Motley, John Lothrop (1814–77),descendant of an old and prominent Boston family, after graduation from Harvard (1831) studied for two years in Germany, toured the Continent, returned to Boston and married the sister of Park Benjamin, and began to study law, though primarily interested in literature. He wrote two novels,
Morton's Hope (1839), a semi‐autobiographical account of an American at a German university, and
Merry Mount (1849), a romantic novel concerning the colony of Thomas Morton. After a year as secretary of legation at St. Petersburg and another in Massachusetts politics, he turned in 1847 to his lifelong work of a historical study of the Netherlands. The subject may have been chosen because he liked the analogy between the United Provinces and the United States, and because it gave him an opportunity to study the triumph of Protestantism in northern Europe and show how it brought freedom where previously there was despotism. He began his work in the U.S., then went to Germany and Holland for further material. The book appeared as
The Rise of the Dutch Republic (3 vols., 1856) after ten years of preparation. In a picturesque, enthusiastic, and dramatic manner, he presented the political and religious history of the country, although he neglected economic and social matters. He arranged his whole canvas around the two subjects of Protestantism and absolutism, making William of Orange the Protestant hero and Philip II the dark‐dyed autocratic, Catholic scoundrel. His continued research bore fruit in the
History of the United Netherlands (4 vols., 1860, 1867), which deals with the period from William's death to the truce of 1609. The period from 1609 to the Thirty Years' War was treated in
The Life and Death of John of Barneveld (2 vols., 1874). A fourth section dealing with the Thirty Years' War and bringing the history down to 1648 was planned but never completed. Although the series was unfinished, his books have a great sweep and a unified pattern, which possess as a core the study of the Protestant movement in developing civilization and liberty, which Motley thought had determined the course of European and American history for the modern ages. The long interval between the appearance of the first two volumes and the second two of the
History of the United Netherlands was partly owing to his duties as minister to Austria (1861–67), in which he proved himself an able diplomat, but was recalled by President Johnson as the result of a political struggle. In 1869–70 he was minister to Great Britain, from which post he was recalled because of disagreement concerning the Alabama claims.
