The States of Holland among Europe's Parliaments

In the history of other civilizations there is no analogue to the parliamentary institutions that appeared all over Latin Christian Europe, from the British Isles to the Crusader states, and from Iberia to Poland, roughly between 1100 and 1400.^[1] The classical tradition of English constitutional history presents a clear line of development from the feudal magnum consilium,

which advised the king on important matters, to parliament in a proper sense, which began only when the king's need for revenue induced him to summon representatives of the commons, including the towns—for no prince could introduce the then novel principle of taxation without the consent of the realm. For bodies that reached this latter stage, Otto Hintze distinguishes between two "ideal types" of parliamentary structure, a "two-chamber" institution found in England, Scandinavia, and eastern Europe, and a "three curia" (or three estates) system to be seen in France, Germany, parts of Italy, and Iberia.^[2] But in the Low Countries (not discussed by Hintze) leagues among the towns of a given principality may be as old as the Anglo-Norman magnum consilium . Hence scholars here are less likely to reserve the term "representative institutions" to assemblies that have the power to consent to taxation.^[3]

Still another difference worth noting is that members of the English Parliament "represented" their constituencies in a different way than the deputies to many continental parliaments. Once elected, members of Parliament had a general mandate to vote as they saw fit on whatever issues might arise. In England the granting of full powers to deputies can be documented as early as Edward I's writ of summons for the "model parliament" of 1295. Over 200 years later, direct pressure from Charles V induced the towns of Castile to grant "full powers" to their deputies to the Cortes, but only after the revolt of the Comuneros had been put down.^[4] In the Low Countries, by contrast, no question could be put to a vote unless it had been raised either in the writ of summons or at a previous meeting, and deputies had an explicit charge (last ) instructing them how to vote on each issue. In the estates of Piedmont-Savoy, which worked in the same way, deputies were called "ambassadors" and indeed functioned like ambassadors, rather than "representatives."^[5] Likewise, deputies to the States General of the Netherlands operated under instructions from their provincial states—which were sometimes so strict that a sharp-tongued minister of Duke Charles the Bold was prompted to ask if the deputies were also told how many times they could drink during the course of a journey.^[6]

These differences raise a more general question about the precise way in which any medieval or early modern parliament

can be said to "represent" the whole territory for which it speaks. At least on the continent, it was common to say that deputies represented "the land," that is, a territory understood by its inhabitants to be a communis patria . The fundamental work on this point was done by Otto Brünner, who argued (from Austrian and south German evidence) that a land was a community of landholders, living under a common law, who may or may not have been ruled by a single prince. Thus the territorial estates (landstände ) should be understood as the land acting as a corporate body.^[7] Brünner's argument does not work everywhere, even for the German-speaking territories—for example, in East-Elbian Germany, land meant a territory ruled by a single lord, not a territory with a common law. But Peter Blickle's impressive study of the smaller territories of south Germany confirms the broad applicability of Brünner's argument for a link between representation (landschaft ) and the existence of a self-conscious community; for Blickle, landschaft means "the subjects of a given lordship, organized as a community and acting as a corporate body."^[8]

These important questions of terminology have yet to be fully explored by Low Countries historians, but preliminary indications do seem to bear out Brünner's contention that there was no representation unless there was first a land to be represented. To be more precise, the term land was often used for small dependencies of a single feudal lord, such as the land van Stein in Holland, near Gouda, whereas gemeen land or communis patria referred to the whole of a territory. During the fourteenth century there were regular meetings of the "Four Members of Flanders," that is, the cities of Ghent, Bruges, Ypres, and the federation of small towns and rural communes known as the Franc of Bruges. At these meetings, gemeen land or communis patria referred to the rest of Flanders, that is, all the other towns and rural communities. By the fifteenth century the Four Members had appropriated these terms for their own use; they now claimed to represent or speak for the gemeen land of Flanders.^[9] Just as the pace of urbanization and political development in medieval Holland was slower than in Flanders, the term gemeen land seems to have appeared quite a bit later here, but it was certainly in use by the late fifteenth century, when the

States of Holland sold what were called gemeen lands renten to finance the Utrecht War.^[10]

The States of Holland sources clearly did speak for the province as a whole in the creation of renten debt (see chapter 5); by action of the States, renten were sold "on the common body" (lichaem, or corpus ) of the land. Gemeen lands renten created a corporate liability in the sense that merchants from any Holland town could have their goods seized for non-payment of interest in towns outside Holland, like Bruges or Antwerp.^[11] But just as the issuance of renten by the States was relatively new in Holland, dating only from the Utrecht War, so too was the idea that Holland was a lichaem, capable of acting (through the States) in a corporate way. As late as 1514 a Dordrecht jurist, Meester Floris Oem van Wijngaerden, argued that Dordrecht and neighboring South Holland formed a lichaem that had nothing in common with the rest of Holland; even if Holland too was a lichaem, as Dordrecht's opponents contended, "the members are so diverse that one cannot be outvoted by the others."^[12] Even in the towns, where magistrates had long been accustomed to pledge the faith and credit of the community through the issuance of renten, the basic metaphor of the body politic had not yet found a universal language. Thus Amsterdam's vroedschap resolutions of the 1490s speak of loans being contracted "on the belly (buyck ) of this city," rather than "on the body of the city," the usage which was even at this time spreading from the towns to the villages.^[13] One has the impression that the pressures of war-time finance were inducing local authorities at various levels—from village elders to the States of Holland—to presume to act in behalf of their constituencies in new ways, and to find a new, corporate^[14] language to express the powers they claimed. For if Holland was indeed a lichaem, there could be no question of the States' right to act in ways by which all Hollanders would be bound.^[15]

In effect, the States were a meeting ground for contrary pressures. On the one hand, Habsburg officials (and, no doubt, many creditors) wanted to deal with a small number of deputies who could speak authoritatively for the entire province. On the other hand, the deputies had a natural desire to share as widely as possible the responsibility for decisions to which either the

government or fellow Hollanders might object. Thus even though the government recognized only the six "great cities" as having voting rights, the States sometimes requested postponement of a particular issue until deputies from the smaller cities could be summoned, so as to have a "broader mandate" (breeder last ) for the final decision.^[16] Also, although the town governments to which deputies were answerable were clearly oligarchical in character, magistrates had an uneasy awareness of their accountability to fellow townsmen, and it was not unusual for deputies to vote against a subsidy proposal on the grounds that "the common man" would not tolerate it.^[17]

For students of Low Countries history, the parliamentary typology that makes the most sense is the one proposed by W.P. Blockmans. Most assemblies, including the English Parliament and many of the French and German estates, were dominated by their noble or clerical deputies; these bodies met infrequently, and were primarily concerned with fiscal and political issues. A second category includes mainly the Low Countries parliaments, plus a few others; these assemblies met frequently, and were often concerned with economic issues, as befits a fundamentally urban constituency. Differences in the frequency of meetings are indeed striking. The Four Members of Flanders met 4,055 times between 1386 and 1506, for an average of 34 times per year, and the States of Brabant met 1,601 times between 1356 and 1430, for an average of 21 times per year. In Holland, the States convened 21 times per year between 1525 and 1529, and 13.5 times per year between 1542 and 1563. By contrast, the English Parliament was in session 73 times between 1384 and 1510, and the Cortes of Castile met 93 times between 1390 and 1520. The number of meetings is not a guide to how many days per year a parliamentary body was in session—for example, sessions of the English Parliament averaged seven months (1450–1520), whereas meetings of the provincial states of the Netherlands on their home ground usually lasted only a few days (delegations sent to court for negotiations with the Regent and her officials might have to remain in Brussels for a month or two). But frequent meetings are a good indicator of the degree to which parliamentary deputies were subject to the control of their principals.^[18]

For present purposes, one might broaden Blockmans's "urban parliaments" category by looking at a few other parliamentary bodies that resemble those of the Netherlands in some respects, even if they may not meet the criteria Blockmans suggests. Piedmont's estates have certain structural affinities with those of the Netherlands, while Württemberg in Germany and Aragón in Iberia each enjoyed a certain historical reputation as a bulwark of parliamentary "liberties."^[19] In Piedmont, the Cisalpine portion of the Duke of Savoy's lands, the estates convened frequently; and town deputies—controlled, as in the Netherlands, by a strict mandate—played an especially prominent role.^[20] In Württemberg, nearly fifty small towns with voting rights made the urban chamber of the Landtag or territorial estates more influential than it was in most other German principalities.^[21] In Spain under the crown of Aragón (including the kingdoms of Aragón and Valencia and the county of Barcelona), towns had a strong position in the Corts . During the sixteenth century the Corts convened infrequently, once every five or six years, and thus was quite unlike the Netherlandish parliaments. Nonetheless, economic concerns figure prominently in the long list of furs or statutes of the Corts which the crown customarily approved at the end of each session.^[22] For Aragón and Piedmont there is a further point of comparison with the Netherlands: in both realms the estates of various territories convened as a "states general," while preserving their separate identities. In Aragón the estates of the three principalities mentioned above usually convened together as the Corts General, but they deliberated and voted separately; in Cisalpine Savoy, the estates of Piedmont, Val d'Aosta, and the marquisate of Saluzzo could meet either separately or jointly as the Stati Generali of Piedmont. Like the Habsburg Netherlands, these polities were, in Otto Hintze's phrase, "monarchical unions of corporate states," in which the natural centrifugal tendencies of each province were anchored in a separate representative assembly.^[23]

During the first half of the sixteenth century, a hypothetical omniscient observer of European political institutions might have singled out the parliamentary bodies of Aragón, England, the Low Countries, Piedmont, and Württemberg as having the most authority in their respective commonwealths. Yet by the

end of the century the stati of Piedmont had disappeared, and the authority of the corts of Aragón and the estates of Württemberg had considerably diminished. In Piedmont, Duke Emmanuel Philibert lost his lands in a French invasion in 1536, and recovered them again only in 1558, after having served as Philip II's Governor-General in the Low Countries. Possibly because he had seen enough of parliaments while in the Low Countries, he declared that the estats of Savoy and the stati of Piedmont were now abolished, and proceeded within a few years to raise the level of the subsidy by 500 percent.^[24] Meanwhile, both the corts of Aragón and the estates of Württemberg transferred much of their power to standing committees. In Württemberg, standing committees that (among other responsibilities) collected and disbursed revenue were created during the Habsburg period (1519–1534), and revived in 1554 when the Duke had to call upon the Landtag for help with his debts.^[25] In Aragón, the separate principalities of Catalonia and Aragón each had a tradition of naming powerful committees to handle business between sessions, and in the sixteenth century the Corts General did the same, electing a permanent committee that, during the long intervals between sessions, had considerable authority in the collection and disbursement of funds and in the appointment of government officials.^[26] Blockmans argues persuasively that committees of this type tend to escape the control of their parliamentary principals, becoming more like organs of the territorial government.^[27]

In part, the contrast between Aragón or Württemberg and the provincial states of the Netherlands was dictated by geography, for it was much easier for town deputies to shuttle back and forth to a central meeting place in tiny Holland (roughly 2,000 square miles) than it was in Aragón or Württemberg. In any case the Netherlandish parliaments never permitted their rulers the luxury of dealing with smaller and more malleable permanent committees. The States of Holland had no standing committees prior to the Revolt, and even the development of ad hoc committees was fairly rudimentary.^[28] Since none of the cities with voting rights was more than a day's travel from The Hague,^[29] where the States traditionally convened, there was no real pressure to create a substitute for frequent meetings. Gov-

ernment commissioners seldom gained approval of what they wanted at the first or even the second session and often had to make a circuit of the towns for direct discussions with the magistrates. One cannot imagine a structure of representation more calculated to keep power in the hands of the deputies, or rather, in the hands of the patrician colleges of burgomasters and town councils to whom they reported for instructions.

Yet the survival of parliamentary institutions did not depend only on their structure. This was, after all, the age in which princes were shaking off the constraints imposed on them by representative assemblies during the late Middle Ages, the heyday of parliamentary authority. Already in 1439 the Estates General of France had voted the usual taxes without attaching to them the usual time limit, so that the French king henceforth enjoyed a unique freedom to tax his subjects without first obtaining the consent of their representatives.^[30] In Castile, the Cortes held monarchs of the early fifteenth century accountable for how they spent war subsidies, but by the time of the Catholic kings, growing royal influence in the election of urban deputies gradually eroded the prerogatives of the Cortes. To be sure, Charles V and his Flamengo entourage did manage to provoke a celebrated uprising by demanding a subsidy for his coronation at Aachen (as King of the Romans, 1520), but once the revolt of the Comuneros was put down, Charles found the Cortes pliant, and free of awkward questions about how the king spent his subsidy income or where he fought his wars.^[31] Meanwhile, political thinkers in France and elsewhere were at work on a theory of princely "absolutism," aided by conceptions of sovereign power found in Roman law and possibly by a practical sense that representative assemblies stood for a self-serving and outmoded parochialism.^[32]

In such an era, parliamentary bodies continued to flourish only where they offered the prince something he could not do without and could not otherwise obtain. For example, at the time of the Reformation prince and parliament had to act in concert to abolish the traditional rights of the Church, both in England and in a number of Germany's secular principalities; in both cases scholars believe that parliamentary bodies, by giving sanction to these great religious changes, enhanced their

own authority.^[33] The help of parliamentary bodies was equally indispensable to princes attempting to cope with the novel phenomenon of government debt. In many of the secular principalities in the Holy Roman Empire (including Württemberg), creditors demanded better assurance of repayment than the prince himself was able to supply. The only remedy was for the Landtag to assume responsibility for his debts, which also meant taking over the collection and disbursement of his revenues.^[34] The provincial states of the Netherlands performed a similar role for their Habsburg rulers, except that the debt in question exceeded that for a number of the major German principalities put together. Moreover, the Netherlands parliaments took a uniquely^[35] active role in managing the debt, by issuing low-interest renten in their own name, so that the capital raised could be used by the government to pay off high-interest bankers' loans (see chapter 5). In other words, the Netherlands provincial states, already distinguished by a structure that gave urban magistrates an unusual degree of influence in affairs of state, had fiscal responsibilities that made them even more indispensable to their ruler than similar bodies were in other territories.

For a variety of reasons, then, Netherlands town magistrates were in a peculiarly strong position to wield the power of the purse. Thus the custom by which such bodies attached formal conditions to their consent to a subsidy was consistently observed in the Netherlands during the sixteenth century, after it had gone out of fashion in Castile and before it became common in England. Under Henry VIII, Charles V's contemporary, English Parliaments passed the king's subsidy requests without delay, "for Commons did not yet realize what great leverage their control over supply gave them."^[36] By contrast, the States of Holland routinely wrote conditions of various kinds into the accord by which they agreed to a bede ; this act, known as the acceptatie after it was signed by the Regent, provided at the very least a basis for complaint if the States felt their stipulations were not being met. To be sure, Charles V in person flatly refused to "bargain" with his subjects in the States of Holland.^[37] Yet Charles was usually absent from the Netherlands (this may have been the real key to the success of the states), and no one who spoke in the Emperor's name com-

manded the same respect he did. Thus Margaret of Austria, as Regent of the Netherlands, recommended postponing the redress of grievances until after taxes were voted, but was not able herself to put the idea into practice.^[38]

The conditions attached to a bede accord often had to do with matters of war and diplomacy. In the late Middle Ages it was not uncommon for parliaments to set limits to the prince's ability to conduct foreign policy, often in the form of a requirement that he not make war without consent of the estates. But such restrictions were largely swept away by about 1500; in the Netherlands, for example, clauses to this effect in the 1477 Great Privilege were among those abolished in 1494.^[39] The new emphasis on princely power had become a received doctrine by the early seventeenth century, when James I's Lord Treasurer tersely informed Parliament that declaring war was part of the king's prerogative.^[40] Such claims would probably not have been formally disputed in the Netherlands. Nonetheless, by setting conditions and restrictions, the states repeatedly hedged in the ruler's war-making power. Like the Württemberg Landtag, the states of Holland were able to negotiate military unions with other Habsburg lands in time of war.^[41] Like the Corts of Aragón, they mandated certain allocations from subsidy income for defense of the sea lanes.^[42] Like the Stati Generali of Piedmont, they made stipulations as to where troops paid by a subsidy would be stationed.^[43] They were also able to insist on the removal of an infantry commander whom they distrusted and to extract promises that the troops they paid for would be used to invade enemy territory instead of merely defending the frontier (see chapter 3). There are as yet no comparative studies of parliamentary involvement in military policy, but one suspects that the Netherlands provincial states intervened in military affairs more extensively than similar bodies did elsewhere.

Finally, the Dutch-speaking parliaments of this era are distinguished by a rich documentation, as befits bodies that played important roles in their respective territories. Sources are of five basic types. Official summaries of the acts or "resolutions" of the States of Brabant and Holland and of the Four Members of Flanders are extant from the sixteenth century. The best known record of this kind is the Resolutiën van de Staten van Holland,

which begins in 1525; the first six volumes (through 1560) were published in 1751, and the whole series (289 volumes, through 1795) was in print by the end of the eighteenth century.^[44] A second class of sources owes its existence to the fact that the annual accounts of town and local treasurers include a section that scrupulously records travel expenses, including monies paid to deputies attending meetings of the provincial states. Even the briefest entries of this kind will usually list dates and places of the meeting, and some towns or other jurisdictions had a tradition of including capsule summaries of the purpose or results of the meeting as well. For the Four Members and the States of Flanders, there are now seven imposing volumes, covering the period from 1384 to 1506, in which materials of this kind are collected and edited by Blockmans, Prevenier, and Zoete.^[45] This basic work remains to be done for the States of Brabant and Holland, although the first volume of a new series of documents for the States of Holland to 1433 has just recently appeared.^[46] Minutes of the town councils or vroedschappen in several Holland towns provide a third kind of source for what was decided or proposed at dagvaarten or meetings of the States. Vroedschap resolutions for Gouda (relating to the States) and Amsterdam (to 1550) have been published, but those of Haarlem give the fullest description of the dagvaarten .^[47]

The rarest but perhaps most interesting kind of source is the Memoriaalboek or travel diary of the town secretary, or (a more grandiose title) town pensionary, a paid official who was often empowered to speak for the town. When the States of Holland sent a delegation to Brussels for discussions with the central government, it usually included the pensionaries of two or three towns (see chapter 5).^[48] Travel diaries for four such officials have survived: Andries Jacobszoon (1523–1538) and Aert Sandelijn (1548–1564) of Amsterdam, and Willem Pieterszoon uyten Aggar and Jacob de Milde (1531–1558) of Leiden. These documents give a running account of the dagvaarten, slanted ever so slightly in the interests of a single town. Andries Jacobszoon's Memoriaalboek, spiced by the author's personal opinions, also provides rare glimpses of private conversations between government officials and Amsterdam's deputies.^[49] Finally, the views of government commissioners who negotiated

with the States can be gathered from the correspondence of leading court figures closely involved with Holland and of the Council of Holland in The Hague, which represented the government at the local level. Two names merit special mention here: Antoine de Lalaing, Count of Hoogstraten, who served as Stadtholder or governor of Holland from 1522 to 1540, and Lord Gerrit, Lord of Assendelft, First Councillor of the Council of Holland from 1527 until his death in 1555.^[50] It will now be helpful to look more closely at the government which these men served.