History of the United Netherlands, 1586c | Page 6

advocates and merchants, some Zeeland fly-boatsmen, and
six million men, women, and children, on the two sides of the North
Sea, who had the power of expressing their thoughts rather bluntly than
otherwise, in different dialects of old Anglo-Saxon speech.
Certainly it would be unjust and ungracious to disparage the heroism of
the great Queen when the hour of danger really came, nor would it be
legitimate for us, who can scan that momentous year of expectation,

1587, by the light of subsequent events and of secret contemporaneous
record, to censure or even sharply to criticise the royal hankering for
peace, when peace had really become impossible. But as we shall have
occasion to examine rather closely the secrets of the Spanish, French,
English, and Dutch councils, during this epoch, we are likely to find,
perhaps, that at least as great a debt is due to the English and Dutch
people, in mass, for the preservation of European liberty at that
disastrous epoch as to any sovereign, general, or statesman.
For it was in the great waters of the sixteenth century that the nations
whose eyes were open, discovered the fountain of perpetual youth,
while others, who were blind, passed rapidly onward to decrepitude.
England was, in many respects, a despotism so far as regarded
governmental forms; and no doubt the Catholics were treated with
greater rigour than could be justified even by the perpetual and most
dangerous machinations of the seminary priests and their instigators
against the throne and life of Elizabeth. The word liberty was never
musical in Tudor ears, yet Englishmen had blunt tongues and sharp
weapons which rarely rusted for want of use. In the presence of a
parliament, and the absence of a standing army, a people accustomed to
read the Bible in the vernacular, to handle great questions of religion
and government freely, and to bear arms at will, was most formidable
to despotism. There was an advance on the olden time. A Francis Drake,
a John Hawkins, a Roger Williams, might have been sold, under the
Plantagenets, like an ox or an ass. A 'female villain' in the reign of
Henry III. could have been purchased for eighteen shillings--hardly the
price of a fatted pig, and not one-third the value of an ambling
palfrey--and a male villain, such an one as could in Elizabeth's reign
circumnavigate the globe in his own ship, or take imperial
field-marshals by the beard, was worth but two or three pounds sterling
in the market. Here was progress in three centuries, for the villains
were now become admirals and generals in England and Holland, and
constituted the main stay of these two little commonwealths, while the
commanders who governed the 'invincible' fleets and armies of
omnipotent Spain, were all cousins of emperors, or grandees of bluest
blood. Perhaps the system of the reformation would not prove the least
effective in the impending crisis.
It was most important, then, that these two nations should be united in

council, and should stand shoulder to shoulder as their great enemy
advanced. But this was precisely what had been rendered almost
impossible by the course of events during Leicester's year of
administration, and by his sudden but not final retirement at its close.
The two great national parties which had gradually been forming, had
remained in a fluid state during the presence of the governor-general.
During his absence they gradually hardened into the forms which they
were destined to retain for centuries. In the history of civil liberty, these
incessant contests, these oral and written disquisitions, these sharp
concussions of opinion, and the still harder blows, which, unfortunately,
were dealt on a few occasions by the combatants upon each other, make
the year 1587 a memorable one. The great questions of the origin of
government, the balance of dynastic forces, the distribution of powers,
were dealt with by the ablest heads, both Dutch and English, that could
be employed in the service of the kingdom and republic. It was a war of
protocols, arguments, orations, rejoinders, apostilles, and pamphlets;
very wholesome for the cause of free institutions and the intellectual
progress of mankind. The reader may perhaps be surprised to see with
how much vigour and boldness the grave questions which underlie all
polity, were handled so many years before the days of Russell and
Sidney, of Montesquieu and Locke, Franklin, Jefferson, Rousseau, and
Voltaire; and he may be even more astonished to find exceedingly
democratic doctrines propounded, if not believed in, by trained
statesmen of the Elizabethan school. He will be also apt to wonder that
a more fitting time could not be found for such philosophical debate
than the epoch at which both the kingdom and the republic were called
upon to strain every sinew against the most formidable and aggressive
despotism