MARNIX, PHILIPS VAN.
Early Career (§1). Diplomat and Soldier (§ 2). Decline of Power (§ 3).
Theological Position and Bible
Translation (§ 4). Other Works (§ 5).
Philips van Marnix, Baron Sainte-Aldegonde, renowned as a Dutch Protestant theologian and statesman, was born at Brussels in 1538 and died at Leyden Dec. 15, 1598. After receiving a thorough education, he resided for a time in Geneva, where he formed a friendship with Calvin and Beza. Returning to his native country between 1560 and 1562, he lived for a time in retirement, from which he was summoned to the struggle to free the Netherlands from Rome and Spain. Here i. Early his first activity was the preparation Career, of the " Compromise " by which the Dutch nobles pledged themselves to resist the introduction of the Inquisition, while the petition to the Regent Margaret of Parma (Apr. 5, 1566) on the same subject was also written by him. He defended the iconoclastic riots in Antwerp in Aug., 1566, in his Van de beelden afgheworpen in de Nederlanden in Augusto 1566 and Vraye narration et apologie des choses passees au Pays-Bas. Before long he also took up arms in the cause of the Reformation, but, with his brother and Brederode, was repulsed at Austruweel (Mar. 13, 1567) in an attempt to raise the siege of Valenciennes, and fled successively to Breda and Germany. He was banished by the " Council of Blood," Aug. 17, 1568, and his estates were confiscated; but in this exile he became the life-long friend of William the Silent, in whose honor he wrote late in 1568 or early in 1569 the famous " William's Lay," a poem which is still a favorite folk-song in Holland. Meanwhile he had entered the service of the Reformed electorpalatine, Frederick III., and at Heidelberg he wrote on Christology and the Eucharist, besides composing his De bienkorf der heilige roomsche
RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Marlorat du Pasquier Marnix
kercke (Emden, 1569) and attending the convention at Wesel (Nov., 1568) and the synod at Emden (Oct. 4-14, 1571).
Holland soon claimed the services of Marnix, whose principal political activity was exercised between 1572 and 1585. In the former year he was the plenipotentiary of William and secured the promise of the Estates to renew the war with Spain. On Nov. 4, 1573, however, he was
2. Diplomat himself captured by the Spaniards at
and Maaslandssluis. He was taken first to Soldier. The Hague and then to Utrecht, where he was induced to make vain negotiations for peace. He was exchanged on Oct. 15, 1574, and from March to June of the following year he acted as William's deputy at the fruitless conferences at Breda. Holland and Zeeland declared themselves independent of Spain and offered the crown, under certain conditions, to Elizabeth of England, Marnix being the head of the embassy which remained in England from Christmas, 1575, to Apr., 1576, in a vain endeavor to persuade Elizabeth to become the sovereign of the Dutch. In the latter year, moreover, he was a leader in the " Pacification of Ghent." Don John of Austria, the Spanish viceroy, who carried through the " Eternal Treaty " (Feb. 17, 1577), recognizing in Marnix a dangerous enemy of Roman Catholicism, now unsuccessfully demanded his expulsion from Brussels. The Spanish attack on the citadel of Namur (July 24, 1577) roused the Dutch to a sense of their situation. Don John was retired from his office on Dec. 7, and three days later the second Brussels union was concluded for mutual protection and toleration. Marnix, as privy councilor after Dec. 29, 1577, first put down the revolts in Groningen and Artois, and, at the Diet of Worms (May 7, 1578), secured German neutrality in the Dutch struggle with Spain.
At this juncture, Marnix and William were attacked in an anonymous pamphlet, to which the former replied in his Response apologelique (see below, § 4) which is particularly interesting for its numerous details of his own life. After
3. Decline a fruitless visit to the Diet of Cologne of Power, in 1580, he entered upon the more hopeful endeavor to induce Duke Francis
of Alencon-Anjou, the youngest son of Catharine de' Medici, to accept the throne of the revolted Dutch provinces. At the head of an embassy sent to France for this purpose, he reached Plessis (near Tours) on Sept. 9, 1580, and ten days later the treaty of Plessis-lez-Tours was signed, in which Marnix ably defended the civil and religious liberties of the Dutch. He remained in France until Mar. 8, 1581, and on July 22 of the same year Philip was declared deposed in favor of Francis, Marnix himself preparing the act (Acte de descheance de Philippe II. de so seigneurie des Pays-Bas). In November he went to England, where Francis was paying court to Elizabeth, and on Feb. 19, 1582, he returned with the new ruler. Francis, however, madly attempted (Jan. 15-17, 1583) to seize Antwerp and the most important cities by treason or a coup d'itat. He was defeated and forced to leave the Netherlands, while Marnix and William,
as his allies, were exposed to such suspicion that the former retired to his estates in West-Souburg, near Flushing. He was called from this seclusion to become first burgomaster in Antwerp, Nov. 30,
1584. A few days later the siege of the city by Alexander of Parma began, ending on Aug. 17,
1585, by its honorable surrender, though without recognition of Protestantism. A storm of indignation broke over Marnix, who defended his surrender of the city in his Bref ricit de Vestat de la ville d'Anvers du temps de I'assiegement. But his political activity was at an end, although he visited England in 1590, France in 1591, and Orange in 1597. He resided at West-Souburg until 1596, when he removed to Leyden.
Theologically Marnix was an enthusiastic partizan of Calvin and Beza, and in this spirit he secured the rejection of the Wittenberg
4. Theo- Concord at the Synod of Antwerp logical Po- (Aug. 20, 1566). He was also instrusition and mental in securing a Calvinistic Pres-
Bible byterian organization, culminating in Translation, a general synod, for the exiled congregations of his coreligionists. Here, too, belong his polemics against the fanatics and Anabaptists, exemplified in his Ondersoeckinge ende grondelijcke wederlegginge der geestdrijvische leere, written in 1595. This was followed by a series of other polemics, the most important being the Response apologetique o un libette fameux (Leyden, 1598), a reply to an anonymous attack by Emmery de Lyere. He was a stern opponent, moreover, of all revelation of God alleged to exist outside the Bible and creation, and was a genuine Calvinist in his assertion that the secular arm had authority to suppress religious error. He was active as a translator of the Bible and the Psalms. After ten or twelve years of labor, he issued a rimed version of the latter (Antwerp, 1580), but this, though the subject of many debates in the synods, never gained a place in the liturgy, despite its scholarly and literary merits. Like previous Dutch versions of the Psalms, the early Dutch translation of the Bible was essentially faulty, and in 1578 the Synod of Dort deputed Marnix and Dathen to seek suitable revisers. The commission was never executed, but Marnix had already begun to translate the Psalms and some of the Minor Prophets, when, in 1586, the Synod of The Hague made unsuccessful overtures to him for an entire new translation. It was not, however, until 1594, when he was formally requested by the States General to perform this task, that he consented, but he lived to complete only the Psalms and Genesis, though he left fragments of Exodus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Daniel, and other books (see Bible Vkrsions, B, III.).
His most important contribution to theology
was the Bienkorf already mentioned. It is a biting
satire on the Roman Catholic Church, written by
a supposed adherent of that commu-
5. Other nion, and ridiculing all its arguments Works, against Protestantism. The book,
which is clearly modelled on the Epistolw obscurorum virorum (q.v.), has won for Marnix a place among the great satirists of all time. The work ran through more than twenty editions (the
Maronites