The Revolt of The Netherlands, book 2 | Page 6

and theologians, who
were to support the Inquisition and the bishop in his spiritual office. Of
these, the two who were most deserving by knowledge, experience, and
unblemished life were to be constituted actual inquisitors, and to have
the first voice in the Synods. To the Archbishop of Malines, as
metropolitan of all the seventeen provinces, the full authority was given
to appoint, or at discretion depose, archbishops and bishops; and the
Romish See was only to give its ratification to his acts.
At any other period the nation would have received with gratitude and
approved of such a measure of church reform since it was fully called
for by circumstances, was conducive to the interests of religion, and
absolutely indispensable for the moral reformation of the monkhood.
Now the temper of the times saw in it nothing but a hateful change.
Universal was the indignation with which it was received. A cry was
raised that the constitution was trampled under foot, the rights of the
nation violated, and that the Inquisition was already at the door, and
would soon open here, as in Spain, its bloody tribunal. The people
beheld with dismay these new servants of arbitrary power and of
persecution. The nobility saw in it nothing but a strengthening of the
royal authority by the addition of fourteen votes in the states' assembly,
and a withdrawal of the firmest prop of their freedom, the balance of
the royal and the civil power. The old bishops complained of the
diminution of their incomes and the circumscription of their sees; the
abbots and monks had not only lost power and income, but had

received in exchange rigid censors of their morals. Noble and simple,
laity and clergy, united against the common foe, and while all singly
struggled for some petty private interest, the cry appeared to come from
the formidable voice of patriotism.
Among all the provinces Brabant was loudest in its opposition. The
inviolability of its church constitution was one of the important
privileges which it had reserved in the remarkable charter of the "Joyful
Entry,"--statutes which the sovereign could not violate without
releasing the nation from its allegiance to him. In vain did the
university of Louvain assert that in disturbed times of the church a
privilege lost its power which had been granted in the period of its
tranquillity. The introduction of the new bishoprics into the constitution
was thought to shake the whole fabric of liberty. The prelacies, which
were now transferred to the bishops, must henceforth serve another rule
than the advantage of the province of whose states they had been
members. The once free patriotic citizens were to be instruments of the
Romish See and obedient tools of the archbishop, who again, as first
prelate of Brabant, had the immediate control over them. The freedom
of voting was gone, because the bishops, as servile spies of the crown,
made every one fearful. "Who," it was asked, "will after this venture to
raise his voice in parliament before such observers, or in their presence
dare to protect the rights of the nation against the rapacious hands of
the government? They will trace out the resources of the provinces, and
betray to the crown the secrets of our freedom and our property. They
will obstruct the way to all offices of honor; we shall soon see the
courtiers of the king succeed the present men; the children of foreigners
will, for the future, fill the parliament, and the private interest of their
patron will guide their venal votes." "What an act of oppression,"
rejoined the monks, "to pervert to other objects the pious designs of our
holy institutions, to contemn the inviolable wishes of the dead, and to
take that which a devout charity had deposited in our chests for the
relief of the unfortunate and make it subservient to the luxury of the
bishops, thus inflating their arrogant pomp with the plunder of the
poor?" Not only the abbots and monks, who really did suffer by this act
of appropriation, but every family which could flatter itself with the
slightest hope of enjoying, at some time or other, even in the most
remote posterity, the benefit of this monastic foundation, felt this

disappointment of their distant expectations as much as if they had
suffered an actual injury, and the wrongs of a few abbot-prelates
became the concern of a whole nation.
Historians have not omitted to record the covert proceedings of
William of Orange during this general commotion, who labored to
conduct to one end these various and conflicting passions. At his
instigation the people of Brabant petitioned the regent for an advocate
and protector, since they alone, of all his Flemish subjects, had the
misfortune to unite, in one and the same person, their counsel and