First Salute (8 page)

The obvious candidate for King, while he was alive, the Netherland’s own Prince of Orange, did not possess the advantages of other sovereigns in military strength or in money. Elizabeth, herself embroiled in Catholic disaffection and intrigue and putative rebellion at home, was too clever to get caught in more of the same trouble abroad, and did not accept the offer.

The assassination of William failed to fulfill Philip’s purpose, for William had imbued the revolt with a life of its own. When, however, Antwerp was taken by Philip’s Governor of the Netherlands, the Duke of Parma, giving Spain a strategic opening to the Channel coast across from Britain, this stroke invited unexpected assistance. It awoke Britain
to the thought that it might be more in her interest, instead of wasting strength in endless inconclusive war with the Dutch, to aid them against Spain, whose intention to invade Britain caused constant anxiety. This became acute when the Duke of Parma, Philip’s designated successor to rule the Netherlands, recaptured Antwerp, giving him a major port and an excellent naval base across the Channel, directly opposite the mouth of the Thames.

Unlike most rulers who fear change because it is change, the Queen of England, bold and canny Elizabeth I, was willing to reverse the ancient enmity and offer alliance to the Netherland rebels. In 1585, she sent an expeditionary force of 8,000 under her favorite, the Earl of Leicester, to help the rebels withstand Parma’s advance. Vainglorious, ambitious and bullheaded, Leicester was not a well-chosen agent. Given the position of Governor General of the Netherlands, which the Dutch in their undue respect for foreign aid accepted, the more deeply, as they thought, to engage Elizabeth, Leicester intervened in Dutch Councils and followed his own idea of strategy without regard for the client’s concerns. When he issued an edict against trading with the enemy, a normal contemporary practice, he committed the unforgivable sin: interference with their trade was a thing the Dutch would not permit. The vaunted alliance fell apart in mutual blame and Leicester departed unlamented. His errors and failures have been overshadowed in history by the more romantic and memorable reputation of his lieutenant, the poet Sir Philip Sidney. Mortally wounded at the Battle of Zutphen, he handed a cup of water to a no less wounded comrade with the memorable last words, “Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.” Other than an immortal line for literature, nothing much came of the English intervention except indirectly to precipitate one of the turning points of European history. By arousing the anger of Philip II, it planted in his one-track mind a design to break up the Anglo-Dutch alliance, destroy the English and strike the final blow against heresy.

The blow was to be delivered at sea by a huge naval armada followed by invasion, which Philip set about organizing with insistent ineptitude in every aspect of command, strategy and supply. He chose as commander an admiral, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who had never commanded in war at sea before and who was to sail to seas unknown to him, with no prearranged port for refuge in case of need, and dependent for success upon a plan of junction with Parma’s forces in the Netherlands with whom it was planned to invade England. Blockaded by
the Dutch, Parma’s troops were never able to meet the rendezvous. Philip’s great galleons, battered by heavy storms and by the British Navy, were sunk and scattered off the Hebrides. With half their crews lost to winds and waves and enemy guns and lack of food, the crippled Armada, forced to take the long cold way around Scotland and the west of Ireland, slunk home on a miserable and disheveled voyage, trailing no clouds of glory or conquest, but only the long shadows of defeat. The resounding failure of Philip’s naval enterprise marked the end of Spain’s primacy in European power politics, never afterward to be retrieved.

Wrapped in his single-mindedness, Philip did not give up, but threw what means Spain had left into the suppression of the Dutch, whom he found newly strengthened by their empire of commerce. Philip himself proved mortal and died in 1598, ten weary years after the Armada, and after completing the Escorial for his mausoleum, the greatest royal tomb since the pyramids. His unrelenting crusade against Protestantism, which had kept him continuously engaged in the religious wars of 16th century Europe, drained what offensive strength Spain had left for action against the Dutch, now grown rich and prosperous in the halls of business and markets of trade. Philip’s own demise took the heart out of Spain’s effort to maintain her rule. With Philip’s death on the brink of the 17th century, the great century of the Netherlands’ Golden Age began. Significantly the mark of new greatness was made in America where history’s winds, moving westward, were about to blow.

In 1609, an English navigator in the service of the Dutch East India Company discovered the Hudson River. In that same memorable year of the birth of the Bank of Amsterdam, Spain agreed to a twelve-year truce which acknowledged in practice the independence of the union of the seven United Provinces of the Netherlands. The spectacle of grand and imperial Spain being brought to a truce by a webfooted republic newly established among the monarchies impressed the older powers. They now began to reckon the former Beggars of the Sea as a factor in the European game with whom it was desirable to be allied. It impressed the Dutch themselves, who at last were ready to face the climax of their effort. After the truce expired, Spain fitfully continued the war without decisive results and finally let go. In 1648, at the Treaty of Westphalia, when the European powers brought to an end the general European conflict of the Thirty Years’ War, the most extensive and destructive of any before 1914, the signatories, including Spain, formally recognized the long-embattled independence of the United Provinces of
the Dutch Republic. The articles were signed at the preliminary treaty of Münster, with the Spanish delegates placing their
hands on a crucifix and the Dutch delegates holding up two fingers pointed heavenward. Burghers of the city formed two lines of an honor guard as the Dutch delegates marched to the Council chamber while cannon boomed in the medieval streets to celebrate the hour. It was the mid-point of the 17th century, a year before the high noon of royal absolutism felt the shadow of the executioner’s axe as it severed the head of King Charles I of England.

While they had been pursuing the expulsion of Spain, the Dutch conducted a cultural life of great fertility. Although their governors were a stiff and conservative company, not, one would suppose, liberal in their sympathies, the cultural atmosphere was liberal and tolerant, allowing freedom of practice to Jews and to a variety of Christian sects, and known for hospitality to refugees fleeing bigotry and persecution abroad. The most notable of the refugees were the English dissidents, seeking religious freedom, who at the turn of the century settled in Leyden and twenty years later embarked on the voyage, carrying its great burden of the future, that in 1620 ended at Plymouth Rock. Another fruitful group were the Jewish émigrés from Spain and Portugal bringing the parents of Spinoza, born in Amsterdam in 1632.

Attracted to the Netherlands by its luxuriant publishing activity, the most vigorous on the Continent, European writers and scholars, whose works were blocked by censorship at home, came to find in the Netherlands willing publishers and distribution in Latin to an international readership. So it was that the Dutch press had the honor to issue one of the world’s most significant books, by a Frenchman who preferred to live in Holland for twenty years rather than at home under the reign of Louis XIII: Descartes’
Discours de la Méthode
was issued in Leyden in 1637. Others of the most significant figures in European culture pursued their careers in Holland, although sometimes arousing the antagonism of colleagues. Baruch Spinoza, philosopher of humane religion, was a native of Amsterdam and though expelled as a Jew from his own synagogue for heretical views, he remained to live and publish his
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
in his native land. Antony van Leeuwenhoek, developer of the microscope, pursued his scientific work in his native Delft. Grotius of Delft, a Dutchman himself, formulated in
Mare Liberum
for all time the principle of freedom of the seas and in his
De Jure Belli ac Pacis
produced one of the most influential works on public
law ever written. It had to be published in Paris in 1625, when he suffered a jail term instigated by private enemies. The renowned scholar Pierre Bayle, exponent of a rational skepticism in religion, whose works propounded his view that popular religious beliefs were based on human credulity rather than on reason and reality, was not a philosopher agreeable to an authoritarian Catholic regime. Forced to leave France, he came to Holland where he was given a chair and stipend in Rotterdam at the
Ecole Illustre
, established by the city to provide working shelter for refugee scholars. His famous
Dictionnaire
, a one-man encyclopedia published in Rotterdam in 1697, illustrated his explanations of natural phenomena and, though banned in its first edition in France, became a source and inspiration for Diderot and the French Encyclopedists. In this welcome to Bayle, Rotterdam gave a home to a man who expressed a supreme statement of tolerance. Remarking the loyalty of religious minorities to the Dutch State, as long as they were allowed freedom of conscience, he suggested that “
an ideal society would extend its protection to all religions, and that since most theological problems are incapable of proof, man should pray for those he cannot convince rather than oppress them.”
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In these words Bayle antedates our First Amendment. Dutch rulers were unusual in that while enjoying security of position and comfort, they fostered a society that harbored the unorthodox. American Puritans of New England, whom the experience of real hardship had taught nothing of gentleness toward their fellowman but the reverse, formed in contrast a bigoted and punishing ruling group.

Owing to the tolerance of Dutch society, no large body of emigrants felt driven to find new homes in New Amsterdam, except merchants rich enough to support settlements of at least fifty colonists, who received land grants from the West India Company, becoming the patroons of the region. In the absence of a large rooted Dutch settlement, Peter Stuyvesant could not find enough men willing to form an army for defense when the English were to come in 1664 to capture the area and name it New York.

Was it the nourishing freedom of Dutch society that gave rise in the mid 17th century to the glory of the Golden Age of painting in the appearance of both Rembrandt, the master of humanity, and Vermeer, the exponent of serene perfection? At the same time flourished the vivid
portraitists Frans Hals and Van Dyck, and the portrayers of domestic scenes, Jan Steen, Ter Borch and de Hooch, and the landscape enchanters of leafy forests and sailboats riding the canals, Ruysdael and Hobbema. If the world cannot explain the Golden Age, it can only be grateful.

In its events, the Golden Age was not peaceful but filled with the bloodshed and alarms of invasion and war. The army of Louis XIV stormed over the frontier in 1672 in a wave of brutality called the French Fury, reminiscent of the Spanish reign of terror. The French penetrated to Utrecht in the center of the country and this time, too, the Dutch fell back on the weapon of water, opening the sluices to flood the land. At the same time, England renewed naval war in an effort, promoted by her own merchants, to destroy Dutch naval and commercial competition by force. The last of three such wars ended in the Treaty of Westminster of 1674, which set rules for the conduct of neutral trade that were to be a serpent’s nest of future trouble.

Troublesome as they were to be, they could not obscure the great political initiator of the Golden Age, the winning of the Netherlands’ sovereignty and independence in 1648. In that act at Münster, the Dutch vindicated the struggle for political liberty that was to pass in the next century to the Americans.

THE Andrew Doria
, vehicle and protagonist of the drama of the first salute, was not just any ship but already the possessor of a historic distinction. She was one of four converted merchantmen of the “singularly small” body—as one of its officers, John Paul Jones, regretfully acknowledged it—that composed the first navy of the United States, created by Act of the Second Continental Congress on October 13, 1775, and she was shortly to take part in its first belligerent action.

Named for a famed figure in the cause of liberty, the valorous Admiral of Genoa (Andrea Doria in his own country), who led the fight for the freedom of his city against the French in 1528, she was about 75 feet long and 25 feet in the beam, with a mixed or “hermaphrodite” rigging of square sails on her mainmast and a fore-and-aft rig of triangular sails on her mizzenmast. For armament she had sixteen 6-pounders, meaning guns that could fire small 6-pound cannonballs as well as a number of swivel guns mounted on deck for a wider field of fire. She carried a crew of 130.