter 1
The Elusive Netherlands: The Question of National Identity in the Early Modern Low Countries on the Eve of the Revolt¹

The question of whether the Burgundian-Habsburg Netherlands had acquired some sort of national identity before the Revolt has long tantalised Dutch and Belgian historians. This is small wonder. While the dukes of Burgundy and their Habsburg successors continued to accumulate new territories in this corner of northwest Europe, neither they nor their subjects seem to have had a clear idea of how these related to one another. Contemporaries seemed unsure what to call the ever expanding country or its inhabitants. Neither did they find it easy to define how the Low Countries stood in relation to France or the Holy Roman Empire.²

The Burgundian-Habsburg state was primarily a dynastic state. Insofar as the prince owed fealty to the king of France and to the Empire and his subjects could therefore appeal to "foreign' courts, his position as the fount of justice was notionally compromised. The Burgundians and their Habsburg successors had created central institutions, but the autonomy of the provinces, which was hedged about with extensive and distinctive privileges, ensured that they governed by negotiation rather than by princely fiat. Nor were the provinces themselves necessarily cohesive political units; a few indeed resembled mini-confederations, each part having its own representative body.³ In this respect, Holland may have been more unified than some, yet it was not until the late fifteenth century that the provincial states of that county became a representative body with which the ruler could do business.⁴ Even here, separatist sentiments still lingered as the revolt in West Friesland in the late 1580s showed.

The identity of the Low Countries was further muddied by contemporary debates about the correspondence between 'Gallia' and France and between 'Germania' and 'Deutschland'. In Antiquity the Rhine had separated Roman Gaul from 'Germania Magna', and the memory of that boundary survived into the sixteenth century, perpetuated by cartographers, who took Ptolemy as their guide. When French scholars claimed that the mantle of ancient Gaul had fallen on contemporary France, patriotic German humanists riposted by equating 'Deutschland' with the Holy Roman Empire.⁵ In this way, they could lay claim to the German-speaking territories west of the Rhine. This blurring between the Holy Roman Empire and 'Deutschland' had repercussions for the Low Countries. If the Germanic-speaking part of the region could readily be reckoned to the 'deutsche Landen', francophone provinces like Namur and Hainault found themselves in a sort of limbo. Indisputably, these provinces fell within the borders of the Holy Roman Empire, but it was a moot point whether their Walloon inhabitants could claim membership of the 'natio Germanica'.⁶ Erasmus once jested that because of where he was born, he did not know whether he was 'Gallus' or 'Germanus'; on that account he could be considered as two-headed, 'anceps'.⁷ And while language provided a plausible basis for the construction of nationality in late medieval England, as it did likewise in France, it was singularly unhelpful in the case of the Low Countries, which sat astride the Romano-Germanic linguistic fault line.⁸

Yet if the sixteenth-century Low Countries possessed no obvious 'natural' identity we also have to acknowledge that somehow these provinces jointly staged one of the very few successful rebellions in early modern Europe, and that seven of them managed to forge a new and prosperous Republic. This would suggest that there had emerged, by the 1560s and 1570s, just about enough cohesion in these lands to work together effectively. The first essays of this book explore how this may have come about.

I

It may be helpful to begin here with a brief survey of the historiographical background.⁹ Johan Huizinga's reflections about the 'prehistory' of the national idea in the Low Countries, which was first published in 1912. makes a good starting point. Huizinga was not the first to confront this question - Pirenne's Histoire de Belgique had begun to appear in 1900 - but the Groninger's essay provided (and still does) the best concise and most sensitive investigation of the provisional and unstable nature of this Netherlandish identity.¹⁰ Tentatively, he concluded that under the Burgundian dukes, the potential for a Netherlandish nationhood, embracing both the French and Dutch cultures, had existed. The loss, however, of first the duchy of Burgundy and the Somme towns after 1477, followed a century later by the secession of the northern provinces, severely curtailed that possibility. What emerged after the Revolt was not one, but two national political entities, following divergent paths. Alongside the Spanish Netherlands, which formed, as it were, the torso of the former Burgundian state,¹¹ there developed the politically freer United Provinces.¹²

Henri Pirenne also discerned the existence of a national Burgundian sentiment in the early modern period, the intensity of which fluctuated in accordance with the gravity of the political situation. The allegiance to Burgundy survived the succession of the Habsburg dynasty, yet after Charles V succeeded to the Spanish Crown, Pirenne discerned a deepening rift between the 'national' interest and the preoccupations of the dynasty. That rift became a gulf, when Philip II decided in 1567 to thrust an absolutist dominum regale on a country unaccustomed to princely Diktat. This provoked a widespread Revolt. Eventually the King's rebellious subjects in the southern provinces returned to their traditional obedience, but not before they exacted a price. In 1579, they obtained the restoration of the autonomy they had enjoyed before the arrival of Alba. In the words of Pirenne, 'the Spanish state capitulate[d] before the Burgundian state', although that triumph was to be short lived, as the administration of the 'obedient' provinces became steadily more 'hispanised' in the early seventeenth century.¹³

One generation later, Pieter Geyl's perspective was radically different. In 1909, two years before he graduated from Leiden, Geyl came under the influence of the Flemish Movement, which aspired to the creation of some sort of Greater Netherlands state embracing all Dutch speakers.¹⁴ If this encounter turned Geyl into a political engagé, as he freely admitted, it also liberated him from the straitjacket of what he called 'the little-Netherlands tradition in Dutch historiography'. Previously Dutch historians had regarded the United Provinces as the product of the Revolt, but they supposed that the Dutch nation antedated the birth of this state. For that reason, they saw the eventual division of the Low Countries as a natural and, indeed, inevitable outcome.¹⁵ While Huizinga had given particular attention to Burgundian court culture and Pirenne to the Burgundian-Habsburg state, Geyl concentrated on the fate of the Dutch-speaking community in the Low Countries, one-third of which found itself after 1609 in the Spanish Netherlands. He was haunted by the failure of this community, 'unlike the majority of other linguistic groups in Europe, ...to produce a state and a nation'.¹⁶

Geyl offered two explanations for the disruption of what he supposed was a natural process. He referred vaguely to a misfit between 'the national forces living in the [Dutch-speaking] people' and 'the state-building forces' directed by foreign dynastic rulers.¹⁷ Above all, he emphasised the arbitrary nature of the border between the Spanish Netherlands and the United Provinces. Since the eventual frontier left the Dutch-speaking community divided, it frustrated the possibility that a nation, based on the possession of a common language, might emerge in the future. The duke of Parma had been able to reconquer Flanders and Brabant for the Habsburgs in the 1580s, yet geography and conflicting military priorities had prevented him from proceeding to the recovery of Holland and Zeeland. Consequently, Flanders and Brabant found themselves marooned within a state whose upper echelons were francophone. Gradually, the vitality of the Dutch-speaking urban culture of these provinces drained away. When therefore in 1795, the Austrian Netherlands were incorporated into France, they were impotent to withstand the wholesale gallicisation of public life.

Despite some criticism, Geyl's concept of the 'greater Netherlands' was generally appreciated as a breath of fresh air because it supplanted the rather Whiggish notion of separate and distinctive Dutch and Belgian nations. The Belgian scholar Léon van der Essen roundly defended the ideal of the 'Greater Netherlands' in his essay on the 'historical solidarity of the Low Countries'.¹⁸ In the period after World War II, however, the 'Greater Netherlands' thesis has come under mounting criticism. There seemed to be no clear reason why language should be regarded as more important than, say, dynastic loyalty in explaining the growth of national sentiment. Moreover, by deliberately marginalising the Walloon provinces, Geyl made it harder to make sense of the history of the Spanish Netherlands. As the Spanish/Austrian Netherlands and the United Provinces drifted apart, his endeavours to treat the Dutch-speaking community as possessing any sort of entity seemed less plausible.¹⁹ When in the 1950s a new general history of the Low Countries was proposed, the editors opted for a 'Benelux' framework in order to take due account of all the communities in the Low Countries, including Wallonia. As some of Geyl's critics noted, this meant a return in part to the standpoint that Pirenne had adopted.²⁰

While scholars in recent decades have generally accepted that there is no point in projecting later linguistic or political divisions back to the sixteenth-century Low Countries, they have not resolved the question to what extent there in fact existed a joint identity in these territories. Historians working on the Revolt in the 1970s and 1980s were certainly sceptical whether for anyone outside the ruling elites, any such identity existed. Wim Smit concluded that because William of Orange's programme for his invasion in 1568 was built around 'privileges, toleration and patriotism' it was doomed: the sense of national consciousness was far too feeble to unify the disparate anti-government forces.²¹ And while Simon Groenveld discerned the faltering growth of a common Netherlandish sentiment during the Revolt, most evidently in the Beggars songs, he broadly shares Smit's scepticism about the situation before the outbreak ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• By Way of Introduction
• 1 The Elusive Netherlands: The Question of National Identity in the Early Modern Low Countries on the Eve of the Revolt
• 2 In Defence of the Common Fatherland: Patriotism and Liberty in the Low Countries, 1555-1576
• 3 Moulded by Repression: the Early Netherlands Reformation 1520-55
• 4 The 'Inquisition' and the Repression of Religious Dissent in the Habsburg Netherlands 1521-1566
• 5 A Legend in the Making: News of the 'Spanish Inquisition' in the Low Countries in German Evangelical Pamphlets, 1546-1550
• 6 Dissident Propaganda and Political Organisation at the Outbreak of the Revolt of the Netherlands
• 7 Posters, Pamphlets and Prints: The Ways and Means of Disseminating Dissident Opinions on the Eve of the Dutch Revolt
• 8 Calvinists and 'Papist Idolatry': The Mentality of the Image-breakers in 1566
• 9 Martyrs with a Difference: Dutch Anabaptist Victims of Elizabethan Persecution
• 10 The Search for Religious Identity in a Confessional Age: The Conversions of Jean Haren (c.1545-c.1613)
• 11 Calvinist Loyalism: Jean Haren, Chimay and the Demise of the Calvinist Republic of Bruges
• Bibliography
• Index