GROTIUS, HUGO (1583-1645), in his native country Huig van Groot, Dutch publicist and statesman, was born at Delft on April io, 1583. The Groots were descended from the French noble family of de Cornets, and this cadet branch had taken the name of Groot on the marriage of Hugo's great-grandfather with a Dutch heiress. Hugo's father had four times served the office of burgomaster of Leyden, and was one of the three curators of the university of that place. Hugo Grotius wrote good Latin verses at nine, was ripe for the university at 12, and at 15 edited the encyclopaedic work of Martianus Capella. At 15 he accom panied Count Justin of Nassau, and the grand pensionary J. van Oldenbarneveldt on their special embassy to the court of France. He took the degree of doctor of law at Leyden, and entered on practice as an advocate.
In 1600 Grotius edited the remains of Aratus, with the versions of Cicero, Germanicus and Avienus. Some Latin lines on the siege of Ostend spread his fame beyond the circle of the learned. He wrote three dramas in Latin :—Christus patiens; Sophom phaneas, on the story of Joseph and his brethren; and Adamus exul, a production still remembered as having given hints to Milton. The Sophomphaneas was translated into Dutch by Von del, and into English by Francis Goldsmith (1652) ; the Christus patiens into English by George Sandys (1640) .
In 1603 the States-General appointed Grotius historiographer, though he was but 20 years of age. He then became advocate general of the fisc for the provinces of Holland and Zeeland. In 1608 he married Marie Reigersberg, a woman of great capacity and noble disposition.
In the winter of 1604 Grotius composed (but did not publish) a treatise entitled De jure praedae. The ms. remained unknown till 1868, when it was edited by Prof. Fruin. It shows that the principles and the plan of the celebrated De jure belli, which was not composed till 1625, more than 20 years after, had already been conceived by a youth of 21. The chief difference between the two treatises is the substitution of more cautious and guarded lan guage, less dogmatic affirmation, more allowance for exceptions and deviations. The Jus pacis was an addition introduced first in the later work. The De jure praedae shows that Grotius was drawn to this subject by a special occasion presented by his pro fessional engagements. He was retained by the Dutch East India company as their advocate. One of their captains, Heemskirk, had captured a rich Portuguese galleon in the Straits of Malacca. The right of a private company to make prizes was hotly con tested in Holland, and denied by the stricter religionists, espe cially the Mennonites. In maintaining the lawfulness of Heems kirk's action Grotius was led to investigate the grounds of the lawfulness of war in general. It was necessary to his defence of Heemskirk that he should show that the Portuguese pretence that Eastern waters were their private property was untenable.
Grotius maintains that the ocean is free to all nations. Years afterwards the jealousies between England and Holland gave importance to the novel doctrine of the mare liberum, broached in the tract by Grotius, a doctrine which Selden set himself to refute in his Mare clausum (1632) . In his De antiquitate rei publicae Batavae (i6io) Grotius vindicates, on grounds of right, prescriptive and natural, the revolt of the United Provinces against the sovereignty of Spain.
Grotius, when he was only 3o, was made pensionary of the city of Rotterdam. In 1613 he formed one of a deputation to England, in an attempt to adjust those differences which gave rise afterwards to a naval struggle disastrous to Holland. Though the mediating views in the great religious conflict between Catholic and Protestant, by which Grotius was afterwards known, had been arrived at by him by independent reflection, yet he was probably confirmed in them by finding in England a developed school of thought of the same character already in existence. After his return from England Grotius sought to find some mean term in which the two hostile parties of Remonstrants and Anti remonstrants, or as they were subsequently called Arminians and Gomarists (see REMONSTRANTS), might agree. A form of edict drawn by Grotius was published by the States, recommending mutual toleration, and forbidding ministers in the pulpit to handle the disputed dogmas. But the stadtholder, Maurice of Nassau, supported the orthodox party—a party to which he in clined the more readily that Oldenbarneveldt, the grand pension ary, the man whose uprightness and abilities he most dreaded, sided with the Remonstrants.
In 1618 Prince Maurice disbanded the civic guards in the various cities of Guelders, Holland and Zeeland, and occupied the places with troops on whom he could rely. The States of Holland sent a commission, of which Grotius was chairman, to Utrecht, with the view of strengthening the hands of their friends, the Re monstrant party, in that city. But the stadtholder entered the city with troops on the night of July 26, 1618. On the early morn ing of the 31st the civic guard was disarmed—Grotius and his colleagues saving themselves by a precipitate flight. But it was only a reprieve. The grand pensionary, Oldenbarneveldt, the leader of the Remonstrant party, Grotius and Hoogerbeets were arrested, brought to trial and condemned—Oldenbarneveldt to death, and Grotius to imprisonment for life and confiscation of his property. In June 1619 he was immured in the fortress of Louvestein near Gorcum. His confinement was rigorous, but after a time his wife obtained permission to share his captivity. Grotius returned in captivity to the classical pursuits of his youth, making Latin translations of Greek tragedians and other writers.
The ingenuity of Madame Grotius at length devised a mode of escape. The books which he had done with were sent out in a chest along with his linen. After a time the warders began to let the chest pass without opening it. Madame Grotius prevailed on her husband to allow himself to be shut up in it at the usual time. The two soldiers who carried the chest out complained that it was so heavy "there must be an Arminian in it." "There are indeed," said Madame Grotius, "Arminian books in it." The chest was carried to the house of a friend, where Grotius was released. He was then dressed like a mason with hod and trowel, and so con veyed over the frontier. His first place of refuge was Antwerp, from which he proceeded to Paris, where he arrived in April 1621. In October he was joined by his wife. There he was presented to the king, Louis XIII., who granted him a pension of which only small instalments were ever paid. In 1623 the president Henri de Meme lent him his château of Balagni near Senlis (dep. Oise), and there Grotius passed the spring and summer of that year. De Thou gave him facilities to borrow books from the superb library formed by his father.
In these circumstances the De jure belli et pacis was composed. The achievement would have been impossible, but for the fact that Grotius had with him the first draft of the work made in 1604. In March 1625 the printing of the De jure belli, which had taken four months, was completed, and the edition despatched to the fair at Frankfort. Though his book brought him no profit it brought him a great and enduring reputation. Grotius hoped that his fame would soften the hostility of his enemies in Holland, but he was disappointed. He then accepted service under Sweden, in the capacity of ambassador to France. He never enjoyed the confidence of the court to which he was accredited, and in he demanded and obtained his recall. He was not happy at Stock holm, and he asked permission to leave. He was driven by a storm on the coast near Danzig. He got as far as Rostock, where he found himself very ill. There he died on Aug. 29, 1645.
Value of His Work.---Grotius combined a wide circle of gen eral knowledge with a profound study of one branch of law. History, theology, jurisprudence, politics, classics, poetry,—all these fields he cultivated. His commentaries on the Scriptures were the first application on an extensive scale of the principle affirmed by Scaliger, that, namely, of interpretation by the rules of grammar without dogmatic assumptions. As in many other points Grotius inevitably recalls Erasmus, so he does in his attitude towards the great schism. Grotius thought that a basis for reconciliation of Protestant and Catholic might be found in a common piety, combined with reticence upon discrepancies of doctrinal statement. His De veritate religions Christianae (1627), a presentment of the evidences, is so written as to form a code of common Christianity, irrespective of sect. The little treatise became widely popular, gaining rather than losing popu larity in the 18th century. It became the classical manual of apologetics in Protestant colleges, and was translated for mission ary purposes into Arabic (by Pococke, 166o), Persian, Chinese, etc. His Via et votum ad pacem ecclesiasticam (1642) was a de tailed proposal of a scheme of accommodation. Like all men of moderate and mediating views, he was charged by both sides with vacillation. The true interpretation of Grotius's mind appears to be an indifference to dogmatic propositions, produced by a pro found sentiment of piety. He approached parties as a statesman approaches them, as facts which have to be dealt with, and governed, not suppressed in the interests of some one of their number.
His Annals of the Low Countries, begun as an official duty while he held the appointment of historiographer, was being con tinued and retouched by him to the last. It was not published till 1657, by his sons Peter and Cornelius.
Grotius was a great jurist, and his De jure belli et pacis (Paris, 1625), though not the first attempt in modern times to ascertain the principles of jurisprudence, went far more funlamentally into the discussion than any one had done before him. The funda mental idea of the book is the law of nature; he recognized and stated clearly that the sovereignty of the new national States of Europe did not involve anarchy in the absence of a common su perior but that prior to any political organization there still exists law, based on reason and the nature of man as a social being. For the content of that law he went to the Roman jus gentium, the generalization by the praetor of the customs of the peoples with whom he had to deal, which had been itself rationalized into a law of nature under the influence of Stoicism, and thereby laid down the other fundamental doctrine of international law, that the primary evidence of what that law is is the existing practice of nations.
For a complete bibliography of the works of Grotius, see Lehmann, Hugonis Grotii manes vindicati (Delft, 1727), which also contains a full biography. Of this Latin life De Burigny published a rechau$ee in French (2 vols., 1752). Other lives are: Van Brandt, Historie van het Leven H. de Groot (2 vols., Dordrecht, 1727) ; Von Luden, Hugo Grotius nach seinen Schicksalen and Schri f ten dargestellt (18o6) ; Life of Hugo Grotius, by Charles Butler of Lincoln's Inn (1826). The work of the Abbe Hely contains a life of Grotius. See also Hugo Grotius, by L. Neumann (1884) ; Opinions of Grotius, by D. P. de Bruyn Grotius's theological works were collected in 3 vols. at Amsterdam (1644-46; reprinted London, 166o ; Amsterdam, 1679 ; and again Am sterdam, 1698) . His letters were printed first in a selection, Epistolae ad Gallos (Leyden, 1648) , abounding, though an Elzevir, in errors of the press. They were collected in H. Grotii epistolae quotquot reperiri potuerunt (Amsterdam, 1687) . A few may be found scattered in other collections of Epistolae. Supplements to the large collection of 1687 were published at Haarlem, 18o6 ; Leyden, 1809 ; and Haarlem, 1829. The De jure belli was translated into English by Whewell (3 vols., 1853) ; into French by Barbeyrac (2 vols., Amsterdam, 1724) ; into German in Kirchmann's Philosophische Bibliothek (3 vols., Leipzig, 1879) . (M. PA.; X.)