The Role of the Bulk Trades in the History of the Netherlands

By 1477, 45% of the population of Holland lived in towns- that population was largely within the maritime towns. The Hague, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and other towns expanded greatly in this era. Their expansion derived mainly from the bulk trades. Amsterdam largely for example traded with Danzig, Konigsberg and Riga. The Herring fisheries similarly expanded throughout the 16th Century- in 1470 there were around 250 herring busses manned by 3000 men, by 1560 there were 500 busses manned by 7000 men. By 1560 there were 1800 ships in Holland with 500 based in Amsterdam- that figure is far larger than any other European fleet- in Venice there were for example only 300 ships at the height of her mercentile power in 1450. It is estimated that 1000 Dutch vessels- some sailing twice- going into the Baltic every year whereas only about 300 German ships went the same way.

These trades influenced the structure of Dutch urban society. Obviously it led to the large populations of the Dutch cities and their survival but its consequences went far further and shaped Dutch history in the 16th Century. Firsty there were important innovations in shipping- leading up to the design of the Hoorn fluit, a large trading ship, in 1590. Dutch shipbuilders designed ships which could take huge amounts of goods, carrying them with small crews over long distances. More importantly though the type of trade influenced the type of society that developed in its wake. There were almost no important Dutch merchants before 1585 and ownership of the ships was diversified over a huge number of men. Consequenctly affluent brewers, millers, grain and timber buyers and farmers might own a section of each ship. Ships were owned sometimes by over 64 people and the profits of voyages were spread over that large amount of owners. This diversification included a diversification across the maritime regions- it was not true that one town or two as in the south dominated trade- rather many towns developed at about the same rate. Hence though the urban population in the northern Netherlands was high, very few of its cities had large populations- only Amsterdam and Utrecht had a population above 20000 in 1560 and no city had a population above 30000 at that date. Compare that to the south which specialised in luxury trades and where Antwerp, Ghent, Brussels, Bruges, Mechelen and Lille all had populations over 30,000.

This diversification is important because it led to the success of the Northern Netherlands in resisting Spanish conquest. Partly this was because there were so many sailers about- to refresh the resources of the sea beggars for example in the 1570s who opposed Spanish rule. Partly also such a large diversification of wealth meant that the ruin of one or two cities could not devastate the entire economy of Holland. Likewise such a development argued against the dominance of the Netherlands or of Holland by one city- rather it led to the development of a regionalised politics in which Holland as the largest maritime province dominated. But as opposed to Parisian France or London dominated England, the Netherlands was a much more regionalised economy and therefore its politics too were much more regional. That had vast consequences for the type of regime that emerged after the revolt and also for the type of revolt that took place: the Spanish found the revolt hard to crush because of the difficulty of subduing its centre.

William the Silent

William the Silent's leadership of the Dutch Revolution was crucial to that revolution and thus to the course of European and World history. What is more interesting though than a simple paean to the role of William is that we obtain some understanding of what his function as a leader was within that revolution. My argument, based on Professor Israel's work, is that the William of the Dutch revolution was less of a leader as we might conventionally understand it, than as a symbol and financier. He was driven by as well as driving the revolution that he created- and in certain significant ways that revolution was not what the Prince of Orange intended it to be. This is true right from the beggining- when William himself joined the revolution, to preserve his own position as the representative of the anti-Habsburg forces in the low countries through to the end when he sponsored the involvement of the Duke of Anjou in 1583 despite the Duke's unpopularity within the low countries. Strategically William's interests and the interests of his followers were different- and the interesting thing about Israel's account of the revolution is that because of the unique circumstances of the Dutch revolt, that led to William actually losing out on his interests and being forced to accept those of his followers.

This is perhaps most evident with respect to the direction of the revolution. The Revolution essentially faced two alternative paths: one was to rely on its popular centre in the north of the country and become a revolution dominated from Holland by Calvinist city elites and mobs, the other was to attempt to span the whole of the low countries and rely on the nobility. William's own interest inclined him to the latter: he had important estates in the southern Netherlands and seems not to have been too inclined to adopting a reformation policy. Toleration for Catholics was essential if you were to have a rebellion spanning the Netherlands. William's policy failed though on two important grounds- the first was that it was difficult to maintain a revolution in the south which had a different character to the revolution in the north: the mobs in northern cities that degraded Catholic churches and clergymen were not happy to see those same churches and clergyment protected in the south- even where as in Ghent there were Protestant populations. Likewise whilst to a radical Protestant, the Habsburg crown was associated with the barbaric atrocities of anti-Protestant persecution, to a nobleman the crown was associated with the pyramid of status that protected both property and ultimately society. William ultimately forced to choose- was always going to choose the successful northern rebellion over the weaker southern rebellion- but we should never forget that he wished for a compromise that would retain the vigour of the Protestant radical military strength, whilst maintaining a traditional form of society.

What is interesting about this is that we might think that this was down to William's failings as a leader- could he not have found a formula to unite these factions and led them to victory- but the evidence of the history of Holland suggests otherwise. For William was not alone in attempting to lead the Dutch rebellion and finding that he was led as much as the leader. In 1585, after the Prince of Orange was assacinated, the States concluded a treaty (the Treaty of Nonsuch) with Elizabeth of England wherein Elizabeth nominated a commander, the Earl of Leicester, to come to Holland as Governor General and command both the English forces sent in aid to the Netherlands and the Dutch forces that resisted the Spanish. Leicester found himself in a similar quandary to William- in that he too found himself up against the overmighty province of Holland and was forced, despite his efforts, to temporise with the provincial authorities and adopt in part their strategy. Leicester also attempted to ally with forces in Dutch society that were anti-Holland (in his case the smaller northern provinces) yet thanks to a variety of circumstances he failed and departed in 1587 (and died in 1588).

Leicester and William's cases might seem pretty mundane- here essentially were two leaders who learnt that in a revolution you have to pay political attention to your followers. But I think that the point is greater than that- it reminds us that the reason that early modern noblemen often rebelled against Kings was to have an effect on the rebellion that they were then leading. The point about a rebellion is that its aims are negotiated by the participants and depend on their political strength- and particularly the strength they bring to it- and sometimes not so much on their title or position within it. It is worth remembering this when thinking about rebellion in general because it is not always true that those who lead a rebellion actually control it: the case of the Dutch revolt proves that the future of a revolution can turn out to be very different from that which the leaders envisaged.

The Role of the Inquisition in the Low Countries

A couple of years ago, on the Radio 4 Program, In our Time, Alexander Murray (Emeritus Fellow in History at University College, Oxford) suggested that the Spanish inquisition was part of an agenda of state formation in Spain in the early modern period. Spain a country created in the late 15th Century imposed ideological conformity and administrative unity through the instrument of the inquisition. Murray's theory is interesting and provoking- reading Jonathan Israel's account of the Early Modern Netherlands it becomes even more interesting- because whether that is what we think that the Spanish Inquisition was doing, I think we can argue based on Israel's book that that is precisely what the Low Countries inquisition was doing, and that the response to that inquisition in the Netherlands was a response both to the clerical and to the centralising agenda of the inquisition.

The transition from a medieval to a modern state might be described as the transition from a state wherein there were multiple focii of power- around several notable families- to a unitary state. One thinks for example of the Percies or the Nevilles in the North of England who were capable in the 15th Century of functioning pretty independently. This is a broadbrush approach- and there are exceptions- but stick with it for a moment. Because wherever it was not true, it was definitely true in the Netherlands that the crown governed through notable landed families in the 15th and early 16th Centuries. Phillip II for example relied upon William the Silent as Stadtholder of numerous provinces in the north. Accross the 16th Century inside the Netherlands we see the crown (at this point the Hapsburg crown) taking an interest in the development of a professional administrative class- Antoine Perrerot de Granvelle and Viglius van Aytta are notable examples of these men- who were educated by the humanists and formed an alternative cadre for appointment.

The crown though had to see inside each nobleman's provinces. We know that in the 1550s and 1560s one of the focii for conflict between the centre and the periphery in the Netherlands was religion. Several noblemen permitted religious heresy to take place on their own lands. Phillippe de Montmorency, Count of Horn, for example within the county of Horn allowed Protestants to proslytise- as did the noble leaders in communities in Gederland such as Culemborg, Broculo-Lichtenvoorde and Batenberg. Developing the powers of the inquisition would not merely enforce religious conformity but undermine the power of the nobility to interfere in their own regions and make their own choices about religion. Consequently when a more efficient structure of bishoprics was imposed- with Granvelle himself going to one bishopric- and when the inquisition was strengthened, the nobility protested. At 's-Hertogenbosch for example the local clergy (the Abbots of Meierij) and the local nobility (the States of Brabant) objected to the installation of Bishop Sonnius. But more was to follow: in 1565 Hendrik van Brederode and Floris of Culemborg set up the league of compromise which was a movement of crypto-Protestant and Protestant noblemen. In April 1566 they were able to present a petition to the regent of the Netherlands- Margerate of Parma- with a petition signed by 200 noblemen advocating the dismantlement of the inquisition.

On the one hand we should see that petition and the events I have discussed here as religious events- a Protestant faction responding to a Catholic crackdown. But also there is another part of the story- whether in the Holy Roman Empire (with Frederick the Wise), in England, Scotland, France or Spain, the reformation and counter reformation represented efforts by rulers to centralise their realms. The crown through these movements was claiming great powers, powers to inspect and verify the faith of its servants at great distances. The reaction to those claims wherever it came from was religious- but it also concerned the extent of those powers. Many within the nobility did not see that centralisation as a particularly 'good' thing- for them it represented a diminishing of their sphere of power and could be a Trojan horse for other royal claims. It is worth remembering that when the Dutch nobility objected to Phillip's inquisition what they were doing was objecting to a counter-reformation attack on Protestantism- but they were also seeking to defend their own privileges and powers against royal aggrandisment.

The dual face of the reformation cannot be ignored: we have to pay attention both to the fact that the reformation was a religious movement and that it turned confessionalisation into royal policy- the first had consequences but so did the latter and out of the fires of the reformation, the modern conception of the state evolved. Whereas where as with Phillip in the Netherlands or the Elizabeth in England, that process of state formation based on the creation of religious uniformity worked- in the sense that resistance was dealt with with ease- in the Low Countries, the process failed and consequently the Northern Netherlands split away forming the United Provinces. State formation- along with religious enthusiasm- is at the heart of the story of the Low Countries in the 16th Century.

Money and Civic Instability

There are certain types of crises that you can only have with money. One of the interesting things about Roman history is that soon after the Gallic invasion we have one of these crises. Livy attributes the crisis to the ambition of the centurion Marcus Manlius. The crisis concerned a centurion who was prosecuted for debt, 'as he was led off to prison Manlius saw him, hurried up in mid forum with a party of his supporters and held forth about the arrogance of the senators, the cruelty of the moneylenders, the miseries of the people, the merits and misfortune of the man.' (VI 14) Manlius does something here which I consider interesting- he contrasts the visible misfortunes of the people and bravery of the man against the invisible power of money. The injustice of the way that money operates- seemingly without any relation to the merit or demerit of the person involved- is for Manlius a political driver.

It is that operation that Manlius is focussed upon- how can someone who was a brave soldier end up in debt. In a sense the invisibility and incomprehensibility of the situation is something that creates a political opportunity. Money also creates inequality- further inequality because it allows people to store resources in a way that is not possible in a barter economy in perishable goods. You have a medium for the storage of wealth- but also a medium for the storage of debt because it is easier to create a concept of interest as well as to ennumerate a universal concept of what someone owes. What Manlius does is to create a political opportunity out of the latter issue. He uses the first development though to imply that the whole situation is the responsibility of a senatorial conspiracy: 'he declared amongst other things that the patricians were concealing treasure hoards of gallic gold and were no longer content with possessing State lands unless they could also appropriate State money; if the facts were made public the people could be freed from debt'.

Manlius's explanation for Rome's situation is clever but inaccurate- there are many reasons why debt would grow after a war, and increasing monetisation would definitely create increased inequality- but this is an interesting episode in Roman history. It is interesting because it reflects something about the way that money affects politics: it allows for further developments in the quantification of debt, allows for increased inequality and also it moves the value society puts on something from the intrinsic value of an item. Instead of a rabbit being worth seven candlesticks, both rabbits and candlesticks are translated into a conventional measure of value. Money ultimately is a civic abstraction. These developments- debt, inequality and abstraction all create a new type of politics- something I think we see in Livy's account of Manlius's debtor's revolt. Simply put, the Manlian moment could not have occured without a monetary moment preceding it.

The Death of Christopher Marlowe: Charles Nicholl's The Reckoning

Christopher Marlowe's death in 1593 is one of the most famous literary whodunnits in English history. Marlowe, Shakespeare's peer, had arguably acheived as much as Shakespeare until that date- his plays, Edward II, Tamberlaine, the Jew of Malta and Dr Faustus are examples taught in English classes and seminars today of classic verse and his poetry too lives on. Marlowe however was killed at the age of 29, in a room in Deptford, by a man called Ingram Frizier. The Coroner's court which met soon afterwards decided that what had happened was that four men, Marlowe, Frizier, Robert Pooley and Nicholas Skiers had met in Deptford, in the house of a Mrs Bull (herself affiliated to the court, and related to William Cecil), and spent around eight hours talking. Later in the evening they had had an argument over the bill for the drink and food that they had consumed, Marlowe had stolen Frizier's knife and attacked Frizier with it, Frizier responded and their was a fight, during which Marlowe was stabbed through the eye and killed. Frizier the assailant was set free on the grounds that he had committed self defence- and that Pooley and Skiers backed up his story.

The coroner's inquest record was discovered in the 1920s- and ever since there have been arguments about whether the record tells the truth or not. I have to confess here to being ignorant of many of the arguments- but one recent attempt to reconstruct the truth of what might have happened comes from Charles Nicholl, in a study published by the University of Chicago Press. Nicholl argues that you can only understand the death of Marlowe if you understand the background of the participants. He establishes that the three men in the room apart from Marlowe all had shady pasts. Frizier was an extortioner. Skiers worked both for the Earl of Essex as an agent and for Frizier as muscle. Pooley was a station chief for William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and had worked for Sir Francis Walsingham in intelligence for years. Marlowe himself was almost certainly an agent too- he was allowed to take a degree in Cambridge despite the worries of the dons about his orthodoxy because of a special warrant from the Privy Council and had been involved in various nefarious activities in the Netherlands as well as being rumoured to have been interested in the succession to Elizabeth.

Nicholl's argument is that what happened in 1593 was that Frizier and Skiers and Pooley were trying to negotiate with Marlowe. Marlowe himself was being questioned by the Privy Council at the time about accusations of atheism- that Nicholl ties to factional struggles at court between the Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh. What may well have happened is that when the negotiation to get Marlowe to confess to atheism and implicate Raleigh failed, these lowly agents panicked and killed the poet spy. Based on what Nicholl writes it is a plausible reconstruction- the idea that this was a panicked killing which the participants then agreed to keep quiet makes sense. Panic is always a good historical explanation- better than any conspiracy at least. Whether Nicholl's precise constellation of facts is right I cannot be sure- there are too many 'musts' and 'shoulds' in his account, too many suppositions for us to express confidence in it as the total and unvarnished truth. Nicholl is addicted to supposing what happened in the gaps between the evidence- and whilst his explanation has the ring of truth to it, it depends on a chain of supposition and presumption. Marlowe's death ultimately may be an unresolved mystery.

Having said all of that, Nicholl's work is still worthwhile and what he has accumulated is interesting. It is interesting less because it reveals what actually happened on that dark day in Deptford, than because it reveals the world in which Marlowe passed. The world that Nicholl reveals is a world where criminality, spying and treachery are phases of a life- rather than divisions between different occupations. A character like Nicholas Skiers was a criminal (who manipulated people into contracts that they could not fulfill and who stuck closely to the letter of the law if not its spirit), a traitor (who consorted with Catholics and may well have had Catholic sympathies) and a spy. Robert Pooley, one of the men in the room, worked for Sir Francis Walsingham's secret service for years- and yet Walsingham never quite worked out which side Pooley was on and which side he worked for. Pooley was arrested for holding seditious literature for example, as well as procuring the arrests of others.

Marlowe himself fits into this world neatly. He was arrested for affray, for counterfeiting coins, was on the outside of circles around noblemen suspected of treachery and may have been stoking the flames there. Many of his friends were involved in the same kinds of activities- Thomas Watson for example another poet and playwright (though all his plays are now unfortunately lost) was a confidence trickster with a mean streak. Nicholl brings to life this world in fascinating detail- in a sense therefore it does not matter what happened in Deptford- because by analysing it we discover a lot more about Elizabethan life, politics and poetry.

Happy New Year

Apologies for the silence- I have a very irritating cold at the moment and am not feeling quite myself. But Happy New Year to all and sundry who visit this blog or who just have come through today through chance- I hope you all have a good 2009, despite the current economic gloom, and had a good New Year.