Article Defeat, Honour and the News: The Case of the Fall of Breda (1625) and the Dutch Republic Erik Swart Utrecht University, The Netherlands E European History Quarterly 2016, Vol. 46(1) 6-26 C The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0265691415620957 ehq.sagepub.com SSAGE Abstract The honour of the polity, closely tied to military success, was of great importance in seventeenth-century European international relations. This article provides an analysis of the importance of the honour of the polity in the early Dutch Republic - the late sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth-century - and the role of military success and failure as crucial matters in this. It also contributes to the debate about the position of the Republic, now no longer seen as an anomaly, in European relations. In existing research scant attention is paid to the role of military glory in this. A military defeat, the loss of Breda in 1625, functions as an analytical tool. Analysing the manner in which this defeat was dealt with enables an assessment of the importance of the Republic's honour in a 'national' and international context. Keywords Honour, international relations, military defeat, news Introduction 'The fall of Breda is very damaging to the reputation of our party ... ". This is how exile Hugo Grotius, residing in Paris in June 1625, judged the impact of the news of the loss of the city of Breda to the Habsburg enemy. It shows that contemporaries saw a clear link between reputation, an aspect or manifestation of honour, and military defeat. The honour appertaining to a seventeenth-century polity as a whole, particularly its role in European international relations, is a relatively neg- lected subject. This is striking, as honour, not a new phenomenon of course, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gradually became more important in relations between noblemen and between princes. The increasing number of conflicts Corresponding author: Erik Swart, Utrecht University, Drift 6, 3512 BS Utrecht, The Netherlands. Email: e.swart@uu.nl Downloaded fromehq.sagepub.conby guest on January 12, 2016
Swart 7 regarding rank and precedence is very apparent.2 This development raises ques- tions as to how republics fit into this. The United Provinces, usually referred to as the Dutch Republic, were the most important such polity. The notion that the Republic was a bourgeois polity, with a foreign policy aimed at only material, and particularly economic, advantages and not the honour and glory important in noble culture, has proven untenable.3 It is apparent that military success was important to all European polities, but just how important and what concrete impact victory or defeat might have on international relations is less clear. With this article I aim to demonstrate that the honour of the polity, formed and propped up by military success, was of great importance in seventeenth-century European international relations. I will focus on and analyse the importance of the honour of the polity in the early Dutch Republic - the late sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth-century - and the role of military