The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

by Michael Pye

  His father pushed him to train as a goldsmith, a trade ‘the most genteel of any in the mechanic way’. Goldsmiths were already rudimentary bankers, taking custody of other people’s silver and gold plate, which could easily be sold, turning foreign coins into local cash sometimes by melting them down, so rich merchants were the very best kind of friend; Verstegan arranged to know grandees, to be associated with Sir Thomas Gresham, who founded the London Exchange. He then stepped up to being a gentleman himself: he wrote. He dedicated his first book to Gresham, a travel guide to Europe which he mostly stole from a German book; he added a guide to Catholic feast days, a list that was officially banned in England, but which he said was a wholesome and useful tool for travellers to work out dates for fairs and holidays.

  That couldn’t last, at least not in the Protestant England of Elizabeth. Even the friends of Sir Thomas Gresham himself were learning compulsory discretion; Martin de la Faille, son of one of the richest merchant houses in Antwerp, was told by his father that it was far too dangerous to handle political letters any more. Verstegan knew about arrests and executions, about the forbidden missions to convert or hold the English and the sudden escapes abroad of the devout, and he didn’t seem to care. He was pulled in ‘for religion’ and imprisoned for a couple of days in the small, dank City prison that usually held debtors and the occasional martyr; the pretext was that the man who printed his travel guide had also printed a book of ‘Spiritual Consolation’. Those days had no effect. Verstegan printed and published a pamphlet on the execution of the Jesuit Edmund Campion, which tactlessly quoted the Book of Revelations. In it the queen’s justice was insulted, and the queen herself linked indirectly to the Whore of Babylon.

  Men went to the gallows for printing such a text. When Verstegan was arrested one more time he knew he had to run. He broke out of England and got across to France; for a while he was in Rouen as a propagandist in the cause of the English Catholic martyrs. This won him friends and infuriated the English ambassador, Sir Edward Stafford, who wrote home to say: ‘I would lose all my credit but I would bring the Englishman to the gallows, to teach all others by him to be honester men to their country.’ The papal nuncio intervened, sprang Verstegan from jail and sent him on to Rome, where his cardinal contact rather tetchily said the Pope couldn’t be expected to support every Englishman who managed to get to Rome.

  Somehow he tacked back to northern France, but he knew he had to head for Antwerp even if the city was under siege. He had to be at the heart of the printing trade, which was the heart of the trade in information.

  His prospects were good. The Spanish relied on their diplomats to report what was happening in enemy England, but their embassies were shut down in wartime. A private intelligence service could fill the gap, and spend a great deal of Spanish money. Even so, life was not easy for Verstegan. The money from Madrid did arrive, but not often and not when it was expected. He opened an account to buy books from the great publisher Plantin in March 1587, and handed over the first cash sixteen years later in April 1603. ‘Good patient Job,’ he wrote, ‘lost only all that he had, but he was not molested for payment of that which he did not have.’

  He published an extraordinary work – the Theatre of Cruelties, one more illustrated book of martyrs but this time all of them recent and most of them in England, a few in Ireland, some in France and the Netherlands, and Mary, Queen of Scots, about to be despatched by an axeman who is almost dancing with the joy of it all. He showed decent citizens, starched and ruffed, being escorted out of their ransacked homes. A horse is being persuaded to eat corn out of a priest’s guts. Bishops have their feet held in the fire, saintly ladies are crushed under weight after weight, ears are cut off, the lights torn out of bodies, and figures in cassocks hang in mid-air from gallows: the book is truly sensational. It suited Catholic Antwerp, battered as it was, to know there was such cruelty somewhere else.44

  That was only the start of Verstegan’s work. The Jesuits were back in England, disguised because it was illegal to preach or convert in a country disturbed by Catholic resistance and Catholic enemies, and worrying out loud that priests might turn worldly since they could not wear the protection of their clerical dress. They needed books, information, money, propaganda and contacts. They needed agents, and the agents’ business was ‘brocage and spierie’, as the Catholic poet Anthony Copley said – fixing and spying.

  Verstegan dealt with the skippers who smuggled priests and books, found passports for anyone who needed them, published their works and missals where it was legal and made sure they reached England where they were illegal. He was lucky that he was moving books over the sea and not overland; it was far too easy to search carts and carriages at every frontier. Even barges on the inland waterways were not safe; one bargeload of Protestant books, seized between Geneva and Paris, took eight booksellers almost a week to inventory, and then suppress. It helped to have diplomatic backing, however indirect; the cook and valet of the French ambassador in London had a busy trade importing illegal books and sending back, in return, the better class of any church furnishings they could salvage.

  Otherwise, printed pages were shuffled into heaps of white paper, or rolled and stuffed into barrels; whole books were buried in loads of raw cloth or raw fibres. They often had to be hidden as they were loaded on board because in some Netherlands ports the Scots merchants were particularly keen on stopping seditious books at source. They had to be landed in Scotland and England very discreetly. Sometimes customs officials could be bribed, but that drew attention to the cargo; it might be better to take a chance, since London customs officers were notorious for confiscating books and then selling them on at their high full price. That did at least mean the books were in England and in use. Anywhere else, it was better to beach the ship on sands, land the passengers first and then take the books off by dinghy – ideally at some small port or some empty beach where there was nobody who thought it worth asking questions. You landed troublesome books at Burntisland in Fife or in Queensburgh if they were meant for Edinburgh.

  Along with the books went letters: the letters that made it possible to organize the English Catholics. Some went by the public post, mostly the Tassis service, which ran out of Italy by way of Frankfurt for Hamburg letters, via Brussels for Paris and via Antwerp for London; so there was plenty of traffic in which to hide important messages travelling from Antwerp to England. English intelligence liked to use mail drops, leaving letters with a London jeweller called Mulemaker or an Italian called Mynistrale; Verstegan may have done the same. Some letters even crossed the sea stuffed into the ornamental buttons on a man’s coat. The public post was a fragile institution, so Verstegan used his own couriers when he could; the English kept an eye on ‘one Laurence, a book-binder in Antwerp who is a little, slender man, with a yellowish little beard and lispeth in his speech and speaketh good French’.

  The letters try to sound innocent. ‘Concerning our marchandise,’ Verstegan wrote, ‘… we are lyke to have heare a very plentifull yeare, so that we may make great commoditie of corne, yf we be secret in our course.’ Nobody plants corn in secret, so it can’t be a farmer’s letter; there must be a second meaning, a harvest of souls. When the Zeeland authorities found letters like this, they wrote pamphlets about the shocking Catholic use of such mundane language to discuss sacred matters. ‘The marchant that was arrested continued still in his distresse,’ Verstegan wrote; the merchant was a priest. As for the sudden appearance in a farmer’s letter of ‘Mr Garlyke the fishmonger’ who ‘was oute of towne, but he saith he will very shortly be there and give orders for our affaires’, you might wonder why a fishmonger is harvesting corn. Mr Garlyke was a Jesuit, most likely.

  Verstegan kept a careful eye on his English enemies and London watched him back: the familiar, obsessional binary game of spying. He wrote to one Jesuit in England in 1592: ‘181 dothe thinck it best to stay for a few weekes to send any 239 to any 139 in 25, because Mr 9 m 12 … dothe here by 227 means very much
seek to understand which way and how 181 dealeth.’ That meant: Verstegan, who was 181, reckons it would be better for a few weeks not to send messages, which is 239, to any priest (139) in England (25); the reason is that some spy in Antwerp is trying to find out exactly how Verstegan operates. The spy, Mr 9 m 12, is probably a man called Robert Poley.

  This breathless world could not go on for ever; the intrigue, the tradecraft, the moral purpose of it all. After Elizabeth’s death in 1603, the English Mission was no longer a covert mission, there were no more moles and decoys to run, and the Spanish did not need Verstegan’s tip-offs and rumours about what was happening in the English court. Verstegan changed business, which only made it clear how much information and intelligence had become a business.

  He used his contacts; he was given a monopoly on importing English cloth into Flanders. He tried to sell the Spanish a cunning device that would stop water going stagnant and allow their ships to stay at sea longer; then he tried to persuade them of a scheme to cut the Dutch out of the carrying trade between the Baltic and the Mediterranean. He did rather well. He took up journalism and poetry; he was even a humorist. He wrote for the broadsheet usually known as the Nieuwe Tijdinghen, which came out three times a week, and continued when it became the Wekelijcke Tijdinghen, which came out only once a week because nobody wanted to read about the Spanish when they were being defeated. The commodity that he traded was fact and information and rumour, and he may well have gone on providing more private newsletters for money, but he was no longer quite a spy; he had graduated at last to being a proper hack.

  He chose his time and his city well. The first English-language newspapers appeared in Amsterdam in the 1620s, translations of the very graphical Dutch news sheets, and came to London just as news in general did: across the North Sea, by way of Antwerp. If the North Sea were not open, England could not know what was happening abroad. John Pory of the London Intelligencer complained in 1632 that ‘touching forraine news, we can have but very little because it is now a fortnight since we had any post from Antwerp’. The world around the sea was addicted already to fact, news, information, intelligence.

  Twenty-eight people crowded on the machine with Prince Maurits at the helm: the sailing chariot devised by Simon Stevin, engineer, book-keeper, king of numbers. His famous toy went skimming the sands close to The Hague, two sails billowing, four great wheels turning, flags standing proud in the wind and a prince with a chance for mischief. ‘At one moment, for fun and in order to play a trick on his gentlemen, his Excellency steered the chariot into the sea, which movement struck many with great fear; but as he moved the helm in good time the chariot struck the beach again and sped along its former course.’

  The sailing chariot was something Dutch sailors had seen in the Orient, a Chinese invention; this one was devised as a pastime, a kind of compliment paid by a tutor to his student, a scholar to his prince and patron. Stevin had known Maurits since their days in the small community of students at Leiden; he was with him all through the war that followed, his tent pitched close to the prince during many sieges; he was physically so close to power he never seems to have written letters of advice or letters asking favours, so close we can’t quite tell if the two men were friends or only colleagues.

  He was the prince’s tutor in mathematics, which also meant the sciences of navigation and fortification and how to aim a gun, and the prince was his patron and protector even when Stevin’s ideas were officially outrageous. Stevin said the Earth went round the sun, and the very Calvinist geographer Ubbo Emmius let it be known that ‘if these things are true, as I understand them, the writer vehemently declares that Moses is a liar and the entire Holy Scriptures are untrue. I regret that the name and the studies of the Prince are sullied by this filth.’ The prince did not even blink.

  Stevin thrived in his first years at Leiden. He registered for the university, a good move since students paid no tax on wine, beer or books, and only a year later he had his first patents: for ingenious machines to dredge the sand and mud out of the canals in Delft, including a large net that could be opened and closed from the surface above. That same year, 1584, a passing fanatic shot Maurits’s father dead on the stairs of his quarters in Delft, and he died with impeccably tasteful last words: ‘My God, my God, have pity on me and on this poor people.’ The death could truly have been a pitiable moment for the rebels because William had been the great leader of the revolt against the Spanish; but his son took over his role, step by step, first the ruler of a couple of the United Provinces, then the general in charge of the army that had to fight for the survival of the whole United Provinces, then ruler of them all and a prince. His life was formed by war and its urgent needs, and so was Stevin’s; his brilliant, practical and didactic mind was needed all the time. There were a hundred problems to solve, and without answers the war and the nation would be lost.

  The urgency Roger Bacon once felt, faced with the stories of Mongol hordes, was now producing a stream of new devices and technology. Stevin became an army engineer and then a quartermaster for ten years. He devised sluices, pumps, dredgers, windmills, even a combined spade, axe and pick so soldiers needed only one tool when digging; he thought this important since digging ‘is held to be one of the principal causes of Maurits’ famous victories in the besieging of cities’. He wrote a treatise on fortifications without doing too much study of what happened in the field, but it turned out sound enough to change the tactics of real-life soldiers: polygon forts, five bastions or more, surrounded by double canals. When he wrote about longitude he devised a way to sail directly to any port without bothering about how to calculate longitude at sea, which was a conundrum not to be solved for decades. The constant tension between the practical and the sheer beauty of mathematical theory kept him fascinated.

  The results were startling. He had been a student for two years when he published what seems a rather prosaic book: De Thiende, which means ‘the dime’. It is, among other things, a plea for uniform measures and money in a country where the Amsterdam pound was not the same as the Nijmegen pound, and the Amsterdam foot was just an approximation of the Guelder foot. It would help trade, and it would help the United Provinces, which had a great muddle of moneys: each province was putting out a very various selection of coins, guilders, daalders and the rest. More important, it meant that people could be taught how to work out value and quantity from first principles, and all on the same basis, not just judging by eye or relying on their personal and disorderly experience.

  In order to get to this nice bureaucratic solution, Stevin started as he always did, from mathematics. In the process, with the notion of making calculation easier and fractions more clear, he invented the first practical decimal system.

  He knew of systems which divided by one hundred – in Antwerp the aum measured wine and it was divided into one hundred pots – but he wanted to set a standard for measuring that would work anywhere: for surveyors, for cashiers, for anyone who had to count and calculate.

  He dedicated his book to ‘Astronomers, Surveyors, Measurers of Tapestry, Gaugers … to Money-Masters and to all Merchants’. He showed how to write down numbers as decimals without awkward fractions, so it was easy to add or subtract or even find a square root simply by keeping the decimals lined up accurately; and he made the case for everyone using the same system, calculating on the basis of tens and not the sixties that were sometimes used. He did not waste time being modest about ‘the great use of his invention’. On principle, he wrote in Dutch so everyone in Holland could understand, but the book was quickly translated into French, and almost as quickly into English and Danish; it was read everywhere.

  He was also a physicist: he changed the science about the pressure water puts on anything under or in it. He wrote the first Dutch book on logic, and a book on man’s civic duty. In mathematics he had a method to carry him almost anywhere. He reorganized the princely lands and money after the morning when the prince complained he ‘had been handed certain a
ccounts which he found obscure, and in his opinion unnecessarily long’. He ran experiments: he may even have beaten Galileo to the simple test of whether weight decides how fast solid bodies fall, taking the burgomaster of Delft up a church tower to drop two balls of lead thirty feet onto a sounding board and discovering ‘they fall together onto the board so simultaneously that their two sounds seem to be one and the same rap’. He took on practical work dredging the canals of Delft and invented sluices where the force of water would scour away silt, and he was well-enough known to be called to Gdansk in Poland to deepen the harbour there; naturally, since he tested everything, he had to see the harbour for himself. He also devised new kinds of watermill, and built them to test his theories; the Delft magistrates wrote him a testimonial saying the mills ‘rebuilt according to the art of the said Stevin have scoured at least three times as much water as the former mills usually did’. The people of IJsselstein were less complimentary when their mill failed and polder land disappeared back under the water. Stevin went to check, again and again, as though he couldn’t quite believe that his ideas had gone wrong. He put the failure down to neglect and even sabotage.

  Everything had to be engineered. That had been true when the first peat-diggers tried to defend the land against water, but now the scale of the work was hugely expanded. There were new trading companies going out to the East and West Indies, shareholder companies, not just shares in particular ships, and they depended on practical mathematics: ships had to be navigated, there had to be walls to keep enemies at bay, waterways to carry goods, surveys to parcel out the newly conquered lands. Someone had to aim the guns accurately. Someone had to keep the books and record the buying and selling of shares. Stadhouder Maurits saw the need to train engineers, surveyors, people who had enough maths ‘but only as much of each as is necessary for a general practical knowledge of engineering’. He proposed a new school alongside the university at Leiden: the Duytsche Mathematique.