Decay And Dispersion Of The Geusen League

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_ Immediately after taking leave of his friend, the Prince of Gaure hastened back to Brussels, to receive from the regent the reward of his firmness, and there, in the excitement of the court and in the sunshine of his good fortune, to dispel the light cloud which the earnest warnings of the Prince of Orange had cast over his natural gayety. The flight of the latter now left him in possession of the stage. He had now no longer any rival in the republic to dim his glory. With redoubled zeal he wooed the transient favor of the court, above which he ought to have felt himself far exalted. All Brussels must participate in his joy. He gave splendid banquets and public entertainments, at which, the better to eradicate all suspicion from his mind, the regent herself frequently attended. Not content with having taken the required oath, he outstripped the most devout in devotion; outran the most zealous in zeal to extirpate the Protestant faith, and to reduce by force of arms the refractory towns of Flanders. He declared to his old friend, Count Hogstraten, as also to the rest of the Gueux, that he would withdraw from them his friendship forever if they hesitated any longer to return into the bosom of the church, and reconcile themselves with their king. All the confidential letters which had been exchanged between him and them were returned, and by this last step the breach between them was made public and irreparable. Egmont's secession, and the flight of the Prince of Orange, destroyed the last hope of the Protestants and dissolved the whole league of the Gueux. Its members vied with each other in readiness--nay, they could not soon enough abjure the covenant and take the new oath proposed to them by the government. In vain did the Protestant merchants exclaim at this breach of faith on the part of the nobles; their weak voice was no longer listened to, and all the sums were lost with which they had supplied the league.

The most important places were quickly reduced and garrisoned; the rebels had fled, or perished by the hand of the executioner; in the provinces no protector was left. All yielded to the fortune of the regent, and her victorious army was advancing against Antwerp. After a long and obstinate contest this town had been cleared of the worst rebels; Hermann and his adherents took to flight; the internal storms had spent their rage. The minds of the people became gradually composed, and no longer excited at will by every furious fanatic, began to listen to better counsels. The wealthier citizens earnestly longed for peace to revive commerce and trade, which had suffered severely from the long reign of anarchy. The dread of Alva's approach worked wonders; in order to prevent the miseries which a Spanish army would inflict upon the country, the people hastened to throw themselves on the gentler mercies of the regent. Of their own accord they despatched plenipotentiaries to Brussels to negotiate for a treaty and to hear her terms. Agreeably as the regent was surprised by this voluntary step, she did not allow herself to be hurried away by her joy. She declared that she neither could nor would listen to any overtures or representations until the town had received a garrison. Even this was no longer opposed, and Count Mansfeld marched in the day after with sixteen squadrons in battle array. A solemn treaty was now made between the town and duchess, by which the former bound itself to prohibit the Calvinistic form of worship, to banish all preachers of that persuasion, to restore the Roman Catholic religion to its former dignity, to decorate the despoiled churches with their former ornaments, to administer the old edicts as before, to take the new oath which the other towns had sworn to, and, lastly, to deliver into the hands of justice all who been guilty of treason, in bearing arms, or taking part in the desecration of the churches. On the other hand, the regent pledged herself to forget all that had passed, and even to intercede for the offenders with the king. All those who, being dubious of obtaining pardon, preferred banishment, were to be allowed a month to convert their property into money, and place themselves in safety. From this grace none were to be excluded but such as had been guilty of a capital offence, and who were excepted by the previous article. Immediately upon the conclusion of this treaty all Calvinist and Lutheran preachers in Antwerp, and the adjoining territory, were warned by the herald to quit the country within twenty-four hours. All the streets and gates were now thronged with fugitives, who for the honor of their God abandoned what was dearest to them, and sought a more peaceful home for their persecuted faith. Here husbands were taking an eternal farewell of their wives, fathers of their children; there whole families were preparing to depart. All Antwerp resembled a house of mourning; wherever the eye turned some affecting spectacle of painful separation presented itself. A seal was set on the doors of the Protestant churches; the whole worship seemed to be extinct. The 10th of April (1567) was the day appointed for the departure of the preachers. In the town hall, where they appeared for the last time to take leave of the magistrate, they could not command their grief; but broke forth into bitter reproaches. They had been sacrificed, they exclaimed, they had been shamefully betrayed; but a time would come when Antwerp would pay dearly enough for this baseness. Still more bitter were the complaints of the Lutheran clergy, whom the magistrate himself had invited into the country to preach against the Calvinists. Under the delusive representation that the king was not unfavorable to their religion they had been seduced into a combination against the Calvinists, but as soon as the latter had been by their co-operation brought under subjection, and their own services were no longer required, they were left to bewail their folly, which had involved themselves and their enemies in common ruin.

A few days afterwards the regent entered Antwerp in triumph, accompanied by a thousand Walloon horse, the Knights of the Golden Fleece, all the governors and counsellors, a number of municipal officers, and her whole court. Her first visit was to the cathedral, which still bore lamentable traces of the violence of the Iconoclasts, and drew from her many and bitter tears. Immediately afterwards four of the rebels, who had been overtaken in their flight, were brought in and executed in the public market-place. All the children who had been baptized after the Protestant rites were rebaptized by Roman Catholic priests; all the schools of heretics were closed, and their churches levelled to the ground. Nearly all the towns in the Netherlands followed the example of Antwerp and banished the Protestant preachers. By the end of April the Roman Catholic churches were repaired and embellished more splendidly than ever, while all the Protestant places of worship were pulled down, and every vestige of the proscribed belief obliterated in the seventeen provinces. The populace, whose sympathies are generally with the successful party, was now as active in accelerating the ruin of the unfortunate as a short time before it had been furiously zealous in its cause; in Ghent a large and beautiful church which the Calvinists had erected was attacked, and in less than an hour had wholly disappeared. From the beams of the roofless churches gibbets were erected for those who had profaned the sanctuaries of the Roman Catholics. The places of execution were filled with corpses, the prisons with condemned victims, the high roads with fugitives. Innumerable were the victims of this year of murder; in the smallest towns fifty at least, in several of the larger as many as three hundred, were put to death, while no account was kept of the numbers in the open country who fell into the hands of the provost-marshal and were immediately strung up as miscreants, without trial and without mercy.

The regent was still in Antwerp when ambassadors presented themselves from the Electors of Brandenburg, Saxony, Hesse, Wurtemberg, and Baden to intercede for their fugitive brethren in the faith. The expelled preachers of the Augsburg Confession had claimed the rights assured to them by the religious peace of the Germans, in which Brabant, as part of the empire, participated, and had thrown themselves on the protection of those princes. The arrival of the foreign ministers alarmed the regent, and she vainly endeavored to prevent their entrance into Antwerp; under the guise, however, of showing them marks of honor, she continued to keep them closely watched lest they should encourage the malcontents in any attempts against the peace of the town. From the high tone which they most unreasonably adopted towards the regent it might almost be inferred that they were little in earnest in their demand. "It was but reasonable," they said, "that the Confession of Augsburg, as the only one which met the spirit of the gospel, should be the ruling faith in the Netherlands; but to persecute it by such cruel edicts as were in force was positively unnatural and could not be allowed. They therefore required of the regent, in the name of religion, not to treat the people entrusted to her rule with such severity." She replied through the Count of Staremberg, her minister for German affairs, that such an exordium deserved no answer at all. From the sympathy which the German princes had shown for the Belgian fugitives it was clear that they gave less credit to the letters of the king, in explanation of his measures, than to the reports of a few worthless wretches who, in the desecrated churches, had left behind them a worthier memorial of their acts and characters. It would far more become them to leave to the King of Spain the care of his own subjects, and abandon the attempt to foster a spirit of rebellion in foreign countries, from which they would reap neither honor nor profit. The ambassadors left Antwerp in a few days without having effected anything. The Saxon minister, indeed, in a private interview with the regent even assured her that his master had most reluctantly taken this step.

The German ambassadors had not quitted Antwerp when intelligence from Holland completed the triumph of the regent. From fear of Count Megen Count Brederode had deserted his town of Viane, and with the aid of the Protestants inhabitants had succeeded in throwing himself into Amsterdam, where his arrival caused great alarm to the city magistrate, who had previously found difficulty in preventing a revolt, while it revived the courage of the Protestants. Here Brederode's adherents increased daily, and many noblemen flocked to him from Utrecht, Friesland, and Groningen, whence the victorious arms of Megen and Aremberg had driven them. Under various disguises they found means to steal into the city, where they gathered round Brederode, and served him as a strong body-guard. The regent, apprehensive of a new outbreak, sent one of her private secretaries, Jacob de la Torre, to the council of Amsterdam, and ordered them to get rid of Count Brederode on any terms and at any risk. Neither the magistrate nor de la Torre himself, who visited Brederode in person to acquaint him with the will of the duchess, could prevail upon him to depart. The secretary was even surprised in his own chamber by a party of Brederode's followers, and deprived of all his papers, and would, perhaps, have lost his life also if he had not contrived to make his escape. Brederode remained in Amsterdam a full month after this occurrence, a powerless idol of the Protestants, and an oppressive burden to the Roman Catholics; while his fine army, which he had left in Viane, reinforced by many fugitives from the southern provinces, gave Count Megen enough to do without attempting to harass the Protestants in their flight. At last Brederode resolved to follow the example of Orange, and, yielding to necessity, abandon a desperate cause. He informed the town council that he was willing to leave Amsterdam if they would enable him to do so by furnishing him with the pecuniary means. Glad to get quit of him, they hastened to borrow the money on the security of the town council. Brederode quitted Amsterdam the same night, and was conveyed in a gunboat as far as Vlie, from whence he fortunately escaped to Embden. Fate treated him more mildly than the majority of those he had implicated in his foolhardy enterprise; he died the year after, 1568, at one of his castles in Germany, from the effects of drinking, by which he sought ultimately to drown his grief and disappointments. His widow, Countess of Moers in her own right, was remarried to the Prince Palatine, Frederick III. The Protestant cause lost but little by his demise; the work which he had commenced, as it had not been kept alive by him, so it did not die with him.

The little army, which in his disgraceful flight he had deserted, was bold and valiant, and had a few resolute leaders. It disbanded, indeed, as soon as he, to whom it looked for pay, had fled; but hunger and courage kept its parts together some time longer. One body, under command of Dietrich of Battenburgh, marched to Amsterdam in the hope of carrying that town; but Count Megen hastened with thirteen companies of excellent troops to its relief, and compelled the rebels to give up the attempt. Contenting themselves with plundering the neighboring cloisters, among which the abbey of Egmont in particular was hardly dealt with, they turned off towards Waaterland, where they hoped the numerous swamps would protect them from pursuit. But thither Count Megen followed them, and compelled them in all haste to seek safety in the Zuyderzee. The brothers Van Battenburg, and two Friesan nobles, Beima and Galama, with a hundred and twenty men and the booty they had taken from the monasteries, embarked near the town of Hoorne, intending to cross to Friesland, but through the treachery of the steersman, who ran the vessel on a sand-bank near Harlingen, they fell into the hands of one of Aremberg's captains, who took them all prisoners. The Count of Aremberg immediately pronounced sentence upon all the captives of plebeian rank, but sent his noble prisoners to the regent, who caused seven of them to be beheaded. Seven others of the most noble, including the brothers Van Battenburg and some Frieslanders, all in the bloom of youth, were reserved for the Duke of Alva, to enable him to signalize the commencement of his administration by a deed which was in every way worthy of him. The troops in four other vessels which set sail from Medenhlick, and were pursued by Count Megen in small boats, were more successful. A contrary wind had forced them out of their course and driven them ashore on the coast of Gueldres, where they all got safe to land; crossing the Rhine, near Heusen, they fortunately escaped into Cleves, where they tore their flags in pieces and dispersed. In North Holland Count Megen overtook some squadrons who had lingered too long in plundering the cloisters, and completely overpowered them. He afterwards formed a junction with Noircarmes and garrisoned Amsterdam. The Duke Erich of Brunswick also surprised three companies, the last remains of the army of the Gueux, near Viane, where they were endeavoring to take a battery, routed them and captured their leader, Rennesse, who was shortly afterwards beheaded at the castle of Freudenburg, in Utrecht. Subsequently, when Duke Erich entered Viane, he found nothing but deserted streets, the inhabitants having left it with the garrison on the first alarm. He immediately razed the fortifications, and reduced this arsenal of the Gueux to an open town without defences. All the originators of the league were now dispersed; Brederode and Louis of Nassau had fled to Germany, and Counts Hogstraten, Bergen, and Kuilemberg had followed their example. Mansfeld had seceded, the brothers Van Battenburg awaited in prison an ignomonious fate, while Thoulouse alone had found an honorable death on the field of battle. Those of the confederates who had escaped the sword of the enemy and the axe of the executioner had saved nothing but their lives, and thus the title which they had assumed for show became at last a terrible reality.

Such was the inglorious end of the noble league, which in its beginning awakened such fair hopes and promised to become a powerful protection against oppression. Unanimity was its strength, distrust and internal dissension its ruin. It brought to light and developed many rare and beautiful virtues, but it wanted the most indispensable of all, prudence and moderation, without which any undertaking must miscarry, and all the fruits of the most laborious industry perish. If its objects had been as pure as it pretended, or even had they remained as pure as they really were at its first establishment, it might have defied the unfortunate combination of circumstances which prematurely overwhelmed it, and even if unsuccessful it would still have deserved an honorable mention in history. But it is too evident that the confederate nobles, whether directly or indirectly, took a greater share in the frantic excesses of the Iconoclasts than comported with the dignity and blamelessness of their confederation, and many among them openly exchanged their own good cause for the mad enterprise of these worthless vagabonds. The restriction of the Inquisition and a mitigation of the cruel inhumanity of the edicts must be laid to the credit of the league; but this transient relief was dearly purchased, at the cost of so many of the best and bravest citizens, who either lost their lives in the field, or in exile carried their wealth and industry to another quarter of the world; and of the presence of Alva and the Spanish arms. Many, too, of its peaceable citizens, who without its dangerous temptations would never have been seduced from the ranks of peace and order, were beguiled by the hope of success into the most culpable enterprises, and by their failure plunged into ruin and misery. But it cannot be denied that the league atoned in some measure for these wrongs by positive benefits. It brought together and emboldened many whom a selfish pusillanimity kept asunder and inactive; it diffused a salutary public spirit amongst the Belgian people, which the oppression of the government had almost entirely extinguished, and gave unanimity and a common voice to the scattered members of the nation, the absence of which alone makes despots bold. The attempt, indeed, failed, and the knots, too carelessly tied, were quickly unloosed; but it was through such failures that the nation was eventually to attain to a firm and lasting union, which should bid defiance to change.

The total destruction of the Geusen army quickly brought the Dutch towns also back to their obedience, and in the provinces there remained not a single place which had not submitted to the regent; but the increasing emigration, both of the natives and the foreign residents, threatened the country with depopulation. In Amsterdam the crowd of fugitives was so great that vessels were wanting to convey them across the North Sea and the Zuyderzee, and that flourishing emporium beheld with dismay the approaching downfall of its prosperity. Alarmed at this general flight, the regent hastened to write letters to all the towns, to encourage the citizens to remain, and by fair promises to revive a hope of better and milder measures. In the king's name she promised to all who would freely swear to obey the state and the church complete indemnity, and by public proclamation invited the fugitives to trust to the royal clemency and return to their homes. She engaged also to relieve the nation from the dreaded presence of a Spanish army, even if it were already on the frontiers; nay, she went so far as to drop hints that, if necessary, means might be found to prevent it by force from entering the provinces, as she was fully determined not to relinquish to another the glory of a peace which it had cost her so much labor to effect. Few, however, returned in reliance upon her word, and these few had cause to repent it in the sequel; many thousands had already quitted the country, and several thousands more quickly followed them. Germany and England were filled with Flemish emigrants, who, wherever they settled, retained their usages and manners, and even their costume, unwilling to come to the painful conclusion that they should never again see their native land, and to give up all hopes of return. Few carried with them any remains of their former affluence; the greater portion had to beg their way, and bestowed on their adopted country nothing but industrious skill and honest citizens.

And now the regent hastened to report to the king tidings such as, during her whole administration, she had never before been able to gratify him with. She announced to him that she had succeeded in restoring quiet throughout the provinces, and that she thought herself strong enough to maintain it. The sects were extirpated, and the Roman Catholic worship re-established in all its former splendor; the rebels had either already met with, or were awaiting in prison, the punishment they deserved; the towns were secured by adequate garrisons. There was therefore no necessity for sending Spanish troops into the Netherlands, and nothing to justify their entrance. Their arrival would tend to destroy the existing repose, which it had cost so much to establish, would check the much-desired revival of commerce and trade, and, while it would involve the country in new expenses, would at the same time deprive them of the only means of supporting them. The mere rumor of the approach of a Spanish army had stripped the country of many thousands of its most valuable citizens; its actual appearance would reduce it to a desert. As there was no longer any enemy to subdue, or rebellion to suppress, the people would see no motive for the march of this army but punishment and revenge, and under this supposition its arrival would neither be welcomed nor honored. No longer excused by necessity, this violent expedient would assume the odious aspect of oppression, would exasperate the national mind afresh, drive the Protestants to desperation, and arm their brethren in other countries in their defence. The regent, she said, had in the king's name promised the nation it should be relieved from this foreign army, and to this stipulation she was principally indebted for the present peace; she could not therefore guarantee its long continuance if her pledge was not faithfully fulfilled. The Netherlands would receive him as their sovereign, the king, with every mark of attachment and veneration, but he must come as a father to bless, not as a despot to chastise them. Let him come to enjoy the peace which she had bestowed on the country, but not to destroy it afresh. _

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