In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 Inquisition Religious Tolerance and Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic Spain’s Ameri­ can conquests in the early sixteenth century catapulted it into a stratospheric rise, transforming it into the most powerful and extensive empire in the world. However, it did not long retain this unqualified position of global eminence. Domestic economic troubles and European wars in the late sixteenth century undermined Spain and precipitated the beginning of its decline. Prescott argued for this interpretation in his unfinished late-­ career History of the Reign of Philip the Second, King of Spain (1855–58). In the opening remarks of this work, Prescott briefly sketched what he saw as the main contours of the narrative that he hadcreatedaboutSpainoverthecourseofhishistoriesof Ferdinandand Isabella’s reign, the Ameri­can conquests, and this final history of Philip II: Spain, “consolidated into one empire” under Ferdinand and Isabella, with “territory extended by a brilliant career of discovery and conquest” during the reign of Charles V, “had risen to the zenith of its power” under his son, Philip II. However, at this point, it had “already disclosed those germs of domestic corruption which gradually led to its dismemberment and decay.”1 In Prescott’s depiction, Spain had succumbed to the rise and fall of empires pattern, which caught the empires of the early modern period up into a seemingly inescapable domino effect. John Lothrop Motley, another Boston historian, also argued in his 1856 Rise of the Dutch Repub­ lic that Philip had already begun to lose his grip on Spain’s dominance. Motley writes that the “Indian revenue, so called, was nearly spent,” and that Philip, the “possessor of all Peru and Mexico[,] could reckon on ‘nothing worth mentioning’ from his mines.”2 In Motley’s interpretation, desperate greed therefore combined with religious bigotry to motivate the persecution of the people of the Netherlands, another key holding of the Spanish empire. The property confiscated from victims of the Inquisition would produce “a torrent of wealth, richer than ever flowed from Mexican and Peruvian mines,” to alleviate Spain’s financial woes (2:103). This policy of persecution inspired the conflict that became Motley’s great subject: the Dutch revolt from Spain. Starting in the late sixteenth century, the Netherlands began to wrest its in- Religious Tolerance and Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic / 75 dependence from the Spanish empire. The surprising success of the Dutch revolt against mighty Spain revealed Spanish weaknesses even at the height of its power, and the loss of the Netherlands further weakened the Spanish empire. Although Motley does not dwell on this era as the beginning of the end for Spain (he devotes too much energy to depicting Spanish infamy to undermine it constantly with reminders of Spain’s growing weakness), he does make clear that the larger context for understanding this moment in history involves the eclipse of Spain by the rising power of the Netherlands. He writes that in the course of its struggle with “the most potent empire upon earth,” the Dutch Repub­lic “becom[es] itself a mighty state, and binding about its own slender form a zone of the richest possessions of earth, from pole to tropic, finally dictates its decrees to the empire of Charles” (1:iv). Philip II and William the Silent—the Prince of Orange who masterminded the first phase of the Dutch independence movement—symbolized their respective countries and embodied the shift in power, despite William’s assassination well before the Dutch Repub­ lic got fully free of Spain.3 Philip in his campaign against the Dutch “was by the same process to undermine his own power forever,” and, had he been able to see the future, he “might have beheld his victim [William], not crowned himself, but pointing to a line of kings . . . and smiling on them for his” (2:87, 2:88). Given that William’s great-­ grandson would, through his alliance with the Stuarts, assume the throne of England in the Glorious Revolution, William’s line was thus associated not only with the great state of the Netherlands but also with the English empire, the successor to global dominance upon Spain’s decline. The Dutch revolt,accordingtoMotley,constitutedtheturningpointinthefortunesofSpain, although Philip—like Cooper’s oblivious Venetian senators—could not see it. However, Motley’s history presents a variation on the imperial eclipse theme. Unlike the other authors of imperial eclipse narratives (with the possible exception of Cooper in his approach with The Water-­Witch), Motley devotes his energies primarily to exploring...

Share