non-payment of his army on the theory that, as he was God’s instrument for crushing heresy, whatever he did, whether or not wise, was right. Like most of Philip’s policy judgments, it turned against himself. The mutineers in their rage set fire to every street in the wealthiest quarter of Antwerp as they broke into the city, not forgetting to fall on their knees in a prayer to the Virgin to bless their enterprise. It is a peculiar habit of Christianity to conceive the most compassionate and forgiving divinities and use them to sponsor atrocity. In the conquest of Mexico, Spanish priests carrying banners of Christ blessed the conquistadors as they marched to the torture and murder of natives in the country. In Antwerp, the mutineers killed every citizen who crossed their path or stood in a doorway, indiscriminately striking down aged householders, young women with infants, fellow-Catholic priests and monks or foreign merchants. In an orgy of pillage lasting three days, they ransacked every warehouse, shop and residence, accumulating money, silver, jewels and fine furniture to untold value, horribly torturing anyone suspected of concealing his wealth, leaving thousands dead and an increased abhorrence of the Spaniards in the surrounding “obedient” provinces. The immediate result was the most damaging to Spain that could have occurred—a movement toward confederation of the provinces, not firm or permanent but enough to mark the beginning of the end for the governing power.
Constant bickering between French-speaking Walloons and Dutch-speaking Flemings, between Catholics and Protestants, between the maritime and inland provinces, between nobles and commoners, between Amsterdam in its hegemony and everyone else had so far prevented common action in the revolt. Netherlanders were now beginning to realize that they must join forces if they were ever to expel the Spaniards. Persuaded of the necessity, William of Orange had initiated a series of letters to the Councils of the provincial states proposing a general peace among them to achieve their mutual purpose. Negotiations were already under way at Ghent. Four days after the “Spanish Fury,” as the sack of Antwerp came to be known, the deputies of nine states brought to birth a treaty or pact called the Pacification of Ghent, pledging them to maintain peace among themselves and devote their lives and goods to delivering their country from the Spaniards and foreign oppressors. As in the case of the assembly almost 200 years later of the thirteen American Colonies, hitherto always at odds, in their first intercolonial Congress, joint action by the Dutch rebels was the one thing that the rulers could not overcome, and had confidently believed would never take place. In America the British, too, by their own actions, were to commit the outrages, by the Boston Port Bill and the Coercive Acts, that brought the fractious Colonies together.
In the Netherlands, the pact of Ghent was embedded in a maze of contracts and conditions defining the rights and duties, geographical, commercial and especially religious, of each city and province and the terms which the new Spanish Governor, Don John of Austria, half-brother of Philip, should be required to accept before meeting the States General, for he was on his way with that intention. It is odd that so soon after pledging to expel the Spaniard, the Dutch should be dealing with him, but at a time when a powerful mystique of royalty endowed every monarchy with absolutism. the Dutch were not yet ready to make the outright challenge nor had they the military means to do so. They lapsed, in the period immediately following the Pacification of Ghent, into such a welter of sectional rivalries and struggles over the dominance of the old versus the reformed religion and of local and foreign combinations and defections as amounted almost to civil war—and made a scrap of paper out of the supposed Pacification. Out of this strife and
Constant bickering between French-speaking Walloons and Dutch-speaking Flemings, between Catholics and Protestants, between the maritime and inland provinces, between nobles and commoners, between Amsterdam in its hegemony and everyone else had so far prevented common action in the revolt. Netherlanders were now beginning to realize that they must join forces if they were ever to expel the Spaniards. Persuaded of the necessity, William of Orange had initiated a series of letters to the Councils of the provincial states proposing a general peace among them to achieve their mutual purpose. Negotiations were already under way at Ghent. Four days after the “Spanish Fury,” as the sack of Antwerp came to be known, the deputies of nine states brought to birth a treaty or pact called the Pacification of Ghent, pledging them to maintain peace among themselves and devote their lives and goods to delivering their country from the Spaniards and foreign oppressors. As in the case of the assembly almost 200 years later of the thirteen American Colonies, hitherto always at odds, in their first intercolonial Congress, joint action by the Dutch rebels was the one thing that the rulers could not overcome, and had confidently believed would never take place. In America the British, too, by their own actions, were to commit the outrages, by the Boston Port Bill and the Coercive Acts, that brought the fractious Colonies together.
In the Netherlands, the pact of Ghent was embedded in a maze of contracts and conditions defining the rights and duties, geographical, commercial and especially religious, of each city and province and the terms which the new Spanish Governor, Don John of Austria, half-brother of Philip, should be required to accept before meeting the States General, for he was on his way with that intention. It is odd that so soon after pledging to expel the Spaniard, the Dutch should be dealing with him, but at a time when a powerful mystique of royalty endowed every monarchy with absolutism. the Dutch were not yet ready to make the outright challenge nor had they the military means to do so. They lapsed, in the period immediately following the Pacification of Ghent, into such a welter of sectional rivalries and struggles over the dominance of the old versus the reformed religion and of local and foreign combinations and defections as amounted almost to civil war—and made a scrap of paper out of the supposed Pacification. Out of this strife and
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