In a certain sense, yes, and in a certain sense, no. This has been a point of contention from the time of the revolt itself: whether it was a revolt primarily for religion or one for political independence. There have been sharp debates over this question right up to the present.
Mainstream Dutch historiography has classically been divided into two currents, which were connected to two main stories that the nation has told about itself since the nineteenth century. One conservative version of historiography claimed that this was a revolt for religion. That was the point of view of Protestant historians.
On the other hand, there were historians who were often equally conservative and nationalist but who said, “no, the prime mover was liberty.” “Liberty” in this sense has a complicated, Janus-faced aspect to it. When sixteenth-century people referred to liberty, they meant autonomy or something very particularist. They were referring to “our ancient freedoms” — the privileges of a city that granted it certain freedoms against the nobility or against a monarch. That was certainly an important element in the revolt.
However, liberty can also mean the liberty of the nation against a foreign power — in this case, Spain. This became a very important perspective for nineteenth-century nationalists who said, “here is a revolt fought for freedom that is the basis of our nation.” But at the start of the revolt, no one expected an independent nation to be the outcome, and no one would have defined freedom in that sense. When you interpret the term “liberty” as referring to national independence, that is anachronistic.
There have only been a handful of radical historians of the Dutch Revolt who, in the fashion of much twentieth-century Marxist historiography, claimed that the prime mover was economic. They argued that it broke out as a lower-class revolt driven by high grain prices and acute hunger. That was the thesis of Erich Kuttner,…
Auteur: Pepijn Brandon
