Heart of Europe

by Ralph Adams Cram

Order was still far away. It was in the year 1573 that Requesens came to reverse the policy of Alva, and not until the Peace of Utrecht in 1715, when Spanish rule was finally terminated, that there was any rest or relief for the tortured and ruined provinces of Flanders and Brabant. Requesens died; the Spanish troops mutinied, were joined by the German mercenaries, and began a war on their own account, burning and sacking Antwerp, butchering 6,000 of the population, and harrying the country right and left. Then came Don John of Austria, Philip’s new governor-general, the victor of Lepanto, and a figure out of the pages of mediæval romance. He came too late; anarchy was firmly fixed in the saddle, riding rough-shod over the desolated garden of Europe. Abandoning his original policy of pacification, he turned to war and was successful, but only to find about every power in Europe represented in the roaring inferno. Orange was fighting from Antwerp as his headquarters, the provincial representatives, with Brussels as their centre, were howling for help from any source; the Protestant faction called John Casimir, Count Palatine, to their assistance, while the Catholics appealed to the Duke d’Alençon, and both put in an appearance, the latter seizing Maubeuge and working thence into the interior, while the former defeated Don John in a pitched battle and drove him back to Namur, where in a few months he died of chagrin and a broken heart, after making his nephew Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, his successor in the field.

Hell is the only name that can be applied to the unhappy land, the condition of which was not unlike that of Mexico in this year of enlightenment, 1915. The Renaissance and the Reformation together had extinguished both civilisation and culture over the greater part of Europe; war was everywhere and incessant, all principle had been abandoned and the ethical standards of society had disappeared. Slaughter, civil war, assassination, treason, and sacrilege howled through an ever-widening desolation and the end of the world seemed at hand. Fortunately, in a way, the outrageous career of the Protestants served as an impulse to union; their savagery in Ghent and Brussels somehow pulled the people of Belgium together and enabled Parma to win some small order out of the insane chaos. He began a new campaign, drove out the French, laid siege to the Calvinists in Ghent, and at last (the Prince of Orange having been assassinated at the instigation of Philip) broke down the last Protestant resistance in Brussels and Antwerp and for the moment restored peace over a deserted, ruined, and blood-stained land. And then Philip II died and dying abandoned the country he had received as the richest in Europe and left as the most miserable and poverty-stricken, handing it over to new rulers in the persons of his daughter Isabella and her husband, the Archduke Albert of Austria.

The great and happy and wealthy state created by the House of Burgundy had been utterly destroyed and irretrievably ruined. A new Protestant state had been formed from one fragment in the north, other portions were shortly to be incorporated in France, and the nine provinces that still remained out of the original seventeen were hardly more than a geographical abstraction. Half the great cities had been sacked and burned, the craftsmen and artisans were slaughtered or in exile, the cold and greedy Hollanders had seized (and were to retain by force or fraud) the vast commerce that once was the possession of Flanders and Brabant, agriculture had ceased, famine was universal, religion and mercy and education were memories, while the old civic spirit and the old freedom and independence were things of so long ago they were not even remembered.

To do them justice, the new sovereigns meant well by the exhausted country, but first of all they had set their hearts on the crushing of the Protestant Netherlands, and nine years of war set in which ended at last with the complete victory of the Dutch republic and its acknowledged independence. Then came the anomaly of twelve years of peace with the astonishing outburst of a genuine and brilliant if evanescent culture. Peace is a good foundation for industry, trade, and commerce, but the fact is unavoidable that the black ploughing and the red fertilising of a land by war frequently bring a luxuriant crop of those cultural products that have issue in character as they follow from it. Here in Flanders the years between the Peace of Antwerp in 1609 and the restoration of Spanish rule on the death of Albert in 1624, were opulent with all manner of civic and personal wealth in those lines that are cultural rather than material. It was a time of the restoration of religion through new monastic foundations, of the establishing of houses of mercy, of the building up of great universities, of the development of printing, of the production of great scientists and scholars, of a new era of painting. The University of Louvain dates from this time, the great printing-house of the Plantins and the Moretus, the art of Rubens and Vandyck.

It was all temporary, however, and ephemeral. Spain took charge once more, the Dutch continued their policy of commercial and religious aggression, the Thirty Years’ War drew the unfortunate provinces into its whirlpool; the war between France and Spain was largely fought on their territory, the war of France against the United Netherlands resulted in the seizure by the unsuccessful party—France—of Belgian territory as a salve to its wounded pride. Year after year Belgium was subject to renewed devastations; what the Protestants and Spaniards had left the French despoiled. Brussels, which had now become the richest and most splendid of the cities, was bombarded with red-hot cannon balls and almost wholly destroyed, sixteen churches and four thousand houses being burned, and the great city deprived of almost its last examples of the great art of the Middle Ages.

And so the wretched tale goes on, generation after generation. God alone knows how or why anything was left in Belgium, either of art or culture or character or religion, or even of the rudiments of civilisation. Still something did remain for destruction, as was proved a little later by the revolutionists of France and recently by the Prussians, both of whom have performed the final work quite perfectly. The Heart of Europe had been torn, lacerated, crushed, for one hundred and sixty years, and yet somehow it continued to beat on. A great Christian culture, a great congeries of Christian peoples, product of the splendid centuries from 1000 to 1500 A. D., had been destroyed and superseded by the very different force engendered by Renaissance and Reformation. If there are those who still, despite the blazing enlightenment of the last twelvemonth, retain any illusions as to the comparative beneficence of the two epochs, it would be well for them to consider in detail the annals and the peoples and the personalities of the Heart of Europe during the five centuries of mediævalism, and the same during the five centuries of the Renaissance and the Reformation. The contrast is striking, the revision of judgments unescapable, the lesson, immediately to be applied in the present crisis, pregnant of possible benefits.

With the Peace of Utrecht all that is now Belgium passed to the Emperor Charles VI, and Austrian dominion began. In contrast to the preceding horrors it was comparatively uneventful; while Prince Charles of Lorraine was governor the country was quiet and prosperous and a certain advance occurred on cultural lines. This enlightened prince deserves well of history in one respect at least, for, by an imperial decree he caused to be issued, it was solemnly asserted that a gentleman did not lose his status as such if he indulged in the practice of the arts or letters! Joseph II, who followed him, was a pedantic reformer of laudable intentions, who set himself to the perfecting of everything, both religious and secular, to the extreme irritation of his people who simply wanted to govern themselves and apparently cared little whether this were well done or ill. In the end the whole country broke up again in rebellion and disorder, the nobles leagued in one group under the Duke d’Arenberg, the lower classes in a second with a vulgar and noisy demagogue, Van der Noot, as its leader. Somehow or other they managed to get together at Breda, raised an army, defeated the Austrian garrisons, and drove the Emperor Joseph across the Meuse when he forthwith died of sheer discouragement.

Then followed a short-lived “republic” engineered by Van der Noot, who was an adherent of the new French ideas, with an attack on the nobles which was sufficiently successful to bring their party to an end. Next, the powers who looked most askance at the fast-growing revolution—England, Holland, and Prussia—united for the restoration of Austrian authority, on general principles, and the Emperor Leopold II, with their support, asserted, and then established his authority, capturing Namur and within two weeks occupying the whole country (which accepted him contentedly enough), driving the ambitious advocate with the revolutionary tendencies into a well-merited exile. Austria tried honestly enough to conciliate the country, but its temper and inclinations were otherwise, so France was asked to intervene, which she was not loath to do, sending Dumouriez to undertake the task. Badly beaten at first, he succeeded finally at Valmy and Jemappes, and the French Revolution assumed control. The cabal of assassins then in power in Paris decreed that Belgium should be saved, but that first she must be purged, and a choice assortment of thirty ruffians was sent to Brussels to see that this was done. A guillotine was set up at once, and clerics, nobles, and the wealthier merchants became its victims, while the patriot army, supported by the local revolutionists, acted after their kind and sacked the remaining churches, destroyed religious houses, and generally plundered whatever they safely could, i. e., whatever was unable to defend itself. Dumouriez countenanced none of this, but he was playing a double game, acting ostensibly for the cabal in Paris though with the idea always before him that if he could control Belgium and conquer Holland he would be in a good position from which to turn on his employers, crush them, and then restore the monarchy on constitutional lines. Unfortunately for his plans, he was defeated by the allies and again Austria won back her insecure provinces. She was received with the facile enthusiasm which now seemed chronic with the shattered Belgian character, but after a few months was driven out for the last time when France was finally victorious over the half-hearted, selfish, and ineffectual allies, only one of whom, England, was waging war against the republic with anything approaching sincerity and determination.

Again the French—or rather the republican faction—entered into possession, and unhappy Belgium felt the full force of its grinning hypocrisy, its satanic savagery, and its unscrupulous greed. “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” was painted on the walls, and simultaneously the country was robbed of its last coins, its laws and privileges were overthrown, its citizens deprived of even the most fundamental rights of liberty and property, while the few remaining abbeys and castles were sacked, burned, and their ruins razed to the ground. Alva had been an amateur compared with the new apostles of liberty, and when at last Belgium was declared regenerate and was incorporated in the French “republic,” nothing remained for incorporation except a name, a memory, and a huddle of entirely ruined and perfectly hopeless victims of four centuries of cumulative enlightenment and progress.

Of course they rebelled; of course whole groups of desperate men took to the forests and moors, robbing, killing, existing as best they could, and of course they were crushed again and again; at last, however, Bonaparte began to bring some order out of the republican anarchy, and conditions improved. When at last he proclaimed himself Emperor the Belgians accepted him with the same avidity they always had shown for any man who promised some alleviation of their intolerable sufferings. Holland was occupied and given a king of its own, Napoleon’s brother Louis, who was not only the strongest and finest character in the family, but so righteous in his kingship and so whole-heartedly devoted to his Dutch that he soon alienated the sympathies of his imperial brother while failing to gain those of his somewhat difficult subjects.