rted
by the young Prince of Orange, [Sidenote: October 25, 1555] and when
his son Philip II had replied to his father in Spanish, even those
present had an uneasy feeling that the situation had changed for the
worse, and that the Netherlands were being handed over from a
Burgundian to a Spanish ruler. From {247} this time forth the
interests and sentiments of the two countries became more and more
sharply divergent, and, as the smaller was sacrificed to the larger, a
conflict became inevitable. The revolt that followed within ten years
after Philip had permanently abandoned the Netherlands to make his home
in Spain [Sidenote: 1559] was first and foremost a nationalist revolt.
Contrasted with the particularistic uprising of 1477 it evinced the
enormous growth, in the intervening century, of a national
self-consciousness in the Seventeen Provinces.

[Sidenote: Religious issue]

But though the catastrophe was apparently inevitable from political
grounds, it was greatly complicated and intensified by the religious
issue. Philip was determined, as he himself said, either to bring the
Netherlands back to the fold of Rome or "so to waste their land that
neither the natives could live there nor should any thereafter desire
the place for habitation." And yet the means he took were even for his
purpose the worst possible, a continual vacillation between timid
indulgence and savage cruelty. Though he insisted that his ministers
should take no smallest step without his sanction, he could never make
up his mind what to do, waited too long to make a decision and then,
with fatal fatuity, made the wrong one.

[Sidenote: Calvinism]

At the same time the people were coming under the spell of a new and to
the government more dangerous form of Protestantism. Whereas the
Lutherans had stood for passive obedience and the Anabaptists for
revolutionary communism, the Calvinists appealed to the independent
middle classes and gave them not only the enthusiasm to endure
martyrdom but also--what the others had lacked--the will and the power
to resist tyranny by force. Calvin's polity, as worked out in Geneva,
was a subordination of the state to the church. His reforms were
thorough and consciously social and political. Calvinism in all lands
aroused {248} republican passions and excited rebellion against the
powers that be. This feature was the more prominent in the Netherlands
[Sidenote: 1545] in that its first missionaries were F