Lotharingia

by Simon Winder

  Finally in 1585 Elizabeth cracked, even though she thought the whole thing a ‘financial sieve’. At the epochal Treaty of Nonsuch (named after one of Elizabeth’s palaces, but in itself having an attractively Alice in Wonderland flavour) she agreed to supply thousands of troops and lots of money. Her status remained weird though – plans for her to be made ‘Lady and Countess of Holland’ fell through and she was never willing to make the jump of claiming full joint sovereignty (a jump eventually made by William III a century later but in the other direction). The Earl of Leicester headed off with Essex and Sydney on the great Protestant adventure – nicely shown on a medal from 1587 with a picture of Elizabeth I and Leicester vanquishing the Beast of the Apocalypse. England took over the sovereignty of the attractively named ‘Cautionary Towns’ – Brill, Flushing, Fort Remmekens. These re-orientated England further north up the coast from lost Calais and could have become permanent – Sydney was Governor of Flushing, and the Governor of Brill marked his English pride by naming his daughter Brilliana, who went on despite her odd name to have a remarkable and adventurous life. Just to finish up the Cautionary Towns – in a typically unvisionary move they were sold back to the Dutch by James I for cash.

  The intervention was a fiasco. Leicester was acclaimed by Puritans as the new Joshua, Moses or Samson depending on which favourite Old Testament hero they wanted to tick. He met up with the new Stadtholder Maurice (William’s second son) in The Hague and then did a grand, haughty tour with fireworks, triumphal arches and banquets. These last got out of hand and the English contingent became increasingly contemptible, with disgusting scenes in Amsterdam as drunken, scarlet-faced young noblemen contemptuously tossed sweets from the windows. A small country under siege for decades, with countless battle-deaths, with a religion based on frugal self-examination, filled with impoverished refugees, had scraped together every penny to entertain their seeming saviours, only to find they had invited in, not proud Spartan heroes, but a bunch of vomiting and groping wallies.

  Leicester spent his time happily designing cap badges and took a delightful barge to Rotterdam rowed by sailors wearing special blue, red and buff uniforms and ‘shag thrummed silk’. Sydney was killed at the woefully useless Battle of Zutphen (there is a small stone marker and a local dining society). If anything, these characters were reducing the Dutch will to resist rather than stiffening it. Philip II, though, had decided to take English intervention very seriously. Appalled at Elizabeth’s actions and, as the consort of her late sister, himself a serious claimant to the English throne, he decided to add England to the Habsburg haul. It took years to build, man and victual and had no precedent – a hundred and thirty ships with some twenty-six thousand soldiers and sailors on board – but in 1588 the Armada sailed up the Channel to meet up with a further thirty thousand Spanish troops on the Flemish coast. For a few summer days the whole future of north-west Europe seemed at stake. The English were much helped by the same sort of swaggering, late-sixteenth-century cock-ups which had so dogged their own actions in the Netherlands. The Armada was weirdly un-thought-through – a few fewer full-choir-and-incense preparatory masses and a bit more time spent on logistics would have helped. The Dutch had taken the elementary and fun precaution of removing all the seamarks from the terrifyingly dangerous, shifting Flemish shoals and sandbanks. The Spanish army in Dunkirk was separated from the Armada by shallow seas patrolled by aggressive coastal-draft Dutch warships. The English harried the Armada along the Channel and then freaked it out with fireships, which caused many Spanish ships to cut their anchor cables to escape. Once beyond the Flanders coast (and having not picked up the army) the winds meant (as was known to everyone involved – it cannot have been a surprise) that they would only be able to continue by returning home via the seas north of Scotland, for which there were no charts.

  Obviously as a patriot I cheer the fate of the Armada, but what a sorry shambles it all was – thousands of corpses dotted around the British Isles, with that terrible, individual privacy that the death of each man on a sea-wreck has. The ships that had lost their anchors off Dunkirk were simply fending off doom by the hour. Some ships that somehow made it into an Irish harbour had their entire surviving crews executed at once. Perhaps ten thousand men returned to Spain, but many of them then died from malnutrition and exhaustion. For the English it was the great founding national victory; for the Dutch Republic it was also an epochal event – but with the additional knowledge that the vast, futile expenditure on the Armada (and its two successors, which were destroyed by storms before even reaching the Channel) could have hired entire mercenary armies for the Spanish. Philip II saw it, as usual, as something to do with God’s will rather than just a stupid idea.

  I was once in Orkney, hiking around the wonderfully barren, gnarled, 400-million-year-old landscape of the island of Hoy. From the southern settlement of Rackwick you can look out towards Scotland across the Pentland Firth, one of the world’s most ghastly stretches of water, littered with hazards, flanked by sheer, implacable sea cliffs and with racing tides that would have made any Armada vessel battling to get back into the Atlantic completely helpless. Soggy and footsore, I staggered into a local community centre. This turned out to be a converted former church with – to my delight – a pulpit made from the oak of an Armada wreck. In itself the pulpit was somewhat disappointing: it was just wood after all, carved in the normal manner of the period. I am not sure how it could realistically look more atmospheric – perhaps if bits of a skeletal Spanish hand were still gripping it. Orkney is virtually treeless so each ship smashing into the shore must have been a total bonanza.

  Life in ‘the garden’

  Following the great Spanish victory over the French army in Picardy at the Battle of St Quentin in 1557, Philip II, who had become king only a few months earlier, took a possibly eccentric decision. In his Catholic fervour he noticed that the victory had occurred on the day of the feast of St Lawrence, a martyr cooked to death by the Romans on a griddle. As the first monarch of a new Empire, he decided to build a great mausoleum outside his new capital of Madrid, El Escorial (‘the Griddle’), which would have a ground plan shaped like that familiar barbecue centrepiece. It was a measure of his power and confidence that his wishes were simply carried out. Nobody seems to have pointed out to Philip that his subjects would have to wait more than two centuries for hot-air balloons to be invented to appreciate from above such an unusual layout – but perhaps it was only meant to be enjoyed by God in Outer Space? The whole monstrous complex took over twenty years to build and in ceremonies that must have filled the entire region with incense his father and mother, Charles V and Isabella of Portugal, were reburied there – as would almost every Spanish monarch be, down to Alfonso XIII in 1980. El Escorial, like all such complexes, was designed to bolster and accrue an overwhelming sense of the royal family’s greatness. Philip also built it as a powerhouse of Catholic scholarship – a place where new generations of priests could learn how to spread true doctrine across the Empire and provide the spiritual and intellectual shock-troops to eradicate Protestantism.

  While El Escorial was being built, a parallel and very similar project was unfolding in the South Holland city of Leiden. The original Netherlands university was at Leuven, now squarely under Philip’s control. In 1575 William the Silent decided, after Leiden had survived its ruinous siege and become more securely part of the north, to build a specifically Protestant university there, which would educate the elite that his new country required. Very oddly and legalistically the original founding document continues to acknowledge Philip II in his role as Count of Holland so, no doubt to his own horror, he technically helped to found this Altar to Moloch.

  In my travels over the years I have several times come home to my family with elaborate plans to move to a European town and start life afresh. The children, swinging their legs and eating their beans on toast, gawp with fear, their ears flattened to the sides of their heads, as I explain how we ought to resettle in Bamb
erg, Novi Sad, Lübeck, Sighişoara. I talk about the languages we could learn, the people we could meet, the different foods, as the children, in mute panic, try to catch the eye of their mother. As I cheerfully sweep from the room, my head filled with the taverns we could run, the embroidered shirts the children could wear and the hikes we could all enjoy, I can hear sounds of whispered reassurance and stifled crying. Sadly, none of these plans have come to anything and the children are old enough now to make withering counter-suggestions as to where I myself might want to go. This is a shame, because it is only now that I can see where we should have settled: Leiden.

  Fuelled, like the other northern Dutch towns, by thousands of southern refugees, the university became a rapid success. Its buildings are scattered around the town and give the whole place today an almost ridiculous sense of optimism and interest, helped by the schematic and rational flavour of the canals and bridges, pubs and churches, concert halls and coffee shops that knit together its great urban landscape. Everywhere its late-sixteenth – and seventeenth-century heyday is celebrated. There is the oldest university observatory in the world, started in 1633 (and wonderfully called in Dutch a Sterrewacht – a ‘Star Watch’). There are buildings associated with the Pilgrims, the sect who settled here, fleeing from England in 1609, before ultimately taking the decision to find religious security and peace in North America. They tried hard to make their austerity work in Leiden but felt let down by constant backsliding and the town’s temptations. Just as their arriving and survival in the New World is marked by Thanksgiving Day, I have always thought there should be matching Thanksgivings in places like Leiden, where they lived, Delfshaven, where they sailed from, and Southampton and Plymouth, where they launched themselves into the Atlantic, to celebrate the disappearance of these gloomy folk.1

  Leiden’s joys just heap up. There is the startling place of execution outside the old palace of the Counts of Holland – a set of pretty, atmospheric buildings including a pillared, covered area for the judges to watch from. Some gardener of genius recently had the brilliant idea of training flattened espaliered trees onto frames facing onto the execution yard so that the branches of each tree stick out on either side like arms spread in horror and dismay – at least, that is my reading of these spindly, Giacometti-esque objects. Just next to them is a former school building, through whose door Rembrandt once used to run.

  Then there is the matchless Hortus Botanicus. This extraordinary place was masterminded by Carolus Clusius, born in Arras in 1526, who came to Leiden from Vienna, where he worked on the first ever catalogue of Alpine plants for the genial Habsburg Emperor Maximilian II. Clusius and his generation were perhaps one of the luckiest in Europe’s history, flooded with the extraordinary challenges and stimulation of the great trade voyages, alert to the full implications of Europe’s religious revolutions, building humanist ideas, but living before the horrors of the Thirty Years War. The Hortus keeps much of its old flavour, with its ranks of strange plants and its mix of academic research and public enjoyment. How many generations have been sickened by the immaculate little tubs of pitcher plants, looking like severed scrotums and filled with a ghastly sweet dew that tricks insects into falling in and then slowly dissolves them alive? There is rank upon rank of the tasty, the poisonous and the weird. An early seventeenth-century engraving shows the Hortus in all its glory, with its collection of strange creatures supplied by Dutch ships coming back from Asia – stuffed monitor lizards, a crocodile, a flying fox, a pufferfish, plus a somewhat random polar bear jaw from Nova Zembla. The gardens were also an early source of bee research, with a famous work on apiary (written as a dialogue between Clusius and his friend, the bee-expert Clutius) published in 1618, and still commemorated in a stack of straw-woven beehives, miniature versions of the ones in Brueghel the Elder’s wondrous The Beekeepers and the Birdnester.

  I will have to come back to the Hortus much later in this book for its huge nineteenth-century role, but I know nowhere that gives a more vivid sense of the excitement of new thinking, new discoveries, new flavours – a world of oranges and durians, of tea as a novelty. Because of the way that the town and university are so entangled you can still sense the degree to which the seventeenth century was filled with people happily wandering between disciplines, both physically and mentally – the sort of promiscuous, chewy intellectual atmosphere that created in the same era in England my own heroes, Sir Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, John Aubrey and Henry Vaughan. Their Dutch equivalents have a similar status in the Netherlands, standing for forms of enquiry that often jump around without the specialization that increasingly clamped down later: figures such as Hugo Grotius and Willebrord Snellius (the latter now with a crater named after him on the Moon, just south of the Sea of Tranquillity). Or the marvellous Simon Stevinus (it is unfortunate that these Latinized names make everyone sound absurd), originally from Bruges, a military engineer and mathematician and heroic dabbler. When not inventing key aspects of the decimal system he added to the joy of nations by building a land-yacht for Prince Maurice, William the Silent’s son and successor, which was raced along the beach outside The Hague in 1600. Setting aside the atypical experience of medieval prisoners catapulted into besieged towns to freak out the defenders, the yacht must have achieved the highest human speed (at last outpacing the horse) yet seen on land in Europe.

  In fact, more generally that experiment-strewn beach must have been an extremely appealing place. Prince Maurice had his own gun foundry built in The Hague and used to experiment on the beach with different calibres of weapon, battling to match up ideal lightness, range and strength – a perfect example of the sort of practical, mathematical and material fiddling which made the Dutch Republic so remarkable, and which could be seen in every area, from growing tulips to building ships, from drainage windmills to new types of oil-paint. As the Eighty Years War continued, one of the oddities became – as Spain yet again declared bankruptcy or all its ships got sunk – that inside the safety of the region behind the Dutch front line known as ‘The Garden’ it became more and more fun. This was also true behind the lines in the Spanish southern Netherlands, where the 1598–1621 joint reign of ‘the Archdukes’ (the Habsburg husband and wife Albert and Isabella) in Brussels saw the blooming of similar arts and gardens and the revival of Antwerp – glassware, jewellery, mirrors, tapestries were churned out and the great printer Christophe Plantin shuttled between Antwerp and Leiden according to the political situation. He printed extraordinary quantities of posters, pamphlets and books (including the works of Clusius), hitting pay dirt with the exclusive contract to supply breviaries and missals to the entire Spanish Empire, a deal which paid for the beautiful house and workshop which survives today in Antwerp.

  Between these northern and southern safe zones the war ground on, aside from the Twelve Years Truce, brokered in Antwerp in 1609 between Prince Maurice and Philip III, with hostilities breaking out again at its end and entangling the Spanish–Dutch war with the wider conflict that became the Thirty Years War. For much of this time the Dutch economy boomed, with the ideal efficiency of most tax being recycled into paying Dutch suppliers of armour and guns, food, uniforms, wagons and horses; or most soldiers’ wages being then spent on entertainment within Dutch towns, the latter immortalized in countless seventeenth-century genre paintings. These towns came to specialize over generations, turning out vast amounts of stuff – grenades from Utrecht, small arms from Dordrecht, priming matches from Gouda. About 90 per cent of Dutch government revenue went into the war and huge but secure debts were run up, while the Spanish were reduced to prostration, praying for the next treasure ships to arrive from America. In 1628 Admiral Piet Hein (a former galley slave) managed the unique feat of capturing the silver fleet – an event still charmingly sung about by Dutch children today, but presumably prompting another round of flagellation at El Escorial.

  Even when things went well for Spain they wound up going badly. The epic of the later part of the war was the Siege of Breda,
where Prince Maurice faced the Spanish general Ambrogio Spinola. By this time most Dutch troops were in fact foreign mercenaries and they faced Spanish troops who were mostly not Spanish (and Spinola was Italian). In contrast to the horrifying slog of such sieges as the nightmare at Ostend (some eighty thousand Spanish casualties; sixty thousand Dutch), the Siege of Breda was a triumph. Maurice died before the siege’s end and was succeeded by his half-brother Frederick Henry, who now became Stadtholder. With the besiegers was Diego Velázquez, who was close to Spinola, and was inspired to create for his patron Philip IV the astonishing painting The Lances, a near sanctification of Spinola as a model of decency and courage, taking the surrender of the town from the Dutch commander Justinus of Nassau (the bastard son of William the Silent). It was a measure of Spanish desperation that by the time Velázquez completed the painting, ten years after the siege’s end, it only had two years to be hung on the walls of Philip’s Buen Retiro Palace before the Dutch took the town back, leaving a certain tension between the brilliance of the picture’s technique and the derisive nature of its continuing presence.

  Birds, beasts and flowers

  Hopping off a rural train in French Flanders north-west of Lille, it is for a few moments confusing that there are no signs showing the way to the town of Cassel, my planned destination. Almost immediately though it becomes clear that there is no need – Cassel is perched on a hill, the hill, in a region famous for flatness, and squats there alluringly a couple of kilometres away. The surrounding fields look – even for someone as ignorant as myself about farming – almost unbelievably and densely fertile. Ploughs had just turned the soil and each rectangle seemed to be filled with sculpted peaks of soil of a fudge-like richness. Alongside the promise of an infinity of root vegetables, the soil also gave away the region’s big problem – that it becomes a nightmarish quagmire in the rain, the soil engulfing boots and wheels, reducing huge animals to floundering helplessness and bringing all movement to a halt. Cassel even has a helpful little tourist information sign pointing out that this quality has encouraged the region’s severely introverted localism – it is simply not worth the life-threatening and filthy hassle of visiting the next town. The winter dark in this sparsely populated area also has its terrors, and since earliest times hardly an autumn or winter can have gone by without farmers, travellers or soldiers finding themselves trapped in the mud with the sun rapidly setting and their hooves, feet and wheels starting to freeze in.