Although, notwithstanding the Gelders War, the Netherlands recovered something of their prosperity during the governorship of Margaret, the downfall of the trade and industry of Flanders was irremediable. Public feeling in England continued to favour the Netherlands, just as of old the Flemish towns had upheld the English alliance; but no substantial change took place for many a long year in the mercantile relations between the two peoples. In consequence of the decline of the Venetian and Genoese trade after the discovery of the Cape route to India, Antwerp, where the Portuguese and Spaniards found the facilities and the security they required, and whither they were followed by the other foreign “nations” from Bruges, gradually became the chief commercial port of Europe; while not a rivulet from the current of trade could be turned back into the sands of the Zwyn. Before the middle of the century the proportion of the total exports of the Netherlands, estimated at between six and six and a half million of pounds Flemish, assignable to Antwerp was reckoned at eighty per cent.-that to Bruges at one-half per cent. While Antwerp had supplanted Bruges, the advance of Amsterdam was beginning to emulate that of the great Belgian city, and the mariners of Holland and Zeeland were in the North Sea and the Baltic learning to play their destined part of carriers on the ocean.
The great religious movement the eve of which this summary has reached, found the intellectual life of the Netherlands in a condition of stillness sufficiently accounted for by its political experiences. But the stillness was not stagnation. University studies were in fetters; but in the schools education was largely in the hands of men anxious to prevent any divorce between theological and grammatical teaching. Among the people at large publications against the sale of indulgences - an abuse with which the Netherlands had been familiarised during the previous half century-circulated before the date of Luther’s theses; and the book of appeal, the Bible, had spread very notably in its Latin form, even before (some time after a version of the body of the Old Testament) the first Dutch New Testament appeared in 1523. The activity of the Windeshem convents continued till the advent of the Reformation, when the Fraterhuizen themselves, many of whose members adopted the doctrines of the reformers, fell into disuse. For the rest, although Erasmus had reason enough for remembering the monks of his native land, the monasticism denounced by him is not so much of a local as of a general type; so too was the disregard by the secular priesthood of one at least of the laws most conspicuously imposed upon their lives by the Church. Yet in the Netherlands, formerly a seedplot of attempts to purify life and morals which too often took a fanatical form and thus came to be branded as heresies, the Reformation had few immediate precursors. John Wessel, as has been seen, died in a convent. The Austin friars at Dort had been influenced by Hendrik of Zutphen, appointed their prior in 1515 after being a pupil of Staupitz and a fellow-student of Luther. Nor do we meet with many enquirers upon whom the Free Spirit, which had formerly likewise had its Brotherhood and Sisterhood, might be thought to have descended. The only heretic of this sort whom Jacob van Hoogstraten, himself of Brabancon origin, tracked to his death in the Netherlands before the Reformation was Hermann of Ryswyk, burnt in 1512.
The share of the Netherlands in the history of the Renaissance, on the other hand, is, insofar as it has not already come under notice here, comprehended in a single name-Erasmus. The ducal Court, as has been seen, was not indifferent to intellectual abilities of many sorts and kinds; the examples of his father and half-brother were in a sense bettered by Bishop David of Utrecht, and a fresh impulse was given to the patronage of learning and its appliances by the English consort of Charles the Bold. The relations between Maximilian and the Renaissance were neither perfunctory nor casual, and justify the warmth of feeling towards him on the part of scholars, poets, and artists which was one of the truest foundations of his popularity; but no traces remain of his having found leisure to encourage a similar devotion in the Burgundian lands, except that among the statues for his own mausoleum (originally meant to be erected at Vienna) he gave orders for two-one of them very likely his own-to be cast in the Netherlands. What he left undone was not supplied either by his son Philip, careless of most of the graver interests of life, or by his daughter Margaret who, poetess as she was, needed all her strength for the business of her life. Thus amidst depressing influences the care of learning and letters, arts and science, was in the main left to the population itself, and chiefly of course to the towns; and from the midst of one of these, trained under influences which more than any other strengthened popular and civic life, came forth Erasmus, a born citizen of the world of letters of which he became the glory.
His early education, as has been seen, he received at Deventer under Alexander Hegius; but after this he had to learn by bitter experience how evil is the corruption of that which is good. For it may be taken as proved that the Collationary Brethren, in whose House he and his brother were placed to be prepared for the assumption of monastic vows, and whom in his celebrated letter he describes as so many decoys for the monastic orders proper, were Brethren of the Common Life under another name. A few years after he had been liberated from the cloister, he began his cosmopolitan career, and the Netherlands could no longer more than transitorily claim him as their own; and when at the height of his fame, he had by the Emperor’s desire fixed his residence at Louvain, there was probably no place in the world which swarmed so thickly with his enemies, who hated him at least as bitterly for his actual learning as for his supposed heresy. But cosmopolite as he was, more especially in the years preceding this date, he was such rather in the sense that all countries were after a fashion alike to him, than that, notwithstanding occasional rhetorical flights, he identified himself with any. His position towards peoples as well as princes was a European one, and has not inaptly been compared to that of Voltaire in the eighteenth century; and though the Renaissance was not his movement, nor that of any one other man, yet his influence over its course was incomparable-even in Germany by the side of Reuchlin, and in England as developing the work of Colet. His earlier publications were mainly linguistic and literary; but it would not be difficult to show that in all, or nearly all of them, the educational purpose proper to the Renaissance movement in his native land maintained itself. In his Education of a Christian Prince, designed primarily for the use of the future Emperor Charles V, he advances political doctrines in harmony with the progress of the constitutional life of his own native land, and effaces the futile distinction between political and Christian morality. Thus, too, there is a real continuity between the whole of these writings and his great biblical and patristic labours-from which of course his one late excursion into the field of dogmatic controversy stands apart. It was not by chance that he was led to theological enquiry, as he had of his own choice addressed himself to ethical problems. He believed that a new era was dawning for the Church and the Christian religion, and that to hasten its advent was eminently a concern of his. But he had made up his mind that a calm and reasonable progress, in which scholar and statesman should go hand in hand, was the only way by which victory could be secured and a real and enduring reformation accomplished. Had he thought differently of his task, he would probably in many ways have proved ill-suited for the leadership of a great popular movement. But in truth, he had no desire in his heart to be reckoned on either side. He was content to stand by himself-herein a true representative of the Renaissance, whose supreme purpose it was after all to vindicate to every man the right of remaining true to his individuality by means of self-education and self-development. Whether or not, from this point of view also, he was in some respects a typical product of his native land, the Reformation as it presented itself to the Netherlands, and as they gave admittance to it with consequences so vital for their future history, was not the Reformation of Erasmus.
CHAPTER XIV. THE EARLY TUDORS, by James Gairdner
THAT which gave the death-blow to feudalism in England was undoubtedly the Battle of Bosworth. The Normans, after their invasion and conquest, had drilled and disciplined the English people with so thorough a comprehension of the capabilities