The treatment these rhetoricians received from the Spanish sovereigns is sufficient proof that they were the mouthpiece of the people and voiced their aspirations for freedom in both church and state--Charles V was their persecutor, Philip II their executioner.
When the long struggle with Spain ended in the subjugation of the Spanish Netherlands and art and literature were stifled in the southern provinces of the Low Countries, Vondel, the Fleming, produced in his safe retreat in Holland plays which are worthy of notice today. About the same time the poet who is known as "le père des Flamands, le Vieux Cats," had many followers, and his works were so popular that they were called "The Household Bible."
Another exile, Jacques van Zèvecote, a native of Ghent, who also emigrated to Holland during the Spanish oppression, was a great poet. His hatred of Spain found expression in these vigorous lines:--
"The snow will cease to be cold, The summer deprived of the rays Of the sun, the clouds will be Immovable, the huge sand-hills on the shore Leveled, the fire will cease to burn, Before you will find good faith In the bosom of a Spaniard."
Under Napoleon the chambers of rhetoric were revived. In 1809, the _concours_ of Ypres celebrated a "hero of the country." In 1810, Alost called on Belgian poets to sing "The Glory of the Belgians." A young poet named Lesbroussart won the prize in a fine poem full of the old national spirit of the race. Jenneval, the author of the "Brabançonne," the national anthem, was killed in a battle between the Dutch and the Belgians outside Antwerp, in the revolution of 1830.
About 1844 Abbe David, and Willems, a free thinker, started literary societies, and later followed Henri Conscience and Ledeganck. Ledeganck was called the Flemish Byron, and another poet, van Beers of Antwerp, was often compared to Shelley. To the early years of free Belgium belonged also Charles de Coster, whom Verhaeren calls "the father of Belgian literature."
Henri Conscience, the Walter Scott of Flanders, was born in 1812, when Belgium was under the rule of France. His father was a Frenchman, his mother a Fleming. He first wrote in French, but in 1830 he said, "If ever I gain the power to write, I shall throw myself head over ears into Flemish literature." In 1830 he volunteered as a soldier in the army of Belgian patriots.