R. Nisbet Bain - The Cambridge Modern History

With the advent on the scene of Henry VIII a new chapter may be said to begin in the political activity of Margaret, to whom the alliance between him and her father was mainly due. The variations of Maximilian’s European policy in these years of surprises were little to the taste of the Netherlanders, and occasionally ran a risk of conflicting with their interests. Thus when he had been tardily induced to take the side of the Head of the Hansa in her quarrel with John, King of Denmark, the latter (in 1507 or rather later) sought to strike a blow at Lübeck’s commercial supremacy in the Baltic by inviting the Holland merchants to make the Sound one of their trade-routes. The Lübeckers insisted on the Holland and Friesland vessels confining themselves to the passage of the Great Belt, as leading more directly to their own city. Hence the outbreak of hostilities between the Hansa and the Netherlands, many of whose ships were taken up the Trave as prizes, and in 1511 the capture of the entire Dutch Baltic fleet by the Lübeckers and Wismarers. Strong pressure was put by the States upon Margaret to induce the Emperor to equip a fleet for the protection of the interests of Holland in the Baltic; in the end, though the Peace of Malmoe (1512) maintained Lubeck’s ascendency there, it secured free navigation for Netherlands vessels, except when carrying contraband of war. But to the schemes of the Emperor-Elect (as he now called himself) against France, with which was curiously mixed up a project for a marriage between Charles and Louis XII’s second daughter Renee, the provinces turned a deaf ear. Not even against Charles of Egmond, though Holland and Brabant were dreading his approach, would they grant aids, unless assured of a general peace. With the exception of Antwerp, Malines, and Hertogenbosch, Margaret wrote, the States were (Tune si maulvaise nature that nothing short of the Emperor’s own presence could manage the business. But even this expedient seems to have failed; and when in April, 1513, he concluded an offensive alliance with Henry VIII against France, the Netherlands were declared neutral. They took advantage of their neutrality to supply the French with arms and ammunition, but at the same time allowed Henry after he had commenced the siege of Terouanne (June, 1513) to levy both foot and horse in the country. Maximilian approved, but he held no independent command, and the capture of Tournay following on the brilliant victory of Guinegaste was treated by Henry as an English acquisition. But though for a time it seemed as if Margaret’s programme of a close alliance against France of England, Spain, and the Austro-Burgundian interest would carry everything before it, Henry was at last estranged by the delay of the marriage between his sister and Prince Charles, due in part at least to the de Chievres influence, and finally entered into an alliance with Louis XII, to whom the English Princess was now wedded. As the project of marriage between the French King and Charles1 sister Eleanor was now likewise abandoned, Charles was in his turn left in a humiliating position, and, though the Netherlands were ex post facto admitted to the new French alliance, all cordiality between the English and Burgundian Courts was at an end. The commercial relations between the two countries had meanwhile made but little advance; the duties levied upon English trade, especially in Zeeland, had again been raised; and a commission summoned to Bruges in 1512 had effected nothing.

Thus Margaret’s foreign policy had proved unsuccessful before (January, 1515) Charles assumed the government of the Netherlands; and in the course of the year she found herself virtually excluded from the more intimate counsels of the nephew over whose interests she had so tenderly watched in his younger days, and for whom to the last she was ready to make any personal sacrifice. Charles, who in 1520 fitly recognised her services by assigning to her as her own domain the loyal city of Malines and the adjoining territory, was during the first years of his government still entirely under the influence of de Chievres, who, in the course of this very year, contrived to send away Adrian of Utrecht to Spain in the interests of the Prince’s succession. The death of Louis XII on January 1, 1515, and the accession of Francis I had offered an opening for the advancement of those friendly relations with France which de Chievres and the Netherlands statesmen were so anxious to cultivate; and even after the death of Ferdinand of Aragon a year later had left to Charles the inheritance of the Spanish monarchy and its Italian dependencies, he continued in spite of Margaret’s action to follow the same policy. Nor was it till the imperial succession loomed largely on the horizon that the three generations, Maximilian, Margaret and Charles were reunited in their efforts for a common end.

A heavy price was paid by the Netherlands for the preservation of the greater part of the monarchy of Charles the Bold. Like the House of Burgundy into which he had married, Maximilian (so popular at Nürnberg and Augsburg) showed scant regard for the rights and usages of provinces or towns in its dominions, though it was only exceptionally that he ventured on such an act as the decapitation of the burgomaster of Dort, who had upheld a meeting of the States on their own motion, as allowed by the Groote Privilegie. Philip the Fair went the logical length of limiting his renewal of this famous Charter by a reservation which rendered his acceptance nugatory. That these sentiments had descended to Charles V was shown by the chastisement inflicted by him in 1540 upon his native city of Ghent-the most far-reaching, though not the most sanguinary of any to which in the course of her history she was subjected. In the face of these experiences the gradual growth of the practice of summoning the States-General, long resisted by Charles, but resumed during the governor-generalship (from 1531) of his sister Maria, Queen Dowager of Hungary, seemed of little account. The sufferings of the country-of Holland in particular-in the period preceding that of the rule of Philip the Fair were un-forgotten by the next generation. In 1494 a new valuation of income (verponding) was made throughout the Netherlands, in order to rectify the modus under which the contributions to the bedes had hitherto been assessed on the several towns and villages; and this had to be again revised in 1514. A most distressful state of things was hereby revealed in many parts of the country-more especially south of Utrecht and Gelderland, where there had hardly been a break in the presence of the German soldiery. The number of the homesteads here had dwindled, the cattle had on many pastures diminished by half; along the coasts navigation and fisheries had declined. In some of the Zuiderzee ports the stillness was beginning to set in from which, owing to natural cause’s, there was to be no later awakening. What wonder that under Philip and afterwards during Margaret’s governorship all classes in the Netherlands should have been practically unanimous in their desire for peace, and that even the Gelders War, upon a successful termination of which the achievement of political unity depended, was held a burden? And what favour could the endeavours expect to find which, set on foot by Maximilian, were carried out by Charles V for establishing in a new form an organic connexion between the whole of the provinces and the Empire at large? The States took very coolly the inclusion in 1512 of the so-called Burgundian Circle (Gelderland and Utrecht were afterwards added to the Westphalian) in the system of Circles established as it were incidentally twelve years earlier, and persistently declined to acknowledge the right claimed by the Emperor of taxing the provinces for imperial purposes. On the other hand the imperial Diet held fast to the pretension, as was shown at Nürnberg in 1543; and in 1548-just a century before the political bond between the United Provinces and the Empire was finally severed-the entire group of the “Burgundian hereditary lands” was included as the Burgundian Circle in the nexus of the Empire. It was in this shape that, with the proper safeguard of a reservation of the privileges and liberties of the several provinces, the undivided Netherlands were by the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549 settled upon Philip, then intended by Charles to succeed him on the Imperial as well as on the Spanish throne.