ABSTRACT
In 1648 at Münster the United Provinces made peace with Spain. Apart from a truce from 1609 to 1621, war had been waged continuously since 1572, when the Sea Beggars captured Brill. The country had been literally made by war. The Union, first established at Utrecht in 1579, had been a makeshift. Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland, Overijssel, Friesland and Groningen, each separatist in outlook, led but not overawed by Holland, the largest and richest of the provinces, had joined to defend their rights; they were then more aware of their common interest in fighting Spain than of their different customs and cherished liberties. The lines of demarcation between north and south
corresponded to no division of culture, religion or language. The southern provinces had made their own union because they could see no future in resistance. The patterns of fighting imposed by the rivers Rhine and Maas made an artificial frontier along strategic lines of defence. For material and sentimental reasons William the Silent had fought for a union of all the provinces. Towards the end of the great war, when it was plain, after the revolts of Catalonia and Portugal in 1640, that the Spanish could not recover the north, some Dutchmen still dreamed of conquering the south: their hopes prolonged the war. But by then the United Provinces, originally the poorer northern half of the seventeen provinces of old Burgundy, had become a nation and, in relation to its size, probably the richest nation in Europe. From any standpoint it is an extraordinary development. There was a dualism in what had formerly been one culture. In learning and art Holland now led: there was rich soil for all the growths of civilized life. But the cost was high. One view is forcibly expressed by Professor Geyl, for whom the split of north and south represents ‘a disaster brought upon the Netherlands by foreign domination’. Dutch, and latterly Belgian, pride has tended to obscure the damage done by the disruption of a once coherent Netherlands culture by the accidents of war. Like the severance of East and West Germany after 1945, equally the product of war, the division created new interests and fostered new ideologies which have made balanced judgement of the cultural and moral issues specially difficult. There is less room for doubt about the political and economic consequences.
