Later History of Belgium

In 1815 Belgium was joined to The Netherlands by the Council of Vienna.

Continuing Revolution in Belgium,
our selection from an article in Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 16 by Thomas Colley Grattan published in 1905. The selection is presented in seven easy 5-minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Revolution in Belgium.

Time: 1830

The marriage of Mary, the daughter of Charles the Rash, with Maximilian, son of the Emperor of Germany, prepared the way for the political annihilation of the Low Countries, by their gradual descent into an appendage of the house of Austria. During the domination of Charles V, and the tyranny of Philip II, these countries, reduced to the rank of colonies, were but so many depots for the production of men and arms, as Peru and Mexico were for that of gold. At once the cause, the theatre, and the victim of the most bloody wars, they sank under the exactions of regal spoliation, at the very time that intellect and civilization were most flourishing.

Philip II, the odious type of tyranny, at once terrible and contemptible, gave a vigorous impulse to the spirit of nationality which so many causes had hitherto repressed. He attempted to establish the Inquisition in the Low Countries, less as a religious tribunal than as an instrument of government. The early resistance to this project was, like it, political. The struggle became religious at a much later period, and only in the North. William of Orange, the greatest of those princes of a house which has produced so many that were great, made the question of religious reform the watchword of national resistance in those provinces where the former had grown into a passion, through the fostering action of the latter, and thus he separated the cause of Holland from that of Belgium. The successful though tardy issue of the struggle left Holland a free republic under the guidance of its stadtholders and secured to Belgium its ancient but imperfect portion of nationality as an integral part of the great monarchy of which it still formed a fief. The Spanish troops quitted its soil; its commercial privileges were guaranteed; and the sovereignty was conferred on Albert and Isabella in a modified form of Spanish power and feudal sway. Their death, without posterity, threw Belgium back under the unmitigated mismanagement of Spain. The benevolent reign of those archdukes — a title which they bore without distinction of sex — was a truce of happiness between the domestic sufferings of the sixteenth century and the desolating wars of Louis XIV. But thenceforward Belgium, subjected to the paralyzing action of the court of Madrid, and thrown into the shade by the vigorous liberty of Holland, sank lower and lower in the scale of nations.

The Treaty of Westphalia, in 1648, regulated in many respects the situation of Europe, placing Holland in the foremost rank among the powers, concentrating religious toleration, and proclaiming a law of nations — imperfect, but still acknowledged as the law. But it left the Belgian provinces in complete dependence on the throne of Spain, without fixing those questions of succession, which soon furnished Louis XIV with pretexts that legalized invasion and left the country a prize for chance adventurers in the bloody lottery of war.

From the Treaty of Westphalia until that of Vienna, in 1814, the Low Countries were little more than the arena to gladiatorial Europe. The house of Austria, which acquired the sovereignty them from Spain by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, never considered its new possessions in the light of an inheritance, and, in order to conciliate Holland, permitted her to establish a footing of supremacy in the country — which generated a notion of mastery that subsequently proved so fatal to her power — when Belgium was joined to her under the absurd and disproportioned title of “an increase of territory.” In 1715 Holland obtained the right of placing garrisons in several Belgian fortresses, having previously insured the commercial ruin of Antwerp, by the closing of the Schelde.

Ostend alone remained, to keep alive the spirit of enterprise on which the ancient prosperity of Flanders was founded. A company for the furtherance of the East India trade was established in 1722 (to be suspended in two years and never revived) by the Emperor Charles VI, who felt himself too weak, or considered the object as too little understood, to resist the jealousy, the intrigues, and the threats of the maritime powers. Thus, the country remained in a state of colonial vassalage, maintaining in turbulent discontent the memory of former days whose only relics were the municipal privileges, sufficiently powerful to foster a narrow spirit of locality, but ineffectual toward procuring the broad advantages of independence.

For seventy years the Low Countries seemed satisfied to forget the moral rights of nationality in the enjoyment of a physical existence, which was called “prosperity.” The misfortunes and romantic energy of Maria Theresa and the entire sway she exercised over the provinces excited a feeling of religious loyalty which overcame the general repugnance to the Austrian régime. But no sooner did the death of the great Empress give her son and successor, Joseph II, an opportunity of attempting his well-meant but illegal and unreasonable reforms, than the old fire of liberty burst forth from the embers in which it had been so long buried. The insurrection of Brabant, in 1788, failed, from a total want of large political views in the leaders and from the absence of enlightened views of religion in the people whom they made their tools. Its failure threw the country back under the feet of Austrian domination until republican France, victorious in 1795, broke the chains of one slavery to rivet them more firmly for another. And when, vanquished in her turn, in 1814, she loosed herself from her exhausted conquests, Belgium, among the rest, was thrown loose on the political waters, like a waif, to be picked up and appropriated by the first discoverers.

In the month of December, 1813, Holland had shaken off the imperial yoke of Napoleon. By the Treaty of Paris of May 30th following, she was promised an increase of territory. In 1815 she entered on the forced partnership with Belgium; and the experience of the subsequent fifteen years of union proved that the incompetent monarch, to whom was confided the task of forming both nations into one, never acted but in the spirit of the fatal flaw in the title which bound them together.

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