Recognition of merit in the journalistic rhetoric of early seventeenth-century Antwerp
(2025) MERLIT conference 2025: Writing Meritocracy — Location: VUB, Brussels (18.September.2025)
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- As the Twelve Years’ Truce between the Spanish Monarchy and the Dutch Republic approached its end, a weekly newspaper was launched in Antwerp by Abraham Verhoeven, licensed by the Brussels government to print and disseminate “new tidings, victories, sieges, and the taking of towns”. One of the writers associated with this endeavour was the poet and pamphleteer Richard Verstegan. Verhoeven’s newssheets not only included reports of aristocratic elevations, knighthoods, and appointments at court, but also commentary that highlighted the absence of any mechanism in the Dutch Republic that could provide similar rewards for meritorious service. Verstegan’s satires make similar points, mocking the failure of republicanism to create social distinction while at the same time explicitly espousing a meritocratic understanding of aristocracy as a heritable reward for service rendered by oneself or one’s ancestors, and one that was in principle open to all, since all humankind is ultimately of equally lofty descent from Adam and Eve. These Antwerp monarchists paradoxically used a rhetoric of egalitarian merit to celebrate social inequalities. The States General of the Dutch Republic rewarded service with cash gifts, pensions, offices and emoluments, but could not create noble status. Rather than develop a republican alternative to aristocracy, wealthy Dutch regents could, and did, acquire noble status while by-passing recognition of royal authority in the Low Countries: seeking ennoblement and knighthoods from the allied monarchies of England and France, or purchasing historical lordships to enjoy the titles attached. While strange from a twenty-first-century perspective, the criticism that republicanism failed to elevate those who merited elevation seems to have hit what was a sore spot at the time.
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Arblaster, P. (2025). Recognition of merit in the journalistic rhetoric of early seventeenth-century Antwerp. MERLIT conference 2025: Writing Meritocracy, VUB, Brussels. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/269658