by Simon Winder
In some very old-fashioned history books I was exposed to when I was a child, Prince Rupert of the Rhine still held sway – his dashing image designed so that young British man-children would imprint, in the manner of goslings, on a positive, royal and hierarchical image. He seems to have now disappeared from popular view completely, which is no great loss. He was in charge of the Royalist exile fleet (it was during one of its expeditions that his brother was killed) and was part of every one of the incredibly elaborate, painful clashes of honour, treachery and expediency that accompanied the end of the Civil War and the establishment of Cromwell’s Republic – a time when the North Sea and Channel were virtually blocked up with clumsily disguised adventurers going back and forth in illegal little ships. As with all Royalists, including his mother, humiliations and strange alliances piled up. The new English king, Charles I’s son, Charles II, together with his younger brother the Duke of York (the future James II), were huddled in Bruges, close to despair as Cromwell’s regime stabilized and began to make friends. Rupert was fortunately out of the way for the most peculiar of twists when Cromwell’s army fought alongside Louis XIV, crushing English exile and Spanish forces, including the troops of the fleeing Duke of York.
This struggle (the Battle of the Dunes, which I deal with later) appeared to be the last straw for Elizabeth and her sons, as well as for her nephew Charles II. But Cromwell’s premature death suddenly revealed that the Republic had in practice been held together by the sheer force of his will and that no plausible structure could be agreed on for his replacement. Yet more boats filled with muffled oddballs zoomed back and forth. England remained at war with Spain, so Charles being in exile in the hated Spanish Netherlands sent an extremely awkward message. Once he had agreed to extensive amnesties if he was allowed back, he had to move to Breda in the Netherlands to avoid further Spanish taint, and signed there the United Declaration of Breda which allowed him and his brother to return, together with Elizabeth and Rupert. The most far-reaching bit of Rupert’s career then followed, as he created the Hudson’s Bay Company and laid claim to one of the world’s largest single bits of private land, stretching from the High Arctic to what are now the Dakotas, and gifting the English more musk-oxen than they could ever use. Known for many years as Rupert’s Land, it would ultimately allow Canada to spread massively westwards and northwards.
Elizabeth’s children then could not have had a more adventurous existence. She was herself born in Scotland, moved to London with her father in 1603 and lived abroad under a boggling range of circumstances from 1613. When she was at last allowed to return to London in 1661 she was sixty-four years old and was seen as a strange creature from a different age, preserving in her manners a world from before the Civil War and the Republic. She died a few months later.
Even after her death however she had one amazing trick up her sleeve. Elizabeth had yet another child, Sophia: tough, clever, impressive and safely married off to the minor German Protestant prince Ernst-August. Following family deaths, military heroism in the war with the Turks and large bribes, Ernst-August clambered up to the exalted rank of becoming a new, ninth Elector (Bavaria had been added as an eighth during the Thirty Years War). In the meantime, an extraordinary series of accidents and tragedies wiped out the Stuart family. Charles II had no children; his brother briefly ruled as James II but was so Catholic and so breathtakingly incompetent that he was thrown out in favour of his Protestant daughter, who became Mary II and her husband who became William III (of whom, more later). The childless Mary died of smallpox shortly thereafter. Her younger sister Anne, the last Stuart, led a truly terrible life, giving birth over and over again to dead or dying children. She had one son, Prince William, who survived: he was therefore the sole remaining thread for Protestant Stuart dynastic survival but he was often ill and died aged eleven in 1700. The crisis was of a slow-motion, but inexorable kind – the childless widower William III, himself always in poor health, would die at some point, to be succeeded in turn by the childless Anne. This would open the way for James II’s descendants again, specifically ‘James III’, his deeply and unacceptably Catholic son. So – blindly ignoring the genealogical sequence which alone was meant to govern kingship – William turned to Elizabeth’s daughter Sophia as top Protestant and Parliament established her and her heirs as the true (albeit not true, obviously) line. It then became an unedifying race between the very old but hearty Sophia and the much younger but unwell and distressed Anne as to how things would turn out. Anne duly became queen and managed to stay alive just long enough to deny Britain an elderly but admirable Queen Sophia I, who died seven weeks after her. Sophia’s grouchy and unpleasant son first became Elector of Hanover and a few weeks later King George I. Elizabeth’s descendants have ruled Britain ever since and the years of flight, penury, danger, drownings and rat-infested palaces all worked out.
Uncle Toby’s hobby-horse
One of the most relentlessly uninteresting displays of sculpture in Western Europe occupies the ground floor of the Musée des Beaux Arts in Lille. Two huge halls are stuffed with nineteenth-century statues which swamp the visitor in a mix of soft porn and hollow rhetoric. You feel sorry for the sculptors, for the museum guards, for the quarrymen who obtained the white marble; in darkest moods, even for the needlessly gouged-out hillsides themselves. Classical subjects and royalist and republican allegory stretch as far as the eye can see. Even a bust of my favourite catastrophic French royal, Charles X, is so bland that it tells you nothing about him except at the level of his having had hair and a nose.
Perhaps the only poignant feature of the halls is the way that they accidentally preserve the bottoms of various models obliged to shiver for hours pretending to be a goddess or classical heroine or one of the Arts. It is definitely an odd feature of the era that allegorical and mythical women seem obliged at moments of crisis to step out of their clothes – as though it is a contractual precondition if people like Lucretia or Cleopatra want to commit suicide. And how startling it would be to find an elaborate sculpture of a nymph on her way to the bath, with a sensible gown on and a little basket for her shampoo, rather than being ‘surprised’ in the bath in a skittish naked pose. These statues make it a mystery as to how nymphs spend their time when they are not bathing or getting abducted. So these cheerless halls instead form an unintentional shrine to ghostly bums-of-yesteryear with the faint, hovering ghosts too of those original gentleman art collectors, almost visible with their elaborate facial hair, distended stomachs, opera cloaks and silver-topped canes.
This mundane experience (topped off by a marble Joan of Arc at the stake, arching her back in fear of the flames and her dress partly unbuttoned to let her breathe more freely) made me worry that the whole of the Lille museum might just be a sort of cultural rag-and-bone shop and, indeed, set me wondering whether modern Europe is simply too weighed down by the rubbish of the past. Should the whole lot be gathered in a huge net, picked up by a helicopter and dumped off the Florida Keys to create the fabulous basis for a new reef, for example? It might be even more pervy to see Joan of Arc with brittle-stars clambering over her breasts, but it would at least be an exciting Green initiative.
As I glumly walked down into the museum’s basement, however, everything brightened up. Having failed to do my research I had not realized that here was something magical: beautifully lit and stretching out into the distance was a series of huge tables. Made for the military commanders of Louis XIV and Louis XV, each tabletop is covered in a relief model of a northern border town and its countryside. They are almost eye-wateringly vivid, with every tree, stream and farm building in place but shrunk to 1/600th of its size. No oil painting or surviving ancient street gets you anywhere near as close to a sense of how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century towns used to be. It seems possible (and painfully desirable) to be shrunk to an eighth of an inch in height, step onto the table and walk through these fields of watercolour-soaked paper, and down roads sheltered by shredded-silk trees.
It is almost too obvious a point, but the sculptures of the upper halls were created as cultural objects and now seem for the most part junk, whereas these models made for practical, military use are today among the greatest of all French works of art. At a glance you can see here that in the eighteenth century the now sprawling industrial city of Charleroi was simply a star fortress guarding a river crossing. Calais used to be an isolated walled town on sand dunes – its one-time status as an English enclave suddenly making sense. Namur’s never-ending significance as a military objective is simply built into its two-rivers-and-craggy-hilltop combo. There is a bustling, convivial-looking Ypres, its Cloth Hall then only four hundred years old. The maps also make clear how the defences created by the Marquis de Vauban, Louis XIV’s military genius, in some cases were as big as the towns themselves – a relatively straggly bunch of houses and churches protected by a monstrous range of sloped walls, water obstacles and strongpoints.
The table-maps are both practical and fantastical. The products of a pre-balloon and pre-aeroplane world, they showed views otherwise unavailable to humans. They also offer a vision of order, rationality and ownership – it is hard not to feel that Louis XIV would ideally have liked the whole of France to be shown on the same scale. He could have then seen everything and known everything. Incidentally, such a table would have had sides that were one-and-a-half miles long, which seems not entirely impossible – perhaps with the Sun King, in tights and wig, hovering above it, moving on crane-borne leather straps from province to province. For soldiers, operating at mere ground level, the table-maps showed up fudges and weak points in the fortifications and perhaps nowhere else are the never resolvable headaches of the period’s wars clearer: the more walls to defend, the more troops, the more food, the more ammunition. In the end, the entire military potential of France could be soaked up by these blotting-paper-like towns. In practice nowhere could be secure – with a vast defensive force under siege simply eating every scrap of food within days – or with what should have been a mobile, offensive, marching army made totally impotent by being plonked inside or outside some walls. If all your troops are manning defences you can no longer react to an aggressive opponent. Perhaps more than for any other country, this dilemma defined France’s strategic headache well into the twentieth century.
Some of the towns on the table-maps are oddly unchanged – places like Tournai and Maastricht are immediately recognizable. You can see the place where the real d’Artagnan was killed during the Siege of Maastricht in 1673, when he was in fact quite elderly, rather than the bee-stung-lipped young blade in the modern life-size statue that now stands by the city walls. The maps show how for soldiers the surrounding countryside and its valleys and rises were just as important. In an era where everyone lived at ground level, an entire army could be hidden behind a gentle slope; only drifting smoke could give away a regiment behind an orchard. Even the picturesque fields on the tables had crucial military value, down to the smallest wall. It is sadly unknown whether the maps had to be updated and adjusted each time another neglected out-building collapsed on Old Grognard’s Farm.
The map-tables had their own adventures. In a symbolically almost banal move many of them were taken away by the Prussians after the defeat of Napoleon. The one for Lille – a rare instance of where Vauban was able to create a pure, regular, colossal star-shape fortress without any frustrating cliffs or rivers in the way – had a rough time in Berlin. It was cut down, lots of the little houses fell off and it was only recovered in 1948 as a very minor part of a much later round of Franco-German post-conflict restitution, with many of the other map-tables destroyed by neglect or bombing.
Looking at the model of Namur, I think of the city’s role in Tristram Shandy (1767), where the charming if insane Uncle Toby devotes much of his life to his ‘Hobby-Horse’, building a scale model in his garden to re-enact the Siege of Namur during the War of the League of Augsburg. Helped by loyal, spade-wielding Corporal Trim, Uncle Toby hopes that if he can create a sufficiently accurate version of Namur’s defences he will somehow be able to understand the mysterious ‘wound in the groin’ which he received from a falling chunk of stonework at the real siege. One of many mazes in the book, these endlessly proliferating ‘saps, mines, blinds, gabions, palisades, ravelins, half-moons and such trumpery’ engulf Uncle Toby’s brain.
Uncle Toby was not alone in his perplexity. I have spent much too much time wandering around Vauban’s surviving fortresses in places such as Besançon and Arras not to feel that he was one of the greatest confidence tricksters of the early modern period. He created a staggeringly elaborate star ground plan for each citadel, which looks from above like a Christmas ornament, and which absorbed immense resources to build: eradicating farms, diverting rivers, blowing up rock outcrops. He also came up with various ingenious fighting methods – perfecting the bayonet, for example (which meant that by the first decade of the eighteenth century the ghastly pike had at last disappeared), and the use of ricochet-firing for artillery, so that cannonballs would bounce into forts and do horrible, random damage. But what is breathtaking is that he then worked out an infallible way to destroy his own forts, using trenches, mines and mortars. Vauban and his Dutch counterpart Menno van Coehorn encased city after city, with each citadel requiring ever-larger magazines and garrisons, but it was all still contestable as they could, with time and huge resources, then be disposed of anyway. What was attractive about this method of warfare was that it was extremely slow. Casualties – aside from Uncle Toby’s groin – could also be slight. Vauban’s tactics for taking a city were so irresistible that, given enough time, there would be a point where the garrison was simply obliged by the logic of its situation to ‘beat the chamade’ – i.e. communicate with the besieger through a massed use of drums that the jig was up. The lines of ‘circumvallation’ needed as a preliminary to seal off the town and get a siege under way were themselves wonders of the world – at the 1667 Siege of Lille they were fifteen miles long. At the 1691 Siege of Mons twenty thousand diggers were used.1 These sieges became an epic struggle between the supplies of the besiegers and those of the besieged. The besiegers themselves in turn were also in effect under siege. At an earlier Siege of Mons, the French had to give up simply because they ran out of forage for their horses. One last fun statistic: a large army with forty thousand horses would need a thousand tons of green fodder a day to keep going.
The demands of these sieges were so vast that the French could generally only manage one at a time – which explains the length of Louis XIV’s and Louis XV’s wars. It also explains how the very small area of the Spanish Netherlands and Dutch Republic was so difficult for Louis to swallow up. I should offer immediate reassurance to readers that I will not give an endless account of the fighting which convulsed the entire border between France and the Empire, with a few breaks, until Waterloo, several generations later. I apologize here if I miss somebody’s favourite encounter, but if this book is to be manageable at all I shall have to choose my battles carefully.
‘Too late to be ambitious’
Only three years in the seventeenth century did not involve serious fighting somewhere in Europe: 1610, 1670 and 1682. Troops circulated across huge areas, with many famous commanders equally involved with fighting the Ottomans in the east and the French in the west. The tenuous routes that were taken drew in otherwise harmless territories. The famous Spanish Road, a side effect of the absurdity of Madrid’s rule over the Netherlands and lack of control over the seas, obliged troops (for the most part Italian mercenaries) to wend their way from the Italian coast up through Savoy and through (to their relief) some genuine Spanish territory such as the Franche-Comté, occasionally friendly territory such as Lorraine and up into Spanish Luxembourg and Bastogne. At one point a single bridge made the route possible and there were humiliating fees to pay and the need to bring weapons in separate mule-trains. In this way, what was meant to be a struggle purely in the Netherlands entangled others.
It also relied on a friendly France, which was also drawn into hostility by anger at Spanish support for specific court factions and in the end simply closed the road entirely.
There was a comparable Protestant road, a highly unsatisfactory one, that led from Scotland (one of the great suppliers of mercenaries) through England, through the rebel Netherlands and down through a mix of the Calvinist (Palatinate, Nassau, Wied, Basle, Zürich) and the Lutheran (Hesse-Darmstadt, Mühlhausen, Baden, Strasbourg). There were fatal gaps (Liège, Trier, Mainz) and the Thirty Years War created endless nightmares for individual parts of this non-self-supporting sequence. Too much is made of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 as, while it did end the general fighting across the Empire and modern political scientists have always enjoyed discussing its terms, it marked no real let-up for much of the zone. Most histories note the ‘Fronde’ rebellion in France (1648–53) as a minor distraction before Louis XIV gets into his stride, but perhaps a million people died. The series of civil wars that wrecked the British Isles from 1639 to 1653 killed a greater percentage of the population than the First World War. By the mid-century the Palatinate had lost half its entire population: whole areas were abandoned, wolves enjoyed their last hurrah and the ecology became so scrambled that great plagues of mice (an old enemy wearily but successfully fought by many centuries’ worth of traps and cats) engulfed whole barns. Germany lost the entire population growth of the previous century and a half.
