The Interests of Holland

The answer to this question lies in the fact that there were outside the province forces and powers which could do more harm to Holland's towns than they could ever do to each other. First, the Duke of Guelders could throttle Holland's commerce by choking off the great rivers in the south, while his free-booters watched the Zuider Zee channels by which ocean-going ships passed to and from Amsterdam. Since the government persistently viewed the Guelders wars as a minor part of the larger struggle with France, Holland's towns had to stick together if they were to use the power of the purse to focus attention on their problems (see chapter 3). Second, despite the differences among the towns, Holland's economy was integrated in two important ways: almost every town and village had at least an indirect stake in the Baltic trade, and the province as a whole formed one of several regional satellites around the great commercial and financial hub of Antwerp. Holland by itself, even if united, was not strong enough to withstand a direct challenge from its rivals in the Baltic, and there was also a danger that fiscal policies at home could undercut its competitive position. A threat in either of these two spheres required persuading the Habsburg government to take the right sort of action, and Hollanders had no leverage for moving Brussels to their will unless they could speak with one voice (see chapter 4). Further, the war taxation of Charles V's reign set in high relief urban grievances against the traditional exemptions of the clergy and the nobility, especially the feudal enclaves (seven towns and some thirty-seven villages) that were "outside the schiltal " and thus did not contribute to the beden . Since the towns were pitted in this case against families like the Egmonts and (later) the Nassaus, here too they had no hope of prevailing unless they pooled their strength (see chapter 5). Finally, the draconian provisions of Charles V's heresy laws posed a direct challenge to some of the most cherished privileges of the towns and threatened at times to provoke riots among the

burghers; here too, magistrates learned that they could protect the privileges of their town only by trying to protect the privileges of all (see chapter 6). All of these themes become tangled up together in the first ten years of Philip II's reign, when a government seriously weakened by war finance (and by a devolution of credit-worthiness to the provincial states) attempted once more to stoke the fires of persecution (see chapter 7).

Some of these conflicts may create the impression that Holland's towns stood for a "modern" conception of social and economic life, in which everyone might trade freely and no one would enjoy special privileges. To see how misleading such an impression is, one need only take note of how the twenty-five "walled cities" of Holland joined together to obtain a ban on rural industry (buitennering ). In Henri Pirenne's classic presentation of pre-industrial economic development in the Low Countries, government and entrepreneurs were allies in knocking down the barriers to cheaper and more efficient production posed by the manifold regulations of urban guilds. In many respects Pirenne was correct: the new cloth industries of the sixteenth century flourished in smaller towns that had no guilds, and high government officials were certainly familiar with the argument that "trade must be free."^[114] But in Holland, unlike the Flanders that Pirenne was more familiar with, towns large and small pooled their political influence to seek relief from rural competition, especially in brewing and cloth-weaving. In 1529, the six great cities voting in the States made a ban on rural industry a condition for their consent to an extraordinaris bede . But nobles voting in the States, who stood to profit from economic growth in the villages, resisted the proposal, and the promised ordinance was not issued. Hoogstraten offered to help, but expressed doubt as to whether feudal enclaves (areas not subject to the jurisdiction of the Council of Holland) could be comprehended within the proposed ban. Finally the cities decided to "make friends" with the influential Lodewijk van Vlaanderen, lord of Praet, who was at this time one of the small circle of councillors travelling with the Emperor. On 11 October 1531 the cities got what they wanted—a prohibition against the practice of brewing, weaving, leather-working, masonry, or any

other industry (nering ) outside the walled towns. A few months later, the States voted a special omslag of 30,000 pounds, presumably to be paid by the towns only, as the cost of this cherished privilege; since the Council of Holland supported the position of the nobles on this question, no member of the Council would sign the authorization for this omslag, and the Advocate of the Common Land had to do it himself. The ban did not mean that rural industry in fact came to an end. Apart from the feudal enclaves, which were indeed not covered by the ban, the ambachtsheren also had to be contented one way or another, either by buying out their claims to operate or license rural industries, or by having the city itself acquire title to the ambachtsheerlijkheid of adjacent districts.^[115] But it would certainly not be right to represent Holland's urban economy in this period as the springboard for a modern form of commercial capitalism. Pirenne saw urban protectionism as a function of the political influence of artisan guilds in the great cities of the southern Netherlands. Holland's magistrates may have had patrician pedigrees, but in their determination to suppress competition from the countryside, they were blood brothers to the weavers and fullers of Ghent.^[116]

There is a unifying thread in the arguments made by urban deputies to the States, but it lies in the medieval principle of privilege (insofar as the towns benefited from it), and not in the modern idea of' free trade. Given Amsterdam's long battle against the Dordrecht staple, it might seem that the merchant communities of these two cities present a textbook between a medieval regulated trade and a modern spirit of enterprise. As will be seen in chapter 4, however, the real defense of Amsterdam's precious freedom of trade in Baltic grain lay not in legal or pragmatic arguments, but rather in a privilege that was granted in 1495 by the cash-starved Maximilian I, exempting Amsterdam from duties on foreign grain. However much Amsterdammers might wish to appeal to the power of the prince to overturn "unjust" privileges (like the Dordrecht staple), they surely realized that the same power could be turned against their vital interests."^[117] In the early years of Charles V's reign, no one could have predicted whether the government might succeed in playing on the divisions among Holland's towns to make

itself stronger, or whether the towns might develop a cohesion among themselves that might effectively limit the government's influence within the province.

In fact, no body politic ever achieves a perfect union. Even in the most stable commonwealth, there are faults and fissures which wisdom of hindsight can always point to in "explaining" whatever schism or bifurcation that the confluence of events may bring about. In the case of the Habsburg Netherlands, Pieter Geyl has pointed out that to observers in Charles V's reign, the most important line dividing the Dutch-speaking provinces would have been between the urbanized areas in the west (Flanders, Brabant, Holland, and Zeeland) and the more rural eastern provinces, some of which had only recently come under the rule of the Netherlands government. But since the division that occurred after 1572 between north and south, patriotic Dutch writers found reasons for believing that even under Habsburg rule Hollanders were different, more independent of spirit than Flemings or Brabanders.^[118]

To speak of Holland's towns as developing, already under Charles V, a spirit of resistance to Habsburg rule would be to fall into the trap Geyl so well describes. But one can speak of habits of action that tend to be repeated simply because people find it easier to do so. A major argument of this book is that Charles V's reign in Holland witnessed the development of important habits of cooperation among the towns and nobles represented in the States. The point is not that the members of Holland's political elite reached, by ripe deliberation, the sage conclusion that there was strength in union. Rather, pressure from external foes, combined with energetic action by the Habsburg government, induced the towns to begin collaborating in new ways. The end result of this process was a States of Holland more capable of speaking for the province as a whole and more confident in dealing with the problems that governments had to face, backed by an administrative machinery of their own and a strong credit rating. The fact that such provinces had come to exist by the time of Philip II's reign did not mean that the Revolt was necessary or inevitable. Had there not been such provinces, however, it is hard to imagine how the Revolt could have succeeded.