WHEN Leyden was entering the shadow of her great agony, an act of her oppressors served to mark with unmistakable distinctness the cause and the object of her suffering. By command of Philip II. the Spanish governor Requesens published a general amnesty, and this was confirmed by a Papal Bull, bearing date April 30, 1574.
After Alva’s régime of blood and fire, it seemed as if the voice of humanity was to be heard at last, and pity and fair mercy were to claim their own. The promises were liberal, the words gentle and conciliatory. Gregory XIII. proffered forgiveness to the Netherlanders, ‘even though they had sinned more than seventy times seven.’ Nor was Philip behindhand in generosity; while the terrible death sentence of seven years before had only exempted a few individuals, the amnesty exactly reversed the process, only a few, mentioned by name, being excluded from its benefits. ‘How often,’ said Philip of Spain—Philip, the patron of the Inquisition, the master of Alva!— ‘How often would I have gathered your children, O ye rebellious, ungrateful provinces, as a hen doth gather her chickens beneath her wings!’
To these large promises and loving invitations, only one condition of any weight was attached. Rebellion might be forgiven; every other offence, to which it led, however heinous, might be buried in oblivion. Even the charters and privileges which the provinces had rebelled to recover, might be restored to them through the royal grace. Nay more, even their past heresies might be condoned. King and Pope demanded only that they should now return to the bosom of the Church. Could anything be more simple, more easy, more reasonable?
Holland had good reason to thank Pope and King for thus narrowing the issue. It gave her an almost unique opportunity of doing, as a nation, what individuals have done so often—making the grand decision, the choice between life and loyalty to God. Speaking by the mouth of their hero and representative, the Prince of Orange, they returned to all the offers of Philip, of Requesens, of Gregory, the sublime and simple answer: ‘So long as there is a living man left in the country we will fight for God’s Word and our own freedom.’
Yet they did not hide from themselves that their situation was desperate. Upon the dominions of the King of Spain the sun never set; his treasury, as his ambassador boasted, ‘had no bottom.’ The best soldiers in Europe were drawn from every country to fill his armies, the gold and silver of Peru and Mexico were poured out like water at his bidding. And what resources had they for the tremendous duel? What did they possess? A little spot of wave-washed land continually threatened by the sea; a barren stretch of dykes and sandhills, where a few peasants and fishermen wrung from earth or ocean a precarious subsistence.
To the sea, their old enemy, they looked now as to a friend. ‘Better a drowned land than a lost land,’ the Prince had said, in planning the relief of Leyden. He and others repeated it now, with deeper and wider meaning. Men’s thoughts turned to it as the last resource, the final refuge of courage and despair. Should resistance become clearly hopeless, there was still one alternative to universal martyrdom. They could even all the sluices, pierce all the dykes, and having thus restored the land to the ocean it was won from, crowd with their wives and children on board every vessel they could muster, and set their sails for the lands of freedom beyond the Western Sea. Should the need arise, they meant to do it. Thus, in their own fashion, said the men of Holland three hundred years ago—
‘Our hearths we abandon, our lands we resign,
But, Father, we kneel at no altar save Thine!’
It is written, ‘He that will save his life shall lose it, and he that will lose his life shall save it.’ The sublime paradox is true of communities, as of persons. Holland, afterward so mighty, drew her very life out of the death throes of that epoch. The nation was born then. ‘Truly in sorrow born, baptized’ —born to conflict and baptized in blood, but also to high destinies and glorious achievements. Even material prosperity came in the wake of moral grandeur. Less than a century later, ‘the little one had become a thousand, and the small one a strong nation.’ Her hand, like Nuremburg’s, ‘reached to every land;’ her flag was reverenced on distant seas, her merchants were princes, and her traffickers the honorable of the earth.
But in the days of the siege and deliverance of Leyden, brave and true men, though they had the gift of martyrdom, had not the gift of prophecy. No wonder if they said: ‘Dark looms our fate, and terrible the storm that gathers o’er us.’
Ay, and said it even after that glorious ‘Relief’ had lent a partial gleam of brightness to their outlook. Leyden indeed was saved; but Amsterdam remained with the Spaniards, and the loss of Haarlem—after a resistance as heroic as that of Leyden herself— ‘cut the land in two.’ Moreover, Zirickzee fell soon, and Maastricht, ‘the key to the German gate to the Netherlands.’ No wonder if, amidst these terrors and misfortunes, men asked of him who stood at the helm of State, still and silent, steering right on with steady hand and heart of quenchless courage— ‘Are you in treaty with any great king or potentate from whom you hope for help and support in this our hour of desperate need?’
This was the answer of William of Orange:
‘Before I ever took up the cause of the oppressed Christians in these provinces, I had entered into a close alliance with the King of kings, and I am firmly convinced that all who put their trust in Him shall be saved by His almighty hand.’
Nor shall they ‘ever be ashamed or confounded unto the Ages without end.’