Was Hugo Grotius a fortunate soul, blessed to live in a historical moment that enabled him to become a legend, or was he a miserable one, beset with misfortune through most of his adult life? Henk Nellen’s comprehensive biography presents readers with this and other striking paradoxes. Was Grotius, he asks rhetorically, an innovative philosopher or merely a compiler of others’ ideas and publicist for others’ causes? As a human being, was he an exemplar or a sleaze?

Adopting a middle course between sympathy and skepticism, Nellen supplies abundant evidence for contradictory assessments of this complicated character. Grotius was among the founders of the Netherlands when the country, in the early seventeenth century, broke away from Spain; but he would spend most of his adult life in unhappy exile after being on the losing side in a coup born of internal religious conflict. He was a prolific author, writing on behalf of both the Dutch East India Company and the Remonstrants faction overthrown in the coup. Unlike the vast run of propagandists, however, his arguments — on subjects ranging from international relations to property and natural rights — had a major impact on the development of legal and political thought. Renowned for this reason as the “Miracle of Holland,” it is also well known that Grotius testified against his mentor and patron, Oldenbarnevelt, leader of the Dutch Republic, after the coup. Oldenbarnevelt was executed; Grotius survived, sentenced to life imprisonment from which he escaped by hiding in a book chest.

Nellen gives us a comprehensive and detailed biography of this complex and important figure. Originally published in Dutch, this English translation makes Grotius’s ideas and writings accessible and explicable to a wider audience. In particular, Nellen superbly explains the substance of the religious disputes that absorbed Protestants across Europe in the seventeenth century and elucidates their political dimensions both in the Netherlands and internationally. The Oldenbarnevelt-Grotian Remonstrants were Protestant liberals, who wanted toleration for differing theological positions; their victorious opponents, the Contra-Remonstrants, were strict Calvinists who strove to use state power to impose uniformity. Nellen informatively complicates the picture by explaining its political dimension: at the time of the coup, a long truce between the Netherlands and Spain was due to expire so that, with war looming, the continuation of internal religious conflict could have been disastrous.

Grotius played politics abroad as well as at home. Nellen sets internal Dutch affairs in the broader international context of relations among Northern Protestant regimes. As a young man, Grotius was sent by Oldenbarnevelt to England on a mission (ultimately fruitless) to ally James I with the Remonstrants. At the other end of his professional life, he spent his last eleven years as the Swedish ambassador to France. There was never a question about Grotius taking Swedish citizenship or even having a residence there, so the position indicates the internationalism of Protestantism in his time.

Anyone researching Grotius, Grotian ideas, and the early history of the Netherlands will find this an immensely useful work. Readers in other fields, principally the history of seventeenth-century religious conflicts in Europe and early modern political theory, will also find this a valuable source of information. Nellen is able to cover his subject in such detail because Grotius was an indefatigable writer: the index lists ninety-four works that receive at least some mention here. The mass of available evidence also includes 7,725 extant letters as well as diplomatic dispatches from his time as ambassador and a record of remarks (titled Grotiana) that he made in the presence of a French physician in several 1643 conversations (594, 657). The letters are exclusively Grotius’s; they were semipublic communications, rather than personal messages, that were circulated as a means to develop cooperation among like-minded colleagues (697). Due in some large degree to the voluminous evidence, which is supplemented by a healthy measure of curiosity about the many people and places related to Grotius’s life, Nellen’s 800-page biography mirrors in length Grotius’s Rights of War and Peace.

Grotius’s thought has never been long out of fashion: The Rights of War and Peace was continuously reprinted into the nineteenth century and was subsequently resurrected in twentieth-century rethinking of international law (752, 756). Nellen’s work, especially as it is now available in English, will aid in keeping Grotius’s reputation alive in the twenty-first century. Beneath the surface paradoxes of his life and professional occupations, and at the core of his voluminous discourses, Grotius told us that devotion and toleration must stand together in the modern state.