Headlong Read online

  Well, who am I talking to now? Who is the ghostly audience for the long tale I tell through every minute of the day? This silent judge sitting, face shrouded, in perpetual closed session? Sometimes I think there’s something recognizable about the way he listens. It’s Kate! It’s God! It’s my old history teacher! No, there’s something even more familiar about him than that. It’s some allotrope of myself, a twin lost in the womb, an alternative version of myself who might have been me – and who might yet be, after he’s heard what I have to say.

  You, yes. In the Reading Room with me, occupying my chair. Who are you? You’re almost as elusive as Bruegel. How much do you know already? How much do I have to explain? How formal do I have to be?

  Quite formal, I think. Experience suggests that you tend to leap to conclusions. You’re not good at grasping a long train of evidence and arguments unless they’re laid out quite pedantically.

  So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to treat you as if you were one of my students. A reasonably able one, but a bit short on concentration and tenacity. I’m going to spell things out to you rather laboriously, and spring sudden questions on you to make sure you’re following me.

  Agreed?

  I think it must be, because here I am, doing it.

  The history of the Netherlands in the sixteenth century has a remarkably familiar ring to anyone reading about it today. However much allowance you make for the unbridgeable dissimilarities between one age and another, it reads like a first draft for the history of Occupied Europe under the Nazis, or Eastern Europe under the Soviets. The imperial power was Spain, and the two great pillars of their Netherlandish policy – as with Germany and Russia in their dependencies – were economic exploitation and ideological repression.

  There’s a painful irony about the way in which the Netherlands became enslaved by Spain. It wasn’t the result of weakness and failure but of strength and success. Their rulers did too well for themselves.

  The Netherlands … (And how many Netherlands were there? I told you I was going to spring the occasional question on you …! Seventeen – yes, good.) … the seventeen Netherlands were assembled into a nation around the end of the fourteenth century by the Dukes of Burgundy. The great skill of the Burgundians was not war but marriage. They married first north into Flanders, then out into the surrounding provinces. The huge revenues from the wool and linen trades, the brass industry and the great entrepôt of Bruges made them immensely wealthy. Philip the Good, who kept thirty-three mistresses and invented the rules of courtly etiquette, was the richest ruler in Europe, and in the fifteenth century the Netherlands became the new heartland of European art, the northern centre of the Renaissance.

  The family had a setback when they lost Burgundy itself, their original power base, to France. They protected their interests by once again exercising their great skill at marrying. This time they married southwards into the power of Spain. They did it with such success that their man, the son of Philip the Handsome, moved on to the Spanish throne as the Emperor Charles V. It was the master-stroke that crowned their achievements – and it was the fatal move that brought the Netherlands down. Charles gradually became accommodated to his new world, and lost to his old one. He was like a provincial English scholarship boy who’s absorbed into the London establishment. The Flemish King of Spain, ruling there through his hated Flemish advisers, slowly became the Spanish King of the Netherlands, ruling there through his hated Spanish councillors. By their success in colonizing the throne of Spain the Netherlands themselves became colonized.

  So that’s how the economic exploitation and ideological repression began. The two were connected. Charles V, in the first half of the sixteenth century, bankrupted Spain by borrowing at high rates of interest from German bankers to pay for his defence of the Catholic faith, which was threatened by the Turks from without and by the Reformation from within. In 1555 he abdicated in exhaustion, and split his huge dominions into two: in the east, the Holy Roman Empire; in the west, the Kingdom of Spain. When his son, Philip II, succeeded to the Spanish half, the bankers would lend him no more, even at forty per cent. Everyone knows that he depended on the income from the precious metals mined in Spain’s South American colonies. What people forget is that he derived four times as much from the huge commercial prosperity of the Netherlandish provinces.

  I’m way past my period by this time, and I’m following the story in John Lothrop Motley’s great nineteenth-century classic, The Rise of the Dutch Republic. Motley was an American Protestant, and openly committed to the Dutch in their struggle against Catholicism and colonialism, so I’m balancing it with Edward Grierson’s The Fatal Inheritance and various other, more temperate works from the middle of this century – Rowen, Geyl, van Gelderen and Arnould and Massing. Whatever source you go to, though, the savagery with which Charles struggled to suppress Protestantism in his Netherlandish colonies remains impressive. He introduced the papal inquisition into the provinces in 1521, and in 1535 reinforced it with an imperial edict specifying that, although unrepenting heretics were to be burnt, repentant males were to be executed with the sword, and repentant females were to be buried alive, though whether this bizarre form of sexual discrimination was intended as oppressive or chivalrous remains obscure. Motley doesn’t believe that Charles was a religious bigot. ‘It was the political heresy which lurked in the restiveness of the religious reformers … which he was disposed to combat to the death. He was too shrewd a politician not to recognise the connection between aspirations for religious and for political freedom.’ Whether for spiritual or political purposes, further edicts were promulgated as the reign progressed, until by the time Charles abdicated, according to Motley, between 50,000 and 100,000 Netherlanders had been burned, strangled, beheaded, or buried alive.

  This was the happy land in which Bruegel passed the first twenty-five or thirty years of his life.

  Then things got worse. Charles was succeeded by Philip.

  Philip II was obsessed with extirpating religious dissent for its own sake. Motley calls him an ‘insane tyrant’. And by this tune the threat to Catholic orthodoxy in the Netherlands was not so much Protestantism as Luther had first conceived it in Germany, but the more extreme version preached and practised by Calvin, that came in from Geneva through the French-speaking provinces.

  Motley asserts that Philip was ‘filled with undisguised hatred’ for the Netherlands. In 1559, four years after his accession, when Bruegel was painting Netherlandish Proverbs and The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, and changing his name from Brueghel to Bruegel, the King announced to a convocation of distinguished local citizens in Ghent that he was leaving the country, and he never set foot there again throughout his long reign. On the same occasion he took the opportunity to proclaim the enduring twin goals of Spanish policy in a crude juxtaposition that made clear both their brutality and their ultimate incompatibility. He announced the renewal and enforcement of the various edicts and decrees for the extirpation of all sects and heresies; and he entered a ‘request’ for three million gold sovereigns.

  The King said none of this in person, though. He couldn’t speak Flemish or French, so thoroughly Spanish had the family become, and the words were uttered for him, like his part in the ceremony where his father had formally transferred his powers, by a spokesman. His voice on both occasions was supplied by the same man – Antoíne Perrenot, the Bishop of Arras.

  Perrenot was plainly the coming man. So was Bruegel. Their paths were converging.

  No one could have known at this stage, of course, quite how great Bruegel was going to become. But then no one can have realized to quite what heights Perrenot would ascend.

  No one, that is, except Philip. The King had secret plans to bring the Netherlandish church under his personal control. He intended to replace the four bishops who’d run it up to then with fifteen new ones, all his own nominees, and each with his own staff of inquisitors. Ruling the new bishops were to be three new archbishops. The seni
or of the three archbishoprics was to be Malines, and the Archbishop of Malines was to be Perrenot. So Perrenot would be primate of the Netherlands, and the managing director of this great conglomerate of religious enforcement.

  To execute his policies in his absence, Philip installed a Regent – Margaret, Duchess of Parma, his father’s illegitimate daughter. According to Grierson, she was an excellent and popular choice. She was Netherlands-born, though Motley says the only language she knew was Italian. He agrees, however, that she was ‘most strenuous in her observances of Roman rites, and was accustomed to wash the feet of twelve virgins every holy week.’

  She was not, however, to be the real conduit of royal power in the provinces. A Council of State was set up to advise her – and the President of the Council was none other than Antoíne Perrenot, the ubiquitous Bishop of Arras. In fact he was more than President, because Margaret had secret instructions from the King not to be guided by the Council as a whole, but only by a cabal of them, the Consulta – and the Consulta, it need hardly be said, included the good bishop, who governed the Regent with what Grierson calls ‘adroitness and the natural delight in ruling that mark the born man of affairs.’ He also maintained a direct correspondence with the King, behind Margaret’s back, so that he was in effect, as Motley says, the real ruler of the Netherlands.

  Perrenot wasn’t a Netherlander but a Burgundian from the Franche Comté. Motley credits him with outstanding force and intellect, and describes him as serene and smiling, smooth in manner, and plausible of speech – but also as overbearing and blandly insolent. In the Anthonis Mor portrait of him in the Kunsthistorisches he looks elegantly and sceptically askance at us, in the manner made fashionable by Titian (who, as it happens, had painted his father). You can hear the bland insolence, though, in his contempt for ‘that wicked animal the people,’ and in his opinion that the rebelliousness of the Netherlands arose from the country’s excessive prosperity, ‘so that the people were not able to resist luxury and gave in to every vice, exceeding the proper limits of their stations …’ He also thought, like Stalin and his henchmen, that great harm, especially in the matter of religion, resulted from the unfortunate commercial necessity of contact with foreigners.

  In the Gaetano portrait, in the London Library’s edition of his collected correspondence, Perrenot seems slightly surprised, perhaps at his own ever-growing eminence. Motley says that he frequently instructed not only Margaret but the King himself what to say. He also told the King to conceal the source of his instructions, and the King habitually obeyed. One of the earliest measures of Philip’s reign was undertaken on Perrenot’s express advice – the re-enactment of Charles V’s notorious ‘Edict of Blood’ of 1550. It seems at first sight surprising that he opposed the King’s restructuring of the church, the device by which Perrenot rose to his position; but he confessed, with engagingly open cynicism, that it was because ‘it was more honourable and lucrative to be one of four than one of eighteen.’ He claimed that he lost money by becoming Archbishop, and perhaps he was forced to undergo further financial sacrifices for his faith when the Duchess of Parma, as a charming secret surprise for him in 1561, persuaded the Pope to give him a red hat, and make him cardinal. Over the gate of La Fontaine, his delightful country house outside the walls of Brussels, which he preferred to his palace within them, he carved a stoical motto: Durate – ‘patiently endure’ – though Motley says that ‘by trading on the imperial favour and sparing his Majesty much trouble’ he grew enormously rich. It says a lot for his character that he himself felt able to resist the evil effects that excessive prosperity had produced upon the people he ruled.

  All in all, he was the Seyss-Inquart of his day – a Burgundian brought in by the Spanish to repress the Netherlands just as the Austrian later was by the Germans. And how did the Nazi Reichskommissar’s predecessor use his newfound wealth? What did the newly created Cardinal Granvelle spend his rapidly accumulating guilders on?

  On paintings by Bruegel. He had become Bruegel’s most important patron.

  Not, so far as anyone knows, his biggest patron, who was Nicolaes Jongelinck, the Antwerp merchant. Jongelinck, according to the famous schedule of security for the debt to the Wine Excise, owned sixteen Bruegels. The inventory of the archbishop’s palace at Malines lists seven. Jongelinck, though, was just another member of the subject people, on the same level as Bruegel himself; his brother Jacques was an artist, a sculptor, and also under the Cardinal’s patronage. The Reichskommissar himself was something else again, the incarnation of absolute power.

  He may actually have owned more than seven Bruegels. Which the seven at Malines were, and what happened to them, no one knows, but they were still there long after Granvelle left. The only Bruegel ever traced to Granvelle’s possession is The Flight into Egypt, which Bruegel didn’t paint until 1563, the year he left Antwerp and followed the new cardinal to Brussels, so it probably wasn’t one of the Malines seven. Granvelle may well have bought it to decorate one of his two new establishments, and if he bought one picture for Brussels he may have bought others.

  Am I beginning to think of Bruegel the way we think of the artists and entertainers in Occupied Europe who worked for the Nazis – as some kind of collaborator? I don’t know. You can’t project modern sensibilities back on to the Renaissance; no one holds it against Michelangelo or Raphael that they worked for Alexander VI, the bad Borgia Pope. All the same, the regime over which Granvelle presided was quite strikingly loathsome. Under Charles V, between fifty and a hundred thousand people had been executed for religious reasons over the course of fifty years. Under Philip II, according to the calculations of the Prince of Orange, who eventually emerged as the leader of resistance to Spanish rule, some fifty thousand people were slaughtered in the first seven years alone.

  You have to keep a sense of proportion, of course. There was nothing particularly remarkable about people being slaughtered by the devout for practising slightly variant forms of devotion, even by the tens of thousands. In any case, if those fifty thousand victims of the re-enacted Edict hadn’t been burnt at the stake or hanged or beheaded or buried alive they’d have died one way or another – probably painfully and before their time, of any one of a hundred different natural plagues and pestilences. No one would have counted them; no one would have remarked upon it. It would be unreasonable to expect some wretched painter to turn down professional success, even if he had much choice about it, just because some of his fellow citizens had died of burns and asphyxiation rather than smallpox or typhus.

  All the same, fifty thousand is quite an impressive total to run up, given the limited technology of the time. It’s in the range produced by dropping an atomic bomb, or by the collision of a hundred or so Boeing 747s. You can’t help wondering what Bruegel thought about his patron, and the reign of terror that he was presiding over.

  Nothing at all, if we’re to believe van Mander, the only writer who might have known him personally. Van Mander could have told us without any danger to Bruegel if he’d ever heard of him expressing the odd reservation, because by 1604, when his book appeared, the painter was long dead. He could have told us without any danger to himself, for that matter, because he published it in Haarlem, and by then the Dutch north had fought its way free of the Spanish and their thought police. For van Mander, though, he was simply ‘the very lively and whimsical Pieter Brueghel,’ always ready with the jokes, but not, apparently, with any opinions.

  None of the scholars seems to show any interest in Bruegel’s relationship with Granvelle. There’s something a bit odd about it, all the same, however indifferent he was to what was going on around him. The re-enacted Edict made it a capital offence for any lay person ‘to converse or dispute concerning the Holy Scriptures, openly or secretly, especially on any doubtful or difficult matters.’ It also promised death to anyone not having ‘duly studied theology and been approved by some renowned university’ who taught or expounded the Scriptures – or even read them. Well, Bruegel was a la
y person, so far as anyone knows. He can scarcely have had time, before he took up his pupillage as a painter in Antwerp, to study theology or graduate from any university, renowned or otherwise. So he was forbidden on pain of death to read the Bible. And yet he somehow managed to paint The Conversion of Saul, The Procession to Calvary, The Tower of Babel, The Adoration of the Kings, not to mention Granvelle’s own Flight into Egypt. On the face of it, the Cardinal was buying self-evidently illicit merchandise from a flagrant criminal.

  All the artists in the Netherlands who worked on religious subjects were in the same position, of course; maybe they were allowed a little latitude. Their status had improved somewhat since 1425, when Philip the Good hired Jan van Eyck to be his peintre et valet de chambre. All the same, they were still members of craft guilds, very like the other craft workers and small tradesmen who were the readiest converts to Protestantism, and the most frequent victims of its suppression. Let painters indulge their vices, and how do you draw the line at weavers and candlestick makers? Difficult even to turn a blind eye, because there must have been plenty of people ready to out a closet Bible reader. The Edict required everyone to inform upon suspected heretics. If you failed to, you were liable to the same punishments as the heretics themselves; if you succeeded in getting a heretic executed, you were entitled to up to a half of his property.

  What did Granvelle think about the traffic he was abetting? It’s not as if he were above taking a personal interest in the prosecution of religious offenders. The records are full of his letters urging on inquisitors throughout the provinces, and pursuing individual cases wherever the zeal of others flagged. When the local authorities in Valenciennes proved reluctant to prosecute two dissenting ministers, Faveau and Mallart, the good Cardinal pressed forcibly for their condemnation, and then, when the local powers dragged their feet again over carrying the sentence out, specifically ordered their execution by burning. The crowd rescued them from the flames, whereupon troops were despatched by Brussels to arrest everyone who might have been among the rescuers, and burn or behead them in place of the original victims.