by Simon Winder
The motives of many involved in the fighting definitely had an end-of-the-world flavour, a sense that an unfortunately rather diverse and mutually hostile spread of Christian Gods were holding various individuals’ sword arms. The Emperor Ferdinand II was one of Europe’s truly chilling leaders, whose unshakable belief that he had been put on his throne to cleanse Europe of heretics lay at the heart of the disaster. We know a lot about the thoughts of his entourage because Protestant historians have enjoyed themselves over the years picking through sermons and letters for creepy comments. My favourite is from Ferdinand’s ghastly Luxembourger Jesuit confessor Wilhelm Lamormaini, who, in the wake of a particularly unworkably violent anti-Protestant edict, wrote to the Pope that ‘no Roman pontiff has received such a harvest of joys from Germany since the time of Charlemagne’ – in other words directly comparing Protestants to pagan Saxons and Avars.
As Ferdinand’s advisers flapped their arms about with excitement, not knowing whether to pray or self-flagellate first, even the Pope began to worry. Europe’s strange self-correcting mechanism now came into play and the clean sweep dreamt of by Ferdinand became impossible, while continuing, pointless ruin rained down. The war in the end outlived almost all its major instigators, grinding to a halt in 1648 after protracted, tortuous negotiations by the next generation. These agreements, known collectively as the Peace of Westphalia, among many other things recognized that the Swiss were no longer part of the Empire – a major breakthrough as the Swiss had spent the war armed to the teeth waiting to be the next item on Ferdinand’s agenda. It also formalized an important left-over piece of business: during the disastrous attempt back in 1551 by various Protestant German princes to rebel against Charles V, the bribe offered by them to the French to intervene in return for the Imperial ‘Three Bishoprics’ had done nothing to help their cause. The French had nonetheless swept in (led by a man called Anne, perhaps oddly) and had held on to the territories ever since in a legal limbo. It was almost a century later then that the Peace of Westphalia acknowledged this transfer. Toul, with its spectacular cathedral, would fall into obscurity: but the confirmed French ownership of Metz and Verdun would have a rich, complex future.
Fencers and soap-boilers
For some years the Musée des Beaux Arts in Antwerp has been shut for repairs, much to the benefit of the whole city as the best of its collection has been found homes in other, less frostily pompous surroundings. So Jean Fouquet’s unbelievable painting from around 1450 of a bare-breasted, alabaster-skinned Agnès Sorel, Charles VII of France’s mistress, pretending to be the Virgin Mary (‘Are you quite sure, Your Majesty?… Yes but of course: a quite brilliant notion’) is in the cosily domestic surroundings of the Mayer van den Bergh Museum and made even more shocking. The great beneficiary though, and with any luck this will be permanent, is that the sequence of guild-sponsored religious paintings, from Quinten Metsijs’s The Lamentation (1509) to Hendrik van Balen’s Saint John Preaching in the Wilderness (c. 1622), are back in the cathedral from which they were long absent: chopped up, re-cut, sold, confiscated, burned, but even after so many upsets still one of the greatest sequences of paintings in all of Western art.
The pictures, together with the much patched-up guild halls on the city’s main square, have battled into the twenty-first century as fragments of a way of life that dominated Europe’s towns and cities from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. The guilds, crafts and fraternities that paid for these pictures not only regulated their own trades but organized everything from carnivals to funerals to local defence. The pictures were designed to act as a promotional tool for the virtues of the group that sponsored them. Some are straightforward: so the Guild of Schoolmasters had Frans II Francken paint Christ among the Scribes, the scribes in gorgeous clothing and dotted among them several saints and various lucky, immortalized guildsmen. One of the wings of this triptych was paid for by the Craft of the Soap-Boilers, who had to scratch around for an appropriate biblical topic and must have been relieved to find the tangential little story of Elijah rewarding the widow of Zarephath by conjuring up whole jugs of oil from one drop. The Craft of the Wine Taverners have an easy home win with Maerten de Vos’s The Wedding at Cana (1597) and the Craft of Tailors, in Artus Wolffort’s Adoration of the Magi (1615), promote their wares simply by giving the kings the most astoundingly lux robes.
There were several ‘armed guilds’, including the Longbowmen, the Arbalesters (crossbowmen), the Fencers and the Handgunners. These provided security for convoys, training and town defence and were upgraded as new weapons were invented. The Guild of Fencers had been founded in 1488 in honour of the Emperor Frederick III and his son Maximilian. It was this guild who paid for one of the most famous of these paintings, Frans Floris’s Fall of the Rebel Angels (1554), the only surviving element from a triptych otherwise destroyed in the great wave of iconoclasm that hit Antwerp in 1566. Floris was probably at the time the most famous Antwerp artist, but principally for his tragically transient, apparently magical contributions to the swaggering Joyous Entry into Antwerp of the Emperor Charles V and his son Philip in 1549. The Fall of the Rebel Angels that he created for the Fencers is a virtuoso phantasmagoria, the entire canvas jammed with mutant bodies assembled from atrocious combinations of snake, boar, butterfly, lynx and human. There is no detail not perverted in some way – a nipple becomes a claw, a penis an eagle’s head. Up above – to the rescue – come St Michael (the Fencers’ patron) and his friends, chopping and stabbing their way through the disgusting heap and, in a smart bit of product placement, using the favoured weapons of the Fencers.
So many places remain haunted by these now long-gone guilds. They were major patrons but their members were also, of course, by definition the creators of almost all the objects that have been preserved in museums. The painters themselves belonged to the Guild of St Luke, named after the apocryphal but charming story that St Luke himself painted from life the real Madonna and Child. All the wonderful things once nurtured by the Craft of Gardeners, Fruiterers and Basket-Makers have long gone, but the Guild of Goldsmiths and the Guild of Ironmongers have left plentiful traces. Guilds sometimes turn up in unexpected places. The Minster of Freiburg-im-Breisgau was built over many years by the townspeople, and guilds paid (among other things) for some of the stained glass, with their symbols as part of the design: immortalizing them with a pair of scissors for the Tailors, a pretzel for the Bakers, a barrel for the Coopers. The Guild of Arbalesters still have the tallest guild hall in Antwerp, topped with a magnificent gold statue of their patron saint St George despatching his dragon. Somehow the Guild of Arquebusiers (who in Antwerp commissioned Rubens’s The Descent from the Cross) still have their practice range in Basle, albeit long turned over to other uses. The more workaday guilds tended to thrive without much innovation (the pretzel in a fourteenth-century window is exactly the same shape as now), but others were obliged constantly to mutate. Anyone dealing with the Burgundian or Habsburg courts was producing goods from extremely expensive, scarce materials for a flighty, fashion-conscious clientele with a poor record for payment. Barring a cataclysm bills were paid, but sometimes not for a generation.
It has been a commonplace for historians since the eighteenth century to moan about guilds and how they held back progress through their restrictive practices and conservatism, but there is no real evidence for this. The great industrial concerns that sprang up later did make them increasingly pointless, but until then they were responsible for almost every innovation in Europe’s history. Indeed, there is a good argument that it was their members’ ceaseless mulling and tinkering that allowed Europe to outstrip the rest of the world. Just as over the centuries the needs of long-distance travel and bouts of fighting meant that naval vessels, through hundreds of small and almost unrecorded fixes, became ever more powerful; so, throughout the aggressively self-improving towns of Western Europe, unknown individuals in specific workshops refined locks, hinges, drills, triggers, cheeses, pendulums. Things
became miniaturized, alloys more reliable, strawberries bigger, gun ranges longer.
Furniture became more elaborate: Antwerp was again important in this, starting a trend for walnut and exotic woods rather than the unvarying oak. Guilds of carpenters, who used to do the lot, were abandoned in the sixteenth century by more specialized joiners, and then the joiners in the seventeenth century split to form guilds of cabinetmakers. Armour, air pumps, navigation aids, engraving techniques were all being chewed over, in most cases with no record at all of who made this slightly more accurate clock or that handy form of wood-join. Different cities were highly competitive and the guilds tried to keep control over specific inventions, but except in the short term this was impossible. There was always an itinerant element, with so many towns so near to each other, even with quite different jurisdictions – not just with journeymen (in their ‘wander years’ before joining a specific town guild) on the move, but also such ambulant characters as clockmakers, who would also work as locksmiths, and blacksmiths (who did a lot more than just shoe horses). Gunners and printers were also traditionally footloose, going wherever somebody needed to be shot or better informed.
A sort of summa of both guild and itinerant work has survived in Strasbourg in its Astronomical Clock. This astonishing object has always had a special place in my heart since visiting it with my family in my early teens. Indeed everything about Strasbourg amazed me then (and now) – but the clock most of all. For years I had a sort of super-postcard of it, made from several layers of card and paper, with a wheel on the side that allowed you to make the Four Ages of Man and the Days of the Week rotate through little cut-out windows. I was very sad on a recent visit that this elaborately crafted postcard is no longer made – although I can see that it does not reflect well on me that at an age which is for most boys an eye-rolling frenzy of coughed-over cigarettes and self-abuse I was enjoying making a little cardboard wheel go round.
The clock fills an entire wall in the cathedral’s south wing and is an amalgam of several centuries of fixes and upgrades. It was first built in the mid-fourteenth century as towns up and down the Rhine fell into a mania of giant clock-making following the invention of weight-driven mechanics. One feature has somehow survived from this ancient machine, which was strapped to the outside wall – a cockerel automaton that crows thrice and flaps its wings (to remind us of St Peter’s betrayal of Christ). This was all drastically upgraded two centuries later by a mathematician and clockmakers and a painter from Schaffhausen. It is hard to convey the sheer lunatic complexity of the resulting confection, powered by an infinity of toothed wheels, and showing the phases of the moon, the saint’s day, sunrise and sunset, eclipses, the day of the week, all decorated with a host of allegorical paintings and sculptures: the Four Ages of Man, the Signs of the Zodiac, and Death, who strikes a bell. Theologically it is a bit of a fruit salad, as it features not just Jesus and some characters from the Apocalypse, but also the seven Roman gods in their chariots to show the days of the week. In French these are austerely correct: mardi = Mars, vendredi = Venus, mercredi = Mercury, rather than being largely engulfed by random Nordics as in English.
The whole clock was given a further major overhaul in the 1840s, which fixed the mechanism and added yet more charts, paintings and furbelows. This was a shame in some ways as the new-painted figures, particularly the Roman gods, have an unfortunate fairground flavour, with Apollo looking like a camp game-show host. Saturn, shown in his dragon-pulled chariot, looks particularly banal, munching on the body of one of his children with much the same inattention that someone might eat a burger at a drive-in. The restorer also made the sad mistake of dumping what must have been a wonderful painting called The Colossus with Feet of Clay in favour of an uplifting image of Copernicus.
There are so many ways in which the clock is a sensation, but I am currently struck by the way that it represents layer upon layer of invention and refinement. It was always meant as a bravura exercise rather than as something genuinely useful. It required a huge breadth of skills – working in stone, wood, metal; drawing, painting, a fine sense of stage-craft, a near-deranged level of ambition; mathematics, geometry, astrology; theology, gilding, mechanics. It heaps up centuries of knowledge, tinkering and biblical imagery (including a superb Adam’s Rib painting) and in its very existence sums up a specific kind of artisanal, guild-based, urban, Imperial pride.
Elizabeth and her children
Britain has always viewed itself as an island of stability and common sense moored offshore from a Continent rife with absurdity and fanaticism. Every neighbour has served as both mortal enemy and figure of fun, whether French, Dutch or Spanish. During the most humiliating of the seventeenth-century naval wars between England and the Netherlands, an enraged John Dryden wrote Annus Mirabilis, a poem which is in part a hymn of hate against the Dutch. In one of its wonderfully written yet deeply disturbing climaxes it imagines English ships firing their cannon at Dutch East Indiamen, whose crews are then hideously killed by flying fragments of porcelain and lethal ‘Aromatick Splinters’ and by an inferno of burning spices: slaughtered by their own high-value commercial products. The poem’s gloating nuttiness would seem to indicate that the English and Dutch were eternal, Manichaean enemies, and yet in practice there were bouts of savagery alternating with fond regard, with each country ultimately saving the other from disaster and despair.
As I hope I have already established, the relationship between England, Flanders and Holland had always been a rich, tangled one. Relative English political stability was in many ways made possible by this safety valve of being able to cross the Channel. Many generations of sailors rolled their eyes at yet another incompetently disguised royal pretended to be an Average Joe passenger just happening to need to flee at high speed to the mainland. The process worked both ways, with any number of temporarily or permanently embarrassed foreigners fleeing to Britain and safety, from as far back as we have records to the twenty-first century.
In the seventeenth century the movements across the Channel were particularly rich and entangling. The long, wide shadow of Henry VIII managed to impose its will long after his death, through the reigns of his three children, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. As only Mary ever married (childlessly and only four years before her death) there was a weird drought in further royal children, with nobody at all born in the direct line between 1537 and the arrival of the fecund Stuart dynasty of James I from Scotland in 1603. If the modern British tabloid press had then existed, this would have been little less than catastrophic – but it also meant that England was oddly unavailable for the sorts of marriage diplomacy that made Europe’s dynastic world function. Elizabeth I’s window in which she could have plausibly had children had already closed early in her reign, dooming the Tudors to extinction.
James I took one critical decision which effectively controlled the entire course of his own dynasty and that of the next, and on to the present. In a Europe split by religious hatreds it was genuinely quite awkward to ‘place’ your children with foreign spouses of the right kind. In the case of his daughter, Elizabeth, he seemed to do well. She had already had an unintentionally adventurous life as the Gunpowder Plot had been based first around the blowing up of her dad and then on her being used as a readily manipulated child monarch. As this did not work out, she was approached by numerous bearded foreigners including, tantalizingly, the great Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. In the end it was decided that the young Calvinist ruler of the Palatinate, Frederick V, fitted the bill. After a brief period of sybaritic glamour at his Heidelberg court, the young couple unintentionally began the Thirty Years War through the catastrophic decision to accept the throne of the Kingdom of Bohemia, a role previously filled for three generations by a member of the Habsburg family and which was unfortunately already occupied by the latest Habsburg, the tough, zealous and fervent Emperor Ferdinand II. Elizabeth and Frederick spent a year enjoying the facilities of Prague Castle before their Protestant troops were crushe
d by Imperial forces. In a change of tide invisible until then, Protestantism had now reached its zenith in Europe and was in retreat. The Palatinate was effortlessly invaded by Imperial forces and Heidelberg ravaged, with a pretty classical welcome arch one of the few surviving mementos of Elizabeth and Frederick having lived there. Following some of the worst, most poorly thought-through decisions of the early modern period, Elizabeth and Frederick, still only in their twenties, fled to the Dutch Republic for sanctuary, never to return.
Sheltered in The Hague, the couple passed the time by having as many children as possible. As the interminable war continued, Protestant forces revived under Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and Frederick left The Hague to discuss with him how he could be made King of Bohemia again. On the way back he became ill and died at Mainz aged thirty-six. Elizabeth now swung into action, devoting the rest of her long life to her children’s advancement and the vindication of her and Frederick’s political actions. I don’t think there is a single painting of Frederick where you do not get a niggling feeling that he was at heart quite a silly person and not a prince you would put much trust in – it might have just been his choice of beard shape and clothing, but artists seem to have had an uncanny ability to reveal the inner prat. Elizabeth was, not necessarily by choice, a sterner figure and even when near destitute in the 1640s – her ‘court’ at The Hague in semi-darkness and with rats and mice scampering around the hem of her frayed dress – she determinedly pushed her children on.
An entire book could be written just about the escapades of the nine children who lived to adulthood. The kaleidoscope of opportunities for them depended on the later stages of the Thirty Years War and on the unfolding disaster of her younger brother Charles I’s reign in England. One child became an important correspondent of Descartes; another became a painter; a third a duellist and mercenary, killed fighting for the Duke of Lorraine; one married a Transylvanian prince. Her eldest son, Henry Frederick, as an excited teenager went to have a look at the sensation of the Protestant decade: the Spanish treasure fleet, captured by Piet Hein, which transformed the embattled Dutch war chest. But en route he was drowned in an accident (in a stretch of water since converted into dry land). Another son, Maurice, fought as a Royalist in the English Civil War, became a naval commander and was drowned in a hurricane off the Virgin Islands. Charles Louis, after endless twists and turns, at the end of the Thirty Years War was allowed to return to Heidelberg and rule a much smaller and downgraded version of his father’s palatinate. Most famous was Prince Rupert of the Rhine, Royalist general, whose stylish clothing, corkscrew locks, soft-leather accessories and damn-your-eyes manner came to define Cavalier chic before the inevitable fashion change of Cromwell’s no-more-Christmas, black-and-white collection.
