by Simon Winder
All sides, using different religious measures, viewed the warfare, plague and ferocious weather (this was the time of what we now call the Little Ice Age) through a peccatogenic lens – what was happening had come about through human sin. Random blows of fate went beyond mere human planning. At one point the Dutch river system froze solid and the Spanish could have simply charged across or along this sudden great sequence of magnificent white highways. The Dutch were only saved from catastrophe by the Spanish commander’s dithering for a fatal, melty twenty-four hours. On another occasion the Swiss Alps remained so cold that there was almost no snow-melt and Louis XIV was able to get his cavalry across the shallowed Rhine just by wading. Such freaks of nature and the terrible harvests and plagues gave the time its own flavour. There was also a strong intellectual sense that the world was moving into a twilit final era. Archbishop Ussher had carried out his famous calculations and published The Annals of the Old Testament in 1650, proving that God had begun Time on the evening of 22 October 4004 BC, with the First Day beginning on the 23rd. It was understood that the Earth would endure for six thousand years, one thousand for each day of the Creation (you can see here a certain number of what might be seen as rather broad working assumptions), with the Last Days occurring in 2004.
The popularization of such ideas gave a shot in the arm to the gloomier sort of Protestant who could only really relish the idea of things getting even worse. The obsession with the greatness of the ancient world had always given a strong tinge of mournfulness to Europe’s intellectual life. The Dukes of Burgundy had surrounded themselves with tapestries of Hector, Alexander and others partly to be boastful, but partly too because they felt themselves to be living in the shadowy afterworld of such figures, not long before God wrapped up the whole rather botched experiment. The great summary of such attitudes came in the Leiden-educated doctor Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne-Buriall, a long essay written during the 1650s in the wake of Ussher’s book, which in astonishing prose roams through the countless, futile ways in which humans have tried to maintain their fame after death.2 Browne has the terse, famous line: ‘’Tis too late to be ambitious. The great mutations of the world are acted, our time may be too short for our designes.’ He points out that it does not really matter how famous Charles V may have been as there was now such a little period remaining before everything comes to an end. Hector had been lucky as he had lived so early on that it made sense to be famous. Browne talks about ‘the Monument of Childerick the first … casually discovered three years past at Tournay, restoring unto the world much gold richly adorning his Sword, two hundred Rubies, many hundred Imperial Coyns, three hundred golden Bees…’. The high summer of being a human was many centuries ago, but now ‘Our longest Sunne … makes but winter arches’. The endlessness of the next world ‘maketh Pyramids pillars of snow, and all that’s past a moment.’ I must stop! The only point of this book is to create a ludicrously over-complex advertisement for Urne-Buriall.
This sense of gloom was not entirely Protestant. Catholicism was of course just as peccatogenic. Spain’s endless setbacks as the century progressed, shifting from predator to prey, are mercilessly portrayed in Velázquez’s great sequence of paintings of his master Philip IV, from stylish teenage hopeful to exhausted ruin. In his forty-year reign, Philip was always fighting somebody. The last straw was the Battle of Rocroi in 1643, when a resurgent French army blew to pieces his Army of Flanders. Philip was reduced to falling back on spirit mediums, pleading with the mystic nun Sor Maria de Ágreda to construct a wall of prayer to hold back his enemies. War after war wrecked everyone’s hopes, seemingly with the most cynical combinations making old friends into enemies and vice versa. As one war subsided another would flare up. They all seem an absurd tangle to us, but each had its own logic. Societies were organized for war, with armies becoming larger and larger. For the first time a global strategy was followed, with colonies around the world being both great sources of wealth and painfully vulnerable to attack. Much of the planet became an opportunity for an outflanking manoeuvre, and whole expeditions vanished without trace from scurvy, starvation and storms. There are so many examples, but among the grimmest are the frenziedly overstretching efforts by the Dutch Republic to create New Holland in northern Brazil, with its principal cities of Mauritsstad (Recife) and New Amsterdam (Natal), at the same time as New Netherland in north-east North America with its capital also called New Amsterdam (New York). A global Dutch future shimmered briefly into view but was destroyed in the 1650s and 1660s. Resources were poured into protecting the unprotectable as both colonies were devastated, the former’s only real trace being Albert Eckhout’s wonderful little painting in the Mauritshuis collection, Two Brazilian Tortoises.
New Netherland was just one of many theatres in which the rapid and total alienation of the English and Dutch, who had for so long been problematic but considerable allies, was played out. Both were well aware of the other’s naval strength and these were strange wars provoked by the jittery conundrum that each passing month allowed one side to build more ships, but each passing month also allowed the other to do likewise. Both sides panicked about their own potential weakness in a very pure example of a destructive arms race. No sooner had relations soured than Andrew Marvell was unhelpfully writing
Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land,
As but th’ off-scouring of the British sand.
The three wars fought between 1652 and 1674 showed continuing English weakness, most spectacularly in the great Dutch raid of 1667 up the Thames and into the River Medway, where much of the English navy was burnt to the waterline or stolen. I am not aware of his commenting on it, but Sir Thomas Browne must have relished the whole, gloomy, too-late-to-be-ambitious sequence of the Great Plague of 1665, the Great Fire of London of 1666 and the Great Naval Fiasco of 1667. To Louis XIV’s delight (he was secretly paying the English) the two sides then tore each other to pieces.
In the Rijksmuseum there is a small piece of stone in a captioned casket which beautifully conveys the point where the whole seventeenth century perhaps changes course. This piece of stone was the first to be touched by the foot of the Stadtholder William III of Orange as he stepped onto English land from his ship in 1688. It is a peculiar object but, more vividly than countless paintings and prints, it encapsulates the hopes and fears of an extraordinary moment. Instead of Elizabeth I becoming ruler of the Netherlands, as had been hoped for a century before, the vexed relationship between the two countries would be resolved by the ruler of the Netherlands becoming ruler of England. With a huge invasion fleet, four times the size of the Armada, and an army of twenty-one thousand men, William achieved what Philip II had not. The same wind that blew his ships south-west through the Strait plugged up James II’s warships in the Thames estuary. The fleet was so wide that William had the fun – and I think unique – pleasure of firing salutes off both Dover and Calais as he swept past. His timing worked brilliantly as Louis XIV’s army was busy destroying the Palatinate and unable to react to the news that the elite of the Dutch army were no longer mounting guard on the Dutch borders but vacationing in Devon. The almost unbelievably incompetent James II, England’s worst king in poll after poll, was an elderly, sincere Catholic, a former hero in fighting wars with the Dutch and hopelessly at odds with his Protestant subjects. Betrayed by his Protestant daughter Mary (married to William III), he took the traditional route of fleeing down the Thames, to the relief of the new authorities in London. In scenes of farce, some honest sailors spotted and arrested him, leading to arguments in a Kentish pub and the potential for either renewed civil war or a royal execution of a kind that had proved so deleterious to James’s dad. The authorities arrived at the pub and brought James back to London before ‘allowing’ him to escape again, this time successfully. Once more, the Channel provided for civilized exile rather than a ruinous bloodbath. And for the first time a large chunk of ‘the Protestant Road’, from Caithness to Gelderland, was now under the same management
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CHAPTER NINE
Nancy and Lorraine » Rebuilding the Rhine » Sperm by candlelight » Gilt and beshit » Adventures in tiny states » In the time of the periwigs
Nancy and Lorraine
I am usually quite meticulous about my notes but I have one small unplaceable sheet of paper. Mixed up with various bits of German vocabulary it simply says: ‘The ducal tombs much damaged, lids pushed open by fungus and mould – appalling photos of some white stuff, like billows of detergent!’ I remember the church as eighteenth century with a painted cupola (which does not narrow it down much) and that it was a longer walk away than I had thought, and that there were gloomy trees (again, these eliminate almost nowhere). There were many years when this mausoleum, wherever it was, must have been extremely important – great solemn ceremonies with black horses, stacks of crêpe, grim-faced dowagers, lines of troops, a sense of an old reign ending and a new one begun, silent capless crowds. But at some point the last person stopped caring and all sorts of chemical grotesqueries were allowed to convulse the remains of men and women who had once commanded armies or been middling players on the spinet.
This scribbled note struck me because it is in such strong contrast to the immaculate, beautifully maintained mausoleum in Nancy of the Dukes of Lorraine. This is tucked away in a corner of the Franciscan monastery built by Duke René II in 1487 shortly after he rubbed out Charles the Bold and it forms a striking contrast to the rest of the complex, which has become the last resting place of lots of statues: frightened, badly damaged marble refugees from other parts of Lorraine, forming a sort of royalist Island of Misfit Toys. Survivors of the devastating iconoclasm of the 1790s, they include such masterpieces as Ligier Richier’s tomb of the pious and powerful Philippa of Guelders, René II’s wife. Once maintained in a sumptuous layer-cake of contrasting marbles, propelled along through the afterlife by the songs and prayers of many generations of priests and choirs, she wound up with her bones and most of her tomb chucked away, reduced to an admittedly still superb recumbent figure, shown in extreme old age wearing her outfit as a Poor Clare – and looking oddly like Darth Sidious.
The circular main chapel of the Dukes of Lorraine is in fine shape however and reflects the dukes’ odd ability to keep going despite often mortal threats to their sovereignty. Simply looking at Lorraine on the map shows its problem, with part of its territory of Bar marooned in France and the three enclaves of Toul, Verdun and Metz entangled within its borders. Its political incoherence and status as an Imperial borderland made it a favourite destination for marauding armies to pass through from every point of the compass. Until the seventeenth century, the Dukes had stayed close to the French kings and thrived through being helpful and adventurous. Near the Franciscan church the much restored Porte de la Craffe has wonderful carved silhouettes, wearing elaborate animal-themed helmets, of some of these warriors – Raoul: fought at Tournai, Gibraltar, in Brittany, killed at the Battle of Crécy; Jean I: fought at the Battle of Poitiers, crusader in Lithuania; Charles II: fought in Tunis and Livonia, and at the catastrophic Battle of Nicopolis alongside John the Fearless; René II: killer of Charles the Bold, inheritor of Bar. Their balancing act was always a difficult one though, particularly after Toul, Verdun and Metz were snapped up by France in 1552. Duke Charles IV’s luck ran out when he backed the wrong factions at the French court. As an extremely minor sub-set of the Thirty Years War he decided to invade the Metz enclaves of Vic and Moyenvic in 1630, bringing down a French invasion on his head.
Just typing the words ‘Vic and Moyenvic’ suggests a level of micro-history plunging into madness but, as usual, Vic has its real moment in the sun. It was where the great painter Georges de la Tour was born (in 1593) and married. Almost nothing is known about de la Tour’s life except that at some point he moved to the Lorraine town of Lunéville, dying there of plague in 1652. His entire working life must have been entangled with the violence and uncertainty of Lorraine in this period and he worked for Charles IV for a short time. Obviously, there is nothing so babyish as ‘the greatest ever painting’, but there seems to be a category of a thousand or so, say, which might be claimed as first equal: travelling around Lotharingia, paintings such as Vermeer’s The Little Street or Brueghel’s The Fall of Icarus or van Eyck’s Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele would qualify. De la Tour joins them with a religious picture (Joseph the Carpenter) and a secular one (The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs – painted just before Vic and Moyenvic made headlines), which make me happy just thinking about them.
Having started this non-politico-military diversion, I have to mention too de la Tour’s contemporary Claude Gellée, born in the Lorraine town of Chamagne, south-west of Lunéville in around 1600. Known as ‘Le Lorrain’, his long career as a painter mostly happened in Rome, so he falls outside this book’s frame. But it is curious that of the three wizard-like great ‘French’ painters of the seventeenth century (i.e. plus Poussin), two were in fact from Lorraine and none worked much in France. In our long and cheerful marriage, practically the only serious area of dispute between my wife and myself is over the virtues of Claude’s work. About once a year this topic will unexpectedly lurch into view at a gallery or somehow just in an unrelated conversation, with her pouring out a shocking stream of derision on how unbelievably dreary and boring his (actually) matchless canvases are. It is years since we have been to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford together because it happens to own his final masterpiece, that spectral twilit farewell to a lost world, Landscape with Ascanius shooting the Stag of Sylvia, a picture that on our final joint trip provoked poorly judged joke snoring noises. Still, even the happiest marriage has to be balanced sometimes by one partner silently soaking a pillow with tears in the darkness and whispering, ‘But I will always love you Claude and will never, never let you down.’
To return to the Dukes: Charles IV was forced to flee (with his sister disguised as a soldier) and Lorraine appeared doomed to follow the fate of the Three Bishoprics, engulfed by France. But the Holy Roman Empire continued to work well and Lorraine’s interests were guarded by the Habsburgs. Despite many indignities, the family switched its allegiance completely to the Imperial army and never backed away from being the rightful rulers, even if they were not allowed into their own territory. Duke Charles V of Lorraine was born in exile in Vienna and became commander of the Imperial armies, the ruthless hammer of both Frenchman and Turk, a victor at the epochal Battle of Vienna (1683) and conqueror of Buda. Charles died young at the beginning of the War of the League of Augsburg, pitting Louis XIV against the Dutch Republic, England, the Empire and Spain, but his actions on behalf of Christendom were remembered. In 1697, a battered France agreed to the Treaty of Ryswick (a town in South Holland – Rijswijk), which included a clause to hand back, among other things, Lorraine.
Charles’s son Leopold after further setbacks re-established his court at Lunéville, still today a wonderful example of an Imperial ‘residence’ town despite its now complete Frenchness, its atmosphere of mournful beauty much enhanced by the dense river-fog shrouding the palace when I was there. But this is the reason why the chapel of the Dukes of Lorraine is today still in such good condition. Leopold scooped the pool. The grim, panicked Emperor Charles VI, mouldering in Vienna, had no male children and spent his entire reign persuading his vulpine and inconstant neighbours to honour his eldest daughter Maria Theresa as his heir. A woman could not be emperor but she could, by agreement (‘the Pragmatic Sanction’), inherit the Habsburg lands. Leopold’s son Leopold Clement was chosen to be her husband – with the plan being that he should be elected Emperor on Charles VI’s death. This sparkling future wobbled badly when Leopold Clement, aged sixteen, died suddenly of smallpox. Suddenly his younger brother Francis, previously a total spare, stepped forward. One of the most genial figures of the eighteenth century, the sybaritic, tubby Francis spent many years happily, if unfaithfully, married to Maria Theresa, sitting in their special pavilion in the midst of their new zoo, drinking ch
ocolate for breakfast. He collected gemstones, had innumerable affairs and spent amazing amounts of money on fun stuff while Maria Theresa actually ran the Empire, fighting successful Prussian and unsuccessful Bavarian predators. From now on the Habsburg dynasty became the Habsburg-Lorraine dynasty.
When this plan for Francis was announced, Louis XV viewed it as intolerable that such a potentially powerful figure should also rule Lorraine, so an elaborate dynastic swap was carried out, transferring Francis to become Grand Duke of Tuscany in return for Lorraine ‘reverting’ to France. The duchy was then given to the former King of Poland, Stanisław Leszczyński, Louis XV’s father-in-law and almost as jolly a character as Francis, who filled the gardens of his Lunéville palace with automata that could sing, milk robot goats, etc. On Stanisław’s death Lorraine simply became part of France, but ‘Duke of Lorraine’ remained as a fossil title of the Habsburg dynasty and the chapel at Nancy a focus of veneration. Francis and Maria Theresa’s son, Joseph II, en route to offending his subjects somewhere in his Empire, came to pray here, as did his sister Marie Antoinette, just after her marriage to Louis XVI. As can be imagined, the whole place got a heavy makeover by French Revolutionaries, with the dust and bones of René II and the others orgiastically chucked about. The current chapel was rebuilt in the 1820s as a neo-royalist stronghold. There is a plaque to Marie Antoinette that can hardly contain its rage: ‘Thus, adored by the French, this proud daughter of emperors came, adorned with the graces and the virtues, to the throne of Louis XVI’. Many years after her execution, her brother-in-law, the French king Charles X, came to pray here, as did her nephew Francis II, the two tailor’s dummies of the Restoration. The morose killjoy Francis shook his head looking at the restored tombs and said, ‘All my ancestors wanted was to make Lorraine happy.’
