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

116
Chapter 4. Times of success. Defending the fatherland
in the southern parts of ‘our common fatherland’, ‘this Netherlands of ours’,
from the dark forces of tyranny. 110 However, by signing the peace of Münster
the Dutch from the north officially agreed to abandon their quest to liberate
the southern provinces, ending any hopes on reunification. The Dutch patria
(fatherland), once ‘joined together and united in one commanding body under
those of Burgundy and Austria’, was no more. 111 For Boxhorn the end of the
war with Spain and the official recognition of the sovereignty and independence
of the Dutch Republic by the king of Spain did not mean a ‘hard-won
unity’, nor a ‘sealed discord’, but a hard-won peace at the expense of a ruptured
fatherland. 112
Another negative aspect of the peace was the possible dangers it contained.
Boxhorn’s fear that peace could lead to internal discord, especially in the religious
and subsequently in the political realm, clearly shows that he had not
forgotten the dramatic events of the Twelve Years’ Truce. In a Dutch translation
of Boxhorn’s Oratio panegyrica de Belgarum pace, published in 1648, a little
additive, inserted at the place where the Latin original refers to the Twelve
110 Judith Pollmann, “‘Brabanters do fairly resemble Spaniards after all’: Memory, Propaganda and
Identity in the Twelve Years’ Truce”, in Judith Pollmann and Andrew Spicer (eds.), Public Opinion and
Changing Identities in the Early Modern Netherlands. Essays in Honour of Alastair Duke (Brill; Leiden/
Boston, 2007), p. 227. The picture that Boxhorn draws in his orations of the Dutch struggle against Spain
fits very well with Judith Pollmann’s analysis that ‘early seventeenth-century popular histories, plays
and poems that evoked the Revolt did not recognize grey areas. The Revolt had not been a civil war, in
which many people had had to make uncomfortable decisions; in the image of the past that the Dutch
created for themselves, a choice for Revolt was the only option open to a people doomed to perennial
slavery under a Spanish regime. The reason for this was that efforts to keep the memories of the Revolt
alive were not inspired by the personal need for remembrance alone. The emphasis on a common Netherlandisch
struggle helped to integrate the Flemish and Brabant exiles into the host population, for
instance; as fellow-Netherlanders, they had suffered the same plight as Hollanders and Zeelanders.’ Ibidem,
p. 221. In their contributions to the collection of articles about the concept ‘fatherland’ published
in the History of Concepts series of the Univerity of Amsterdam, both Simon Groenveld and Guido de
Bruin emphasise that in the Dutch Republic feelings of solidarity and unity between the Northern and
Southern provinces were ‘strictly kept alive by refugees from the Southern provinces’ and that the ‘fiction
of a common fatherland had died with William of Orange’. Simon Groenveld, “‘Natie’ en ‘patria’
bij de zestiende-eeuwse Nederlanders”, in Van Sas (ed.), Vaderland, pp. 75-77, and Guido de Bruin, “Het
begrip ‘vaderland’ in de pamfletliteratuur ten tijde van de Republiek, 1600-1750”, in ibidem, pp. 151-52.
111 According to Groenveld, most Dutchmen living in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries held
a particular small conception of their patria; the small geographical area of the village or town they lived
in. Only the political elites, government officials, artisans, and the clergy conceived a province or that
conglomerate of seventeen provinces that was known as ‘de Nederlanden’ (the Netherlands or Low
Countries, sometimes also indicated with the singular ‘het Nederlant’) as their patria. Therefore, most
Dutchmen did not saw the peace as a rupture of the seventeen Dutch provinces, since they never had
conceived the seventeen provinces as belonging to one body or forming one patria. Groenveld, “Achtergronden
en betekenis van de Vrede van Westfalen”, pp. 48-49, 68-69. For a more extensive discussion
of these topics, see Simon Groenveld, Verlopend getij: de Nederlandse Republiek en de Engelse Burgeroorlog,
1640-1646 (De Bataafsche Leeuw; Dieren, 1984), pp. 15-22, 55-66, and idem, “‘Natie’en ‘patria’ bij de
zestiende-eeuwse Nederlanders”, pp. 55-81.
112 Frijhoff and Spies, Hard-Won Unity, pp. 139-41, and Anton van der Lem, “Bevochten eendracht?
Beklonken tweespalt!”, in Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden, Vol. 117,
No. 4 (2002), pp. 467-70, 565.