W^^?Mm^^r^-.:r, 
 
 F 
 
 68 
 
 G87i 
 
 A 
 A 
 
 : 
 
 I 
 
 1 i 
 1 I 
 
 6 i 
 
 1 1 
 
 9 I 
 
 7 I 
 6 i 
 
 Griffis 
 
 Influence of the ^Netherlands 
 in the Making of the xiinglish 
 Coimnonwealth and the 
 American Renublic
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 THE 
 
 INFLUENCE OF THE NETHERLANDS 
 
 IN THE MAKING OK THE 
 
 ENGLISH COMMONWEALTH 
 
 AMERICAN REPUBLIC, 
 
 NOTICE OF WHAT THE PiLGRIMS LEARNED IM HOLLAND, THEIR TREAT 
 
 MENT BY THE GOVERNMENT AND PEOPLE, AND ANSWERS 
 
 TO CRITICISMS MADE UPON THE PROPOSED 
 
 Delfshaven Memorial. 
 
 A PAPER 
 
 READ BEFORE THE BOSTON CONGREGATIONAL CLUB, 
 
 Monday Evening, Oct. 26, 1S91, 
 
 By WM. ELLIOT 'GRIFFIS, D.D., 
 
 Chairma 
 
 N OF TJ^E Delfshaven Memorial Committee, and printed by 
 their order. 
 
 Copies of this Pamphlet may be obtained of 
 De WOLFE, FISKE & CO., 365 Washington Street, 
 
 BOSTON, MASS. 
 Price, 15 Cents by Mail.
 
 InSTTK.OID'CJCTOK.^ir INToxEj^'^ Vj 
 
 The writer in sending forth this pamphlet, written since his return from a visit to the 
 Netherlands and the eastern counties of England, cannot thank by name all the kind friends, 
 Dutch, Knglish, and American, who have given him hints and suggestions, or answered 
 his questions. He must, however, especially thank the Rev. Daniel Van Pelt, D.D., of 
 New York City, Rev. John Todd, D.D., of Tarrytown, and Douglas Campbell, Esq., of 
 Schenectady, N. Y. In the forthcoming volume of the latter, entitled "The Puritan in 
 England, Holland, and America," will be found fully argued, illustrated, and, I believe, 
 demonstrated, certain claims as to American history at which the writer has in this paper 
 only hinted. It is a matter of regret, also, that lack of time, space, and money does not 
 permit the writer to increase the size and expense of this pamphlet, by giving in full the 
 references to books and authors which furnish the basis of authority for the statements 
 made. In a course of reading begun some years ago, when pastor of the Reformed 
 Protestant [Dutch] Church in Schenectady, N. Y., and lately refreshed by a visit to 
 Europe, the writer has consulted the historians of English Nonconformity, and the local 
 annalists of the eastern counties of England, as well as the standard writers, such as Hume, 
 Macaula}', Hallam, Freeman, Stubbs, Green, Carlylc, Froude, Maine, Masson, Goadby, 
 Thorold Rogers, de Gibbins, Sotherden Burns, etc., besides the old authorities, Strype, 
 Parker, Hollinshead, Lord Somers, and many pamphlets and monographs of the period 
 between 15S0 and 1640. In matters concerning Holland, — the dark side of the moon to most 
 English and American historians, since among the great number of writers on England' 
 American, or Congregational history, a critical knowledge of Netherlandish historv is as 
 rare as a Dutch library or shelf of books in an American or English college, — I have little 
 obligation to acknowledge to writers in English. Besides consulting Carleton, Davies, 
 Brodhead, Steven, Motley, the Pilgrim autographs, and the printed works of the great 
 illuminator of Pilgrim history, the late Dr. H. M. Dexter, I have depended on the state- 
 ments of Wagenaar, Bor, Groen Van Prinsterer, the Ryks (national Dutch) archives, and 
 the help so kindly afforded me by Dutch scholars both in the Fatherland and in America. 
 
 Unable to boast one drop of either Dutch or Pilgrim blood, the writer herein sets forth, 
 as a student of history, some of the results of his reading and reflection, and of those experi- 
 ences of the Dutch in America, Japan, and Europe, into which Divine Providence has led 
 him. The outcome of researches, necessarily critical in their nature, is a more profound 
 admiration and reverence for the Pilgrim Fathers and mothers alike — and the attainment 
 of full faith in both the absolute truth and personal sincerity of Governor Bradford's 
 two messages from Plymouth to the Dutch at Manhattan, March, 1627, and Oct. i, Anno 
 1627 : "Acknowledging ourselves tied in a strict obligation unto your country and state, 
 for the good entertainment and free liberty which we had, and our brethren and countrymen 
 yet there have and do enjoy under your most honorable Lords and States; " " for which we 
 are bound to be thankful, and our children after us." \Vhat if it has taken "nearly two 
 centuries and a quarter to discover" what all the Pilgrims knew and Bradford has recorded? 
 Is it ever too late to do a good thing? Not so thought the Rev. Dr. Richard Salter Storrs. 
 In his oration on "The Puritan Spirit," in Boston, December iS, 1SS9, he said : "A monument 
 has been raised to them (the founders of New Enghmd) at Plymouth, on a spot near which 
 they landed. It is wholly fitting that another be raised, as is now, I iearn, proposed, on 
 the site of their departure from the Old World to the New. The two should stand as 
 answering towers, — Martello towers, — commemorating hearts that were as resonant iron, 
 and words that were hammers; between which the unfailing wires of reverent remembrance 
 shall bind not Delfshavcn and Plymouth alone, but all the hearts fearless of man and 
 s.ti-adfast for righteousness in both the continents." vv. li. g.
 
 Ft? 
 
 Mr. President and Members of the Boston Congregational 
 Club: — 
 
 On the 24th of February, 1889, your servant was appointed 
 by the President of this Chib, Mr. Charles Carleton Coffin, 
 chairman of a committee of five gentlemen charged with the 
 inauguration of an enterprise designed to do honor to both the 
 Pilgrims and their hosts in Holland. Efforts were at once made 
 to enlist public interest and support of the enterprise. Criticisms, 
 however, came from an unexpected quarter, and historical ques- 
 tions were raised which, for their settlement, required an exam- 
 ination of the sources of authority. There were special reasons 
 existing then, which no longer obtain, why the prosecution of 
 the Delfshaven* Memorial enterprise should remain in abeyance. 
 The Committee of the National Congregational Council, charged 
 with the erection of a tablet to the memory of John Robinson, to 
 be affixed to St. Peter's Church in Leyden, had not yet finished 
 their work. The right of way was therefore cheerfully accorded 
 to those who had first proposed to honor the noble, self-effacing 
 pastor and leader. 
 
 For the settlement of the historical questions raised by critics 
 of the larger enterprise inaugurated by this Club, it was necessary 
 that those who defended it should not be content with second- 
 hand opinions, but form their judgments independently, after 
 examination of the sources of authority. Accordingly the writer 
 made a special trip to the Netherlands and to the eastern 
 counties of England, spending a month in each of these countries, 
 seeking new facts, and refreshing the memory, also, of a line of 
 readings begun some years ago and continued to the present time. 
 The result has been the confirmation of judgments to which, as a 
 student and independent investigator, he came some years ago. 
 
 Waiving all further introduction, I shall enter at once upon 
 my theme, which is, The Inffuence of the Netherlands in the 
 Making of the English Commonwealth and the American Repub- 
 lic ; the outlines of which are as follows : — 
 
 I. The influence of the Netherlands upon England generally. 
 *The modern spelling, Deli'shaven, is used in this papei\ 
 
 .'57948!
 
 II. Upon that part of England from which the settlers of 
 New England almost wholly came ; viz., the eastern counties. 
 
 III. Upon the Pilgrims while in Holland, with answers to 
 special criticisms. 
 
 IV. Upon the tens of thousands of Englishmen, whether 
 refugees, soldiers, merchants, or scholars, who lived in the 
 Dutch Republic from 1580 to 1640. 
 
 V. Upon Cromwell, his army, the English Parli imcntarians, 
 and the temporarv Republic, or Commonwealth. 
 
 VI. Upon the Puritan settlers and political life of New 
 England. 
 
 VII. Upon local, state, and national government in this 
 American Republic,, both in the colonial and the constitution- 
 making epochs, with a final glance at the relations between Hol- 
 land and the United States. 
 
 At the opening of the sixteenth century, when in 1509 Henry 
 VIII. ascended the throne, the contrast in wealth, culture, and 
 civilization between England and the Netherlands was as much 
 to the disadvantage of the former, as the contrast in point of 
 political and commercial importance is to-day the reverse. 
 
 Then in the fine arts, music, civic architecture, painting, 
 science, learning, agriculture, inventions, organized industries, 
 navigation, finance, political science, and local freedom, the 
 j^eople of the Netherlands were among the leaders of Europe. 
 Feudalism, which had so long checked the growth of popular 
 liberty elsewhere, had taken less hold of Holland than of any 
 'country in Europe. In Frisia, the original home of the Anglo- 
 Saxons and the largest of the Dutch provinces, it had never been 
 known. In other parts of the Netherlands the development of 
 town life, in the form of municipal republics, checked the growth 
 of feudal tyranny. The walled cities, so much richer and more 
 numerous than in England, were fortresses of local freedom. 
 Ilallam well says that " their self-government goes beyond any 
 assignable date." The clergy had never been allowed to become 
 one of the estates of the realm, so that the Dutch were saved from 
 spiritual tyranny petrified in the form of a king, or house of 
 lords, or legislature. In all Europe the principle cujus regio^ 
 cujus rellglo was the rule. The Dutch were the first to reverse 
 this rule, that the people must be of the same religion as the
 
 ruler, and to declare that the ruler must be of the same religion 
 as the people. Thev were the Hrst to stand for the principle, 
 and to fight for it and secure it, " No taxation without the con- 
 sent of the taxed." They were the first to teach, by revolt 
 against despotism, that power, under God, originates with the 
 people ; that government exists for nations, and not nations for 
 government. In many respects Holland is the land of first things 
 in modern Christian civilization. Here art was first made the 
 servant of the home, glorifying the things of common life, and 
 the people rather than kings and nobles. Here science was 
 made the quick heritage of the multitude. Here religion and 
 reformation were not the possession and work of princes and 
 aristocrats, but of the masses. Here, first, to cite a few out of 
 many examples, wei^e practiced wood engraving, and the cheap 
 illustration of books, the weaving of linen underclothing, the 
 reform of the calendar, and the abolition of witchcraft ; here were 
 invented the pendulum clock, the telescope, spectacles, and a 
 host of modern comforts. 
 
 Besides this growth of scores of little municipal republics, 
 checking, first, feudalism and then arbitrary rule, the exceptional 
 dissemination of books, of common-school education, and of the 
 Bible in the vernacular, explain largely why, in the sixteenth 
 centur}', a strong republic sprang up in Northern Europe, 
 federal, Protestant, tolerant, and free. 
 
 , Through the wonderful activity of that fraternity of teachers, 
 begun about 1360, called the Brethren of the Common Life, 
 the Netherlands had the first system of common schools in 
 Europe. These schools flourished in every large town and 
 almost in every village, so that popular education was the rule. 
 The Netherlands, as soon as they became a republic, insured their 
 spiritual independence by immediatclv establishing institutions 
 of education. They founded universities in Leyden, Franeker, 
 Groningen, Utrecht, and Harderwyck. Soon after movable 
 types were invented Holland became the printing office of 
 Europe, and the home of vernacular, as well as of classic learning. 
 The Bible was translated as early as 1477, the same year in whicli 
 the National Parliament, or States-General, first assembled. As 
 soon as it was translated it was printed and widely circulated. 
 Before ever there was a Bible printed in England, the common
 
 people of the Netherlands had hought and read twenty-four edi- 
 tions of the Dutch New Testament, and fifteen editions of the entire 
 Bible. The Bible was thus not in manuscript, inaccessible to 
 poor men, or furtively copied in scraps and portions, but within 
 the reach of all. There was no other nation in Europe so satu- 
 rated with Bible ideas, and this fact explains the religious history 
 and political energy of the Dutch. The Netherlands furnished 
 the first martyrs of the Reformation, as well as the greatest num- 
 ber. Esch and Voes were burnt to death as heretics, July i, 
 1523, fort)'^ years before the first under Bloody Mary of England, 
 and their praises were sung by Luther. 
 
 This general reading of the Bibleby the quick-witted and serious 
 people who had conquered the sea, and won the mastery over nature 
 in art, industry, and science, made them also hate tyrants and love 
 self-government. True, it also made many sects besides the State 
 Reformed Church, and among these first organized in power 
 were the Anabaptists, — one of the most misrepresented of all 
 bodies of men, persecuted by Protestants and Catholics alike, 
 and only now vindicated by modern research. Out of the Ana- 
 baptists sprang the Baptists and the Qiiakers, two of the most 
 democratic denominations, under whom two of our freest and 
 noblest American States — Rhode Island and Pennsylvania — were 
 settled. The Anabaptists — that is, the re-baptizers — were all 
 Congregationalists in church polity. Each church was a unit 
 and a republic by itself, their only officers being pastors and dea- 
 cons ; while the Mennonites, who originated in Holland, were 
 not only Congregational in polity, but the foundation principle 
 was what is now the cardinal doctrine of American political life — 
 the utter separation of church and state. Persecuted b}' all state 
 churches, their children found toleration in Pennsylvania, where 
 they produced, in their "Book of Martyrs," the largest and the 
 finest piece of printing and bookmaking ever done in the Ameri- 
 can colonies. We shall, further on, try to show that not only 
 this idea of the separation of church and state, but nearly all 
 the political institutions peculiarly American, came out of Hol- 
 land, and not out of England. 
 
 In brief, in the sixteenth century the common people of the 
 Netherlands, owing to their great mechanical, agricultural, and 
 nautical skill, their intelligence and their diversified industries,
 
 were — what we like to say of Americans to-day — the best fed, 
 the best clothed, the best educated, and the most relij^ious people 
 in the world. The Dutch were Calvinists, and, somehow, Cal- 
 vinism never breeds despotism or poverty. IMotley, in telling 
 their story, grandly as he has done it, has practically left out 
 the mainspring of all — the Dutchman's intense failh in God. 
 Motley is too much of a partisan not only for the Dutch against 
 the Spaniard, but of one school of Dutch writers. Above all, 
 JSIotley is dramatic, and the very brilliancy of his antitheses 
 and rhetoric blinds the average reader to the moral grandeur of 
 the facts he arrays. In spite of Motley's prodigious industry and 
 superb learning, he is the slave of one author, the Dutch histo- 
 rian Wagenaar, while there are large stores of evidence and au- 
 thority into which he never looked. Some of his subjective judg- 
 ments, the result of his prejudices, will not stand as the verdict of 
 dispassionate history. 
 
 Contemporaneously, England presented a marked contrast with 
 the Netherlands. She had a population of but two and a-half 
 millions. Only one fourth, even, of her arable land was culti- 
 vated, the remainder being wild, sterile, or fallow land, woods 
 filled with wild beasts, or a great stretch of marsh and fen, which 
 included six eastern counties of England. Only one kind of 
 farming was practiced, the grain being planted one year, and the 
 field allowed to lie fallow for another. The root crops were un- 
 known, and so were garden vegetables. Of her twenty-six cities, 
 London and Norwich were the chief, the former having no more 
 than 100,000, and the latter about 5,000 people. Her onl}^ in- 
 dustry for centuries had been wool-raising, which had been sent 
 to the Netherlands to be woven. Her. hemp, flax, and hides 
 were exported for manufacture by the Dutch. The people were 
 ignorant and poor. Learning was confined to the church and 
 the court, both of which were ordered by a king who had cast 
 out the Pope, and made himself Defender of the Faith. Whereas 
 in Holland the confiscated abbey lands, monasteries, and church 
 funds were applied to common schools, universities, and hos- 
 pitals, in England they were distributed among the king's favor- 
 ites, the nobles and the State church. The people were op- 
 pressed by land laws made in the interest of the nobles ; for feu- 
 dalism in England, spite of Magna Charta and so-called Parlia-
 
 ments, was deeply rooted in English soil, and the manor system 
 made the farmer a sort of serf. The old common lands were rap- 
 idly going the way they have since about all gone — into the hands 
 of the nobles. The food of the common people was chiefly pork 
 and grain, for table vegetables were unknown, and leprosy and 
 scurvy were common. Their clothes were of coarse homespun 
 woolen, or linsey-woolsey, for the finer sorts of woolen cloths 
 came entirely from the Netherlands, and even the first rough 
 woolen cloth was not woven in England luitil Netherlands weavers 
 were imported, in 1331. Such luxuries as brick houses, under- 
 clothing, or table linen were known only to the rich, though com- 
 mon enough across the Channel. Indeed, the ordinary English name 
 for table and body linen was " Holland" ; while the very names 
 Lisle thread. Diaper, Duffels, Bombazine, and a score more of 
 textiles, being names of places across the Channel, show their origin. 
 In England the Bible was not popularly known or read. 
 Wyclif had, indeed, translated the Scriptures out of the Vulgate 
 Latin into English ; but, being in manuscript, were never printed 
 until hundreds of years afterwards, and then only as a literary 
 curiosity for scholars. Wyclif 's translation from the Vulgate was 
 practically unknown to the people in their homes, for poor men 
 could not aflbrd to buy a manuscript book at the cost of a year's 
 wages. Indeed, in the strict modern sense of the word, which 
 suggests printing and diffusion, Wyclif's Bible was not even pub- 
 lished. ' Further, even in manuscript it was prohibited by law, in 
 140S. Indeed, Wyclif himself did not become a pronounced 
 opponent of the Pope until he had visited the Netherlands, under 
 direction of John of Gaunt who re-introduced still large numbers 
 of Dutch weavers into Eastern England, where for centuries 
 the word "weaver" and "heretic" were synonymous. Even the 
 Lollards, who took their name from a society in Antwerp, were 
 largely found in those eastern counties in which the Flemish 
 and Dutch farmers, dike-builders, brick-makers, reclaimers of 
 land, and weavers were most numerous ; so that even in the first 
 flush of tlie coming Protestantism in Wyclif's time, we find the 
 Netherlands' influence discernible. When, however, the king, 
 and nobles, and state churchmen had cast on it the odium of Wat 
 Tvler's rebellion, aiul crushed out the Lollards by persecution, 
 Wyclif's Bible became a curiosity, and the promised reform
 
 movement a memory. When finally the Protestant Reformation, 
 which is ours, and the printed Bible — the h^nglish Bible that we 
 know — came into England, it was through Erasmus the Dutch- 
 man, Luther the German, and Calvin the Frenchman ; while the 
 Bible that got into the hands of the people was not from the 
 Latin or based on Wyclif, but made direct from the Hebrew and 
 Greek by Tyndale, who was tracked by the English bloodhounds 
 and garroted. The editions of Tyndale's New Testament smug- 
 gled into England, were printed by Dutchmen on Dutch soil. 
 When, finally, a printing press was set up and the Bible printed in 
 England, research shows that the foreman, compositors, and 
 pressmen, just as in the case of Caxton's, a generation or two be- 
 fore, were Dutchmen. It must not be forgotten, either, that the 
 grand outburst of the English intellect in the Elizabethan era was 
 the fruit of culture on pagan lines, even as the government of 
 this time was essentially despotic. It was part of the Renais- 
 sance, not of the Reformation which was built on the open 
 Bible. For wherev.er the Protestant Reformation was a move- 
 ment of the people, there was no episcopacy, but the Reformed 
 church, or Presb\terian government. Wherever the Reformation 
 was the work of kings or princes, the form chosen was episcopacy, 
 or Lutheranism. In science, too, England was far behind the 
 rest of Christendom ; for even Bacon, with all his overrated 
 learning, was the victim of many superstitions, including witch- 
 craft, and the idea that the sun went round the world. Even 
 down to 1753 England was in her calendar, like Russia to-day, 
 eleven days behind the rest of the civilized world. 
 
 In political and religious freedom the status of the English 
 was far before that of the people of the Netherlands. Magna 
 Charta, in which after ages have seen so much, was an episode of 
 feudalism. Its obtaining was not the work of the common peo- 
 ple, but it was demanded by a confederacy of barons, or tenants- 
 in-chief of the crown. In the event of Runny mede, June 15, 
 1 215, a company of feudal proprietors redressed their grievances 
 of feudal tenure against the royal prerogative. Indirectly, 
 indeed. Magna Charta made for the good of the people, and set 
 the supremacy of the law of England over against the will of the 
 monarch ; hence it was in after ages grandly used as a precedent 
 of liberty. With the ]\Iagna Charta, whose chief glory was won
 
 8 
 
 in after centuries, grew up the English Parliament, which had, 
 however, in the days of Henry VIII., become as to power a 
 memory, — a matter of archiEology, rather than living force. The 
 Parliament that to-day rules England was born later, in the strug- 
 gles of the Puritans with the Stuart kings, Charles and James. 
 
 It was for their Bible printing and reading, their sturdy 
 Protestantism, and their doctrine, that power comes from the 
 people, and their insistance upon "no taxation without consent of 
 the taxpayer," that Philip II. of Spain began, in 1561, the 
 Inquisition. It was for these that, in 1567, he sent the bloody 
 Duke of Alva with the finest infantry in Europe, and the first 
 army equipped with muskets, to begin those persecutions that 
 made the martyr roll of the Netherlands crimson with one hun- 
 dred thousand names. For years the iron heel of Spain seemed 
 planted on the neck of the little country. Then, by the tens 
 of thousands, the Netherlanders fled to lands adjacent. This 
 tremendous exodus did not stop until the seven northern prov- 
 inces, led by brave little Holland, formed the first United States 
 in a federal republic ; and drawing sword against the Pope and 
 the Spaniard, threw away the scabbard, and gave the world the 
 first great example of successful revolt against tvranny. It is suc- 
 cessful precedents that rule the world. 
 
 Where did these Bible-reading Protestants, skilled mechanics, 
 farmers, engineers, inventors, polished gentlemen, and learned 
 men settle.'* Many in Germany; many lived at Embden, where 
 flocked the English refugees driven out by Bloody Mary, and 
 where election by the written ballot was the rule ; but most of 
 them in England. In open boats, braving th'e dangers of the 
 stormy North Sea and English Channel, they fled to hospitable 
 England that had then no mechanical industries worth speaking 
 of, and that wanted them. They swarmed into the southern, but 
 more numerously in those eastern counties already mightily 
 leavened by previous emigrations of Dutch and Flemish weavers, 
 brick-makers, dike-builders, and reclauners of the fens. In a 
 word, they planted themselves in those very counties which later 
 became the hotbed of nonconformity, the hearth of the new 
 faith, the ash heap of the Protestant martyr fires, the cradle of 
 Congregationalism, the recruiting ground of Cromwell's Iron- 
 sides and army, and the home of probably three fifths of the 
 settlers of New England.
 
 9 
 
 It is true that of this great immigration, numbering perhaps 
 one hunched tliousand, besides Flemish and Dutch, tliere were 
 thousands of Walloons and Huguenots. There were many, 
 also, who came mainly for trade and gain, but the vast majority 
 were refugees for conscience' sake, as truly as were later the 
 Pilgrims to Holland. This, also, is certain, that among them 
 were thousands of Anabaptists, whose polity of church govern- 
 ment was purely Congregational. Coming from Embden and 
 Friesland, of which we know the features of local government 
 so well from Ubbo Emmius, and where, especially in the choosing 
 of church officers, the method was by the written ballot, these 
 despised and persecuted people brought with them some of the 
 practices and principles we now A\alue as though they were 
 entirely of New England and American origin. 
 
 In detail, it may be said, these Protestant refugees settled in 
 London, Canterbury, Colchester, Maidstone, Sandwich, Dover, 
 Hastings, Rye, Winchelsea, Romney, Hythes, Sheffield, Yar- 
 mouth, Hattield, and a score of smaller towns. More numerously 
 than anywhere else, they established themselves in Suffiilk and 
 Norfolk and the counties adjacent. The region around Old Bos- 
 ton, in Lincolnshire, "the capital of the fens," which were 
 drained by the Dutch, is still called " Holland." Burns, in his 
 " History of the Protestant Refugees in England," mentions fourteen 
 towns — all of them reproduced in New England — where the 
 Dutchmen were numerous. They drained the fens, built dikes, 
 reclaimed land and settled on it, taught and practiced hydraulic 
 engineering, scientific farming, introduced gai'den vegetables, and 
 taught the curing of herring. We find them introducing window 
 glass in the dwelling houses, and stained glass windows in the 
 chapels and cathedrals ; the making of iron and steel at Sheffield ; 
 the manufacture of felt and beaver hats ; and the invention or 
 improvement of pottery and porcelain from native English clay. 
 But more than all else, the weavers brought or made their looms, 
 and thus introduced the arts of dyeing, coloring, and various textile 
 industries. They made lace from Antwerp thread at Honiton, 
 and established factories in other lace towns in various shires. 
 They invented new styles and sorts of textures, and at once a new 
 vocabulary of dress-stufls appeared in English speech, out of 
 which, from names curiously changed, or mispronounced, we 
 can almost construct a map of the countries adjoining England.
 
 10 
 
 To give some idea of this influx of skilled labor into England, — 
 remembering that the figures possible to attain by enumerating 
 only the town populations are necessarily far below the scattered 
 total, and that the smaller groups are left out, — we note that there 
 were (not of the old immigi'ation of two centuries before, but 
 fresh Protestant refugees) in 1553, 15,000, and in 1562, 30,000 
 Netherlanders in England. In 156S, of 6,704 foreigners in London 
 (which then had a population of less than 100,000), 5,235 were 
 from the Netherlands. In Canterbury two thirds of the population 
 were from the same country. In Norwich, in 157I5 there were 
 3,935 Dutch and Walloons, and in 15S7 there were 4,679. "Before 
 the end of Alva's rule," says Davies, "there had quitted the Nether- 
 lands 100,000 heads of families." Of this number, with their 
 households, between So, coo and 100,000 persons came into Eng- 
 land. The direct influence of these refugees on the English people 
 was seen in this — that each foreign workman was compelled by law 
 to take and train one English apprentice. This law sent, proba- 
 bly, fifty thousand English boys and young men to school, not 
 only in industry, but in republican ideas and libei'al notions. 
 
 These refugees, as English historians acknowledge, achieved 
 the industrial revolution of England. They laid the foundation 
 of that commercial and manufacturing supremacy of Great Britain 
 which is to-day the envy and w'onder of the world, and which has 
 changed the character of the islanders from that of shepherds and 
 agriculturists to that of machinists and manufacturers, and which 
 has made England the richest country in Europe. The fens of 
 Eastern England became a garden. The introduction of table 
 vegetables and the cultivation of winter roots, enabled an acre of 
 land to support double the number of human beings living ofl it. 
 One direct result of this, as Prof. Thorold Rogers proves, was 
 that the population of England was quickly doubled. The Dutch 
 discovered the uses of clover, and introduced the so-called 
 " artificial grasses," making the life of the English farm laborer 
 richer, amazingly improving the breeds of sheep and cattle, and 
 increasing mightily the comfort of human life. The plough in 
 its modern form is a Dutch invention ; so are the uses of turnips, 
 potatoes, and the root crops by which, instead of the old custom 
 of letting land lie fallow a whole year, tlie same meadow can be 
 twice cropped in one year. By copying the horticultural, agri-
 
 11 
 
 cultural, and stock-raising methods of the land which boasts a 
 cow to every human inhabitant, the population of England was 
 not only doubled, but scurvy and leprosy were banished. 
 
 Why is it that most of the^ names of things in and on a ship, in 
 the kitchen and dining room, of garden vegetables, of clothing, of 
 commerce and organized industry, are in so many cases Dutch, 
 and were more numerously so in the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 centuries? Simply because they were direct importations from 
 Holland. Besides these comforts of life, there was no fine art of 
 pamting in England or Scotland until Holbein and Van Dyck 
 brought it there. The Dutch invented oil painting, and "the 
 first smile of the republic was art." So far as we have oil paint- 
 ings of New England worthies, tliey are from Dutch easels. In 
 science and invention, what would be left of "Whewell's History 
 of the Inductive Sciences" after all references to the Netherlands 
 are taken out.^ London is now the financial center of the world, 
 having snatched the scepter from Amsterdam ; but originally the 
 Bank of England was founded by men whose names seem taken 
 from a Dutch directory. 
 
 In theology, queen of sciences, what does not England owe 
 Holland from Thomas aKempis, author of the "Imitation of Christ," 
 to Kuenen, one of the ablest intellects of Europe.'' Erasmus, the 
 great humanist, the literary king of Christendom, was at Oxford 
 as early as 1498, and at the zenith of his fame spent five years mostly 
 at Cambridge. It was he who introduced the study of Greek 
 in England, and first taught the peerless language in an English 
 university. How mighty his influence was, is seen even to-day, 
 for his scepter touches us yet. In America, and Great Britain, and 
 all the English colonies, with very slight changes, Greek is pro- 
 nounced as if it were common Dutch. It was the Dutch Erasmus 
 that gave to the world that edition of the Greek New Testament 
 which all the reformers of every country studied ; which more 
 than any other one thing — humanly speaking — produced the 
 Protestant Reformation. For over three hundred years tliis 
 Dutchman's edition of the Greek Testament has been the re- 
 ceived text of the original of our English New Testament, as 
 well as of Luther's German. It was this Dutchman who trans- 
 lated it into pure and elegant Latin which first departed widely 
 from the Vulgate, and thus became the chief corner stone of the
 
 12 
 
 Reformation. After all criticisms are made on Erasmus, it is 
 hard to see how there could have been any Protestant Reforma- 
 tion without the work he did. Erasmus was one of the direct 
 fruits of the great school system of the Brethren of the Common 
 Life in Holland. 
 
 Systematic theology as the Pilgrims and early Puritans knew 
 it, apart from Calvin, was made in Holland, and perfected at that 
 only ecumenical Protestant council, held at Dordrecht, in 1619, 
 whicli Robinson attended, and at which Dr. Ames, so persecuted 
 by the English hierarchy and denounced by King James, was re- 
 ceived, honored, and employed by the Dutch, in spite of King 
 James and all his bishops. One of tlie strong ties binding the 
 Dutch and the Pilgrims together in congenial friendship, was their 
 common adherence to the identical system of theology. 
 
 Still further, we must look to Holland for the orgin and 
 growtli of that Biblical theology which is now everywhere sup- 
 planting systematic. Coccejus, the Leyden professor, is its 
 acknowledged father. He founded his theology on the Bible 
 alone, without consulting Augustine, Calvin, or any but inspired 
 men. Many of the framers of the Westminster Confession and 
 Catechism, and of the leading Congregational ministers of Eng- 
 land, received their education at Leyden or Utrecht during the 
 seventeenth century, then the finest universities in Europe, one 
 of them educating two thousand English students. 
 
 Why are Cambridge and Oxford so different — the one so pro- 
 gressive, the other so reactionary ? Is it any wonder that Cam- 
 bridge, which is right in the heart of these eastern counties of 
 England, which in the fourteenth century were thickly planted 
 with the Dutch weaver-heretics, and in the sixteenth century 
 were overrun by the republican and Bible-reading Protestants 
 of tlie Netherlands, which was almost reborn under Erasmus 
 and John A'Lasco, his pupil, which was served by the great 
 Dutch professor of history, Dorislaus should have begun to 
 be, and should still continue to be, the center of liberal ideas.'' 
 Oxford, in the midland counties, has always been royal, conserv- 
 ative, and reactionary ; while Cambridge has been parliamentary, 
 lil:)cral, and progressive. Among her sons in the sixteenth and 
 seventeenth centuries were Tyndale, and the leading Nonconformists 
 and Independents besides the Congregationahsts, Robert Browne
 
 13 
 
 ami John Robinson. Oxford educated champions of episcopacy, 
 and the ecclesiastics of the Established Church. Cambridge, right 
 in the heart of the Netherlands influence, trained the Pilgrims, 
 Puritans, and Liberals. Of seventeen most prominent New 
 England clergymen in the New England colonies, fourteen were 
 trained at Cambridge, and of eighty known names the majority 
 received education at the same place. 
 
 The mention of the names of Browne and Robinson stirs the 
 heart of every Congregationalist. The question is at once asked, 
 to the answer of which noble scholars have devoted years of re- 
 search. Where lay the fountain of the sacred fire.-* Did it first 
 burn in their own hearts out of the Word, or were there other 
 Bible students who before Browne had churches Congregational 
 in polity, and free from the State.'' 
 
 It has been said, by those who think that the mere suggestion 
 that we, either as New Englanders or Congregationalists, owe 
 anything to the Dutch, is "a fancy in the face of history," 
 "a pleasing fiction," something to be scoffed at, that it is all 
 the more suspicious, that it has taken two hundred and seventy 
 years to find out such obligation. Possibly so ; but then, as 
 matter of fact, it took two hundred and thirty-nine years to find 
 even the place whence the Pilgrims came. From Scrooby, and 
 Bawtry, and Austerfield, even the very fact of the Pilgrims' 
 emigration, or of their ever having lived there, had faded out. 
 No tradition survived, or was locally known, until reverent 
 American research on the spot informed the people, and repro- 
 duced the past. Even in England, within fifty years, when a 
 picture of the departure of the Pilgrims in the Speedwell from 
 Delfshaven was hung up in the corridor of the House of Lords, 
 it was labeled, " Departure of a Puritan Family for New Eng- 
 land," even though the painter declared he had taken his ideas 
 from Governor Bradford's own writings. Only after repeated 
 protest to Lord Macaulay and Earl Stanhope, were the words 
 " Pilgrim Fathers " substituted for " Puritan Family." Even now 
 in the painting on the wall of the Lords' corridor on the ship 
 sailing from Delfshaven, is the word "Mayflower," instead of 
 "Speedwell." It is only within very recent years that the popu- 
 lar confusion, even in American minds, of the term Puritan and 
 Pilgrim has been partly clarified ; and it is yet on Forefathers'
 
 14 
 
 Day a frequent phenomenon when orators, supposed to be 
 scholars, seem hopelessly mixed, and become amusingly hazy, on 
 the subject. Some things which we know about the Bible, about 
 history, about truth, do not get discovered imtil after thousands 
 of years. Do not critics of Congregationalism say it is a modern 
 invention ? We who read the New Testament know better ; 
 but then, it is a fact that Congregationalism was practically 
 rediscovered when the Greek language rose from the dead with 
 the New Testament in her hands. Who first rediscovered it, 
 the Dutch Anabaptists or the Protestant English ? 
 
 Only recently have English historians begun, in writing the 
 history of England, to look beyond the sea, and to link insular to 
 continental history. The history of the United States has not 
 yet been written except by New England historians, who have a 
 tendency to forget, or do not like to know, what New York, Penn- 
 sylvania, and Virginia have done. Even yet, in the eyes of Eng- 
 lish historians, republics are not quite respectable. English his- 
 torians draw roots, precedents, comparisons, from monarchies, — 
 Germany, France, Italy, Spain ; but i^epublican Switzerland and 
 Holland they scarcely notice. So our historians copy English 
 models, and think that in our political development we are Eng- 
 lish, and the fruits of English life alone, instead of the movement 
 of continental Evu-ope. They say we are an English nation, and 
 they attempt to derive our institutions from England, notwith- 
 standing that our institutions which are most truly American 
 were never in England. The story of Holland's direct influence 
 on the English-speaking world is an omitted chapter. 
 
 Where is the historian of England, or of the United States, or 
 of New England, or of Congregationalism, who shows critical 
 acquaintance with the details of Dutch history? Do not most 
 New England writers take what Washington Irving himself 
 confessed was his own coarse caricature of the early history of 
 New York as actual fact, and rely upon Diedrich Knickerbocker 
 for "local color".'' What American college has in its library 
 a set of the works of Dutch historians.'' Rarely is an American 
 professor of history at home in the language and literature of the 
 one republic vsdiich was the training school of our nation's found- 
 ers and the "great example" of our revolutionary and constitu- 
 tional fathers.
 
 15 
 
 The story of the Dutch influence upon the English^Uommon- 
 wealth cannot be traced in those Acts of Parliament, archives 
 chronicles, and state papers which make the usual staple of the 
 historian. This jiowerful influence was not phenomenal ; it came 
 without observation, with no noise of trumpets, but rather like 
 the dew, or sunshine, or other things less noticed than a meteor 
 or a thunderstorm. It may be likened in lesser degree to that 
 Christianity of whose history in the second century we know so 
 little, which yet transformed the Roman Empire. A knowledge 
 of the facts in the sixteenth century once obtained, is like an 
 electric search light all along the track of English and American 
 history. 
 
 Brethren, it may be that we Congregationlists owe something 
 even more directly to the Dutch ; that we inheritors of the New 
 Testament polity are debtors to the Barbarians as well as to the 
 Greeks, to the Dutch as well as to Browne and Robinson. 
 
 To my mind it is more than probable that our American 
 Congregationalism was borrowed, in germ, at least, from these 
 Dutch refugees in England. We do not assert, or positively 
 claim, that Robert Browne got his ideas of Congregationalism 
 from these Dutchmen, but this is what the facts show ; viz., that 
 all through SutTolk and Norfolk, and especially right in Nor- 
 wich, where Biowne lived and taught, were Dutch Anabaptists, 
 whose government was Congregational in form. Each congre- 
 gation of the Dutch Anabaptists and Mennonites was a distinct 
 church, a republic by itself, holding, besides many things we do 
 not hold, substantially to the same order as that of the Baptists 
 and Congregational ists of to-day. They had so held these prin* 
 ciples before Browne was born. Living in England, where the 
 Established church was all-powerful, they paid their taxes, fur- 
 nished substitutes for military service, but kept intact their ideas 
 of religious freedom. 
 
 Right where the fire was already kindled in England, tliere 
 was our flame lighted and thence the torch borne. Remember, 
 that in Bloody Mary's reign, from 1563 to 1567, of two hundred 
 and eighty martyrs, the burnings were in general most numerous in 
 the towns overrun by the continental refugees ; such as Maidstone, 
 which furnished seven, and Canterbury forty, and Lewes seven- 
 teen, while seventy, or one fourth of the whole number burnt,
 
 16 
 
 came from the woolen and weaving districts of the eastern 
 counties. Beyond the parts overrun by the Dutchmen, this New 
 Testament "■heresy," or martyrdom because of it, was rare. 
 When, later, Robert Browne lived and preached in Norwich, the 
 Dutch and Walloons then numbered one half of the population, 
 and the Anabaptists were having their ears cropped, their noses 
 sliced, or were burnt alive in the castle ditch right under Browne's 
 windows, while he daily lived right among them. So, also, 
 John Robinson, who held a charge in or very near Norwich, had 
 hundreds of these Congregational Anabaptists all around him. 
 Certain it is that in the eastern counties of England, and right out 
 of the midst of the Netherlands influence, English Congrega- 
 tionalism arose, and here English Congregationalists multiplied. 
 
 Another point to be noticed about the rise of Congregational- 
 ism, as well as of nonconformity generally, is, that the vast ma- 
 jority of these New Testament heretics wei'e poor men of the 
 humbler classes. Not only do the historians Strype, Hollings- 
 head, Hopkins, and others tell us this, but the bishops, their 
 critics and enemies, expatiate on the fact that these heretics are 
 cobblers, weavei's, feltmakers, dyers, and other mechanics and 
 wage earners, or, as they said, '•'such trash," — in other words, the 
 very men most closely associated with the Dutch Anabaptist me- 
 chanics and workingmen who overran the eastern counties. In 
 those days there was no need of the discussion about "the church 
 and the workingman." The workingmen made the church. 
 
 Let us look further, and note that a noticeable strain of Eng- 
 lish blood flows from this immigration. Thousands of these 
 Dutchmen and other refugees, from the fourteenth to the seven- 
 feenth centuries, changed the pronunciation and spelling of their 
 names, translated them into English, or otherwise x\nglicized 
 them beyond all recognition, and were merged into the great 
 ethnic composite of the English people. Thousands of their 
 children, also, married and remained in England. The preva- 
 lence of certain family names in these eastern counties is to-day, 
 even were there no other testimony, strong evidence of a power- 
 ful Netherlandish infusion. It has been remarked by the great 
 authority in genealogy, Mr. Savage, that over eighty per cent of 
 the original settlers of New England could trace their descent to 
 the eastern counties of England. He might have added, that
 
 17 
 
 going farther back in time they could trace them, in a consider- 
 able number of cases, to Dutch immigrant ancestors. 
 
 When one of several of the companies of English Brownists, 
 or Congregationalists, at Gainsborough and Scrooby, called to 
 face persecution, imprisonment, and death, sought refuge and 
 asylum, where did they look? Where save to Holland, in which 
 they heard there was "freedom of religion for all men"? How 
 had they heard it ? From the thousands of Hollanders in Eng- 
 land, because the news of the Dutch declaration of independence 
 of Spain and the story of Leyden, of the toleration afforded even 
 to Jews at Amsterdam, was already a generation old ; perhaps 
 from English wits and politicians who sneered at the vcr^' idea 
 of toleration ; from Bradford himself, who had been in the Nether- 
 lands when a youth. So they fled to "the States," — that is, the 
 United States of the Netherlands. At Amsterdam, "Brownists 
 ^Vlley" is still so named, and there stands yet their humble meet- 
 ing house. The Scrooby company, led by Robinson, after a 
 year in Amsterdam left tlieir quarrelsome brethren, and found 
 welcome, honor, peace, and comparative comfort in eleven years' 
 residence at Leyden. There they lived during the truce with 
 Spain, and before the war again broke out the best part of them 
 were on their way to America. 
 
 What did these Pilgrims learn in the Dutch Republic? How 
 were they treated ? How were they trained during those pregnant 
 years from Scrooby to Cape Cod, when, as precious oil in the 
 hands of the Almighty, they were poured from vessel to vessel, 
 until beaten, refined, pure, their light was kindled to shine on 
 forever ? 
 
 We do not know all that we should like to know, but this is 
 certain : The leaders and most forceful men among the Pilgrim 
 company, as the municipal records in the townhall of Ley- 
 den still show, became citizens, paid their taxes, and took 
 advantage of the common schools and the inunicipal privileges. 
 They thus received practical, political education in a republic. 
 Many, probably nearly all the original Scrooby company, learned 
 to speak and read Dutch fluently. Some of them married Dutch 
 wives, and thus a noticeable strain of Pilgrim blood is Dutch 
 blood. Exercised and sensitive on all questions relating to soul 
 and body, God and man, searching heaven and earth, sacred and
 
 18 
 
 classic history, for precedents relating to the ruler and ruled in 
 government, they learned much. Holland was then the foremost 
 school of political science, so far as government was exhibited in 
 a republic. In this country, and at this time, and right before 
 the Pilgrims' eyes, men were trying the experiment of self-gov- 
 ernment, and to make a nation out of states as varied in elements 
 as Massachusetts and South Carolina. The forces of Calhounism 
 under Barneveldt, and of Lincolnism, or vmion and central gov- 
 ernment, under Maurice, were contending in death grapple. 
 They saw the people and the Calvinists vv'ere always with the 
 House of Orange, who stood for the union ; while Barneveldt 
 and the Arminians stood for state rights and secession. At the 
 same time the Dutch were fighting their Gettysburg in home 
 politics, they were arming for another twenty-eight years' fight 
 for life against the Spaniard. Grotius was writing his epoch-mak- 
 ing book on international law, which, more than any other unin- 
 spired writing, taught national righteousness and the duties of 
 countries one to another; while from the presses of Leyden and 
 other Dutch cities were issuing books that described and analyzed, 
 gave the history and philosophy, both local and national methods 
 of government, in the one republic of Northern Europe, in which 
 at that time were living most of the political and military leaders 
 of the men who settled Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, 
 New York, and Pennsylvania. The time when Englishmen 
 were numerousl}' abroad, and in a republic, too, was the time of 
 Holland's richest fruitage of political science. Even in the mat- 
 ter of loneliness, the Pilgrims in Leyden were lonely only as they 
 chose to be loneh^ There were in the same city an English 
 church a few yards from their meeting house, and one hundred 
 and thirty-five English families resident. Englishmen — soldiers, 
 travelers, merchants, ecclesiastics — were all around them. Prob- 
 ably an average of ten thousand British subjects dwelt in the 
 Netherlands during their stay. They lived under the shadow of 
 the greatest university of Europe, that matriculated over two 
 thousand English students in the seventeenth century, of which 
 their own Robinson, and Brewer were members. 
 
 What they learned we do not know fully ; but these high- 
 souled men, wide-awake to all good influences, lived in a good 
 school. Surely it was a kind Providence that kept these
 
 19 
 
 founders of New England eleven years in a federal republic. 
 Let us see what things, what institutions like those in this repub- 
 lic of ours, they had daily before their eyes. 
 
 1. They lived under a national religious establishment, which, 
 though a State Protestant Church, something like that of Eng- 
 land, yet, unlike England's, tolerated other faiths, even Roman 
 Catholic and Jewish when exercised in private houses privately ; 
 and to all Protestant sects and congregations, especially the 
 English, furnished places of worship when regular, formal appli- 
 cation was properly made therefor. They enjoyed, also, what 
 Milton later plead for, — the liberty of unlicensed printing. They 
 enjoyed the benefit of the free schools for their children. While 
 the English political church emissaries were all the time prodding 
 the Dutch government to molest them, the Dutch government, 
 often defying King James, quietly sheltered the Pilgrims. 
 
 2. They lived in a land where they could buy, hold, and sell 
 land in fee simple, which they could not do in England, with its 
 entail and primogeniture, manor system and semi-feudalism ; 
 and they lived in a land whei'e deeds and mortgages were regis- 
 tered. 
 
 3. They lived under a system of local self-government which 
 had its town meetings, with its written ballot and its municipal 
 representation in the state or provincial legislature. In every 
 court was the public prosecuting ofiicer, named the '•'• schout" ox 
 what we call the "district attorney," — the accused having the 
 right of counsel for defense, and money indemnity paid to the 
 acquitted person wrongly accused. Both the jurisprudence and 
 the prison system of Holland, as they saw, were vastly in advance 
 of what they had actually experienced in England. 
 
 4. They lived under a republic of united states which, with 
 all its defects, had a written constitution, the Union of Utrecht, or 
 of the Seven United States of Holland, framed in iS79? ^"tl foi' 
 two hundred and fifteen years appealed to as the supreme law of 
 the land by the Supreme Court of Holland. In that republic, 
 whose motto was, " In vmion there is strength," and whose flag 
 was the red, white, and blue, the stadtholder, or president, ruled, 
 his powers defined by the written compact, so that he could 
 neither expand into a dictator nor dwindle into a figurehead. We 
 grant it was not, nationally, a constitutional democracy like ours,
 
 20 
 
 but a confederation of sovereignties ; but, in its municipal life all 
 Holland was intensely republican ; and it was the city life that most 
 affected the English dwelling in the country. The national legis- 
 lature, Congress, or States General, like ours, — for ours is copied 
 directly from it, — consisted of two houses; one the Senate, repre- 
 senting sovereign states, and having the treaty-making power, and 
 the other a popular assembly representing the people. The free- 
 dom of the press was guai-anteed, and limited only as ours is 
 limited. The Pilgrim printers published freely, but the line was, in 
 1619, drawn at scurrilous and slanderous books, and until they were 
 suspected of printing those they were absolutely unmolested. 
 Complete independence of the judiciary was the rule. In a word, 
 that which we countmost peculiarly American, existed in the heroic 
 days of the Dutch Republic, before the eyes of the founders of 
 Massachusetts. A detailed examination shows that our American 
 political institutions, when compared with those of the other 
 nations of Europe, — classic, media3vat, or modern, — are more like 
 those of the republic of the Netherlands than like any other. 
 We do not deny that this federal republic of the Netherlands, 
 compared to ours, was a crude and weak affair ; that even its 
 privileges and liberties, when set by the side of those with us, which 
 have been won after three hundred years experience in the New 
 Woi'ld, seem small ; but for that time they were wonderful. For, 
 far ahead of the nations in toleration and freedom, the Dutch were 
 ridiculed by other nations as being eccentric, as ' introducing 
 dangerous innovations in government ; yet, in sjDite of contempt 
 and ridicule, these men of the United States of Holland perse- 
 vered, and thus gave the precedent of success for all time, and the 
 cue to the English Commonwealth and the Revolution of 16S8, 
 and to the American Revolution. Successful jDrecedents govern 
 the world. 
 
 How were the Pilgrims treated by the Dutch individually, 
 and by the Government? We answer, "The hospitality of the 
 free republic of Holland was generously bestowed.'' We shall 
 now give proofs and answer criticisms. 
 
 I. The Pilgrims did not get free food, clothing, rent, or use 
 of a church edifice when it was not asked for. They were not 
 treated, they did not wish to be treated, as paupers, but as men, 
 and their leader as a scholar. What was most precious to them
 
 21 
 
 they received. Theirs was in full what England denied them, — 
 life, liberty, freedom to worship (iod in their own way, and the 
 pursuit of happiness. The measure of freedom, toleration, and 
 protection granted them was equal to that which the Dutch Gov- 
 ernment bestowed upon their own people. 
 
 But some have said, " Not so ; this idea of Dutch hospitality 
 is a pleasing fiction," " a fancy that is in the face of history," and 
 we have no money to waste on a monument at Delfshaven or 
 anywhere else to perpetuate such a fancy. Special criticisms have 
 been made upon the project of this Boston Congregational Club 
 to erect a memorial in honor alike of the Pilgrims and their 
 Dutch hosts at Delfshaven, where the dikes were cut to relieve 
 Leyden, and whence the founders of New England sailed to 
 America. 
 
 Most of the criticisms made refer to the acts of individual 
 Hollanders ; and the original writings of Bradfor^J, Winslow, 
 and other Pilgrims have been put, by the critics, under the 
 microscope to find one single passage that could be made to seem 
 like complaint of the Dutch, and harsh treatment by them. The 
 search has been made in vain. The Pilgrim writers dwell much 
 on their own straitened cotidition^ on their reasons for leaving 
 Holland, but have only gratitude and kind words for the hospita- 
 ble people and goodly land that sheltered them. Let us consider 
 these criticisms in detail. 
 
 I. After an English sea captain had already deceived and 
 betrayed the Scrooby men, they engaged at Hull a Dutch skipper 
 to meet them on the Lancashire coast and carry them to Amster- 
 dam. True to his word he appeared punctually, despite the risk 
 he ran ; for both the Pilgrims and the Dutchmen were breaking 
 the law of the land in attempting unlicensed emigration ; /. ^., to 
 get out of England by the way of the underground railroad to the 
 Canada of that day. After part of the men had got on board, the 
 armed police of King James appeared in the distance. What 
 should the Dutchman do.'' In any event he must lose his profits. 
 Should he lose his ship, too, be cast into prison with all his crew, 
 and, further, surrender up those Pilgrims who were already on 
 board to prison, and possible death ? Even the men of the Pilgrim 
 company left on shore, with the exception of a few who stayed 
 with the women, ran away to save themselves. Of the conduct 
 of the Dutch captain, in such a case, judge you.
 
 22 
 
 2. It is said that Robinson's company in Leyden "was not 
 allowed to have a meeting house," 
 
 Answer. The profound researches of Dutch scholars, archi- 
 vists, and historians, backed by the labors of American specialists 
 and men of research, have failed to find any trace of a desire on 
 the part of the Pilgrims to have a meeting house at the gift of the 
 govei'nment. They made no application for a place to worship 
 in. We know that other Protestant congregations, asking, 
 received. Consistent with their intensely Separatist and Inde- 
 pendent principles, they preferred to be by themselves, pay their 
 own rent, and ask no favors. All who believed in Christ could 
 have a church, or house of worship, if regularly applied for ; but 
 the Pilgrims would not recognize a State church. " They stood 
 on their own legs." They were true to their own principles. 
 Heartily in sympathy with the Dutch Calvinists in theology, they 
 differed with them on the question of church polity, and declined 
 all ecclesiastical favors. They even criticised freely certain 
 Dutch customs, such as the election of church officers in rotation, 
 instead of for life, which their descendants have since almost 
 universally followed. The Dutch churches elected elders and 
 deacons for a term of years, not for life ; the American Congre- 
 gationalists now do the same. In making answer to this objec- 
 tion, as in others, the defense' of the Dutch is the defense of the 
 Pilgrims, also, for the Pilgrims were nobly consistent. 
 
 3. It is said that while Rev. Robert Durie, pastor of the 
 English church in Leyden, had to wait onh- a year before being 
 admitted to the privileges of membership in the University, John 
 Robinson had to wait five years and a-half for the like privilege, 
 — that is, free tuition, free use of the library, large personal and 
 municipal privileges, and almost unlimited free beer and wine, in 
 an age when the hot drinks of modern life, tea, cofiee, and choco- 
 late, were unknown. 
 
 Answer. No one except the omniscient God now knows 
 whether Robinson was obliged to wait, or voluntarily waited. 
 When, however, it is remembered that Robinson had come from 
 the quarrelsome Brownists of Amsterdam, and lived two years in 
 Leyden before having a ])crmancnt house or becoming a property 
 owner, there may have l)een good reason why the Leyden Uni- 
 versity kept Robinson waiting — even supposing they did, of
 
 23 
 
 which there is no proof. Both Robinson and Brewer were ad- 
 mitted to the Leyden University, and reaped great benefits from 
 tlieir privileges. The number of members or fellows of the 
 University was necessarily limited, for with membership went 
 other valuable accessories which illustrate old-time Dutch hospi- 
 talities, but which could not be indiscriminately lavished on 
 strangers. As in most continental universities, members were ex- 
 cused from the liability of oi'dinary citizens to have soldiers billeted 
 upon them in case of siege or other need, to take their turn at the 
 night watch, and to contribute to public works or fortifications ; 
 while in case of arrest or accusation, they were free from the ju- 
 risdiction of the town authorities. All these were matters of 
 great advantage, as we shall see presently. Further, the hospi- 
 tality of the Dutch was generously bestowed in that they were 
 made the recipients, free of town and state duties, of two tuns of 
 beer every month and ten gallons of wine every quarter ; that is, 
 twenty-four hogsheads of beer and forty gallons of wine every 
 year. As tea was not known in England until 1610, and coffee 
 until 1652, and the word "temperance," as limited to the matter 
 of drinking, was unknown in any European language, the use of 
 beer or wine was considered a necessity at the table by both Eng- 
 lishmen and Hollanders. Think of twenty-four hogsheads of 
 beer and forty gallons of wine to each one of the Pilgrim Univer- 
 sity Fellows ! And yet we are told that Dutch hospitality to the 
 Pilgrims is " a pleasing fiction," " a fancy in the face of history." 
 
 4. It is charged that " during all the residence of the Pilgrims 
 in Holland, the conduct of the Dutch Government towards them 
 was modified by its craven fear of offending his High Mightiness 
 King James the First of England"; and that it was "in some 
 measure in consequence of this sharp e3'e kept on them from 
 England, and the sensitiveness of the Dutch to it, that our 
 fathers suffered as severely as they did in Holland," etc. 
 
 This we deny. Charge these Dutchmen of this heroic age 
 with other faults, but not cowardice. They had no "craven 
 fear" of either the Pope, the Devil, Philip II., or James I. The 
 exact contemporaneous words of Bradford, quoted by the critic, 
 do indeed refer to the caution which the Dutch took to avoid 
 offending their Protestant ally ; for Holland, the little Protestant 
 republic, was, like another David, fighting almost alone the battle
 
 24 
 
 of liberty against giant Spain. Indeed, the Netherlands republic 
 was, as Principal Fairbairn so eloquently acknowledged at Ley- 
 den, fighting England's battle; yes, and she was fighting our 
 battles, too. She stood for Protestantism, freedom, toleration, 
 humanity. She sorely needed England's help and sympathy, 
 just as in our days of war, when the Alabama was about to be let 
 loose from British port, we needed both in our struggle with 
 secession and slavery. We, too, were careful not to give oflensc 
 to England during our Civil War. We wanted her help. We 
 feared not with the coward's, but with the fear of a brave man 
 who knows his cause is just. We hesitated to displease Great 
 Britain, but we had not for a moment, any craven fear of her : 
 and when Charles Francis Adams said to the Qiieen's representa- 
 tive, "It is needless to remind your lordship that this means 
 war," he had fear, but neither he nor we had any " craven " fear. 
 
 So the Dutch republic of which Benjamin Franklin declared, 
 "in love of liberty, and bravery in the defense of it she has been 
 our great example," had no craven fear of King James. Both 
 republics of united States, Dutch and American, had just 
 exactly that kind of fear which the Greeks, using the word only 
 of gods and heroes, call eulabeia. Barneveldt gave this royal 
 coward, pedant, and persecutor to understand that he had better 
 mind his own business, and let Dutch affairs alone. The repre- 
 sentative of the United States of the Netherlands in the seven- 
 teenth century did exactly what the envoy of the United States of 
 America did in 1862. For the life of the republic they shrank 
 not, even during their sti^uggle for life, from the menace of war. 
 
 5. In the alleged cases of the Danish professor, Vorstius, and of 
 Dr. William Ames, of Norfolk, whotD Young, in his Chronicles 
 of the Pilgrims, mistakenly imagines were deposed and perse- 
 cuted by the Dutch at the instigation of King James and his 
 minions, the facts are the reverse of those stated and repeatedly 
 copied. In the case of Conrad V^orstius, an Arminian in oflice 
 at Ley den University, it was tlie Dutch theologians of the State 
 church who deposed him from his professorship on account of 
 heresy, and the Synod of Dort that banished him. In any event, 
 having made King James umpire in the dispute, the Dutch con- 
 trovertists were bound to abide 1 )y the imipire's decision'. The per- 
 secution of Dr. Ames, the military chaplain and l*uritan refugee,
 
 26 
 
 Was wholly an affair of the English church, and the Dutch had, 
 so far as known, nothing to do with it. Living in Leyden, Sir 
 Horace Vere made him chaplain, but the English Episcopalians 
 forced Vere to dismiss him. Without asking King James' per- 
 mission the Dutch at once made him a professor at Franeker, and 
 later gave him a pension, and chose him clerk of the Synod of 
 Dort. He died of a cold contracted after a flood in Rotterdam, 
 profoundly lamented by the Dutch, who had defied King James 
 in lavishing honors upon him. 
 
 Again, and again, and again the Dutch went contrary to King 
 James' will, and metaphorically snapped their republican fingers 
 under his monarchical and heresy-smelling nose. So far from 
 any craven fear, these Dutch would have fought the Englishman 
 as well as the Spaniard and the Pope, and sunk their land under 
 the waves, rather than truckle to this royal enemy of the Pilgrims. 
 
 6. It is stated that "when the Pilgrims had made up their 
 minds to emigrate to the New World, and the Dutch made them 
 'large offers' to settle in the New Netherlands in America, their 
 experience had been such that they do not seem ever seriously to 
 have entertained that proposition, but 'decided not to meddle with 
 ye Dutch.' " 
 
 This is untrue. The facts are, that John Robinson himself, 
 Feb. 13, 1620, first made the proposition to the Dutch merchants 
 of Amsterdam to go and settle in the New Netherlands. His 
 purpose was much larger in scope than the later enterprise in the 
 Mayflower. He asked for Dutch help, promising to cross the 
 ocean with four hundred families from Leyden and England. 
 Naturally, however, this self-eflacing pastor and far-seeing states- 
 man, as well as accomplished theologian, wanted, while on the 
 new continent, military protection guaranteed against the papist 
 Spaniards. 
 
 In other words, the experience by the Pilgrims of the Dutcli, 
 and of the hospitality generously bestowed upon them, was such 
 that they wanted to go under the order and protection of the red, 
 white, and blue flag of the United States of the Netlicrlands. 
 These are facts attested by the Dutch documents at Albany, New 
 York, and in Brodhead's and Winsor's Histories, as well as in 
 Bradford's own testimony of "large offers." Unfortunately 
 for the credit of early New England historians, these facts are
 
 26 
 
 not found on their pages. And this is the reason why some 
 students of American history wlio go to the original authorities, 
 do not accept as the final verdict of history the defective and 
 distorted statements of those who somehow forget, or ignore, 
 what other countries beside England have done in the making of 
 our nation. 
 
 Why did not the Pilgrims accept the liberal offer of the 
 Amsterdam Company of free cattle and transportation to the 
 region of the North River? For one reason, and, so far as 
 records show, for this reason alone. It was the year 1620. 
 During the twelve years the Pilgrims had, with the Dutch, en- 
 joyed profound peace. Now, truce with Spain was to end next 
 year, 1621, and the little republic must summon all her resources 
 against the mightiest military power in Europe. As Bradford 
 says, there was nothing heard on all sides but the beating of 
 drums and preparations for war. Hence, the States-General 
 were unable to guarantee military protection, especially in the 
 shape of two ships of war and a garrison of soldiers, to a colony 
 of Englishmen aci^oss the Atlantic. They could not even pro- 
 tect their own people, the colony of Dutchmen and Walloons 
 proposed by Jesse de Forest; though later, in 1623, with his 
 company of fifty-six Walloon families, he was able to lay the 
 foundations of the Empire State. The Pilgrims, glad as they 
 would have been to close with the generous response of the Am- 
 sterdam merchants to Robinson's application, must have foreseen 
 what answer the States-General would give ; and so they had to 
 turn from fair oflers, and accept the rigorous terms of the English 
 Merchant Adventurer's Company, which kept them in debt and 
 at hardest toil for several years. 
 
 7. It has been charged that Elder Brewster endured persecu- 
 tion for "having printed some Nonconformist books which were 
 unacceptable to the English hierarchy ;" that "the Dutch govern- 
 ment cowered beneath his intimation " [of Sir Dudley Carleton, 
 the British minister at The Hague], "and set their machinery of 
 law at work to arrest the elder for doing what he liad in Holland 
 a perfect right to do. In fear of Dutch prisons he fled, witli all 
 his, and seems to have laid low in England, until he could join 
 the exiles on the Mayflower, at Southampton, on their way 
 home." 
 
 t^^
 
 27 
 
 Answer. These statements are not according to fact, or are 
 distorted. Nearly the whole story may be traced in Sir Dudley 
 Carleton's "Letters." Just as our republic gratefully made it 
 possible, during a generation or two, for "a citizen of the United 
 States [even though a foreigner] at the time of the adoption of 
 this Constitution," to become President of the United States, so 
 the Dutch honored the ambassador of their Pi-otestant ally with 
 a pince in their councils. To his opinions and advice they gave 
 as much deference as the Continental Congress gave to the sugges- 
 tions of Steuben or Lafayette ; but they never for a moment, as 
 even Sir Dudley Carleton's letters show, "cowered beneath his 
 intimation," or that of his master. King James. At his request, 
 in December, 1619, the States-General issued a "placart" against 
 indecent, scurrilous, scandalous publications, ten months after 
 Brewster had left Holland for England. Further, Elder Brew- 
 ster endured no persecution whatever from the Dutch. He 
 printed as m any Brownist or Congregationalist books without, 
 so far as we know, any opposition. There is no proof whatever 
 that Elder Brewster fled to England in fear of Dutch prisons ; 
 but, so far as we know, went of his own accord, with his family, 
 in February, 1619. It is possible that he never saw Southampton 
 till he first saw it from the deck of the Speedwell. It is more 
 than probable that he returned safely and untroubled to Leyden, 
 late in 1619, and was with the Pilgrims in their embarkation at 
 Delfshaven, as represented in Weir's accurate picture, and Pro- 
 fessor Franklin Dexter's chapter in Winsor's History. 
 
 8. It has been said that while searching for Brewster at 
 Leyden, the Dutch constable, through a confusion of names, ar- 
 rested Brewer. Brewer, who was a fellow of the University, 
 had been associated with Brewster in the printing business. It 
 is charged that, "Thus caught, Brewer was dealt with, and after 
 lying a long time in prison, his types being seized and his 
 property confiscated, he was sent, under guard, home to England, 
 to be dealt with by the government there." 
 
 To any one familiar with Dutch life in a university town of 
 this period, this statement causes merriment. Nevertheless, it 
 contains a fraction of the truth. The facts are these : A fiery 
 Scotsman, supposed by Cotton to have been the Rev. John 
 Tarbes, or, as is more probable, David Caldcrwood, the famous
 
 28 
 
 champion of the chinch of Scotland and opponent of King James, 
 had published a violent and scurrilous personal attack, virtually 
 charging the king w^ith perjury. This involved a point of inter- 
 national law, and under the treaty between Holland and England 
 the offender, if caught, could be justly extradited. The Dutch 
 government would not shelter anarchists ; theirs was libertv 
 under law. Sir Dudley Carleton suspected that Brewster was 
 the printer of this libelous book, of which there is no proof. By 
 mistake of names Brewer was apprehended. Now what hap- 
 pened.^ Brewer was not cast into the city prison ; his property 
 was not confiscated ; he was not sent under guard as a prisoner to 
 England, When the Universit}'^ officers heard of the British min- 
 ister's purpose they took Brewer under their own charge, English 
 subject though he was, with no fear of King James, or England, 
 or Sir Dudley Carleton before their eyes. They then demanded 
 that Brewer should go as a member of the University, and go of 
 his own accord as a free man, to London, and that the British 
 ambassador should guarantee his safe return, and, further, pay 
 all his expenses. And all this Sir Dudley Carleton was, to his 
 great disgust, obliged to do. So Brewer went, under no 
 bonds, in company with a private citizen, enjoyed the picnic to 
 London, and came back scot free with flying colors, much to the 
 chagrin of Sir Dudley Carleton, who had to pay the bills. It is 
 probable that Brewer, and all the Pilgrims, who at the first fuss 
 had offered to go Brewer's bail, doubtless belie\ing him innocent, 
 had a good laugh over the whole affair and the discomfiture of 
 King James and his envoy, and doubtless with admiration for the 
 Dutch, who would not allow themselves to be insulted even by 
 King James. It is even probable that some of the Dutchmen, 
 along with the fiery Scotsman, the real troubler of the monarch, 
 hugely enjoyed this "twisting the British lion's tail." 
 
 9. Finally it is alleged, on the strength of a piece of gossip set 
 forth in the seventeenth century, fifty years after the event, that 
 the Dutch bribed the captain of the Mayflower to take the Pil- 
 grims to Cape Cod, instead of to the Hudson River. 
 
 Answer. Such a story is not only "incredible," as Professor 
 Franklin Dexter declares, but is a palpable absurdity, unworthy 
 of notice. 
 
 Finally, after balancing the question of remaining in Holland
 
 29 
 
 and losins^ their identity as Englishmen, and becoming- absorbed 
 in the Dutch nation, — so many of their sons marrying Dutch 
 wives, antl their daughters Dutch men, and their boys entering 
 the Dutch arm}-, — or of emigrating to America, and after debating 
 the question whether to risk the cruelty of the red Indians or 
 the dark Spaniards, with heroic courage and sublime faith in God, 
 the younger and stronger portion embarked on the Speedwell, to 
 sufler many treacheries, hardships, and sorrows at the hands of 
 their own English countrymen before landing on the boulder at 
 Plymouth to begin New England. 
 
 How the Pilgrims really felt towards the Dutch and Holland, 
 is seen in the genei'al tone of the records they have left behind 
 them. They picture their poverty and lowly estate, for their 
 condition was hard. There are criticisms, also, of Dutch 
 opinions and customs, of the way the Sabbath was kept, the fact 
 that school education for the children was in Dutch, not English, 
 etc. ; but not in all their writings can be found one sentence that 
 can be tortured into an expression of complaint of their treat- 
 ment by the Dutch national government, by the authorities of 
 Leyden, or b}' the Dutch people. On the contrary, we have two 
 distinct and positive expressions of acknowledgment and grati- 
 tude by Governor Bradford, penned on this side of the Atlantic 
 and on Massachusetts soil. Writing to the Dutch on Manhattan 
 Island early in 1627, and referring to the alliance between Eng- 
 land and Holland, he says — and remember that, as Dr. Dexter 
 once wrote, "An ounce of matter-of-fact record at that time is 
 worth a ton of the rhetoric of to-day" : — 
 
 "Now, forasmuch as this [alliance] is sufficient to unite us 
 together in love and good neighborhood, in all our dealings ; yet 
 are many of us tied by the good and courteous entreaty which we 
 have found in your country, having lived there many years, with 
 freedom and good content, as many of our friends do this day ; 
 for which we are bound to be thankful, and our children after us, 
 and shall never forget the same, but shall heartily desire your 
 good and prosperity as our own forever." 
 
 Again, Oct. i, 1637, Bradford wrote from Plymouth to Man- 
 hattan expi'essing his gratitude and sense of obligation, "Ac- 
 knowledging ourselves tied in strict obligation unto vour country 
 and state for the good entertainment and free liberty which we
 
 30 
 
 had, and our brethren and countrymen yet there have and do en- 
 joy under your most honorable lords and states." 
 
 Whatever may be thought now, Bradford did not believe that 
 Dutch hospitalit}' to the Pilgrims was "a pleasing fiction." It is 
 true, inifortunately true, that some good inen, professing to rep- 
 resent the Pilgrims, have tried to prove that Bradford was speak- 
 ing the language of politeness only, and not of truth. They say 
 he was diplomatic, and meant what he said only in the sense of 
 modern politics. They see in this scene only the bandying of 
 mutual flattery. 
 
 Well might the Pilgrims saj-, "Save us from our friends." In 
 our opinion, such explanations blacken the character of noble, 
 sincere men. The Pilgrims stir our souls to noblest endeavor to- 
 day, because we believe them to have been God's men, brave, 
 simple, sincere, scorning polite lies. No ; Bradford, who had 
 been first in Holland, and in all probability first advised the Pil- 
 grim exodus thither, spoke truth and lied not. 
 
 Let us glance now at the influence of the Dutch Republic 
 upon that great multitude of Englishmen who lived in the Nether- 
 lands during the period 1580 to 1640, mainly from whom, and 
 during which time, New England was settled. Holland, in defy- 
 ing Spain and the Pope, was, during her eighty years' struggle, 
 fighting the battle of Protestantism and religious liberty for Eng- 
 land as well ; and England knew it. One reason of the greatness 
 of the British Empire to-day, is that Holland once stood as her 
 bulwark against Spain. Hundred of English merchants were 
 settled as traders trading, and hundreds of English volunteers 
 were fighting in the Dutch armies, as early as 15S0; but it was 
 not until the treaty of 1585,. six years after the United States of 
 the Netherlands had formed their union, and five years after they 
 had published their declaration of independence, that large bodies 
 of Englishmen entered the Dutch military service and drew Dutch 
 pay. From 1585, Elizabeth agreed to furnish five thousand 
 foot and one thousand horse for thirteen years. In addition to 
 these six thousand men, there were three or four thousand English 
 volunteers in the Dutch armies. After the truce of 1609, the 
 year the Pilgrims arrived, the Dutch army was reduced to thirty 
 thousand men, of whom five thousand were English or vScottish. 
 This military force drew with it large numbers of merchants,
 
 81 
 
 contractors, students, and sending men, besides the chaplains, and 
 families o/ officers and men, swelling the average total, refugees 
 and adventurers being counted, to probabl)' ten thousand people 
 annually. When, in 149S, the English merchants were expelled 
 from Stade, in Germany, they settled first at Middleburg, in 
 Zealand, where Browne went, and where there was an English 
 Congregational church before that at Amsterdam or Leyden. 
 On June 15, 1593, as we find from the Dutch archives there were 
 manufactories of English cloth situated in twelve cities of the 
 Netherlands ; viz., at Dordrecht, Haarlem, Delft, Gouda, Leyden, 
 Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Alkmaar, Gorincham, Enkhuysen, and 
 The Hague. During the Dutch war of freedom, there were in 
 all twenty-two English churches in the Netherlands, notices of 
 which are found in the appendix to Steven's " History of the 
 Scottish Church, Rotterdam." Among the names of the minis- 
 ters and chiuxh officers, are those of several who afterwards 
 became famous in America. 
 
 This vast number of Englishmen, of all sorts and conditions, 
 attracted by the toleration, prosperity, or military or commercial 
 opportunities of the little republic, continued until the Dutch 
 United States had substantially won the day. By 1648, Spain, 
 exhausted by her vain task, having fertilized the ditches of Hol- 
 land with the corpses of a third of a million of her sons, having 
 learned that the Dutchman's "mines above ground" were more 
 than the silver lodes of Peru and Mexico, acknowledged the in- 
 dependence of the repviblic. Long before this, however, the 
 English soldiers and most of the merchants had returned to Eng- 
 land, while whole congregations of aggressive Presbyterians, 
 Congregationalists, Baptists, Qiiakers, and other Nonconformists, 
 their nei'ves braced by republican air, and faces flushed with the 
 consciousness of coming success at home, crossed the Channel to 
 cross swords also with King Charles, and attempt the establish- 
 ment of a commonwealth. Surely a crop of dragon's teeth was 
 sown long before 1640. 
 
 Let us see what came to the surface in the four years' civil 
 war. 
 
 I. The eastern and southern counties were Parliamentary and 
 republican, — the eastern counties being the impregnable fortress 
 of the commonwealth ; in other words, the counties overrun by
 
 82 
 
 the heretic weavers, brick-makers and brick-layers, dike-builders 
 and land-drainers from the Netherlands in the fourteenth century, 
 and only two or three i^enerations before by the Dutch Protestants, 
 and where tens of thousands of English apprentices had been 
 trained in the homes, and in the ways, and thinking of Bible-reading 
 men. Thousands of English children with one or more Dutch 
 parents, and thousands of grandchildren helped to explain what 
 suddenly came to the surface when Parliament and king crossed 
 swords. It was the sons and grandsons of these English appren- 
 tices who formed the bulk of Cromwell's army. Further, the 
 man who trained Cromwell in military tactics was a Hollander, 
 Dalbier, and the first judge advocate of the Parliamentary army 
 was Dr. Dorislaus. The Ironsides were raised and trained in the 
 Holland districts, and a Dutch captain was the Steuben who 
 drilled these militia into regulars who opposed the predecessor 
 of King George. Of the men who organized the Parliamentary 
 forces, Fairfax, Essex, Monk, Warwick, Bedford, Skippon, and 
 others, as Masson and Carlyle show, were trained in the Nether- 
 lands. 
 
 Yet the English Commonwealth did not stand. It went to 
 pieces within fifteen years. Why.'' Because England was not 
 prepared for a republic. It had not the right land or property 
 laws, the right jurisprudence, popular educational system, the 
 right local and national spirit. Feudalism, the worship of rank, 
 the power of the State church, entail, and primogeniture were all 
 against a republic. 
 
 Yet it is possible that if the reforms proposed by the commit- 
 tee of the Long Parliament could have been carried out, and the 
 preliminary work needed for a republic had been done by these 
 reforms put in action, England might have been a republic, and be 
 leading the world in the ideas that underlie our American demo- 
 cratic government. John R. Green says that for the last two 
 hundred years, in a tentative way, England has been following 
 out the Parliamentary army's scheme of political and social 
 reform. 
 
 Yet where were the precedents obtained, the basis of these 
 reforms and features found .f" In English history, in the English 
 unwritten constitution .'' No ; they are not there. They are 
 almost every one found in Dutch history, and from thence are they
 
 33 
 
 taken.* They would not work in England ; the soil was not 
 ready for the seed. Picked men, Englishmen, — not average men, 
 but morally far above the average, and trained in, or influenced 
 bv, the Dutch republic, — brought them to America. Rejected 
 of England, but elect and precious in God's sight, they introduced 
 them into New England. Huguenots, Quakers, Baptists, Scotch- 
 Irish, Germans, Dutch, brought them to the middle and southern 
 colonies, and the great Teutonic ideas, vitalized by Christianity, 
 took root on American soil, and their fruit is the republic of these 
 United States. The reforms proposed to the Parliament of the 
 Commonwealth, for which England was not ready, were carried 
 out in America by Englishmen wlio had been fired with Bible 
 ideas. To them the Old Testament became a text-book, but the 
 Protestant republic gave them visible precedent and example. 
 When England relapsed into monarchy, — that is, one-man power, 
 — and Puritanism slumbered until goaded to wrath again by James 
 II., then again the men of England looked to Holland. They 
 took their precedent from the deposition of Philip II., and the 
 cue of their own Declaration of Right from that of Holland's 
 Declaration of Independence. They asked the Dutch stadtholder 
 to cross the North Sea with his Dutch regiments, and become 
 William III. of England. 
 
 For the original and inspiration of England's Magna Charta 
 of 1 688, see the Dutch Act of Abjuration of 15S0, and put the 
 two documents side by side, and you will see the fomily Hkeness. 
 Chronology and style will show which is the father and which the 
 son. When the immortal document signed July 4, 1776, is made 
 one of the series, its genealogy is sound and sure in the order, — 
 Dutch, English, American. 
 
 Let us turn now to American history, and see whether the 
 Dutch Republic influenced our making. Let us look at States 
 and groups of men. All, or nearly all, the military leaders of 
 the colonists were trained in the Dutch armies, gaining their 
 experience in Holland's fight against Spain — Miles Standish and 
 Governor Dudley of Massachusetts, Lyon Gardiner of Connecti- 
 cut, Sir Samuel Argal, Virginia, Leisler of New York, and many 
 others less prominent. 
 
 * This part of the subject here glanced at, is treated at length in Mr. 
 Douglas Campbell's work, " The Puritan in England, Holland, awd 
 America."
 
 34 
 
 Massachusetts was settled by men educated eleven years in the 
 Dutch Republic, in 1620. Their ten years' success led others to 
 come over and settle. It was the men trained in Holland who 
 made the Plymouth settlement a success ; for the best emii^rants 
 for the next five years (or until John Robinson died), as Palfrey 
 shows, were emigrants from Leyden. Full of charitv, kindliness, 
 and toleration, their minds broadened l)v experience in a land 
 where religion was free to all men, and whose people respected 
 the rights of the Indians to the soil, their treatment of Roger 
 Williams the radical, and of Miles Standisli the Roman Catho- 
 lic, was in marked contrast to \\hat men who differed in con- 
 victions received from the Puritan immigrants. Holland was one 
 of the first countries to cast off the delusion of witchcraft, — the first 
 book against the superstition being bv a Dutch physician, and the 
 Pilgrims were never under its spell. Reared under a federal 
 republic, they and their sons led in the formation of the New 
 England Confederation, of 1643. Even in the Mayflower's cabin 
 they had imitated the Netherlanders in having a written compact 
 for their government. 
 
 Of the settlers of Massachusetts beyond the old colony, five 
 sixths came from the shires of England, which had been most 
 profoundly leavened by the opinions and presence of the Nether- 
 lands refugees. The overwhelming majority of the early minis- 
 ters in New England were educated at Cambridge, spending their 
 student life in the heart of the eastern counties. In scores of in- 
 stances the fmiily cognomen of these New England settlers are 
 only Dutch names Anglicized, and a considerable strain of both 
 Puritan and Pilgrim blood is Dutch blood. 
 
 Connecticut, it is believed, is the typical American Common- 
 wealth, being even more democratic in origin and sturdy main- 
 tainence of independency and republican principles than Massa- 
 chusetts or any other State, having the first regular written con- 
 stitution ; that is, a signed compact, which not only provided, but 
 prescribed, a definite system of government. In tliat instrument 
 elections were ordered to be by secret, written ballot. In other 
 words, the main features of the political organization of Connecti- 
 cut are not borrowed from England. Arc they original .'* We 
 answer, that between the details of the early political methods of 
 Connecticut and of the Holland states, as Ubbo Iinmiius's famous
 
 S5 
 
 book shows, the Hkencss is that of heredity. No place in the 
 early American colonies is so politically like a bit of the old Dntch 
 republic as Connecticut. In political conii)lexion, feature, and 
 detail, in town representation, le_<;"islatine, C(nn"ts, detail of parlia- 
 mentary proceeding, the little federal republic of Connecticut was 
 a close copy of Friesland or Holland. 
 
 The hand of Thomas Hooker, the Cambridge graduate driven 
 out of England to find refuge in Holland, and forced to cross part 
 of the ocean as a stowaway, is distinctly visible in the first Ameri- 
 can written constitution. In his sermon preached before the in- 
 strument was framed, the great preacher laid down the doctrine 
 first nationally proclaimed and obtained in the republic under 
 whose flag Hooker had lived tluring four years, — that " the founda- 
 tion of authority [is] laid in the free consent of the people ; " 
 "that the choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by 
 God's own allowance ; " that "they who have power to appoint 
 ofiicers and magistrates, have the right also to set the bounds 
 and limitations of the power and place unto which they call 
 them." Not only were both Hooker and Davenport, the 
 founders of Connecticut, politically educated in Holland, but so 
 also were a number of the chief men associated with them and 
 leaders of the emigration. 
 
 What of Rhode Island.^ It was settled by a man who, 
 whether ever in Holland or not, is not known ; but this is cer- 
 tain, — he was a fine scholar in the Dutch language, familiar with 
 Dutch politics and history, and taught the poet Milton Dutch. 
 He studied and preached in the region of England overrun by 
 Dutch Anabaptists ; he was extremely beloved, and sheltered by, 
 the Pilgrims. He was banished not merely for theological rea- 
 sons, but mainly because he insisted on the right of the Indians 
 to the soil, and believed and practiced the Dutch doctrine laid 
 down in all their charters and steadily carried out, of buying the 
 land of the natives and paying for it, as in New York, and New 
 Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and Delaware, before occupation. In 
 Rhode Island's constitution was followed the precedent of tolera- 
 tion set by Holland. 
 
 To sum up, then, concerning New England, the men who 
 settled it put in operation at once written constitutions, registra- 
 tion of deeds and mortgages, common schools, and written ballots,
 
 36 
 
 besides other things having no precedent in England, l)ut known, 
 practiced, and seen by men in a republic. In other words, the 
 life of English Nonconformists in England being made a burden 
 to them, and toleration being refused at home, the colonists to 
 New England, numbering twenty-one thousand men, had left 
 their native land before 1640 and come to America, thousands of 
 them by way of Holland. These settlers were not average Eng- 
 lishmen. As a rule, they were picked men, morally and spirit- 
 ually. Many of them, especially their leaders, had breathed long 
 and deeply the air of ffeedom in a republic, and so carried with them 
 to the virgin soil of the New World, the best English traditions, 
 reinforced by living examples and precedents of a Protestant, 
 federal, and free republic. Hence, in settling Massachusetts, 
 Rhode Island, and Connecticut, they did not reproduce English 
 social or political life, but, by a noble reversion, they re-erected 
 on American soil the old Teutonic institutions, and they copied 
 largely, with improvements, exactly what they had seen in opera- 
 tion under the red, white, and blue flag of the United States of the 
 Netherlands. 
 
 Of New York, the Empire State, which led all others in iu- 
 risprudence, constitutional law, and political influence on the 
 nation, it is enough to say that it was settled by the Dutch, who 
 transferred to the New World the republican principles in their 
 fullness. The Dutch in America were not pilgrims or refugees. 
 They had no need to be. Their Protestant faith, their toleration, 
 their republicanism, were already won. Owing to an act of British 
 treachery, committed in time of peace, by the Stuart King James, 
 in 1664, like the seizure of Alsace-Lorraine by the French Louis, 
 the little colony of seven thousand persons in the New Nether- 
 lands had but forty-one years of peaceful development, twenty- 
 one of which were during the fatherland's struggle for life with 
 Spain. After the English treachery and conquest of 1664, about 
 one half of the inhabitants of the New Netherlands returned to 
 the Fatherland. They were not willing to live under the rule of 
 that king whose son the English themselves drove out twenty- 
 four years later. 
 
 The Dutch settlers brought with them something else than 
 what Washington Irving credits them with. They had schools 
 and schoolmasters, ministers and churches, the best kind of land
 
 37 
 
 l;nvs, with the registration of drcds and mortgages, toleration, 
 the habit of treating the Inthan as a man, the written ballot, the 
 village community of freemen, and an inextinguishable love of 
 liberty were theirs. They originated on American soil many 
 things, usually credited to the Puritans of New England, but 
 which the English rule abolished. They who remained, however, 
 assisted by Huguenot, Scotsman, and German, though in a con- 
 quered province, fought the battle of constitutional liberty against 
 the royal governors of New York night and day, and inch by inch, 
 until, in the noble State constitution of 1778, the victory of 1648 
 was re-echoed. "Having no royal charter, the composite people 
 of New York, gathered from many nations, but instinct with the 
 principles of the free republic of Holland, were obliged to study 
 carefully the foundations of government and jurisprudence. It 
 is true that in the evolution of this commonwealth the people 
 were led by the law}'ers rather than by the clergy. Constantly 
 resisting the invasion of royal prerogative, they formed, on an 
 immutable basis of law and right, that Empire State which, in its 
 construction and general features, is, of all those in the Union, 
 the most t)-pically American. Its historical precedents are not 
 found in a monarchy, but in a republic. It is less the fruit of 
 English than of Teutonic civilization."* 
 
 Pennsylvania's part in the making of the American Union is 
 not the least. Her foundations were laid in brotherly love to the 
 Indians, and to men of all creeds, in prayer, in faith, in profound 
 trust in God, as truly as was Massachusetts or Connecticut. Hers 
 was one of the most liberal of all the colonial constitutions. All 
 faiths were tolerated, even Roman Catholic. Church and state 
 were separate. William Penn changed prisons from nurseries of 
 vice to models of reformatoi'y and penal institutions ; taught 
 orphan children trades, and gave persons wrongfully accused of 
 crime damage against the prosecutor. To Pennsylvania came 
 the persecuted of many countries as to a holy land of peace. 
 Here was raised the first ecclesiastical protest against slavery; 
 and here the first book in America condemning it was written. 
 Here, also, was printed the first Bible in a European tongue, the 
 first treatise on the philosophy of education, the largest and most 
 
 * Preface to the author's " Sir William Johnson and the Six Nations," 
 in the series, " Makers of America." 
 
 ;i?948l
 
 38 
 
 sumptuous piece of colonial printing ; and here was the first liter- 
 ary center and woman's college established, in America. Penn- 
 sylvania led off in establishing the freedom of the press, in reform 
 of criminal law, in reform of prisons, in awarding to accused 
 persons the right of counsel for defense. In proportion to her 
 numbers, Pennsylvania lost more men than any other Northern 
 State during the Civil War for freedom. In not a few features 
 now deemed peculiarly American, besides that of honoring the 
 Lord's day, the State founded by William Penn is (despite con- 
 temporary politics), the land of first things, and the shining 
 example. 
 
 Well, who was William Penn ? He was the son of a Dutch 
 mother, Margaret Jasper, of Rotterdam. Dutch was his native 
 language, as well as English. He was a scholar versed in Dutch 
 law, history, and religion. He preached in Dutch, and won 
 thousands of converts and settlers, inviting them to his Christian 
 commonwealth. He himself wrote the grand Constitution of 
 Pennsylvania. Were his precedents taken from English law.'' 
 No! While writing that instrument he lived in Embden, — the 
 oldest known home of the written ballot, and one of the cities 
 of refuge to the English Protestant refugees, — with the laws of 
 Friesland, the old home of the Anglo-Saxons, and one of the first 
 states of the Dutch Republic, daily before his eyes. 
 
 Time would fail to tell of all the vitalizing influences, direct 
 and indirect, of the Dutch Republic upon ours. These can be 
 clearly discerned, not only in colonial times, but also in the 
 revolutionary and constitution-making epochs. Was it not a kind 
 Providence which so laid the foundation stones of our national 
 history, that the tolerant Dutch and the peaceful Quakers were 
 placed between Puritan and Cavalier, between Long Island Sound 
 and Mason and Dixon's line, until Old-World feuds were swallowed 
 up in the grander issue of the American Revolution.'' Can we 
 forget how little Holland, first after France, recognized our 
 national independence, and showed her faith in us during our 
 dark days by a loan of fourteen millions of dollars.'' When after 
 the Revolutionary war, Americans were searching all history for 
 precedents and examples of republican government, to what 
 nation in ancient, mediaeval, or modern times did they look most 
 closely, and copy more directly, than Holland and her republic, 
 profiting by her faults and her costly experiences.
 
 39 
 
 Well do the English critics who, in recent years only, since re- 
 publics were made respectable in their eyes by the success of our 
 Ci\il War, study us, say that the political writings of the framers 
 of the American Constitution show minute familiarity with Dutch 
 history, while the political experience of England has not been 
 drawn upon. Well wrote Washington to Professor Luzac, of 
 Leyden, the famous professor of history, editor, and writer on 
 republican principles, and political teacher and correspondent of 
 Washington, Jeflerson, and John Adams, and later the instructor 
 of John Qiiincy Adams, "America is under great obligation to 
 the writings of such men as you." Still more direct testimony 
 to the influence of the Dutch Republic on the American Revolu- 
 tionary leaders and makers of our national Constitution is fur- 
 nished by Franklin, who wrote, "In love of liberty and bravery 
 in the defense of it, she [Holland] has been our great example." 
 Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, authors of "The Federalist," 
 and so prominent in the formation of our national government, 
 were closely allied by marriage to the Dutch families of New 
 York, and to them, as to Madison, the father of the Constitution, 
 the story of Holland's struggle and experience was as a household 
 tale. " The Federalist" and their other writings show how well 
 they utilized their knowledge, and how largely they drew upon 
 the political experience of the United States of Holland. 
 
 Were time and space given, it could be here clearly shown 
 that we are less an English nation than composite of the Teu- 
 tonic peoples ; the result of the whole continental movement of 
 the sixteenth century, when the Bible and printing became the 
 property of the common people. In our American common- 
 wealth the features enumerated below were not derived from 
 England, but were, in germ, or directly, borrowed from the 
 Netherlands Republic. We inherit the best spirit of the Roman 
 empire, and of the Teutonic principles, vitalized by Christianity, 
 and the nations of the earth now borrow more from us than we 
 from them. The main features of the American commonwealth 
 are : — 
 
 1. The principle that "all men are created equal." 
 
 2. Separation of church and state. 
 
 3. Our land laws, with the system of registration of deeds 
 and mortgages.
 
 40 
 
 4" Local self-government, from the town meeting to the " gov- 
 ernment of governments" at Washington. 
 
 5. Written constitutions prescribing and limiting the powers 
 of rulers and departments of government. 
 
 6. Our State governors and national President, the Stadt- 
 holders of States and United States. 
 
 7. Our State Senates and national Senate, or States-General 
 of sovereign States. 
 
 8. Our Supreme Court, and the supremacy of the judiciary. 
 
 9. Our common-school system. 
 
 10. Freedom of religion. 
 
 1 1 . Freedom of the press. 
 
 12. The secret, written ballot. 
 
 13. Reform of criminal law. 
 
 14. Prison reform. 
 
 i^. The office of District Attorney. 
 
 16. The right of counsel for defense. 
 
 17. The amalgamation of law and equity in codes. 
 
 iS. Reform in the laws concerning the rights of married 
 women. 
 
 It is less needful for me to enter into detail and proofs of the 
 claims here made, since one more able and better versed in his- 
 tory and law, an American lawyer, Douglas Campbell, has 
 wrought out the argument, and his work will soon be published. 
 
 It has been my piupose in this paper only to supplement the 
 ordinary story of English and American history by furnishing an 
 omitted chapter. How far I may have succeeded, you must be 
 judges. This much, however, I believe ; viz., that your proposi- 
 tion to erect at Delfshaven some durable token of American 
 appreciation of both hosts and guests, Hollander and Pilgrim, is 
 one worthy of praise, honor, and support by all Amei^icans who 
 honor alike the principles and the founders of the older and the 
 younger republic. In believing that Gov. W^illiam Bradford, in 
 1627, spoke the truth and lied not, when acknowledging so un- 
 stintingly tlie kindness of Holland and the Dutchmen, he said, 
 "for which we are bound to be thankful, and our children after 
 us," you are vindicatmg them from the sectional or sectarian pre- 
 judice that dwarfs the character of both.
 
 ITKUit- <Ai» 
 
 vr;- 
 
 — / ; 
 
 ADOPTED AT THE REGULAR MEETING OP 
 THE CONGREGATIONAL CLUB OF BOSTON. 
 MASS.. MONDAY. 24TH FEBRUARY. 1890. 
 
 nOJ^eteftB, Remembering the hospitality of the free republic of Holland 
 so generously bestowed upon the Pilgrims, who, after twelve years resi- 
 dence in Amsterdam and Leyden, sailed from Delfshaven on a voyage 
 which was completed at Plymouth Rock, it is fitting that we, members of 
 Congregational Clubs throughout the L^nited States, should unite in grate- 
 ful recognition of Dutch hospitality, and at Delfshaven raise some durable 
 token of our appreciation of both hosts and guests, — calling upon all 
 Americans who honor alike the principles and the founders of the two 
 republics to join in the enterprise. Therefore be it 
 
 ^CBoftjeb, That the Club heartily approves of the erection of such a 
 commemorative monument, and that the Rev. William Elliot Griffis, 
 D.D., Mr. Hamilton A. Hill, Mr. William O. Grover,* the Rev. 
 Arthur Little, D.D., and Mr. Thomas Weston, be a committee in 
 behalf of this Club to act with full power in conjunction with committees 
 of other Congregational Clubs, and of any other appropriate organizations, 
 to obtain the necessary funds, and to secure the erection of such a 
 memorial. 
 
 Charle.s Carleton Coffin, 
 
 President. 
 
 (^ffeBf: 
 
 M. M. Cutter, 
 
 Secretary. 
 
 Send ail contributions to Mr. Frank Wood, 352 Washington Street, 
 Boston, Mass., and receipts will be sent. No money to be expended until 
 a national association is formed, but held in trust for the purpose. 
 
 *Mr. Grover being unable to serve, Mr. Krank AVood was appointed, Marcli 27th, 
 in his place. 
 
 UNlVEKSlTJf 01 UAi^iruKiv 
 AT
 
 Syrocuse, N. Y 
 Stockton, Calif 
 
 II III iiHii (III iiii II 11 nil II Hill mil „,„„ 
 
 3 1158 00662 4794
 
 U]