July 28, 2018 Dear Reader

The Genealogy of the Western European

and World Bourgeoisie

Roman commercial law to 476 C.E.

Byzantine and Muslim trade Viking commerce 500-900

Revival of European town life 800-1100 Jewish, Lombard, Frisian commerce

Venice, Genoa, Barcelona c. 1300
Florence c. 1500 Hanseatic towns c. 1500

The Northern Lowlands 1585-1689

English, Scottish, American 18^th century

Japanese parallels

The Rhineland, northern France, Belgium c. 1820

Political triumph of liberal and bourgeois values

in Europe
[theoretical reaction: 19^th century]
[political reaction: 20^th century]

Japan, Latin America, Asia late 20^th century:

spread to world

Chapter 3:

The Dutch Bourgeoisie Preached

Virtue

What made such talk conceivable was the “rise” of the bourgeoisie in northwestern Europe. The rise was more than numbers: it was a rise in prestige. The rise happened, in the Netherlands especially, and the Netherlands was the model for the rest.

“Holland is a country where. . . profit [is] more in request than honor” was how in 1673 Sir William Temple concluded Chapter Five of his Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands. The “honor” that Temple had in mind was that of a proud aristocracy. Yet the profit more in request was not achieved at the cost of the Dutch bourgeoisie’s soul.

The Dutch gave up aristocratic or peasant images of themselves a century before the English and Scots or the American English colonists did, and two centuries before the French. What made the project of ethics in commerce conceivable was the economic and political rise of the middle class around the North Sea, merchant communities hurrying about their busy-ness with ships packed with herring, lumber, wheat, and later with colonial products, the “rich trades” of spices and porcelain. The league of Hansa towns from Bergen to Novgorod, and south to Deventer in the Netherlands, never took national form. In the 8^th century a “Frisian” was a synonym for “trader”---and for “Dutchman,” since the languages now called Frisian and Dutch had not yet diverged, and Frisia was not as it is now confined to the northern Netherlands.⁶³ The Jews, the “Italians,” and the Frisians were the great traders of the Carolingian Empire. The Dutch were henceforth the tutors of the Northerners in trade and navigation. They taught the English how to say skipper, cruise, schooner, lighter, yacht, yawl, sloop, tackle, hoy, boom, jib, bow, bowsprit, luff, reef, belay, avast, hoist, gangway, pump, buoy, dock, freight, smuggle, and keelhaul. In the last decade of the 16^th century the busy Dutch invented a broad-bottomed ship ideal for commerce, the fluyt, or fly-boat, and the “German Ocean” became a new Mediterranean, a watery forum of the Germanic speakers—of the English, Scots, Norse, Danish, Low German, Frisian, Flemish, and above all the Dutch—who showed the world how to be bourgeois.

The shores of the German Ocean seemed in, say, 98 A.D. an unlikely place for town life and the bourgeois virtues to flourish. Tacitus at least thought so. The storms through which a skipper would cruise in his schooner were rougher than the Mediterranean of a navicularius, and were rough more of the year. Tacitus claimed that the Germani, and certainly the wild Batavii, used cattle rather than gold and silver as money, “whether as a sign of divine favor or of divine wrath, I cannot say”(he was criticizing civilized greed).⁶⁴ “The peoples of Germany never live in cities and will not even have their houses adjoin one another.”⁶⁵ And he claimed it was precisely those whom Dutch people later looked on as their ancestors, the Batavians, who were the first among the Germani in martial virtue (virtute praecipui).⁶⁶ The modern Dutch therefore dote on Tacitus.

But it is doting, not a racial history, because the Dutch have been since the 15^th century at the latest the first large, Northern European, bourgeois nation. It was at first a “nation” in a loose and ethnic sense, and nothing like as nationalistic as England or even France. The modern master of Dutch history, Johan Huizinga---his name is in fact Frisian---believed that Holland’s prosperity came not from the warlike spirit of the Batavians of old, or in early modern times from the Protestant ethic or the spirit of capitalism, or from modern nationalism, but from medieval liberties—an accidental free trade consequent on the worthless character of its mud flats before its techniques of water management were invented, and the resulting competition among free cities after the breakup of Carolingian centralization.⁶⁷ “We [Dutch] are essentially unheroic,” Huizinga wrote. “Our character lacks the wildness and fierceness that we usually associate with Spain from Cervantes to Calderòn, with the France of the Three Musketeers and the England of Cavaliers and Roundheads. . . . A state formed by prosperous burgers living in fairly large cities and by fairly satisfied farmers and peasants is not the soil in which flourishes what goes by the name of heroism. . . . Whether we fly high or low, we Dutchmen are all bourgeois—lawyer and poet, baron and laborer alike.”⁶⁸

In the late 16^th century the course of the Revolt against Spain stripped away the aristocracy, which in parts of the northern Netherlands had been pretty thin on the ground to begin with. Many aristocratic families simply died out. After the northern Dutch had made good their defiance of the Spanish, by 1585---though it was not official until 1648---they lacked a king, and so the aristocracy could not be refreshed. It is an instance of the importance of marginality in theorizing the liberal evolutions of the 17^th and 18^th century that North Holland was far from the courts of Burgundy or even of Brussels that attempted to rule it, and very far indeed in miles and in spirit from its nominal ruler from 1555 to 1648, Madrid. City-by-city it was quite able to govern itself. It lay behind, or rather above, the Great Rivers, as the Dutch call them, protected the same way the German army of occupation was protected in 1944 by a bridge too far. What was left to rule was the haute bourgeoisie, the big merchants and bankers, very haute in such a compacted, urbanized place at the mouth of two of Europe’s larger rivers. Yet such regenten, regents, for all their pride in humanistic learning and their hard rule of the mere “residents” (inwoners) without political rights, were not aristocrats literally or in their own or in the public eye.

The mud flats became rich cities without, so to speak, anybody noticing, and by the time Philip II and the Duke of Alva and others sprang to attention it was too late. Mediterranean Europe, true, was still the place of great cities. In 1500 three out of the (merely) four cities in Europe larger than present-day Cedar Rapids, Iowa (viz., 100,000 check) were Mediterranean ports, two of them Italian: Venice and Naples, with Constantinople. Of the twelve in 1600 half were still Italian (Palermo and Messina, for instance, had become giants of honorable city life).⁶⁹ Yet it is indicative of stirrings in the German Ocean that Antwerp in the mid 16^th century temporarily and London by 1600 and Amsterdam by 1650 permanently broke into the over-100,000 ranks.

By the early 17^th century the tiny United Provinces contained one-and-a-half million people, as against about six million in Britain and over eighteen million in France. There may have been check?? more people in Paris and London, each, than in the whole of the Dutch Republic. Yet more Dutch people (360,000 or so) lived in towns of over 10,000 in 1700 than did English people then out of a much larger population. This makes no sense at all: get the numbers straight! The United Provinces were bourgeois, all right.
* * * *

The question is whether Holland was the worse in spirit for being bourgeois. In the town-hating, trade-disdaining rhetoric of some Christianity and all aristocracy and nowadays the clerisy of artists and intellectuals, Holland would be corrupted utterly by riches earned from gin, herring, government bonds, and spices, and would therefore be “bourgeois” in the worst modern sense. Was such a town-ridden place less ethical than its medieval self, or than contemporary and still aristocratic societies like England or France?

Not in its declarations. I could rest the case for this by pointing to Simon Schama’s brilliant Embarrassment of Riches: NNN date, which discusses . . . . brief summary of Schama, not repeating what’s said in The Bourgeois Virtues

The Dutch art historian R. H. Fuchs notes that Golden Age painting was infused with ethics. During the 16^th century (the first age of printing) and later the Calvinist and bourgeois Netherlanders eagerly bought “emblems”—paintings and especially etchings illustrating ethical proverbs. Fuchs shows an example from 1624 of a mother wiping her baby’s bottom: Dit lijf, wat ist, als stanck en mist? “This life, what is it, but stench and shit?” Such stuff is especially prevalent early in the 17^th century, it would seem, when Dutch painting had not yet (as Svtelana Alpers has argued vigorously, against such “iconological” readings) separated itself from written texts.

A painting such as Bosschaert’s Vase of Flowers (1620) looks to a modern eye merely a bouquet that an Impressionist, say, might paint from life, though with much more attention to surface detail than the Impressionists thought worthwhile. But under instruction one notices (as the bourgeois buyer would have noticed without instruction, since behind his canal house he cultivated his own garden) that the various flowers bloom at different times of year. Therefore are collectively impossible (Fuchs date, p. 8). Something else is going on. The iconologists among art historians favor a theological interpretation: “For every thing there is a season, a time to be born and a time to die, saith the Preacher.” “That in principle,” writes Fuchs, “is the meaning of every [Dutch] still-life painted in the seventeenth or the first part of the eighteenth century.”⁷⁰ I said that Fuchs’ view (and the view of many other students of the matter, such as E. de Jongh, whose work is seminal) has opponents who argue against it. Eric Sluijter, for example, joins Alpers in skepticism. He notes a 1637 poem by the Dutch politician and popular poet Jacob Cats (1577-1660) which portrays painters as profit-making and practical. He analyzes in detail one of the few contemporary reflections on the matter, in 1642 by one Philips Angel lecturing to the painters of Leiden. The conclusion Sluijter draws is that “it is difficult to find anything in texts on the art of painting from this period that would indicate that didacticism was an important aim.”⁷¹

The argument of the skeptics is that secret meanings, if no contemporary saw them, might not in fact be there. Fair point. The purpose of paintings would not be, as the iconological critics think, tot lering en vermaak, “to teach and delight,” reflected in museum guidebooks nowadays—this from the humanism tracing to classical rhetoric and Cicero, two of the offices of rhetoric being docere et delectare; and the other movere, to move to political or ethical action.⁷² At least it would not be ethical teaching, delighting, moving. Perhaps, as Alpers argues, it was essentially scientific, showing people how to see.

But even Alpers and Sluijter would not deny that a still-life of a loaded table with the conch, book, half-peeled lemon, half-used candle, vase lying on its side, and (in the more explicit versions) a skull signifying all the works that are done under the sun, such as Steenwijck’s painting of c. 1640, entitled simply Vanitas, was a known genre, to be read like a proverb. Pieter Clauszoon’s [?]still life of 1625/30 in the Art Institute of Chicago is filled with symbols of Holland’s overseas trade—olives, linens, sugar, lemons—to the same end. All is vanity and vexation of spirit, saith the preacher.

We ignoramuses in art history are liable to view “realism” as a simple matter of whether the people in the picture appear to have “real” bodies (though rendered on a flat canvas with paint: hmm), or instead have half-bodies of fishes or horses, or wings attached for flying about (‘fantasy”); or whether you can make out actual objects apparently from this world (again admittedly on that flatness), or not (“abstraction”). Fuchs observes on the contrary that what he calls “metaphorical realism” was the usual mode of early Golden Age painting showing (barely) possible figures or scenery which nonetheless insist on referring to another realm, especially a proverbial realm, always with ethical purpose. The same is true of much of French and British realism of the early-to-mid 19^th century, such as Ford Maddox Brown’s “Work” [1852-63; in two versions] or in France what Gustave Courbet called “real allegories,” which Richard Brettell notes put aside the Academic conventions of mythology in favor of apparently contemporary scenes but are nonetheless “ripe with pictorial, moral, religious, and political significance.”⁷³ The Dutch pioneers of metaphorical realism, or “real” allegories, would depict merry scenes of disordered home life, such as Steen’s painting of c. 1663 “In Luxury Beware” (itself a proverbial expression: In weelde siet toe), with ethical purpose. Such a scene became proverbial in Dutch, a “Jan-Steen household” now meaning a household out of control.⁷⁴ “In Luxury Beware” is littered with realistic metaphors. Even an untrained eye can spot them: while the mother-in-charge sleeps, a monkey stops the clock, a child smokes a pipe, a dog is feasting on a pie, a half-peeled lemon and a pot on its side signal the vanitas of human life, a woman in the middle of the picture looking brazenly out at us holds her full wine glass at the crotch of a man being scolded by a Quaker and a nun, and a pig has stolen the spigot of a wine barrel (another literal proverb, Fuchs explains, for letting a household get out of control).

The Golden Age of Holland, in other words, if thoroughly bourgeois, was ethically haunted. (Similar art is produced under similar social conditions, I just noted, during the much later triumph of the bourgeoisie in England and especially in France.) Even in Holland the age was still one of faith. After all, in the rest of Europe, and recently in the Netherlands itself, the varied Christians had carried out crusades against one another. The transcendent therefore keeps bursting into Dutch art, as in Rembrandt. One thinks of parallels in 17^th-century English poetry, especially from priests like John Donne and George Herbert or Puritans like John Milton. The literary English and the painterly Dutch reaching for God seems to come to a climax of earnestness around the middle of the 17^th century. Poetry and painting in the age of faith was not just entertainment (delectare); it had work to do (docere et movere), justifying God’s ways to man, to be sure, but also as Trevor-Roper observed Doing Politics (regere). A. T. van Deursen instances Cats, who began as a poet of emblem engravings and who “wanted to instruct his readers through moral lessons. . . . Those who desired something more erotically tinted would have to learn Italian”—or buy a painting.⁷⁵ Nothing means in the early-17^th century notion merely what it seems. Every thing in the poem or painting points a moral.

An urbane reaction followed, in Dryden, for example, and in late Golden Age Dutch painters. A century later the keys to this system of early-17^th-century moralizing symbols in both poetry and painting had been entirely mislaid. Romantic critics had no idea what Milton was on about, since they had set aside the religious attitudes that animate his poetry. The two pillars that van Deursen spoke about, Christianity and pagan literature, had been pushed apart by early Enlightened and then Romantic Samsons, and the ethical building had collapsed. Even so spiritual a reader as Blake gets Milton wrong. And in looking at painting even the Dutch critics of the late 18^th century had misplaced the emblematic keys to their own national art (admitting that Alpers and Sluijter think there was no key to be lost in the first place). Foreigners had no chance at all. Gerard Terborch had painted around 1654-55 a scene in a brothel in which a young man bids with a coin for a woman (whose back is to the viewer) dressed in lovingly rendered satin. The procuress goes about her business. And the table shows a vanitas arrangement. The scene was conventional—Vermeer did one, for example; two if you include Officer and Laughing Girl around 1657 in a different arrangement, similar to a painting of 1625 by van Honthorst named explicitly The Procuress (in which a lute is offered: luit in Dutch, Fuchs explains, can mean either the musical instrument or a vagina). Yet by 1809 [Elective Affinity] Goethe was interpreting the Terborch painting as a scene of a father [i.e. the john] admonishing his daughter [i.e. the whore] while the mother [i.e. the procuress] averts her eyes modestly.⁷⁶ Goethe is not to be blamed: an 18^th-century engraver had retitled the work “Paternal Admonition,” and appears to have deleted the coin from the client’s hand. On the other hand, Goethe likewise misunderstood Milton's Satan as a Romantic hero, and Hamlet as one, too, and so we have a change in sensibility.

The painters themselves as much as the critics forgot, too. Fuchs shows the metaphoric realism of the Golden Age giving way in the mid-19^th century to a pictorial realism, that is, a realism not of the soul---remember the flowers blooming and dying at different times of year---but of the eye. Or of the mechanized eye. The camera obscura, we have only recently discovered, played a role in painting from the Renaissance on. When photography comes, the artists follow suit. The subjects just happen to be in the frame of the picture, as in Gustave Caillebotte’s masterpiece in the Art Institute of Chicago (1877). The bourgeois walkers at a rainy Paris intersection in the newly built quarters are glimpsed just at that moment, which will in an instant dissolve meaninglessly into another moment. A different level of reality is not breaking in from above—though one might argue that impressions such as this carried their own vanitas message. Ethical transcendent is rejected at last in the Industrial Age, as it was embraced in the early Golden Age.

The first large bourgeois nation of the North was ethical, very far from blasé about the good and bad of trade.

* * * *
Nor was Holland especially corrupt in its political declarations. Rather the contrary. The Northern, literate Protestant nations on the North Sea were cradles of democracy, too, at least of a highly limited “democracy” among the full citizens of the towns, and here too Holland led. The Dutch Republic was an insult to the monarchies surrounding it, more so even than the older and inimitable islands of non-monarchy in Switzerland, Venice, and Genoa. The Republic’s federal form (in which each province had a veto in the generality and each city in the seven provinces) was an inspiration later to the Americans. Though I repeat it was nothing like a full-franchise democracy of the modern type—the big property owners, as in the early American republic, were firmly in charge—it was always a contrast in theory to the divine right of kings being articulated just then by Philip and Charles and Louis.

Protestantism had something to do with all this good talk about the rights of man (and the reality of the rights in Holland of women). The priesthood of all believers, and behind it the individualism of the Abrahamic religions generally, was central to the growth of the bizarre notion that a plowman has in right as much to say on public matters as a prince. Yet on the Catholic side, as again the school of Quentin Skinner has taught us, the theory of natural rights justified a right even of revolution. Skinner argues that French, Dutch, and English theorists of politics in the early 17^th century owed a good deal to a scholastic tradition.

The English in their impetuous, aristocratic, pre-bourgeois way went a lot further at the time than the Dutch did. At the Putney debates of the New Model Army in 1647 Colonel Rainsborough declared, “I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he has not had a voice to put himself under.”⁷⁷ He was a Puritan colonel [check DNB]. Such shocking, leveling views did not prevail against the position more usual until the 19^th century—that, as General Ireton replied to Rainsborough, “no person has a right to this [voice] that has not a permanent fixed interest [namely, land] in this kingdom.” But the position was taken, and became a specter haunting European politics for centuries. Charles I, two years after Putney, asserted the counter-position succinctly, before the headman's block: “A subject and a sovereign are clean different things.” [CHECK SOURCE]

Whatever their debt to the scholastics, the Protestants, imagining early Church history as their model, had challenged the monarchies and aristocracies of popes and bishops. When priests were literally rulers, when cardinals marshaled armies and abbots and bishops collected a fifth of the rents in England, in Holland, and in other lands, religion was politics. It was a small step in logic, if not in practice, to the citizenship of all believers. Arthur Herman notes that the Presbyterian Kirk in Scotland was from the time of John Knox “the single most democratic system of church government in Europe.”⁷⁸ Herman may not be remembering that in the same 1560s and 1570s the Dutch were creating the same sort of church government, by contrast to the less radical Lutherans and Anglicans elsewhere around the German Ocean: no bishops; pastors chosen by the lay elders, that is, from the Greek, “presbyters.”

The northern Dutch like the northern Britons cast off their bishops in the 16^th century but then took the further step of casting off their monarch too. "Religion, in fact,," observed Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1940, "was also an aspect of politics—the outward symbol, the shibboleth, by which parties were known. . . Religion was not merely a set of personal beliefs about the economy of Heaven, but the outward sign of a social and political theory."⁷⁹ What seems to us absurd excess in Archbishop Laud or Oliver Cromwell, he argues, is no more or less absurd than would be invading Poland in the name of Lebensraum or defending South Vietnam in the name of anti-Communism or invading Iraq in the name of suppressing world terrorism.

Bourgeois Holland, and its rhetoric of rights against kings and aristocrats, led. They put on show what is supposed in anti-capitalist rhetoric to be impossible: the virtuous bourgeois.

Chapter 4:

And the Dutch Bourgeoisie Was Virtuous
Yes, but surely the Dutch of the Golden Age did not actually carry out their painted and poemed project of the virtues? Surely the bourgeoisie then as now were mere hypocrites, the comically middle class figures in a Molière play; or, worse, of a late-Dickens novel; or, still worse, of an e. e. cummings poem, n’est ce pas?

No, it appears not. In an essay noting the new prominence of “responsibility” in a commercial America in the 18^th and 19^th centuries Thomas Haskell asserts that "my assumption is not that the market elevates morality." But then he takes it back: "the form of life fostered by the market may entail the heightened sense of agency."⁸⁰  Just so.  Surely commerce, with 17th-century science, heightened the sense of agency.  Earlier in the essay Haskell had attributed the "escalating" sense to. So the market does elevate morality.   It did in market saturated Holland.

“Charity,” for example, “seems to be very national among them,” as Temple wrote at the time (Temple DATE, iv, p. 88). The historian Charles Wilson claimed in DATE that “it is doubtful if England or any other country [at least until the late 18^th century] could rival the scores of almshouses for old men and women, the orphanages, hospitals and schools maintained by private endowments from the pockets of the Dutch regents class” (Wilson, date, p. 55). The fact is indisputable. But its interpretation has made recent historians uneasy.

Their problem is that like everyone else nowadays the historians are not comfortable with a rhetoric of virtues. An act of love or justice is every time to be reinterpreted as, somehow, prudence. Anne McCants, for example, begins her fine book on Civic Charity in a Golden Age: Orphan Care in Early Modern Amsterdam (1997) with a discussion of how hard it is to believe in altruistic motives from such hard bourgeois and bourgeoises. A compassionate motivation for transfers from the wealthy to the poor is said to be “unlikely” and “can be neither modeled nor rationally explained.” By “rational” she seems to mean “single-mindedly self-interested, following prudence only.” By “modeled” she seems to mean “put into a Max U framework that a conventional Samuelsonian economist would be comfortable with.” Altruistic explanations are “not to be lightly dismissed as implausible.” But then she lightly dismisses the compassionate grounds, with a scientific method misapprehended—altruism, she says, holds “little predictive power.”

“After a long tradition of seeing European charity largely as a manifestation of Christian values,” McCants is relieved to report, “scholars have begun to assert the importance of self-interest.”⁸¹ Her own interpretation of the Amsterdam Municipal Orphanage is that it was “charity for the middling,” a species of insurance against the risks of capitalism. The bourgeois said to themselves: there but for the grace of God go our own orphaned bourgeois children; let us therefore create an institution against that eventuality.⁸² As Hobbes put it in reducing all motives to self-interest, “Pity is imagination of fiction of future calamity to ourselves, proceeding from the sense of another man’s calamity.” {search and cite: is it in an essay, “On Human Nature”?] McCants makes as good a case as can be made for her Hobbesian view of human virtues. But the virtue of prudence does not have to crowd out temperance, justice, love, courage, faith, and hope, not 100 percent.

The unease of modern historians in the presence of virtues shows in six of the pages the leading historian of the Dutch Republic writing in English, the admirable Jonathan Israel, devotes in one of his massive and scholarly books, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise and Fall (1995), to the Golden-Age poor law. It was he admits at the outset an “elaborate system of civic poor relief and charitable institutions . . . exceptional in European terms.”⁸³ The assignment of the poor to each confession, including the Jews (and even eventually in the 18^th century the Catholics), foreshadows the so-called “pillarization” (verzuiling) of Dutch politics, revived by Abraham Kuyper in the late 19^th century: sovereignty in ones own domain,.

“But,” Israel claims, “charity and compassion. . . were not the sole motives.”⁸⁴ And then he lists all the prudential, self-interested reasons for taking care of the poor. His first seems the least plausible—that “the work potential of orphans” was worth marshalling. Oakum picking could scarcely pay for even the first bowl of porridge, even in Dickens. He turns to civic pride among towns and social prestige inside a town to be got from running a “caring, responsible, and well-ordered” set of institutions. Certainly the innumerable commissioned paintings of this or that charitable board argue that the pride and prestige was worth getting. But it is hard to see how such rewards to vanity can be distinguished from the virtue of charity itself, at any rate if we are to confine our historical science in positivistic style to "predictive power." If caring is not highly valued by the society then doing it in well-ordered institutions will not earn social prestige.

“At bottom,” though, Israel continues—and now we approach the prudential bottom line—the alleged acts of charity were “rather effective instruments of social control,” to support the deserving poor (that is, our very own Dutch Reform in Rotterdam, say). It amounted to paying off the poor to behave.⁸⁵ The equally admirable Paul Langford makes a similar assertion about the later flowering of charity in England. The hospitals and foundling homes of the 18^th century were “built on a foundation of bourgeois sentiment mixed with solid self-interest.”⁸⁶ Ah-hah. Caught again being prudent. The Dutch and English bourgeoisie were not really charitable at all, you see. They were simply canny. The rascals.

Such arguments would not persuade, I think, unless one were determined to find a profane rather than a sacred cause for every act of charity. 100 percent. When the argument is made it is it usually unsupported by reasoning and evidence. McCants does offer reasoning and evidence for her cynical view, but that is what makes her book unusual. Most other historians, even Israel and Langford, don’t. The lack of argument in even such excellent scholarship indicates that the cynicism is being brought into the history from the outside. And no one, even such gifted historians as Israel and Langford and McCants, explains exactly how “social control” or “self-interest” was supposed to result from giving large sums of money to the poor. It often hasn’t. But in any event no historian tells how, or offers evidence that the how in fact was efficacious in the Dutch case. A hermeneutics of suspicion is made to suffice.

But it doesn't compute. The question arises, for example, why other nations did not have the same generous system of charity—that is, if it was such an obviously effective instrument of social control, requiring no proof from the historian, or if it was so very self-interested that any fool could see its use. The acts of love, justice, and, yes, prudence were in any case astonishingly widespread in the Netherlands, and became so a century later in England and Scotland. Israel ends his discussion by implying that in 1616 fully twenty percent of the population of Amsterdam was “in receipt of charity,” either from the town itself or from religion- or guild-based foundations.⁸⁷ The figure does not mean that the poor got all their income from charity, of course, merely that one fifth of the people in the city received something, perhaps a supplement. Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, who are better at dealing with statistics than Israel, put the figure lower, but still high: "In Amsterdam as many as 10 to 12 percent of all households received at least temporary support during the winter months." The figure is high by any standard short of a modern and northern European welfare state. De Vries and van der Woude note that "it is the steadiness of charitable expenditure . . . that distinguishes Dutch practice from other countries, where most financing . . . was triggered by emergency conditions.”⁸⁸

Charity was by the Golden Age an old habit in the little cities of the Low Countries. Geoffrey Parker notes that by the 1540s in Flanders one seventh of the population of Ghent was in receipt of poor relief, one fifth at Ypres, one quarter at Bruges.⁸⁹ Prudential explanations of such loving justice seem tough-minded only if one thinks of prudence as tough, always, and love as soft, always, and you for some reason want to be seen as tough, always. But the charity was evidently no small matter. It was bizarre in the European context. It is hard to see as prudence only.

The first large bourgeois society in Northern Europe was charitable.

* * * *

Nor was the exceptional Dutch virtue of tolerance, dating from the late 16^th century and full-blown in the theories of Grotius, Uyttenbogaert, Fijne, and especially Episcopius in the 1610s and 1620s a matter entirely of prudence. The Dutch stopped in the 1590s actually burning heretics and witches. This was early by European standards. The last burning of a Dutch witch was 1595, in Utrecht, an amusement which much of the rest of Europe—and Massachusetts, too, where Quakers were burned on Boston Common—would not decide to abandon for another century. In the fevered 1620s hundreds of German witches were burnt every year [GET PRIMARY SOURCE FOR THIS]. On January 8, 1697 in Scotland one Thomas Aikenhead, an Edinburgh student, was tried and hanged for blasphemy, aged 19, for denying the divinity of Christ—alleged by one witness, and part of a youthful pattern of bold talk. The event was the last hurrah of what Arthur Herman calls the ayatollahs of the Scottish Kirk (Herman date, pp. 2-10). After that they were on the defensive, though able to block university appointments, say, and keep skeptics like David Hume quiet.

By contrast the 13^th article of the Treaty of Utrecht had stipulated 120 years before Aikenhead’s execution that “Everyone must remain free in his religion,” though of course observing suitable privacy, since religion was till a matter of state, “and no one should be molested or questioned on the subject of divine worship.”⁹⁰ In 1579 it was a shocking assertion, and could not be expected to be literally followed—and was not. But by Christian standards the Dutch were then and later astonishingly tolerant. The obvious test case was Judaism—though Catholicism, as the religion of the Spanish or the sometimes-enemy French, was often treated with even more hostility in Holland. That same Grotius, who was no 21^st-century liberal, advised against liberal treatment of the Jews across the Dutch Republic. But the States General in 1619 decided, against his advice, that each Dutch town individually should decide for itself how to treat them, and forbad any town to insist that Jews wear special clothing.

True, it was not until 1657 that the Dutch Jews became actual, full-rights subjects of the Republic. But by comparison with their liabilities down to the 19^th century in Germany or England, not to speak of Spain and Portugal, the Dutch Jews were exceptionally free. No locking up in ghettos at night, for example; no expulsions and appropriations. In 1616 Rabbi Uziel (late of Fez in Morocco) remarked that the Jews “live peaceably in Amsterdam,” and “each may follow his own belief, but may not openly show that he is of a different faith from the inhabitants of the city.”⁹¹ It is the melting-pot formula of not being allowed to wear special clothing, of the sort that in 2003 secular France affirmed in respect of shawls for Moslem women.

And so nowadays. Since the 1960s, and after a long period of conformity to the Dutch Reformed Church, tolerance is witnessing a second golden age in the Netherlands. Outside the train station in Hilversum, the center for Dutch radio and TV, stands a block of stone representing praying hands, with the word carved on its sides in Dutch, Russian, Spanish, and English. Tolerance, verdraagzaamheid (from dragen, “bear,” in the way that "toleration" is from Latin tollere). It is the central word in the civic religion of modern Holland in the way that “equality” is in the civic religion of Sweden or “freedom” in the civic religion of the United States. That is, it does not always happen, but is much admired and much talked of.

Dutch people react uncomfortably to praise for their tolerance, especially for the new sort of tolerance growing among Catholics after Vatican II and among Protestants after the decline of the Dutch Reformed Church. A society heavily influenced by Dutch-Reform dominies, as not long ago the Netherlands was, would not be particularly tolerant of gays or marihuana, for example. Thus the anti-homosexual hysteria in the Netherlands in 1740-42 (after which the Dutch were ashamed). But Michael Zeeman notes that the anti-bourgeois, anti-clerical movement of the 1960s was more successful in the Netherlands than anywhere else.⁹² The transformation from a church-going, respectable society, divided into “pillars” by religious group and stratified by class, into the present-day free-wheeling Holland has been astonishing. The Dutch reply nowadays with an uncomfortable, “You don’t know how intolerant we really are.” Progressive Dutch people nowadays move directly to embarrassments—for riches, for slavery, for imperialism, for the handing over of the Dutch Jews, for capitalism, for Srebencia, for their countrymen’s embarrassing reaction to immigrants. “We’re not really so tolerant,” they repeat. To which foreigners now and in the 17^th century reply that the Dutch do not know how really intolerant the competition is.

In the 17^th century most visitors were appalled, not delighted, by religious toleration in the United Provinces. The notion one king/one religion was still lively, and still seemed worth a few dead heretics—one third of the population of Germany, 1618-1648, for example. Israel notes that foreigners then as now tended to judge the Dutch character by the metropolises of Amsterdam and Rotterdam rather than by the lesser and less liberal places.⁹³ But even with that bias the Dutch were exceptionally tolerant by 17^th-century European standards, as they were exceptionally charitable.

Consider the events immediately following August 23, 1632. Frederik Hendrik, Prince of Orange, took the southern and Catholic city of Maastricht from the Spaniards, and yet permitted there for a time the continued free exercise of the Catholic religion. The poet Vondel of Amsterdam, the Dutch Shakespeare, his family expelled when he was a child from Antwerp for being Anabaptists, was by 1632 not yet a Catholic convert but very active in support of Grotius and other forward thinkers in favor of toleration. He wrote a poem for the occasion praising the Prince’s triumph and tolerance, in contrast to the dagger of the Italian Duke of Parma in Philip II’s service, who in the same city a half century before had drunk the “tasty burgers’ blood.”

One can argue in the easy and cynical and modern way that some of Frederik Hendrik’s tolerance came from mere prudence in a political game, especially the game played so skillfully by the House of Orange. It is a cliché of 16^th and 17^th century European history that religion was used by state-building monarchs, as when Cardinal Richelieu arranged on behalf of a Catholic French monarchy for secret and then public subsidies to the Swedish Lutheran armies fighting the Catholic Habsburgs. Dutch politics was dominated for a century by the question whether or not the Netherlands should become a Christian city on a hill, as the radical Calvinists wished and as they believed they had achieved in Geneva, in early Massachusetts, and under kings in Scotland. Against this plan men like Frederik Hendrik, the Dutch stadhouders---in effect the elected presidents of particular provinces, drawn usually and then exclusively from the House of Orange--- sometimes joined with the upper bourgeoisie, the regents, to counterbalance orthodox opinion railing against tolerating the “libertines [as the orthodox called the liberals], Arminians, atheists, and concealed Jesuits.”⁹⁴ Yet at other times the Orange stadhouders supported Calvinist orthodoxy. It depended on political convenience, one could say. Religion, to repeat, was politics. Soon after the triumph at Maastricht, for example, Frederik Hendrik found it convenient to abandon his liberal friends and take up again with the Calvinists. Prudence. Maastricht was worth a mass. And Amsterdam was worth suppressing it.

And you could say that businesspeople need in prudence to be tolerant, at least superficially, if they earn their living from dealing with foreigners. William of Orange had noted in 1578 that it was desirable to go easy on Calvinists "because we [Dutch] are necessarily hosts to merchants . . . of neighboring realms who adhere to this religion."⁹⁵ By the 17^th century the city of Amsterdam alone had many more ships than Venice did. By 1670 about 40 percentage of the tonnage of European ships was Dutch (and even nowadays a third of the long-distance trucking in Europe is in Dutch hands).⁹⁶ The liberal pamphleteer Pieter de la Court (of the illiberal town of Leiden), Israel recounts, urged in 1669 “the need to tolerate Catholicism and attract more immigrants of diverse religions. . . to nourish trade and industry.”⁹⁷ Similar appeals to prudence had been made by the pioneering liberal pamphleteers of the 1620s.

But rationalize as you will, the Dutch liberal regents and the Dutch owners of ships had of course ethical reasons, too, for persisting, as likewise their more strictly Calvinist enemies, the so-called Counter-Remonstrants, had as well. Both sides were in part spiritually motivated. That people sometimes lie about their motives, or also have prudent reasons for their acts, or are misled, does not mean that all protestations of the sacred are so much hypocrisy. "Religion is a complex thing," wrote Trevor-Roper long ago, "in which many human instincts are sublimated and harmonized" [thus the secularism of the age of anthropology], "and political ambition is only one among these." When the advanced liberal (“libertine”) theorist Simon Episcopius wrote in 1627 that only “free minds and hearts . . . are willing to support the common interest,” perhaps—startling thought—that is what he actually believed, and for which against his prudential interests he was willing to pledge his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor.⁹⁸ In other words, perhaps it is not only his pocketbook but his spirit that was motivating him. Not 100 percent.

This is of course obvious. It would be strange indeed to explain the more than century-long madness of religious politics in the Low Countries after the Beggars’ Compromise of the Nobility of 1566 in terms of material interest, certainly not alone, or even predominantly.

But in the early and mid-20^th century the rhetoric of progressive history writing always wished to remake the sacred into the profane, every time, and to see motives of class and economics behind every professed sentiment. It was a reaction to the nationalist tradition of Romantic history writing. Thus Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913) or Georges Lefebvre’s Quatre-vingt neuf (1939: The Coming of the French Revolution) or Christopher Hill’s The English Revolution 1640 (1940). In those times even non-Marxists such as Trevor-Roper wished to slip in at the outset a quantitative estimate of 100 percent for profane prudence. Trevor-Roper added to the concession to the sacred just quoted ("political ambition is only one among" the instincts sublimated in religion) an estimate that "in politics it is naturally by far the most potent."⁹⁹ Well, sometimes. You don't know on page 3. You need to check it out, with some other theory of human motivation than prudence-only always rules.

When the wish to see every behavior as prudence-motivated makes little scientific sense, as often in the Dutch case, it should not be indulged. The battle over toleration in the Netherlands continued. Israel observes that it was not finally thoroughly resolved in favor of tolerance until around 1700, as it was then too in England, Scotland, France (with exceptions for an occasional trial of a father accused of trying to convert his son from Catholicism), and the German states (with exceptions for a lush growth of anti-Semitism). The hypothesis that European religious toleration was merely a reaction to the excesses of the 17^th century was expressed explicitly by Herbert Butterfield, for example in his posthumous book, Toleration in Religion and Politics (1980): toleration "came in the end through exhaustion, spiritual as well as material."¹⁰⁰ But as Peter Zagorin points out, "unaccompanied by a genuine belief," which was the product of two centuries of intellectual labor by his heroes Erasmus, More, Sebastian Castellio, Dirck Coornhert, Arminius, Grotius, Escopius, Spinoza, Roger Williams, John Goodwin, Milton, William Walwyn, Locke, and Pierre Bayle, exhaustion would not have mattered.¹⁰¹ It didn't in France as late as 1685, in which the Edict of Nantes, after all, was revoked. Some people in Europe were very willing to go on and on and on with their fatwas. The point is that an increasing number of people, especially in tolerant Holland, were equally willing to argue and even fight in favor of toleration.

Zagorin's 14-man list of honor is in aid of showing that ideas mattered as much as did prudent reaction to disorder. The 14 names are the 17^th- and 18^th-century men to whom he accords chapter sections in his book, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (2003). Six of the 14 were Dutch, and the Frenchman Bayle spent most of his adult life as a professor in Rotterdam. That makes half.

The Netherlands was the European frontier of liberalism. Locke, finally publishing in the late 1680s, was in many respects a culmination of Dutch thinking. He spent five years in exile there, before returning to England with the Dutch stadholder William, now also the English King, having absorbed in Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Rotterdam the results of the country’s liberal thought from Erasmus through Episcopius to Bayle. He stayed two years in Rotterdam with the English Quaker merchant, Benjamin Furly and was friendly with the Arminian theologian Philip van Limborch, both of whom typified the liberal side of opinion gathered in a tolerant Holland of the 1680s.¹⁰² Locke’s very first published writings saw light in the Netherlands in the 1680s. And his famous first essay on toleration (1689), as his pen started to flow in earnest, was first published for van Limborch at Gouda.

Likewise in the United Provinces a wider and older Erasmian humanism was real, and persistent, and virtuous, down to the present day. The broad-church attitudes of Erasmus had became a permanent if not always dominant feature of Dutch intellectual life before Protestantism, and survived its excesses. In uncouth Scotland by contrast, Huizinga notes, Calvinism descended in the mid-16^th century as a 150-year night of orthodoxy, before an intellectual dawn in the early 18^th century.¹⁰³ In the Dutch controversies of the 17^th century “Scottish” was a by-word for unethical and self-destructive intolerance.¹⁰⁴ In its Dutch version Calvinism “was held in check,” wrote Wilson, “by the cautious Erasmian obstinacy of the ruling merchant class. Freedom of thought, in a remarkable degree, was preserved. Europe . . . was to owe an incalculable debt to the Erasmian tradition and to the dominant class in the Dutch Republic by whose efforts it was protected.”¹⁰⁵

All this was surely not crudely self-interested in the way that the historical materialists would wish. Charles Wilson begins his praise of “the Erasmian strain, the belief in reason and rational argument as a means of moral improvement and a way of life” by quoting Huizinga on such qualities as “truly Dutch.”¹⁰⁶ That such opinions are old and liberal does not strictly imply that they are mistaken. Cynicism about such noble themes in history is not always, not every single time, in order. The regents, stadhouders, poets, and intellectuals acted and wrote for self-interested reasons, sometimes, Lord knows. But they acted and wrote for faith, hope, love, temperance, justice, and courage, too. The Lord knows that, too.

In 1764 the English satirist Charles Churchill wrote a poem against everything he didn't like—a long, homophobic blast against "catamites," for example, and, a commonplace at the time, against French luxury and Spanish dogmatism and Italian "souls without vigor, bodies without force.” But he pauses in his rant to accord rare praise:

To Holland, where Politeness ever reigns,

Where primitive Sincerity remains,

And makes a stand, where Freedom in her course

Hath left her name, though she hath lost her force

Which last is to say that the Holland of the Golden Age had decayed by 1764 into a less aggressive, though still very wealthy, place. Yet:

In that, as other lands, where simple trade

Was never in the garb of fraud arrayed

Where Avarice never dared to show his head,

Where, like a smiling cherub, Mercy, led

By Reason, blesses the sweet-blooded race,

And Cruelty could never find a place,

To Holland for that Charity we roam,

Which happily begins, and ends at home.

Charles Churchill, "The Times," 1764

ll. 185-196.

Read again to make sure this is not sarcastic