CHAPTER III.
LOUVAIN—WATERLOO AND NAMUR.
Scenery around Louvain—The Belgian railroad system—Peculiar adaptation of the country—Policy of Government interference in their construction—The average cost per mile—Causes of the difference in outlay between Belgium and England—Cheap rates of travelling in Belgium—Accidents—Success not yet decided—Louvain—Its extent—THE UNIVERSITY OF LOUVAIN—Its former fame—Its present condition—The bierre de Louvain—The great brewery—Its processes—Amazing consumption of beer in Belgium—Its different characters—The Hôtel de Ville—Its pictures—Gallery of M. Vanderschreick—The collegiate church of St. Pierre—Legend of Saint Margaret of Louvain—Tomb of Justus Lipsius—Flight of the “brave Belges,” at Louvain in 1832—Singular change in the character of the people for courage—The present soldiery—Terveuren—The park and palace of the Prince of Orange—The Forest of Soigné—WATERLOO—The Belgic Lion—Its injury to the field—Irish anecdote—Bravery of the Irish troops at Waterloo—Hougemont—The orchard—Relics of the fight—The Duke of Wellington’s estate—No monument to him on the field—The Duke of Marlborough—La Belle Alliance—Quatre Bras—The woods cut down—Beautiful scenery of the Meuse and the Sambre—Namur—My Uncle Toby—The citadel—Don John of Austria—The cathedral—The church of St. Loup—The trade in cutlery—THE DESCENT OF THE MEUSE—Its beauty and its wealth—Andennes—History of Mr. Cockerill—His influence on the manufactures of Belgium—His print-works at Andennes—Ruined by the revolution—The manufacture of paper in Belgium—Huy.
The route from Mechlin to Louvain, which we passed this morning, is the first of the line of railroads on which we have perceived any striking inequality of surface; numerous cuttings and embankments occurring as it approaches the latter town. Beyond it the alluvial and sandy plains disappear, and the country assumes the usual hilly and diversified appearance, so much so, that before arriving at Tirlemont, it passes under a tunnel of nearly a thousand yards in length. The scenery, too, along the banks of the Dyle, is most rich and diversified, Louvain, itself, being seated on the skirts of a forest, which has evidently been a portion of that of Soigné, at some distant period. Fuel must be here pretty abundant, not only wood being plentiful, and coal at no great distance, but, in the sunk land, I observed a stratum of turf, under the sandy surface, which had been worked in large quantities, and stacked along the side of the road.
Belgium, from its geographical position, not less than the extraordinary adaptation of the nature of the surface, seems to have invited the experiment of supplanting the old modes of conveyance, by an uniform and comprehensive system of railroads. The project was taken up by the government in 1833, and the plan finally executed, was that of taking one point, in the centre of the kingdom, and issuing from it—north, west, east, and south—lines, to maintain a communication with the sea-ports of Ostend and Antwerp, and the great commercial outlets of France and Prussia. It is expected, that on reaching the frontier of these two states, at Limbourg and Couvin, in the Bois de la Thierache, the enterprize would be taken up by private speculators, who would continue the chain to Cologne, on the east, and, on the south, in the direction of Paris. The whole project is in direct opposition to the laissez faire principle of the English government, whose maxim is, to leave everything to private enterprize, that private capital is calculated to grapple with. But Belgium has been so long accustomed, both under France and Holland, to “government interference” in the minutest concerns of the nation, even to the prejudice or supersession of individual speculation, that the habitual policy of the country may have rendered its intervention indispensible. And as the entire extent of all the lines projected, in progress, and open, will not exceed three hundred miles, and these can be completed, at a cost infinitely lower than anything that has yet been attempted in Great Britain, the undertaking is not so very gigantic as at first sight it might appear. One advantage which arises from this undertaking, is that its benefits will thus be extended equally to every portion of the kingdom; had it been left solely to private enterprise, those lines alone would have been selected, which promised to be the most prolific in profits; and other districts, less inviting, would never have been traversed by a railroad at all. But the government, by combining the entire into one comprehensive system, is enabled to apply the excess of gain on one section, to repair the possible loss upon another, and thus extend its facilities alike to all. But private enterprise is by no means prohibited, and in addition to the government works, applications from capitalists have been already granted, to construct branches in the mining districts of Hainault.
The average cost of those already completed scarcely exceeds £8,500 a mile,[8] including carriages and buildings. The most expensive line was that from Louvain to Tirlemont, which, including the tunnel I have mentioned, cost £11,661 a mile, and the cheapest, that from Dendermonde to Mechlin, which, as the level surface of the ground had barely to be disturbed for laying down the rails, cost only £4,583. This, however, is for single lines of rails; that alone from Brussels to Antwerp being yet laid with double, though all have been constructed with a view to their ultimate adoption. The line now in progress from Liege to Verviers, passing, as it does, through a most unequal and hilly country in the vicinity of the Vesdre, will, I imagine, from the numerous embankments and cuttings through rocks, be the most costly yet attempted. The natural facility of the ground, and the consequent simplicity of the work, led to one result very different from our experience in England;—the actual costs of the works, even on the most difficult sections, have not exceeded the estimates by more than eight per cent.
In England, the least expensive line yet opened has cost £10,000 a mile, (in Ireland one has been completed, from Belfast to Lisburn, for less than £7000), but others have cost upwards of £40,000; and the average of forty-five lines, for which bills were passed in 1836 and 1837, was upwards of £17,500 a mile on the estimate, which may have fallen much below the actual outlay subsequently. But, besides the mere facilities of the country; other causes have contributed to render the expenses in Belgium infinitely lower than those of Great Britain; in the former, there were no committees of the House of Commons to enable the solicitors’ bills to mount to 70 and £80,000 for expenses of obtaining an act, as was the case on the instances of the London and Birmingham line, and that of the Great Western; nor were there rich demesnes and parks to be preserved, whose proprietors were to receive the prætium affectionis in compensation for the damages; nor towns to be entered in search of termini, where whole streets of houses and acres of building ground were to be purchased up, at an expense that would prove ruinous to any but the joint-stock capital of a railroad. Their engineers too were enabled to avoid the expense, whilst they profited by the success of the experiments in every stage which were making in England—experiments which were even more costly when they failed.
The fares by the Belgian trains are, from all these circumstances, reducible to a sum much below the cheapest rate of railroad travelling in England; in their first-class conveyances “Berlins” (which were equivalent to the “mail carriages” on our lines, but are now withdrawn), the fare from Antwerp to Brussels was only two shillings and eleven-pence, whilst for the same distance, thirty miles, it was six shillings and six-pence from Manchester to Liverpool. In their present, most expensive carriages, the “diligences,” the charge is two shillings and six-pence, whilst those in England are five and six-pence—and in their “chars-a-banc” or second-class, one shilling and eight-pence, whilst ours are four shillings—they have also an inferior trainstill, “the waggons” for which we have no equivalent, that carry passengers for a shilling. As these rates are something about one-half the old fares by the conveyances which railroads have superseded, the increase of intercourse has been augmented in a ratio that almost exceeds credibility. The number of passengers between Antwerp and Brussels before 1836, was estimated at about 8000 annually, but since the opening of the road throughout, in that year, they amounted in 1837 to 781,250, and though the numbers diminished, as the attraction of novelty wore off, in 1838 they still exhibited an increase of from five to six hundred per cent over the old mode of travelling.
The rate of travelling does not exceed twenty-six miles an hour, and in general does not average more than twenty; and by the statement of M. Nothomb, the minister for public works, of the number of accidents there appears to have been but one man wounded in 1835, one in 1836, five in 1837, twelve in 1838, and seven in the six months to June 1839, when the return was made up. All of these catastrophes are ascribed by the minister to the wilfulness or imprudence of the parties themselves, “no possible blame being attachable to any officer of the company.” One man was drunk, and another was deaf, a third would persist in riding on the balustrade of the waggon, and a fourth stood upright in passing a viaduct, several were killed in looking after their hats; and one formidable accident alone admits of censure upon the officials, when a train returning at night, after leaving King Leopold at Ostend, went by accident into the Lys, near Ghent, the guardian of a drawbridge, which had been opened to allow a lighter to pass, having gone to drink in an adjoining cabaret, without taking the trouble to close it! The engine actually cleared the gulf by its velocity, but was dragged back into the river by the weight of the train, and the engineer and his assistant killed upon the spot.”
As yet M. Briavionne remarks in his work, “De l’Industrie en Belgique,” the receipts of the railroads are below the calculations of these projectors; but this is hoped to be remedied in time by a diminished expenditure in management and repairs; and, perhaps, by an increase in the tarif of fares, which are felt to be lower than is equitable to the interests of the undertaking. Sixty-eight out of every one hundred passengers availing themselves of the very cheapest conveyance, the “waggons,” instead of a fair proportion, as had been anticipated, travelling by the first and second class carriages. The enterprise, he conceives to have been unwisely expanded into the present stupendous system, when the original idea of effecting a rapid communication with Germany across Belgium, independent of Holland, would have achieved the grand object aimed at, with a less expense. This was a sacrifice of solid advantages to ostentation, and has been followed by financial disappointment; but it arose in some degree, from the national desire to give independent Belgium an important prestige in the eyes of Europe. “The Chemin de Fer is then the more popular in Belgium, adds M. B., because the people can see the intimate connexion between its construction and the events of 1830; without the revolution, we should have had no railroad, and without the railroad we should have been better without the revolution.”[9]
Louvain, the Oxford, or rather the Maynooth of Belgium is a miserable, dilapidated old town, with narrow streets and an air of dirt and desolation. Four hundred years ago, it was a place of wealth and importance, the capital of the ancient duchy of Brabant, and the residence of its sovereigns before its incorporation with the territory of Burgundy. Justus Lipsius, himself a citizen of Louvain, and born in a little hamlet between it and Brussels, records, on the authority of some old tradition, that in 1360 there were within the walls from 3,000 to 4,000 cloth workers, who gave employment to 150,000 artizans, (an evident exaggeration in amount, that attests, however, the fame of its past prosperity), and the story adds, that at the hours of meals, the great bell of St. Peter’s was sounded to warn parents to keep their children within doors, lest they should be crushed and trampled by the crowds who were passing from their workshops to their homes! At present, its manufactures are at an end, with the exception of its beer, whose fame is known throughout the Netherlands, its population is dwindled to 25,000, and even within the circuit of the walls, large spaces covered with buildings are now converted into fields or cultivated as market gardens for the supply of the citizens.
In later times, the name of Louvain was familiar throughout the Roman Catholic world, from the renown of its university, which had existed since the year 1426, and was long one of the most eminent seminaries of theological learning in the west of Europe. It contained in the last century no less than forty-three colleges, distributed over the various quarters of the city, and was frequented by upwards of 8,000 students in humanity and divinity, who obtained, at various times, from the emperors extraordinary privileges, exemption from taxes, freedom from arrest, freedom of the city and presentation to the most valuable livings. The bishops of the Pays Bas were ordinarily chosen from the fellows of Louvain; numbers of its members attained the dignity of a cardinal’s hat, and one the Pontificate itself, under the title of Adrian VI. Charles V and his sisters were educated at Louvain. The power and the influence which it enjoyed, however, were not tempered by due discretion, and its houses assuming a right of political interference in opposition to the government, were suppressed and dispersed by the Emperor Joseph II. Under the dominion of France, the university was never restored, as its funds were required for other purposes, but in 1816, the King of Holland, as a measure of conciliation to his Roman Catholic subjects, revived its charter and re-opened its schools.
The principal building, “the Halle” of the university, is situated behind the Hôtel de Ville in the rue de Namur. Some of the minor colleges have been thrown down or converted into hotels, warehouses, hospitals and barracks. Others are still used as the lecture rooms and theatres of the revived university. The Collège des Prédicateurs Irlandais, founded in 1697 by Cardinal Howard, is no longer in existence. Since the revolution of 1830, the University of Louvain has been again remodelled, and its name altered to that of l’Université Catholique, to distinguish it from that of Brussels, which is known as l’Université Libre.
“La bière de Louvain,” is to be found in every hotel and estaminet in Belgium. We went over one of the largest breweries, that of Messrs. Renier, Hambrouk and Co., the Barclay and Perkins of Belgium. It is but recently built, and being an entirely new building from the foundation, its arrangements are the most commodious and compact imaginable; it is calculated to brew two hundred barrels a-day, and is now in full work; its usual stock is 14,000 barrels. The machinery had been constructed by Sir John Rennie, of London, but has since been increased. I found here the same preference for high pressure steam engines which seems so universal in Belgium, the one erected was a low pressure one, very much to the regret of one of the proprietors, M. Behr, who conducted us over the establishment. The apparatus exhibited all the recent English improvements, but what is, I think, considered dangerous in England, they had a large copper cooler in use. Their boilers were constructed with one cylinder within another, to avoid burning in the process, a precaution which is rendered necessary from the quantity of wheat flour used for their favourite and peculiar “white beer.”
The malt which was on the floors had been allowed to germinate much longer than in England, in fact, till a shoot of half an inch to an inch long had issued from each grain. By this means, the saccharine matter is intentionally so exhausted, that the beer has but little or no flavour of it. The name of their ordinary beer is Peetermans, (from an ancient military corps of Louvain, which had existed since the thirteenth century), and the finer is the bière blanche, which is consumed at a distance in large quantities. An Englishman would not let either enter his lips, they are both as thin as water and as sour as verjuice, and yet the quantities consumed everywhere in Belgium is quite surprising. The annual consumption, calculated upon the excise duty paid upon beer, which is upwards of seven millions of francs per annum, and is collected in the proportion of one franc and a half for every hectolitre, or twenty-six gallons, amounts to 5,400,000 hectolitres, or something above four millions of barrels, being about thirty-five gallons per annum for every individual of the population! A small quantity only, not exceeding 40,000 gallons, is for foreign export. The usual price is about twelve francs a hectolitre, from which some idea may be formed of the “thin potations” in which the Belgian peasant delights.
The operation of making this light beer is amazingly quick, the malt is mashed one day, brewed and cooled the next, fermented for forty-eight hours, and drunk the fourth morning. That for immediate use is fermented in the barrel on its end, a practice unusual in this country, but which M. Behr conceived advantageous. A chime, rather deeper than usual, served to retain on the top, the barm and the liquid forced up by the expansion of the fermentation, which, as the process declined, retired again to its place, thus keeping constantly an ascending and descending current, which facilitated the operation, beside being more cleanly and costing less labour. Every different district in Belgium produces a different kind of beer, which, curiously enough, cannot be successfully imitated by the others, thus the brewers of Brussels have not succeeded in producing the uytzet of Ghent, nor those of Ghent the yellow faro which is the favourite beverage of Brussels, whilst both have failed to rival the “white beer” of Louvain.
The great lion of Louvain is its Town Hall, which is certainly the most surprisingly rich specimen of gothic architecture in the world. It is literally covered with most elaborate and intricate carvings from the foundation to the roof. Charles V spoke of placing the Cathedral of Antwerp under a glass shade, but actually one is inclined to wish for something of the kind to keep the dust from discolouring the florid tracery of the Hôtel de Ville at Louvain. It is situated in a little ancient square in which Marshal Villeroy held a council of war by torch-light on the night of the Battle of Ramilies, in 1706. The building itself, which is of the fifteenth century, is small, but its proportions and ornaments are of the most delicate elegance. It has no tower, but the heaviness of its lofty roof is relieved by turrets at the corners. The whole front is covered with bas-reliefs, representing the history of and the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, with more fidelity than is reconcileable to modern taste. The whole has for many years been undergoing a thorough restoration, which is now complete, every decayed piece of stone being accurately replaced by a fac-simile of the original carved work. The interior is not suitable to the beauty of the outside, and an old hall on the third story is fitted up as a gallery, with a wretched collection of pictures, which are libellously ascribed to the old masters. There is, however, a gallery in Louvain of high repute, that of M. Vanderschreick, which contains a number of superb paintings of the Dutch school, Rubens, Teniers, Vandyke, Rembrandt, and, in short, a specimen of all its best masters. It is accessible to strangers, and since the dispersion of M. Schamp’s pictures at Ghent, is, perhaps, the best collection in Belgium.
The churches in Louvain, notwithstanding the long presence of so many luminaries of the establishment, are not eminent for either their riches or their beauty. The Collegiate Church of St. Pierre, which is the principal one, has a superbly carved pulpit by Berger of great height—a rock crowned with trees, and at its foot, St. Peter on one side denying Christ, and at the other, Saul struck from his horse on his way to persecute the Christians of Damascus. A little chapel at the back of the altar is dedicated to St. Margaret, the saint of maid-servants, and is connected with a curious little legend illustrative of the times. Margrietje was the domestic of an old couple, who kept an hostelry for pilgrims in the year 1225, at Louvain. Her master and his wife had resolved to retire from the world, and had converted all their property into money, with which they were about to retire into the monastery of St. Bernard. On the eve of their putting this plan into execution, however, some miscreants formed a conspiracy to assassinate them, and, disguising themselves as pilgrims, came late in the evening to seek for shelter at the accustomed inn. The good old people anxious to perform their last act of charity, sent Margaret to bring wine in a wooden bottle, still preserved in the church. The pretended pilgrims then strangled their hosts, and on Margaret’s return, she shared a similar fate. Her body, however, which they carried out and precipitated into the Dyle, instead of sinking in the river, floated back against the stream crowned with an aureole, and the ripple of the water making sweet music as it bore her along. The Duke and Duchess of Brabant astonished at the miracle, caused a chapel to be built for her remains at the back of the great church of St. Pierre, where her body was embalmed and enclosed in a gilded shrine. The fame and the fidelity of the interesting saint attracted crowds of devotees to her tomb, and in time the door upon the street was closed, and another opened from the church, where the chapel and the altar of Margrietje are still the favourite resort of the serving maidens of Brabant.
The church of Saint Michel, which once belonged to the order of the Jesuits, was one of the most sumptuous in the city: it has, however, been dismantled of all its ornaments, and its superbly carved pulpit was removed by Maria Theresa to the Church of St. Gudule at Brussels. During the reign of the French republic, St. Michel’s was converted into the Temple of Reason for the district, and the statue of the Saviour was removed from the altar to make room for the Goddess of Liberty. The tomb of Justus Lipsius in the old ruined convent of the Recollets, with its sententious inscription written by himself, is a curious illustration of “the pride that apes humility.”
“Quis his sepultus, quæris, ipse edisseram
Nuper locutus et stylo et linguâ fui
Nunc alteri licebit. Ego sum Lipsius
Cui litteræ dant nomen et tuus favor;
Sed nomen, ipse abivi, abibit hoc quoque;
Et nihil his orbis quod perennet possidet.
Vis altiori voce me tecum loqui?
Humana cuncta fumus, umbra, vanitas
Et scenæ imago, et, verbo ut absolvam, Nihil
Extremum hoc te alloquor
Æternum ut gaudeam tu apprecare.”
Lipsius, as a scholar, was the rival of Scaliger; he was successively a Roman Catholic, a Lutheran, and a reformed Protestant, and after publishing an exhortation to persecution, died in 1606, in the bosom of Rome with “ure et seca!” upon his lips. Strange that the same spirit which could prescribe fire and faggots for its fellow-men, should have lavished all its fondness upon flowers and favourite dogs, whom Lipsius has immortalized in his odes and epitaphs! Rubens has introduced the portrait of Lipsius into his picture of the philosophers along with that of Hugo Grotius, Rubens himself and his brother, with his faithful Saphir fawning at his knee, and behind him a tulip, emblematic of his love for flowers, placed beside a bust of Cicero; his comments upon whom, written at the age of nineteen, introduced Lipsius to the notice and patronage of the Cardinal Granvelle.
It was at Louvain that the Belgian troops, under their new King, achieved, in 1832, their ludicrous flight before the Prince of Orange, which fully vindicated for them the soubriquet of the “Braves Belges,” which they had acquired years before by their cowardly pusillanimity at Quatre Bras and Waterloo. A few days before the affair at Louvain, they had made a similar pitiful exhibition at Hasselt, where they fled in terror on the approach of the Dutch, and yet two years before, the Dutch were utterly unable to make head against the Belgians, either at Brussels, Ghent, or Antwerp! The bravery of the Belgians is, indeed, become a past tradition. Cæsar accords them credit of being the most gallant soldiers, whom he encountered in Gaul, “horum omnium fortissimi sunt Belgæ,” and Florus ascribes to them the honour of turning the fortune of the day at Pharsalia. These titles they have long since, however, resigned; the last fire of their gallantry seems to have burned out under the Arteveldes and John Hyoens, in the wars of the “Fullers and Weavers;” for in the troubles of the Spanish persecution, the military renown of the patriots belongs almost exclusively to the soldiers of “Father William,” as the Prince of Orange is still affectionately styled. The Flemings were anxious enough, in the first instance, to fly to arms when the Duke of Alva was wringing from them his iniquitous taxes, but so soon as these were repealed, they were quite contented to leave the Dutch all the glory of their liberation. Years of repose and peace under Austria, and an addiction to agriculture and commerce, appear to have effaced even the recollection of their former valour; they were utterly incapable, even if they had been inclined to resist the progress of the French in 1794; and the whole series of the exploits of the Belgian soldiers from Quatre Bras to Hasselt and Louvain, with the single exception of the affair of 1830 at Brussels, is but a succession of laughable scampers, almost before coming within the range of a shot.
In appearance, the soldiery, whom we saw at Ghent, Brussels, and elsewhere, are awkward and diminutive little fellows, such as one could hardly see cased in uniform, on which the tailors have evidently worked by guess, without creating a smile, even without the inseparable association of the braves Belges, which recurs to one’s mind every time they pass. The officers, who are always lounging about the railroad stations, are much the same, and with their savage mustachios, fierce black locks, and breasts padded out till they look like pouter pigeons, they strongly remind us of the military air of the riding-master at Astley’s.
Heavens! how unlike their Belgian sires of old,
Rough, poor, content, ungovernably bold,
War in each eye and freedom in each brow,
How much unlike the sons of Belgium now!
Having come by the railroad to Louvain, we hired a calèche to return across the country to Brussels by Terveuren. The drive is a very beautiful one, running along the slope of the gentle, wooded hills, at the foot of one of which Louvain is situated. Terveuren is a pretty village built down the glen between two hills, with a picturesque old church on the summit of one of them. It was formerly the seat of some manufactures, and in 1759, Prince Charles of Lorraine established in it works for printing calico, and took the utmost pains to bring artists from Switzerland and Alsace, but it has long since been utterly abandoned. The park, on the verge of which the village is built, has been for centuries the vice-regal residence for the Austrian governors of the Netherlands. It is beautifully wooded, and the irregularity of the grounds afford some exquisite landscapes. The present palace was erected by the nation, and presented along with that at Brussels to the Prince of Orange, as a recognition of his services at Waterloo. Like it, it has been waiting the fate of the final treaty of partition, and its gorgeous furniture, which has been undisturbed since 1830, is now in process of removal to the Hague. The building has no external beauty, a heavy solid edifice without decorations of any kind, and its grand charms, its paintings, and garniture, it derives from the truly princely taste of its owner. We drove home through the Forest of Soigné, and through the village of Ixelles to Brussels.
We left Brussels this morning for Namur through the forest of Soigné and across the field of Waterloo. The forest is thick with young straight trees; and any thing but picturesque. The timber is chiefly beech with oak and elm intermixed, and the trees are very densely planted, with a view, we were told, to render the wood loose and moist being withdrawn from the hardy action of the air, in order that when felled and cut into lengths it may the more readily split, which the beech does almost spontaneously. The foresters live in huts dispersed throughout the forest; and along the edge of the road were long piles of cleft wood ready for transport to Brussels. On the road we passed several waggons laden with coals from Charleroi, and after emerging from the forest we reached the village of Waterloo, which is situated almost upon its outskirts. We visited the church with its numerous monuments to the “unreturning brave,” and were solicited by some ecclesiastical official for a contribution to the fund for keeping them in order. At Mont St. Jean we had a most comfortable breakfast at the little inn, and being waited on by Sergeant Cotton of the 7th Hussars, the guide who seems to have most successfully taken the place of Da Costa, we walked with him to the various positions on the field. One has really no patience with the great hulking mountain of sand on which the Iron Lion is raised as a trophy of the valour of the “Braves Belges!” Some one has observed that the pretension of the monuments at Waterloo are precisely in the inverse ratio of the importance of the services they commemorate; the English have none, the Prussians a modest record, and the Belgians a pyramid! on which, as the Brussels guide book magniloquently points out “the Lion of Belgian proudly paws the bolt of war, with his head turned towards vanquished France, as if to menace her with vengeance and teach her the homage which is due to valour!” But it is not the gasconade of this ambitious trophy that irritates one so much as the fact, that in order to scrape the earth together, out of which it is heaped up, the whole surface of the field has been disturbed and its identity destroyed; and that, at the most interesting spot, where the British guards made their immoveable and immortal stand “from day-break till set of sun” against all the chivalry of France. The mischievous vanity, which has thus destroyed what it pretends to commemorate, has something very Irish in it, and is not altogether without a parallel. Some years since a remnant of a very ancient castle of the chiefs of the clan O’Neil, which stood upon the summit of the hill of Castlereagh in the estate of the late Marquis of Downshire, was fast crumbling away, owing to the injury which it received from the cattle who browsed about it, and his Lordship directed that a wall should be built round it to save it from utter destruction. The labourers, however, who were sent for the purpose, thinking it a pity to be at the trouble of drawing stones up to the top of such a mountain, where there were abundance close at hand, very naïvely pulled down what remained of the castle and built the wall round its site with its own materials!
By the way, whilst all justice has been done to the bravery of the English at Waterloo, and all the credit to which they were entitled, at least, claimed for the Scotch regiments—it is a fact that speaks, whole bulletins and gazettes for the gallantry of the Irish, that the regiment which had the greatest number killed of any on the field was the 27th foot, the Enniskillens, which lost one hundred and three men besides three hundred and sixty wounded.
The Château of Hougemont is undergoing a similar change, the wood which surrounded it has been all cut down, new buildings are erecting and the old ones fast passing into dust—the gate, however, still hangs upon its hinges with remnants of the old leaves that witnessed the great day, perforated by ten thousand bullets—the little chapel stands almost roofless in the ruinous court—and the guide points out “with bated breath,” the walls of the barn which was set on fire by the artillery and consumed the wounded and the dying who had been carried into it for shelter. Crossing the farm-yard a little postern leads to the
Copse where once the garden smiled
And still where many a garden flower grows wild.
The ruinous alcoves and grass grown walks serve to show what it had once been—and by its side is the orchard, the possession of which on that memorable day was to decide the freedom or the subjection of Europe. It was then piled with carnage, and strewn with “garments rolled in blood”—it is now encumbered with a bending crop of fruit, and one solitary grave over an English officer, who was buried where he fell, is the only memento of that fearful morning. In the field around it, three thousand French were slain by the well directed fire from within; we walked over it as it had been newly ploughed, and in the course of a few minutes picked up a handful of bullets, some fragments of shells and grape-shot, and a musket flint still clasped in its leaden envelope—what an iron shower must have rained upon it, that after so many years, the plough should still furrow up its deposits!
The Duke of Wellington has his estate between Nivelles and Quatre Bras. Why did not the King of Holland confer on him the field itself? Above all, why are there so many monuments to all the subalterns, and none to the great Captain? It would have been surely more just, as well as wiser, to have reared that vast pyramid to mark the spot where the conqueror stood, than to provoke the remembrance that those who intrude themselves upon our notice by it, four times turned to flight. It is even said that a party of the “braves Belges,” notwithstanding all the terror in which they were scampering back to Brussels, under the panic that the day was lost, overtook the Duke of Wellington’s baggage near the forest of Soigné, and coolly took time to plunder it—rather than let it fall into the hands of the enemy.
Lord Byron mentions his impression that Waterloo, as a plain, seems marked out for the scene of some great action. This is, of course, association in the imagination of the poet; but it is a curious coincidence that, in 1707, the Duke of Marlborough selected it as a desirable spot on which to encounter the French, and actually encamped, for many days, on the verge of the forest, in the hope of seducing Vendome to give him battle there.
At the little cabaret of La Belle Alliance, to which we had sent our carriage on from Mont St. Jean, to await our arrival from Hougemont, we got some excellent light wine: at Marengo, some years ago, I got an equally refreshing draught, after a sultry walk over the field of battle. Houses are building at this little spot; and, in short, in every direction trees are felled, ground levelled, walls fallen, and cottages constructed; so that in a few years the individual features of the scene will be changed; but that which even time cannot efface—its deathless renown—will still, like Marathon,
Preserve alike its bounds and boundless fame.
We took the usual route by Jemappe and Quatre Bras, through the Waloon country. The flax crop was abundantly spread over the fields, undergoing the process of “dew rating,” or dew riping, in which the operation of detaching the cuticle from the wood and pith, is performed by merely exposing it on the grass without steeping. At Quatre Bras the wood has been cut down from which the British, under the Duke of Wellington, repulsed Marshal Ney in the affair of the 16th of June, in which the gallant Duke of Brunswick fell. The hill is now a naked height, which is seen on the right of the road to Sombreffe.
The country, as we approach the banks of the Meuse and the Sambre, becomes at every step more and more picturesque, and the dull monotonous plains of Brabant are exchanged for the woody hills and precipitous valleys of Namur. I never saw a more charming prospect, nor one which is so truly refreshing to an eye ennuied with the tiresome monotony of Flemish scenery, than the first view which is obtained of the old town and fortress of Namur, from the heights above the Sambre, in coming from Temploux—a wide and winding valley, with the rapid river toiling below between towering cliffs of rugged rock upon the one hand, and steep banks covered with foliage, and occasionally crowned with old chateaux, upon the other; and in the distance, the bridges, towers, and steeples of the warlike old city, with its renowned, and once thought impregnable fortress, rising terrace upon terrace, and bristling with artillery above it.
We drove down the steep hill to the river under a glowing sunset, and having crossed the hollow drawbridge and traversed the tortuous passages that lead from the outward fortifications to the heart of the city, we took up our quarters for the night, at the Hotel de Harscamp, in a starved little square, that seemed to have been grudgingly crimped off the already pinched and narrowed streets. It was still light enough for a stroll round the fortifications, but we soon discovered that it required the acumen of some future Sir William Gell or Claudius Rich, to determine the precise spot, which we were in search of—namely, that at which my Uncle Toby received his memorable wound, in the attack made by the Dutch and English, “upon the point of the advanced counterscarp before the gate of St. Nicholas, which enclosed the great sluice or water-stop,” and which he himself declares to have been, “in one of the traverses about thirty toises from the returning angle of the trench opposite to the salient angle of the demi-bastion of Saint Roche.”
The citadel which stands directly above the town is constructed upon the shelves of a stupendous rocky escarpment, that rises almost perpendicularly from the banks of the river, and looks like the Gibraltar of the Meuse. It was accurately restored, and its works in some places extended, by the King of Holland, some few years before the revolution, but when that event arrived, Namur was amongst the first places that hoisted the standard of revolt. There seems, in fact, to have been something between treason and cowardice in the conduct of the garrisons, who occupied every fortress in Belgium, and who, with the single exception, I think, of Antwerp, surrendered them to the “patrioterie” without lighting a match.
In public buildings, Namur, has nothing to exhibit, except two moderate churches: one of them, the Cathedral, contains some paintings, and the tomb of the gallant Don John of Austria, the natural son of Charles V, Barbara Blomberg of Ratisbon, who assumed the credit of being his mother, in order, it is said, to conceal a more illustrious parentage. Don John, who, as the grand admiral at Lepanto, combined, in his own person, the functions of a naval as well as a military commander, added to both the genius of a diplomatist, and was invested with the government of the Low Countries after the pacification of Ghent. He, in person, obtained possession of the citadel of Namur, by going thither under pretence of visiting the Queen of Navarre, Margaret of Valois, who was enjoying the gaiety of Spa, and being permitted to walk on the glacis, and finally to view the interior, by the young son of the governor, in the absence of his father, he took the opportunity to entrench his immediate guard as a garrison in the name of his brother of Spain, who the next year rewarded his bravery, by causing him to be poisoned, to avoid a marriage, which he apprehended between the hero of Lepanto and Queen Elizabeth of England. He died at the camp of Bongy, a short distance from Namur, in 1578, when only thirty-three years of age.
The other church, that of St. Loup, is overlaid with a profusion of decorations of all descriptions, paintings, carved confessionals and gilded altars, its floor is of variegated marble, the columns which sustain the vaults of the roof are polished porphyry or red granite, with square plinths, interposed between each tambour in the shaft, and the ceiling which is of solid white stone, is laboriously chased from end to end in a multitude of florid devices, so accurately raised out and under cut, that the whole looks like a Chinese sculpture in ivory. Tradition says, the carving of the entire roof, was the work of one individual monk of the Jesuits, by whom the church was erected.
The town itself has nothing else to shew, except its tall gaunt-looking old houses, crowded into narrow lanes and passages, the dullness of which is only relieved by the showy windows of its shops, shining with cutlery and polished brass work, the staple trade of Namur. It divides this manufacture with Gembloux, a little town, a few miles to the north, which is as famous for the coarser articles of “Sheffield ware,” as Namur is for the finer. The prosperity of the trade, however, has been declining ever since 1814, when Belgium not only lost the French market, but the protection of the French douaniers to protect her own from being invaded by the English; her decline was consummated by losing, in addition, the supply of the Dutch colonies, by the events of “the glorious days” of September 1830, and the entire of the workmen now engaged at Namur, do not exceed one thousand. Cheapness is of course their grand aim, and some penknives which we bought surprisingly low, we speedily discovered, like Peter Pindar’s cutlery to be “made for sale.”
The Athenæum of Namur has attained some celebrity by the chair of geology, which was established by the King of Holland, and for the study of which, the rocky ravines and valleys of the environs present abundant opportunities.
The Hotel de Harscamp is excellent, and after a most comfortable night, disturbed only by the thundering moans of a most inopportune réveille, rung, from the bells of the church hard by, every night at eleven, and every morning at four o’clock; we started, before breakfast the following morning for Huy and Liege, along the descent of the Meuse. The same delightful scenery accompanied us, which we had overtaken the evening before on descending to Namur. On either side, high, beetling cliffs of limestone and basalt, in every crevice of which, spring the hardy roots of the little mountain ash, now covered with its ruby berries, and from every crag, luxuriant creepers hung down their “lush of leaves,” which the early frost was already beginning to tinge with crimson. Every spot that could afford soil for the roots of a tree, was covered with waving foliage, and into the rich recesses of the cliffs ran up little velvety meadows from the verge of the river, in which were nestled some of the most beautiful and romantic villas and chateaux. Occasionally, on the summit of the steep ravine, in the distance, were perched the buildings of a suppressed convent, or the ruins of some feudal castle; and the very limestone rock itself, worn into fantastic shapes by the weather, not unfrequently presented all the features of a fortress, jutting out over the river below it. The road ran along a broad, rich plain, intersected by the river, with fruit-trees planted along the hedge-rows, and yellow crops of corn which had not yet been severed. The boats were already on the river, and innumerable cars and waggons were toiling along the road, laden with produce for Namur—it was precisely the scene and the season described in Wordsworth’s sonnet:
The morn that now along the silver Meuse,
Spreading her peaceful ensigns, calls the swains
To tend their silent boats and ringing wains,
Or strip the bough, whose mellow fruit bestrews
The ripening corn beneath.
But the beauty of the Meuse is its least recommendation to the affection of the Belgians; and, like the vale of Avoca, and the banks of some other equally exquisite streams, which are “sacred only in song,” its picturesque attractions, are, at every spot, most rudely torn away by the very matter-of-fact speculators of the neighbourhood, in the search of the mineral treasures which they conceal. Rocks of black marble are rolled down to the edge of the road, and left ready for transport to the river; limestone is tumbled from the cliffs, and numerous manufactories of alum are constructed between Namur and Schlayen. These and the other riches of the Meuse, its floors of coal and beds of iron render this rugged defile the most important and valuable possession of the crown.
At Andennes we passed the first of those vast manufactories, the establishment of which has made the name of one Englishman more renowned in Belgium than those of all its native speculators combined—Mr. William Cockerill. Every district of the kingdom exhibits some memorial of his enterprise, and there is scarcely a branch of the national industry which, if it does not owe its introduction to his suggestion, is not indebted to his genius for its improvement. He came to Verviers in 1798, an humble mechanic, in search of employment, returning with a numerous family from Stockholm, where he had been to erect some apparatus for spinning wool. He obtained an engagement with a house there to construct for them machinery for the same purpose, similar to that in use in England, and by dint of singular talents, unwearied industry, and energies almost unparalleled, he speedily elevated himself to wealth and importance; mines were sounded at his suggestion, iron-works constructed, cotton-mills built, woollen-machinery erected, in short, every department of Belgian art received a new impulse under his all-grasping and comprehensive superintendence, aided by the munificence of Napoleon, and, subsequently, by the equally ardent co-operation of King William of Holland, who seemed to place the national funds for the promotion of industry, almost at his disposal. Under the powerful influence of France, and even afterwards with access to the extensive markets and colonies of Holland, the vastness of his speculations were not disproportionate to the wants and commercial connexions of the kingdom. But the simile of a tub for a whale is no actual exaggeration to represent the incompatibility of his Leviathan establishments, to the puny resources of the new and independent kingdom, within which they were suddenly walled up by the revolution of 1830. The gross of green spectacles which Moses brought home from the fair, were not more utterly disproportionate to the wants of the family of the Vicar of Wakefield.
The establishment of Andennes had been originally constructed by the act of the government and the King of Holland, for the printing of calicoes in the style, and with a view to out-rival the English—every process was borrowed from them, the machinery, the workmen, the designs, were all brought from England, and, for a time, the concern seemed to be prosperous. But the events of 1830 soon put a stop to that; it was useless to print calicoes while there was no stranger to buy, and no one at home to wear them, and in the course of a few years, the works were sold by order of the government to pay off their advances, and bought by their original promoter, who converted them into a paper-mill.
This trade is now one of the most prosperous in Belgium. She formerly imported her paper from France at from twenty to five-and-twenty per cent. dearer than she can now produce it for herself, thanks to the ingenuity and enterprise of Mr. Cockerill, which gave the manufacture a new character by the introduction of the machines for producing the entire contents of the vat in one continuous sheet. Since that period, the manufacture has advanced with a rapidity that is quite surprising. In 1836 there were seven machines on the same construction in use in Belgium; in 1839 nineteen, but of these six have now been attached to Holland by her acquisitions in Luxembourg and Limbourg. The value of their produce is upwards of nine millions of francs per annum, and their success has communicated an impulse to the production of books at Brussels, that has rendered it likewise one of the most important and promising branches of the national industry.
A few miles from Andennes, after passing a romantic old ruin of the castle of the Dukes of Beaufort near Bien, we stopped to breakfast at the foot of the romantic fortress of Huy, which was long considered as the portal of the Meuse, till its inefficiency was demonstrated by Marlborough and Marshal Villeroy in “King William’s wars,” who took and retook it four times within as many years, almost without a struggle.