3
The Guelders Wars

During the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century, as Europe's great powers fought each other for control of Italy, then plunged into a long era of religious conflict, more and more states adopted for their own use the professional standing armies first developed in France. Field armies grew in size by several magnitudes, from the 10,000 England's Henry IV led into battle at Agincourt (1415), to the 30,000 France's Charles VIII led across the Alps (1494), to the 100,000 or more commanded by Tilly or Wallenstein in the Thirty Years' War. Since the proportion of wealth that princes extracted from their subjects grew apace with these changes in the character of warfare, military expenditures promoted greater centralization of political power in the hands of the prince and his officials. In Perry Anderson's words, "war was the forcing house of absolutism." This "military revolution" confronted sixteenth-century Europeans with a momentous political choice.^[1] They could avoid dependence on a military establishment, by attempting to revive the civic militia; Machiavelli's Florence embarked on this path, but the militia's flight before a Spanish army (1512) showed only how difficult it was to recreate an institution that was tied to the waning city-state culture of the late Middle Ages.^[2] Alternatively, they could accept the practical necessity of relying on professional troops and swallow the consequences by surrending more and more power to the prince who served as commander and paymaster.

This chapter will show how the States of Holland found a way of managing military affairs that might be seen as an alternative to this dilemma. Burghers in Holland and other Low Countries provinces were still expected to maintain military equipment in

good order and to rally to arms when summoned by the town bell. Yet the States were under no illusions about the chances of Holland's burghers standing in an open field against professional troops. Instead, the States endeavored to maintain civilian influence in military affairs by using their power of the purse to influence the way in which wars were fought.

In what follows, it will first be useful to examine the deep suspicions with which Charles V's subjects viewed the constant incursions into their territory by the Duke of Guelders—as if certain great nobles in the Netherlands deliberately fomented wars they did not intend to win, merely to enhance their own power and that of the prince. This climate of suspicion, indicative of the inexperience of commoners in matters of war and diplomacy, actually strengthened the position of the States as they bargained with officials over war subsidies, for deputies were able to argue persuasively that the war had to be fought in such a manner as to lay to rest popular mistrust of the government. Even if troops were not in fact employed as the States had wished, deputies were brought in on the discussion of military finance and military organization, in order to gain their confidence and their consent to taxation.

The Guelders Wars and the "Common Man" in Holland

Leonardo Bruni, humanist and chancellor of republican Florence, remarks at one point that when the armies of a republic lose a battle, citizens will sooner believe they have been betrayed than that they have been beaten.^[3] The process by which human beings attribute sinister motives to those who rule over them has seldom been addressed by historians, perhaps because the phenomenon is too commonplace, or because scholars prefer to avoid the nettlesome task of deciding which suspicions are worth taking seriously and which are not. But there are no good reasons for thinking that princes were ever so fiendishly clever as (for instance) Erasmus makes them out to be, when he suggests that rulers deliberately provoke each other to war in order to have an excuse for taxing their subjects.^[4] It is true that

sixteenth-century rulers could find reasons for thinking that war was "not altogether a bad thing." As J. H. Shennan says of Charles V's political testament, the old Emperor believed that war "kept soldiers occupied and prevented them from causing trouble at home; people paid their taxes more readily in wartime and formed the habit of paying."^[5]

War was also seen as providing a certain tension that was needed for the health of the body politic. For example, Guillaume Budé, the great French humanist, suggested that the blessings of peace were not unmixed: "Yet peace also brings forth a hesitant and sluggish sense of security, which usually gives birth to luxury and laziness, whence come torpor and shameless pleasures."^[6] Despite the fact that it was sometimes jurists, "men of the long robe," who argued for war while noblemen with military experience counselled against it, nobles were commonly thought to encourage their princes to enter into conflicts in which the nobles themselves found employment. During ceremonies to celebrate the Peace of Cambrai, ending hostilities between France and the Habsburg lands (1529), the chamber of rhetoric of the French town of Amiens put on a play about how wars were ended. While merchants and peasants plead for peace, Mars objects; when the parties appeal to Lady Nobility, she explains that peace is difficult because the nobles are nourished by war. The conclusion is that only God can bring war to an end.^[7]

Suspicions of this kind were no doubt enhanced by the special circumstances of the Habsburg Netherlands in its long conflict with the Duchy of Guelders (1493–1528). To begin with, the Emperor Maximilian was always seen as the foreigner who entered into his Low Countries inheritance by marriage, and he did hope to employ the wealth of the Low Countries to help finance his projects elsewhere in Europe, even if he had little success in doing so.^[8] In addition, the usages of war made combat a matter of life and death for the ordinary peasant or townsman, but not for rival noble commanders. Noble commanders on both sides regularly made private truces with one another (stillsaeten ) to exempt their own lands from the ravages of campaigning. Netherlands peasants who lived outside the enclaves of feudal jurisdiction thus bore the brunt of enemy attacks,

Map 3. 
The Habsburg Netherlands in 1555

and when the Duke of Guelders' mercenaries chanced to fall within their grasp, their vengeance was swift and sure.^[9] .

In addition, Guelders was ideally located to conduct "exploits" into the Netherlands provinces of Holland and Brabant—that is, to inflict damage on the subjects of Charles V.^[10] The Duke's lands bestrode three branches of the Rhine important to Holland's commerce—the Waal, the Lek, and the Nederrijn. To the south, it adjoined Holland's fertile southeastern salient along the Maas. To the north, its coastline was a springboard for harrassment of the merchant shipping that threaded its way to Amsterdam along well-marked channels through the Zuider Zee shallows. In between, Guelders was separated from Holland by the down-river portion of the episcopal principality of Utrecht (later, the province of Utrecht), but this did not prevent Karel van Egmont's armies from striking through into central Holland.^[11] Facing an invasion from Guelders almost as soon as she assumed office as Regent (1506), Margaret of Austria found the problem compounded by the fact that the States General consistently refused to vote funds for the war, just as they had done under Charles's father, Archduke Philip.^[12] After a brief interval of personal rule by the young Archduke Charles (1514–1517), Margaret resumed the regency just in time to witness the enemy's most stunning success in thirty-five years of campaigning. The Black Band, a feared mercenary army now in the service of Guelders, crossed from Friesland and cut a swath of destruction down the length of Holland; before returning to Guelders, they sacked the small town of Asperen with a brutality that impressed itself vividly on the minds of contemporaries.^[13] The modern historian of this conflict finds that Margaret and Maximilian were quite reasonable in demanding stern measures against Guelders and that critics of this policy, among), the nobles and in the States General, were naive to think that Karel van Egmont could be controlled by maintaining good relations with his patron, the King of France. But what struck contemporaries was the inability of the seemingly powerful Habsburg state to protect its subjects from the depradations of a robber-baron princeling. As an English envoy in Brussels remarked in 1516, "Even now the prince [Charles] is in the Low Countries, and the Duke of Guelders takes his subjects prisoner."^[14]

Moreover, the secret nature of diplomacy was bound to cause suspicion in a regime in which ministers of the prince had to offer some explanations to the parliamentary bodies that granted new taxes, but did not wish to explain everything. When Habsburg officials met with the Bishop of Utrecht at Schoonhoven (November 1527), the States of Holland were told the Bishop had offered his lands to the Emperor in return for protection against Guelders, but that no final agreement was made since the Regent had no authority to accept such an offer. Amsterdam's Andries Jacobszoon rightly scoffed at this evasion: "I don't believe a bit of it, because they were there together in Schoonhoven for a whole week." Deputies grudgingly admitted on another occasion that they could not expect to be privy to all of the Emperor's "mysteries," but they would no doubt have been shocked by some of the schemes concocted by clever and ambitious officials for expanding Habsburg dominion. (For example, in 1535 there were contacts between emissaries of the radical Anabaptist kingdom of Münster [1534–1535] and Habsburg officials who saw in the Anabaptist uprising a chance to grab the Bishop of Münster's lands.)^[15] Even the more ordinary and reasoned processes of statecraft involved strategic thinking that was difficult to grasp from the more local vantage point of the states. In his Historia Brabantiae Ducum the Leuven humanist Hadrianus Barlandus suspects a sinister motive for the inaction of a Habsburg commander and his 2,500 landsknechten while a Guelders army sacked the town of Tienen in Brabant (1507). In fact, Rudolf von Anhalt, a respected commander, was under orders from Margaret of Austria to avoid a direct engagement until he had more troops.^[16]

All of these circumstances may help to explain why Charles V's Netherlands subjects mistrusted their government. Yet it is a surprise to see how matter-of-factly sensible men like Barlandus and Erasmus can talk about devilish intrigues mounted by princes against their own subjects. Indeed, one might be tempted not to believe they meant what they said, were it not for the fact that equally sensible and learned men a generation or two later spoke in the same matter-of-fact way about the reality of witchcraft. One must not underestimate the fears of ordinary

people about the mysterious world of power politics or discount the capacity of intellectuals to spin such fears into theories so as to give them the appearance of rationality.

Sources for political opinion in the Habsburg Netherlands for the first two decades of the sixteenth century are sparse and indirect. For debates within the states, there are only the brief summaries of States General meetings edited by Gachard,^[17] and a similar compilation at the provincial level, the "Roet Boek van de Staten van Brabant," which is extant from 1506.^[18] For Holland in particular there are several chronicles or histories, including three by friends of Erasmus: Hollandiae Gelriaeque Bellum, a narrative of the 1507–1508 campaigns by Willem Hermans, an Augustinian canon of the congregation at Steyn (near Gouda) to which Erasmus had also belonged;^[19] the Divisie Chronyk, a compilation attributed to Cornelis Geraerts (called Goudanus or Aurelius), another monk of the same order, which covers Holland's medieval history down to 1517;^[20] and the De Rebus Batavicis Libri XIII of Reynier Snoy, a physician of Gouda.^[21] Rather more interesting and seemingly better informed than any of these works is the unpublished "Historie van Hollant" (1477–1534) by an anonymous author who clearly had close ties with Amsterdam and who reports on religious matters with a detail that suggests a clerical hand.^[22]

These authors are by no means unanimous in assigning blame for the depradations Holland suffered in the Guelders wars. The point of Hermans's narrative is that the seige of the strategic castle Poederoy (1508) failed because Holland's towns were squabbling among themselves, "as in the fables: the frog and the mouse were having a fight; the crow, watching from on high, snatched up both warriors and tore them to pieces."^[23] Cornelius Aurelius, in a Latin verse essay on the ancient Batavians, apostrophizes Holland in a similar vein:

But though you have such power on land and sea,
  it is to be regretted
That Guelders alone diminishes your praise,
For does it not seem that, by the great sluggishness
   of the Senate [i.e. the States],
All your ancient glory has ebbed away?^[24]

Elsewhere in the same work Aurelius has letters to his "patrons," including one who was a member of the Council of Holland, and it seems likely that his views on Guelders reflect the outlook of Habsburg officials in The Hague.^[25] Holland's leading commander in these campaigns was Floris van Egmont, Count of Buren and lord of IJsselstein, whom Reynier Snoy portrays as the innocent victim of destructive jealousy among other nobles.^[26] Since Snoy (like Hermans and Aurelius) had ties with Gouda,^[27] it may be that all three writers represent the clear hostility to Guelders that one finds in the regions most often subject to direct attack, that is, northern Brabant ('s Hertogenbosch) and southern Holland (Dordrecht and Gouda). But the "Historie van Hollant" blames Holland's problems on the government and its commanders, and occasional references in discussions within the States General suggest that similar views were not uncommon.

Floris van IJsselstein, a military hero for Reynier Snoy, was apparently the object of widespread suspicion. Since Karel van Egmont was a distant cousin of the Holland Egmonts, IJsselstein's leading role in the Guelders wars might be attributed to family jealousy. Thus in March 1512 he complained to the Regent that deputies from Delft and Amsterdam undercut his appeal to the States of Holland by "coming into your presence crying for peace." Some months later, Thomas Spinelly, an English agent in the Low Countries, reported that the Hollanders were willing to raise funds for 1,200 landsknechten, should the Duke of Braunschweig command them, but would do nothing for IJsselstein.^[28] The anonymous author of the "Historie van Hollant" recognizes in many instances that it was IJsselstein's timely intervention that raised a seige or beat back an invading force,^[29] yet on other occasions he represents IJsselstein as deliberately refraining from pressing home the attack. In the fall of 1504, IJsselstein withdrew his army south of the Maas to's Hertogenbosch, even though the weather was still fair, thus permitting Guelders to make forays into Holland; in 1508 his fainthearted counsel stayed the brave Rudolf von Anhalt^[30] from storming the town of Weesp after it had been taken by the enemy; and he played the same role at Venlo in 1511, where a combined AngloNetherlands army eventually had to break off its seige.^[31]

Conversely IJsselstein is blamed by this anonymous writer for starting up the war against Guelders after the Peace of Cambrai (December 1508) by his incursion into Guelders territory the next spring.^[32] As the chronicler reads them, IJsselstein's intentions were to prolong the fighting. Though other "lords" also advised Anhalt against storming Weesp, it was IJsselstein, "so the common rumor went," who spoke as follows: "Let the Hollanders have experience of war, until we get the bottom ones out of the chest."^[33] Theodoricus Velius, a seventeenth-century chronicler of Hoorn, reports a similar rumor for 1517, when the Black Band passed under the walls of Hoorn in the course of its destructive foray: "Lord Floris van IJsselstein stood with the lord of Wassenaar and other nobles on the north bulwark, and as the enemy passed by, said to those around him, 'This is not the way it was said.' Hearing these words the burghers misunderstood them, and suspected the lords of having known about this attack in advance."^[34] It was thus not just IJsselstein whom some evidently mistrusted, but other great lords as well. According to the "Historie van Hollant," Anhalt left Holland after the dilatory seige of Weesp "because he could see that what the old lords were doing here was nothing but foolishness, and there was no honor to be gained."^[35]

The devastating invasion of Holland by the Black Band (1517) was the occasion for special recrimination against those deemed responsible. The author of the "Historie van Hollant" calls attention to the fact that Haarlem was one of the places where Stadtholder Hendrik van Nassau had stationed cavalry as a defensive measure. Since Haarlem was remote from Guelders and Friesland, whence invasion might come, "many people wondered" why cavalry had been posted there. But once the invasion came, "it gave testimony that the lords of the Court had known very well what the lord of Guelders would do, and that the whole business was planned."^[36] When Nassau's (including a detachment of the Black Band that had chosen to remain "Burgundian") were giving chase to the Black Band, they arrived at Amsterdam's Haarlem gate and sought passage through the city to shorten their way. The burgomasters were amenable to this proposal, but citizens gathered at the Haarlem gate and prevented its being opened to the mercenaries. Without doubt, says the

anonymous chronicler, what the burghers feared would indeed have come to pass if the knechten had been let in, "for, as some of the knechten later admitted, had they gotten within the gates they would have at once cried out, 'Guelders, Guelders' "!^[37] Even as Asperen was being sacked, Erasmus, then in Brussels, provided an account of the invasion in a private letter to a close friend. Unlike the anonymous chronicler, he was unaware that Nassau had posted troops in various towns. He blamed the government for not even allowing the towns of Holland to defend themselves, much less providing for their defense, and predicted that the mercenary band responsible for the sack of Alkmaar would be allowed to escape unpunished. Rather, they were themselves the chosen instrument to punish Holland for its refusal to accede to government requests for a second bede to cover the costs of Prince Charles's journey to Spain: "Since the Hollanders grumbled about this, the storm was loosed on them by design; everyone understands the trick, but it is not safe to speak." When the members of the Black Band were in fact released some months later, after being surrounded and forced to surrender, Erasmus was not surprised.^[38]

Another major invasion from Guelders some years later seems to have provoked similar suspicions in Holland. When Maarten van Rossum occupied The Hague (March 1528), instead of sacking the city, he extorted from its burghers the sum of 28,000 pounds, roughly twenty times its quota in the ordinaris bede . Two later chroniclers, Lambertus Hortensius of Amsterdam and Pontus Heuterus of Delft, assert that Van Rossum's assault on The Hague was carried out by agreement with Margaret of Austria, whose intention was to induce the Hollanders to be more generous in granting new taxes (the accounts seem to be independent of each other, since each writer gives a different reason for reaching this conclusion). D. S. van Zuider, the scholar who in 1911 published a comparison of these two accounts, notes cautiously that he has found no information in the archives to confirm the allegations of Heuterus and Hortensius.^[39] Here, it is possible to recognize the stories related by Heuterus and Hortensius as elements in a persistent political myth: when Hollanders suffer defeat, they are not beaten by the enemy, but betrayed by their leaders.

Such extreme suspicions of the government were by no means confined to Holland. In April 1509, when Margaret of Austria was again trying without success to pry some money loose from the States General, Maximilian received reports about "certain secret damned devils who are making the deputies believe that lord Floris van IJsselstein and I are not content with the Peace made at Cambrai and that we two are trying to break it—unlike their beloved idol, the aforesaid Karel van Egmont, who will be well content to keep the peace if no one gives him occasion to break it."^[40] In 1512 Margaret complained of her constant difficulties with the States of Brabant, in which two of the great cities, 's Hertogenbosch and Antwerp, were willing to support the war against Guelders, while the other two (Brussels and Leuven, which lay farther from the usual theater of action) were "unmanageable." Certain wicked spirits, she writes, "say that I ask only to have war and destroy them, as you did before, and many other evil words tending to arouse the people. What is worse, on Good Friday night they were so bold as to post secretly certain notices on the church door of this city [Mechelen?], to my derision and scorn."^[41] Such people could not be reasoned with; they could only be humored. One way to deal with the states, often employed by Margaret, was to offer peace to Guelders on favorable terms, with the understanding that the states would grant subsidies once peace was concluded.^[42] Another way, suggested by Maximilian, was to send a commanderinchief whom the states trusted (Duke Heinrich of Braunschweig), while offering the states a chance to name the captains who would serve under him.^[43] It was a measure of the government's desperation that deputies to the states, mere laymen in military affairs, were invited to play a role in important decisions. It remains now to be seen how the States of Holland responded to such invitations in the 1520s, when the campaigning against Guelders was renewed.

The States of Holland and the Management of War

During the 1520s the Habsburg government finally made headway against Guelders. Between 1521 and 1523 an army com-

manded by Jan 11 van Wassenaar, scion of one of Holland's oldest families, occupied and subdued the hitherto independent province of Friesland, thus depriving Guelders of an important base of support, while vindicating a claim to the lordship of Friesland which dated back to the medieval counts of Holland. In 1527, an invasion by Karel van Egmont prompted the Prince-Bishop of Utrecht to surrender both parts of his territory to Charles V; thus by the Treaty of Schoonhoven (November 1527) Utrecht and Overijssel became Habsburg provinces. An ensuing campaign into Guelders forced the childless Duke to recognize Charles V as the heir apparent for his own lands (Treaty of Gorinchem, October 1528).^[44]

Holland made important contributions to these successful campaigns, as can be seen from the following table:^[45]

Spending for the Guelders wars was concentrated in the four years for which figures are printed in bold (1521–1523, 1528); in both columns, totals for these four years are roughly equivalent to totals for the other eleven years covered. What Holland contributed in 1528 would not be matched or exceeded until the great military crisis of the 1550s. From these figures one may conclude that the States (at least in Holland) were no longer unwilling to support the war. It seems reasonable to infer that years of punishing raids all along the frontier had finally overcome the disunity in Holland that Willem Hermans lamented in his account of the siege of Poederoy. But if Hollanders understood the need for a united front against Guelders, they still did not necessarily trust the government which fought the war on their behalf.

Hoogstraten and the Council of Holland would have preferred to guard against the hitandrun tactics of Karel van Egmont by creating a permanent military force to stand watch along Holland's frontier. (Hoogstraten himself commanded one of the bandes d'ordonnance that made up the small standing army of the Netherlands, but it was not stationed in Holland.) Several times during the 1520s the States were asked to organize a 1,000-man militia, or a call-up system in which every tenth man from the towns and every fourth man from the villages would report for duty whenever the church bell or town clock sounded the tocsin. But deputies could recall earlier occasions when mercenary companies stationed in the province failed to prevent hostile incursions. Burghers and peasants could not be expected to stand in the open field against landsknechten with nothing to lose, and besides no one could be found willing to serve "for less than six, eight, or ten stuivers" per day—at a time when the going rate was between three and four stuivers per day for German landsknechten (infantry) and eight stuivers for a cavalryman.^[46] These reasons for rejecting the militia proposal were not without merit, but the result was the discussions about war taxation invariably took place in the aftermath of a raid from Guelders that left people in some part of Holland angry and frustrated.

In these circumstances the deputies and their fellow townsmen could support new beden for the purpose of avenging what

the Hollanders themselves had suffered. Yet from the government's point of view, an army once raised might serve more useful purposes if it were not risked in the hazard of battle. This conflict of perspectives could only exacerbate the climate of suspicion that already existed. In Jacobszoon's Prothocolle, deputies often excuse their unwillingness to approve war subsidies by referring to widespread popular mistrust of the government. When the States consented (3 October 1523) to a sale of renten that would raise 80,000 pounds, they were told the money was needed to invade Guelders, which was the only way to make Karel van Egmont cease his depredations in Holland. But three weeks later, Hoogstraten and his men were still camped, as before, near the town of Gorinchem. Far from invading Guelders, Hoogstraten forbade the men of Gorinchem to improve their defenses by razing houses outside the walls. Hence "the common talk is that had no bede been promised, peace would have been concluded by now."^[47] In fact, this guess was not altogether amiss, even if "common talk" put the cart before the horse: peace was not delayed in order to obtain a new bede, but the bede was viewed by the Regent as a means of bringing Guelders to the bargaining table. The States were not told that Margaret of Austria had rejected (8 October) Hoogstraten's proposal to invade Guelders, since there was not money enough for such an undertaking; an invasion was in any case inopportune so long as it remained unclear whether the Duke of Guelders might be willing to come to terms. Backpedalling from what he had promised the States, Hoogstraten responded to the Regent by falling into line with her wishes: "the worst agreement we could get would be better than the best war we could manage."^[48]

Some months later (28 December) Hoogstraten defended his conduct at Gorinchem and asked approval of a revised budget^[49] for the 80,000-pound bede . But the deputies insisted on allocating the money according to the budget they had approved when they consented to the sale of renten . Moreover, the folks back home had found new reasons for thinking the government was not serious about prosecuting the war: "The common man cannot understand, and murmurs greatly, because the men of Guelders crossed the Vaert [a channel running south from

Utrecht] and came into our land just after our people withdrew from the Vaert, the houses were burned in Naarden two or three days after the 80 horse [stationed there] were called away to Brabant; whence comes great murmur  . . .  among the people, so that an uprising is to be feared."^[50] In one of the private conversations Jacobszoon records, an Amsterdam burgomaster put things succinctly to Jean Carondolet, Archbishop of Palermo and President of the Privy Council: people will refuse further support for the war "because they believe things are still being done the same old way. This infamy cannot be purged and extirpated from the human heart except by carrying the war (exploicterende ) into the land of Guelders; seeing this, people will give the hearts out of their bodies."^[51]

Confronted with such arguments, officials like Carondolet and Hoogstraten, desperate for new extraordinaris beden, had no choice but to promise what the deputies seemed to want, even if they had no authority from the Regent to make such promises. Hoogstraten had to deal with "great murmuring in Holland" because his troops had remained inactive at Gorinchem, despite the attack that had been promised when the States agreed to the 80,000-pound sale of renten .^[52] While this sale was still proceeding, the government broached the idea of a further subsidy for campaigning during the following spring and summer. In Mechelen on 31 December, Margaret of Austria, known to her subjects as the Gracious Lady, spoke in French to deputies from Holland. Guelders must be invaded, said the Gracious Lady, but the Hollanders must help themselves, as in case of fire, since Brabant and Flanders were expending their resources for the defense of Hainaut and Artois, which had been ravaged and burned by the French.^[53] In the world of statecraft, matters were never so simple as one made them out to be in public speeches. But Margaret was (as she wrote Charles V) "embarrassed as to how I shall content" the frequent deputations she received from the States of Holland: "What they most complain about is that they always pay under cover of war, but one does not use their money to make war." The Regent's experience with the Hollanders was a textbook example of the maxim proposed by her shrewd and trusted adviser, Mercurino Gattinara, as one of his "ten commandments for war": "Seeing all their sacrifices end in a

truce, peoples will not resign themselves to more [sacrifices], for they believe the semblance of war is a pretext for taking their money." On this occasion (31 December 1523) Margaret herself promised the Hollanders an attack against Guelders, and both IJsselstein and Hoogstraten privately recommended an attack to the Regent. Yet Margaret believed it more important to conserve the resources of the Netherlands for a spring offensive against France.^[54]

Publicly, Margaret encouraged the States of Holland to discuss a Union with Antwerp and 's Hertogenbosch, the two "great cities" of the States of Brabant that had consistently supported the war against Guelders.^[55] She perhaps had in mind a campaign of plunder, as Hoogstraten had at one point suggested, rather than a fullscale invasion. Meanwhile, keeping her options open, she pursued the possibility of discussions with Guelders.^[56] In the States of Holland, negotiations for a new bede were held up because the Hollanders, sniffing the truth, learned that Habsburg commanders had been ordered not to attack (exploicteren ) while representatives from Guelders were in Gorinchem to discuss a truce. Having received assurances on this point, the Hollanders agreed to the Union and approved another extraordinaris bede of 80,000 pounds, but it was in fact not to be spent for a new campaign since Guelders and the Netherlands signed a oneyear truce in June 1524.^[57]

The bede discussions in 1523 and 1524 show that the States of Holland lacked the leverage to set effective conditions on how the troops they paid for would be used. The Stadtholder and even the Regent simply made whatever promises seemed necessary and then set military policy as they thought best, without much regard for the will of the States. It is hard to imagine how the rulers of the Netherlands could have conducted themselves much differently, since they could not permit the wishes of a single province to become paramount. For the Netherlands as a whole, France was a more dangerous enemy than Guelders, even though Hollanders might not think so.^[58] Also, since the deputies usually represented the extravagant fears of the populace without claiming these fears as their own, government officials may have felt they had some room for maneuver, assuming that the deputies, wiser in the ways of the world than the com-

mon man, would understand why certain promises could not be kept. Bargains were more likely to be kept when deputies spoke for themselves and for the concrete interests of the towns they represented.

During the Frisian campaign of 1522–1523, the States were in effect presented with a choice between Holland's shortrange and longrange interests. Holland had not supported either the Habsburg government's redemption of its claim to Friesland (pawned to a German prince) or the confiscation of goods from Guelders and Friesland, the immediate casus belli in 1522.^[59] But once Guelders had joined forces with the antiHabsburg resistance in Friesland, threatening to make the Zuider Zee a hostile lake for Holland's commerce, Hollanders gave strong support to the war effort, especially to Wassenaar's siege of Sloten, the last fortress held by the "Guelders Frisians." When the States approved a 40,000-pound sale of renten in March 1523, the formal acceptance of this bede by the Regent stated that all of Holland's cities wished the money to be spent for the campaign in Friesland where (the deputies complained) the war had been badly managed until now.^[60] Evidently in hopes of drawing Wassenaar back to Holland, a band of "Guelders Frisians" crossed the Zuider Zee in September and conducted a raid through Holland from north to south while Hoogstraten's deputy, Castre, did nothing to stop them. According to the "Historie van Hollant," all of these events occurred because of "some at Court who do not love Holland," and would have been sorry to see the war in Friesland brought to a successful conclusion. In the States, deputies grappled with the more concrete question of how best to allocate Holland's bede revenue. Together with some smaller towns, four of the six great cities (Delft, Gouda, Haarlem, and Leiden) reversed their previous decision, arguing that funds still coming in from the 40,000-pound sale of renten should be used for "putting out the fires at home," that is, for defending Holland itself. But Amsterdam, with a vital interest in making the Zuider Zee safe for its commerce, took a longer view, insisting that the fires in Friesland were more important. In the end, it was Amsterdam's reasoning that prevailed. When the States consented to a sec-

ond and larger sale of renten for 80,000 pounds (3 October 1523), they stipulated that the war in Friesland must go forward, and that "robbers' nests" or pirate bases along the Zuider Zee must also be cleared out.^[61]

The outcome of this discussion is indicative of Amsterdam's influence in the States. Voting members of the States spoke in a fixed order, and each one had a distinctive and reasonably consistent profile in sources of the 1520s. The nobles were inclined to give the government what it wanted (though not at the price of infringing on their own fiscal privileges), and they also represented the interests of rural taxpayers, opposing efforts by the great cities to minimize what city-dwellers would have to pay.^[62] Dordrecht spoke after the nobles, and first among the cities; its deputies continued the city's tradition of support for government requests, though somewhat less loyally than the nobles did.^[63] Haarlem, speaking second, had made (prior to 1518) a secret agreement to the effect that a large portion of its bede quota would be remitted if Haarlem provided the necessary third vote whenever two other cities agreed to a new bede (three towns plus the nobles made a majority of four votes).^[64] Delft, speaking third, was the first city in Holland to adopt the poor law reform pioneered by leper (Ypres) in Flanders;^[65] its deputies declaimed repeatedly against the inequity of a system of taxation in which the wealthy paid little and against the inequity of the schiltal assessment, in which Delft itself had the highest quota.^[66] Leiden (speaking fourth)^[67] and Gouda (speaking last)^[68] complained incessantly of their blighted industries (brewing and woolen cloth, respectively), and almost always had to be brought round by private negotations after a majority of the States had already agreed to a bede . (The government insisted that unanimity was not required for a binding consent, but in practice towns threatened to withdraw their consent unless all of the others agreed to pay.)^[69] Amsterdam, speaking fifth, had a certain tactical advantage because it would often be the second city (after Dordrecht) to vote affirmatively on a bede request; thus, the conditions it attached to its consent had a good chance of being taken seriously. Haarlem's secret agreement with Nassau could not have been enforced for very long (after a time, the city's favorable rebate level could be defended simply as a

matter of custom), but the pattern of consent to bede requests in the 1520s shows a certain regularity: it often happened that the nobles and Dordrecht consented first; Amsterdam consented after the kind of private discussions that Jacobszoon records, and Haarlem added the needed fourth vote. Special commissioners would then be sent to Delft, Leiden, and Gouda to extract their consent.^[70]

As a price for their cooperation with the government on the Frisian war, Amsterdam's deputies demanded access to government bede accounts. Ruysch Janszoon, perhaps the most influential figure among Amsterdam's burgomasters at this time,^[71] wanted to know how money from the 40,000-pound sale of renten (approved in March 1523) was actually being spent. Willem Goudt, Receiver for the beden in Holland, agreed to show him his accounts, but Ruysch Janszoon was not pleased with what he found, for (as was the usual practice) the expense items in Goudt's accounts were mostly in the form of quittances (décharges ) from government officials, with only vague indications as to what they did with the credits that Goudt had provided. In fact, harrassed fiscal officers of the Habsburg government regularly used bede income to pay off old debts, while raising new loans to cover the needs for which a given bede had been requested.^[72] Hoogstraten assured Ruysch Janszoon that the accounts of the Treasurer of War (from whom Goudt had décharges ) would show how monies from the 40,000-pound sale of renten were indeed expended for the war in Friesland; further, he said, money from the new 80,000-pound sale of renten was badly needed, for the States of Brabant, having other commitments elsewhere, could not afford to maintain more than 1,000 knechten in Friesland. Unwittingly, Hoogstraten had given Ruysch Janszoon the proof he needed that something was amiss. According to Janszoon's information, which Hoogstraten did not dispute, if Wassenaar had only 3,200 knechten in Friesland and if Brabant supported 1,000 while the pro-Habsburg Frisians paid for another 1,500, what had happened to Holland's 40,000 pounds? "I know very well where the money has gone," said Janszoon, "to purge old scars and wounds of debt, for the Friesland garrisons, whose wages the Emperor should be paying from his domain revenues."^[73]

At the next meeting (25 October 1523), the States tried to get Hoogstraten to agree that, as a further condition for their consent to the 80,000-pound bede, Wassenaar would be ordered not to dismiss his troops so long as Sloten held out. Speaking in Hoogstraten's behalf, the Audienceur, Laurence Dublioul, told the deputies it was not in the Stadtholder's power to make such decisions. But Dublioul did invite the States to name a committee to oversee disbursement of the 80,000 pounds.^[74] Soon afterwards, Sloten surrendered to its besiegers, and Friesland became a Habsburg province. This happy conclusion to the Frisian campaign did not prevent a bitter and protracted discussion in the States over the budget (staet ) for the 80,000 pounds currently being raised through a sale of renten . A new budget submitted to the States included (as Ruysch Janszoon had suspected) a large sum, more than 30,000 pounds, for "old debts" in Friesland, and another 16,000 pounds to reimburse Hoogstraten for money he had raised against his own credit to hire troops (these were evidently the men that were supposed to invade Guelders, but did not). The States at first insisted on striking out both items, but agreed after six weeks of wrangling to accept the 16,000 pounds for Hoogstraten and 12,000 for old debts in Friesland. In the interim Hoogstraten had a sharp exchange with Aert van der Goes, then pensionary of Delft, who told him he would not be reimbursed for troops that had done Holland no good. "I know some of you do not want me as Stadtholder of Holland," Hoogstraten retorted, "but whether you like it or not I shall remain Stadtholder so long as it pleases his imperial majesty."^[75]

It must have been galling for a man of Hoogstraten's stature to wait upon the pleasure of Holland's burghers to have his loan repaid. The States had apparently asked to have him as their Stadtholder,^[76] and it certainly made sense to have a man with Hoogstraten's influence at Court take a personal interest in Holland's welfare. But now Delft's pensionary insulted him, and the Amsterdammers refused to credit his word that the Zuider Zee would be included in the truce (June 1524) with Guelders. Believing that they had even sent a secret mission to the Emperor in Spain to plead for his removal as Stadtholder, Hoogstraten retaliated by threats and bluster: the truce with

Guelders, he told the Amsterdammers, "is not so strongly made that I do not know how to break it."^[77]

By this time the Stadtholder had gotten his money back, but there were further indignities to be endured at the hands of the States. Since Hoogstraten spent most of his time in Mechelen, as a member of the Privy Council and head of the Council of Finance, he appointed the lord of Castre, a Brabant nobleman, as his Deputy Stadtholder for Holland. Mistrusted by the States, Castre certainly did not give the impression of being an effective commander. He did nothing to stop the raid that Guelders forces mounted from Friesland (September 1523). When Hollanders feared another invasion during the following winter, Castre, who had withdrawn to the south, suggested opening sluice gates to flood the countryside—a comment that prompted Dordrecht's deputies to say Hollanders would do better to keep their bede money and defend themselves. When Castre appeared before the States, it was to say he dared not return to his Walloon mercenaries without money, and when he faced a Guelders army in battle, he was beaten (Vianen, May 1524). Hence when the truce with Guelders was extended for another year (June 1525), Amsterdam's delegation to the States suggested saving 1,800 pounds by cancelling Castre's appointment.^[78]

Castre's position in Holland became an urgent matter when war with Guelders was renewed late in 1527, owing to the annexation by the Habsburgs of the ecclesiastical principality of Utrecht. The States of Holland were not privy to these "mysteries" of statecraft, but they were quick to recognize the strategic importance of having a Habsburg Utrecht as a buffer between Guelders and Holland. By March 1528, Holland had entered into a Union with northern Brabant for a spring offensive, in support of which the States agreed to a new issue of 80,000 pounds in renten .^[79] Doubtless in keeping with Hoogstraten's wishes, Margaret of Austria provided Castre with a letter of appointment as commander of infantry for the invading army. But it was at this time that Maarten van Rossum marched through Holland and occupied The Hague. Castre, stationed with a detatchment of troops in Leiden, sent instructions to bar the dike roads leading towards Haarlem and Amsterdam,

should Van Rossum attempt to exit Holland by going north; he would see to it that the enemy did not escape via Leiden. In fact, Van Rossum did pass by way of Leiden and crossed unharmed into Utrecht.^[80]

The States plainly told Hoogstraten that because of assault on The Hague and because of his pleurisy, Castre commanded no respect among Hollanders who rallied to arms at the sound of their town bell. In turn, Hoogstraten painted the Amsterdammers as disloyal, accusing them of supplying victuals to the rebel town of Utrecht. Amsterdammers surmised that Castre had been told all, for he "smiled broadly" at them, and said he would personally stuff into a sack and drown anyone caught supplying Utrecht with victuals. "Do it, lord," replied an Amsterdam burgomaster, Meester Pieter Colijn, "we ask it of you."^[81] On 14 April, deputies from fifteen cities met to consider having a Captain-General for Holland. By way of Pieter Colijn, Wilhelm von Renneberg, a Rhenish nobleman whom the Bishop of Utrecht had appointed commander of his cavalry, sent word that he too lacked confidence in Castre. The States then fixed on Renneberg as Castre's replacement to command the infantry that Holland would fund. To reach their goal, the States appointed a committee to set about going over Hoogstraten's head to other members of the Regent's Privy Council. Pieter Colijn, with deputies from Dordrecht and Gouda, held conversations with Erard de la Marck, Prince-Bishop of Liège and an important Habsburg ally; Jan van Bergen, lord of Bergen-op-Zoom in Brabant; Adolph of Burgundy, lord of Vere in Zeeland and hereditary Admiral of the Netherlands; and Floris van IJsselstein, who, as Captain-General of the whole army, supplied the necessary letters of appointment (for Renneberg) and dismissal (for Castre). Hoogstraten had to accept a fait accompli.^[82]

On still another issue, Hoogstraten and IJsselstein found Margaret of Austria and the States lined up against them. When the States approved the 80,000-sale of renten in February 1528, their agreement stipulated that in this war there must be no more stillsaeten or private truces with the enemy by vassals of the Emperor.^[83] Stillsaeten were not the exclusive privilege of the nobles, for towns and even villages could enter into these agreements on their own. But the great nobles' use of stillsaeten was, for urban

deputies in the States, a major test of whether these powerful men "belong to the body of Holland" and are therefore obliged "by natural law" to share in the burdens of defense.^[84] Margaret of Austria promised the States to do her best to abolish the practice. Yet it was no easy task for the Regent to lay down orders to the men who commanded her armies. When Hoogstraten ordered an embargo on trade with towns in Utrecht that were in rebellion against their PrinceBishop, the Council of Holland had to point out that no embargo could succeed while towns of Charles V's vassals—including Culemborg (which Hoogstraten ruled in his wife's name) and Montfoort—continued their trade with the enemy.^[85] Hoogstraten made a counter-proposal to the States: his wife's town of Culemborg, even though it was a fief of the Duchy of Guelders, would nonetheless cease trading with the enemy if the States would agree to station 700 or 800 footsoldiers within its walls.^[86] Since the towns and villages that made up feudal enclaves did not pay in the beden, using bede money for their defense was a sensitive issue. When the States were asked to pay extra for placing 1,000 knechten in the vassal towns of southeastern Holland, the nobles agreed at once, "since we are all together members of one lichaem ." But urban deputies will have recalled that the nobles showed less enthusiasm for the notion of Holland as a common body when it came to exemptions from taxation. In this case Dordrecht supported the proposal, but the other five great cities said they had no instructions for discussing it.^[87]

While Hoogstraten and the States argued over private truces, the war against Guelders went well for the Habsburg cause on several fronts. Towns in Overijssel declared for Charles V; Bishop Henry of Bavaria subdued rebels within the city of Utrecht; IJsselstein and others captured several Guelders towns on or near the Zuider Zee. But Tiel, near Holland's southeastern frontier, held out stubbornly against IJsselstein's besieging army.^[88] During these months the States of Holland approved several additional extraordinarls beden,^[89] and deputies continued to raise the question of stillsaeten . Even as his army lay before Tiel, IJsselstein as Count of Buren concluded special truces for Buren and other portions of his lands that lay within the Duchy of Guelders. Again Margaret of Austria

promised not to permit any stillsaeten, but members of her Council told the deputies that the city of 's Hertogenbosch in Brabant, always a staunch foe of Guelders, had requested IJsselstein to make these arrangements, so he would agree to undertake the siege of Tiel. IJsselstein himself said the same thing when he appeared before the States, but noted that the agreement involving Buren was due to expire soon and would not be renewed.^[90] But within a matter of weeks Tiel surrended, and Guelders submitted to terms so that effective enforcement of the ban on stillsaeten was left to Margaret of Austria's successor as Regent, Mary of Hungary.

Attempts by the States to bend the government's war policy to their will cannot be called a great success. Government leaders did agree to stipulations that troops raised be used to attack Guelders, but Margaret of Austria did not allow agreements of this kind to interfere with her perceptions of how the Netherlands (not just Holland) might best be defended. The States were able to dedicate to Friesland much of the income from beden approved to support Wassenaar's campaign there, but in this case Holland's interests and the government's were the same. Margaret and her advisers surely welcomed the opportunity to add another province to the Habsburg dominions. In the case of stillsaeten the Regent and the States were also in agreement, but here the bede agreement clauses that Margaret endorsed and tried to implement had little real effect since the "great lords" were not easily dislodged from the traditional practice of protecting their own lands in this way. The one instance in which the States were able to assert their will against direct opposition—the dismissal of Castre—again points to the powerful position of the great nobles. It was only with their cooperation that Castre was ousted.

Yet this cooperation with the great lords may also be indicative of what the deputies learned from the Guelders wars. As it happened, there was no further land warfare within Holland's borders until the time of the Revolt. But there were occasions (as will be seen in the next chapter) when the States turned to the great lords in order to get military orders written to their satisfaction. By the 1520s, and no doubt a good deal earlier, the

States had learned the advantages of nurturing a close relationship with these powerful men. Just as the city of 's Hertogenbosch engaged IJsselstein's selfinterest by promising to support his private truces if he agreed to besiege Tiel, the States of Holland secretly offered him 1,200 pounds if he would capture the rebel city of Utrecht.^[91]

Deputies had also learned to discuss military strategy in terms that the great lords might approve. Much of the pressure for an offensive against Guelders came from the fear and anger of common folk, but one of the conversations Jacobszoon records (within the vroedschsap of Amsterdam) suggests that urban elites had their own wellconsidered reasons for an aggresive strategy: "If war comes, let it be offensive and not defensive, for in a defensive war the wellbeing of the land is wasted, and there is no profit to be gotten."^[92] The speaker seems to mean by "profit" the same thing that Maximilian I meant by "exploits" of war; in other words, money is better spent if it brings results, by forcing the enemy to terms, than if it merely attempts to prevent what probably cannot be prevented anyway—that is, damage to one's own territory. There is in fact a certain resemblance between the States' demands for an offensive against Guelders and the pleas that Maximilian reiterated, mostly in vain, during the reign of his son, Archduke Philip. Under the pressure of repeated raids from Guelders, the Hollanders seem to have become belated converts to the strategy that the Emperor had advocated and that the men who fought under him would have appreciated.

Finally, the deputies gained some practical experience of what had to be done, off the field of battle, to support and maintain an army. Upon the invitation of government officials, the States appointed from among their number commissioners of muster, whose job it was to make sure that mercenary commanders actually enrolled the men for whom they were being paid.^[93] They inspected the accounts of the Receiver for the beden, and in order to keep money free for the current campaigns they wished to support, they bargained with some success about which of the government's old debts might be charged to the accounts of Holland's beden .^[94] Perusal of these accounts led to questions about the Treasurer of War's accounts,

and in 1528 the Council of Holland wrote Hoogstraten that the States would not approve a further bede unless the Treasurer of War or his clerk came to Holland to render account of how previous subsidies had been spent.^[95] Discussions of this kind were no doubt facilitated by the fact that at least a few of the deputies were men with some military experience who could deal without embarrassment with professional commanders.^[96]

Thus civilian deputies were by way of gaining some experience in the arts of managing a war, not because of their own stature as merchants or landowners, but because they represented the common body of the land. If popular suspicion of the government was invariably exaggerated and misplaced, it was a creative error, stiffening the resolve of the deputies to be firm in their negotiations with government commissioners. For their part, officials could not deal directly with popular fears, but they could and did respond to the climate of suspicion by taking into their confidence those who claimed to speak for the common man. Poised between the anxieties of their fellow townsmen and the fiscal needs of the government, deputies dealt with both by moving, somewhat timidly, into areas that had formerly been the exclusive preserve of the great lords.