Characters

"It is not necessary to hope in order to undertake, nor to succeed in order to persevere."

A German count who inherited the principality of Orange at eleven and was raised at the Habsburg court as Charles V's favourite, William was the ultimate insider — the emperor leaned on his shoulder at the abdication. He was made a stadtholder, a councillor, and one of the richest men in the Netherlands, and he had every reason to stay loyal. He rebelled anyway, over Philip II's Inquisition and the destruction of the provinces' ancient liberties. He was a mediocre general who lost most of what he commanded, and it did not matter. His genius was endurance and politics: he mortgaged his estates to pay armies that were destroyed, watched two brothers die at Heiligerlee and Mook, was outlawed with a bounty on his head, and simply kept going. He broke the dikes to save Leiden, held together a coalition of Calvinists and Catholics who loathed each other, and made a revolt into a nation. Uniquely for the age, he argued for religious tolerance on principle — that conscience could not be coerced. Balthasar Gérard shot him on the stairs of his house in Delft in 1584, collecting Philip's bounty. He was the first head of state in history assassinated with a handgun. He never saw the Republic he founded, and its anthem is still sung in his voice.

"I would rather lose all my lands and a hundred lives than be king over heretics."

Philip ruled the first empire on which the sun never set — Spain, Portugal, half of Italy, the Americas, the Philippines that bear his name, and the Netherlands — from a desk. He was a bureaucrat of colossal diligence, reading and annotating state papers late into the night at the Escorial, and he governed the richest provinces in Europe as an absentee who had not visited them since 1559 and did not speak their languages. His Netherlands policy was a catastrophe compounded by conviction. He raised taxes to pay for wars the provinces had no interest in, reorganised the bishoprics over their objections, ignored their ancient charters, and sent Alba to enforce it — and when that produced a general revolt he could not conceive of the compromise that might have ended it, because the issue was heresy and heresy was not negotiable. American silver let him fight anyway, and the silver was never enough: Spain declared bankruptcy in 1557, 1560, 1575, and 1596, and the 1575 default triggered the mutiny that sacked Antwerp and cost him the loyal provinces. He outlawed William of Orange and paid for his murder, sent the Armada, and died in 1598 with the war unwon and unwinnable, leaving it to his son and grandson to lose properly.

"I have tamed men of iron; shall I not be able to tame these men of butter?"

The finest soldier in Europe and the worst possible choice. Alba arrived in Brussels in 1567 with 10,000 veterans and orders to end the disorder, and he did exactly what he had been sent to do with total competence: he established the Council of Troubles — the Dutch called it the Council of Blood — which condemned thousands and executed over a thousand, including the popular counts Egmont and Horn in the Grand Place. He beat Louis of Nassau's army out of existence at Jemmingen in a single afternoon. By 1568 the revolt was finished. Then he imposed the Tenth Penny, a permanent ten-percent sales tax, on the most commercially sophisticated society in the world, and united everyone against him — merchants and Calvinists and Catholic magistrates alike. When the Sea Beggars took Brielle almost by accident in 1572, the whole of Holland went over. His answer was terror: Mechelen, Zutphen, and Naarden were put to the sword, and Haarlem's garrison was executed after surrendering on terms. It was the terror that beat him. After Naarden, no Dutch town ever surrendered on a Spanish promise again, so every siege had to be fought to the end — and the Army of Flanders could not afford that. He was recalled in 1573 having turned a manageable grievance into an eighty-year war.

"Cities are not taken by assault but by patience, and by the spade."

Philip II's nephew and by common consent the best general of his generation, Parma was everything Alba was not: patient, politically subtle, and willing to offer terms. He grasped that the revolt was held together by fear of Spanish tyranny, and he set about detaching the southern provinces by giving them what they wanted — their privileges restored, Walloon troops instead of Spanish, amnesty for those who returned. The Union of Arras in 1579 was his work as much as anyone's, and it split the seventeen provinces in two. Then he reconquered the south city by city with the most sophisticated siege craft in Europe. His masterpiece was Antwerp in 1585: an 800-metre fortified bridge of boats thrown across the Scheldt to cut the city from the sea, held against fire-ships that killed 800 of his men in the largest deliberate explosion yet engineered, and a thirteen-month blockade that starved out the richest city in northern Europe. He was on the verge of pushing into Holland when Philip ordered him to wait on the Armada, and then to invade France instead. Those two diversions saved the Republic. Parma died at Arras in 1592, worn out and out of favour, having done more than any Spaniard to win the war and having been stopped by his own king.

"The army must be paid, or it is not an army but a mob with weapons."

William the Silent's son was seventeen when his father was murdered, and he became the most influential military reformer in European history. Maurice studied mathematics and the classics at Leiden and rebuilt the Dutch army from first principles: standardised weapons and calibres, regular pay from the States-General so soldiers did not have to mutiny to eat, engineers and sappers as a permanent corps, endless drill, and the countermarch — ranks firing and rotating so that musket volleys never stopped. The results spoke. He took town after town in the 1590s with siege methods so systematic that observers came from every army in Europe to watch, and at Nieuwpoort in 1600 he did what no Dutch commander had done in eighty years: beat the tercios in an open field battle. His drill book, illustrated and printed, was translated everywhere; Gustavus Adolphus built the Swedish army on it, and through Sweden it shaped the Thirty Years' War and every army after. His politics were uglier than his soldiering. He and Oldenbarnevelt — the statesman who had made him — fell out over the Twelve Years' Truce, and Maurice used a theological quarrel to destroy him, having the seventy-one-year-old Advocate beheaded on the Binnenhof in 1619. He died in 1625 with the war going badly again and Breda under siege.

"Men, do not believe that I am a traitor. I have acted uprightly and piously as a good patriot, and as such I shall die."

If William the Silent founded the Republic and Maurice defended it, Oldenbarnevelt actually built it. As Land's Advocate of Holland — the province that paid most of the bills — he was the Republic's de facto prime minister for over thirty years, and he ran the war, the diplomacy, and the money. He engineered the union that survived William's assassination, secured the English and French alliances, and merged the competing spice traders into the Dutch East India Company in 1602, inventing the joint-stock corporation and the Amsterdam exchange along the way. He also negotiated the Twelve Years' Truce of 1609 over Maurice's furious objection, judging correctly that Spain was bankrupt and that twelve years of peace would make the Republic rich beyond argument. It did. And it freed both men to destroy each other over a quarrel about predestination: Oldenbarnevelt backed the tolerant Remonstrants and provincial autonomy, Maurice the strict Counter-Remonstrants and central authority. Maurice won, arrested him, and had him tried by a packed court. At seventy-one, deaf and leaning on his stick, he was beheaded on the Binnenhof in 1619. He told the executioner to make it quick. The Republic's greatest statesman was killed by the Republic he made, in peacetime, by his own side.

"The Spanish infantry may be beaten, but it does not run."

A Genoese banker with no military training who bought his way into the war and turned out to be the only man who could match Maurice. Spinola raised a private army on his own family's credit and brought it to Flanders in 1602, and Philip III — chronically broke — gave him command largely because he was financing it himself. He then took Ostend after a three-year siege that Maurice could not break, and campaigned against him on level terms for a decade. He took Breda in 1625, his most celebrated feat, and the moment Velázquez painted: raising the defeated Justin of Nassau by the shoulder and refusing to let him kneel. The chivalry was real, and so was the arithmetic behind it — Spinola knew better than anyone what these victories cost, because he was paying for them. That was his ruin. Madrid never repaid the fortune he sank into the Army of Flanders, and the Spinola bank went down with the Spanish crown's credit. He died in Italy in 1630 in disgrace and disillusion, reportedly murmuring about his lost honour and his lost money. The best general Spain had left was destroyed by the same bankruptcy that lost Spain the war.

"Give me engineers and spades, and I will give you the city."

William the Silent's youngest son — born months before his father's murder — inherited the command from his half-brother Maurice in 1625 with Breda falling and the war going badly, and turned it around completely. Where Maurice was the drillmaster, Frederick Henry was the siege engineer, and the Dutch called him the Stedendwinger, the Forcer of Cities. He took 's-Hertogenbosch in 1629 by damming rivers and pumping a marsh dry with windmills, then Maastricht, then Breda back again in 1637. He fought a rich country's war. The VOC and WIC were making the Republic the wealthiest state per head in Europe, Piet Hein's captured silver fleet paid for a campaign outright, and Frederick Henry could afford engineers, siege trains, and time — while Spain, fighting the Thirty Years' War at the same time, could not. He also presided over the Republic at its cultural height: Rembrandt, Huygens, Descartes in exile, tulips and the first speculative bubble. He died in March 1647, ten months before the Peace of Münster that gave the Republic everything. It was his son Willem II who signed, and his war that had won it.

"Now they praise me because I brought treasure. Had I failed, they would have hanged me."

Piet Hein went to sea as a boy, was captured by the Spanish, and spent four years chained to an oar as a galley slave before being exchanged. He came back and made a career out of it. Rising through the Dutch West India Company, he raided Spanish and Portuguese shipping across the Atlantic and twice attacked Salvador in Brazil. In September 1628 he did what no one had ever done: he cornered the Spanish treasure fleet — the annual bullion convoy that paid the Army of Flanders — in Matanzas Bay in Cuba and took it almost without a shot. Eleven million guilders in silver, gold, indigo and cochineal. The Republic funded its army for eight months on it and took 's-Hertogenbosch the following year with the proceeds; Spain's admiral was executed for losing it. Hein, unimpressed by the celebrations, observed that the same crowd would have hanged him if the wind had changed. He was killed a year later in a skirmish with Ostend privateers in the Channel, hit by a cannonball on his own quarterdeck. Dutch children still sing about him — *Piet Hein, Piet Hein, zijn naam is klein* — which is a strange fate for a former galley slave who financed a siege by robbing an empire.

"The sea is wide, but there is only room for one fleet upon it."

Tromp watched his father die in a fight with an English pirate when he was nine, and was himself twice enslaved — once by Barbary corsairs. He came up from nothing to command the Dutch navy at the moment it became the best in the world. His masterpiece was the Downs in October 1639. Spain's last great armada, carrying an army to reinforce Flanders, took shelter in English neutral waters; Tromp blockaded it for weeks, waited for fog, and then sailed in and destroyed it in front of the English fleet, which could do nothing. Over forty Spanish ships were sunk, burned or taken. With the land route cut and the sea route now closed, the Army of Flanders could not be reinforced at all, and the Netherlands were lost to Spain for good. He fought the war's last act and then the first of the next one: within four years of the Peace of Münster the Dutch were at war with the English, and Tromp — who supposedly flew a broom at his masthead to say he had swept the Channel clean, though the story is probably a myth — was killed leading the fleet at Scheveningen in 1653. He is buried in Delft, near William the Silent.