The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 | Page 2

Holland, England, and America, are all links of one
chain.
To the Dutch Republic, even more than to Florence at an earlier day, is
the world indebted for practical instruction in that great science of
political equilibrium which must always become more and more

important as the various states of the civilized world are pressed more
closely together, and as the struggle for pre-eminence becomes more
feverish and fatal. Courage and skill in political and military
combinations enabled William the Silent to overcome the most
powerful and unscrupulous monarch of his age. The same hereditary
audacity and fertility of genius placed the destiny of Europe in the
hands of William's great-grandson, and enabled him to mould into an
impregnable barrier the various elements of opposition to the
overshadowing monarchy of Louis XIV. As the schemes of the
Inquisition and the unparalleled tyranny of Philip, in one century, led to
the establishment of the Republic of the United Provinces, so, in the
next, the revocation of the Nantes Edict and the invasion of Holland are
avenged by the elevation of the Dutch stadholder upon the throne of the
stipendiary Stuarts.
To all who speak the English language; the history of the great agony
through which the Republic of Holland was ushered into life must have
peculiar interest, for it is a portion of the records of the Anglo-Saxon
race--essentially the same, whether in Friesland, England, or
Massachusetts.
A great naval and commercial commonwealth, occupying a small
portion of Europe but conquering a wide empire by the private
enterprise of trading companies, girdling the world with its
innumerable dependencies in Asia, America, Africa,
Australia--exercising sovereignty in Brazil, Guiana, the West Indies,
New York, at the Cape of Good Hope, in Hindostan, Ceylon, Java,
Sumatra, New Holland--having first laid together, as it were, many of
the Cyclopean blocks, out of which the British realm, at a late: period,
has been constructed--must always be looked upon with interest by
Englishmen, as in a great measure the precursor in their own scheme of
empire.
For America the spectacle is one of still deeper import. The Dutch
Republic originated in the opposition of the rational elements of human
nature to sacerdotal dogmatism and persecution--in the courageous
resistance of historical and chartered liberty to foreign despotism.
Neither that liberty nor ours was born of the cloud-embraces of a false
Divinity with, a Humanity of impossible beauty, nor was the infant
career of either arrested in blood and tears by the madness of its

worshippers. "To maintain," not to overthrow, was the device of the
Washington of the sixteenth century, as it was the aim of our own hero
and his great contemporaries.
The great Western Republic, therefore--in whose Anglo-Saxon veins
flows much of that ancient and kindred blood received from the nation
once ruling a noble portion of its territory, and tracking its own
political existence to the same parent spring of temperate human
liberty--must look with affectionate interest upon the trials of the elder
commonwealth. These volumes recite the achievement of Dutch
independence, for its recognition was delayed till the acknowledgment
was superfluous and ridiculous. The existence of the Republic is
properly to be dated from the Union of Utrecht in 1581, while the final
separation of territory into independent and obedient provinces, into the
Commonwealth of the United States and the Belgian provinces of
Spain, was in reality effected by William the Silent, with whose death
three years subsequently, the heroic period of the history may be said to
terminate. At this point these volumes close. Another series, with less
attention to minute details, and carrying the story through a longer
range of years, will paint the progress of the Republic in its palmy days,
and narrate the establishment of, its external system of dependencies
and its interior combinations for self-government and European
counterpoise. The lessons of history and the fate of free states can never
be sufficiently pondered by those upon whom so large and heavy a
responsibility for the maintenance of rational human freedom rests.
I have only to add that this work is the result of conscientious research,
and of an earnest desire to arrive at the truth. I have faithfully studied
al1 the important contemporary chroniclers and later historians--Dutch,
Flemish, French, Italian, Spanish, or German. Catholic and Protestant,
Monarchist and Republican, have been consulted with the same
sincerity. The works of Bor (whose enormous but indispensable folios
form a complete magazine of contemporary state- papers, letters, and
pamphlets, blended together in mass, and connected by a chain of
artless but earnest narrative), of Meteren, De Thou, Burgundius,
Heuterus; Tassis, Viglius, Hoofd, Haraeus, Van der Haer, Grotius-of
Van der Vynckt, Wagenaer, Van Wyn, De Jonghe, Kluit, Van Kampen,
Dewez, Kappelle, Bakhuyzen, Groen van Prinsterer--of Ranke and
Raumer, have been as familiar to me as