Relative values

Created in the 1580s and owned by the Amsterdam merchant Jacob Rauwaert, the three paintings by Cornelis van Haarlem considered in this article add an important dimension to the artist’s focus on the human figure by underscoring how the animal played an equally important part in Cornelis’s practice. Seen together, the paintings exhibit the attention to both human and animal bodies that Karel Van Mander encouraged artists to pursue. Yet, the hierarchy of human over animal indicated by Van Mander’s writings is, I argue, subverted by the particularly violent iconographies of Cornelis’s paintings. Suggesting human fallibility and a potential breakdown in the natural order, the paintings can be seen as reflecting the social conditions permeating life in the Netherlands during the Dutch Revolt. This article concludes by speculating how a dialectic of violence, one that encouraged beholders to recognise a relativity of viewpoints, may have served the paintings’ first owner.

Maintaining the Common Peace: Security and the Religious Peace of 1578 during the Dutch Revolt

This article analyses the failed Dutch Religious Peace of 1578 through the lens of security. As Wayne te Brake recently argued in Religious War and Religious Peace in Early Modern Europe, creating security for all parties is key for an effective religious peace. In the sixteenth century, communal security was deemed a collective responsibility. In practice this meant that religious peace – suppressing and preventing violence and threats between Protestants and Catholics – was framed as a matter of preserving the common peace. Theological questions were dissimulated or kept out of peace settlements. In 1578, the religious peace proposed that Catholics and Calvinists were to live in the Netherlands side by side, each allowed to worship publicly. Some 27 Dutch towns introduced this religious peace. Yet the municipal magistrates mostly did so reluctantly and generally declined to share political power, thus contributing to its failure. Moreover, there were different, conflicting conceptions at work concerning the common peace, as well as regarding how to keep it.

Laws, Liberties, and the Will of the People

From the 1560s, tensions between Protestant and Catholics escalated and this was accompanied by a wave of writing on political and religious ideas, especially in France and the Netherlands. There was a renewed interest in the nature and origins of authority within the political sphere, particularly the importance of the ‘people’ and the ways in which their will could be both represented and controlled. This chapter considers some of the key texts of resistance theory written in the 1560s and 1570s, including Francogallia and the Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos in France, and George Buchanan’s De Jure Regni apud Scotos in Scotland. Discussions of liberty and privileges in the Netherlands during the Dutch Revolt are also considered; here historically based arguments began to be supplemented by appeals to wider principles of morality and natural law. The election of Henry of Valois to the Polish throne provides one example of elective monarchy in practice. This chapter discusses the role of religion and of legal arguments in the development of resistance theories. It also highlights some of the practical and conceptual difficulties in appealing to popular sovereignty, especially in a period of deep confessional divisions, and shows how the authority of magistrates could be understood in different ways.

A Prodigy Child of the Dutch Revolt: Immediate ‘Precursors’ to Grotius on Just Revolt

One of the odd things about Grotius’s thought is that he – advocate of a rebellious regime – was not very supportive of the right of resistance. Justifying the revolt at the time not only meant legitimizing the new regime he was serving; it also meant ruling out opposition against it. That posed an intricate puzzle; a puzzle Grotius solved by drawing on the theorizing on just revolt of the previous decades. This paper purports to show the connection between Grotius’s thought on just revolt and the intellectual and political environment in which Grotius came of age. It also sets out to show that the solution to the puzzle lies in the element of authority and the particular view taken on the constitutional position of the States in the Low Countries.1