History of the United Netherlands from the Death of William the Silent to the Twelve Year's Truce, 1607b

This is history written the way it used to be: sprawling, ornate, and unapologetically immersed in the grand narratives of nations and dynasties. John Lothrop Motley, whose multivolume history of the Dutch struggle for independence won the Pulitzer a century before such things were common, turns his considerable gifts to the delicate negotiations and brutal military campaigns that brought the United Provinces to the brink of lasting peace with the Spanish Empire. The year is 1607. The Dutch have survived decades of war, but exhaustion and the desperate mathematics of imperial power now shape possibilities that seemed impossible before. Here are the diplomats toasting over wine while armies winter in different camps, the Marquis Spinola calculating whether he can buy peace with gold or must purchase it with blood, and Prince Maurice of Nassau weighing the fates of provinces against the pride of kings. Motley's prose carries the weight of Victorian confidence in the drama of history, in the notion that nations, like people, have destinies written in their courage or their cowardice. For readers who find modern historiography too restrained, too concerned with structures over stories, this is a portal to an older way of thinking about the past: as theater, as moral instruction, as the forging of the modern world.