Het beest van Babel, etc. (The plate in its second state.)
Het beest van Babel, etc. (The plate in its second state.)
The design is very elaborate and crowded with figures, those in the foreground being executed with considerable spirit. The Dutch Lion (1) carries a sword in its right front claws, as does that on the Persian flag of to-day. On its back rides William of Orange (7) with lance in rest and bearing a shield upon which St. Michael is represented combating sin in the shape of a dragon. William is supported by mounted soldiers, one of whom bears a flag inscribed with {218} the words “Prot religion and libe”—(For religion and liberty). Over his head flies a winged Revenge (3) carrying a shield in one hand and the lightnings of God’s wrath in the other. Before him flies the seven-headed Beast of Babel (2), shorn of two of his heads, which lie bleeding on the ground beneath the lion. The monster, which “utters horrible shrieks,” bears upon its back between its wings Father Petre (6), who holds on his lap the infant Pretender (5), to whom his “brains have so infamously given birth.” The too-old infant carries in his hand the ever-present toy windmill. Blood pours from the decapitated necks of the Beast as he plunges with his accompanying rabble into the “pool of horrors.” Priests and other Romish officials, some mounted on goats, asses, and wolves, flee (4) or are trampled under foot (8).
In the mid background William of Orange (9), by a poetic licence able to be in two places at once, a fairly common convention even in serious pictures of that and an earlier date,[42] is being {221} greeted by the English nobles as their saviour. To the left, through an archway, James II. (10) is seen fleeing by boat with his wife and infant, though, as a matter of fact, he remained in England some months after the latter were safely abroad. To the right, through another arch, Louis XIV. (11) is seen “embracing the child and taking pity on his mother,” and putting two of the curious, hearse-like carriages of the period at their disposal. Here we not only find Mary of Modena duplicated, but the infant Pretender triplicated in the same picture! So much for the plate in its first state.
[42] See, for example, Tintoret’s great picture of “Adam and Eve” in the Accademia at Venice.
In its second and adapted state it takes its place in the armoury of the anti-Jesuits. The Jansenist controversy was at its height in the year of grace 1705, and Jansenism, although nominally subject to Rome, was regarded favourably by the Protestant Dutch as being a reforming movement within the Roman Catholic Church against the theological casuistry of the Jesuits.
This is not the place to go into the anti-Jansenist polemics of the Jesuits since the publication of the “Augustinus” of 1640, though the {222} interest of the matter is sufficiently tempting. We must content ourselves with remembering that now at the beginning of a new century a supreme effort was being made by the Jesuits in France to destroy completely the pious community of Port Royal; that within four years they were to succeed in dispersing the nuns; within another year the cloister itself was to be pulled down; that in 1711 the very bodies of the departed members of the community were destined to be disinterred from the burial ground with the greatest brutalities and indecencies; and in 1713 the church itself demolished.
But, though Port Royal itself was doomed, Jansenism was finding freedom under the Protestant Government of Holland.
In 1689 Archbishop Codde had been appointed by the Pope Vicar Apostolic in Holland. Soon, however, it was discovered by the Jesuits that he favoured the Jansenists.