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

Chapter 5. Times of trouble. Taking a stand
while the Act of Exclusion that was secretly adopted by the States of Holland
meant a serious break in the political structure of the Dutch Republic. 213 As
Boxhorn had pictured it in the Commentariolus, this structure was incomplete
without a stadholder. Now, that community of interests that was the Dutch
Republic would have to find another way to make its political machinery
work. With no stadholder to mediate and no possibility of majority voting in
the States General, this would prove to be a hard bargain. 214 Soon many came
to long for ‘the good old times’. 215 However, it would take respectively six
and eighteen years before the situation would return to the status quo ante that
Boxhorn had sought to defend in the last five years of his life.
It was to defend the ‘powers that be’, then, that Boxhorn had put the pen to
paper. In 1649 he re-edited an old dissertation held by one of his students to
defend the rights of the House of Stuart to the English throne. He also inserted
and manipulated a text taken from the Spanish jurist Vázquez to add authority
to his thesis. When attacked, he used an array of biblical, juridical, historical,
and political argumentation to backup his standpoint and to incriminate
his opponent as their fatherland’s true enemy. In 1653 Boxhorn published
another work to denounce England’s republican regime. This time he used
the latest publications on English history and the latest political commentaries
and constructed them into a single theory driven thesis. These publications,
then, show the readiness, the ability, and the flexibility with which the
Dutch responded to contemporary events and the ingenuity with which they
adapted and adjusted historical and political works and the ideas expressed
in them to the demands of new circumstances. Furthermore, they show the
willingness of Dutch scholars to mingle in contemporary debates and, judging
by Boxhorn’s works and those of his colleagues, on a variety of subjects. 216
213 The Treaty of Westminster, which was ratified by the States General on April 22, 1654, was the
peace treaty that ended the First Anglo-Dutch War. Connected to this treaty was the Act of Exclusion, ‘a
secret clause … in which the States of Holland declared that in future the Oranges would be excluded from
the stadholdership in Holland’. The Act of Exclusion was adopted by the States of Holland on May 4, 1654,
despite the opposition of six towns, among them Leiden and Haarlem. See Israel, The Dutch Republic, pp.
722-23, and Prak, The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 47-48, with quote on p. 48.
214 At the Great Council of 1651 the sovereignty of the provincial States was once again confirmed.
In his famous Deduction (1654), in which he defended the late Act of Seclusion, Johan de Witt, the grandpensionary
of Holland, stressed Holland’s absolute sovereignty within the Union of Utrecht, making it
clear that Holland would act on its own if it deemed this necessary. This greatly undermined the spirit of
the Union and made a mockery of majority voting. Deductie, ofte declaratie vande Staten van Holland ende
West-Vrieslandt: behelsende een warachtich en grondich bericht vande fondamenten der regieringe van de vrye
Vereenigde Nederlanden … ingestelt ende dienende tot justificatie van ‘t verlenen van seeckere Acte van seclusie,
rakende ‘t employ vanden heere prince van Oraigne … op den 4. Mey 1654 gepasseert (Van Wouw; The Hague,
1654), esp. pp. 35-42. Knuttel 7545.
215 The success of the Commentariolus during the 1650s and 1660s can be seen as an indication of that
longing.
216 Both Boxhorn and Salmasius, for example, had voiced their opinion in the so-called ‘hairy-war’.
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