106: The Sea Beggars: The Revolt in Holland and Zeeland

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Pieter Bor, Origin, Beginning, and Continuation of the Dutch Wars, c. 1600
“Afterward, on the second day of Easter, they had all the farmers of the island muster, and they swore to one another to assist each other and to guard the town on behalf of the Prince of Orange as Stadtholder of Holland, on behalf of the King of Spain. The Count swore first, and after him the farmers. They then outfitted barges and small boats, and robbed and plundered daily on the rivers.”

Tuesday, the first of April, 1572. A little after two in the afternoon, two ships drop anchor off the small port of Brill at the mouth of the Maas. More follow. By the time the last sail is in, twenty-four, maybe twenty-six vessels are riding at the town’s quays, and the people of Brill know exactly who they are. The wealthier citizens start packing.

These are the Sea Beggars. They have come because they have nowhere else to go. A month earlier, Queen Elizabeth ordered every freebooter out of English ports, and by mid-March, some forty vessels had been driven out of Dover. Since then, they have wandered the Channel, taking what they can. Now their food has run out. One account says the two lead ships shared a single piece of cheese. Nobody aboard knows whether Brill has soldiers. Nobody in Brill knows what the fleet wants.

Then a ferryman steps in. Jan Koppelstok has seen the ships from the river, and he rows out to the vessel of Willem Blois (bloys) de Treslong, a Brill man whose father was once bailiff here. Koppelstok tells them what they most need to hear: there are no troops. Treslong hands over his signet ring, and the ferryman carries it to the town council. According to one chronicler, he tells the councilors that the fleet holds five thousand men. It holds about six hundred.

The fleet’s commander is already ashore. His name is Willem II van der Marck, Lord of Lummen, also known as Lumey. He has sworn not to cut his hair, beard, or fingernails until Count Egmont is avenged. He gives the council two hours. The councilors argue. Townspeople try to slip out the south gate, but they are turned back. Between eight and nine that night, a Beggar captain piles fuel against the north gate and sets it ablaze. The Beggars walk in. Nobody on either side is killed.

That night is a drinking party as the fleet strips the churches and monasteries. Men burn wooden saints for warmth and wear monks’ robes. The plan is simple: load the loot and sail away. But in the morning, Treslong argues for staying, and Lumey lets himself be talked into it. The wind is against them anyway. They flood the moats and start building up the walls.

Far away in Dillenburg, William of Orange hears the news and winces. Too soon, he thinks. Orange was piecing together a coordinated plan with himself, the Huguenots, and a fleet from La Rochelle, with whom the Beggars were supposed to join. His brother Louis calls the Beggars fools, too hasty by half. And the Duke of Alba, told that rebels hold Brill, is said to have shrugged. It is nothing.

Remember this: the empty town was an accident; the argument over breakfast was the foundation. They had come to loot and leave, but they stayed. 

So who were these men?

Let’s start with the name. As you may recall from Episode 101, in the spring of 1566, a crowd of Netherlandish nobles carried a petition to the regent, Margaret of Parma. Lord Berlaymont, watching, reportedly sneered that she had nothing to fear from a pack of beggars. The nobles took the insult as their badge. After the failed risings and Alba's arrival, many fled, and some took to the sea. By 1568, the first ships were working the waters off Friesland: perhaps twenty ships, perhaps twelve hundred men, most of them not gentlemen at all, but seamen, laborers, and craftsmen.

You may have heard that these were foreign pirates. Most were not. Historian Geoffrey Parker counted the captains whose origins we know: 108 from the northern provinces, 33 from the south. About forty percent of the crews were exiles. The rest were unemployed fishermen. Add some dispossessed nobles, some Calvinist refugees, and, at Brill, about three hundred Gascon and Walloon gunners discharged from Spanish service. A mixed lot, certainly. But overwhelmingly Dutch.

In 1569, Orange began issuing commissions as sovereign Prince of Orange, a legal fiction that dressed privateering in the guise of war. His first admiral could not control his men and ended up in an English jail, with Orange’s quiet connivance. Another followed, and by late 1571 the command had passed to Lumey. Orange was supposed to receive a third of the booty. By most accounts, he never saw it. By 1570, the fleet was taking some sixty vessels a month and robbing its own countrymen as readily as strangers. Some ships flew a flag with ten coins at the masthead: the Tenth Penny, Alba’s hated tax. Of a hundred and eight Beggar songs, twenty-nine mention it.

And where did they live? Not in Flushing, not yet. They used English ports like Dover, the German port of Emden, and La Rochelle, the Huguenot stronghold in France. Elizabeth had tolerated them as a thorn in Philip’s side. By 1572, the thorn was in her own foot. English shipping was being hit; the Hanseatic merchants complained, Alba was pressing her, and she wanted trade with the Netherlands reopened. A letter from Lumey himself survives from that March, asking to stay. He proposed a single regulated port and admitted his fleet was in great disorder. Elizabeth said no. The expulsion looked like a disaster. It was the push.

And what of Lumey himself? 

He was a minor nobleman from Liège, descended from a robber baron known as the Wild Boar of the Ardennes, the villain in Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward. A cousin of Brederode and devoted to Count Egmont, he vowed when Egmont went to the block: no cutting of hair, beard, or fingernails until that death was avenged. One writer dismissed it as soldiers’ talk. An English soldier who served in the Netherlands called Lumey valiant, generous, lascivious, and obstinate. Hold on to that last word. Lumey also hated priests. In a few weeks, his men will hang a group of Catholic clergy, and Orange will have to decide what to do about it.

For now, the Beggars have a harbor. The question is whether anyone else will join them.

Five days after Brill, it is Easter Sunday in Flushing, the port that guards the mouth of the Scheldt. Townspeople leaving church meet the quartermasters of three Spanish companies, who are heading to the town hall to arrange billets. They remember Spanish billeting. They swear that no Spaniard will enter, while insisting they remain loyal to the king. Alba’s engineer arrives with plans for a citadel and orders the magistrates arrested and the Tenth Penny collected. The townspeople hang him. Alba had ordered the citadel built on the third of April. Three days too late. On the twenty-second, a fleet of Beggar ships is admitted, flying a banner that combines the arms of the king and the Prince of Orange.

Then, very little. Alba’s stadtholder, Maximilien de Henin (ay-nan), Count of Boussu (boos-sue), retakes Rotterdam by trickery and sacks it. Alba decides Brill and Flushing are a sideshow and keeps his troops where he sees the real danger: the French frontier. Weeks pass. On May twenty-first, Enkhuizen, on the Zuider Zee, goes over. The militia and a mob force the issue, and only then do the Beggars arrive. Three days later, Orange’s brother Louis takes Mons in the south. Now Alba has to turn his army around. On June fifteenth, he orders every Spanish soldier out of Holland.

And now the towns go. Hoorn on the eighteenth of June. Gouda by the twenty-first. Alkmaar (alec-mahr) on the twenty-eighth. Haarlem in early July, then Leiden and Dordrecht. One historian put it neatly: Brill was the occasion. Mons was the signal.

So why did they open their gates? 

Partly hunger. The winter had brought frost, plague, and a failed grain harvest from the Baltic, and there may have been twenty or thirty thousand fishermen out of work along the coast. Partly the tax. In Brussels, brewers and bakers stopped working rather than pay the Tenth Penny. Children played a game outside Alba’s palace, counting off every tenth child and pretending to beat the collectors. But Parker adds a twist. Town after town, the regents, the ruling families, negotiated terms with the Beggars that let them keep their seats. In Holland, it was less a people’s uprising than a palace revolution. And most of those people, remember, were still Catholic.

On the nineteenth of July, in the old town of Dordrecht, something remarkable happened. Boussu has summoned Holland’s towns to The Hague, where Spanish troops stand ready. Instead, nobles and delegates from twelve towns meet in Dordrecht, with no royal summons. Amsterdam and Delft refuse to attend. Orange is far away on the Rhine, so his secretary, Marnix, speaks for him.

The States are asked to do three things. Recognize Orange as the king’s stadtholder and promise no separate peace. Pay for the ships and soldiers fighting in his name. And uphold freedom of worship for Catholics and Protestants alike. They agree to all three. The fiction is that they are fighting not the king but his bad ministers. One historian calls it a bizarre mix of conservatism and revolution. Around the same time, the privateer captains are put on fixed pay under a single admiral. The pirates are being turned into a navy.

The States already held the purse. Since the 1540s, they had controlled the excise taxes, which would now pay the soldiers. The change was that no king sat above them. It was no tidy government: every town considered itself sovereign, and in 1572 the money barely trickled in—about thirty-one thousand pounds. The real money came later. But the revolt now had a body to carry it.

Orange himself, meanwhile, is not returning home in triumph. On July 7, he crosses the Rhine with some twenty thousand men. It is his second overland invasion, and it heads not for Holland but toward Mons, where he hopes to meet French Huguenot support. On August 24, that hope dies. The St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre kills the Huguenot leader Coligny, and Orange calls it a sledgehammer blow. In September, Spanish troops storm his camp at night. Legend says his dog wakes him just in time. Mons surrenders to the Spanish. His army melts away.

So he goes to the only place left. He writes to his brother that he intends to make his grave in Holland. At the end of October, he reaches Enkhuizen with a small bodyguard. Parker reports eighty horsemen and no men of note. The historian K.W. Swart describes an almost hopeless military situation and a political crisis. Orange does not return in triumph. He retreats to the last ground he has and decides to stay.

The crisis has a name: Lumey. In July, his men arrested a group of Catholic clergy at Gorinchem (Gorcum) and brought them to Brill. Orange ordered their release by letter. Lumey took offense at being commanded by a letter Orange had only signed, and on July ninth the priests were hanged. Seventeen or nineteen, depending on the source. The Catholic Church canonized them in 1867. Catholic writers blamed Orange for what his Beggars did.

Lumey also hanged a Delft prior in Leiden, defying Orange’s order. The States, whose money Orange needed, demanded Lumey’s arrest. Orange gave in, knowing the army would resent the decision. By January 1573, Lumey’s commissions were revoked. Orange had chosen the States’ money and legitimacy over the Beggars’ goodwill, and the coalition of regents, Catholics, and Calvinists held. This would not become a Calvinist state.

But the revolt has one more test. Alba cannot split his army to retake every rebel town, so he chooses what one historian calls selective brutality. At Mechelen in early October, his soldiers spend three days killing and looting, and the towns of Brabant surrender. At Zutphen in mid-November, the garrison and many citizens are slaughtered, and the northeast gives up. Terror works as long as it seems discriminating. Then comes Naarden (Nahr-duhn).

Naarden is the first town beyond the Holland border. Its council refuses a summons for a week, then attempts to surrender. Three versions describe what happens next. The Dutch chroniclers say Spanish officers promised lives and property, then killed the men herded into a church. A Spanish officer says a shot was fired during the parley. Alba told Philip that not a man born escaped. The town was burned. Whatever the truth, here is what matters: the towns of Holland believed Naarden had surrendered in good faith and had been destroyed. They would fight without quarter, and if necessary, without hope.

Haarlem sits where the land narrows between the sea and the Haarlemmermeer, a vast shallow lake. Take it, and you cut Holland in two. Don Fadrique, Alba’s son, arrives in December with some thirty thousand men, expecting it to fall within a week. Alba himself lies sick in Amsterdam, running the siege by letter.

It does not fall in a week. The Spaniards carry an outer fortification and discover another wall behind it. The citizens have built a second line almost overnight. When Fadrique orders a general assault on the last day of January, the defenders blow a mine beneath the attackers. A Spanish captain writes home that his men are on guard for twenty-eight of every forty-eight hours.

And who is defending? More than four thousand trained men, including Beggars, Germans, and Scots, with the citizens beside them. They set statues from the churches on the ramparts to be shot at. They parade in stolen vestments. Supplies cross the frozen lake on sleds, and soldiers fight on skates. Alba orders thousands of pairs for his own men. Legend adds that a woman, Kenau Hasselaer (kenow hasiler), leads a group of three hundred other women on the walls. Historians now doubt it. But the story tells you how Haarlem saw itself.

In February, Fadrique wants to quit. Alba writes back: If you raise the siege, I will not consider you my son. If you die, I will come myself. And if we both die, your mother will come from Spain.

Then the ice melts, and the lake decides. A Spanish fleet from Amsterdam takes the water, and on May twenty-eighth, Orange’s fleet is beaten. On July ninth, his last relief column, about five thousand men, mostly untrained burghers, is ambushed after the Spaniards intercept the carrier pigeons carrying his plans. Three days later, on July twelfth, Haarlem surrenders. The terms are set. No sack; the town will pay a ransom. But Alba has already written to his son: the garrison must die. About two thousand are killed. When the executioners tire, the rest are tied back-to-back and thrown into the river.

The siege cost the Spanish thousands, perhaps ten or twelve thousand. A veteran officer, Romero, writes of the horror with which people now speak of Alba’s name. In Leiden, a mob throws stones at Orange’s windows, and Haarlem’s fall splits his territory in two. It is a tragedy: they did nearly everything right and still lost. Yet they had held the Spanish army for seven months.

After Haarlem, the Spanish army mutinies. The surrender terms prohibit a sack, and the soldiers, unpaid for years, feel cheated. Alba offers himself as a hostage until they are paid. It is August 21 before the army reaches Alkmaar, a small town in North Holland. Some sixteen thousand veterans face eight hundred soldiers and thirteen hundred citizens able to bear arms. Alba swears that if he takes it by storm, he will leave no one alive. He tells Philip that a sparrow could not get in or out.

And inside, the town nearly votes itself out. Alkmaar had refused Orange’s governor. At one gate, royalist troops stand; at another, a detachment of Beggars. The council argues while both demand entry. In one account, two bold supporters of the Prince let the Beggars in. In another, the burgomaster swears to live and die with the Prince, and a carpenter opens the gate with axes. The details differ. The vote was close.

On the eighteenth of September, after a twelve-hour bombardment, Don Fadrique attacks. The citizens fight on the walls alongside the garrison with sledgehammers and poleaxes. The Spaniards fall back, leaving hundreds dead, some say over a thousand. They try the next day again. Fadrique, sick with gout, is carried about in a chair.

And then there is the water. Here, the sources disagree. In one account, word reaches Orange through the Spanish lines, and he orders his commander to flood the country. In another, the regents of Hoorn refuse to cut their dikes, worried about their cattle. A third account says some sluices were already open, the rain was constant, the Spanish guns were bogged in mud, and a captured letter revealed that every dike was about to be opened. Fadrique, almost swimming in his chair, lifts the siege on October eighth. Alba blames the weather: flooding, rain, and the threat of the sea.

In the Netherlands, they began to say that victory began at Alkmaar. One historian calls it the first emphatic check. It was not the first Spanish setback, since Boussu’s counterattack at Brill had also failed. But it ended the campaign in the north.

So where does the revolt stand at the end of 1573? Not where you might think. Swart reminds us that the defiant area did not include all of Holland or all of Zeeland. Amsterdam sided with Spain, as did most of Zeeland. The whole area held no more than three hundred thousand people, and with Haarlem lost, it was cut in two. A cluster of water-ringed towns, not a country.

But it has a body: the States of Holland, which hold the purse and meet in the name of an absent king. Money is still short. Holland’s new taxes bring in only about sixty-six thousand pounds in 1573. Yet the structure holds.

And it has a navy. Three days after Alkmaar, on October eleventh, a Beggar squadron from Enkhuizen and Hoorn destroys the Spanish fleet on the Zuider Zee and captures Boussu aboard his flagship, which, believe it or not, was named the Inquisition. A sailor named Jan Haring climbs the mast and hauls down the commander’s flag. Eighteen months after Brill, the pirates are a navy. Though a few days later, crew members were still in the streets asking for their pay.

And it has a leader. That October, Orange, a Lutheran by upbringing, becomes a Calvinist. Yet he still refuses to build a Calvinist state. The man who arrived with eighty horsemen to find his grave has found something to build on.

As for Alba, the new governor, Requesens, reaches Brussels in November. Alba leaves on December eighteenth, a sick man who has begged to be relieved, if need be, by an arquebus shot. He had promised that six months and eight hundred executions would teach the Netherlands a lesson. It had cost him six years.

Requesens is a mild man. He will try talking. Why that fails is the story of our next episode.

An accident gave them a harbor. What they did with it over eighteen months gave them a state in embryo.


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