The History of the Revolt of the Netherlands | Page 5

her terrible element, the sea itself,
leaguing with her oppressors, threatened her very infancy with a
premature grave. She felt herself succumb to the superior force of the
enemy, and cast herself a suppliant before the most powerful thrones of
Europe, begging them to accept a dominion which she herself could no
longer protect. At last, but with difficulty--so despised at first was this
state that even the rapacity of foreign monarchs spurned her opening
bloom--a stranger deigned to accept their importunate offer of a
dangerous crown. New hopes began to revive her sinking courage; but
in this new father of his country destiny gave her a traitor, and in the
critical emergency, when the foe was in full force before her very gates,
Charles of Anjou invaded the liberties which he had been called to
protect. In the midst of the tempest, too, the assassin's hand tore the
steersman from the helm, and with William of Orange the career of the
infant republic was seemingly at an end, and all her guardian angels
fled. But the ship continued to scud along before the storm, and the
swelling canvas carried her safe without the pilot's help.
Philip II. missed the fruits of a deed which cost him his royal honor,
and perhaps, also, his self-respect. Liberty struggled on still with
despotism in obstinate and dubious contest; sanguinary battles were
fought; a brilliant array of heroes succeeded each other on the field of
glory, and Flanders and Brabant were the schools which educated
generals for the coming century. A long, devastating war laid waste the
open country; victor and vanquished alike waded through blood; while
the rising republic of the waters gave a welcome to fugitive industry,
and out of the ruins of despotism erected the noble edifice of its own
greatness. For forty years lasted the war whose happy termination was
not to bless the dying eye of Philip; which destroyed one paradise in
Europe to form a new one out of its shattered fragments; which
destroyed the choicest flower of military youth, and while it enriched
more than a quarter of the globe impoverished the possessor of the
golden Peru. This monarch, who could expend nine hundred tons of
gold without oppressing his subjects, and by tyrannical measures
extorted far more, heaped, moreover, on his exhausted people a debt of

one hundred and forty millions of ducats. An implacable hatred of
liberty swallowed up all these treasures, and consumed on the fruitless
task the labor of a royal life. But the Reformation throve amidst the
devastations of the sword, and over the blood of her citizens the banner
of the new republic floated victorious.
This improbable turn of affairs seems to border on a miracle; many
circumstances, however, combined to break the power of Philip, and to
favor the progress of the infant state. Had the whole weight of his
power fallen on the United Provinces there had been no hope for their
religion or their liberty. His own ambition, by tempting him to divide
his strength, came to the aid of their weakness. The expensive policy of
maintaining traitors in every cabinet of Europe; the support of the
League in France; the revolt of the Moors in Granada; the conquest of
Portugal, and the magnificent fabric of the Escurial, drained at last his
apparently inexhaustible treasury, and prevented his acting in the field
with spirit and energy. The German and Italian troops, whom the hope
of gain alone allured to his banner, mutinied when he could no longer
pay them, and faithlessly abandoned their leaders in the decisive
moment of action. These terrible instruments of oppression now turned
their dangerous power against their employer, and wreaked their
vindictive rage on the provinces which remained faithful to him. The
unfortunate armament against England, on which, like a desperate
gamester, he had staked the whole strength of his kingdom, completed
his ruin; with the armada sank the wealth of the two Indies, and the
flower of Spanish chivalry.
But in the very same proportion that the Spanish power declined the
republic rose in fresh vigor. The ravages which the fanaticism of the
new religion, the tyranny of the Inquisition, the furious rapacity of the
soldiery, and the miseries of a long war unbroken by any interval of
peace, made in the provinces of Brabant, Flanders, and Hainault, at
once the arsenals and the magazines of this expensive contest, naturally
rendered it every year more difficult to support and recruit the royal
armies. The Catholic Netherlands had already lost a million of citizens,
and the trodden fields maintained their husbandmen no longer. Spain
itself had but few more men to spare. That country, surprised by a

sudden affluence which brought idleness with it, had lost much of its
population, and could not long