The Sea Beggars

EARLY BIRD BOOKS

FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

BE THE FIRST TO KNOW—

NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY!

The Sea Beggars

A Novel

Cecelia Holland

For Spike van Cleve
,

and his blue filly

You can blow out a candle
,

But you can't blow out a fire
,

Once the flames begin to catch
,

The wind will blow it higher
.

—Peter Gabriel
,
“Biko”

Historical Note

The revolt of the Dutch against the Spanish monarchy in the late sixteenth century was the first of a long series of national revolutions that changed the nature of government and shaped the societies we now live in. Its impact on the English is clearly visible in Shakespeare's and Marlowe's writings and was obviously an influence on the English revolts of 1648 and 1688, direct forerunners of the American and French revolutions of the next century.

In a time dominated by the personalities of mighty individuals, the revolt of the Dutch stands out as the action of an entire people. Yet it produced at least one great man, William of Nassau, William the Silent—the Prince of Orange, one of those rare people in history about whom the more I learn the more I admire him. For these reasons, and the deeper one of its being a struggle between freedom and autocracy, tolerance and ideology, the Dutch revolt is the first real modern event.

The Netherlands—the Low Countries, what we now call Belgium, Luxembourg, and Holland—began in the Middle Ages as a cluster of dozens of autonomous provinces along the banks, swamps, and estuaries of the three great rivers, the Rhine, the Maas, and the Shelde, that empty their waters into the North Sea. In the fourteenth century the dukes of Burgundy, striving to create a separate state between France and Germany, acquired the Provinces one by one, by marriage and conquest. Still the region remained a patchwork of local governments. Here and there great cities sprang up, centers of commerce and finance. Elsewhere the Dutch reclaimed swamp and wasteland and the shallows of their coastline for farms.

In 1477, with the death of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, the ruling line failed of male issue, and the great duchy of Burgundy in the south reverted to the Crown of France. The daughter of Charles kept title to her father's other lands, consisting mainly of the Low Countries.

The heiress of Burgundy married the son of the Hapsburg Emperor of Germany. Their son in turn married the daughter of the great Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, thus uniting under the Spanish Crown the greatest assemblage of real property the world had yet seen. Included in this domain were the Low Countries, the hereditary German lands of the Hapsburgs, Italy and Sicily, Spain, and the Spanish Indies, which people did not then know consisted of two entire continents.

Thus, in 1555, when Charles V was still Emperor, the Dutch people found themselves under the rule of a foreign prince whose interests spanned the world and whose traditional policy committed him to support of the Catholic Church, newly resurgent against the Protestant Reformation.

The Dutch have ever been a tolerant people, their prevailing religious attitude better expressed by Erasmus of Rotterdam than Luther, Calvin, or Ignatius Loyola. In this greenhouse atmosphere, a diversity of sects flowered throughout the sixteenth century, some swiftly withering, some taking lasting root. The Emperor Charles, born and reared in Ghent, Flanders, was wise enough not to interfere openly with this climate, but in 1555 Charles relinquished the Netherlands, yielding power to his son, Philip II of Spain.

Philip spoke only Spanish. A few months after his father's death, in 1558, he sailed from the Low Countries to Spain, where he remained for the rest of his more than forty years of rule. He was an unimaginative, dedicated, scrupulous man, overmeticulous and rigid, and a fanatic Catholic. His policy of consolidating power in the administration of his property brought him face to face with the great Dutch nobility, who feared for the loss of their hereditary rights and privileges. From the moment of his accession, the tension between him and the Low Countries grew steadily into violence and revolt.

This book's story is fiction. The van Cleef family is a product of my imagination; and while the events in which the van Cleefs act are all drawn from actual incidents, I have tampered with some details in the interests of the narrative. The business in Antwerp, where the Spanish garrison fled from three sails on the river thinking they were the Beggars, happened several years later than it does here. Not Alva's son, but a lesser commander, led the royal army against The Brill. And Willem Lumey de la Marck did not die as I have it; he was bounced from his position as admiral and went back to his native Germany, where the great priest-killer returned to the Catholic Church.

The revolt of the Dutch has inspired two great classics of history: John Lathrop Motley's
The Rise of the Dutch Republic
, and Pieter Geyl's
The Revolt of the Netherlands
. One hundred years separates these works; the differences in attitude and style between them splendidly illuminate the intellectual adventure of those hundred years.

The song on p. 243 is from
Tudor Songs and Ballads from M.S. Cotton Vespasian A-25
, edited by Peter J. Seng, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1978.

Finally, I want to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, with whose generous support the novel was finished.

Prologue

“Beggars!” exclaimed Count Horn. “They called us
beggars
for requiring what is ours by right of law and custom!”

The Prince of Orange said nothing.

“The King will set all in order,” Count Egmont said, on the Prince's left. “It's these Spanish fools advising the King's sister who think they can remake the Low Countries to their new fashions. They had to accept the petition, after all—that's what matters. Once it reaches the King, he will restore our place here, and chastise these schemers and plotters.”

Still the Prince of Orange said nothing. The fresh breezes of early spring in his face, he rode with his friends beneath the elms and linden trees of Brussels, his mind heavy with doubts. He had heard about the petition, although he had kept himself out of it—out of the writing of it, out of the delivery—knowing the Governess mistrusted him already. Margaret would have damned the whole enterprise, had he been attached to it—that gaudy, innocent parade of noblemen and youth who had ridden to the Palais-Royal with their request that the King honor their ancient habits and refrain from installing the Inquisition in the Low Countries.

“If only the Emperor were still alive!” Egmont said, with a gusty sigh.

As well pray that all good men might live forever. The Emperor Charles V had been dead for ten years. Egmont and Horn and probably thousands of others in the Low Countries looked back on his reign as a golden age of harmony and prosperity. The Prince of Orange knew they were yielding to delusions when they did.

Did the past always seem better to men than the present? That was the core of the petition, the request that the King of Spain restore the past of the Netherlands—a past when her rulers had lived here, when the counts of Holland and Flanders, the dukes of Brabant and Burgundy had centered their policy on the good of these provinces, when they had not tried to fit them into some corner of a huge mosaic of states reaching very nearly around the world and having no commonality save the man who governed them all, the King of Spain. So they had ridden to the Palais, the Dutch nobles, with their bit of paper, asking: Please make things as they were before.

The Governess, the King's sister, had resorted to tears, her customary refuge in times of stress. Which led one of her advisers to say, “Madame, are you afraid of these
beggars?
”

“When the King has our petition,” Egmont said, “we shall see who the beggars are.”

There was danger in such optimism. The Governess had promised to hold off the persecution of heretics in the Low Countries until the King gave her fresh instructions. To take for granted that the King would do as the nobles asked …

Horn's gloved hand fell roughly on Orange's sleeve. “Come, William. Why so quiet? You look as if you're riding in a funeral train. Seem happier—there are people watching.”

The Prince of Orange pulled on his smiling public face. “Forgive me, friend.” Turning his hand over, he caught the older man's brocaded wrist in a brief intimate grasp. “You know I have much on my mind of late.”

“Well, get her off your mind,” Egmont said, and laughed.

They were riding abreast down the broad, tree-shaded street; on either side stood the homes of wealthy men, the glass windows shining like gold in the late light of the sun. From an upper story a woman leaned and waved her handkerchief.

“Vive le Prince! Messieurs les comtes!”

Egmont and Horn swept off their caps and waved them, and Orange lifted up his hand, smiling. At the shout, half a dozen other doors popped open, and a small crowd poured forth into the street to watch the lords ride by.

“Vive le Prince!”

Orange saluted them; his spirits rose at this boisterous greeting. He turned his mind from his gray inward thoughts to the outer world. It was spring, and Brussels, with its palaces and gardens, its courtly people, was dressed in new bloom; fresh young flowers everywhere danced in the sunlight; the leaves of the trees were uncurling like pale green flags. He waved and smiled to the people who called his name, and resolved to be less gloomy.

After all, the Governess had agreed to cease attacking the Protestants. The King was notoriously slow in his deliberations: it would be months before his answer reached Brussels, perhaps years. And now the street before them was filled with noisy people, in celebration costume, cheering.