Austrian Netherlands

“ To Austria fell the Spanish Netherlands, hereafter called the Austrian Netherlands, which continued to form a barrier between Holland and France. Holland received certain fortresses to make its position still more secure. The Spanish possessions in Italy, i.e., Naples and Milan, were also given to Austria, and in this way Austria got the hold on Italy which it retained until 1866. England acquired from France, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and the Hudson Bay region, and so began the expulsion of the French from North America. ”

“ These were highly favourable to the Habsburgs. In eastern and central Europe Austria regained her former position, the lands ceded to Bavaria and also eastern Galicia, which had been in the hands of Russia since 1809, being restored; she gave up the Austrian Netherlands, soon to be known as Belgium, to the new kingdom of the Netherlands, and acquiesced in the arrangement which had taken from her the Breisgau and the remnant of the Habsburg lands upon the Rhine. ”

“ In both wars the southern Celts fell away from the league, their courageous but corrupt chieftains having been purchased with imperial gold to bring about the abject submission of their followers; while the German Netherlands, although eventually subjugated by Rome, after a desperate struggle, were successful in the great conflict with Spain, and trampled out of existence every vestige of her authority. The Batavian republic took its rank among the leading powers of the earth; the Belgic provinces remained Roman, Spanish, Austrian property. ”

“ By the beginning of February, the Four Members of Flanders, the three Estates of Brabant and Hainault, and the deputies of the States of Holland were assembled at Ghent. In the hands of these representatives of the vier landen, who explicitly took it upon themselves to act on behalf of the country at large, the executive remained till the Austrian marriage, and their united action imposed upon the lady of Burgundy the grant of the great charter of Netherlands liberties, and of the special charters which supplemented it. ”

“ The scenery of Dutch history has episodes as stirring and instructive as those of any civilized people since history began; but it reached its dramatic and moral apogee when the independence of the United Netherlands was acknowledged by Spain. The Netherlands then reached their loftiest pinnacle of power and prosperity; their colonial possessions were vast and rich; their reputation as guardians of liberty and the rights of man was foremost in the world. ”

“ The pictures painted of the republic by shrewd and caustic observers, not inclined by nature or craft to portray freedom in too engaging colours, seem, when contrasted with those revealed of Spain, almost like enthusiastic fantasies of an ideal commonwealth.
During the last twenty years of the great war the material prosperity of the Netherlands had wonderfully increased. They had, become the first commercial nation in the world. ”

“ France writes, but, unfortunately, the Empire reads. The soldiers of the Bishop of Liege are at open war with the bankers of Spa. The Netherlands have risen against their sovereign without knowing why. Soon, no doubt, people will kill one another in the hope of gaining more freedom and happiness. Austria, exposed to dangers at home, timidly threatens both friend and foe, and is unable to distinguish one from the other. England, who is never entirely of the same opinion, has a majority in favour of Prussia, who has already fired a few shots in Holland! ”

“ KING. "'It is inconceivable to me how Austria should dare to think of such a thing. Limburg? Are there not solemn Engagements upon Austria, sanctioned and again sanctioned by all the world, which render every inch of ground in the Netherlands inalienable?'
ROBINSON. "'Engagements good as against the French, your Majesty. ”

“ His ducal cap was to be exchanged for a kingly crown, while all the provinces which lay beneath the Mediterranean and the North Sea, and between France and Germany, were to be united under his sceptre. The Netherlands, with their wealth, had been already appropriated, and their freedom crushed. Another land of liberty remained; physically, the reverse of Holland, but stamped with the same courageous nationality, the same ardent love of human rights. Switzerland was to be conquered. Her eternal battlements of ice and granite were to constitute the great bulwark of his realm. ”

“ The minor allies of England also obtained advantages by the treaty of Utrecht. Holland was given a favourable commercial treaty and a line of strong towns in the Spanish Netherlands known as the "Barrier fortresses," because they lay along the Pg 477 frontier of France. They included Namur, Tournay, Ypres, and six or seven other places. The Duke of Savoy received Sicily and the title of king; the Elector of Brandenburg took Spanish Guelders—a district on the Meuse—and was recognized as King of Prussia. But Austria, our most powerful ally, does not appear in the agreement. ”

“ Austria resumed the provinces which Napoleon had conveyed to his Rhenish proteges; and, finally, a Germanic Confederation was formed, to take the place of the extinct Empire, and with no more efficiency in its constitution. In the Netherlands, a new kingdom was formed, to bear the Netherland name, and to embrace Holland and Belgium in union, with the House of Orange on the throne. The Holy Alliance. ”

“ In the summer of 1603 it had been firmly but mysteriously arranged between the monarchs of France and Great Britain that the House of Austria should be crushed, its territories parcelled out at the discretion of those two potentates, the imperial crown taken from the Habsburgs, the Spaniards driven out of the Netherlands, an alliance offensive and defensive made with the Dutch republic, while the East and West Indies were, to be wrested by main force of the allies, from Spain, whose subjects were thenceforth to be for ever excluded from those lucrative regions. ”

“ Their national industry was untiring; their prosperity unexampled; their love of liberty indomitable; their pugnacity proverbial. Peaceful in their pursuits, phlegmatic by temperament, the Netherlands were yet the most belligerent and excitable population of Europe. Two centuries of civil war had but thinned the ranks of each generation without quenching the hot spirit of the nation. ”

“ But to feel how a little confederacy of seven provinces loosely tied together by an ill-defined treaty could hold so prominent and often so controlling a place in the European system of the seventeenth century, we must remember that there was then no Germany, no Russia, no Italy, no United States of America, scarcely even a Great Britain in the sense which belongs to that mighty empire now.
France, Spain, England, the Pope, and the Emperor were the leading powers with which the Netherlands were daily called on to solve great problems and try conclusions ”

“ It is not even rumored that the Dutch themselves object to the succession of the king’s daughter, the little Princess Wilhelmina, or that they desire a republic, and there is only one external power which has the means even to raise the question. France has no claim, and puts forward no claim, either on Holland or Luxemburg; the Austrian claims, once so real, were disposed of by the Treaty of Vienna, and there remains only Germany which could benefit even by successful interference. ”

“ Its trade, its wealth, and its prosperity, were gradually transferred to Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and the towns of Holland and Zealand; and the growth of Dutch commerce attained its proud maturity in the establishment of the India Company in 1596, the effects of which we shall have hereafter more particularly to dwell on.
The exciting and romantic enterprises of the Portuguese and Spanish navigators in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries roused all the ardor of other nations for those distant adventures; and the people of the Netherlands were early influenced by the general spirit of Europe. ”

“ But a very grave disaster to Holland and England was soon the fruit of the hatred borne by Leicester to Sir John Norris. Immediately after the battle of Zutphen and the investment of that town by the English and Netherlanders, great pains were taken to secure the city of Deventer. This was, after Amsterdam and Antwerp, the most important mercantile place in all the Provinces. It was a large prosperous commercial and manufacturing capital, a member of the Hanseatic League, and the great centre of the internal trade of the Netherlands with the Baltic nations. ”

“ They form nearly one-fourth of the population of the whole kingdom, or about one million three hundred thousand persons. All the rest of the nation speak Low German, in its modifications of Dutch and Flemish; and they offer the distinctive characteristics of the Saxon race—talents for agriculture, navigation, and commerce; perseverance rather than vivacity; and more courage than taste for the profession of arms. They are subdivided into Flemings—those who were the last to submit to the House of Austria; and Dutch—those who formed the republic of the United Provinces. ”

“ The first appearance of this people in the history of the world is the moment of its fall; their conquerors first gave them a political existence. The extensive region which is bounded by Germany on the east, on the south by France, on the north and northwest by the North Sea, and which we comprehend under the general name of the Netherlands, was, at the time when the Romans invaded Gaul, divided amongst three principal nations, all originally of German descent, German institutions, and German spirit. The Rhine formed its boundaries. ”

“ It should have seemed obvious to the meanest capacity in the kingdom that the great house of Austria, reigning supreme in Spain and in Germany, could not be allowed to crush the Duke of Savoy on the one side, and Bohemia, Moravia, and the Netherlands on the other without danger of subjection for France. Yet the aim of the Queen-Regent was to cultivate an impossible alliance with her inevitable foe. ”

“ In Germany, under the Electors of Brandenburg, in the Palatine, and other places near at hand, there is land and territory enough; but that amounts to nothing, as they possess few places for trade, and therefore the countries cannot prosper.
New-Netherlander. We must look to commerce, and there we can have it; and that which at present is carried on in the New-Netherlands, consists mostly in grain, as wheat, rye, peas, barley, &c, and in pork, beef, fish, beer and wine, and what is necessary for families, for the back and the belly. ”

“ The commerce with England, though less important than that with Spain, was calculated yearly at twenty-four million florins, which was chiefly clear profit to the Netherlands, as their exportations consisted almost entirely of objects of their own manufacture. Their commercial relations with France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and the Levant, were daily increasing. Antwerp was the centre of this prodigious trade. Several sovereigns, among others Elizabeth of England, had recognized agents in that city, equivalent to consuls of the present times ”

“ On the 20th of July, 1814, Russia, Austria, and Prussia, together with England, agreed to recognize and support the new Kingdom of Holland and to add to the territory of the old republic the former Austrian possessions in Belgium. This meant the revival of a state which greatly resembled the old Burgundian Kingdom. The allies did not found this new country out of any sentimental love for the Dutch people. England wanted to have a sentinel in Europe against another French outbreak, and therefore the northern frontier of France must be guarded by a strong nation. ”

“ Even the disasters of his reign had sometimes their good effect: as in the case of his failure to subjugate the great county of Flanders. Originally a fief of the Kings of France, it had been growing apart from the French monarchy, through the independent interests and feelings that rose in it with the increase of wealth among its singularly industrious and thrifty people. The Low Countries, or Netherlands, on both sides of the Rhine, had been the first in western Europe to develop industrial arts and the trade that goes with them in a thoroughly intelligent and systematic way. ”

“ The extended and profound remarks of many celebrated writers on the state of Europe from the decline of the Roman power to the epoch at which we are now arrived must be referred to, to judge of the gradual progress of civilization through the gloom of the dark ages, till the dawn of enlightenment which led to the grand system of European politics commenced during the reign of Charles V. The amazing increase of commerce was, above all other considerations, the cause of the growth of liberty in the Netherlands. ”

“ If the immediate alarm on the side of Holland seems to be a considerable inducement to the grant of the subsidy, in order to interest Austria in that very important defence of which the Netherlands make so essential a part, it should not, on the other hand, escape notice, that all our observation on their language and views would lead us very much to doubt how far [Pg 280] they would cordially concur in the defence of the Netherlands, even though they might consent to do so in the words of their contract ”

“ After the separation of the latter from Spain, their industry and commerce reached an unprecedented height of development. Colonies were acquired in East India, in the Indian Ocean, in North America, and in South Africa. During the German wars of religion, the Netherlands offered a place of refuge to many of the best elements of the German population, and also convenient and profitable investments for their money. Emigrants and investments contributed very largely to the growing prosperity of the little country. ”