a bit of religion

I haven’t talked a whole lot about the religious conflict in the Spanish Netherlands, or at least not about how it started, so I thought I’d go into that a bit, especially because it ties in pretty nicely with at least Mia’s topic.

For a background on religious matters in the Low Countries, I found it helpful to look at Hendrick Willem van Loon’s book The Fall of the Dutch Republic, which seems to be more accurately the Rise and Fall of the Dutch Republic, considering it begins its narrative in the very early middle ages. According to van Loon, “the inhabitants of the Low Countries had always been good Catholics. More than that, they had been intensely and almost puritanically interested in religious matters.” Apparently, to “the average Latin mind of the sixteenth century, the Church was a sort of general club to which you belonged as a matter of course, which baptized you and which buried you and kept a record of your marriage, but which otherwise was not expected to interfere with the agreeable pursuits of your daily life.” On the other hand, “here in the north, in the depressing and serious atmosphere of a country lower than sea-level, religion had always been taken with a terrible amount of seriousness. The easy-going and superficial mind of the Latin races was a horror to the heavy and plodding mind of the Hollander. He took his religion seriously because he took everything in life seriously.”

Such a description is interesting in its own right, but it also seems to mean that, when the 16th century came around, the serious Hollanders threw themselves behind the ideas of the Reformation, they didn’t do it halfway, but with the same entirety and seriousness of purpose. Maybe, then, that was part of the reason that a clash between the Catholic authorities and the newly Protestant people of the Low Countries was so inevitable, because the Dutch people couldn’t compromise and be just quietly and inconspicuously religious, or be somewhere in between Protestant and Catholic (like, say, the ambiguous British), but had to be really and truly “heretical,” at least in the eyes of the Catholic Church.

And then there was the Hapsburg point of view. I’ve talked a bit in earlier posts about how the Hapsburgs came down hard on the “heretics” in the Low Countries, but not really about why. Bailey has an interesting insight: “Unable to suppress the heretics in Germany itself – where a major religious conflict would have crippled German support for his war against Francis I of France – Charles V [Holy Roman Emperor, King of Spain, and ally of the Church], concentrated on putting down the reform movement in the Low Countries.” (72) So not only were the people themselves, arguably based on a certain national sensibility, incapable of compromise and simply sitting back and letting the government tell them what to believe, but the government couldn’t, for many reasons, ignore the discrepancy between the Protestant public and the Catholic authorities.