Allocation of Holland's Fiscal Burden

In their capacity as "mighty lords," the deputies decreed unprecedented levels of taxation that fell most heavily on the peasants and on urban commoners. In order to understand why the fiscal burden was allocated in this way, it will be helpful to look first at two categories of property that for political reasons could not be taxed: 1) towns and rural districts lying within feudal enclaves held by the more important nobles; and 2) the commercial wealth of the towns.

Feudal Enclaves

In Holland, as elsewhere, the clergy had privileges that the States attacked repeatedly and with some success, but ecclesiastical wealth could not be more than a secondary issue in a province which had few important monasteries and where land owned by ecclesiastical corporations seldom exceeded ten percent in any given village. The same might be said of the personal privileges of the nobility, for Holland's 200 noble families, though important as landholders, were not a dominant presence in the economy of a province that in 1514 had an estimated population of 275,000.^[60] Instead, the major obstacle to any equitable system of taxation in Holland was the private jurisdiction of the great lords. Morgental accounts from the middle decades of the sixteenth century suggest a total of about 300,000 morgen of land in Holland (1,055 square miles), of which approximately twelve percent consisted of lands "outside the schiltal "—that is, they were not liable to the beden because they were part of feudal enclaves.^[61] In addition, the Count of Egmont, whose nine villages in Kennemerland had been assessed for 3.15 percent of the schiltal valuation in 1514, was granted a privilege in 1522 exempting these lands from all future beden, provided only that he and his heirs paid the trea-

sury 800 pounds a year.^[62] Roughly speaking, then, fifteen percent of the landed wealth in Holland lay beyond the tax collector's reach. Private lords also controlled seven small towns located in Holland's southeastern corner.^[63] The sovereign or his Regent claimed on occasion to draw on a reserve of power (potestas absoluta ) in order to "derogate from" or overturn privileges deemed contrary to the general good. This authority was sometimes used against the towns,^[64] and deputies to the States could not understand why it might not also be used against the holders of feudal enclaves, especially for forms of taxation not based on the schiltal .

Yet the Habsburg state in the Netherlands was founded on the cooperation of the great nobles who in their capacities as Stadtholders and military commanders were expected to help maintain the loyalty and obedience of the provinces where their own lands were concentrated. Only a few men had this kind of status in Holland. Floris van IJsselstein (d. 1539) and his son and successor as Count of Buren, Maximiliaan van Egmont (d. 1551); Lamoraal van Egmont, son of Jan IV, Count of Egmont; Reinout van Brederode (d. 1556), and his son and successor Hendrik; members of the Nassau family, including Hendrik (d. 1538), his son Reynier, who died in the Emperor's campaign in the Rhineland (1544), and their distant cousin Wilhelm (henceforth William of Orange), who came from his German homeland to claim Reynier's inheritance and acquired important holdings in Holland by marrying the heiress of Maximiliaan van Egmont; and, finally, Philippe de Montmorency, Count of Hornes, who married into the other branch of the Egmont family.^[65] The importance that Charles V attached to such men may be gauged from his patient and detailed correspondence with the young Reynier van Nassau, who briefly succeeded Hoogstraten as Stadtholder of Holland.^[66] When Charles V was dangerously isolated at Regensburg just before the beginning of the first Schmalkaldic War, it was Maximiliaan van Egmont who led a Netherlands army across Protestant Germany to bring him support (1546).^[67] Since the same men controlled much of the land in Holland's feudal enclaves, efforts by the States to have these areas taxed faced a formidable political obstacle.

The issue was of long standing,^[68] but became acute in the

1540s when new forms of taxation were introduced and the previously exempt lands were supposed to be included. Since the States doubted that money would actually be collected in these areas, they inserted in their acts of consent to the new beden clauses providing that the rest of Holland would not be liable for sums not paid by the pretense vryen or "self-styled free" lords.^[69] There are occasional references to sums being paid, either by voluntary agreement with a particular lord, or by time-honored methods of constraint (placing local magistrates under arrest). In fact, between 1543 and 1556, a total of 98,598 pounds was collected from lands held by the "three personages" most prominent among Holland's exempt lords: William of Orange, Count Lamoraal of Egmont, and the Count of Hoorn. It is equally clear, however, that these great men waged a stubborn legal battle to maintain their privileges intact and never permitted their subjects to surrender a stuiver, except under protest.^[70] For example, when the magistrates of Maximiliaan van Egmont's town of Leerdam refused to pay the tenth penny on real property and renten income, the Council of Holland had them placed under house arrest in The Hague. But the Count of Buren, "neglecting his government" (as Stadtholder of Friesland), came to The Hague and insisted on sharing the fate of his loyal subjects. The Council, fearing reproach, let everyone go.^[71]

The Grand Council of Mechelen issued a "provisional verdict" condemning those who claimed exemption to pay what was asked, pending a final resolution of the validity of their claims. After the death of Maximiliaan van Egmont (1551), William of Orange pursued his late father-in-law's claims before the Grand Council, as did the Count of Hornes. The States expected their case before the Council to be defended by Holland's Procurator General, but this official seemed unwilling to go against the great lords, despite an admonition from the Emperor.^[72] In April 1553, the States consented to a tenth penny on real property income, as part of an extraordinaris bede of 300,000 pounds. In November, Holland's delegates sought the help of Viglius Zuichemius van Aytta, Schore's successor as President of the Secret Council. The act of consent for the 300,000-pound bede stated that the Emperor agreed to a "derogation de motu proprio " from any privileges that might obstruct the collection of

the tenth penny from all persons of whatever condition. Thinking this clause might not be sufficient, the Hollanders wanted a derogatie particulier naming the Count of Egmont by name, but Viglius said the Emperor would never grant such a thing without giving Lamoraal van Egmont a hearing. He did admit that the Egmont privilege of 1522 applied only for beden collected by the schiltal, not for all beden . By the end of Charles V's reign, the nobles in the States were taking the same line as the towns, suggesting that gratie for beden collected by the schiltal should be made up from the exempt areas, but the issue was still in doubt.^[73]

It thus became a question for Philip II, the new King of Spain and Count of Holland, who came to the Netherlands in late 1555 to take charge of the campaign against France. By August 1556 the States must have had an inkling how the King would decide, since calculations were being made as to how much would have to be returned to the "three personages" if their claims were vindicated. On 7 September, Philip announced that Orange, Hornes, and Lamoraal van Egmont were absolved of all bede liabilites past or future. Counting sums that had to be repaid as well as sums that were never collected, the total loss to the King's treasury was reckoned at 190,000 pounds.^[74] Even so, it might have been a small sum to pay for the friendship and loyalty of such important men, were it not one of the ironies of Low Countries history that these three personages would become, in the King's mind, his great enemies. Twelve years later, Orange was in exile, leading a fledgling revolt; Hoorn and Egmont, protesting their loyalty to Philip, had been placed under arrest by the iron-fisted Duke of Alba and were beheaded in the Groote Markt of Brussels.

Commercial Wealth

In general, the government's efforts to tax Holland's commerce were not much more successful than its attempts to impose a congie on the re-export of Baltic grain (see chap. 4). The new taxes introduced in 1543 included a hundredth penny on the value of all goods exported from the Netherlands and a tenth penny on commercial profits. But Holland resisted both, appar-

ently more so than the other provinces did. Mary of Hungary had to impose the hundredth penny "ex potestate absoluta Imperatoris" ("by the Emperor's absolute power") because the States would not accept it; even then, the edict was not published in Holland for some months, and when it was, Amsterdam's port officials refused to cooperate with the collector.^[75] Holland was also the only province to insist on modifying the tenth penny on commercial profits, to make it instead a tenth penny on the assumed profit (1:16) of mercantile inventory. More than six months after the States had agreed to the tax in this form, the Queen complained that it was still not being collected. By November 1545, only about 1,200 pounds had actually been collected from the tenth penny on mercantile inventory. The tenth penny on commercial profits was collected again in Flanders and Brabant,^[76] but in Holland it was not even proposed to the States.

The next major effort to tax the activities of Holland's merchants came in 1549, in the form of a four-year tax on imported wine consumed in the Low Countries, a tax intended to pay for warships to patrol the North Sea.^[77] From the start, the wine tax failed to live up to expectations. In July 1550, the first sailing season when the new system was to be in effect, the States were told that the promised warships had not materialized because there was as yet no revenue to pay for them. The tax-evading skills of wine importers in the Low Countries are suggested by the decline of receipts over the first two years as indicated in the following table:^[78]

Receipts cannot have improved in subsequent years because war with France broke out again later in 1552. In August,

Viglius admitted to deputies from Holland that money collected on wine consumed in Holland would not fit out a single warship, "indeed, not even a jacht ." (For purposes of comparison, it might be noted that the wine excise farm in Amsterdam yielded the city 6,960 pounds for 1552; but this levy the farmer could recoup by collecting from tavern keepers, not from wine merchants.) After four years, a summary of the wine tax accounts shows a net deficit in excess of 59,000 pounds, representing sums borrowed that were not covered by the receipts.^[79]

Combining all efforts to tax what one treasury official called "the great and excessive monopolies that merchants practice," it seems that roughly 40,000 pounds were collected in Holland between 1543 and 1554. During the same twelve years, Holland's net bede contributions, not counting deductions for gratie and renten interest, amounted to 2,235,705 pounds. In other words, direct taxes on mercantile activity (not counting what was paid for commercial properties in the tenth pennies on real estate) yielded a sum equal to only 1.8 percent of the taxes collected in Holland.^[80]

In the absence of tax records from other provinces, one cannot tell if, for example, Flanders and Brabant were any different, but there are indications that Holland was peculiarly stubborn in fighting off taxes in commerce. If so, it was no doubt because the States of this province were so composed as to provide no real counterweight to the influence of the cities with voting rights. The States of Brabant had a clerical first estate,^[81] as well as an influential noble estate; in the all-important third estate of the States of Flanders, known as the Four Members, one of the four votes was cast by the Franc of Bruges, a corporate entity representing the small towns and rural communities of West Flanders.^[82] By contrast, the college of nobles in the States of Holland had only one of the seven votes. As for the six great cities, each had dominant economic interests, and the deputies who represented these towns, however their own wealth may have been invested, were expected to uphold and defend these interests. Every town hall had a locked chest containing privileges granted by previous rulers, and if these were not sufficient to fend off danger to a town's economic wellbeing, deputies in the States were expected to employ whatever

arguments might work. For example, "free trade" could be defended by citing arguments from "natural law" or by adducing the practical experience of towns that prospered by allowing foreigners to trade without restrictions.^[83] Some of these discussions in the States, if studied more closely, might be of considerable interest for historians of economic thought; but the point here is that Holland's urban deputies, by a combination of legal reasoning, judicious bribes, and plain stubbornness, were just as successful as the great lords were in shunting the burden of taxation off onto someone else.

Since money had to be gotten somehow and could not be obtained either from the merchants or from the feudal enclaves, one obvious alternative was to look more closely at taxes on land. In the 1515 schiltal assessment, Holland's rural areas were assigned only 42.25 percent of the ordinaris bede, whereas twenty-five cities, including the six great cities, were asked to pay 57.75 percent. In light of recent work on Holland's prosperous agrarian economy, the rural assessment seems low, and there could be some truth in claims made by urban deputies that the towns were given high quotas in 1515 to make up for the rebates they habitually received. From the accounts of levies of the tenth penny on renten and real property income, beginning in the 1540s, it seems the towns had only about thirty percent of such investment in Holland. To bring the urban share up to the percentage represented by the 1515 schiltal (57.75 percent), one might assume that characteristically urban assets (mercantile inventory, part-ownership shares in ships, etc.) amounted to nearly as much as all investments in the countryside, but this assumption seems unlikely.^[84] If there was any initial imbalance in favor of the countryside, the States, dominated by the great cities, more than took care of it during Charles V's reign. Towns with voting rights steadily increased their own rebates, and pressure from the government to make good what was lost through rebates sometimes led to still higher burdens for country folk. To take but one example, in 1543 the States agreed to a 75,000-schiltal levy to be paid in the full amount, that is, with no deduction for gratiën . To gain the great cities' consent to this novelty, the government had to allow them

the gratie they would have gotten if the face value of the levy were 100,000, or approximately 24,000, the amount that the countryside would have paid in a levy of 60,000. Hence to get the full 75,000, Holland's villages had to be assessed for quotas consistent with a levy of about 135,000, nearly twice as much as the sum to which the States had agreed. Noble deputies insisted that they had not consented to this nefarious scheme, and when village magistrates went to the town halls of Haarlem and Amsterdam for an explanation, "the burgomasters said, '[the collectors] are asking too much,' and they said nothing about their gratiën ."^[85]

Many of the extraordinaris beden to which the States consented after 1543 included a morgental, or a tenth penny on income from renten and rural property. By making a few assumptions,^[86] one can construct a rough estimate of the portion of net bede income (after subtraction for rebates) collected from the countryside.

In other words, the proportionate real contribution of Holland's countryside (sixty-two percent) and towns (thirty-eight percent) was almost exactly the reverse of what both were assessed in the schiltal of 1515—that is, forty-two percent and fifty-eight percent, respectively.

Taxing the land more heavily was not altogether unreasonable, in light of indications that there was a new impetus for reclamation projects after about 1550. Morgental accounts show

new land being added outside the dikes,^[87] and there was also considerable investment in the building of sturdy new dikes and retaining walls at sensitive points. At Hondsbosch (Petten), north of Haarlem, such a dike was constructed to guard newly reclaimed land in the Zijpe polder, and the important sluice at Sparendam was rebuilt for the first time in stone in 1566. The technique for draining inland lakes by attaching pumps to windmills, although not used extensively until after 1600, was also developed during these years. Even apart from improvement of the land, the spread of a new type of mixed farming, described by Jan De Vries, made the coastal regions of the northern Netherlands attractive to investors from the wealthier and more urbanized provinces to the south.^[88] Major investors included members of the great nobility, both in Holland^[89] and in the southern Netherlands, as well as Antwerp merchants^[90] and Holland magistrates. For example, Heyman Jacobszoon van Ouder Amstel, burgomaster and sheriff of Amsterdam during the 1530s, made extensive purchases of domain land put up for sale.^[91] Among those who controlled Amsterdam's college of burgomasters during the 1540s and 1550s, Dirk Hillebrandszoon Otter owned fishing rights near Edam, and Joost Buyck and Geraard Klaaszoon Mattheus were said to be the only nonlocal owners of land near the village of Egmond Binnen.^[92]

In the taxation of land, the important question was whether the "mighty lords" of the States were taxing wealth-holders like themselves, or the peasants who were their leaseholders, and their debtors on the private renten market.^[93] In this respect, there was an important difference between the morgental and the tenth penny. In collections of the tenth penny, the owner was usually expected to pay two-thirds; the "user," only one third. In practice, the peasant paid the collector the full ten percent that was due and then recovered two-thirds of the amount by deducting it from what he owed his landlord or his rentenier . By contrast, the morgental in Holland was collected "at the burden of the user." Used periodically, the tenth-penny tax raised large sums, but the morgental became the more regular feature of the new taxation system, especially for the purpose of keeping up annual interest payments on the renten debt created after 1542.^[94]

As for the towns, the most practical way^[95] to extract more revenue (as distinct from investment, in the form of renten purchases) was to create provincial excises to go with the accijnsen that towns had been collecting from their inhabitants for centuries. Traditionally, a wealthy town like Amsterdam paid its bede quotas directly from accijns revenue, whereas a poor town like Leiden depended on accijnsen to fund the town renten it made its burghers purchase in order to meet its bede quota. Since higher excise taxes had been known to cause riots in Low Countries towns, magistrates were not eager to see provincial excises added on top of their own.^[96] When the States agreed to an "impost" on beer and wine to help fund renten, the rate was only two stuivers per barrel of domestic beer. By contrast, as of 1520, Leiden was charging its inhabitants eight stuivers per barrel, whereas Haarlem charged ten.^[97] In the 1550s, the cities still collected considerably more from beer drinkers than the province did:^[98]

In theory, provincial excise taxes were supposed to be paid by everyone, but whether privileged persons in fact paid them is not clear. Members of the Council of Holland certainly did not,^[99] and no doubt most of the money came from ordinary consumers. It was thus the urban commons, along with the peasantry, who funded annual interest payments on States of Holland renten held by patrician investors.

The inequity of this arrangement, apparent to contemporaries, did not pass without discussion in the States and in the correspondence of government officials. A deputy from Rotterdam, complaining of how the small cities were "deceived" when their

quotas were set higher to make up for the rebates of others, told the great cities that "they could all go to a thousand devils." Even those who benefited from gratie acknowledged it to be "an ungodly thing." The men of Delft went so far as to suggest that because of gratie "God decrees that this land remain burdened by wars."^[100] But none of the other cities took Delft's complaints very seriously because everyone knew that Delft had the highest quota in the schiltal of 1515, and thus had the most reason for seeking a new basis for taxation. In fact, any pleas for greater justice in the allocation of burdens could be interpreted as special pleading.^[101] Each party to the discussion had a clear vision of the inequity of all special exemptions—except its own, which were of course based on immemorial privileges from the ruler or sanctioned by "natural law" or both. Government officials, from Meester Vincent Corneliszoon to Mary of Hungary herself, were determined to have "equality" in taxation, yet Viglius would not oppose the exemptions enjoyed by his friends and colleagues in the Council of Holland.^[102] Everyone agreed that some ways of raising new revenue might be more fair than others. For example, Delft's deputies invoked the authority of the New Testament and the "Emperor Octavian" on behalf of a province-wide capitale impositie, or one percent capital levy of the kind that towns commonly imposed on their own burghers.^[103] Yet everyone recognized that, as the Council of Holland once commented, if such a proposal was indeed "fairest," it was also hard to achieve; for without the spirit of community still expected to prevail within town walls, who would estimate the value of his own property correctly?^[104]

One might well wonder why ordinary Hollanders did not rebel against an increasingly heavy burden of taxation widely perceived as unfair. Representing the authority of the Habsburg state, the Council of Holland worried a good deal about potential rebelliousness among the peasants, especially in Holland north of the IJ where memory of late medieval peasant rebellions may have lingered.^[105] Members of the Council knew about the "Bread and Cheese" uprising in this region in the 1490s, and they may have known about the local Receiver for the beden who was murdered in 1497 by the villagers of Callants Oog, north of Alkmaar—a crime that had never been pun-

ished.^[106] Thus in January 1537, Assendelft warned Hoogstraten that it might cause a revolt if there was yet another extraordinaris bede in which the cities received gratie but the countryside did not. In May 1544, the Council told the Queen that "the common folk will murmur" at the extraordinaris bede (described above) in which village quotas were set nearly twice as high as they should have been for the face value of the subsidy.^[107] As for the "mighty lords" of the States, they surely understood that their standing in the eyes of the government derived from the fact that they were perceived as representing, in a milder and more manageable form, the anger and ill humor of the populace. Could they retain the trust of the "common man," as they increasingly took on the functions and attributes of a government whose motives remained deeply suspect? The truth is that their authority, like that of the government, hung by slender threads of tradition and grudging obedience.