Politieke theorie en geschiedenis

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A history in the grand manner^*

Jan den Tex, Oldenbarnevelt. Translated by R.B. Powell. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1973. 2 vols. xii + 760 pp.

The 1960s was an extraordinarily fruitful decade for Oldenbarnevelt studies. In 1962, Dr. A.J. Veenendaal published the second volume of a series of ‘Documents on Johan van Oldenbarnevelt's Politics and Family’, a series that had been started in the 1930s by S.P. Haak but had stagnated for thirty years; in 1967, the third and last volume of the collection came from the press.¹ Both of Veenendaal's books are enormous tomes, rather old-fashioned in their conception but eminently useful. In 1965, H. Gerlach published a book of more than 700 pages on Oldenbarnevelt's trial considered from a juridical and theoretical point of view.² In the same year, Dr. S. Barendrecht completed her work on one of Oldenbarnevelt's collaborators and foes, François van Aerssen.³ Meanwhile, with majestic regularity, Dr. Jan Den Tex was writing his biography of Oldenbarnevelt. With each volume, its proportions grew more stupendous. The first volume (1960), with its 440 pages, is light compared with the 690 pages of the second (1962) and the 808 of the third volume (1966). Even Dr. Den Tex's hope to compress his appendixes into one final volume was an illusion; he needed two stout books for them (1970-72). In all, more than 5000 pages of material on Oldenbarnevelt was published during the decade.

The paradox of the situation is that this enormous output cannot be considered as an Oldenbarnevelt revival. During the 1960s, Dutch public opinion, obsessed as it was with various forms of New Left ideologies rather than with historical antecedents, moved farther than ever away from the past. Passionate attacks on what in Dutch vocabulary is called the ‘regent mentality’ - a term indicating the authoritarian paternalism of an egoistic patriciate - were infinitely more common than admiration for

* Lijst van publikaties, infra, 490, nr. 76 (1974).

1 Oldenbarnevelt: Bescheiden II, III.

2 Gerlach, Proces; see supra, 176 e.v.

3 Barendrecht, Van Aerssen.

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the founding father of the Dutch Republic, who was the archetype of the regent patrician. At the same time, Dutch historiography was slowly adapting itself to international fashion and turning from political to socio-economic subjects and from the micro-analysis of events to the macro-consideration of developments and structure. From the point of view of both politics and historical scholarship, the works on Oldenbarnevelt were deliberately old-fashioned. They were the same in their literary style. Dr. Den Tex's form in particular is careful and patient narrative, pithy enough, to be sure, and enlivened by facetious epigrams that sometimes border on the vulgar, but essentially rather staid. In conception, style, and nature of their subjects, these various books were intended to belong to the nineteenth-century tradition.

Especially Dr. Gerlach's undoubtedly valuable book - it is a mine of information on its subject - was so firmly rooted in that tradition that its appearance came as a shock. How, in fact, was it possible for a historian living in the 1960s to write as if he were taking part in the nineteenth-century discussion on whether the sentence leading to Oldenbarnevelt's execution was legitimate or illegitimate? The author's verdict was clear: He sided with Motley and many a Dutch liberal in declaring that Oldenbarnevelt was not guilty. And he did so with such emphasis that his reader was bound to wonder whether any human being could be as guiltless as Oldenbarnevelt was made out to be. Was it still necessary in the second half of the twentieth century, whose political inspiration is so completely divorced from history, to worry as much as nineteenth-century politicians and historians did about the death of a statesman whom liberals hailed as the founder of a tolerant and constitutional state, and whom orthodox Protestants condemned as the foe of the glorious Orange dynasty and a traitor to Dutch liberties, which were based not on the aristocratic tyranny of town councils but on the wisdom and tolerance of William the Silent and his heirs? Gerlach's reader was moved back to the nineteenth as well as to the sixteenth century; it should be added that he learned much from this double confrontation with Holland's past.

This may suffice to indicate that Dr. Den Tex's major work is not to be regarded as representative of present-day tendencies in Dutch historiography. It is an old-fashioned book. It is, moreover, not the work of an academic historian but of a gentleman of leisure who obtained a doctor's degree in law in 1926 for a published thesis on Locke's and Spinoza's conceptions of toleration.

The English translation of Den Tex's biography of Oldenbarnevelt is drastically shortened; its text, apart from indexes and the like, is approximately two fifths of the original. The painful operation has been done extremely well with tact and intelligence, and the English reader need not have the impression of having before him the digest of a work whose merits can only be appreciated in the original version. Still, the tone of the

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two versions differs. The English prose is more serious. Many of the author's witticisms and most of his sometimes highly imaginative hypotheses have been cut - rightly, of course, given the circumstances - but with the inevitable result that the text has become weightier and more solemn. It would not be possible to deduce from the English text, as is so easily done from the Dutch, that Dr. Den Tex wears his immense learning lightly and occasionally allowed himself a degree of flippancy one would not expect in such a book. Nor does the translation indicate that where his material is thin or nonexistent the author filled the gaps with hypotheses that have left some reviewers of the original breathless. However, what is more serious, Den Tex's elaborate annotation has virtually disappeared in the English book. It is true that occasionally some footnotes have been taken over, but it is difficult to say why these have been kept - probably only for the reason that they refer to English material. This almost total elimination of the apparatus criticus inevitably diminishes the value of the English book as a tool for scholars.

Yet we must be deeply grateful for the publication of this work in English; it is a book of unusual merit that fully deserves being made available to the république des lettres. Oldenbarnevelt is described by Dr. Den Tex as one of the greatest statesmen in European history, the builder of a new state, the Dutch Republic. Named ‘Advocate of the Land’ in 1586 - later this officer was to be called Grand Pensionary - Oldenbarnevelt succeeded in driving the Earl of Leicester away without losing Queen Elisabeth's support. Then, with as much perseverance as skill, he not only managed to organize the emerging state in a more or less satisfactory way but also created the financial and political framework that allowed Maurice of Nassau, under constant supervision by Oldenbarnevelt himself, to achieve his decisive military victories.

Although not himself interested in trade, Oldenbarnevelt built the Dutch East India Company, primarily as an instrument of war. However, it became immensely productive economically and highly original with regard to its organization and its initial conceptions. Some years later, Oldenbarnevelt correctly realized that the war with the Southern Netherlands and Spain should be brought to an end; with inexhaustible patience and an astounding versatility, he controlled the negotiations leading to the Truce of 1609, which represented a clear Dutch victory. Dr. Den Tex describes all these great events with the utmost care and subtlety. He spares us no detail, although in this respect the English version is superior to the Dutch edition; in the latter, in spite of his mastery of the material, the author sometimes leads his reader into confusion by piling up far too many facts. Even so, the English version also has sentences like this one: ‘When Van der Horst had been fobbed off, Oldenbarnevelt told Richardot, through Cruwell, that a passport would be granted for Neyen’ (p. 364).

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The portrait that Den Tex sketches is tactfully and cautiously drawn. He does not work on the grand canvas. He is bold enough in his interpretation of Oldenbarnevelt's character but has no use for modern psychological categories. Oldenbarnevelt appears in this book as an incredibly active man, ambitious, ‘passionate, mistrustful and cynical’, ‘flexible in practice, but on the subject of texts... most obdurate’, undoubtedly a religious man, ‘a genuine Calvinist but not an existential one’, with ethical-religious and religious-humanist conceptions that were becoming old-fashioned in the early seventeenth century. He was deeply influenced by his study of law. As with so many of his contemporaries, positive law mattered enormously to him. All the turns of his domestic policies and all his innovations had to be justified by texts. Political theory was unimportant to him. He had no clear political doctrine, and it did not bother him. Dr. Den Tex perhaps does not sufficiently emphasize that, in this respect also, his attitude is characteristic of his sixteenth-century background. It was law, not abstract political philosophy, by which the Netherlanders tried to justify their resistance to King Philip. Dr. Den Tex gives an impression of seeing it differently. In his view, Oldenbarnevelt's indifference toward theory was an original element in his statesmanship; Oldenbarnevelt, he writes, ‘had as little political philosophy as any other great statesman in world history’ (p. 239).

Oldenbarnevelt, averse from meditation and philosophy and in no way an idealist, nevertheless pursued one consistent policy and tried to achieve one single political objective: He wanted to organize an independent Dutch state, divorced from the southern provinces of the Low Countries and with the province of Holland firmly in possession of all real power. According to Den Tex, it was Oldenbarnevelt's sense of reality that brought him to this position. William of Orange, the great nobleman from Brabant, had never given up his dream of re-establishing the federal unity of the seventeen provinces. Oldenbarnevelt, whose debt to William of Orange was immense and whose admiration for that most respected man was boundless, belonged to a generation able to abandon this profitless illusion. There was no way to reconcile the North and the South; the southern and the northern provinces were bound to go separate roads. Oldenbarnevelt by no means regretted this, and Den Tex does not either. Dr. Den Tex takes a very clear stand in Dutch and Belgian historical discussions about the ‘split of the Netherlands’.

It is well known that Pieter Geyl, with great learning and no less obstinacy, put forward the view that the history of the Netherlands was an unnatural process. According to him, the Dutch-speaking provinces of the northern and southern Netherlands belong together; it was because of accidents and the hazards of war that in the course of the Revolt the Netherlands were split into an independent northern half and the Spanish southern provinces. Geyl deplored this as the deeply tragic element in the

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history of the Low Countries, leading after centuries of decline in Flanders and Brabant to the creation of the Belgian state in 1831, a state dominated by France, an artificial and ambiguous state.

Dr. Den Tex will have nothing of this. He is a ‘Little-Netherlander’ who distinguishes sharply between all the territories south of the Rhine and Maas rivers, which he calls Belgium - even those that eventually formed part of the Republic and now belong to the Dutch state - and the provinces north of them, which he calls the Netherlands. This somewhat rash terminology is not explained in the English version, although the author has tried to justify it in the foreword to the second volume of the Dutch edition. Dr. Den Tex is too excellent a historian to adopt a dogmatic attitude in this complex matter, and for anyone writing about this period to refuse occasionally to call the inhabitants of the southern Netherlands Belgians is equivalent to condemning himself to linguistic contortions of dubious aesthetic quality. To write constantly of southern Netherlander or southern Netherlandish is historically sound but stylistically absurd.

Yet Dr. Den Tex exaggerates to such an extent that he becomes at times positively confusing. When he states (p. 414) that both Maurice and Oldenbarnevelt were agreed ‘that the Belgians were Netherlanders’ and that if ‘it were possible to speak to the Belgians alone their Netherlands character would emerge’, the word ‘Netherlands’ obviously indicates the old seventeen Netherlands provinces comprising both North and South. Yet, on the next page, Dr. Den Tex writes about Netherlands independence when he means Dutch independence. Moreover, one would expect an author who uses the word Belgium with such consistency to have formed a positive opinion of Belgian nationality. Dr. Den Tex, however, does not believe in Belgian nationality at all: He writes somewhere that ‘the character of the archducal state’ was ‘far from national’ (p. 383). But why then use a term that in normal parlance suggests exactly the contrary?

Not only the author's vocabulary but also his general thesis regarding Oldenbarnevelt's attitude toward the problem of Netherlands unity causes difficulties. It comes as a surprise when Dr. Den Tex suddenly acknowledges on p. 280 that in 1598 the

ideal of the Burgundian state was... still so strong on both sides of the front - it could be called pan-Netherlands national feeling, from Cambrai to Groningen - that years of useless bloodshed were to pass before the illusory reunion was given up in favour of the strong basis of the status quo.

This is a paradoxical and enigmatic statement. In what sense may we regard a strong national feeling as an obstacle to realistic policies? In what

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sense can policies aiming at achieving what is implied in such a feeling be called illusory and useless?

Some pages later (pp. 295 ff.), Dr. Den Tex is reduced to calling Oldenbarnevelt's attitude ‘a mystery’ when he has to explain why the advocate insisted so much during negotiations with the States General of the southern provinces in 1600 on a joint North-South effort to drive out the Spanish foe and on the reunion thereafter of all the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands. It is true that Oldenbarnevelt's policy was unrealistic, for the Belgians, if we may call them so, were not at that time striving for anything like this. On the other hand, the episode clearly shows the still-important influence of the Burgundian past. It should not be treated as a sort of aberration on Oldenbarnevelt's part, for which all rational explanation fails, or, at best, as a hypocritical move to break off peace negotiations that Dutch public opinion - on which Oldenbarnevelt was dependent for his own survival as a statesman - did not yet think appropriate.

Oldenbarnevelt, convinced that the northern Netherlands should become an internationally recognized independent state, had, according to Dr. Den Tex, a clear view of the character this state should adopt. In this respect, too, his attitude was determined by realism rather than any preconceived theory. He did not worry too much about crucial issues like the position of the stadholder and the Orange dynasty; or the controversy between monarchical and republican ideas; or the problem of representation and the difficult decision of how this republic - if a republic it was to be - had to be organized, as a more or less unitary state ruled by the States General or as a federation of more or less sovereign provinces.

In altogether admirable and lucid pages, Dr. Den Tex analyzes Oldenbarnevelt's policies in respect to all these questions, showing him to be constantly guided by enlightened and miraculously percipient opportunism. The result, although far from logical and systematic, was not incoherent and was eminently workable. As long as the province of Holland and its highest officer, Oldenbarnevelt, remained predominant, Oldenbarnevelt was perfectly content with a form of government in which the States General were recognized as a ‘sovereign’ body. As long as the Orange stadholder concentrated on his military function and did not meddle in politics, Oldenbarnevelt was glad to increase his power and even to raise him to a higher status. Nothing in Oldenbarnevelt's policies prefigures the much more dogmatic controversies of the late seventeenth century. He reduced all problems to practical and legal issues. By doing so, he transformed the traditional Dutch institutions into instruments of government so efficient and flexible that they survived the turmoils of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to be wrecked only in 1795.

Moreover, Oldenbarnevelt was one of the first to grasp that, whatever

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the outward constitutional form, real power resided with the rich merchants in Holland. Thus he was in favor of what the author calls an oligarchy. In his use of the word oligarch, Dr. Den Tex is as little scrupulous as in his use of the word Belgian. It may be questioned whether the word is adequate. In the Aristotelian tradition, the word indicated a corrupted form of aristocracy, but there is no question of this here. Secondly, it suggests that the emphasis lies on the reduction of the number of rulers. In fact, however, a relatively large number of people played a role in Dutch politics. Third, the Brief Demonstration that one of Oldenbarnevelt's collaborators of that time, François Vranck (who later became an enemy of the advocate) wrote in 1587 and that served, to use Den Tex's words, as ‘the Magna Charta of the mercantile republic now being formed’, is by no means simply to be regarded as ‘the creed of the victorious oligarchical faction’ (p. 123). It does indeed justify rule by patricians, but it does so by explicitly stating that this rule is based on popular sovereignty and representation.⁴ However unsatisfactory and partisan the whole argumentation may have been, it is misleading to associate it with the concept of oligarchy.

These remarks are not intended to detract in any respect from the merit of Dr. Den Tex's work. They have no other purpose than to indicate a characteristic of the author's style: his inclination to cut Gordian knots by rather dogmatic expressions. Den Tex has obviously wanted to prevent himself from drowning in a morass of subtleties. He endeavors to be firm, clear, and outspoken. He wants to hit hard. Is such an attitude adequate when he has to describe and analyze the dramatic lawsuit leading to Oldenbarnevelt's execution, the most severe test for any writer on early-seventeenth-century Dutch history? It is, for Dr. Den Tex's book grows in depth and power when it reaches the great conflict during the truce.

With painful objectivity, the author, himself an agnostic, has made a truly heroic effort to grasp the meaning of the controversies between Arminians and Gomarists. What superficially looks like a mere dogmatic squabble he is prepared to consider in the last analysis as an unbridgeable contrast between totally different religious opinions and sentiments involving the whole personality. If this was the case, then Oldenbarnevelt's Erastian principles and his decision to make his opponents keep silence about the dogmatic issues were doomed to failure from the start. Oldenbarnevelt no longer understood the spirit of the time. He could not see that his own form of religious persuasion, that of the sixteenth-century Politiques, was heresy in the eyes of people who sought salvation through a rigidly organized and virtually independent dogmatic church. Nor

4 Cf. Rowen, Low Countries, 105-108 who prints some translated passages of this difficult document. The date on page 108 should be 1587 instead of 1578. See also supra, 98 e.v.

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could he ever recognize that the discussion about predestination was a discussion about the very basis of people's beliefs and not just learned and abstract verbiage.

Although this may well be true and due respect should be paid to Dr. Den Tex's interpretation, there is a weakness in the argument: Not only Oldenbarnevelt but most other Dutch rulers also failed to understand the existential profundity of the conflict. And what did the broad public make of it? Even if one acknowledges that Oldenbarnevelt gravely underrated the seriousness of the conflict - there can be no doubt about this - one may still ask whether the controversy was as existential as Den Tex suggests. As far as the Dutch church was concerned, the Gomarist triumph at the Synod of Dordrecht (1619) was virtually a pyrrhic victory. It is true that the Arminians were driven out of the church, but did the established church develop the characteristics the Gomarists had so ardently wished it to possess? The question answers itself: no. Should this not make us cautious in respect of an interpretation of the conflict that lays so much stress on its inescapable finality? Intellectual discussions, so it seems, have their own momentum. Gathering speed, they grow in size like snowballs rolling down a hill. In the course of time, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between the essence of the debate and its epiphenomena, and there is a danger of reading more into it than may be necessary.

Den Tex's treatment of the religious conflicts is immensely detailed. There is undoubtedly some disproportion between the first part of the book (423 pages), which brings the narrative to 1609, and the second part (280 pages), in which Oldenbarnevelt's last ten years are described. This is still worse in the Dutch edition (1,111 as against 692 pages). However, there is no reason for complaint. The story is absorbing, and, although Dr. Den Tex carefully refrains from dramatizing it, even in his cool voice the narrative rises to emotional heights. It is remarkable that in telling his story the author - who in a swift aside politely waves away Marx and the Marxists (p. 219) - is nowhere tempted to interpret the conflict between Arminians and Gomarists in terms of social antagonism and that the population, although doubtless a factor of some importance, nowhere seems to play an active role. For a reader somewhat allergic to generalization about class conflict, this may come as a relief. Yet one has the feeling that, as an attempt to rewrite the history of the truce - the 692 pages of the Dutch edition show that this is really what Dr. Den Tex has been doing - the work is not entirely satisfactory.

However, Den Tex's analysis of the conflict between Maurice and Oldenbarnevelt is admirable. With the utmost caution and great objectivity, the author assesses the rights and wrongs in the struggle that according to him was inevitable and, in the classic sense, tragic. He shows how Oldenbarnevelt, an old man whose health was declining, refused to

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acknowledge the defeat of his ideas and could not be brought to give in or to resign. But he was much more than a stubborn old man whose days had gone. In many respects, he was quite right.

In his epilogue, Dr. Den Tex summarizes his assessment of Oldenbarnevelt's character (pp. 701-2). Oldenbarnevelt possessed the qualities of the great statesman: industry, intelligence, eloquence, goût du risque, determination, energy, a well-developed sense of justice, and the courage to set ideals above expediency. But, Den Tex writes, Oldenbarnevelt had too much of these qualities:

His liking for dangerous actions sometimes cost him political advantages, and eventually his life. His boldness turned into overboldness, his determination into obstinacy, his energy, especially towards the end of his career, into hastiness, his sense of justice into fanaticism, his idealism into disregard for the ideals of others. His greatest handicap was his delusion about himself. He thought himself tolerant, pacific, always ready for mediation and reconciliation, prepared for every reasonable compromise. It was far from the case. He could keep up appearances to himself, since he attached little value to much that was of importance to others. Their ideals could easily be sacrificed. But as soon as his own ideals were at stake: the authority of the States of Holland, in ecclesiastical and military matters too, a broad church without dogmatic boundaries, non-intervention by foreign countries in domestic affairs, by judges in politics, by the people in the government - then it was Right with a capital R, always the enemy of peace, and he was more aggressive and less disposed to compromise than anyone else. It can be called worthy of respect, even noble, but politics is the art of the possible, and when his sense of justice spoke, Oldenbarnevelt sometimes failed to realize what was attainable.

This is history in the grand manner.