town, so that they fell into Alva's hands. They contained a definite promise from the Duke of Orange to flood the country so as to drown the whole Spanish army. Incidentally this would also have drowned most of the Dutch harvest and cattle. But Alva, when he had read these documents, did not wait for the opening of any more sluices. Presently the stout men of Alkmaar, cheering and jeering, watched the Spaniards breaking camp....
The form assumed by the government of Holland was a patrician republic under the headship of the house of Orange. The States-General was far less representative of the whole body of citizens than was the English Parliament even in its "Venetian" days. Though the worst of the struggle was over after Alkmaar, Holland was not effectively independent until 1609, and its independence was only fully and completely recognized by the treaty of Westphalia in 1648. We have given this account of the origin of free Holland after our account of the English revolution because it was less representative of the essential triangle of forces in the developing modern state, and because it was complicated by the merely patriotic element of insurrection against the Spanish foreigner. But though we have told of it later, the reader must remember it came to its climax in the time of Queen Elizabeth of England, half a century earlier than the English civil war. As Motley says, the Dutch, the English, and the American revolution, of which latter we have presently to tell, "form but a single chapter in the great volume of human fate."
§ 4
Upon no part of Europe did the collapse of the idea of a unified Christendom bring more disastrous consequences than to Germany. Naturally one would have supposed that the Emperor, being by origin a German, both in the case of the earlier lines and in the case of the Habsburgs, would have developed into the national monarch of a united German-speaking state. It was the accidental misfortune of Germany that her Emperors never remained German. Frederick II, the last Hohenstaufen, was, as we have seen, a half-Orientalized Sicilian; the Habsburgs, by marriage and inclination, became in the person of Charles V,
