Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda

by Anthony Bailey

  XVII. LAS LANZAS. BREDA AND SEVILLE.

  On waking it can take an effort to climb out of a dream into the light and air. Deprived of personal detail from letters and conversations, one plunders pictures, connections, correspondences. In Schiller’s play Don Carlos, which provided the gist for Verdi’s opera Don Carlo, the revolt of the Netherlands against Spain and in particular the personal rebellion of the pro-Flemish, radicalized infante against his father, a malevolent Philip II, and against an even more menacing Grand Inquisitor, lies at the heart of the action. The play and opera set the tone for the historian Motley’s slightly later take on that period, where plucky little Holland defeated a puffed-up and perverted Spain. (Don Carlos is madly in love with the queen, the twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth of Valois, his former fiancée but now stepmother, married to his father Philip II.) In George Bernard Shaw’s play The Doctor’s Dilemma, the young artist Dubedat, dying of consumption, says “I’m perfectly happy. I’m not in pain.… I’ve … fought the good fight. And now it’s all over, there is an indescribable peace. I believe in Michelangelo, Velázquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design; in the mystery of colour; in the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed.” Dying five years before his king, the king’s painter didn’t have to witness the demise of his greatest patron, Philip IV, who lived until 1665, leaving in Carlos II an heir who made a particularly impotent monarch—well-matched to his increasingly impoverished country. Golden Ages don’t go on forever; by definition they have a beginning and an end; the Dutch found this, too, though more genially. Velázquez was fortunate to squeeze his life into the last part of one of the greatest Golden Ages. He did better still by growing all the way from young prodigy to mature genius.

  * * *

  I WENT RECENTLY to Breda to get the lie of the land and examine the terrain out of which Velázquez without ever going there conjured his martial masterpiece. I traveled by overnight ferry across a calm North Sea and then by train through Rotterdam, over the great rivers, Waal and Maas, past Dordrecht, south into Brabant. Mist hung over the low meadows, the air was filled with moisture, the land was like a giant sponge. Even the early June sunshine was watery. My hotel was on the edge of town and the bus drivers were on strike, but the hotel (Het Scheephuis, the Ship House) kept a half dozen bicycles for its clients. I cycled daily to the Breda town archives to read about Ambrogio Spinola and the Spanish occupation. I walked through the Grote Markt, where Descartes had strolled in contemplation during the period after the turfship success, when the Dutch had controlled Breda. The Surrender of Breda still hangs resplendently in the Prado in Madrid, but I looked at the two huge replicas of the painting that are here, one in the Town Hall, the other in the Breda museum, where a curator pointed out to me one mistake Velázquez had made and that these copies had copied: He had painted the Dutch ensigns as horizontal tricolors of (from the top down) blue, red, and white when in fact the United Provinces Prinsen flag, which served from 1572 to the 1630s, had been—from the top—orange, white, and blue; several years after the siege it became red, white, and blue. I walked, too, around the outside of the castle walls, through the pretty Valkenberg Park, and along the calm canals. The castell, now the Dutch military academy, its Sandhurst or West Point, stands at one corner of what was the old walled town. One of the remaining canals enters the walls at what is still called the Spaniards’ Gate; alongside the quayside just outside this a big coal-black iron barge was moored. The vessel had been converted into a floating café-restaurant named Spinola. No hard feelings! Other conflicts have intervened—and other surrenders. One recalls news photos of terms being signed in the railway carriage at Compiègne, and Field Marshal Montgomery accepting the German surrender in 1945. The bars and cafés of Breda were awash with orange banners, flags, and scarves in anticipation of the football World Cup matches.

  I made a thorough reconnaissance by bike of the country around Breda and found no natural eminence high enough for the view Velázquez posits in his Surrender. But although the generous suburbs have spread out into the low hinterland where Spinola’s men set up their siege positions, one can still find the separate villages that Chaplain Hugo recorded as strategic sites, places of skirmish, concentrated defense, or armed confrontation. From Teteringen toward Wisselaar and Terheijden a narrow road runs across the old polders along the Zwarte Dijk, the Black Dike, that is visible in Velázquez’s picture as a dark line above a flooded area of the countryside. I made a farther excursion one morning with a Dutch friend, Lies Vonkeman, a psychologist from IJlst in Friesland, out past the spot near the Hertogenbosch gate in the walls where Justin is said to have handed over the keys of the town. We cycled northward to Teteringen and then, after asking directions at a village store, pedaled on past the church and several street junctions at the central square, and then westward across the Vucht Polder, which had been flooded during the siege. Part of a recently marked-out route called the Spinolaweg begins as a paved road and continues over the Black Dike as a dirt-and-gravel lane, with earthen verges and muddy ditches on each side. We were passed by one vehicle, a pickup truck, and one other couple on bikes came toward us. Otherwise Lies and I had the country to ourselves. An open expanse of flat farmland on the former polder stretched to woods on the right, and a tidy outskirts-of-Breda housing development filled the horizon on the left. The sky had a sprinkling of white clouds but—as is usually the case in the Netherlands—seemed immensely high. Our lane, still the Spinola Way, made a sharp bend northward toward the woods and past a farm called the Hartel. Here we found the river Mark, now canalized, a broad waterway with not a single vessel in sight upon it. And here, in a small empty parking area near a highway called the Nieuw Bredasebaan, we dismounted, locked up the bikes, and walked eastward on a gravel path into the woods. Here Spinola’s name was also remembered in the remains of a small fort or schans, where his engineers had built a redoubt to buttress the double line of ramparts and entrenchments encircling Breda. This circuit of the inner contravallie and outer circumvallie was generally made with the siege lines at a distance one from the other but was here built with the lines close together, because of the natural obstacles available and useful features of the terrain. The gap between the vallies varied from a stone’s throw, as here, to as much as a kilometer near Terheijden in the north and Gineken in the south. The double circuit was to keep the Dutch garrison of Breda penned in and repel any Dutch relieving force planning to attack the Spanish besieging army from without.

  The schans was now overgrown, the grass on its twenty-feet-high banks a foot or so tall except where it had been flattened by walkers, though we were alone here today. The trees were mostly ash and alder, not large but dense enough to obscure any view. A light breeze ruffled the leaves. In the center of the roughly square grassed area of the schans, about half a football pitch in size, a red tubular metal pole was impaled in the earth—meant to suggest a lance, we gathered, and to indicate that this site was on the Spinola Way; the pole’s color, bloodred, helped give the impression that it was an offensive weapon rather than just an old piece of scaffolding. Outside the green ramparts lay a moat of dark water beyond which the supposedly firm ground looked wet. The moat had apparently been dug in already boggy soil by Frederick Henry’s troops a decade after the Spanish siege.

  Lies and I sat on the highest part of the bank for a snack of Fries suikerbrod and apples she had brought. We kept our eyes open for the wildlife that presumably was not much different from that almost four centuries before: frogs, hedgehogs, crows, blackbirds, sparrows. The place was immensely peaceful. No distant traffic sounds intruded. As on other battlegrounds I’ve been to, at what the French call Azincourt in the Normandy countryside and in the fields along the river Boyne in Ireland, this site gave little help in prompting images of violent action. Passages of fighting then were of course intermittent. For the participants, wars were as now spent most of the time waiting for something to happen and then,
suddenly, there one was, in the swirl of lethal thrust and parry, amid moments of panic and horror, cowardice and blind bravery. Father Herman Hugo’s record of the siege of Breda gave few figures for military fatalities or casualities. In the schans, here and elsewhere around the siege lines, the small units guarding the operation posted sentries who were meant to raise the alarm when needed and call the men nearby to hold the ground against the Orange attackers until a reserve force from the Army of Flanders could come to help.

  The ten-month siege was for the most part a conflict of excavation and construction. Spades were the essential if unremarked Spanish weapon. Spades were at hand for peat digging; they could deliver knock-out blows and, sharpened, served to disfigure and dismember. The siege works were formed primarily of the four-mile circuit of ditches, trenches, earth-and-turf ramparts strengthened here and there with oak palisading, and redoubts like this schans. In appropriate spots both sides fought water wars. The Dutch dammed watercourses and tried to inundate Spinola’s army. The Spanish replied with engineering works that they hoped would drown or at any rate impede the Dutch. There were frequent skirmishes and sallies, with attempts being made to break through the lines by patrols or by groups escaping from the city. It was a war of constriction and attrition, and there were—from what the records tell—few out-and-out battles. Father Hugo details one exception, numbering the casualties suffered in one more than usually bloody incident when English troops serving Prince Frederick Henry attacked a schans at Terheijden garrisoned by Italians of the king of Spain’s army, and according to Hugo, Spinola’s spokesman in this, “a great slaughter” ensued: Nearly two hundred of the prince’s men were killed by the defenders of the schans with the loss of a dozen or so of their own. (About five hundred United Provinces’ horses were also captured.)

  In Breda today the “surprise” of the turfship is still commemorated every year, but the anniverary of the success of Spinola’s army is unremarked by festivities. However, the Spanish siege of Breda has featured in several works of fiction: in Calderón’s play of that name not long after the surrender and more recently in an adventure novel, The Sun over Breda, by the Spanish writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte—one of a series of swashbuckling tales about a squad of seventeenth-century Spanish diehards and their taciturn leader, Captain Alatriste. Much of the detail in Pérez-Reverte’s book rings true, and there are some nice touches—for example, the presence, toward the end back in Madrid, of Alatriste’s young servant Íñigo who is asked to advise an artist named Diego Velázquez as he paints The Surrender of Breda. But much of the action of the book seems offstage or indirect in presentation, with a consequent etiolation of character. Captain Alatriste comes across—despite his macho mustache and a reputation for robust swordplay—as a thinly portrayed fellow, morose and speechless. Here at Breda, where our author puts Alatriste in the thick of it, one suspects the actuality of the ten-month siege was a good deal less violent and more tedious, though possibly just as deadly. According to Father Hugo, five thousand inhabitants of Breda, about a third of the town’s population, died during the siege, mostly it would seem from sickness and malnutrition. The war cry that arose from Spanish ranks as the tercios went into battle with arquebus, lance, sword, and spade was “Santiago cierra España!” (“Saint James! And close ranks, Spain!”). Yet the occasions for yelling it would have been infrequent, compared with the hours spent digging or sitting in lice- and rat-ridden shelters waiting for the skimpy rations to arrive at waterlogged redoubts. This was the cockpit of Europe, where enraged captive birds peck and claw at each other. Flanders Fields—even then closer to a wet hell than heaven. Sancho Panza exclaimed from the dry heart of Spain, “If any more Devils or Horns come hither, they shall as soon find me in Flanders as here!” A century and a bit later Uncle Toby recalled in Tristram Shandy, of one of Marlborough’s wars, “Our army swore lustily in Flanders.” The Dutch and Spanish artillery salvoes at Breda were only a tiny taste of what was to come in 1914–18, but were effective for all that in maiming and killing. Even so, the mud was a more tiresome foe than pike-tip or musket-shot; trench foot and death by pneumonia brought on by damp clothing and wet blankets were common, albeit unrecorded by Chaplain Hugo.

  There were deaths, too, from friendly fire and military punishment. Breda natives caught attempting to smuggle out messages or smuggle in tobacco and provisions were executed, often by being hanged from a gibbet and then shot for target practice. This was done within view of the town walls, to discourage others. Callot drew a graphic scene of such an event in his map of the siege, with a mounted officer shown supervising the fatal occasion. It was diffficult to identify spies accurately at that time because no one wore recognized uniforms. Soldiers distinguished their loyalties by scarves and sashes, the Dutch with blue and orange, the Army of Flanders with red, or by standards—the Spanish favoring the red Saint Andrew’s cross of Burgundy or the “ragged cross” flag showing two red-colored bumpy wooden clubs on a white background. Spinola, however, used his discretion in decreeing penalties. Some hungry escapees from Breda were simply shepherded back to the town walls to be let back in; that way the garrison inside still had the increasingly difficult job of feeding them. Three young Frenchmen tried to get away from the town and were carried back to a gate in the captain-general’s own coach. Spinola, riding hither and yon, monitored the sentries and lookouts and ensured reinforcements were stationed at points where enemy assaults might occur. He had a charmed life, he and his horse being nearly hit on several occasions by Dutch cannon fire.

  Apart from the birds and frogs, all was fairly quiet at what is now called Spinola-schans on the day we stopped there. The sylvan morning allowed for peaceful meditation but interfered with any imaginative connection with 1625. No ghostly, furious calls of “Santiago!” or “España!” could be heard. I had a few grateful thoughts about European union and the inevitable bureaucracy that has at any rate suppressed national war-lust for the last sixty-five years. Lies and I gave the symbolic lance—planted like a javelin in the earth—a parting look and walked back around the top of the rampart and then along the uneven trail to the parking place where our bikes awaited. Here, across the Mark River, Spinola’s men had built a pontoon bridge to enable supplies to reach the siege ring. We cycled back into Breda and lunched at a bedecked café where the orange flags and pennons proclaimed support for the Dutch football team. The Spanish victory in the final left the Netherlanders naturally disappointed, but it was one they put up with; they found it preferable to a German victory. After three hundred and eighty some years, old enmities undergo metamorphoses. Serious grievances are replaced by irony and humor. In the Breda Museum the next afternoon I spotted inside a glass exhibit case a large rusty key, a hand-span long, which looked as if it had fitted an old mortice lock from an immense door or gate. Alongside it lay a piece of paper on which was inscribed a handwritten poem by the Breda artist who had made the key: Pieter Laurens Mol, born in 1946.

  Dear Diego Velázquez

  Let’s make it up

  No more fuss.

  At last I found the bloody key

  Of my bloody home town.

  Pedro de Barca

  Below this Mol had drawn an array of lances.

  * * *

  DURING THE YEARS of the “protectorate” in which Cromwell ruled England, the Stuart pretender and future English king Charles II lived in Breda, not far from his sister Mary, who had married the second Prince William of Orange. When the Cromwellian regime faltered, Charles delivered in 1660 his Declaration of Breda, laying down the conditions on which he would accept the restored crown of England. In the First World War Holland managed to stay neutral, unlike Belgium, but during the Second World War German armies occupied all of the Low Countries, north and south, including Breda, on their way into France.

  The German occupation—and the collaboration of occupied people with the enemy—were cleverly foreseen in Jacques Feyder’s very stylized film of 1935, La Kermesse héroique or Carnival
in Flanders, starring Jean Murat and Louis Jouvet and set in the former Spanish Netherlands. The year is 1616, and the male residents of the Flemish town of Boom panic at the prospect of the Army of Flanders moving in on them. The female residents demonstrate greater ambivalence about the threat. Much fun is made of the craven cowardice of Boom’s burgomaster and councillors. Much sport is also made of the cupidity of the town’s merchants who regard the pike-carrying foreign soldiery as good for trade. One burger takes comfort in the notion that a captured town gets a year’s exemption from taxes. Signs go up: “Welcome to our visitors.” The womenfolk of Boom reckon that, given the supine behavior of their husbands, the Spaniards offer the chance of amorous entertainment. The keys of the town are eagerly handed over with the unspoken suggestion that a key can unlock more than a city gate. The welcome ceremonies become a feast, with oysters, wine, and love-play. One good wife of Boom says longingly, “The Spaniards are supposed to rape and pillage. And I’ve waited all day.” Another declares, “These Spanish have been maligned—this is just a dream.” Life is a wonderful dream, and rape, it turns out, is unnecessary in Boom. At the time the film was regarded by some Belgians and French as unpatriotic, promoting appeasement, and slanderous toward the Flemings. A few years later the Wehrmacht panzer divisions gave them more serious worries.