Holland and
Zeeland, behind their moats, made them the natural refuge of a hunted
sect and, this tendency once having asserted itself, the polarization
of the Netherlands naturally followed, Protestants being drawn and
driven to their friends in the North and Catholics similarly finding it
necessary or advisable to settle in the South. Moreover in the
Southern provinces the two privileged classes, clergy and nobility,
were relatively stronger than in the almost entirely bourgeois and
commercial North. And the influence of both was thrown into the scale
of the Roman church, the first promptly and as a matter of course, the
second eventually as a reaction from the strongly democratic tendency
of Calvinism. In some of the Southern cities there ensued at this time
a desperate struggle between the Protestant democracy and the Catholic
aristocracy. The few Protestants of gentle birth in the Walloon
provinces felt ill at ease in company with their Dutch co-religionists
and were called by them "Malcontents" because they looked askance at
the political principles of the North.

[Sidenote: January 1579]

The separatist tendencies on both sides crystallized as some of the
Southern provinces signed a league at {272} Arras on January 5 for the
protection of the Catholic religion. On the 29th this was answered by
the Union of Utrecht, signed by the representatives of Holland,
Zeeland, Utrecht, Friesland, Guelders, Zutphen, and the city of Ghent,
binding the said provinces to resist all foreign tyranny. Complete
freedom of worship was granted, a matter of importance as the Catholic
minority was, and has always remained, large. By this act a new state
was born. Orange still continued to labor for union with the Southern
provinces, but he failed. A bitter religious war broke out in the
cities of the South. At Ghent the churches were plundered anew.
[Sidenote: 1581] At Brussels and Antwerp the Protestant proletariat
won a temporary ascendancy and Catholic worship was forbidden in both
cities. A general emigration from them ensued. Under the stress of
the religious war which was also a class war, the last vestiges of
union perished. The States General ceased to have power to raise taxes
or enforce decrees, and presently it was no more regarded.

Even William of Orange now abandoned his show of respect for the
monarch and became wholly the champion of liberty and of the people.
[Sidenote: 1580] The States General recogniz