The Habsburg Government of the Low Countries

Just as he gave credence to charges of criminal behavior by the friars, Erasmus readily accepted rumors that painted the government of the Low Countries as bent on filching the wealth of an industrious people by any means possible. For the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, the great adversary of the Netherlands court faction led by Chièvres and Le Sauvage, Erasmus could barely disguise his contempt. When a largely English army jointly led by Henry VIII and Maximilian captured the French city of Tournai (1514), the English king, reportedly angered by insults from townsmen, insisted on a siege to satisfy his honor, even thought the city had wished to surrender at once. But Erasmus nonetheless made Maximilian the prince who vindicated his honor in this way. In a thinly veiled reference to Maximilian and the sums he demanded of the Netherlands estates for governing the territory during his grandson’s minority (1506–1514), one of the 1515 adages notes that although nature does not allow the obnoxious eagle to hatch more than two eaglets at a time, “this practice is more to be desired than observed in Roman eagles, for whom there is neither any measure nor any end to fleecing the people.” Another 1515 adage seems to allude to the great nobles of the Habsburg-Burgundian Netherlands, often portrayed wearing the distinctive gold-chain necklaces that marked them as members of the Order of the Golden Fleece: “nowhere will you find less true nobility” than among those braggart dignitaries resplendent in their “golden collars.” ^[14] Not only were princes greedy, but Erasmus held the firm conviction that they regularly “colluded,” making war solely to extract more funds from their subjects. “They speak of just war when princes collude in a game [inter se colludunt], of which the outcome is to exhaust and oppress the commonwealth”; when all other means of filling the prince’s fisc have failed, “war is the excuse put forward: the generals all play the same game [colludunt], and the unfortunate public is sucked to the marrow.” ^[15]

Erasmus spoke freely of such matters only in letters to close friends or confidants. To Thomas More (March 1517) he connected Maximilian’s presence in Brussels with an armed band, as well as mysterious troop movements in the nearby countryside, with deliberations in the provincial states of Brabant, where the third or urban estate^[16] were considering a request for a “vast sum of money” to which the clerical and noble estates (“the only people, that is, who will pay nothing”) had already given their consent: “I pity this poor country, gnawed by so many vultures! How happy it would be, if only the cities could agree among themselves.” To More again a few months later he reported (incorrectly) that the emperor had prevented Charles’s government from signing a peace with the duke of Guelders, France’s ally and the great enemy of the Netherlands; according to Erasmus, Maximilian acted as he did “for fear that we have no war anywhere.” To Beatus Rhenanus in Basel (August 1517) he reported on the rampage through Holland that summer by a mercenary army known as the Black Band, which put to the sack both the notable but unwalled city of Alkmaar and the small walled town of Asperen. The Black Band was in the pay of the duke of Guelders, but whether Erasmus knew this or not he thought there was more to the story: because the provincial states of Holland had refused to grant a subsidy, which he (incorrectly) described as intended to pay for Charles’s impending journey to Spain, “the storm was deliberately unleashed” on the Hollanders: “Everyone can see it was a trick, but it is not easy to find a remedy, nor safe to speak the truth.” This campaign was still in his mind when in August 1519 he commented to Georg Spalatin, Luther’s friend, on a mercenary force that was gathering in Württemberg, not far from the frontiers of the Netherlands: “Many people are still terrified by the example of Asperen, which was annihilated two years ago.” According to some, Erasmus said, the army in Württemberg was being kept in readiness by the powers-that-be “so as to have a weapon handy to oppress the common people if they show any reluctance to do as they are told.” In any case he did not view the outlook as good, for “I see how power is being gathered into a few men’s heads, while the relics of our traditional democracy [democratia] are being done away with.” ^[17]

Erasmus allowed only some of these opinions to enter the public domain, and then only at the right time. He did publish the second letter to More and the letter to Spalatin, but only in a collection that appeared eight months after Maximilian’s death, the Farrago Nova Epistolarum. More explicit comments, as in the first letter to More and the letter to Beatus, he never published. Despite some factual errors in what Erasmus says, his familiarity with the workings of government shows that he was either reasonably well informed about Low Countries politics or frequented the company of men who were. But there is no shred of documentary evidence to support his picture of the deeper significance of these events. Many of his claims will strike a modern historian (especially a historian of state finance) as ludicrous: that rulers still indebted from previous wars could hope to make more money from war taxes than they spent on war costs; that any government would connive at the destruction of the tax-paying capacities of its own subjects; or that the Habsburg government would keep troops in the field as a way of bending the will of urban deputies in the provincial states, when it could do so much more cheaply by judiciously timed special concessions to the cities that had voting rights—as Erasmus himself hinted in wishing the towns could stick together.^[18]

The more interesting point is that Erasmus’s way of thinking about such matters was, as he suggests, widely shared, at least in the Low Countries. Adrianus Barlandus, a friend and sometime professor in the Collegium Trilingue at Leuven, writing of the sack of a Brabant town by a Guelders army (1507), imputed a sinister motive to the Habsburg commander who waited passively nearby (in fact, as we now know, he had orders not to risk his forces in battle). Several other chroniclers, writing in Latin or Dutch, assert that major invasions of Holland by forces loyal to Guelders (1517, 1528) had the secret connivance of the Habsburg government. One could cite similar suspicions about the government from authors writing in other parts of Europe and under other governments.^[19] Erasmus’s comments and those of Low Countries chroniclers are in fact but tiny fragments of a vast and as yet unwritten history whose topic would be not the actual harm that rulers have done to their subjects but the much greater harm that their subjects have suspected rulers of wanting to do. Since suspicions are likely to be enhanced among those who have some knowledge of a situation but cannot control it, the Low Countries region, with its strong tradition of participation in affairs of state by urban elites, would have a prominent place in this hypothetical history.

The Netherlands provincial states, unlike many other such bodies at the time, regularly attached strategic conditions to their consent to subsidies (for example, that an army invade enemy territory, not just defend the frontier) and claimed a share in the management of war finance. Deputies from the states served as commissioners of muster, they badgered commanders for not observing the conditions set by the states, and they demanded and sometimes got access to government account books to determine whether their money was in fact being spent for the present war instead of for paying off debts from the last one.

Urban deputies’ mistrust of the government was all the stronger because Maximilian and Charles were absentee rulers; because provincial states had a keen sense of local interests, less so for the interests of the larger polity; and because of the social gap between Netherlandish-speaking burghers in the most populous provinces and members of a largely French-speaking high aristocracy who served the Habsburg dynasty just as their ancestors had served the Burgundian court. Erasmus’s comments reflect a decidedly urban and states perspective, despite his connections to the court through Le Sauvage. Thinking back to a protracted civil war among Holland’s towns, extending into his own lifetime, he blames not the bellicosity of the towns but the negligence of their ruler, Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy (d. 1477). According to Querela Pacis, “the majority of the common people loathe war and pray for peace; only a handful of individuals, whose evil joys depend on general misery, desire war.” One of the 1515 adages laments that there is no “line of Brutus” to rise up against the sort of princes “and princes’ chief ministers” who are “cruel in their love of destruction, merciless in their tyranny.” Such men see clearly that “the one remaining sheet-anchor of public prosperity is the restraint of despotic power by honorable agreement between citizens and between cities [civitatum].” Ordinary property holders in the Netherlands were understandably resentful of the practice whereby noble commanders on both sides of a war made private truces to spare their own lands from fire and sword, and this complaint too one hears from Erasmus: if war must come, let it fall on the heads of those responsible, but as things are now “princes wage war unscathed and their generals thrive on it, while the main flood of misfortune sweeps over the peasants and humble citizens.” ^[20] If Erasmus was wholly one-sided, even naive in his view of conflicts between the provincial states and the Habsburg dynasty, he faithfully reflects something of the enduring tension that, under still more aggravated circumstances, erupted in the Revolt of the Netherlands some thirty years after his death. Paradoxically, he was perhaps nowhere more a Netherlander than in his profound suspicion of the Netherlands government.