History of the United Netherlands, 1586c | Page 7

that the world had known since the fall of the Roman
Empire.
The great dividing-line between the two parties, that of Leicester and
that of Holland, which controlled the action of the States-General, was
the question of sovereignty. After the declaration of independence and
the repudiation of Philip, to whom did the sovereignty belong? To the
people, said the Leicestrians. To the States-General and the States-
Provincial, as legitimate representatives of the people, said the Holland
party. Without looking for the moment more closely into this question,
which we shall soon find ably discussed by the most acute reasoners of

the time, it is only important at present to make a preliminary reflection.
The Earl of Leicester, of all men is the world, would seem to have been
precluded by his own action, and by the action of his Queen, from
taking ground against the States. It was the States who, by solemn
embassy, had offered the sovereignty to Elizabeth. She had not
accepted the offer, but she had deliberated on the subject, and certainly
she had never expressed a doubt whether or not the offer had been
legally made. By the States, too, that governor-generalship had been
conferred upon the Earl, which had been so thankfully and eagerly
accepted. It was strange, then, that he should deny the existence of the
power whence his own authority was derived. If the States were not
sovereigns of the Netherlands, he certainly was nothing. He was but
general of a few thousand English troops.
The Leicester party, then, proclaimed extreme democratic principles as
to the origin of government and the sovereignty of the people. They
sought to strengthen and to make almost absolute the executive
authority of their chief, on the ground that such was the popular will;
and they denounced with great acrimony the insolence of the upstart
members of the States, half a dozen traders, hired advocates, churls,
tinkers, and the like--as Leicester was fond of designating the men who
opposed him--in assuming these airs of sovereignty.
This might, perhaps, be philosophical doctrine, had its supporters not
forgotten that there had never been any pretence at an expression of the
national will, except through the mouths of the States. The States-
General and the States-Provincial, without any usurpation, but as a
matter of fact and of great political convenience, had, during fifteen
years, exercised the authority which had fallen from Philip's hands. The
people hitherto had acquiesced in their action, and certainly there had
not yet been any call for a popular convention, or any other device to
ascertain the popular will. It was also difficult to imagine what was the
exact entity of this abstraction called the "people" by men who
expressed such extreme contempt for "merchants, advocates,
town-orators, churls, tinkers, and base mechanic men, born not to
command but to obey." Who were the people when the educated
classes and the working classes were thus carefully eliminated? Hardly
the simple peasantry--the boors-- who tilled the soil. At that day the
agricultural labourers less than all others dreamed of popular

sovereignty, and more than all others submitted to the mild authority of
the States. According to the theory of the Netherland constitutions, they
were supposed--and they had themselves not yet discovered the
fallacies to which such doctrines could lead--to be represented by the
nobles and country-squires who maintained in the States of each
Province the general farming interests of the republic. Moreover, the
number of agricultural peasants was comparatively small. The lower
classes were rather accustomed to plough the sea than the land, and
their harvests were reaped from that element, which to Hollanders and
Zeelanders was less capricious than the solid earth. Almost every
inhabitant of those sea-born territories was, in one sense or another, a
mariner; for every highway was a canal; the soil was percolated by
rivers and estuaries, pools and meres; the fisheries were the nurseries in
which still more daring navigators rapidly learned their trade, and every
child took naturally to the ocean as to its legitimate home.
The "people," therefore, thus enthroned by the Leicestrians over all the
inhabitants of the country, appeared to many eyes rather a misty
abstraction, and its claim of absolute sovereignty a doctrine almost as
fantastic as that of the divine right of kings. The Netherlanders were, on
the whole, a law-abiding people, preferring to conduct even a
revolution according to precedent, very much attached to ancient
usages and traditions, valuing the liberties, as they called them, which
they had wrested from what had been superior force, with their own
right hands, preferring facts to theories, and feeling competent to deal
with tyrants in the concrete rather than to annihilate tyranny in the
abstract by a bold and generalizing phraseology. Moreover the
opponents of the Leicester party complained that the