We dined with M. David, a wealthy merchant, for whom we had brought a letter of introduction; and if his house is to be taken as a specimen of the rest, the merchants of Antwerp must indeed be “princes.” It occupied three sides of a large court-yard, with lofty staircases on either side of the porte-cochère, the rooms furnished with English carpets, and the walls, as usual, covered with some excellent pictures by native artists. It is singular, that the use of carpets should be so slow in making its way upon the continent; climate is not the cause, because in countries much colder than England, they equally reject them with the countries of the south. Independently of their comfortable enjoyment, they are as much a picture on the floor as stucco work or frescoes are a picture for the ceiling. We seem to divide the two with our continental neighbours; with us the floors are richly decorated, and the ceilings forgotten, comparatively, whilst with them the ceiling is the great field for the display of taste, and the floors of ordinary houses are seldom more costly than earthen tiles or sanded fir. In their palaces, indeed, the idea of an English floor is adopted, but it is exhibited not in velvety carpets, but in the more expensive material of an inlaid parquet.
The Citadel of Antwerp is now little more than a patch of ground encompassed by the circuit of its fortified walls; the chapel and the interior buildings, which once occupied its centre, having been blown to dust by the bombardment in 1830. The accounts which an eye-witness gave us of some of the scenes of this siege, were an admirable illustration of the slight space that separates the ridiculous from the sublime. The sensible people of the city were, as I have before mentioned, dreadfully opposed to the revolution, and M. Rogier, and the other leaders of the “patrioterie Brabançonne,” having in vain essayed to persuade them that they were the most suffering population in Europe, were about to give them up as
Wretches no sense of wrongs could rouse to vengeance,
Sordid, unfeeling, reprobate, degraded,
Spiritless outcasts,
when the victorious republicans resolved to carry their arms to the gates of Antwerp, and achieve its regeneration by assault and storm. They accordingly invaded the city, seven thousand strong, and sent a summons to General Chassé to surrender. The general, who had resided for years in the city, was well aware of its loyalty, and had likewise been inspired by the Prince of Orange with a confident hope that the rebellion would yet be stayed without bloodshed. He looked on the martial display of the “liberators” only as a riot which might be quelled by the civil power, if it did not sooner expire of itself, and he advised the magistrates, as the best means to save the city from being destroyed by artillery, if he were compelled to repel them by force, to assent to their entrance within the gates, on an express understanding that they were not to approach the citadel, or molest the gun-boats in the river, and that they were merely to hold quiet possession of the town till the commandant should communicate with the Hague. To save the property within the walls from destruction, the magistrates complied, and opened a negociation with the commanders of the insurgent force. The mortifying degradation of this step, and the violence which it must have been to the feelings of men of loyalty and respectability, may easily be imagined when it is known who these commanders were. One was a Monsieur Mellinet, a French officer, who had been compelled to abscond in consequence of “a suspicion of debt” and a conviction of bigamy. Another was a M. Neillon, a Frenchman also and a private soldier, but since a major-general in the Belgian service. He had a short time before been hissed off the stage at Antwerp, when an actor at the theatre there. Like General Vandamme, who, when a barber’s boy at Ghent, had been whipped and banished for thieving, and vowed never to return unless at the head of an army, which he lived to accomplish; M. Neillon is said to have launched a similar threat against the audience of Antwerp, which he too had, perhaps, sooner than he expected, the means of putting in execution. The third was a Monsieur Kepells, once an artillery man in the Dutch service, but whose chief occupation had been carrying the skeleton of a whale round the country, the same which was afterwards exhibited at Charing Cross in London, and from its huge dimensions acquired the title of “the Prince of Wales.” It was to these three eminent commanders, that the opulent merchants of Antwerp were now compelled to surrender quiet possession of their town. The negociation was concluded by them in utter ignorance, however, of the real strength of the insurgent army, but when the gate was thrown open, and the mob rushed into the city, the gentleman, who was my informant, and had been an eye-witness of their entry, declared that their appearance baffled all description. They poured like a torrent of mud through the gate, some with no shoes, some with but one, some without hats or head-covering of any kind, some few on horseback, others dragging along two field pieces with ropes, some with guns and swords, others with bludgeons, but the vast majority with no arms of any kind,
“Viribus confisus admirandisque lacertis!”
They instantly broke faith with the townspeople, denied the right of the magistrates to enter into any convention with the Dutch commandant, an alien and a foreigner; and proceeded forthwith to attack both the citadel and the gun-boats, in which they had an idea that there was money deposited, in direct violation of their specific stipulations. They assaulted the hospital attached to the citadel, killed some four-and-twenty poor invalids, and put the rest to flight over the back wall into the citadel, when old Chassé, reluctant to give credit to the probability of their perfidy, believed it to be some mistake, and gave them twenty minutes to retire. But instead of following his advice, they attacked the arsenal in search of arms, upon which Chassé fired a few guns from the ravelin in the hope of dispersing them, and finally hauling down the white flag, he opened the whole thunder of the citadel, the forts and the fleet in the harbour; he beat the arsenal to the ground in a few minutes, and setting fire to the great warehouses, known by the name of the entrepôt, which was stored full of merchandize—the whole were in a few hours reduced to ashes and ruin. In the meantime, the shot and shells which were falling in the town were playing havoc in all directions; the inhabitants fled in terror, or hid themselves in the cellars; the prison caught fire and disgorged its inmates, and the whole city seemed threatened with instant destruction; till the magistrates having succeeded in reaching the citadel, succeeded in appeasing the rage of the indignant commandant, and procured a renewal of the truce. What a picture of the leaders, the agents and the acts of a revolution!
The subsequent siege by the French in 1832, when the Dukes of Orleans and Nemours “fleshed their swords” against the Dutch, was something equally characteristic. It inflicted no injury or danger upon the town, being confined merely to the citadel and the trenches around it, and was rather regarded by the inhabitants as a kind of grand military drama, which was got up at the expense of Holland and France for their amusement. The French, in fact, did all in their power to contribute to its theatrical effect. They had not smelt powder since Waterloo, except across their own barricades, and they were impatient to make a grand display for the recovery of their reputation. The operations were conducted with all the pomp and paraphernalia of a parade, and the soldiers marched to work in the trenches with colours flying and trumpets sounding. In fact, so thoroughly melodramatic was the whole affair, that seats on all the elevated parts of the city were hired out to view it, and the roof of the theatre itself, being a suitable place, the play-bills announced, “the public is informed that places may be procured at the Théâtre des Variétés for seeing the siege!”
With the exception of its churches, Antwerp possesses no public buildings of any importance. The Hôtel de Ville was, at one time, a rival for any in the Netherlands, but it was burned by the mutinous Spaniards of the army of Requesens in the sixteenth century, and the present edifice has nothing very remarkable in its appearance. It is situated in a curious little antique square, surrounded by old Spanish houses, and amongst the rest, one in which Charles V was wont to lodge on the occasion of his visit to the city. The Exchange is the model from which that of London was constructed, a square court-yard, surrounded by arcades with groined arches, and supported by truncated pillars in the Venetian style, with rudely sculptured capitals. The Hanseatic House is another huge mercantile depôt which stands between the two basins of Napoleon. It is of vast dimensions and is visible from a considerable distance on all sides of Antwerp. In an old tower near the Marché de Poisson, we were told that there were still to be seen the dungeons which had been occupied by the Inquisition during the reign of the Duke of Alva and the “Council of Blood.”