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

Chapter 4. Times of success. Defending the fatherland
The liberation of, and reunion with the Dutch living in the south, ‘our kinsmen’,
as an important impetus behind the Dutch war efforts is a returning
theme in Boxhorn’s orations and works from the mid-1630s right up to the
peace of Münster in 1648. In the Historia obsidionis Bredae (History of the Siege of
Breda, 1640), a more serious and critical work, Boxhorn lets Frederik Hendrik
explain his actions in a letter the prince had drafted and distributed among
the Dutch in Brabant when on campaign there. The letter reads that the prince
‘did not only act on behalf of the freedom of the confederated Dutch, but also
on behalf of the freedom of all the Dutch. Everybody who longed for freedom
had absolutely nothing to dread from its defender’. The letter, however, did
hardly sort any effect; no Dutchman from the south rallied to the prince ‘as
long as most people preferred the present and slavery above the future and
freedom’. 84
More passionate of tone is Boxhorn in his Oratio ad Belgas, Hispano adhuc
parentes (Speech to the Dutch, Who hitherto obeyed the Spaniard), an oration he
delivered on the occasion of the capture of the Flemish town Sas van Gent
in 1644. 85 ‘Once you [i.e. the Dutch living in the south-JN] were our kinsmen
and relatives, because you were born of the same forefathers; once you
were [our] brothers and friends, either when we individually recognised [our
own] separate princes or when we all together recognised the same prince,
because we were united by [our] love for freedom. Now, however, we fight
each other as enemies, in an internal and external war that already lasts some
seventy years, because of the unheard of stubborness, especially from your
side, among them, [whose] natural disposition, and personal relationships
and mutual interests commanded them that they are very closely related.
And everywhere we stain [our] common fatherland with blood, but we do
uw dan gheluck met u weder verkregen vryheyt, u meynick, dien de gheleghentheyt tot noch toe niet
toeghelaten heeft te verplaetsen. Ghy zijt nu gheheel uws selfs, die te vooren diende onder slaven.’
84 Boxhorn, Historia obsidionis Bredae, p. 14. ‘A quo sparsae passim litterae & vulgatae; “Non Foederatorum
modo, sed Belgarum omnium libertatis caussam a se agi; cujus vindicem haud metueret,
quisquis eam vellet. Nec cuiquam noxae futurum hoc bellum, qui, odiis postpositis, caussam ejus probaret.”
Quibus tamen haud multum effectum; dum plerique praesentia & servitutem, quam futura &
libertatem mallent. Ad quae vix promittenti fides. quam qui sibi tantum habent, saepe aliorum suo cum
damno postponunt.’ Boxhorn paraphrases in this piece of text a passage from Tacitus, in which the
Roman historian explains that after the battle of Actium Augustus’s rise to absolute power went unopposed,
‘since the most defiant had fallen in the battle line or by proscription and the rest of the nobles …
preferred the protection of the present to the perils of old.’ Tacitus, The Annals, I.2.1, p. 2. For the Latin
text, see Tacitus, Annalivm ab excessv divi Avgvsti libri. Recognovit breviqve adnotatione critica instrvxit
C.D. Fisher (Clarendon Press; Oxford, 1 st ed. 1906, 1973), I.2. ‘… cum ferocissimi per acies aut proscriptione
cecidissent, ceteri nobilium, quanto quis servitio promptior, opibus et honoribus extollerentur ac
novis ex rebus aucti tuta et praesentia quam vetera et periculosa mallent.’
85 Marcus Zuerius Boxhorn, “Oratio ad Belgas, Hispano adhuc parentes, Sassa Gandanvensi, auspiciis
Foederati Belgii Ordinum, Ductu Frederici Henrici, Arausionensium Principis, expugnatâ. foederati
et liberi Belgae loquuntur”, in idem, Orationes, Varii Argumenti, IV, pp. 62 [68]-103.
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