The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555 | Page 7

whole
assemblie, stranger or another, that dewring the time of a good piece of
his oration poured not out as abundantly teares, some more, some lesse.
And yet he prayed them to beare with his imperfections, proceeding of
his sickly age, and of the mentioning of so tender a matter as the
departing from such a sort of dere and loving subjects."
And yet what was the Emperor Charles to the inhabitants of the
Netherlands that they should weep for him? His conduct towards them
during his whole career had been one of unmitigated oppression. What
to them were all these forty voyages by sea and land, these journeyings
back and forth from Friesland to Tunis, from Madrid to Vienna. What
was it to them that the imperial shuttle was thus industriously flying to
and fro? The fabric wrought was but the daily growing grandeur and
splendor of his imperial house; the looms were kept moving at the

expense of their hardly-earned treasure, and the woof was often dyed
red in the blood of his bravest subjects. The interests of the Netherlands
had never been even a secondary consideration with their master. He
had fulfilled no duty towards them, he had committed the gravest
crimes against them. He had regarded them merely as a treasury upon
which to draw; while the sums which he extorted were spent upon
ceaseless and senseless wars, which were of no more interest to them
than if they had been waged in another planet. Of five millions of gold
annually, which he derived from all his realms, two millions came from
these industrious and opulent provinces, while but a half million came
from Spain and another half from the Indies. The mines of wealth
which had been opened by the hand of industry in that slender territory
of ancient morass and thicket, contributed four times as much income
to the imperial exchequer as all the boasted wealth of Mexico and Peru.
Yet the artisans, the farmers and the merchants, by whom these riches
were produced, were consulted about as much in the expenditure of the
imposts upon their industry as were the savages of America as to the
distribution of the mineral treasures of their soil. The rivalry of the
houses of Habsburg and Valois, this was the absorbing theme, during
the greater part of the reign which had just been so dramatically
terminated. To gain the empire over Francis, to leave to Don Philip a
richer heritage than the Dauphin could expect, were the great motives
of the unparalleled energy displayed by Charles during the longer and
the more successful portion of his career. To crush the Reformation
throughout his dominions, was his occupation afterward, till he
abandoned the field in despair. It was certainly not desirable for the
Netherlanders that they should be thus controlled by a man who forced
them to contribute so largely to the success of schemes, some of which
were at best indifferent, and others entirely odious to them. They paid
1,200,000 crowns a year regularly; they paid in five years an
extraordinary subsidy of eight millions of ducats, and the States were
roundly rebuked by the courtly representatives of their despot, if they
presumed to inquire into the objects of the appropriations, or to express
an interest in their judicious administration. Yet it maybe supposed to
have been a matter of indifference to them whether Francis or Charles
had won the day at Pavia, and it certainly was not a cause of triumph to
the daily increasing thousands of religious reformers in Holland and

Flanders that their brethren had been crushed by the Emperor at
Muhlberg. But it was not alone that he drained their treasure, and
hampered their industry. He was in constant conflict with their ancient
and dearly- bought political liberties. Like his ancestor Charles the
Bold, he was desirous of constructing a kingdom out of the provinces.
He was disposed to place all their separate and individual charters on a
procrustean bed, and shape them all into uniformity simply by reducing
the whole to a nullity. The difficulties in the way, the stout opposition
offered by burghers, whose fathers had gained these charters with their
blood, and his want of leisure during the vast labors which devolved
upon him as the autocrat of so large a portion of the world, caused him
to defer indefinitely the execution of his plan. He found time only to
crush some of the foremost of the liberal institutions of the provinces,
in detail. He found the city of Tournay a happy, thriving, self-governed
little republic in all its local affairs; he destroyed its liberties, without a
tolerable pretext, and reduced it to the condition of a Spanish or Italian
provincial town.
His memorable chastisement of Ghent for having dared to assert