by Simon Winder
One English traveller marvelled at how the Republic was like a great fair where all the different peddlers of religion tried to drum up business with their ‘Phanatick Rattles’. The final victories in the war with Spain had in any event brought in a block of straightforwardly Catholic territories in the south such as Breda and Maastricht which could not realistically be converted – there was simply no longer that sort of zealous sense, particularly as, to the horror of the Elect, there seemed to be a declining interest in Calvinism even among Calvinists. In this splintered, riven environment there was even space for Spanish Jews (but not in Maastricht, where a ban stayed in place until the 1790s), who settled into non-guild industries and trades such as tobacco-spinning and diamonds.
The opposite approach was taken by Louis XIV, who in the 1680s disposed of all remaining protections for Protestants, resulting in some 250,000 leaving France and settling wherever they could find a welcome – including the area of south-west London I live in, where there is still a grand, if battered Huguenot cemetery. The influx of thousands of French-speaking Calvinists added to the mayhem in the Netherlands as ‘Walloon’ churches were set up to accommodate the refugees (there is still a very beautiful one in Delft, just by the Old Church). A new, if semi-detached, group of exiled French academics further enriched an intellectual life already crazily contradictory and fecund. Among these was Pierre Bayle, who had taught at the Academy of Sedan, set up by a fervent member of the Principality of Sedan’s ruling family, to teach French Calvinist clergy.3 When Louis shut down the Academy, Bayle moved to Rotterdam and spent much of his adult life teaching there while never learning a word of Dutch. Bayle has many virtues, but above all he cut through all the parrot-house of fervent, loopy, pious voices bickering across the Republic with the resounding, magical and new statement that drags humankind forward into a fresh era: everyone has ‘the right to be mistaken and to hold ill-founded views.’
It is hard to know who to point to in this ferment of interest – in the 1650s Delft is home to Fabritius, Vermeer, Steen and de Hooch, for example. But the Old Church there contains the modestly elegant tomb of perhaps the most important of them all (obviously we don’t need to choose really), a narrow pyramid of grey marble to commemorate Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. While Bayle made the comment which allowed humans to cross a new intellectual frontier, Leeuwenhoek was using his strangely powerful and steady eyes to cross another. Over a tremendously long life (he died in 1723) he sat for the most part in Delft, fiddling for year after year with tiny glass lenses, tubes and candles, their light intensified by concave mirrors. A young Leeuwenhoek can be seen in the background of Cornelis de Man’s nauseating painting The Anatomy Lesson of Cornelis ’s-Gravesande (a dissection carried out in the Baptistry of the Old Church!), upstaged by the moustachioed corpse, its chest opened, its ribs making me promise never to eat rack of lamb again, and its flensed skin spread over its arms like a napkin.
Leeuwenhoek was himself a great chopper and slicer and did terrible things to dogs. He was supplied by a local butcher, who must have scratched his head at the gentleman’s funny needs more than a few times. He was fascinated by eyes, from bee to cow, and at one point tinkered with a whale eye the size of a baseball thoughtfully brought to him by the captain of a Greenland whaler pickled in brandy.4 His the-world-before/the-world-after breakthroughs were to discover sperm and micro-organisms.
It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of what Leeuwenhoek did: one day he identified red blood corpuscles, the next flagellates and rotifers. His discovery of sperm was in itself a bit of a semi-breakthrough as nobody knew, having established their existence, what these little characters did or why. Supplying himself with a steady stream of his own subjects for study, Leeuwenhoek could not work out what they meant. The Great Spermist Controversy that now developed – which he did not agree with himself – lay in the belief that each sperm had a tiny homunculus inside it from which the human grew. Operating at the far outer reaches of what a contemporary lens could do, many claimed to see such a thing, crouched at the base of the head – a tiny, tiny element in an already tiny object. The fascinating argument emerged that logically the homunculus must in turn have, like a series of Chinese boxes, but not actually box-shaped obviously, myriad further tiny men in his testicles, who in turn … Perhaps with powerful enough lenses it could be discovered how many more generations of humans God planned there to be?
It had long been a party piece in scientific European circles to use a lens to see fleas and mites, but the discovery of micro-organisms was equivalent in importance, on the tiniest canvas, to the discovery of America, launching vast enterprises without which our world would be unimaginable. Leeuwenhoek’s strongest surviving lens is x266, enough to enlarge a bluebottle to the size of a spaniel, fortunately not all at one go, but also powerful enough to allow extraordinarily small animalcules (‘diertgens’!) to swim into view: ‘I make the proportion of one of these small Water-creatures to a Cheese-mite, to be like that of a Bee to a Horse’.
Leeuwenhoek became a great celebrity. He was a favourite of exiled English gentlemen with time on their hands – John Locke came to have a peep at some dog sperm in 1678 and the future James II the year after. Peter the Great passed through on his special barge and, in a curious instance of the Republic’s trading reach, could talk to Leeuwenhoek in Dutch, having picked it up on various Russian Baltic docksides. Leeuwenhoek does not seem to have been a particularly winning individual and, despite his fame, I’m not sure I would particularly have wanted to shake his hand, but as the Dutch battled wave after wave of invaders, he and Bayle and many others were transforming the world in ways which had far greater repercussions than the Siege of Namur.
Gilt and beshit
A strange constant in a long stretch of Western European history was the blocking of the Scheldt by the Dutch to asphyxiate the trade of Spanish-controlled Antwerp. A small piece of territory still ruled by the Netherlands (Zeelandic Flanders) is left over from this period of enforced quarantine from 1585 to 1792. One of the greatest ports in the world became a stagnant backwater. The Spanish turned instead to the small settlement of Dunkirk. Taken from the Dutch in 1583, it was built up in the following decades into Europe’s premier pirate port. It bristled with ever more ingenious stone castles, walls and strongpoints which, in a world of scarily vulnerable wooden ships, made it invincible. A spectacular approach to the harbour was built between two, almost mile-long, massively armed protective moles carved through the enjoyably named Splinter Sands (Dunkirk wallowed in sand and has always been the toast of dredger captains and crews). Once permitted past the entrance to the moles (armed with devices which would blow to smithereens anyone trying it on), ships could be hauled down the channel and into the fortified harbour. The moles meant that no unfriendly ship could even think of coming within range of the happily carousing pirates, barmaids, loblolly boys and so on who roared and smoked in the tavern-packed town. The Spanish could also rely on wildernesses of shifting sandbars and reliably awful squalls and storms to make any attempted blockade into a nightmare. Dunkirk became the great home of the frigate, a new type of shallow-water attack-ship which swarmed down the Channel or into the North Sea.
The first half of the seventeenth century was an English nadir. With songs and folklore of the Armada’s defeat still humiliatingly fresh, southern England was now navyless. Dunkirkers could massacre and sink entire fishing fleets and the Channel emptied of merchants. At the western end of the Channel, corsairs from Morocco could with impunity raid Cornish coastal villages and abduct their inhabitants as slaves (perhaps provoking a short-lived craze for pasties in Fez). The roots of the Royal Navy lay in this crisis, as huge ship-building programmes gradually allowed for more anti-Dunkirker patrols. After the English Civil War, Cromwell’s new Republic had tentative discussions with the Dutch about joint sovereignty for mutual protection, as the two Godly states fought the Catholic Hydra. When these came to nothing, Cromwell allied with France, both agains
t Spain and against the various members of the exiled English royal family sheltered by Spain, some lurking in the Spanish Netherlands. Aside from taking Jamaica, the key result of this war was the Battle of the Dunes in 1658. Unable to approach Dunkirk from the sea, there was no choice but to march along the beach, creating a battle on a strangely restricted site between the French army, braced by six thousand psalm-singing New Model Army troops, and the defending Spanish. After a very short, very violent fight, Dunkirk fell and, as a treaty condition, became an English possession. This was 25 June 1658, ‘the mad day’, when Dunkirk was Spanish in the morning, French at noon, English by the evening. Ownership of Dunkirk at last fixed all of London’s security worries, allowing control of the Channel and a fabulous base into which troops could be loaded for use against any future threat. But after the Restoration – in a typically heavy-lidded and brocaded moment – Charles II decided, to the incredulity of his ministers, to sell it to Louis XIV, and so Dunkirk became for ever French – one more silty element in the ancient County of Flanders at last brought to obedience.
This meant that when war broke out again – inevitably – between France and England the town turned into an even worse nest of buccaneers: cussing and belching in the footsteps of the Spaniards, again grabbing or sinking English ships, effectively with impunity, lurking behind the further upgraded and, if possible, even more bristling Splinter moles. The damage was amazing: during the War of the Spanish Succession, the French captured or sank close to a thousand English ships, thanks to such characters as the swaggering, much eulogized but obviously very annoying French hero Jean Bart. As this monstrous conflict staggered to its end, the exhausted French as part of the Treaty of Utrecht agreed to demilitarize Dunkirk, and it became a more routine port. English visitors noticed however that the dismantled fortifications were carefully piled up as thousands of numbered and categorized stone blocks which could, in time of emergency, be quickly popped back into place, like the world’s heaviest Lego kit.
The whole of the eighteenth century was spent by the British trying to keep the southern Netherlands in friendly hands (and, indeed, this has been true ever since). Every combination of allies was tried in order to achieve this, including even a further period of allying with the French themselves. In another of the treaties that ended the Spanish succession war, the Austrians in 1714 took over the old Spanish Netherlands. This allowed a member of the French royal family to become King of Spain, but shorn of some of the lands which would have given him a Philip II-like heft. The new Austrian Netherlands were reinforced against future French predation by a series of ‘barrier fortresses’ manned by Dutch Republic troops, in places such as Tournai, Ypres, Namur and Ghent. These proved hopelessly flimsy as the Austrians soon lost interest in their remote and hard-to-defend territory, and the Dutch went into an economic death spiral. Both the British and the Dutch agreed about the barrier’s importance, but the sheer weight of France leant on it heavily. In a series of epic wars (the War of the Austrian Succession, the Seven Years War, the American Revolutionary War and the French Revolutionary Wars) the British battled to fend off the French before eventually the whole lot was swept away in 1794 and incorporated into France, the outcome that the British had dreaded for generations.
The British argued endlessly about their Continental commitment, which became more closely integrated with their sharing a ruler – generally called George – with the Electorate of Hanover: a worthwhile but awkward-to-reach territory well to the east of the Dutch Republic. An extreme though plausible argument could be made for the British Empire itself being largely a displacement activity for the frustrations of fighting in Flanders. Generally the French were held back during these wars by different combinations of allies in the Austrian Netherlands, but there was never any question of mortal damage being done to France itself, which remained impregnable behind its Vauban fortresses. It became a clever British strategy to use its huge navy to deflect the French through forcing them to defend absurdly remote colonies, which once grabbed could then either be kept or used as bargaining chips in Europe later. As one British official attractively put it in 1813: ‘Antwerp and Flushing out of the hands of France are worth twenty Martiniques in our own hands’.
There is something shark-like and unappealing about the British in the eighteenth century – they created a great and fun literary and domestic culture at home, but abroad there seems to be no end to the bad faith and violence. The American Revolutionary War was such a disaster not least because at last all Britain’s potential European allies had been so frequently betrayed, nagged, lied to, let down or bullied that they finally lined up with France, shutting Britain out and taking turns to be awkward. By 1780 Britain was managing to fight Spain, France and the Dutch – with others gloatingly neutral – as well as the Americans. At last everyone had seen through Britain as an ally, making it impossible for the British to concentrate on the Thirteen Colonies in what should have been just a minor policing operation, he says controversially.
The triumphs and disasters of these endlessly extended eighteenth-century wars now have little resonance, but for many tens of thousands of British troops, the journey across the Channel was a rite of passage, heading off yet again to Flanders and points east, cursing their seasickness but at least relieved not to be dying of fever on the Spanish Main. Sometimes their transports could be trapped against the coast for days by adverse winds or flung about by appalling storms. There were also all kinds of safe-conducts for clumps of diplomats – each time the gunsmoke at last cleared, other, more voluntary British travellers at last were allowed to cross the Channel – and many of the wars’ major treaties were signed in towns dotted up and down Flanders and the Rhine: Nijmegen, Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen), Rastatt, Amiens; even the Anglo-American negotiations to end the unsatisfactory War of 1812 were carried out at Ghent.
This subject, of course, is a book in its own right, but the ink would hardly be dry on one of these treaties before any number of British ne’er-do-wells would come across from Dover to see what had been closed off by years of fighting. The most famous flood of British travellers was after the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, during the wars with Napoleon, when after ten years it was at last possible to go to France without carrying a musket. But it was equally true after earlier wars, as happy French inn-keepers and barmen casually wiped down a few surfaces, chucked a fowl in a pot and waited to fleece the new tourists. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, for example, had roistering characters such as William Hogarth and Tobias Smollett making the trip, the latter reporting that in Ghent he had talked with a Frenchman who explained carefully that France had let the Duke of Marlborough win his battles in order to thwart the machinations of the king’s mistress.
Hogarth is the real hero though. He went over to Calais with a few mates just, it seems, to get drunk and provoke a punch-up. He was a near-miraculous artist, but also a near-unhinged sort of patriot. When asked to admire any specific piece of French furniture or ornaments he said: ‘What then? But it is French! Their houses are all gilt and beshit.’ He expressed his amazement at the impact of the ‘little distance as from Dover’, suddenly finding himself face to face with ‘a farcical pomp of war, parade of riligion, and Bustle with very bussiness in short poverty slavery and Insolence’. He was arrested patriotically sketching the old English fortified gate. Hogarth’s revenge was one of his greatest paintings: The Gate of Calais. Making Calais into a stage set, viewed through an archway, every inch of the picture is crammed with derisive anti-French detail. A fat monk slobbers over a huge piece of beef for British visitors, while starveling, rickety French soldiers eat tiny bowls of grey soup. A wretched Jacobite lies on the ground with a raw onion to eat (‘brozing on scanty french fair’). A group of fishwives gawp reverently at a ray which they have arranged with a small fish to look like the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus. In the far background some absurdly handled Catholic service is going on. But the whole painting is dominated by the Gate, sunlight catching the
carved English coat of arms. Hogarth paints himself sketching it, with a hand reaching out to arrest him.
A generation later, after the Seven Years War, Smollett was able to return and create a marvellous prose equivalent to The Gate of Calais: his hymn to dyspepsia, Travels through France and Italy. Like all British visitors, he first engaged with the old Burgundian stamping grounds. Boulogne was his first focus of contempt and dismay and Travels initiates the tradition of the incredulous, comic British travel book, where readers can both marvel at foreign idiocy and warm themselves on their own national greatness. I feel sad not to have space to quote entire pages, as Smollett rages against his Continental surroundings. He cannot quite believe the awfulness of French food or French manners or their spindly, dirty furniture. He uses wonderful, now extinct words: just on a couple of pages: chalybeate, zonic, corinths, endemial, mundic. He piles on contempt for everyone in Boulogne – the nobility, living in ‘dark holes’ in the Upper Town, have ‘no education, no taste for reading, no housewifery, nor indeed any earthly occupation but that of dressing their hair and adorning their bodies’. Their only pastimes are playing cards and going to church. He is very funny both about the French (‘volatile, giddy, unthinking’, ‘a frivolous taste for frippery and shew’, ‘utter strangers to what we call common decency’, etc.) and Catholic ‘mummery’. He reserves a special hatred for a revered Virgin Mary, a statue carried off by Henry VIII but later found, miraculously, drifting back into Boulogne harbour in her own little boat: ‘At present she is very black and very ugly, besides being cruelly mutilated in different parts of her body, which I suppose have been amputated, and converted into tobacco-stoppers’.5
The sheer hysteria of Smollett’s scorn (‘They are hardy and raw-boned, exercise the trade of fishermen and boatmen, and propagate like rabbits’) gets wearying after a bit, but as he shouts and grinds his teeth, he invents a new genre. Laurence Sterne, who also took advantage of the war’s end to get across the Channel, was appalled by his predecessor and nicknamed Smollett the dreadful ‘Smelfungus’ in his novel A Sentimental Journey, which describes a Sterne-like figure’s Continental adventures and ends with the wonderful line