De Zeventiende Eeuw. Jaargang 10

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‘By their fruits shall ye know them’: the cultural legacy of the Revolt
J.L. Price

In recent years there seems to have been something approaching a conspiracy among historians to minimise the importance of revolutions. This tendency has been particularly marked with regard to the English civil war, where the revisionists have tried to deny it both long-term causes and significant effects, and to the French Revolution, where not only has the Marxist interpretation of it as a bourgeois revolution been attacked, but it has recently also been denied that it marked a decisive break with the French past. The situation as far as the Dutch Revolt is concerned is rather different, as historians - at least this seems to be the case as far as Dutch historians are concerned - have generally been reluctant to see it as a revolution at all, but here also there has been a parallel tendency to play down the relevance of long-term causes and to question its lasting significance. However, in this instance such movements of opinion have to be followed through parenthetical comments and by implication rather than through direct argument because of the paucity of recent full-scale interpretative studies.^1.

The end result is that the Revolt has come to be seen as not only a complex series of events, but as fundamentally incoherent with no single set of either causes or consequences. In this view, the Revolt could have had no causes because it was not a single phenomenon: the various elements and events making up what is called the Revolt can be discussed causally, but the Revolt itself lacked the coherence necessary for such discussion to be meaningful. In the same way, the Revolt could have had no consequences: the effects of its various constituent events or movements might well be traced but, apart perhaps from aggregating the results of these disparate elements, its diversity means that there could be no coherent set of effects which the historian can hope to discover. What this amounts to, in effect, is the denial of the reality of the Revolt, or at least of the usefulness of the term in historical discourse. The ‘Revolt’, according to this line of thought, brings together complex and varied historical phenomena which are in fact too disparate to be brought meaningfully under the same heading. In this view, the way ahead must be to drop the idea of the Revolt, as an historical generalisation which seemed useful in the past but has proved to be fundamentally misleading, and concentrate instead on perhaps less glamorous but more practical issues.

It will be evident from the title of this piece that the author is not entirely convinced that such radical scepticism is justified.^2. In particular, the far-reaching changes which occurred in the course, and in the wake, of the Revolt - at least in the northern Netherlands - suggest not only that it is still possible to talk in meaningful terms about the results of the Revolt, but that it is impossible properly to understand seventeenth-century Dutch society without such a perspective. The legacy of the Revolt affected almost all areas of Dutch society to a greater or lesser extent.

1. See the comments by E.H. Kossmann, Politieke theorie en geschiedenis, Amsterdam 1987, p. 59 (in a piece originally published in 1984), and by Robert S. Du Plessis, Lille and the Dutch Revolt, Cambridge 1991, p. 3, together with the general approach of G. Parker, The Dutch Revolt, London 1977, which gives a narrative without really tackling the problem of causation.

2. Such scepticism with regard to the validity of large-scale interpretations of historical events can be seen as related to the radical relativism which is the hall-mark of postmodernism: some historians seem eager to substitute an individualised aesthetic response to the past for attempts at analysis, explanation and, above all, greater understanding. The much touted revival of narrative is one example of this trend.

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First of all, politically there was a complete transformation with the emergence not only of a new state but, moreover, one that was governed by a republican system where political power was radically decentralised. Both these latter characteristics contrasted sharply with the dominant political trends of contemporary Europe. Also this new state was marked by a degree of religious toleration, in practice if not always in theory, that was again in marked contrast to both the theory and the practice of the rest of Europe at the time. Indeed - though the term is one that should be used with extreme caution in this period - it is perhaps not too much of an exaggeration to see here the beginnings of secularisation, again in sharp contrast to the rest of Europe where political communities still defined themselves largely in religious terms. Thus, the cultural changes which followed on from the Revolt are perhaps less obvious but possibly just as radical as the political. This can certainly be seen with regard to painting, and possibly also in literature, though in areas like political theory where the general European tradition was so important the case is less clear. Most importantly, however, the extent of the cultural transformation is shown by the development of a bourgeois ethos within Dutch society in the course of the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century. Such at least seems to be the case for Holland; the extent to which such cultural changes spread to the rest of the Republic is as yet unclear, though it can be suggested that the ethos which came to dominate the leading province cannot fail to have had profound effects on the others.

Of these major changes, the transformation of the political system is perhaps the most obvious. The reason it is given particular attention in this essay is not only that such political change is in itself cultural, but also to suggest that it can be used as a metaphor for more general processes of change, particularly cultural. The first point to be stressed about the emergence of a new state in such an innovative form is that it was not the result of any conscious attempt to create something new. On the contrary, those involved in the construction of a workable state out of the loosely allied rebel provinces were concerned to preserve the existing system or to recreate the past. The key term in this context was the ‘privileges’, used both to refer to specific rights held by individuals and groups, and as a symbol of the traditional political system as a whole. The Revolt had been fought to protect and preserve the ‘privileges’ of the people of the Netherlands, and the new state was seen as the embodiment in political practice of these ancient rights.^3. Consequently, the new state and its way of operating were presented in a conservative guise as the reassertion of the traditional way of government.

This conservative orientation is also shown by the authority and power given to precedent. The new polity was seen as a continuation of the past, not as a break with it, and so precedents from that past political practice were still seen as valid in the new state. However different the political reality of the Dutch Republic may now be seen to have been from that of the Netherlands before the Revolt, the conventional wisdom of the time saw it as essentially a continuation of the traditional system with only the head - that is, the authority of the king of Spain - removed (though in contradiction of the popular metaphor of the body politic, this particular headless trunk seemed to perform remarkably well). In general, the ideology of the new polity was one of nostalgia, looking back to the past, even to the large-

3. See most recently, Martin van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt, Cambridge 1992.

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ly mythical case of the Batavians, for the ideal mode of government which the present should seek to emulate.^4. The Revolt against Spanish rule was justified not by reference to religious considerations, political ideals or abstract standards of right, but by reference to the past. What the Spanish did and were trying to do was wrong, not because religious persecution or absolutism were necessarily and in themselves wrong, but because in the pursuit of these policies they had contravened the one universal standard of right recognised by the rebels, the privileges.

Thus, it can be argued that a new form of state was created in the northern Netherlands by inadvertence rather than intention. In the course of the struggle to preserve the old, something radically new emerged, though it is doubtful how far contemporaries were capable of recognising this fact. A new political structure emerged, controlled by a new dominant social group and, perhaps most notably of all, with markedly secular political priorities, in practice if not always in rhetoric. The change in structure is clear, and involved not only the devolution of political power to the provinces, with a consequent weakening of central government and a prevailing uncertainty with regard to the location of sovereignty, but also an even more radical decentralisation in practice within the provinces themselves, to the benefit of the towns and of local power-holders in general. Similarly, the rejection of Philip II removed a whole level of political authority from the top of the political system and allowed the urban regents to become dominant, certainly in Holland. Although the nobility retained much if not all of its power in the other provinces, the wealth and demographic strength of Holland gave it a decisive voice in the affairs of the Republic, and this voice was controlled exclusively by the regents.

However, the most radical break with both the past and the common European pattern lay in the markedly secular priorities displayed by all levels of government and administration in the new state. These were clearly evident in Dutch foreign policy from the very beginning, though it should be noted that this orientation was not without challenge from proponents - especially within the Reformed Church - of a religious interpretation of the meaning of the Dutch state. Although rational pursuit of the interests of the state was neither new in the seventeenth century nor confined to the Republic, it was something new that the ends pursued were so relentlessly mundane. Economic advantage in particular, along with political survival, was pursued to the exclusion of those considerations of dynastic interest, personal honour, religious partisanship, and territorial aggrandisement which were so important to other states of contemporary Europe. Internally also the civil authorities at all levels put the highest priority on the maintenance of civil order and general prosperity, even at the cost of the religious purity of the community. Religious toleration as it evolved in the Republic in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century was not so much the result of high-minded idealism as of a hard-nosed concentration on the secular priorities of government.

Thus the Revolt brought in its wake radical change in the way the political system worked, in who controlled the system, and in the nature of its priorities, despite the persistence of traditional forms and a conservative ethos. The defeat of the Spanish involved the rejection of central political authority in favour not just of provincial autonomy but of an even more fundamental particularism. The main beneficiaries were the towns and other local authorities which became the ultimate location of political power in the Republic.^5. In this way the political traditions and

4. The classic example of the mode of interpretation is Hugo Grotius, De antiquitate reipublicae Batavicae, Leiden 1610. It is worth noting that this Batavian myth was typically not an innovation of the period of the Revolt and its aftermath either, it was already present in the early sixteenth century, cf. Karin Tilmans, Aurelius en de Divisiekroniek van 1517, Hilversum 1988, chap. III.

5. On this theme see J.L. Price, Holland and the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century (forthcoming).

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practices which were already firmly established at the town and to some extent provincial level, particularly in Holland,^6. were able to expand to dominate the political system of the Republic as a whole. The Revolt was an assertion of the political values and practices which were already dominant at the local, particularly urban, and provincial level, and they became the foundations on which the new polity was built.

The pattern of fundamental change coming through and despite the persistence of traditional forms and ideas which can be seen in the political system provides a possible model for the broader processes of cultural transition in this period. If cultural change did come in such a conservative guise, then this can perhaps explain at least some of the apparent contradictions and ambivalences within Dutch seventeenth-century culture.

The study of the culture of the Republic in the seventeenth century has reached an interesting if sometimes frustrating phase where past certainties have been brought into question, but no compensatory new synthesis seems as yet in sight. The new directions which research over a whole range of fields has taken are beginning to reveal not only a greater variety than was once thought but, perhaps even more significantly, to reveal unsuspected ambivalences in areas which had appeared relatively unproblematic. The point can be illustrated by brief glimpses at recent developments in the study of art and literature.

With regard to painting, there has been a marked tendency to stress the persistence of traditional forms and thus to question the established picture of a realistic art which is in some significant sense the reflection of the values of a ‘bourgeois’ society. This research has taken two main forms: firstly, a whole school of iconologists has attempted to demonstrate that the apparently realistic paintings in genre and other forms are in fact packed with symbolic meaning, and that these symbols are of a distinctly traditional nature; secondly, and with even more potentially radical implications, other students have argued that the conventional picture of Dutch art was only created by ignoring the significant proportion of artistic production which failed to fit in to this preconceived model. So both the meaning of the paintings contained in the conventional canon, and the composition of the canon itself have been challenged.^7.

It now begins to appear that the ‘Dutch School’ was to a significant extent the creation of the collecting strategies of individuals and institutions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who saw realism as the defining and most admirable characteristic of Dutch seventeenth century painting, and consistently selected for this quality. The holdings of the major art galleries of the twentieth century are the end result of this rigorous selection procedure: they do not give an unmediated picture of the art production of the seventeenth century, but one which is the result of centuries of weeding out of those paintings which failed to fit in with the established conception of what was distinctive about Dutch art.

One of the areas of artistic production which suffered most in this process was history painting. It has been argued that many more history paintings were produced and consumed in the seventeenth century than conventional accounts would have us believe, and that in general art production in the seventeenth-century Republic was much more like that of the rest of Europe in both form and themes than

6. See, for example, James D. Tracy, Holland under Habsburg Rule, 1506-1566, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1990.

7. A more nuanced picture of the social position of the painter is also beginning to emerge, see for example Maarten Jan Bok, ‘“Nulla dies sine linie.” De opleiding van schilders in Utrecht in de eerste helft van de zeventiende eeuw’, De zeventiende eeuw, 6, 1990.

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used to be thought. This latter suggestion has been supported by the work of the iconologists whose interpretations of the symbolism contained in Dutch paintings has also moved them significantly closer to the European artistic mainstream. Although some of the iconologists' interpretations are open to question, it is less important that they have perhaps overstated their case than that they have reminded us of the necessity of trying to understand how contemporaries saw and understood these paintings.^8.

The net result is not perhaps as revolutionary as the protagonists of either school would have us believe. While there is an urgent need for a reassessment of the importance of history paintings, Italianate landscapes and the like, it seems probable that this will modify rather than transform our understanding of art production in the seventeenth century. Similarly, iconological interpretations cannot wish away the innovations of the painters of the seventeenth century. Dutch art must still be seen as part of a major cultural transformation, but with both the influence of the past and that of the rest of contemporary Europe being given more weight than has too often been the case in the past.

With regard to literature, one of the effects of recent research has been, in contrast to the trends in art, to give greater emphasis to the ways in which seventeenth-century writing reflected the changing nature of Dutch society, and move away from the established interpretation which stressed the essentially conventional nature of the themes and forms of Dutch literary production at this time. Here the result has been to suggest that there was more innovation than used to be thought, and that even in the guise of conservative literary forms significant changes in tone and content took place.

One area where especially intriguing possibilities are being opened up is popular literature. The nature of the publications which were aimed at the broad popular audience which was such a feature of this most literate of seventeenth-century societies (again, this comment is true particularly but not only of Holland) is at last beginning to emerge from obscurity. Popular writing seems to have been more prolific, and perhaps even more intrinsically interesting than used to be thought. Pamphlets on political, religious and other topics were, of course, produced in great numbers throughout the seventeenth century, though as yet little is known about who read them; there was also the emergence of a picaresque genre aimed at a popular audience, though again little is known about the consumption of such publications; and popular drama may have been a more important phenomenon than once seemed to be the case. New perspectives are also being opened up through the re-interpretation of writers in the established canon, particularly dramatists, to bring out the ways in which their works were implicated in contemporary ideas, attitudes and assumptions, as well as containing specific responses to contemporary events and circumstances.^9. In this way a literature which has too often in the past seemed to float in an aesthetic limbo is beginning to be given a credible foundation in the social reality of the seventeenth century.

However, there still remains an ambivalence about the relationship of Dutch literature of this time to the society which produced it. A recent survey, produced primarily for English readers it must be admitted, proceeds from the confident assertion that Dutch society in the seventeenth century was unambiguously bourgeois to a discussion of a literature with apparently few or no bourgeois character-

8. For a recent account of the state of play by a leading protagonist, see E. de Jongh, ‘De dissonante veelstemmigheid sinds Haaks Hollandse schilders in de Gouden Eeuw’, Theoretische geschiedenis, 19 (1992), n. 3.

9. Recent examples which have come to my attention with regard to drama are H. Duits, Van Bartholomeusnacht tot Bataafse opstand, Hilversum 1990, and Marijke Meijer Drees, De treurspelen van Thomas Asselijn, Enschede 1989.

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istics.^10. In this account the cultural orientation of Dutch writers was to the classical and renaissance past, and to the literature of France and Italy especially. In other words the literary works most admired by Dutch writers were produced by very different societies from their own, and certainly far from bourgeois. If writers were to be true to their models, could they also be true to their own society? This does not seem to have been a problem which consciously troubled the writers themselves, but that does not mean that it did not exist.

The culture which developed in the Dutch state in the last decades of the sixteenth and in the course of the seventeenth century was to an extent in the thrall of the past: this is shown in the conservative ethos of politics as well as in the influence of traditional forms and values in painting and literature. Also Dutch society may have been bourgeois in form but it was perhaps not yet so in spirit, and this situation engendered deep-seated cultural ambivalences which are far from being properly understood. These influences were reinforced by the cultural authority of the rest of Europe. The creation and preservation of a distinct cultural identity was a particular problem, then as perhaps now, for a small country which had a pronounced international orientation, not only politically and economically but culturally also.

In this society there could be no conscious embrace of the new: the dominant cultural values stressed the eternal verities, the importance of the imitation and emulation of past achievements, and the employment of established forms. Almost by definition, the new was likely to be regarded as suspect, as evidence of corruption rather than of vitality. This orientation was greatly encouraged by the influence of humanism, and in particular of the humanist education enjoyed - if that is the right term - by the social élite. An education which concentrated almost exclusively on classical literature was a somewhat curious preparation for life in the first bourgeois society in human history - if that indeed is what it was - and the consideration that this was perhaps not the classical heritage taken neat but rather as seen through renaissance filters can only have been a marginal improvement. In parallel to the ideological nostalgia of the Batavian Myth and the idealising of the ancient constitution, was a cultural nostalgia which took fidelity to past values and achievements as the standards by which not only art and literature but also religious and political thought were to be judged. In these circumstances there was a built-in ideological inhibition against innovation and change.

Similarly, there seems to have been no direct challenge to the aristocratic value system that was dominant in the rest of Europe. ‘Bourgeois’ values appear only to have been asserted in sharply delimited areas - such as economic policy and the commercial priorities of government at all levels - and not to have developed into any general or systematic attack on established attitudes and values. Even in Holland, where the advance of commercial capitalism was most spectacular, it has been argued that the prestige of the nobility remained very largely intact,^11. though there is some evidence that a certain scepticism was emerging by the end of the century. It is commonly argued that the regents, even in Holland, were moving in the direction of becoming a sort of urban aristocracy rather than acting as champions of the interests and values of the bourgeoisie from which they sprang. This interpretation may well be an exaggeration, or even largely untrue, but neverthe-

10. M.A. Schenkeveld, Dutch Literature in the Age of Rembrandt, Amsterdam 1991.

11. See H.F.K. van Nierop, Van ridders tot regenten, n.p. 1984.

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less it does suggest that there was at the very least a certain ambivalence among the regents as a group with regard to the promotion of anything resembling a bourgeois ethos.

It should also be noted that, although in the wake of Max Weber it has been usual to look for the links between protestantism and the development of capitalism, there is an important sense in which all branches of christianity were essentially conservative. The social and moral teachings of all religious groups in the seventeenth century were firmly rooted in the past, and were the product of the social and political circumstances of over a thousand years of European history. Even taking a distinctly shorter perspective, protestantism began and succeeded in societies which were still largely traditional, though many if not most were rather more influenced by urban and perhaps capitalist values than most of catholic Europe. It may well be that there was in some sense a Wahlverwandtschaft between capitalism and certain strands of calvinism, but it is more obviously true that protestantism, even in its calvinist variant was at least as much a conservative force as a progressive one. In the Republic itself this is shown by the controversy over usury sparked off by the revisionist writings of Salmasius: the most vocal proponents of the conventional condemnation of usury were Voetius and his followers. Thus, in the heartland of commercial capitalism, and as late as the 1640s, it was the most puritan elements within the Reformed Church which proved most resistant to the values inherent in the new economic order.

A further problem with trying to see the Republic as a bourgeois society in any unambiguous sense is the absence of cultural forms which might have been expected to develop if this were the case. It is at least curious that not only did the novel, the bourgeois literary form par excellence it might be argued, not develop in the Republic during the seventeenth century, it only emerged in the later part of the following century and even then not very strongly. The contrast with England is suggestive: here the development of the novel followed closely the transformation of the country into a capitalist society.

It can be suggested that the political system of the Republic also represented an ambivalent response to social change. The regents may have represented the interests of the bourgeoisie, especially in their economic and social policies, but they were not directly elected or controlled by them. The development of political theory in the seventeenth century was also distinctly hesitant, not only in the sense that a theory appropriate to the new polity was rather slow to arrive, but also in the weak representation of theories supporting the inclusion of a significant part of the bourgeoisie in the political process. Arguments for greater burger participation in local politics were usually traditional in form, looking back to real or mythical privileges to support their case; only in the eighteenth century did proposals for at least a limited degree of democracy begin to make some headway outside very narrow intellectual coteries.

The changes in art can also be put in this context. Here there was indeed a radical break with the past, but it was not as universal nor as complete as it once seemed to be. Also it now seems that more than a natural Dutch aversion to theory is required to explain why this radical development was not accompanied by a literature explaining and justifying what was happening. To a significant extent it would seem that such radical change was possible in this area because it was not under-

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taken in any conscious sense of innovation. Theory - the consciousness of painting - remained conservative, while practice changed.

A central problem here is the difficulty of disentangling burger cultural traditions in the broadest sense from new developments associated with the fuller development of commercial capitalism in the Republic in the seventeenth century. It may well be that many aspects of Dutch culture after the Revolt which have tended to be labelled bourgeois would be better understood as the continuation of the powerful urban traditions of the Netherlands in the later middle ages and sixteenth century. There is a possible parallel here with the transformation which took place in the political system: just as the removal of Spanish rule enabled urban politics to expand to embrace the whole of the new polity, so perhaps the new situation after the Revolt allowed urban culture to put its distinctive stamp on the society of the new state. What appears new may be more traditional than it seems, though in the conditions of the seventeenth century it could also have radical effects while remaining conservative in ethos.

In examining the nature of the cultural consequences of the Revolt, the basic suggestion of this essay is that, as in politics, a transformation took place through the selective use of the past, and in the absence of any conscious will to innovate. This process produced a culture which was fundamentally ambivalent, in part involved in a radically new practice but also largely committed to traditional values which fitted at times rather ill with contemporary realities.

The extent of the changes that took place are clear and affected every - or nearly every - aspect of culture. Painting was the area of most obvious innovation, and this remains true despite attempts to stress the persistence of more traditional forms and influences. Literature, although remaining closer to the norms prevailing in the rest of Europe, is now beginning to look distinctly more responsive to the social and political changes within the Republic than used to be thought. The transformation of the religious and political environment were perhaps even more radical, with the establishment of a republican system and a considerable degree of religious toleration. Typically, however, in both cases the practice was stronger than the theory: in politics republican theory limped rather pathetically behind the successful working of the new system; and as regards religion, the civil authorities were more tolerant in practice than they could afford to admit openly. In the new atmosphere, liberal theology and radical protestant movements could flourish as nowhere else in Europe.

More generally, the rise of a bourgeois Weltanschauung, though difficult to document and assess, seems evident, especially in the new conceptions of the purpose of the political community, expressed in both the domestic and the foreign policies of the new state. The stress on economic welfare and the maintenance of order as the chief priorities, together with the employment of rational and practical approaches to the solution of religious as well as other problems, mark at least the beginning of the most radical of all cultural changes - the process of secularisation.

The notable changes in the attitudes to witchcraft and witchcraft accusations are perhaps an indication of the degree to which Dutch society had changed already by the first years of the seventeenth century. The key decade appears to have been the 1590s: from this point on not only did executions for witchcraft cease in Hol-

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land, but the courts of the province ceased to deal with such cases, except where the accuser was being tried for slander.^12. This is a remarkable sign of discontinuity with both the past and the common European experience of the time. (Though it should be noted that the history of witchcraft prosecutions in some of the other provinces, at least in the early seventeenth century, was much more in line with the European norm.)

Such new developments were rooted in the urban culture of the past in the Netherlands, just as the new political system was formed by the extension of urban particularism and political values to the state as a whole. As was also the case in politics, the cultural changes were radical in effect, but remained very largely conservative and traditional in spirit and consciousness. One of the consequences of this fundamental ambivalence was that after a certain point further change became problematical, certainly in politics but possibly the same syndrome applied in broader areas of culture as well. In the course of the Revolt and in its immediate aftermath, political and cultural change took place through the promotion of local practices, traditions and values to the level of the whole polity, but these developments were so imbued with conservative and backward-looking values that the new system embodied almost insurmountable barriers to further change.

In general it might be suggested that the radical nature of the political and cultural changes which took place in the wake of the Revolt were obscured by the dominance of a traditionalist mode of discourse, which made for a degree of ambivalence in seventeenth-century culture which awaits its historian.^13. However, the innovative nature of this culture is clear whether we consider it to be best described as bourgeois or not; over a whole range of areas of high and low culture this society was markedly different from both the past and from the rest of contemporary Europe. Thus, it might be argued that if the cultural consequences of the Revolt were as radical as has been suggested in this essay, then perhaps the Revolt itself should be considered as more of a revolution than most historians would have us believe, for: ‘By their fruits shall ye know them’.

12. For an up-to-date account of modern research on the issue relating to the Republic as a whole, see W. Frijhoff and M. Gijswijt-Hofstra, Nederland betoverd, Amsterdam 1987; for the particular case of Holland, see Hans de Waardt, Toverij en samenleving. Holland 1500-1800, The Hague 1991.

13. Simom Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches, New York 1987, also sees an ambivalence in Dutch culture - with regard to wealth. I find it difficult to believe that the seventeenth-century Dutch were other than single-minded in their attitude to wealth.