by Simon Winder
As the major southern cities in Flanders and Brabant fell into Spain’s grip, the rebels compensated through the crazy growth of the heavily protected and as it proved invulnerable Amsterdam. Behind the fighting, the north was reliably held by the rebels and they could safely train, build and supply themselves. These towns thrived. Whereas the Spanish were frantically trying to get supplies of bullion to their often mutinous garrisons, the Dutch found themselves in a virtuous circle, with the money raised from taxes being re-circulated to other Dutch merchants who were selling breastplates, horses or beer. As one cheerfully admiring London leaflet said: ‘What the souldier receives in pay, he payes in drink’. ‘Dutch’ armies were of course far from being Dutch. The war with Spain brought innumerable mercenaries and adventurers – it became the great training ground for the Thirty Years War, but also a sort of Protestant crusade for Scots, English, Saxons, Swedes.
Every city’s drama deserves mention. Leiden, for example, endured a year-long series of horrors with floods and starvation. There is in the town an attractive nineteenth-century statue of Mayor van der Werf, unfortunately not showing his most famous moment, when he rolled up his sleeve and displayed his bare arm to a desperate crowd, saying that if he must die anyway then they should eat him. The city still celebrates the day when flat-bottomed boats full of herring and bread at last arrived. There were lighter moments too, such as when Breda was almost bloodlessly captured in 1590 from the Spanish by a few men slipping in, hidden in a peat barge. The ‘Spanish Gate’ through which they may have slipped is still there and there is no Dutch museum complete without a jaunty medal or print celebrating this occasion.
My favourite memorial to this era is in Zeeland, now in the Zeeuws Museum in Middelburg. The city fathers were so overwhelmed by the great series of events they had lived through that they decided to commission a set of six huge tapestries. Beautifully looked after and restored, these extraordinary objects have their own room and still make vivid the Battle of the Scheldt, the Siege of Zierikzee and other events that defined Zeeland and made it part of the Dutch Republic rather than the Spanish Netherlands. Minutely detailed Spanish galleys filled with drummers, pikemen and gunners; ships on fire; pennants flying; crews racing up rigging, all captured in the somewhat slow-moving medium of wool and silk. The tapestries have cheery mythological elements too – so William the Silent is shown as Hercules burning off one by one the heads of the Spanish Hydra, although it is impossible not to think that Philip II must have had a matching tapestry put up somewhere in which it is the Dutch who feature as the Hydra.
Through sheer good luck, while I had been sitting staring at these great works for an hour or so, the room suddenly filled with people as part of a Middelburg music festival and a group of Dutch girls sang a cappella. It was hard to think of anything odder or more enjoyable than staring in wonder at woven images of driftwood, billowing sails, fish, waves, smoke and flames while listening to perfect renditions of ‘Java Jive’ and ‘Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else But Me)’.
The Catholic case
The Brabant town of Mechelen is overshadowed by the flanking monsters of Brussels and Antwerp, but has had its moments of glory, both as the palatial base for the Margarets of York and of Austria and as a major legal and religious centre, more often known historically under its French name of Malines. Its wonderfully gnarled, battered cathedral has been through a lot. One thing that struck me on my first visit there is that the River Dyle goes through it. This briefly appears as historically important in 1940 when the British and French, after spending over six months creating fortifications for themselves, decided, following the German invasion of what had been neutral Belgium, to abandon their fortifications and move up to the ‘Dyle Line’. This was an important element in walking into the very simple trap the Germans had prepared for them. I had always vaguely assumed that the ‘Dyle Line’ had some heft, but on the basis of its width in Mechelen even the town’s tourist board would be hard-pressed to make claims for it as more than anything than a jumpable runnel. I later came across it in Leuven, where it is a sparkling, moss-lined brook, unlikely to hold up Nazi tank commanders except for those particularly interested in herbaceous worts, tansies and celandines.
Shaken by the inadequacies of the Dyle, I found myself walking through the streets north of the cathedral when, strangely, the whole width of road and pavement was blocked by men fixing up the paving. It is a small point, but the geography meant I simply could not proceed to where I wanted to go and had to take a detour that meant accidentally finding myself on a road which contained both the world’s first carillon school (founded in the 1920s and still today the carillonneurs’ Mecca) and the Church of St John, which was open. I had already been puzzled by the road gang as normally they work on one side of the street and then the other so pedestrians can get by, and once I walked into the church, I was compelled to believe that I had been tricked by members of the Baroque Liberation Front, continuing their army-of-the-shadows campaign to raise awareness of seventeenth-century devotional art. For myself, I was quite happy to be manipulated in this way and respect their fervour. I had felt them at my elbow in Kortrijk (how else did I come to be standing before van Dyck’s lugubrious Raising of the Cross?), but here they were, hiding in plain sight.
The Church of St John is where a lot of Catholic devotional art has ended up and is so crowded that it feels almost as much an auction house as a religious building. But it is also the home to one of the most astounding paintings by Rubens, himself one of art’s greatest wonder-workers. It shows a crowded, magical version of the Three Magi venerating a glowing baby Jesus, seemingly the picture’s light source. He is putting his hand in a gold goblet presented by the first of the Magi, who wears a simply staggeringly rich and elaborate gold cloak and lynx muffler. Beyond them are a brilliantly observed gang of bystanders in armour, turbans and fur hats and including a particularly striking African’s head. The painting’s side panels can be ingeniously flipped two ways. On one side of each there is an upbeat picture of St John baptizing Christ and of St John the Evangelist on Patmos. On the other sides, used for special more glum occasions, the first St John is shown decapitated with a gloating Salome and the second being boiled in oil in the Colosseum (he survived in fact and was such a crowd-pleaser that he immediately converted the entire audience).
I specifically mention these fantastic pictures partly as my fervent evangelical duty to urge anyone in the Mechelen area to go and see them, but also to make a wider, fairly obvious point about the entire conflict from its origins in the 1550s to the final agreement to partition the Netherlands in the 1640s. These extreme, passionate, strange paintings were commissioned from Rubens in 1616 as just one small element in the vast work of rebuilding that followed the consolidation of the Spanish Netherlands during the Twelve Years Truce. The church had been devastated during the wars. Mechelen had been wrecked by a huge gunpowder explosion in 1546, its religious images smashed and burned during Calvinist riots in 1566, it had been captured in 1572 by pro-Orangist forces who were then promptly defeated with attendant massacres by the Duke of Alva’s Spanish troops; it was then retaken largely by English troops in 1580 who carried out further killings, before its final reconquest by Spanish troops in 1585, shortly before the Fall of Antwerp.
For English-speaking readers all sympathy tends to be with the rebels, a tradition begun with the events themselves, which had everyone across the Channel agog. The problem, though, has always been that many inhabitants of the Seventeen Provinces were not rebels and it always remained plausible and intellectually decent to stay Catholic. The nightmare for people living in towns such as Mechelen was that, depending on the year, it was fatal to believe either one thing or the other. In the end the great sorting machine of the wars drove Protestants north and Catholics south, but from a Catholic point of view the fighting saved ten of the seventeen, just as brutal actions in much of the rest of Europe (in France, in the Austrian Habsburg empire) ensu
red that, in roughly the span of Rubens’ lifetime (1577–1640), Protestantism would become herded just into northern Europe and parts of Switzerland, leaving Catholicism as the genuinely global form of Christianity.
The Black Legend of Spain has so shaped our understanding of the wars that at some level we still do not think of even modern Belgium as an entirely legitimate country. Indeed the very existence of Rubens and the other great Catholic painters of the period in the south who repaired the amazing damage done to the patrimony of the Netherlands has always had an unacceptable, sinister air, certainly to Dutch Calvinists who rejected the very idea of such religious images, but also to British Protestants. It was Charles I’s enthusiasm for commissioning paintings by Rubens and his pupil van Dyck that set off alarm bells among Puritans about his being a crypto-Jesuit Trojan horse. Cromwell deliberately made Charles walk to his execution on Whitehall through the Banqueting House, which featured Rubens’ vast frothy ceiling paintings he had commissioned, of his father, James I, floating in heaven surrounded by cupids in a thoroughly non-Puritan manner. If Charles glanced up this would have been the last thing he saw before emerging onto the platform, and into a strange form of historical greatness.
The war between Spain and the rebels was carried out through the power of images, and countless paintings and pamphlets now in museums were part of a hysteria-laden propaganda drive by one side or the other. With the Duke of Alva’s arrival in 1567 both sides were occupied by a frantic need to appeal for moral and material help. Alva was there, with his ten thousand Spanish troops, not just in response to the spread of Calvinism, but because of the Beeldenstorm (‘statue storm’), one of the great cultural catastrophes in Europe’s history, where mobs in each province made bonfires of the whole medieval artistic tradition – statues, paintings, robes, flags, carvings in monasteries, convents and churches were hauled out into the street. This had been a factor in Protestant victories across Europe for a generation, from the expunging of images in Zürich to the extraordinary purging of Scotland, which was so effective that almost no traces remain of its Catholic art. For the Spanish it was the last straw, as a confusing swirl of the local, urban, provincial, Burgundian and religious militated against their rule. There were many loyal Catholics who hated the Spanish, but quite rapidly there was not enough room to maintain such a pose. Alva set up what became known to Catholics as the ‘Council of the Troubles’ and to Protestants as the ‘Council of Blood’. It executed some thousand people and pronounced sentence on thousands more who fled north or to friendly German territory and had all their property confiscated. It ruined much of the pre-Alva ruling class – killing most famously the Catholic leaders Hoorn and Egmont. They had known Philip II well, were leaders of the Council, Knights of the Golden Fleece, but this did not save them. Prince William of Orange fled, while Hoorn and Egmont stayed under the impression they could reason with Alva, and this was why it fell to William to become the Revolt’s leader.
In the modern Netherlands there is no museum complete without copies of the crude little engravings distributed in their thousands across Protestant Europe, showing Hoorn and Egmont decapitated in the main square of Brussels. This was both a religious and aristocratic outrage and fuelled a loathing for Spain which became fanatical, with volunteers and mercenaries from Scotland, England and the German Protestant states coming to fight. Less well known was that, of course, this also became the great Catholic cause – with equally fervent and articulate fighters from Spain, France and Italy filling the southern provinces, backed up by the intellectual firepower of the Jesuits and with their confidence rebuilt after the reforms of the Council of Trent. It was from this period that the cult of the Virgin Mary became central to Catholicism as Rome realized that Calvin and the others had created a morose, masculine, visually uncompelling (whitewash) and generally unfun creed. Rubens became the premier exponent of this cult of glamour and emotion, wounds and sacrifice. His contribution to the re-Catholicizing of Antwerp Cathedral, paid for by the Guild of the Arquebusiers, is a Descent from the Cross of such extremity that it is hard to look at. The painting is a bitter play on the Guild’s patron saint being St Christopher, the ‘carrier of Christ’, who is painted charmingly with the infant on an outer panel as one of Western art’s most convincing beefy giants, but in the main image is mirrored by a group of appalled figures who are between them taking the weight of the devastated white corpse of the adult Jesus.
Throughout the fight to suppress the rebellious provinces, the Catholic world poured in money, resources and men to crush the Protestant upstarts. Men such as Alva, Parma and Spinola were heroes, patiently working on the side of God to expunge heresy. Each siege or battle was part of a cosmic conflict – imagined by Rubens in several huge canvases as between St Michael’s angels and Satan’s demons – which also became confused with the predominantly Catholic battle in Central Europe and the Mediterranean with the Ottoman Empire and, in a wider world, with the battle to extirpate every manner of paganism, from America to Asia.
Needless to say, the Protestants disagreed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The sufferings of Lady Belge » Life in ‘the garden’ » Birds, beasts and flowers » Croissants of crisis » Whitewash and clear glass
The sufferings of Lady Belge
The English role in sixteenth-century Europe was an unhappy and vulnerable one. Early converted to Protestantism by Henry VIII for reasons of personal convenience, England formally removed itself from the influence of Rome in the 1530s but was buffeted by dynastic accident as three siblings took turns on the throne – Edward VI (the ‘godly imp’, a convinced but short-lived Protestant), Mary I (an equally convinced Catholic married to Philip II, but who was also short-lived) and Elizabeth I (a Protestant who any number of enemies prayed would also be short-lived). Each one of these reigns was convulsed by the killing or expulsion of those too close to the last regime. The English Channel was filled with the ships of terrified, dispossessed exiles. Douai, in the Spanish Netherlands, became a great centre for English Catholics, with several hundred missionary priests trained there to be infiltrated back into England and spread the word, of whom some one hundred and sixty were hunted down and killed on arrival. England played out its own version of the misery created by having several Christian variant faiths, each claiming absolute authority. Under Mary I, England supported her husband’s war with France, which promptly resulted in the humiliating loss of its two-century-old outpost at Calais.
The intimate nature of English links with the nearest Netherlands towns is shown by their having their own English spellings: Flushing, Brill, The Hague, Ghent, Dunkirk. The North Sea was a pooled area of English–Dutch trade and fishing and the vagaries of the wind often meant their ships finding security in each other’s ports. With the outbreak of the rebellion against the Spanish, Dutch Watergeuzen (‘sea beggars’), a marginal nuisance to the Spanish, used English ports for a while to refit and to sell their booty before Elizabeth kicked them out as too much of a liability. It was their expulsion that forced them into their desperate raid on the coastal South Holland town of Brielle in 1572 which, famously, succeeded – the beginning of a process that would usher in decade after decade of acrimonious correspondence between Madrid and various generalissimi in the Low Countries and a tremendous number of penitential masses.
William the Silent was desperate for allies and there were numerous, inconclusive talks with Protestant states. Elizabeth shared the problem of all European royalty that the Dutch were, however agreeable, just rebels. There was no clear means by which such a novelty could be recognized. The only other case – the Swiss Cantons – was dealt with by pretending they were not there. William’s assassination in 1584 removed the closest the Dutch had to a ‘real’ ruler (a prince) of a kind that could be recognized by other monarchs, but his title of Prince of Orange was now by descent inherited by his estranged Catholic son in Madrid.
Each outrage in the struggle by Spain to impose its authority and scotch t
he heads of the Protestant Hydra heaped pressure onto Elizabeth. The ‘Spanish Fury’ in Antwerp in 1576 which killed some eight thousand of its inhabitants and destroyed much of the town was seen by Protestants across Europe as something close to the Apocalypse. Back in rebel hands, Antwerp held out as the capital of the Dutch Revolt until 1585 when, after an epic siege, it finally fell to the Spanish. Thousands of Protestants trudged north and the city was rapidly re-Catholicized. One of the most wealthy and powerful ports in the world was now in ruins. Many of the key figures around Elizabeth – Leicester, Spenser, Sydney, Essex – were whipped up into a frenzy about the awful sufferings of what Spenser called ‘Lady Belge’. There had been earlier plans, put forward by William’s brother Louis of Nassau, to end the agonies of the Seventeen Provinces by shutting out Spain and giving each of the major adjoining countries a chunk – with England getting Zeeland and Holland, France Flanders and Artois and William the inland provinces and Friesland. This was a very Holy Roman Empire sort of proposal and one which looks wholly alien to us, but was plausible then. But with each year of the rebellion the northern provinces became more clearly a separate and self-conscious entity.
