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They had three daughters and four sons. That same year Grotius published a drama , Christus Patiens , that was to be widely imitated. In Grotius was appointed pensionary governor of Rotterdam, and led a delegation to England to protest the seizure of the cargoes of two Dutch ships on the seas near Greenland.
A political dispute arose in Holland between orthodox Calvinists and reformers over Arminianism.
Grotius, Oldenbarnevelt and other supporters of religious tolerance sided with the reformers or "Remonstrants" against Maurice, the Calvinist establishment and other "Contra-Remonstrants. In a purge of "Remonstrants" from the government, Oldenbarnevelt was executed, and Grotius and Hoogerbeets were sentenced to life imprisonment. Grotius had access to books and writing materials in prison, and was permitted to correspond with outsiders, but there was constant danger that the authorities might also decide to execute him.
In , with the help of his wife Maria, Grotius escaped by hiding himself in a large trunk which she sent to him, and having it carried out of the prison, pretending that it contained a large number of books. He fled to Antwerp and then to Paris, where his family joined him. The French authorities welcomed Grotius and awarded him an annual pension. The work quickly made him famous, and in he attempted to return to the Netherlands. Prince Maurice had died in , and Prince Frederick Henry of Orange intervened on his behalf, but Grotius was still threatened with arrest by the government.
He was offered the governor generalship of the Dutch East India Company in Asia, but the authorities moved against him, offering a large reward for his capture and forcing him to flee Holland in April , never to return. Grotius had achieved such a reputation internationally that in , the Swedish chancellor, Count A. Oxenstierna, offered him the position of Swedish ambassador in Paris.
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Grotius accepted and wrote a drama in honor of the count, Sophompaneas , relating the fortunes of the biblical Joseph as minister at the Egyptian court. Grotius served, with mixed success, for ten years as ambassador for Sweden, which was then a major European political power. He helped negotiate a treaty which eventually ended the Thirty Years' War, but at one point he made a misstep which required the Swedish chancellor to come to Paris and intervene personally. During this time, Grotius became increasingly concerned with the task of achieving Christian unity among the various Protestant factions and the Catholics.
Intellectually, the effort to unite Christianity raised many philosophical and theological questions, and politically Grotius was in a position to exert influence in Europe. He wrote some interesting works on theology, many of which were collected in his Opera Omnia Theologica. After Queen Christina ascended the Swedish throne in , she began to dismantle the political structure of her rival Oxenstierna. She relieved Grotius of his ambassadorship and called him to Stockholm to assume a different position.
Reluctantly, he set sail in March of His ship was wrecked in the Baltic and he barely escaped with his life. After a few months in Sweden, though he was received there with great honor, he decided to return to Germany. Weather conditions were poor; the normally short journey took eight days and Grotius died of exhaustion two days later in Rostock, Germany, on August 28, His last words are said to have been, "By attempting many things, I have accomplished nothing. Grotius was a philosopher , a legal scholar, a theologian, a poet , a dramatist , a philologist and a prolific writer and editor.
It is said that he later regretted that he had chosen a career in law instead of in literature. He never stopped writing, even while carrying out the legal, political and administrative responsibilities to which he had been appointed.
Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty
As a poet and philologist, Grotius edited, with a commentary, Martianus Capella's handbook of the seven liberal arts , the Phaenomena , a work on astronomy by the third century B. Greek Aratus of Soli; he also collaborated with the humanist Daniel Heinsius on a Latin translation of the Greek bucolic poet Theocritus. The drama was widely read and imitated, and was admired by the English poet John Milton.
In he again edited a Roman author, Lucanus. He defended his position in the Dutch religious conflict in Apologeticus eorum qui Hollandiae Westfrisiaeque et vicinis quibusdam nationibus ex legibus praefuerunt. His voyage to the East Indies was supposed to be a peaceful trading venture. The directors of the United Amsterdam Company had explicitly prohibited the use of force, except in cases of self-defense or for the reparation of any damages sustained.
Even if the Dutch Admiralty Board had authorized him to attack Portuguese shipping, the validity of such a privateering commission would have been highly questionable in international law. The northern Netherlands were in a state of rebellion against their rightful overlord, the king of Spain and Portugal, and achieved de jure independence only in Grotius did not produce any significant legal scholarship prior to the writing of De Jure Praedae.
He had been trained in the liberal arts at the University of Leiden, where he was tutored in classical rhetoric, philology, and philosophy by the likes of Joseph Justus Scaliger, the greatest Protestant intellectual of his generation. Born into a patrician family in the town of Delft, Grotius could not pursue the studia humanitatis to the exclusion of more practical considerations. In the latter capacity, he became a member of the provincial government, the Estates of Holland, and, in , of the Estates General, the federal government of the Dutch Republic.
He was put on trial for sedition in and banned to the castle of Loevestein. Two years of reflection and study at Loevestein turned Grotius into the finest legal scholar of his age. He died in the German port of Rostock at the age of sixty-two, an embittered exile and, like so many of his countrymen, the hapless victim of a shipwreck. The Holland and Zeeland overseas trading companies, including the United Amsterdam Company, had merged in March to form the VOC, which enjoyed a government- sanctioned monopoly of Dutch trade with the East Indies.
The directors realized, however, that it would take more than a verdict to win widespread support for their cause, both in domestic and international politics. It was imperative to placate Henry IV of France and James I of England, for example, who had recently made peace with the king of Spain and Portugal, but who might be induced to back the Dutch diplomatically over their attacks on the Iberian colonial empire.
Document V in appendix II. Instead, he was eager to comply with the criteria of forensic rhetoric as defined by the orators of ancient Rome. Like Cicero and Quintilian, he considered it sufficient to present some, but not all, of the facts of the case. Yet he carefully refrained from any kind of willful distortion of the evidence at hand. In lawyerlike fashion, he decided to furnish material proof of Portuguese culpability in order to win his case in the court of public opinion.
English translations are included in appendix I below. The first half of the manuscript contains the introduction, followed by nine chapters of legal principles, the so-called Dogmatica de JurePraedae. The sovereign, free 4. Yet Grotius should not be considered a proponent of democratic government and inalienable individual rights in a twenty-first- century sense of the word. He argued, for example, that human beings could become slaves of their own volition, in which case their total subjection to the will of others constituted a valid contract. He boldly argued in chapter thirteen of De Jure Praedae that Van Heemskerck had acted as the agent of a sovereign and independent Dutch state, which could order indiscriminate attacks on Iberian shipping as part of its public war against Philip III of Spain and Portugal.
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Yet his argument in chapter twelve of De Jure Praedae was more radical still: Granted that the United Provinces had an ambiguous status in international politics, its inhabitants were nonetheless entitled to freedom of trade and navigation, a right innate to all free peoples, which they could enforce themselves in the absence of an independent and effective judge. Since the right to self-defense made private individuals judges and executioners in their own cause, a company of merchants like the VOC must, under certain circumstances, also qualify as a full-fledged actor in international politics.
When confronted by Portuguese harassment and intimidation, the VOC had every right to take up arms in order to safeguard its trade with Asian princes and peoples. Civil magistrates could not be expected to call the Portuguese to account on the high seas, or in countries where judicial systems were either weak or nonexistent.
Hence it fell to the VOC to enforce freedom of trade and navigation in the East Indies and to punish Portuguese transgressions of the natural law by means of a just war. Once it was established that Van Heemskerck had engaged in a just war, Grotius could simply cite the law of war to show that he was entitled to reparations for injuries sustained by himself, his employers, and the Dutch Republic. Grotius admitted that the Portuguese had never harmed Van Heemskerck in his own person or made any attempts on his crew, cargo, and fleet. Yet chapter eleven of De JurePraedae was proof that Portuguese harassment and intimidation of the natives had materially damaged Dutch prospects for trade in Monsoon Asia.
If the dismal fate of Ambon and Ternate was not sufficient reason to engage the Estado da India, the execution of seventeen Dutch sailors in the Portuguese port of Macao in November should certainly qualify as a casus belli. They had committed no crime except to unwittingly enter the harbor of Macao. Their execution was a blatant injustice, which Van Heemskerck could not ignore in his capacity as agent of the Dutch government and servant of the United Amsterdam Company. Predictably, Grotius concluded that his capture of the Santa Catarina had been justified in order to obtain damages on behalf of his employer and the Dutch Estates General.
They show that Van Heemskerck had already interpreted his commission as authorizing the use of force for the purpose of safeguarding Dutch trade in the East Indies and obtaining damages for the United Amsterdam Company. Yet it was Grotius who turned this hotchpotch of legal grounds into a seamless whole by means of a radical redefinition of natural law and natural rights. Grotius must have realized that it was not opportune to publish a defense of Dutch privateering in the East Indies on the eve of peace and truce negotiations between the United Provinces and Philip III of Spain and Portugal.
Yet he continued to feel a strong commitment to the VOC. In March , he drafted a petition for the VOC directors, for example, wherein he asked the Dutch Estates General to forgo its legal share of all booty taken in the East Indies 20 percent out of consideration for the great expenses incurred by the com5. When the Dutch East Indies trade became a topic of discussion at the Ibero-Dutch peace conference in The Hague in February , Grotius provided the VOC directors with a road map for the negotiations and correctly predicted that the privateering war would continue in the East Indies, regardless of whether a treaty should be concluded in Europe.
Document X of appendix II. Hugo Grotius, The Free Sea, trans. Hugo Grotius to N. Martinus Nijhoff, , The manuscript was purchased by Leiden University Library. Other books in this series. Treatise of the Laws of Nature Richard Cumberland. Vindiciae Gallicae James Mackintosh. Written to justify the capture by the Dutch of a Portuguese merchant ship in the Strait of Singapore, the book eventually entered the approved corpus of international mercantile law regarding the expanding empires of European commerce.
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Grotius' Latin manuscript was not transcribed and published until H. Hamaker brought it out in after it had been found among Grotius papers sold at auction in Now it appears with some newly discovered material in appendices.
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