This volume presents five texts which were published in the Low Countries between 1570 and 1590, during the crucial decades of what is nowadays labelled, with understatement, the ‘Dutch Revolt’. From 1555 a series of revolutionary events led to the abjuration of Philip II by the States General of the Dutch provinces in 1581 and to the subsequent foundation of the ‘Dutch Republic of the Seven United Provinces’, one of the great powers of the seventeenth century.

Despite the general recognition that the rise of the Dutch Republic was of major political, cultural and economic importance for the course of European history, historians have tended to neglect the political thought of the Dutch Revolt. However, as more than 2,000 publications (published between 1555 and 1590) exemplify, the political debate of the Revolt was not only immense, but also comprehensive and, above all, passionate. The purpose of this volume is to make some of the most important texts of the Revolt available in a modern edition.

The first major issue which the protagonists of the Revolt had to confront was how to justify first the protest and resistance against the government of Philip II and eventually his abjuration by the States General. Closely related to the reflections on the limits of political obedience and the justice of political resistance was a fundamental debate on the true and desirable character of the Dutch political order.

On a late October afternoon in 1555, the political elite of the Low Countries gathered in the Great Hall of the Ducal Palace in Brussels. The principal nobles, clergymen and representatives of the major towns in the Netherlands had come to bid farewell to Charles V. The Emperor, a native of Ghent, answered for his life and deeds and renounced an impressive number of titles in favour of his son Philip. It was a ceremony of both grandeur and disillusionment. For although Charles seemed a broken man, the very fact that his son inherited all titles covering the ‘Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands’ as they were known – such as Duke of Brabant, Duke of Guelders, Count of Flanders, Count of Holland and Lord of Friesland – could be seen as the crown on the policy of centralization of the Burgundian – Habsburg dynasty in the Low Countries. After the formal unification of the Low Countries, which in 1549 had been declared ‘one and unbreakable’ by ‘pragmatic sanction’, Philip was the first, and, one should add, the last to govern the Low Countries as a whole.

The new sovereign was probably the sole dissonant in the political theatre played out in Brussels on that October day. As Philip did not speak Dutch, Antoine Perrenot, Bishop of Arras, had to answer for his lord. In a memorable speech he pointed out that it was natural for the prince to protect and uphold the liberty of the country.

This fundamental ground is our preference of doing to thinking. Now this preference is a main element in our nature, and as we study it we find ourselves opening up a number of large questions on every side.

Let me go back for a moment to Bishop Wilson, who says: “First, never go against the best light you have; secondly, take care that your light be not darkness.” We show, as a nation, laudable energy and persistence in walking according to the best light we have, but are not quite careful enough, perhaps, to see that our light be not darkness. This is only another version of the old story that energy is our strong point and favourable characteristic, rather than intelligence. But we may give to this idea a more general form still, in which it will have a yet larger range of application. We may regard this energy driving at practice, this paramount sense of the obligation of duty, self-control, and work, this earnestness in going manfully with the best light we have, as one force. And we may regard the intelligence driving at those ideas which are, after all, the basis of right practice, the ardent sense for all the new and changing combinations of them which man's development brings with it, the indomitable impulse to know and adjust them perfectly, as another force.

From a man without a philosophy no one can expect philosophical completeness. Therefore I may observe without shame, that in trying to get a distinct notion of our aristocratic, our middle, and our working class, with a view of testing the claims of each of these classes to become a centre of authority, I have omitted, I find, to complete the old-fashioned analysis which I had the fancy of applying, and have not shown in these classes, as well as the virtuous mean and the excess, the defect also. I do not know that the omission very much matters. Still, as clearness is the one merit which a plain, unsystematic writer, without a philosophy, can hope to have, and as our notion of the three great English classes may perhaps be made clearer if we see their distinctive qualities in the defect, as well as in the excess and in the mean, let us try, before proceeding further, to remedy this omission.

It is manifest, if the perfect and virtuous mean of that fine spirit which is the distinctive quality of aristocracies, is to be found in a high, chivalrous style, and its excess in a fierce turn for resistance, that its defect must lie in a spirit not bold and high enough, and in an excessive and pusillanimous unaptness for resistance.

Matthew Arnold is not primarily read or remembered for his contribution to the history of what has come to be known as ‘political thought’, and at first sight it may seem surprising to find him in such company. ‘Literary critic’ is the label most readily applied to him today; certainly, he did more than any other single figure to endow the role of the critic with the cultural centrality it has come to enjoy in the English-speaking world. At the same time, his poetry, including such frequently anthologized pieces as ‘Dover Beach’ and ‘The Scholar-Gypsy’, has earned him a secure place in the canon of English literature. He also wrote extensively and influentially on religion and education, among other topics, and at his death in 1888 he was recognized as the leading man-of-letters in Victorian Britain. Nonetheless, his best-known work, Culture and Anarchy, first published in 1869, has left a lasting impress upon subsequent debate about the relation between politics and culture, not least by provoking vigorous disagreement, and this book and the selection of his other writings included here reveal him to have been a social critic and political commentator of rare power and persuasiveness.

Culture and Anarchy, which may be one of the most frequently cited non-fiction prose works in the English language, is hard to classify in terms of modern academic disciplines.

My foremost design in writing this Preface is to address a word of exhortation to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. In the essay which follows, the reader will often find Bishop Wilson quoted. To me and to the members of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge his name and writings are still, no doubt, familiar. But the world is fast going away from old-fashioned people of his sort, and I learnt with consternation lately from a brilliant and distinguished votary of the natural sciences, that he had never so much as heard of Bishop Wilson, and that he imagined me to have invented him. At a moment when the Courts of Law have just taken off the embargo from the recreative religion furnished on Sundays by my gifted acquaintance and others, and when St. Martin's Hall and the Alhambra will soon be beginning again to resound with their pulpiteloquence, it distresses one to think that the new lights should not only have, in general, a very low opinion of the preachers of the old religion, but that they should have it without knowing the best that these preachers can do. And that they are in this case is owing in part, certainly, to the negligence of the Christian Knowledge Society. In the old times they used to print and spread abroad Bishop Wilson's Maxims of Piety and Christianity.