1477 - The Reformation
The land, a delta of great rivers liable to overflow their banks, or a coast-line on which the sea made continual encroachment, produced a people hardy, strenuous, and independent. Their struggles with nature had braced their faculties. Municipal life had struck its roots deeply into the soil of the Netherlands, and its cities could vie with those of Italy in industry and intelligence.
The southern provinces were the home of the Trouvères. Jan van-Ruysbroec, the most heart-searching of speculative Mystics, had been a curate of St. Gudule's in Brussels. His pupil, Gerard Groot, had founded the lay-community of the Brethren of the Common Lot for the purpose of spreading Christian education among the laity; and the schools and convents of the Brethren had spread through the Netherlands and central Germany. Thomas à Kempis, the author of the Imitatio Christi, had lived most of his long life of ninety years in a small convent at Zwolle, within the territories of Utrecht.
Men who have been called “Reformers before the Reformation,” John Pupper of Goch and John Wessel, both belonged to the Netherlands. Art flourished there in the fifteenth century in the persons of Hubert and Jan van Eyck and of Hans Memling. The Chambers of Oratory (Rederijkers) to begin with probably unions for the performance of miracle plays or moralities, became confraternities not unlike the societies of meistersänger in Germany, and gradually acquired the character of literary associations, which diffused not merely culture, but also habits of independent thinking among the people.
Intellectual life had become less exuberant in the end of the fifteenth century; but the Netherlands, nevertheless, produced Alexander Hegius, the greatest educational reformer of his time, and Erasmus the prince of the Humanists. Nor can the influence of the Chambers of Oratory have died out, for they had a great effect on the Reformation movement.”
The struggle for religious liberty, combined latterly with one for national independence from Spain, lasted for almost sixty years. When the lifelong duel between Charles the Bold of Burgundy and Louis XI of France ended with the death of the former on the battlefield under the walls of Nancy (January 4th, 1477), Louis was able to annex to France a large portion of the heterogeneous possessions of the Dukes of Burgundy, and Mary of Burgundy carried the remainder as her marriage portion (May 1477) to Maximilian of Austria, the future Emperor.
Speaking roughly, and not quite accurately, those portions of the Burgundian lands which had been fiefs of France went to Louis, while Mary and Maximilian retained those which were fiefs of the Empire. The son of Maximilian and Mary, Philip the Handsome, married Juana (August 1496), the second daughter and ultimate heiress of Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain, and their son was Charles V., Emperor of Germany (b. February 24th, 1500), who inherited the Netherlands from his father and Spain from his mother, and thus linked the Netherlands to Spain.
Philip died in 1506, leaving Charles, a boy of six years of age, the ruler of the Netherlands. His paternal aunt, Margaret, the daughter of the Emperor Maximilian, governed in the Netherlands during his minority, and, owing to Juana's illness (an illness ending in madness), mothered her brother's children. Margaret's regency ended in 1515, and the earlier history of the Reformation in the Netherlands belongs either to the period of the personal rule of Charles or to that of the Regents whom he appointed to act for him.
When Charles assumed the government of the Netherlands, he found himself at the head of a group of duchies, lordships, counties, and municipalities which had little appearance of a compact principality, and he applied himself, like other princes of his time in the same situation, to give them a unity both political and territorial. He was so successful that he was able to hand over to his son, Philip II of Spain, an almost thoroughly organised State. The divisions which Charles largely overcame reappeared to some extent in the revolt against Philip and Romanism, and therefore in a measure concern the history of the Reformation.
Charles made his scattered Netherland inheritance territorially compact. Friesland was secured (1515); the acquisition of temporal sovereignty over the ecclesiastical province of Utrecht (1527) united Holland with Friesland; Gronningen and the lands ruled by that turbulent city placed themselves under the government of Charles (1536); and the death of Charles of Egmont (1538), Count of Gueldres, completed the unification of the northern and central districts.
although political and geographical difficulties might be more or less overcome, others remained which were not so easily disposed of. One set arose from the fact that the seventeen provinces were divided by race and by language. The Dutchmen in the north were different in interests and in sentiment from the Flemings in the centre ; and both had little in common with the French-speaking provinces in the south.
The other was due to the differing boundaries of the ecclesiastical and civil jurisdictions. When Charles began to rule in 1515, the only territorial see was Arras. Tournai, Utrecht, and Cambrai became territorial before the abdication of Charles. But the confusion between civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction may be seen at a glance when it is remembered that a great part of the Frisian lands were subject to the German Sees of Münster, Minden, Paderborn, and Osnabrück; and that no less than six bishops, none of them belonging to the Netherlands, divided the ecclesiastical rule over Luxemburg.
The people of the Netherlands had been singularly prepared for the great religious revival of the sixteenth century by the work of the Brethren of the Common Lot and their schools. It was the aim of Gerard Groot, their founder, and also of Florentius Radevynszoon, his great educational assistant, to see “that the root of study and the mirror of life must, in the first place, be the Gospel of Christ.” Their pupils were taught to read the Bible in Latin, and the Brethren contended publicly for translations of the Scriptures in the vulgar tongues.Y. There is evidence to show that the Vulgate was well known in the Netherlands in the end of the fifteenth century, and a translation of the Bible into Dutch was published at Delft in 1477, Small tracts against Indulgences, founded probably on the reasonings of Pupper and Wessel, had been in circulation before Luther had nailed his Theses to the door of All Saints' church in Wittenberg.
Luther's writings were widely circulated in the Netherlands, and that between 1513 and 1531 no fewer than twenty-five translations of the Bible or of the New Testament had appeared in Dutch, Flemish, and French. When Aleander was in the Netherlands, before attending the Diet of Worms he secured the burning of eighty Lutheran and other books at Louvain; and when he came back ten months later, he had regular literary auto-da-fés.
On Charles' return from the Diet of Worms, he issued a proclamation to all his subjects in the Netherlands against Luther, his books and his followers, and Aleander made full use of the powers it gave. Four hundred Lutheran books were burnt at Antwerp, three hundred of them seized by the police in the stalls of the booksellers, and one hundred handed over by the owners; three hundred were burnt at Ghent, “part of them printed here and part in Germany,” says the Legate; and he adds that “many of them were very well bound, and one gorgeously in velvet.”
