historical and political thought in the seventeenth - RePub - Erasmus ...

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Chapter 4. Times of success. Defending the fatherland
years later civil war broke out in England, diminishing the threat the English
posed to Dutch navigation and fishing for almost the rest of the 1640s. 69
The naval victory at the Downs was one of the few military successes the
Dutch booked in the late 1630s. In 1636 Frederik Hendrik managed to recapture
Schenckenschans, an important fortress strategically situated on an island
in the Rhine, just below the Dutch-German frontier, that the Spaniards had
captured the year before. Its recapture was of crucial importance for the Dutch
because its possession would have given the Spaniards unobstructed access
into Gelderland and Utrecht and endangered trade on the Rhine. 70 The next
year the Dutch captured Breda, thereby stopping the gap in Holland’s outer
line of defence between Geertruidenberg and Bergen op Zoom, although the
Spaniards compensated their loss by taking Venlo and Roermond in Upper
Gelderland. Thereafter, however, business was going through a rough patch.
In the States of Holland opposition grew against new land offensives. Now
that Holland was sufficiently shielded from Spanish incursions by the capture
of Breda, a growing number of towns, headed by Amsterdam, favoured peace
and pleaded that if the war should be continued, its main emphasis should lie
on sea, not on land. 71 The prince of Orange did not oppose peace on principle.
But he first wanted to complete the Republic’s outer line of defence and,
if possible, to capture Antwerp, reasoning that by keeping the enemy under
high military pressure more concessions could be extracted from him at the
negotiating table. With the capture of Sas van Gent (1644) and Hulst (1645) in
Flanders, Frederik Hendrik succeeded in the former, creating a defensive ring
with a buffer zone that stretched from Bourtange in the north east to Sluis in
the south west. But Antwerp, his main target, remained out of reach. 72
By now a majority in the States of Holland and the States General were
preparing the road for an enduring peace agreement with Spain. On April 4,
1645, the provincial deputies in the States General reached a verbal agreement
about the three principle pillars upon which the future, post-war cooperation
of the seven united Dutch provinces should rest: the union, religion, and
down the rebellion of the Scottisch Covenanters, the negative outcome of the English military campaigns
and his empty coffers forced Charles I to summon a parliament twice to come to his and the
country’s rescue. The first parliament the king summoned (the so-called ‘Short Parliament’) was a failure,
the second parliament (the so-called ‘Long Parliament’) would turn out to be his undoing. Mark
Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain, 1603-1714 (Penguin Books; London, 1996), pp. 138-41.
69 Muller, Mare Clausum, pp. 313-18; Edmundson, Anglo-Dutch Rivalry, p. 129; Groenveld, “The
English Civil Wars as a Cause of the First Anglo-Dutch War, 1640-1652”, pp. 545-50.
70 Israel, The Dutch Republic, pp. 529-32, and C.M. Schulten, Met vliegende vaandels en slaande trom:
oorlog in de Lage Landen, 1559-1659 (De Bataafsche Leeuw; Amsterdam, 2005), pp. 208-10.
71 Groenveld and Leeuwenberg, De bruid in de schuit, pp. 99-107.
72 Schulten, Met vliegende vaandels en slaande trom, pp. 215-28, and Van Nimwegen, ‘Deser landen
crijchsvolck’, pp. 204-41.