Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, Part XVIII: Illogical, Unthinking, Hypocritical Britain, contd.

The next example Price offered in Part II, Section IV of his Observations, while delving further back into European history, adopted essentially this same approach as his analysis of the Corsican Crisis. The colonies, in this case, were represented by the provinces of the Netherlands which would go on to form the Dutch Republic at the end of the 16^th century, with Britain’s equivalent accordingly being the Kingdom of Spain as ruled by the House of Hapsburg. “The United Provinces of Holland [,]” Price accordingly explained,

Were once subject to the Spanish monarchy; but, provoked by the violation of their charters, by levies of money, without their consent; by the introduction of Spanish troops among them by innovations in their antient modes of government; and the rejection of their petitions, they were driven to that resistance which we and all the world have since admired; and which has given birth to one of the greatest and happiest Republics that ever existed.

While, somewhat curiously, nothing more than this was offered in the aforementioned passage of Observations, the thrust of Price’s intention would nevertheless seem fairly evident. Spain, he endeavored to remind his audience, had brought about the loss of its territories in the Netherlands by precisely the kind of overestimation of its authority that Britain had itself arguably committed in relation to the Thirteen Colonies. Doubtless seeking to drive this point home further, the offences cited by Price as having been committed by the Spanish against the inhabitants of the Netherlands very closely aligned with those the North Ministry had been lately accused of in America. Spain – like Britain, it seemed – had provoked rebellion in one of its dependent populations by, “The violation of their charters, by levies of money, without their consent; by the introduction of […] troops among them by innovations in their antient modes of government; and [by] the rejection of their petitions [.]” If it could be agreed, then, that the subsequent revolt and independence of the United Provinces of the Netherlands was wholly justified by these abuses – an opinion which Price most certainly held, and which he seemed willing to attribute to the majority of his countrymen –it seemingly followed that the North Ministry’s parallel policies in America likewise provided ample justification for colonial resistance.

            As with his previous citation of the Corsican Crisis, however, Price’s treatment of the Dutch War of Independence was somewhat lacking in nuance. His citation of the “charters” of the Dutch provinces as having been violated by the Spanish monarchy, for example, somewhat misconstrues the nature and character of the contemporary Spanish Netherlands. Unlike the American colonies to which they were being directly compared, the various counties and duchies which collectively comprised the “Low Countries” were not the product of communal/imperial efforts at exploration, expansion, or commerce. The County of Flanders, for example, was not founded by Spanish settlers in cooperation with royal authorities or with the aid of private capital. Rather, the provinces of the Netherlands were separate feudal possessions which over time were successively inherited by the Dukes of Burgundy (1384), the Archdukes of Austria (1482), and the Kings of Spain (1556). Throughout these periodic transfers of sovereignty, the individual lordships, manors, towns, and church holdings within the provinces began to normalize certain procedures, affirm precedents within the context of their various feudal relationships, and delineate specific privileges as having become, by custom, effectively inviolable. Attempts by Burgundian and Hapsburg authorities to abrogate or elide the primacy of these traditional forms – generally in pursuit of a more centralized model of administration on the model of contemporary France – frequently met with armed resistance, notably culminating in the granting by Duchess Mary (1457-1482) to the States General – a kind of representative assembly of the various provincial authorities – of the so-called “Great Privilege” in 1477. While this guarantee was shortly thereafter abrogated by Mary’s husband, Maximilian of Austria (1459-1519), the memory of its existence arguably served as a kind of rallying point for subsequent revolts against Hapsburg rule.

            By the time the Dutch Revolt began at the end of the 1560s, the formal administration of the Netherlands could thus hardly have been described as streamlined, rational, or harmonious. Indeed, it rather represented something of a patchwork of local, regional, and imperial authorities. Power was shared – unevenly, it must be said – amongst municipal governments, the local nobility, provincial governments, imperial officials, the States General, and whatever governor had been appointed by the Spanish Crown. Perhaps unsurprisingly, hardly any of this arrangement was codified, and there remained an underlying tension between the provincial interests of the various local power-brokers and the centralizing ambitions of their nominal Hapsburg rulers. While this latter characteristic could perhaps also be fairly ascribed to the Anglo-American relationship during the majority of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the history and dynamics of the English/British colonial project were otherwise wholly unlike those which characterized Hapsburg rule in the Netherlands. Whereas the aforesaid counties and duchies were secured in their privileges by a web of customs, traditions, local and regional institutions, and a continually shifting balance of power – almost none of which, it bears repeating, was codified by law – the various colonies all possessed written charters, granted to them under the authority of the Crown, which clearly defined both the nature and style of their respective governments and the character of their relationship with the relevant imperial authorities. To claim, therefore – as Price seemed intent on doing – that the Dutch provinces suffering to have their “charters” violated by the Spanish Crown was the same as the Thirteen Colonies having their governments violated by the British Crown represents something of an awkward and ultimately flawed comparison.

            There could be no question that Parliament and the Crown had violated the sovereignty of The Province of Massachusetts when, in May, 1774, they respectively approved and gave sanction to an act of law revoking the charter of the same. The very fact of the charter indicated the existence of a compact between two parties – the inhabitants of Massachusetts and the British Crown – which could not be independently abrogated or altered by either, and which gave fairly unequivocal evidence that the sovereignty of the one was fundamentally separate from the sovereignty of the other. Just so, while the governing charters of the other American colonies did not necessarily declare and affirm that the British Parliament could not make laws which acted upon them – in the form of taxation, for example, or commercial regulations – the explicit codification of separate legislative bodies would seem quite clearly to indicate that Parliament was never intended to govern America directly. The actions of the North Ministry – and those of the Grafton, Chatham, Rockingham, and Grenville ministries before them – could therefore reasonably be described as standing in unequivocal opposition to the dictums of a relationship that had theretofore been well and clearly established and attested.

Conversely, the same could almost certainly not be said of the actions of the Spanish Crown in the Netherlands in the 1550s and 1560s. As cited above, the privileges, customs, and institutions that largely served to shape the character of Hapsburg administration in the Low Countries were more precedential than explicit. The powers exercised by a given city, noble, or province were not infrequently subject to invalidation, enlargement, or repression depending on the nature of their relationship with either the reigning monarch or their appointed regent, and local potentates were often forced to compete for influence with royal officials imported from some other corner of the House of Hapsburg’s extensive domains. Even if the various privileges had at some point been made explicit, however, this somewhat ambiguous state of affairs would arguably have remained. The fact that the Hapsburg King of Spain was also the recognized feudal lord of the individual provinces of the Netherlands – he was the Count of Flanders, for example, and the Duke of Brabant, and the Count of Holland, and so forth – combined with the inability of either the States General or its various provincial counterparts to exercise much legislative authority, would still have made it something of an open question whether or not the provinces themselves had any standing upon which to offer protest to a claimed violation of their traditional rights. The authority and sovereignty of the individual states of the Hapsburg Netherlands were simply too nebulously-defined, or if defined, unrecognized, or if recognized, unenforced. An honest appraisal of the circumstances immediately preceding the outbreak of the Dutch Revolt in 1568 would therefore arguably have revealed that it wasn’t necessarily clear what the Spanish Crown or its representatives could or couldn’t do, what the cities, nobles, and states could or couldn’t expect, and with whom, in the end, paramount sovereignty ultimately resided.  

Bearing this is mind, the other parallels that Price attempted to draw between the abuses of the British Crown in America and of the Spanish Crown in the Netherlands become somewhat harder to reconcile. The North Ministry absolutely violated the charter of Massachusetts, for example, and arguably violated the charters of the other colonies as well. By comparison, it would be difficult to say that Spain violated the charters of the various provinces of the Netherlands because, as aforementioned, there weren’t really any charters in place to violate. By the same token, while successive British governments did levy taxes upon the American colonies in violation of their sovereign right to be taxed only by a government in which their enjoyed some measure of representation, the King of Spain – Philip II (1527-1598) – arguably possessed the right and authority to do exactly that in the provinces of the Netherlands as the sovereign ruler of the various counties and duchies therein. Furthermore, though the North Ministry did authorize the stationing of troops within the bounds of the Province of Massachusetts without the consent of either the inhabitants or government thereof, thereby violating the spirit – if not necessarily the letter – of one of the key guarantees of the Bill of Rights, Philip II’s earlier use of this same measure could not rightly be regarded in exactly the same light. Revolts having occurred in the Netherlands under both the Burgundians and the Hapsburgs since at least the mid-15^th century, the presence of armed soldiers could hardly be said to have represented an innovation. Granted, popular resentment at the appearance of, say, a garrison of German soldiers dispatched from some possession or other of the Hapsburgs was certainly far from uncommon during that family’s period of rule over the Netherlands. But the fact remains that there were no formal legal prohibitions in place which would either have prevented the relevant authorities from taking such actions or offered censure in the event that they did.

This, in truth, forms the crux of the weakness embedded in the comparison Price attempted to offer. Rhetorically, his approach was sound enough. As with his evocation of the shame and frustration which surrounded the Corsican Crisis, his intention seemed to be to unfavorably compare Great Britain to one of its European rivals. In this case, rather than France, Price set his sights upon Spain, perennial bastion of Catholic supremacy, home of the Inquisition, and unrepentant practitioner of political absolutism. If, he ostensibly determined, he could convince his readers that Britain’s actions in America were as deplorable as Hapsburg Spain’s had been in the Netherlands, some people might actually be shocked into agitating for an end to the North Ministry’s military campaign. While the success of such an attempt would have required the average British reader of Observations to tacitly sympathize with the Dutch Republic and its inhabitants – a less than obvious impulse, given the fraught history between the British and Dutch peoples in the realms of commerce and naval superiority – it remained, on its face, a fairly reasonable approach. Price arguably spoiled it, however, by failing to recognize that Britain’s behavior in America was in many ways substantially worse than that of the Spanish Crown in the 16^th and 17^th century Netherlands.

Make no mistake, the attempts made by Philip II to excessively tax his Dutch subjects, to station foreign troops among them, and, crucially, to stamp out the burgeoning Protestant faith by persecuting non-Catholics and creating a Netherlands chapter of the Inquisition – a point notably absent from Price’s evaluation, it bears noting – were cruel, imperious, and morally unjustifiable. But neither Spain nor the extensive dominions of the Hapsburgs recognized anything like the guarantees written into the 17^th century British Constitution which prohibited taxation without consent or the arbitrary use of standing armies. At the same time, the guarantees which the various provinces of the Netherlands believed they were entitled to took the form of unwritten customs rather than codified – and mutually agreed-upon – charters. Spain’s actions in the 16^th century Netherlands, therefore, while by any measure undeniably deplorable, could not be said to have violated any unambiguous legal proscriptions, injunctions, or agreements. By comparison, the policies enacted by successive British governments and directed at the American colonies over the course of the 1760s and 1770s flagrantly infringed upon a number of explicitly enumerated constitutional protections embedded in both the Bill of Rights and in the various colonial charters to which the Crown was a party. That Price, as aforementioned, failed to recognize this fact, and thus failed to make use of the rhetorical power it embodied, would seem to represent something of an error on his part. His argument, in short, could have been stronger.