The assemblies of the estates were rather diplomatic than representative.  They consisted, generally, of the nobles and of the deputations from the cities.  In Holland, the clergy had neither influence nor seats in the parliamentary body.  Measures were proposed by the stadholder, who represented the sovereign.  A request, for example, of pecuniary, accommodation, was made by that functionary or by the count himself in person.  The nobles then voted upon the demand, generally as one body, but sometimes by heads.  The measure was then laid before the burghers.  If they had been specially commissioned to act upon the matter; they voted, each city as a city, not each deputy, individually.  If they had received no instructions, they took back the proposition to lay before the councils of their respective cities, in order to return a decision at an adjourned session, or at a subsequent diet.  It will be seen, therefore, that the principle of national, popular representation was but imperfectly developed.  The municipal deputies acted only under instructions.  Each city was a little independent state, suspicious not only of the sovereign and nobles, but of its sister cities.  This mutual jealousy hastened the general humiliation now impending.  The centre of the system waging daily more powerful, it more easily unsphered these feebler and mutually repulsive bodies.

Philip’s first step, upon assuming the government, was to issue a declaration, through the council of Holland, that the privileges and constitutions, which he had sworn to as Ruward, or guardian, during the period in which Jacqueline had still retained a nominal sovereignty, were to be considered null and void, unless afterwards confirmed by him as count.  At a single blow he thus severed the whole knot of pledges, oaths and other political complications, by which he had entangled himself during his cautious advance to power.  He was now untrammelled again.  As the conscience of the smooth usurper was, thenceforth, the measure of provincial liberty, his subjects soon found it meted to them more sparingly than they wished.  From this point, then, through the Burgundian period, and until the rise of the republic, the liberty of the Netherlands, notwithstanding several brilliant but brief laminations, occurring at irregular intervals, seemed to remain in almost perpetual eclipse.

The material prosperity of the country had, however, vastly increased.  The fisheries of Holland had become of enormous importance.  The invention of the humble Beukelzoon of Biervliet, had expanded into a mine of wealth.  The fisheries, too, were most useful as a nursery of seamen, and were already indicating Holland’s future naval supremacy.  The fishermen were the militia of the ocean, their prowess attested in the war with the Hanseatic cities, which the provinces of Holland and Zeland, in Philip’s name, but by their own unassisted exertions, carried on triumphantly at this epoch.  Then came into existence that race of cool and daring mariners, who, in after times, were to make the Dutch name illustrious throughout the world, the men, whose fierce descendants, the “beggars of the sea,” were to make the Spanish empire tremble, the men, whose later successors swept the seas with brooms at the mast-head, and whose ocean-battles with their equally fearless English brethren often lasted four uninterrupted days and nights.