In Leiden, the memory of the Eighty Years' War seems more vivid than anywhere else. Every year, the city celebrates the Relief of Leiden on October 3, 1574. The city started that tradition right away that year. The core of the party was and is fraternization between all Leiden residents. This while before and during the siege, Leiden was deeply divided between supporters and opponents of the Revolt. How did the citizens overcome those divisions?
In 1946 Winston Churchill advocated an 'act of oblivion', an agreement to forget the war past. After Germany was disarmed and the culprits punished, it was necessary to turn their backs on the past in order to achieve lasting peace. His proposal doesn't fit in with the current age of truth commissions, where an extensive discussion of the past should help digest, but it stood in a long tradition where forgotten was standard policy. In late medieval and early modern Europe, such an arrangement was the rule rather than the exception after civil wars.
During the Eighty Years' War (1568-1648) we come across this, for example, in the Pacification of Ghent in 1576. Then the rebellious provinces of Holland and Zeeland agreed with the other Dutch provinces that all offenses and crimes should be done in the troublen among the natives of the provinces (…) will be forgiven, forgotten and kept as not done'.
The same phrases can be found in the treaties with which the Duke of Parma sealed the surrender of the rebellious cities in Flanders and Brabant in the 1580s. It was also agreed in the Peace of Münster of 1648 that the past would be forgotten. What was the point of such provisions?
In the first place, it was a general amnesty. In the Dutch Revolt this meant that both the rebels and their opponents were exempt from further persecution. No one would be held accountable for the crimes and violations of the laws of war committed on both sides since 1566, not only by the soldiers, but also by civilians among themselves.
In the second place, it helped to end the endless discussions and lawsuits about the possessions that had changed hands in the course of the war. But the forget clauses went further. They also called for forgetting the past and treating it as if it hadn't existed.
Collector item
Historians have been wondering for some time what exactly early modern policymakers intended by this. How were they going to enforce such an agreement? And how much of that forgetting came to be? If we look at the exuberant commemorative culture that already arose in the seventeenth-century Republic around the Rebellion, the forgetful appointment from the Pacification seems at first sight to have had no effect whatsoever. Leiden, for example, immediately decided after the relief of the city in 1574 to commemorate this yearly, with a church service, a shooting parade and soon also with an annual market.
The Pacification of Ghent did not put an end to this. On the contrary, history books, church windows, songs and commemorative medals commemorated the siege. There were inscriptions in public places and plays performed annually. In the town hall hung a tapestry and paintings with the siege and relief as subjects. The emergency money minted during the siege was so popular as a collector's item that as early as 1,600 counterfeits were circulating. Leiden therefore remained very busy with its war past.
Breaking the spiral of violence
But if forgetting was a sham, what was the point of including forgetting clauses in peace treaties? According to a recent political science insight, this was not so much a question of erasing the past, but of deactivating it:no one should be allowed to rely on events from the past to justify actions in the present. In this way, living, active memory is accelerated and 'made into history'.
Above all, the forget clauses were intended to break the spiral of violence that is characteristic of civil wars. The Eighty Years' War began as such a civil war. William of Orange was a hero to some Dutchmen, but to others a terrorist and a war criminal. The decision of a number of Dutch towns in July 1572 to support the Prince was, according to other towns, totally illegal. In their view, the 'first Free States Assembly' had no more legitimacy than we attribute to the Donetsk People's Republic in 2015.
That is why the beggars did not always receive support. Not only did Amsterdam have nothing to do with the Revolt, the rebels also often encountered resistance in the countryside. What was patriotic to one, another considered treason. In addition, the Dutch of all walks of life did things in war conditions that disadvantaged other Dutch people or even cost their lives. And as the war went on, there were more and more scores to settle.
Leiden intensely divided
Take Leiden. The city had joined the Revolt in 1572 against the wishes of part of the city council and the bourgeoisie. A number of these dissident citizens, the so-called Glippers, then fled the city – they remained loyal to the Habsburg ruler, King Philip II. Their homes were soon confiscated. Most were assigned to residents of Leiden who had previously had to flee because they were wanted by the Council of Beroerten, the court set up by the Duke of Alva to try those responsible for the Iconoclasm of 1566. Their possessions in the city had been confiscated by this “blood thread” at the time. When Leiden sided with the Prince of Orange in 1572, these exiles were allowed to go home, but they did not get their property back. Many of them now moved into the confiscated houses of gliders.
The new city government also did little to protect the churches and keep Catholic priests free from beggar violence. In 1573 it decided to ban Catholic worship; Church property was confiscated. All this again caused an exodus of refugees to the still royalist Amsterdam and other cities where Catholics could openly profess their faith. Leiden was then besieged twice by royal troops. During the second siege, several riots broke out against the city council, which did not want to stop fighting despite the hardships. In the meantime, the city council itself was also intensely divided.
By the time the city was relieved, on October 3, 1574, nearly half of all Leiden residents had died. Part of the bourgeoisie still remained outside the city, furious about the expropriations and the forced reformation. But also for the survivors within the city there was a legacy of loss, division and bitterness. It wasn't just gone. A refugee Leiden beguine who ventured back after the relief was stripped of her clothes and led through the city, booed as a traitor and then expelled from the city without being allowed to see her family and fellow sisters.
Overwrite the past
How was it to be reconciled here? Could there really be forgotten here? And why did the city keep reminiscing about the siege? If we look at it through the lens of the deactivation strategy, however, the forget clauses in Leiden may have worked after all. The Pacification meant that the Leiden gliders could come back. They got their property back on condition that they swear an oath of obedience. 81 men and women did this. The forgetting policy meant that neither they nor those who had survived the siege were allowed to hold each other accountable for what had happened.
We do not know whether the Leiden residents adhered to this. The city council couldn't control that, and whether neighbors were gossiping or arguing about their past disputes is hard to find in the administrative records. However, it is known from modern psychological research that memories are not stable; they change under the influence of time and the images of the past that are propagated around us.
It seems that the people of Leiden have successfully deactivated the legacy of division by 'overwriting' it with a new version of the past. We hardly see anything anymore of the resentment, division and bitterness in the remembrance culture that developed in Leiden after 1576.
Unity against Spain
In this city a version of the war past was commemorated in which Leiden residents were never perpetrators but only victims. Violence in this story did not come from fellow citizens or from beggars, but exclusively from the 'Spanish' enemy. Most of the deaths had been caused by the contagious diseases that had hit the city during the siege, but in the memory now especially the hunger symbolized the victimhood of the people of Leiden.
All Leiden residents, young and old, rich and poor, Catholic and Protestant, shared in that victimhood, which again offered a nice contrast to the 'miraculous feeding' with loaves and fish, or the herring and white bread that the beggars relieved after the had distributed. That in 1572 the same beggars had looted churches, terrorized nuns, fought Catholics who wanted to prevent them from setting fire to the beguinage, murdered two local priests in cold blood and executed the Delft priest Cornelius Musius after terrible torture, didn't tell the story anymore.
Not everyone agreed. In Catholic memory, the fate of the martyr Musius remained very much alive. In his memoirs, the Catholic war child Frans van Dusseldorp in the seventeenth century looked back with bitterness. But others grabbed the new version of the story with both hands. Pieter van Veen, son of a glider, gave the city a copy of a painting of the entry of the beggars that his brother Otto had made. It indicates that a family with a Glipper background also felt safe with the rewritten past. The new version would therefore dominate in the collective, public memory. And it stayed that way. It is still proclaimed every year on October 3, the anniversary of the relief.