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

Chapter 4. Times of success. Defending the fatherland
prayer would be answered; his second prayer would not, with far-reaching
consequences for the future of the peace the Dutch had just acquired.
Conclusion
From the beginning of his academic career Boxhorn set out to defend what he
believed to be the interests of his fellow Dutchmen. In the case of his dispute
with Heuterus it was the economic interests of the Dutch, especially of the
Hollanders and Zeelanders, at sea. In his orations it was the political interests
of the Dutch on land. In both cases Boxhorn always appealed to a higher
cause. Boxhorn’s refutation of Heuterus’s accusation that the Hollanders had
had hardly any experience with long distance overseas travel before the sixteenth
century was really directed against English and Danish claims to a
lordship over the sea that threatened Dutch maritime interests, especially in
the Baltic and the Northern seas. The historical documentation Boxhorn put
forward made clear that the behaviour of Christian IV did not correspond
with that of his predecessors, while the copy of the Magnus Intercursus served
as an argument against Charles I’s maritime policy.
In his orations Boxhorn made an appeal to a national sentiment of Dutch
brotherhood that transgressed the provincial boundaries. What the Dutch had
in common was their love for freedom, and it was to defend their freedom and
to restore it to the Dutch still living under the Spanish yoke that the Dutch
from the north campaigned in the south. The goal of the Dutch struggle with
the king of Spain was the liberation and reunification of the Netherlands, the
common fatherland. It was this goal that in Boxhorn’s opinion legitimised the
Republic’s conquest and expansion in the southern Dutch provinces.
The peace of Münster, therefore, was only half a success. Although it brought
reconciliation between the north and the south, it also meant that the Dutch
agreed to accept the political status quo, thus agreeing to the division of the
Netherlands in a northern part under the guidance of the States General, and a
southern part under the lordship of the king of Spain. For Boxhorn this was a
bad break. In his orations Boxhorn, like most exiles from Brabant and Flanders,
‘who were keener than anyone else to continue the Revolt until the Spanish
Netherlands were “liberated”’, time and again depicted the war against Spain
as a war of liberation. The Dutch from the north had only one goal: to liberate
the Dutch, ‘our kinsmen … born of the same forefathers’, who were living
simum, cum suis pace conjungat.’
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