Several times, Peter left the shipyard to visit the lecture hall and dissecting room of Professor Fredrik Ruysch, the renowned professor of anatomy. Ruysch was famous throughout Europe for his ability to preserve parts of the human body and even whole corpses by injection of chemicals. His magnificent laboratory was considered one of the marvels of Holland. One day, Peter was present in front of the body of a small child so perfectly preserved that it seemed alive and smiling. Peter gazed at it a long time, marveling, and finally could not resist leaning forward and kissing the cold forehead. Peter became so interested in surgery that he had difficulty leaving the laboratory; he wanted to stay and observe more. He dined with Ruysch, who advised him on his choice of surgeons to take back to Russia for service with his army and fleet. He was intrigued by anatomy and thereafter considered himself qualified as a surgeon. After all, he was able to ask, how many others in Russia had studied with the famous Ruysch?
In later years, Peter always carried two cases with him, one filled with mathematical instruments to examine and verify construction plans presented to him, the other filled with surgical instruments. He left instructions that he was to be informed whenever an interesting operation was to be performed in a hospital in his vicinity, and he was usually present, frequently lending assistance and acquiring sufficient skill to dissect, to bleed, to draw teeth and to perform minor operations. Those of his servants who fell ill tried to keep it a secret from the Tsar lest he appear at their bedsides with his case of instruments to offer—and even insist on their acceptance of—his services.
In Leyden, Peter visited the famous Dr. Boerhaave, who supervised a celebrated botanical garden. Boerhaave also lectured on anatomy, and when he asked Peter what hour he would like to visit, the Tsar chose six o'clock the following morning. He also visited Boerhaave's dissection theater, where a corpse was lying on a table with some of its muscles exposed. Peter was studying the corpse with fascination when he heard grumbles of disgust from some of his squeamish Russian comrades. Furious, and to the horror of the Dutch, he ordered them to approach the cadaver, bend down and bite off a muscle of the corpse with their teeth.
In Delft, he visited the celebrated naturalist Anton von Leeuwenhoek, inventor of the microscope. Peter spent more than two hours talking with him and looking through the miraculous instrument by which Leeuwenhoek had discovered the existence of spermatozoa and had studied the circulation of blood in fish.
On free days in Amsterdam, Peter wandered the city on foot, watching the citizens bustling by, the carriages rattling over the bridges, the thousands of boats rowing up and down the canals. On market days, the Tsar went to the great open-air market, the Botermarket, where goods of every kind were piled up in the open or under arcades. Standing next to a woman buying cheeses, or a merchant choosing a painting, Peter observed and studied. He especially enjoyed watching street artists performing before a crowd. One day, he watched a celebrated clown juggling while standing on top of a cask, and Peter stepped forward and tried to persuade the man to come back with him to Russia. The juggler refused, saying he was having too much success in Amsterdam. In the market, the Tsar witnessed a traveling dentist who pulled aching teeth with unorthodox instruments such as the bowl of a spoon or the tip of a sword. Peter asked for lessons and absorbed enough to experiment on his servants. He learned to mend his own clothes and, from a cobbler, how to make himself a pair of slippers. In winter, when the skies were eternally gray and the Amstel and the canals were frozen, Peter saw women dressed in furs and woolens and men and boys in long cloaks and scarves go speeding by on ice skates with curved blades. The warmest places, he found, and the places where he was happiest, were the beer houses and taverns where he relaxed with his Dutch and Russian comrades.
Observing Holland's immense prosperity, Peter could not escape asking himself how it was that his own people, with an endless stretch of steppe and forest at their disposition, produced only enough to feed themselves, whereas here in Amsterdam, with its wharves and warehouses and forest of masts, more convertible wealth had been accumulated than in all the expanse of Russia. One reason, Peter knew, was trade, a mercantile economy, the possession of ships; he resolved to dedicate himself to achieving these things for Russia. Another reason was the religious toleration in Holland. Because international trade could not flourish in an atmosphere of narrow religious doctrine or prejudice, Protestant Holland practiced the widest religious toleration in the Europe of that day. It was to Holland that the dissenters fled from James I's Calvinist England in 1606, from there to sail a decade later to Plymouth Bay. It was to Holland also that the French Protestant Huguenots swarmed by the thousands when Louis XTV revoked the Edict of Nantes. Throughout the seventeenth century, Holland served as Europe's intellectual and artistic clearinghouse as well as its commerical center. It was to defend their religious liberties as much as their commercial supremacy that the Dutch resisted so fiercely the aggrandizements of Louis XIV's Catholic France. Peter was intrigued by this atmosphere of religious toleration. He visited many Protestant churches in Holland and asked questions of the pastors.
One brilliant facet of Holland's seventeenth-century culture did not much interest him. This was the new and remarkable painting of the great masters of the Dutch School—Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals and their contemporaries and successors. Peter bought paintings and took them back to Russia, but they were not the Rembrandts and other masterpieces which later were collected by Catherine the Great. Instead, Peter collected pictures of ships and the sea.
15
THE PRINCE OF ORANGE
In a predatory world, Holland's wealth and power were neither gained nor maintained without a struggle. The republic had been born in the sixteenth-century struggle of the Protestant provinces of the northern Netherlands to break the grip of their Spanish master, Philip II. In 1559, they finally achieved independence. With skill and determination, the Dutchmen developed the sea power that defeated the Spanish admirals, inherited Spain's worldwide ocean trade routes and laid the foundation for Holland's overseas empire. But as the republic waxed in prosperity, it aroused the envy and greed of its two most powerful neighbors, England and France. Coveting the Dutch near-monopoly on European trade, the English under both Oliver Cromwell and Charles II assaulted Holland, and three Anglo-Dutch naval wars resulted. It was in the second of these wars that an English fleet commanded by the King's brother, the Duke of York (later to become King James II), seized the harbor of New Amsterdam and named the village at the tip of Manhattan Island "New York" after himself. Later, the Dutch retaliated with a daring naval raid up the Thames estuary, thrusting into the main British naval base at Chatham, burning four ships-of-the-line at anchor and sailing away with the Royal Charles, the pride of the Royal Navy, in tow. In these wars at sea between two seafaring peoples, the Dutch more than held their own. Led by two superb admirals, Tromp and de Ruyter, the Dutch sailed their smaller, round-nosed warships against the larger, heavier English ships with such bravery and seamanship that Holland became the only nation ever consistently to defeat the British navy.
Holland's wars against England were fought at sea and in the colonies. A far deadlier threat to the United Provinces was to come by land from Holland's mighty neighbor, the France of Louis XIV. To the men gathered around Louis at Versailles, the success of the tiny Protestant republic was an affront to France's greatness, a sin against her religion and, most important, a barrier and competitor to her commerce. The King, his finance minister Colbert and his war minister Louvois were united in their desire to crush the remarkable, upstart Dutchmen. In 1672, with the largest and finest army in the history of Western Europe and the Sun King in personal command, France swept across the Rhine to within sight of the steeples of Amsterdam. Holland was finished . . . or would have been if not for the emergence into history of one of the seventeenth century's most extraordinary figures, William of Orange.
William, Prince of Orange, simultaneously Stadholder of Holland and the United Nethe
rlands and King William III of England, was perhap the most interesting political figure Peter was to meet in his lifetime. Two dramatic, almost miraculous events had set the direction of William's life. At twenty-one, at a moment when an apparently invincible French army had swallowed half the Dutch republic, William was handed supreme military and political power and asked to repel the aggressors. He succeeded. Fifteen years later, at thirty-six, without relinquishing his Dutch officers and titles, he conducted the only successful invasion of England since the days of William the Conqueror.
Physically, William of Orange was not blessed. Slender and unusually short, with a slight deformity of the spine which crooked his back, he had a thin, dark face, black eyes, a long, aquiline nose, full lips and black hair hanging in heavy curls which gave him an appearance more Spanish or Italian than Dutch. In fact, William possessed very little Dutch blood. He was born into a curious European family, a princely house whose history is integral to the struggle for independence of the Netherlands, and yet whose hereditary principality of Orange lies hundreds of miles to the south, in the Rhone Valley of France, a few miles north of Avignon. Since the days of William the Silent, who led the Dutch to freedom against Spain in the sixteenth century, the House of Orange had furnished the republic with elected leaders—stadholders—in times of danger. The family's blood was good enough for marriage into other royal families, and half of William's ancestors were Stuarts. His grandfather was King Charles I of England, his mother was an English princess, her brothers—his uncles—two Kings of England: Charles II and James II.
William became the head of the House of Orange at the moment of birth; his father had died of smallpox a week before. Brought up by his grandmother, he suffered severely from asthma, and through his childhood he was lonely, delicate and unhappy. In those years, the office of stadholder was vacant and Holland was ruled by an oligarchy led by two brothers, John and Cornelius De Witt, who believed that by careful conciliation they could placate Louis XIV. Then, in 1672, the year of Peter's birth, came the first crisis of William's life. In that spring, Louvois presented Louis with a magnificent new French army of 110,000 men massed at Charleroix on the northern frontier. Louis, arriving to assume personal command of the blow which was to destroy the Protestant republic, expected no difficulty. "I now possess an escort which will allow me to take a quiet little journey into Holland," he said contentedly.
Although the Sun King was in nominal command, the experienced Marshal Turenne and the Prince de Conde gave the actual orders. Louis' army easily forced the Rhine on new copper pontoon bridges, and Dutch cities and fortresses fell like ninepins. Seeing the French implacably advancing, the people of Holland panicked. There were riots against the De Witts, who were held personally responsible for the country's plight. In The Hague, a frenzied mob burst in upon the brothers and lynched them.
It was at this moment of crisis that the Dutch suddenly turned like terrified children to the House of Orange, which had provided salvation a century before. William was only twenty-one, but on July 8 he was appointed Stadholder of Holland and Captain General of the Army for life. His program was straightforward and bleak: "We can die in the last ditch." Immediately, he began to demonstrate the qualities for which he was to become famous. He took the field wearing the commander's garb which was to be his attire for many years: the azure uniform of the Dutch Blue Guards, light armor covering his back and chest, a full cravat of Brussels lace, an orange sash and scarf, high boots, fringed braided gloves and belt, a broad-brimmed hat with feathers. Remaining on horseback from dawn until nightfall, indifferent to fatigue, the slight young prince threw down the gauntlet before Louis and his veteran marshals.
Within a week of taking command, William was forced to make an appalling decision. Despite his efforts, his army could not hold the French, who thrust swiftly forward into the heart of the United Netherlands. Arnhem fell and Utrecht, only twenty-two miles from Amsterdam. Then, when the French were only a day's march away from the great Dutch port, the Dutch obeyed William's command and cut the dikes. The sea rolled in, flooding crops and meadows, engulfing rich country houses and gardens, drowning cattle and pigs, and undoing the labor of many generations. As soldiers opened the sluices and cut the dikes, desperate farmers, unwilling to see their farms disappear beneath the onrushing waters, fought to prevent them. Amsterdam, hitherto almost defenseless, now became an island. The French, lacking boats, could only stare at the great city from a distance.
To Louis' chagrin, although the Dutch army was beaten and half of Holland inundated, William refused to yield. The Dutch battalions, unable to defeat the more numerous French, nevertheless remained in the field, waiting. Conde settled into winter quarters in Utrecht, hoping that when winter came he could attack Amsterdam across the ice. But the winter was mild, and Louis, who never liked to have French armies operating far from France, became nervous. Meanwhile, William had been active diplomatically. To the Hapsburg Emperor, to Brandenburg, Hanover, Denmark and Spain, he pointed out that Louis' power and ambition were a threat not just to Holland but to other states as well. All were impressed by the argument, and even more by the continuing Dutch resistance. In the spring, the war widened.
William's small army began to attack the French lines of communication, and Louis became more nervous. At last, systematically destroying the towns they had occupied, the French withdrew. This partial victory—the survival of Holland—was almost solely the achievement of a twenty-one-year-old soldier and statesman who in those few months became the second most important national leader in Europe.
Peace finally came in 1678, but the suspicions raised in William by Louis' ambitions were never assuaged. Opposition to the great French King became William's obsession. He understood that the power of France could never be matched by any other single power; therefore, his life work became the tireless weaving of coalitions of European states strong enough to repulse the Sun King's ambition, which was, as William saw it, to establish in Europe "a universal monarchy and a universal religion."
The young hero grew quickly into an experienced statesman and warrior. Physically couragous and energetic, a ruthless disciplinarian of himself and his men, William was nevertheless not a great soldier. Although he commanded Dutch and English armies for almost three decades, he never rose above the second rank as a military commander; he certainly was not to be compared with the lieutenant who succeeded him as generalissimo of the anti-French coalition, John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough. William's talent lay not in winning battles—he was frequently beaten—but in surviving defeat, in remaining in the field, in pulling back, enduring, and preparing for the next campaign. His genius lay in diplomacy. Stern, unlovable, impatient, self-willed, passionate, his true nature was to tolerate no obstruction, smashing through everything to his objective. But because Holland had not the power to indulge this side of his character, he was forced to suppress these feelings, to compromise with his allies, to make concessions, to soothe and to wait.
William was a Calvinist, but he tolerated all religions: The Pope was his ally, so was the Catholic Emperor; there were Catholic officers in his army. Every other prejudice and antagonism was set aside; his sole vendetta was with Louis. At bottom, however, his life was guided by a steely Calvinist belief in predestination. He was convinced that he, like others in his family before him, was acting as an instrument of God. The Deity, he believed, had chosen his family and now himself to save the Netherlands and the Protestant cause in Europe. He even saw his mission as personal: himself and Louis locked in single combat for the future of Europe. Given this granite foundation to his faith, it did not dismay William when his armies failed in battle: Everything was preordained by God, and defeat was only a challenge to his worthiness, a test of his ability to continue as God's champion. Although William sometimes doubted and even despaired, he never gave up, believing that somehow, through miracles if necessary, God would save his cause. Thus, although his power was much less than Louis', William, unlike L
ouis, was prepared to run great risks. It was a risk of this magnitude, a second miracle almost, which in 1688 suddenly catapulted William onto the throne of England.
For years, William's primary diplomatic objective, after the safeguarding of Holland, had been to pull his cynical uncle, Charles II of England, away from France, and to attach England to Holland in alliance against France. He never entirely succeeded, but after 1672 England remained neutral in the uneasy peace that followed. In 1677, to further his policy, twenty-six-year-old William married his first cousin, Charles II's niece, the fifteen-year-old Princess Mary of England. It was not a love match, as women in general meant little to William, and the marriage was childless. The Princess, however, was a devoted wife who gave up England and dedicated herself to-becoming a Princess of Holland, not even visiting her own country for ten years after her marriage. She became much beloved by the Dutch people, and she returned their affection. She had no expectation of ever mounting the English throne: Before her stood first the incumbent king, her uncle Charles II, then any legitimate male heirs whom he might sire, then her father, the Duke of York, followed by his legitimate male heirs.
In 1685, however, after twenty-five years on the English throne, Charles II died, leaving no legitimate child, and the throne passed to his younger brother, England's finest admiral, James, Duke of York. This change of monarchs greatly altered England's position. James was honest, blunt, proud, single-minded and devoid of subtlety. Born a Protestant, he had converted to Catholicism at the age of thirty-five, displaying thereafter all the special fanaticism of the convert, a trait in which he was enthusiastically encouraged by his Catholic second wife, Mary of Modena. On the decks of his ships or in a special little wooden chapel mounted on wheels and trundled along in the midst of his army, James heard mass twice a day.
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