by Simon Winder
Unlike the sad, chemically forced apart and ignored tombs mentioned at the beginning of this section, the chapel of the Dukes of Lorraine continued to function throughout the oddities of the twentieth century. When the Habsburgs were forced to abdicate at the end of the Great War, the ex-Emperor Charles, after various low-grade semi-adventures, went into exile in Madeira (I mention this because I was recently there and visited his tomb – festooned in legitimist ribbons1 – meaning that I have now completed the long-standing dream of collecting all the Habsburg imperial tombs). His son, Otto, born in 1912, became the heir to the ex-throne, but was banned from ever entering the former Habsburg lands. A genial, devout and thoughtful character, Otto was doomed to wander the world with a funny batch of passports, promoting pan-European cooperation. As he could not go to Austria or Hungary he adopted the Nancy chapel and was married there in 1951. When he died in 2011 an elaborate requiem mass was held for him. Each year a mass is still held for the Dukes of Lorraine.
I once stayed in a very old-fashioned boarding-house in Vienna where the breakfast room had as one of its decorations a little luridly coloured and yellowing printed card from 1915, showing the ancient Emperor Franz Joseph feeding a baby in a high chair, Otto. This action on his part seems extremely unlikely, but the survival of such a piece of devotional kitsch shows the odd nature of history. In his enormously long lifetime, instead of becoming Emperor Otto I, he was on the run from republicanism, communism, republicanism again, Nazism, communism again, outliving them all and by the end of his life cheerily showered in honorary citizenships by many of the countries he might once have ruled. Somehow, more often than not through no virtue of its own, the House of Lorraine clung on.
Rebuilding the Rhine
Ever since I can remember I have hated Louis XIV. I would not say the same about most other rulers, even those with a consistently anti-British record. It is not as though he came up as an object of scorn in the playground or my parents routinely discussed the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes at dinner. I do remember having history lessons, aged fourteen or fifteen, about seventeenth-century France when the teacher made clear his love of Richelieu and Mazarin and the civilized and thoughtful world they conjured up under Louis XIII. There was perhaps an implication that it all then became colder and grimmer with Louis XIV.
Off and on for years, when the children were small, we would often find ourselves at Versailles, either en route to a train trip into Paris or visiting a sister who lived nearby. One way or another I have spent a lot of time at Versailles and always disliked it – the sheer chilly dreariness and pomposity; the talentless brown-nosing decorators who did all the Sun King ceiling paintings; the way that nothing about the palace contributes anything warm or stylish. I associate it in any event less with aesthetics and more with the endless hunt for toilets characteristic of holidays with small children. Louis’s great building in Paris, Les Invalides, created for his war veterans, has the same family connotations: a whole afternoon was once spent in furious argument there with a stubborn seven-year-old son wanting to buy a ‘paper-knife’ in the shop which was obviously just a dagger. My – I thought – trial-winning argument that nobody sent him any letters to open anyway, him being only seven, bounced off uselessly. My three-year-old daughter then toddled into the laser alarm of an amazingly ugly giant vase donated by Tsar Alexander I to Louis XVIII which, if she had successfully shoved it over so that it shattered into a thousand golden bits, would have been an action clapped by most present. So perhaps I just associate the Sun King, perhaps unfairly, with that awkward phase in parenting where intentions related to sex, reading, sleep and alcohol are always being trumped by emergency changes of clothing and tantrums about foreign food.
Louis XIV’s lifelong, weary pursuit of gloire made him into a sort of giant wigged animal restlessly confined within the hexagon of France, battering its edges in a rage just to expand them ever so slightly. He could have spent his time on pleasant trips to the Loire valley with carriages packed with effectively limitless sacks of money, but instead he spent the lot on soldiers, killing many tens of thousands of them so that Lille and Strasbourg should become part of France. Armies of toadying lawyers were paid to come up with various absurd reasons why region x should be French or town y had ancient historical links with his family, but nobody except Louis believed them and he simply ground his way north and east, conjuring up the active enmity of almost everyone during half a century, a legacy continued under his long-lived successor Louis XV.
Minor but poignant casualties in all this were the ten Alsatian towns of the attractively named Decapolis. These pieces of the Empire had been somewhat ineffectively allied since the fourteenth century, had been ravaged during the Thirty Years War and now all fell definitively into Louis’s lap, with the exception (for now) of Mühlhausen (Mulhouse), which continued to have a ring of magic fire around it from being an exclaved member of the Swiss cantons. Schlettstadt, once home of a great early sixteenth-century school of humanists, became Sélestat; Hagenau became Haguenau but nobody pronounced the H any more and Louis had Frederick Barbarossa’s palace there eradicated to prevent any further associations with ‘Germanness’ (the stones were used to build Fort-Louis on the Rhine, bits of which are still there); Kolmar became Colmar, and so on.
There is no space here to deal with the seemingly endless dynastic wars that battered Europe under Louis XIV and Louis XV. The Dutch for a few months in 1672 came close to being destroyed – their incorporation into France being a what-if on a far vaster scale than that of the Decapole. The extra naval heft of a Franco-Dutch state might have devastated Britain, and much of the world might now be speaking French, with all of North America called Louisiana and no French Revolution as Paris would never have had to bankrupt itself fighting the Seven Years War and the American War. The Dutch brushed off all their old anti-Philip II pamphlets and simply dropped in Louis’s name instead, portraying him as Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, who (biblically) shouts, ‘Kill, kill, for the hunt is good!’
Setting aside pointless conjectures, the grinding nature of European warfare from Louis XIV onwards meant both relatively little change in borders but also a general sense that the real prizes were elsewhere. What headway Louis enjoyed was in part because the Empire was so fully distracted by fighting the Turks – and indeed Louis had himself somewhat un-Christianly encouraged the Turks to attack Vienna. Briefly it looked as though the Habsburgs would be crushed by the Ottomans and their territories swept away, allowing Louis to absorb the remaining tatters of western Germany and launch his own crusade against the Turks, or simply partition Europe with them. This future is almost too peculiar to comprehend. But with the failure of the Siege of Vienna (not least thanks to Charles of Lorraine), vast swathes of Central Europe in turn opened up to Habsburg power and it was Louis who suddenly appeared to be monarch of a mere cheese-and-wine backwater. The French tugging back and forth with the Dutch the corpse of the Spanish Netherlands was very small beer compared to the apocalyptic Battles of Mohács and Slankamen (1687 and 1691) which had large, mainly German armies racing around ecstatically some five hundred miles into the Ottoman Empire. When not being called Nebuchadnezzar, Louis was sometimes called ‘the Great Turk’, a potentially mocking rather than admiring name.
While the Habsburgs were enjoying themselves in the east, Louis XIV’s general the Count of Mélac was engaging in his since legendary campaign physically to destroy western Germany, with Mannheim, for example, levelled ‘like a field’. The intention was to so damage the area between the Rhine and France that it would become a demilitarized zone. Even if it could not be absorbed by France (even Louis admitted he had no claim on places such as the Electorate of Cologne) it could be wrecked. As each town was burned to the ground, each palace and cathedral blown up, a German black legend around France grew up as severe as that of the Dutch with the Spanish.
Perhaps frivolously we at least can appreciate some of the results of the French demolitions as, natura
lly, these provoked a great wave of rebuilding. Numerous superb new palaces, inspired by Versailles but with a genial frivolity lacking in that chilly pile, sprang up along the Rhine. The Elector-Archbishop of Cologne, Clemens August, built his spectacular Augustusburg Palace near Bruhl, a glamorous confection reflecting the perhaps rather worldly eighteenth-century concerns of the Elector and allowing for colossal parties. He tended to spend the spring and summer here, indulging his enthusiasm for using falcons to catch herons. Perhaps oddly, given its owner’s role as a great prince of the Church, the palace had only a tiny little chapel tucked in next to a gigantic hunting-themed room. Clemens August was the son of the Elector of Bavaria and younger brother of the anomalous, luckless non-Habsburg Emperor Charles VII who was militarily humiliated by Maria Theresa and died quickly before his plight got even worse, allowing the Imperial crown to land on Francis’s head. There are portraits of Clemens August and his brother at Augustusburg which make them look identical, like those paper dolls whose clothing you can change, one a priest, the other a soldier. In the wake of Allied bombing during the Second World War, this was one of the handful of attractive big buildings left standing on the Middle Rhine and it became the incongruously curlicue location for many West German state galas.
The Bishop of Speyer built his own magnificent replacement palace at Bruchsal, burnt out in March 1945, but now home to the unmissable German Mechanical Music Museum which, alas, I have no space to write about except to say how much the world owes to the genius of Franz Rudolph Wurlitzer. But the pick of these great structures has to be the palace at Rastatt rebuilt by Ludwig Wilhelm, Margrave of Baden, from 1700 onwards. ‘Turkish Ludwig’ was, like Charles of Lorraine, a superb example of how effectively the Empire worked in this period. He had fought with Charles at Vienna, commanded at Slankamen and during the War of the Spanish Succession played a key role in the campaign that resulted in the devastating Battle of Blenheim.2 His palace at Rastatt was built over many years, sadly Ludwig Wilhelm himself not living long enough to enjoy it much. Baden was not a big state, but there on the roof is a colossal gold statue of Jupiter shaking his thunderbolts in the direction of France at a presumably quailing Louis. The endlessly absorbing military museum in the palace includes a deranged nineteenth-century panorama of the Battle of Slankamen, with some six thousand little tin figures fighting in a desert (presumably because the maker assumed this would make it all Muslim-looking, although it was fought in a quite green and bosky bit of north Serbia). The panorama shows the disciplined Imperial troops marching in ranks against the impulsive uncoordinated childishness of the Turks, who are backed by exotic cannon, prisoner heads on spikes, a camel park, a big janissary cooking-pot, some quixotic old-school archers (perhaps reused from another panorama) and the Grand Vizier’s tent, soon to be booty.
The panorama is positively rational compared to the palace’s Ancestral Hall, decorated with gigantic statues of nude Turkish captives in chains, sighing, groaning, pulling at their top-knots and threatened on every side by gilt plaster decorative swirls. The ceiling shows the Apotheosis of Hercules (i.e. Ludwig Wilhelm) flanked, inevitably, by his chums Magnanimitas, Nobilitas, Auctoritas and so on. The palace also has some amazingly retro tapestries celebrating Ludwig Wilhelm’s friendship with William III, Marlborough, etc., the tapestries mainly showing French houses being set fire to. After Ludwig Wilhelm’s death, the Treaty of Rastatt between the French and the Empire was negotiated here, ending their parts in the War of the Spanish Succession. The elegant little wood-panelled room has been preserved where Marshal Villars, signing for the aged and bitter Louis XIV, and Prince Eugene of Savoy initialled the agreement.
‘Turkish Ludwig’ rode the crest of a particular moment of glamour – colossal wigs, unironic allegory, pretty furniture – and through many setbacks his palace has somehow survived, albeit with its surrounding area rather hedged in with much-later-built shops, such as Top Hair, Hair Impuls and S + B: Body Wear (and more!), providing a cheerful frame. Ludwig’s greatest monument though is in the Stiftskirche in the town of Baden-Baden where he is buried. Taking up an entire wall, it might be said that his tomb decorations effectively corrupt and end an entire fun genre. But if so, this is in a good cause. The tomb is almost impossible to look at there is such a confusion: cascades of armorial decoration, skulls, flags, cannon, attractive allegorical girls representing something or other, a hapless Turk being clawed at by an eagle (i.e. the Empire), while another has the claws of a lion (i.e. Baden) sunk into his face. Death (a cloaked skeleton) acts as a sort of gloating circus master, while a litter of grenades, cannonballs and abandoned kettle drums are scattered at the monument’s foot. A stretched Hercules-style Nemean lion skin has Ludwig Wilhelm’s many virtues carved onto it: ‘Protector of the Empire, Atlas of the Germans’, etc. I love this stuff, obviously – it takes Louis XIV’s architecture and allegory and, on behalf of little Baden, reduces them to camp absurdity. All these great battles, grand alliances and the rest may be long forgotten, but from grand wigs to Hair Impuls life goes on.
Sperm by candlelight
The Old Church in Delft is externally a bit of a disaster, with its clumsy tower slumped to one side at an alarming angle (but remaining steady like that for some six hundred years). Internally though it is a magical advertisement for Protestant whitewash – pristine, severe and elegant. Its tombs are many and enjoyable, particularly Admiral Tromp’s, with its life-size marble armoured figure, lying with its head propped up by a cannon covered in a flag, capturing the moment of his death at the Battle of Scheveningen – but even the biggest tomb is swamped by the sheer height and whiteness of the interior, which frowns down in Calvinist rectitude on human folly.
Delft’s churches, like many others across the Netherlands, are an extraordinary mishmash. From the seventeenth century onwards other Europeans marvelled at the religious tolerance of the Republic. The British Isles, for example, had been made almost ungovernable by frenzied religious hatreds, with civil wars, massacres, exiles, rebellion and four regime changes in less than fifty years, before William III’s invasion and coup yoked British resources to Dutch needs. Throughout these British ructions, Zeeland, Rotterdam and the Hague found themselves dealing with often bedraggled yet snooty English exiles turning up in small boats – these provinces’ coasts providing the vital safety valve that prevented more English regime opponents from suffering the fate of Charles I. His sons, the future Charles II and James II, were at different points grateful for Dutch hospitality, even if the marriage of James’s daughter Mary to William III ended with the destruction of James’s own serio-comic attempts to re-impose Catholicism on his surly and derisive country. It was while twiddling his thumbs in Breda that Charles bought one of the greatest paintings now in the Royal Collection, Brueghel’s The Massacre of the Innocents, painted almost a century before, a horrifying portrayal of the New Testament story, but updated for the 1560s with armoured Spanish troops killing Dutch children. An earlier owner, the Emperor Rudolf II, found it so upsetting that he had all the children painted over, so a mother is weeping in despair over a parcel on her lap and another mother is fighting with a soldier over a swan, while horsemen thrust their lances into a group of farmyard fowls.
The Brueghel was only one striking example of a whole world of paintings, plays, poems and songs execrating the invaders of the Low Countries. These foreigners were, whether Spanish or French, Catholic. The Republic defined itself by being Calvinist and, as in England or Ireland, faith became both a cultural and religious marker, often hard to tell apart. In miniature, the Republic became a lesson in the limits of reform. As all other variants on Catholicism found, having broken Rome’s monopoly it was impossible to persuade everybody, even if they agreed with the break, what the substitute should be. This was also not helped by the different religious experience of each Dutch province and the degree to which each would go to almost any length to defend its local interests. Calvinists themselves, with their focus on discipline and biblical ex
egesis, found it impossible to maintain a united front, with a terrible splitting sound never far off. Like a cake recipe, once you start mixing ingredients, you can never pick them apart again, and each reform movement had to blunder ahead throwing into the mixer ever more bizarre things, cheered on by one group and mocked by others. Every attempt to go back to basics was thwarted by the real basics being that the cake had been already baked by one and half thousand years of the Catholic Church. Ideas around reform spun off in every direction. There were extreme ‘Cocceians’ within the Reform church whose close study of the Bible led them to believe, for example, that God did not really part the Red Sea, a revolutionary suggestion that went down poorly with mainstream opinion more concerned with God’s anger being brought down on the Netherlands by (as usual) dancing schools, tobacco, coloured hankies, etc. Outside the official Church, the Mennonites’ severe attitude towards the unacceptability of violence led them through many convolutions to agree that they could pray for the success of the Dutch state, but not to pray specifically for the success of its armies.
