to compromise or not to compromise?

Back to that point I made earlier, or at least hinted at, that a compromise was pretty much impossible between the Catholic and Protestant factions in the Spanish Netherlands? Well, van Loon has a bit to say about that. “For half a century, at least, a compromise seemed quite possible.” So why wasn’t it? My research seems to say, rather definitively, that it was all Philip II’s fault. Simplistic, yes, but true, I think. Bailey tells the story of Charles V handing over the Low Countries and Spain to his son Philip in 1555: “It was a moving scene: Charles, born in Ghent, still aroused feelings of loyalty, despite his heavy-handed government.” Unfortunately for the Low Countries, “Philip II acted like more of a Spaniard than his father had.” That’s a nice way of saying what van Loon puts this way: “under anybody else, less stupidly narrow-minded and less bigoted, there would have been a great chance of preventing the religious reformation from also becoming a political movement and from preventing the political movement from becoming an actual rebellion.”

I’ve talked a bit about Alba and enforcement, but not really about Philip’s own policies. Bailey puts it this way: “He reinforced his father’s repressive edicts and as a result political discontent and religious unrest were further aroused and added their collective combustive forces to the flame.” (81) Van Loon says pretty much the same thing: “An attempt was made to force upon [the people of the Netherlands] a political system which was tolerated in Spain, but which no more fitted their Dutch nature than the Manchu system would have fitted America. The nature of the people was of an old Germanic, individualistic sort, and instinctively rejected all attempts at trying to press it into the collectivistic system of an absolute monarchy.” (12) Interestingly, although the revolt is described as essentially political in nature, I would argue (as van Loon does) that religion played a more decisive role, because of the whole inability to compromise thing. By this point, in the north, essentially every city except Amsterdam was devoted to the new religion, to the doctrines of Martin Luther or Calvin. As van Loon puts it, “after many years of rebellion, the cities were willing to compromise upon political matters, to recognize their ruler’s right to institute such political innovations as he thought necessary. But, one and all of them, they positively refused to promise to give up their new religious convictions.” It’s really interesting to me that it was the arguments over religion that seemed to be the most divisive, that the Dutch people were willing to take a whole lot from their oppressive monarchs as a general rule, to give up a lot of their own freedoms, even their right to their land and money in some cases (although, as we’ll see/we’ve seen, those were two big subjects of contention), but not to give up their religion, even though it had so newly (in the grand scheme of things) become a part of their lives. I guess it has something to do with those “heavy and plodding mind”s of the Hollanders.