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Hugo Grotius, 1583-1645.
Hugo Grotius (Huigh De Groot) was a Dutch legal scholar, philosopher playwright and poet.
Huigh de Groot (Grotius) was to a well-to-do Calvinist family in Delft, in the Province of Holland, part of the United Provinces of the Netherlands. His family were leading citizens inside Delft, and well-connected outside of it. Showing an early aptitude for scholarship (sometimes characterized as a child prodigy), at the age of eleven, Grotius enrolled at the University of Leiden in 1594, studying classics and law, and received his degree in 1598. Family connections secured him a position in a Dutch embassy led by Johann von Oldenbarnevelt, the grand pensionary of Holland, to France in 1598. There, the young Grotious personally met the recently-installed Bourbon king Henry IV of France. During his sojourn, Grotius received a (honorary) doctorate from the University of Orleans in 1599.
Upon returning to the Netherlands, Grotius set aside any academic aspirations and, following family expectations, set upon a legal career, registering as an advocate in the Hague. It was a stepping stone to a future political career, under the patronage of Oldenbarnevelt. In 1601, the Estates-General of the Netherlands commissioned Grotius to write an official history of the revolt of the Netherlands from Spanish rule.
Grotius's interest in international law came as a result of the Dutch overseas expansion. Throughout the 16th Century, overseas trade to Americas, Africa and Asia had been largely exclusive to the Spanish and Portuguese empires. But the discovery and publication of the details of the Portuguese India trade by Dutch spies broke that old monopoly. In 1598, a slew of Dutch trading companies (voorcompagnie) were set up and launched fleet after fleet to Asia to break into Asian markets and pick at the decrepit Portuguese positions. The companies eventually congealed into the united East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, VOC) in 1602 Things reached a head in early 1603, when the Dutch VOC captain Jacob van Heemskerk captured the Santa Catarina, a richly-laden Portuguese carrack anchored off Singapore, seizing a fortune in Sino-Japanese wares that nearly doubled the capital of the fledgling company. This kicked off a discussion in Holland, as some shareholders had qualms about keeping the prize. Grotius entered the debate with his 1604 Commentary on the law of bounties and prizes, and more generally, on the law of the seas. Although the general work would remain unpublished until 1868, the extract specifically related to the laws of the seas was published as an anonymous separate tract in 1609. The Portuguese and Spanish authorities had replied to Dutch encroachment with the legal assertion that the oceans were their sovereign territory. Contrary to the "closed seas" (Mare clausum) doctrine of the Iberian powers, Grotius asserted a "free seas" (Mare liberum) doctrine, claiming no nation had the right of sovereignty over the oceans, that the high seas were open to navigation by everyone.
Grotius's career star continued to rise. He was appointed attorney-general of Holland in 1607, got married into an influential family 1608 and published a well-received poem on the passion of Christ that same year. In 1610, Grotius composed a somewhat propagandist tract, claiming to find evidence of the existence of an ancient Batavian republic, serving as the legal basis for the right to existence of the current Dutch republic. In 1612, he submitted his completed history of the Dutch Revolt to the States-General (albeit it was only published posthumously, in 1657). Grotius's career peaked with his election to the leading civic position of pensionary of Rotterdam, and a seat on the provincial estates of Holland in 1613. But Grotius would soon be embroiled in destructive political conflict.
The Dutch war with Spain had been suspended by a truce in 1609. By his close association with Oldenbarnevelt, Grotius became involved in the sectarian politics inside the Netherlands, which broke out in the aftermath. Although commonly portrayed as a religious conflict between strict Calvinists (Gormarists) and more flexible Remonstrants (Arminians), the quarrel was partly based on rapidly changing economic and social conditions which had been patched over during the war, but now broke into the open. It pitted Oldenbarnevelt, the champion of the rising great burgher commercial elite of the domineering province of Holland, against the prince Maurice of Nassau, behind whom stood a complex alliance of the older aristocracy, the pietistic clergy, the poorer urban classes, the other provinces and the central States-General. Oldenbarnevelt (and Grotius's) support of the Remonstrants was notionally an effort to prevent the erection of a Calvinist theocratic state, but de facto an attempt to prevent any schemes - whether an independent clergy, or a national Synod, or central directives from a States-General or the general army command - that might curtail or dilute the grip on political power the burgher elite of Holland enjoyed.
It was in the heat of this that Grotius published his pamphlet Ordinum Pietas (1613) commending the policy of toleration followed by the civic government of Holland, allowing Arminians to preach freely. In conjunction with this, Grotius also wrote a more wide-ranging tract De imperio (unpublished) asserting the general right of civic authorities to ultimately determine religious policies. Grotius pushed the envelope further in his Defensio (1617), a theological work, in which he concluded the Arminian doctrines were perfectly innocent of the charges of heresy.
It was ultimately not religion but rather the provincial Holland's position against a national army that finally led to Maurice's coup of August 1618 and the subsequent suppression of the Remonstrants. Grotius was arrested, along with Oldenbarnevelt and other Remonstrants, and tried for treason in a series of secret trials. Oldenbarnevelt was executed ni May 1619, while Grotius were sentenced to life in prison and the confiscation of his property.
While incarcerated at Loevestein fortress in 1620, Grotius wrote a didactic vernacular Dutch poem on religion (better known by its Latin title De veritate), addressed to laypeople, which was perhaps his most popular work in his lifetime. During that same period, Grotius wrote his influential treatise on Dutch jurisprudence, much of it from memory (pub. 1631), that would go on to be became a foundational basis of Dutch law until the 19th C.
Grotius escaped prison in March, 1621, hidden in a chest of books, and made his way to France. The high-profile escape embarrassed the Dutch authorities, and his Apologeticus issued from France, justifying his innocence and impugning his persecutors, dashed any hope of pardon. If Grotius hoped for a warm reception and official positions in the court of Louis XIII, he was soon disappointed and frozen out by the suspicious Cardinal Richelieu. Grotius would spend the next decade in Paris, largely unemployed. To pass his time, and perhaps win official favor, Grotius composed his most famous work, De Jure belli ac pacis (1625), a monumental treatise on international law.
Hearing that the city of Delft had agreed to restore his property, Grotius made his way back to Holland in 1631. But he did not stay long. Grotius arrived with great fanfare and got immediately into some very public disputes, and by 1632, had to flee Holland again, this time making his way to Hamburg, Germany. Entering the service of the Swedish crown, in 1635, Hugo Grotius returned to Paris as the ambassador of Sweden to the French court.
Grotius died in Rostock in August, 1645, after having fallen ill on a troubled voyage between Sweden and Germany. The publication of his remaining manuscripts was primarily arranged by his surviving wife and sons.
As a natural law philosopher, Grotius is generally credited as the originator of "natural morality" and the "social contract" theory of the State, that was highly influential on later writers. His 1609 book promoted idea that seas should be free for the innocent use and mutual benefit of all -- an idea disputed subsequently disputed by some Mercantilists. Grotius's 1625 treatise is acknowledged as one the first treatises in international law. Grotius famously argued that "property" was only the outcome of social consent, and thus had nothing "inalienable" in it, a conclusion subsequently disputed by Pufendorf.
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