9789004241862.Pdf

The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Low Countries National Cultivation of Culture

Edited by Joep Leerssen

Editorial Board John Breuilly, Ina Ferris, Patrick Geary, John Neubauer, Tom Shippey, Anne-Marie Thiesse

VOLUME 5

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ncc National Cultivation of Culture The Historical Imagination

Edited by in Nineteenth-Century Britain Joep Leerssen and the Low Countries Editorial Board John Breuilly, Ina Ferris, Patrick Geary, John Neubauer, Tom Shippey, Anne-Marie Thiesse Edited by Hugh Dunthorne and Michael Wintle

VOLUME 5

Leiden • boston The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ncc 2013 Cover illustration: Nicaise De Keyser, Albrecht Dürer visits Quentin Matsys, c.1862–1872, oil on canvas, 29 × 18 cm. (detail). Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp—Photo: © Lukas—Art in Flanders VZW photo Hugo Maertens.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The historical imagination in nineteenth-century Britain and the Low Countries / edited by Hugh Dunthorne and Michael Wintle. p. cm. — (National cultivation of culture ; v. 5) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-23379-9 (hardback : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-24186-2 (acid-free paper) 1. Great Britain—Historiography—19th century. 2. Belgium—Historiography—History— 19th century. 3. Netherlands—Historiography—History—19th century. 4. Art and history—Great Britain. 5. Art and history—Belgium. 6. Art and history—Netherlands. 7. Literature and history— Great Britain—History—19th century. 8. Literature and history—Belgium—History—19th century. 9. Literature and history—Netherlands—History—19th century. I. Dunthorne, Hugh. II. Wintle, Michael J.

DA530.H57 2013 907.2’041—dc23 2012035970

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This book is printed on acid-free paper. CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ...... vii Preface ...... ix Notes on Contributors ...... xi Ken Haley: An Appreciation ...... xvii Bob Moore

PART one INTRODUCTion

Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands and the Historical Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: An Introduction ...... 3 Michael Wintle

1. From Waterloo Field to Bruges-la-Morte. Historical Imagination in the Nineteenth Century ...... 19 Niek van Sas

PART two THE SCOPE AND LANGUAGE OF NATIONAL HISTORY

2. A Very English Affair? Defining the Borders of Empire in Nineteenth-Century British Historiography ...... 45 Andrew Mycock

3. Who is the Nation and What Does It Do? The Discursive Construction of the Nation in Belgian and Dutch National Histories of the Romantic Period ...... 67 Marnix Beyen

4. The Colonies in Dutch National Museums for Art and History (1800–1885) ...... 87 Ellinoor Bergvelt vi contents

PART three HISTORICAL FICTION AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY

5. ‘Retro-Fitting the Past’: Literary Historicism between the Golden Spurs and Waterloo ...... 113 Joep Leerssen

6. The Victorians, the Dark Ages and English National Identity .... 133 Joanne Parker

7. ‘A True Conception of History’: ‘Making the Past Part of the Present’ in Late Victorian Historical Romances ...... 151 Anna Vaninskaya

PART four THE PAST IMAGINED IN THE VISUAL ARTS

8. Picturing Patriotism: The Image of the Artist-Hero and the Belgian Nation State, 1830–1900 ...... 171 Jenny Graham

9. A Few Painters, A Few Heroes and Many Factory Workers: In Search of the Historical Culture of Belgian Immigrants in Northern France, 1850–1914 ...... 199 Tom Verschaffel and Saartje Vanden Borre

10. ‘Retracing the History of our Country’: National History Painting and Engraving in Britain and the Low Countries in the Nineteenth Century ...... 219 Hugh Dunthorne

General Bibliography ...... 243

Fifty Years of Anglo-Dutch Historical Conferences and Britain and the Netherlands Published Volumes, 1959–2012 ...... 259

Index ...... 263 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1. J. van Lennep & Compagnie, Tafereelen uit de geschiedenis des vaderlands tot nut van groot en klein (Amsterdam, 1854), title page...... 28 1.2. Van Lennep, Tafereelen, plate VI...... 28 1.3. Van Lennep, Tafereelen, plate VII...... 28 1.4. Van Lennep, Tafereelen, plate VIII...... 29 1.5. Van Lennep, Tafereelen, plate X...... 29 1.6. Van Lennep, Tafereelen, plate XII...... 30 1.7. Van Lennep, Tafereelen, plate XV...... 30 1.8. Van Lennep, Tafereelen, plate XVI...... 30 1.9. Van Lennep, Tafereelen, plate XVII...... 31 1.10. Van Lennep, Tafereelen, plate IX...... 31

4.1. Art Museums: Overview of numbers of old and contemporary paintings acquired and total expenditure in guilders...... 89 4.2. Non-art Museums under Willem I: Expenditure on acquisitions and expeditions in guilders...... 93 4.3. Antoine Payen, De Borobudur, 1835. Oil on canvas, 80 × 110 cm. Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden, RMV 200–26...... 101 4.4. Private Museums...... 104

8.1. Statue of Hans Memling (c. 1430–1494) by Hendrik Pickery, 1871. Woensdagmarkt, Bruges. Author’s photograph...... 172 8.2. Jean-Baptiste Madou, ‘Quentin Matsys—Le Portrait’. Lithograph, 30.5 × 40.6 cm. From Scènes de la vie des peintres de l’école flamande et hollandaise (Brussels, Société des Beaux-Arts, 1842). Image by courtesy of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford...... 178 8.3. Nicaise De Keyser, Albrecht Dürer visits Quentin Matsys, c. 1862–1872. Oil on canvas, 29 × 18 cm. Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten. © Lukas—Art in Flanders VZW...... 179 8.4. Richard Redgrave, R.A., Quentin Matsys, the blacksmith of Antwerp, 1839. Oil on canvas, 101.6 × 127 cm. Private collection. © Christie’s Images Limited 2012...... 180 viii list of illustrations

8.5. Edouard Wallays, Mary of Burgundy visits Memling in the Hospital of Saint John, c. 1861–1872. Oil on canvas, 94 × 148.5 cm. Groeningemuseum, Bruges. © Lukas—Art in Flanders VZW...... 185 8.6. Henri Leys, The Visit of Dürer to Antwerp in 1520, 1855. Oil on panel, 140 × 210 × 14.5 cm. Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten. © Lukas—Art in Flanders VZW...... 193

9.1. Jean-Joseph Weerts, L’assassinat de Marat, 1880. Oil on canvas. © RMN, Alain Leprince, Musée La Piscine, Roubaix...... 205 9.2. Remy Cogghe, Le bain de pieds inattendu—scène de cabaret en Flandre, 1895. Oil on canvas. © RMN, Alain Leprince, Musée La Piscine, Roubaix...... 208

10.1. Honoré Daumier, The Public at the Salon: the danger of taking impressionable children to see Monsieur Gallait’s picture [‘Last Honours rendered to Counts Egmont and Hoorn’] and of reading out to them the notice on the execution of Count Egmont. Lithograph, 25 × 21 cm. Le Charivari, 28 April 1852. © The British Library Board...... 220 10.2. Mathieu-Ignace van Brée, William Prince of Orange interceding in 1578 with the Magistrates of Ghent on behalf of Catholics arrested and detained in defiance of the Pacification, 1819. Oil on canvas, 430 × 620 cm. Ghent, Town Hall. © IRPA-KIK, Brussels...... 228 10.3. William Dyce, The Baptism of King Ethelbert, 1846. Fresco, 499 × 286 cm. London, Palace of Westminster, Lords Chamber. © Palace of Westminster Collection, WOA 2964. ... 231 10.4 Hendrik Breukelaar, Van Speijk at the Tomb of De Ruyter in the Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam, 1832. Oil on canvas, 77 × 62 cm. Amsterdam Museum, loan from Stichting Het Burgerweeshuis—Rooms Katholiek Jongens Weeshuis...... 233 10.5. Ford Madox Brown, Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois, 1877. Oil on canvas, 86 × 107 cm. © Manchester City Galleries...... 236 PREFACE

This collection of essays began life as a residential conference or symposium held at the University of Sheffield in September 2009, the seventeenth meeting of what has informally been called the Anglo-Dutch Historical Society. The first joint conference of historians from Britain and the Netherlands took place at Oxford in 1959, and this most recent one fifty years later at Sheffield. Over the course of that half-century, scholars from the two countries, and often from Belgium and Ireland as well, have met every three years or so to consider a theme or period of mutual interest. In 2009 the theme was the historical imagination itself, in all or at least many of its forms, and the period was the nineteenth century, the historical age par excellence. The papers delivered at the symposium were subject to formal commentary as well as general discussion, and with the benefit of this scrutiny twelve of the contributions have now been revised and rewritten in the light of the collective commentary to form the integrated volume presented here. Our thanks must go first to our colleagues at the University of Sheffield, Bob Moore of the Department of History and Roel Vismans of the Department of Germanic Studies, whose hospitality and efficient organization did so much to ensure the success of the meeting, socially as well as intellectually. In planning the conference we benefited much from the expert advice of Peter Mandler and Stefan Berger in Britain and Joep Leerssen in the Netherlands. For generous financial support we are grateful to our sponsors: the Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms, the Huizinga Institute, and the Institute for Culture and History, all based at the University of Amsterdam; the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Sheffield; the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands; the Flemish Representation in London; and the Association for Low Countries in Great Britain and Ireland. We are also grateful for the constructive advice of two anonymous referees, and for the support and assistance of the staff at Brill publishers in Leiden. The Sheffield conference was an opportunity to mark the passing of a great Anglo-Dutch and Sheffield historian, Ken Haley, and we preface our essays with a short appreciation of his career and contribution to the subject and the series by fellow Anglo-Dutch and Sheffield historian Bob Moore. A list of the conferences and seventeen volumes so far published in the Britain and the Netherlands series is provided at the end of book. Not least, we x preface thank the original speakers at the 2009 conference, the commentators at each of our sessions (Charlotte van Emstede, Nele Bemong, Stefan Berger, Lieske Tibbe, Prys Morgan, and Frans Grijzenhout), and all the other participants, whose input helped to make our discussions so stimulating, and enhanced the quality of the chapters printed here.

Hugh Dunthorne Michael Wintle NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Ellinoor Bergvelt is Associate Professor in the Department of the Cul- tural History of Europe at the University of Amsterdam, and programme chair of the Master in Museum Studies. She is one of the co-ordinators of the international research project National Museums and National Iden- tity, Europe and the United States, c. 1760–1918. Her publications include: (ed., with Renée Kistemaker), De wereld binnen handbereik, 2 vols. (Exh. Cat., Amsterdams Historisch Museum, Amsterdam, 1992); Pantheon der Gouden Eeuw. Van Nationale Konst-Gallerij tot Rijksmuseum van Schilderi- jen (1798–1896) (Zwolle, 1998); (ed., with D.J. Meijers and M. Rijnders), Kabinetten, galerijen en musea. Het verzamelen en presenteren van natura- lia en kunst van 1500 tot heden, (Heerlen/Zwolle, 2005); ‘Potgieter’s “Rijks- museum” and the Public Presentation of Dutch History in the National Museum (1800–1844)’, in L. Jensen, J. Leerssen and M. Mathijsen (eds.), Free Access to the Past. Romanticism, Cultural Heritage and the Nation (Leiden, 2010), pp. 171–195.

Marnix Beyen teaches modern political history and the history of historiography at the University of Antwerp, where he is head of the research group on Political History. His own research deals with the historical, literary and scientific representation of nations and with the history of parliamentary culture in Western Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has published articles on Belgian and Dutch national historiography and historical culture in Storia della Storiografia and the European History Quarterly, and with Benoît Majerus he recently wrote the chapter on the Low Countries in S. Berger et al. (eds.), The Con- tested Nation. Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories (Basingstoke, 2008). Currently, he is preparing a book on the direct contacts between Members of Parliament and their constituents in Belgium and France between 1880 and 1940.

Hugh Dunthorne was educated at the University of Edinburgh and the London School of Economics, and taught history at Swansea University from 1971 until his retirement in 2009. He is a Fellow of the Royal His- torical Society and was for several years Secretary of the Association for Low Countries Studies in Great Britain and Ireland. He has written on xii notes on contributors

Anglo-Dutch relations in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, on the Enlightenment, and on the history of art and of travel. He has recently completed a study of Britain and the Dutch Revolt to be published by Cambridge University Press.

Jenny Graham is a Lecturer in Art History at the University of Plymouth specializing in the reception of Renaissance artists in the modern period, from 1750 to the present, particularly in the context of nationalism and politics. She is the author of Inventing Van Eyck. The Remaking of an Artist for the Modern Age (Oxford, 2007), and has published on the afterlives of the Old Masters for a number of periodicals including the Burlington Mag- azine, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Journal of the History of Collections and The Low Countries. Arts and Society in Flanders and the Netherlands. She is also a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites, a regular speaker at the National Gallery, London, and has appeared on BBC 2’s Private Life of a Masterpiece. She is now working on a study of the later fortunes of Vasari’s Lives, Afterlives. Giorgio Vasari and the Rise of Art History.

Joep Leerssen is Professor of Modern European Literature at the Uni- versity of Amsterdam and director of the Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms (SPIN). He has published widely on the relations between literature, cultural memory and nationalism, and is a recipient of Hol- land’s premier academic award, the Spinoza Prize. His recent books are: National Thought in Europe, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam University Press, 2008); Imagology. The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters, ed., with Manfred Beller (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2007); Editing the Nation’s Memory. Textual Scholarship and Nation-Building in 19th-Century Europe, ed., with Dirk van Hulle (Rodopi, 2009); Free Access to the Past. Romanticism, Cultural Heritage and the Nation, ed., with L. Jensen and M. Mathijsen (Leiden, Brill, 2010).

Bob Moore studied at the University of Manchester, graduating in 1976, and subsequently completed a PhD in 1983. Since then, he has held teaching posts at UMIST, North London Polytechnic, Manchester Polytechnic, Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology, Bristol Polytechnic and the Manchester Metropolitan University. He joined the University of Shef- field in 1999. His research is in the field of twentieth-century European history, and in addition to his post at Sheffield he has held visiting fel- lowships at the Department of War Studies in King’s College London, notes on contributors xiii the Center for Advanced Holocaust Study at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Institut d’Études Politiques (Sciences Po) in Paris. His most recent book is Survi- vors: Jewish Self-Help and Rescue in Nazi-Occupied Western Europe (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Andrew Mycock is Reader in Politics at the University of Huddersfield. His key research and teaching interests focus on post-imperial citizenship and national identity, particularly in the UK and the Russian Federa- tion, and the impact of citizenship and history education programmes. He has published a number of articles on the ‘Politics of Britishness’ and the role of education. His monograph, Post-Imperial Citizenship and Educa- tion. Britain and Russia, will be published by Palgrave in 2012. His research also explores the historiography of the British Empire, particularly in the late nineteenth century. He served on the UK Ministry of Justice Youth Citizenship Commission in 2008–9, and is co-founder of the Academy for British and Irish Studies, based at Huddersfield, and the Political Studies Association Britishness Specialist Group.

Joanne Parker is a Lecturer in Victorian Literature in the Department of English at the University of Exeter. She specializes in Victorian reinven- tions of the past, the mythologization of historical figures in the nineteenth century, and the influence of this upon modern culture. Her recent publications include: England’s Darling. The Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great (Manchester, 2007); (ed.), Written on Stone. The Cultural History of Brit- ish Prehistoric Monuments (Cambridge, 2010); ‘ “More wondrous far than Egypt’s boasted pyramids”: The South West’s Megaliths in the Romantic Period’, in N. Roe (ed.), English Romantic Writers and the West Country (London, 2010); ‘Brunanburh and the Victorian Imagination’, in M. Living- stone (ed.), The Battle of Brunanburh. A Casebook (Exeter, 2011).

Niek van Sas studied history and law at Utrecht University where he was Senior Lecturer in History from 1974 till 1989. Since 1989 he has taught at the University of Amsterdam, where he currently holds the Chair of Modern History. His doctoral dissertation (1985) was on Anglo-Dutch relations—in a European context—between 1813 and 1831. His present research is mainly concerned with the political and cultural history of the Netherlands and Western Europe from the eighteenth century onwards, including themes such as state-building and nation-building, national identity, history and memory. One of his chief research interests is the revolutionary period xiv notes on contributors around 1800 in the Netherlands and elsewhere. In 1994 he was awarded the first Prins Bernhard Fonds Prize for the Humanities and was subsequently a fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies. In 2007 he was appointed an honorary curator of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Among his many publications are: De metamorfose van Nederland. Van oude orde naar moderniteit 1750–1900 (Amsterdam, 2004); (with Frans Grijzenhout), The Burgher of Delft. A Painting by Jan Steen (Amsterdam, 2006).

Saartje Vanden Borre obtained her masters degree in history in 2007. Her research project entitled ‘Intercultural Identities: Belgian migration to Northern France (1850–1914)’ operates from the Centre for the History of Intercultural Relations at the University of Leuven’s Kortrijk Campus, and examines the socio-cultural life of Belgian migrants in Northern France in the second half of the nineteenth century. She has recently published articles in the Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Nieuwste Geschiedenis (2009) and the Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis (2011). She also collaborated on the book Vlaamse migranten in Wallonië 1850–2000, ed. Idesbald Goddeeris and Roeland Hermans (Tielt, Lannoo, 2011).

Anna Vaninskaya is a Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of William Morris and the Idea of Community. Romance, History and Propaganda 1880–1914 (Edinburgh, 2010), as well as over twenty articles and book chapters on topics ranging from Chester- ton, Orwell, Tolkien, and Stoppard to Anglo-Russian cultural relations, nineteenth-century socialism, education, popular reading, and historical cultures. Her work has appeared in journals such as Modern Language Review, Translation and Literature, English Literature in Transition, Jour- nal of Victorian Culture, History of European Ideas, and Modern Intellectual History, and she is a contributor to The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel and Oxford Bibliographies Online. She has also edited special issues of Nineteenth-Century Contexts (‘Reading the Past in the Nineteenth Cen- tury’), The Journal of William Morris Studies, 19 and Oscholars.

Tom Verschaffel studied history at the University of Leuven and at the European University Institute (Florence). Since 2004 he has been Associ- ate Professor at the University of Leuven (Kortrijk campus) and a member of the University’s research unit on Cultural History. His main research interests are the intellectual and cultural history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and more specifically the history of historical writing and of popular historical culture, cultural nationalism and the notes on contributors xv

history of migration. Among his publications are: (ed., with J. Tollebeek & L. Wessels), De palimpsest. Geschiedschrijving in de Nederlanden 1500–2000 (Hilversum, 2002); (ed., with Raf de Bont), Het verderf van Parijs (Leu- ven, 2004); (with Peter Rietbergen), Broedertwist. België en Nederland en de erfenis van 1830 (Zwolle, 2005); (ed., with Wolfgang Cortjaens and Jan de Maeyer), Historism and Cultural Identity in the Rhine-Meuse Region (Leuven, 2008).

Michael Wintle studied at Cambridge, Ghent and Hull Universities, and is now Professor of European History at the University of Amsterdam, where he helps direct the degree programmes in European Studies. Prior to 2002, he held a chair of European History at the University of Hull, UK, where he had taught since 1980. His current research interests are in European identity and the visual representation of Europe, cultural aspects of European integration, European industrialization, and the modern social and economic history of the Low Countries. He has published widely on Dutch and European history, including the following recent books: An Economic and Social History of the Netherlands (Cam- bridge, 2000); (ed., with M. Spiering), Ideas of Europe since 1914 (London, 2002); (ed.), Image into Identity. Constructing and Assigning Identity in a Culture of Modernity (Amsterdam, 2006); The Image of Europe (Cambridge, 2009); (ed., with M. Spiering), European Identity and the Second World War (London, 2011).

KEN HALEY: AN APPRECIATION1

Bob Moore

The return of the Anglo-Dutch Conference of historians to the University of Sheffield for its seventeenth meeting and for the first time since 1979 provides an appropriate occasion to mark the career and contribution of a scholar whose entire working life was spent at the institution. Ken Haley made a major contribution to the study of the Netherlands in the United Kingdom and can be seen as the precursor to the pre-eminent role that Sheffield now plays in the study of the Netherlands, both within the His- tory Department and through the Centre for Dutch Studies within the School of Modern Languages. Kenneth Harold Dobson Haley (1920–1997) was a Lancastrian by birth but brought up in the West Riding of Yorkshire where he acquired a love of cricket and a commitment to Methodism. He attended Huddersfield College from 1931 before leaving to read modern history at Balliol College, Oxford in 1938, and thus following in the footsteps of a previous college alumnus, Herbert Asquith. His academic career was interrupted by the Second World War in which he joined the Royal Engineers and served in the Middle East from 1941 to 1945 before returning to Oxford and graduating with a first in 1946. After a further year at Oxford, he was appointed as an Assistant Lecturer in the History Department at the University of Sheffield, rising to Lecturer in 1950 and Senior Lecturer in 1960. When he arrived, the Department consisted of only three scholars led by Professor George Potter and had few honours students. His attitude to the research- ing and teaching of history was deeply rooted in the importance of primary sources as the very bedrock of the discipline—a concept that remains embodied in the syllabus at Sheffield in the form of the document-based third year special subject. His written work reflected his championing of political biography and analytical narrative history as the best means of bringing out the complexities of history. This was perhaps best demonstrated in his masterwork, The First Earl of Shaftesbury, which ran to 767

1 My thanks are due to David Luscombe, Mark Greengrass, Alastair Duke, Mark Zawadzki and Jacky Hodgson for their help in compiling this appreciation. xviii bob moore pages and 31 chapters and which was published in 1968, some six years after he had been appointed to the chair of modern history. There is no doubt that Ken Haley left a substantial imprint on both the Department he headed and the University. His inaugural lecture The Study of the Past set out his view of the discipline as he reflected on its origins in Sheffield with the first lectures given by Charles Harding Firth at the then Sheffield College in 1880. His words could leave no doubt about his predilections, as he noted that ‘good narrative, which includes analysis, is in extremely short supply at present’.2 His traditional views on syllabus and the primacy of British political history latterly brought him into conflict with younger colleagues as the Department expanded to meet the increased recruitment of undergraduate students in the 1960s. In spite of being wracked by ill-health, he was a very effective Dean of the Faculty and also gave long service as a Vice-President of the Historical Association. It is, however, his role as a proponent of the study of Dutch history that primarily concerns us here. Having been supervised by Sir Keith Feiling, it was Sir George Clark, then Regius Professor at Oxford, who advised him after completing his B. Litt. in 1951 to learn Dutch and choose a Dutch topic for his future research. This was seen to bear early fruit in his first publication, William of Orange and the English Opposition (1953) although he saw this work primarily as a precursor to his study of Shaftesbury which cemented his reputation as one of the leading scholars of seventeenth- century England when it appeared some fifteen years later. Subsequently, Haley turned more explicitly to topics related directly to the Netherlands and placed himself clearly as the successor to a previous generation of scholars who had pioneered the study of the Low Countries beyond the dramatic events of the Revolt of the Netherlands in the later sixteenth century. His illustrated general survey, The Dutch in the Seventeenth Cen- tury (1972), became his most popular and well-known work. Appearing in the Thames and Hudson series, the Library of European Civilization, it acknowledged Haley’s debt to Pieter Geyl, who had held the Chair of Dutch Studies in London from 1919 to 1935, Charles Wilson, Charles Boxer, and his mentor Sir George Clark, but argued that his approach to an understanding of the Dutch in their golden age was fundamentally

2 K.H.D. Haley, The Study of the Past. Inaugural Lecture, Delivered 30 January 1963 (Shef- field, Sheffield University, 1963), p. 7. ken haley: an appreciation xix different from theirs.3 What emerged was a highly readable synthesis of the political, social and economic bases for the emergence, efflorescence and decline of the golden age. His justification for his work was also vested in a view that the study of European history in the anglophone world had been too heavily skewed towards France—for both linguistic and political reasons—but that there was much that could be learned from understanding the similarities between the British and the Dutch. As he himself said at the end of his synthesis on Anglo-Dutch relations sometime later, ‘. . . it is not fanciful to see a community of outlook in open and tolerant societies, formed in contact with one another over a long period of time’.4 While perhaps not quite in the realms of comparative history, he was nonetheless suggesting that the study of the interactions between the two countries could inform an understanding of the history of both polities. His precise role in the formation and development of Anglo-Dutch scholarly links is not altogether clear. The first meeting of the specifically titled Oxford-Netherlands Conference took place in 1959 but there is no indication of who all the attendees were. There is nevertheless no doubt that Haley would have approved of the sentiments expressed by the editors of this first volume of essays. Considering how often the Dutch and English nations have been drawn together by ties of cultural sympathy and common danger, and at how many points their economic rivalry has influenced the course of modern history, it may be a matter for surprise that their respective historians have on the whole worked without much close contact with each other.5 Soon transformed into the Britain and the Netherlands, or more colloquially the Anglo-Dutch conferences, the series benefited from having Ken Haley as one of its guiding spirits. However, his first direct contribution came at the fifth conference held at Southampton in 1973 with a paper entitled ‘ “No Popery” in the Reign of Charles II’. In it, he explored what was essentially an English topic but one where he was keen to provide comparatives with the Netherlands and a proper contextual introduction

3 K.H.D. Haley, The Dutch in the Seventeenth Century (London, Thames and Hudson, 1972), p. 7. 4 K.H.D. Haley, The British and the Dutch. Political and Cultural Relations through the Ages (London, George Philip, 1988), p. 233. 5 J.S. Bromley and E.H. Kossmann (eds.), Britain and the Netherlands [Vol. I]: Papers Delivered to the Oxford-Netherlands Historical Conference 1959 (London, Chatto and Win- dus, 1960), p. 7. xx bob moore for his Dutch listeners. He was also not afraid to make some contemporary references—hinting that he had no idea what the people of the Shankill Road might make of his particular interpretation of their ‘beloved King Billy’—at a time when the troubles in Northern Ireland were very much in the public eye.6 His fellow speakers included Ivo Schöffer and Joel Hurst- field—like Haley, very much senior figures in the field. His reputation as a scholar of the Netherlands later led to his appointment as a member of the Anglo-Netherlands Mixed Cultural Commission between 1976 and 1982 and of the William and Mary Tercentenary Trust from 1985 to 1989. Later he was instrumental in bringing the seventh Anglo-Dutch conference to Sheffield. By this stage, the conferences had adopted a policy of concentrating on specific themes, and this one was focussed on Church and State since the Reformation. He and his then junior colleague Dr. (later Professor) Mark Greengrass acted as hosts and were thanked for their flawless organisation, conspicuous hospitality and civic patriotism by the editors of the subsequent conference proceedings.7 This one acco- lade, however, cannot do justice to Ken Haley’s role in fostering the study of Dutch history in the United Kingdom. While it remains a minority subject in today’s academic environment, the fact that the Revolt of the Netherlands and the various aspects of the Golden Age remain very much a part of mainstream European history studies in British Universities is in no small part due to Ken Haley’s unstinting work in popularising the subject for generations of students.

References

Bromley, J.S. and E.H. Kossmann (eds.), Britain and the Netherlands [Vol. I]: Papers Deliv- ered to the Oxford-Netherlands Historical Conference 1959 (London, Chatto and Windus, 1960). Duke, A.C. and C.A. Tamse (eds.), Church and State since the Reformation. Papers Delivered to the Seventh Anglo-Dutch Historical Conference (The Hague, Nijhoff, 1981), Britain and the Netherlands VII. Haley, K.H.D., The British and the Dutch. Political and Cultural Relations through the Ages (London, George Philip, 1988). ——, The Dutch in the Seventeenth Century (London, Thames and Hudson, 1972).

6 K.H.D. Haley, ‘ “No Popery” in the Reign of Charles II’, in J.S. Bromley and E.H. Koss- mann (eds.), Some Political Mythologies. Papers Delivered to the Fifth Anglo-Dutch Historical Conference (The Hague, Nijhoff, 1975), Britain and the Netherlands V, pp. 102–119, quotation at p. 103. 7 A.C. Duke and C.A. Tamse (eds.), Church and State since the Reformation. Papers Deliv- ered to the Seventh Anglo-Dutch Historical Conference (The Hague, Nijhoff, 1981), Britain and the Netherlands VII, p. vi. ken haley: an appreciation xxi

——, ‘ “No Popery” in the Reign of Charles II’, in J.S. Bromley and E.H. Kossmann (eds.), Some Political Mythologies. Papers Delivered to the Fifth Anglo-Dutch Historical Confer- ence (The Hague, Nijhoff, 1975), Britain and the Netherlands V, pp. 102–119. ——, The Study of the Past. Inaugural Lecture, Delivered 30 January 1963 (Sheffield, Sheffield University, 1963).

part one introduction

BRITAIN, BELGIUM AND THE NETHERLANDS AND THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: AN INTRODUCTION

Michael Wintle

The nineteenth century in Europe not only laid the foundations of history as a professional discipline but also popularized and romanticized the subject, often as a by-product of the process of nation-building. National histories were written and state museums founded at the same time as collective memories were being created in fiction and drama, art and architecture and through the growth of tourism and the emergence of a heritage industry. The importance of historicism as a theme in nineteenth-century European culture is widely recognized and has often been discussed, though almost always in a national context. Studying the historical imagination in the nineteenth century consists essentially of reconstructing the views of the past held at that time, together with the reasons for those views, and the consequences for contemporary and subsequent society. The subject is important because of the consensus amongst scholars of collective identity, and especially of national identity, that a shared view of a common history is one of the essential ingredients of that group identity. It is held to be vital for nascent and developing nationalist or regionalist identification that there be no major fissures in the shared views of the national past, or at least that varying views are compatible with each other; competing views of the past can tear the nation asunder. As for how the study should be conducted, Stephen Bann asserted as early as 1984 that the ‘study of historical representation in this period’ involved a ‘historical poetics’, looking at the devices and strategies and fictions used by historians of all kinds in order to construct their particular view of the past; he was quick to point out that ‘this vast and sprawling domain’ was comprised not only of formal or professional history-writing (which was after all in its infancy), but that it ‘extends from historiography proper, through historical novels to visual art, spectacle and the historical museum’.1 All these sources and more will be explored in this collection.

1 Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio. A Study of the Representation of History in Nine- teenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 3. 4 michael wintle

Much has been written on the historical imagination in the nineteenth century. While neither this collection nor this Introduction will attempt to paraphrase or précis the evolving debate, Hayden White’s work was of course a landmark, with his definition of ‘history’ as ‘a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse’.2 Here we do not venture into his philosophical terrain of the structured means through which history is understood, but we are still indebted to his determination to study through the poetics of historiography the underlying assumptions about the historical past held at least to an extent in common by many people in a specific society in a specific time period. The implication is that, given form by various rhetorical techniques (which can be scientifically studied), the historical imagination is entirely a human construction rather than a reality: the ‘metahistorical’. Most producers of the various forms of ‘history’ are neither unfailingly truthful scientists nor simply peddlers of present-generated myths, in which ‘the past only functions as confirmation of present prejudices’; rather the producers of history, from professional historians to cartoonists and historical novelists, are part of the historical discourse itself and indeed caught up in it as essential components.3 Alongside the work of the pioneers in the study of the historical imagination, memory studies have also boomed, and while not identical, the historical imagination is linked with and adjacent to the way in which collective memory—which may be an oxymoron, but which is perceived to exist—operates to legitimize a current or desired social order.4 More- over, the precise nature of the ‘historical understanding’, ‘representation’ or ‘imagination’ often served a contemporary political or societal purpose. The past could be and was frequently used to instruct, influence and indeed shape the present, for instance by presenting laudable examples by means of which the admirable national past could be emulated by right- thinking citizens in the present: as Lord Rosebery said in 1901, ‘we dignify

2 Hayden White, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. ix. 3 Stefan Berger, ‘Introduction. Narrating the Nation: Historiography and Other Gen- res’, in Narrating the Nation. Representations in History, Media and the Arts, edited by S. Berger, L. Eriksonas & A. Mycock (Oxford, Berghahn, 2008), pp. 1–16, quotation from p. 2. See also Ann Rigney, The Rhetoric of Historical Representation. Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990). On a wider range of the uses of the past for present purposes, see David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985). 4 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 3–4. an introduction 5 and sanctify our own aspirations by referring them to the historic past.’5 Imaginings of the past, shared across communities to a greater or lesser extent, provide reference points for current societies and indeed indications of the course to be followed in the future, in the form of heroes to be admired, shared sufferings, joint victories, and the salience of particular characteristics. In the words of Prosper de Barante in 1857, ‘we seek in the past for motives which will give us confidence in the future.’6 In certain media, for example street theatre, pageantry, and other visual forms, the performance of the imagined past is a particularly strong, ritual- ized reinforcement of the lessons of the historical imagination;7 an excellent example would be the commemorations begun in nineteenth-century Flanders of the Battle of the Golden Spurs, as detailed by Joep Leerssen in Chapter 5 of this collection. The imagination of the past is usually in the form of a narrative, devised and elaborated by each generation anew, and especially powerful in the nineteenth century; the narrative carries lessons or morals for specific issues in the present. As Joanne Parker explains here in Chapter 6, the treatment of Saxons and Vikings in British historical Alfredian romances bore a direct relevance to the troubles over Schleswig and Holstein in the 1850s and 1860s on the borders between the German lands and Denmark. And the nation of course was the principal object of most of the historical narrative in the nineteenth century, even if the reception of these powerful romantic narratives was often uneven, variable, and at odds with perceived contemporary reality.8 Rather than revisiting this well-trodden ground, notwithstanding its continuing interest and potential, this collection aims to concentrate on a particular set of perspectives, in order to cast fresh and more nuanced

5 Quoted in The Times (21 Sept. 1901), p. 10; cited below in Joanne Parker’s essay in Chapter 6. 6 Cited in Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York, Twayne, 1995), p. 26. 7 Connerton, How Societies Remember, p. 4. The literature on memory studies is now vast, and need not be elaborated again here. Three more recent works however deserve mention in this context: Ann Rigney, Imperfect Histories. The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2001); Stefan Berger, L. Eriksonas and A. Mycock (eds.), Narrating the Nation. Representations in History, Media and the Arts (Oxford, Berghahn, 2008); and Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree and Jay Winter (eds.), Per- forming the Past. Memory, History and Identity in Modern Europe (Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2010). 8 See e.g. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Introduction: Narrating the Nation’, in Nation and Narra- tion, edited by H.K. Bhabha (London, Routledge, 1990), pp. 1–7. On the historical narrative and the ‘historical thesis’, see also Chiel van den Akker, ‘Historische representatie en de betekenis van het verleden’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 123/3 (2010), pp. 430–40. 6 michael wintle light on what has in many cases already been outlined in general theoretical terms over the past several decades (to which work all the authors refer wherever appropriate). In particular of course we foreground a fresh juxtaposition of Britain with the older Dutch nation but new version of the Dutch state (dating from 1813/30) and the new Belgian one (1830), a comparison which is taken on directly in several of the chapters and implicitly in the entire book, offering some revealing new observations. We also pay special homage to the breadth of the source material through which the historical imagination can be studied. This has been a feature of the subject since the beginning of its investigation: the language and rhetoric of historiography was the target of Hayden White himself,9 the historical novel has been recognized as having perhaps even more potential to affect the historical imaginary than professional historiography,10 visual images of all kinds, from paintings and cartoons to pageantry and architecture, have long been seen as a potential resource for uncovering the historical imagination of a given generation,11 and we have already noticed that the content and arrangement of museums were highlighted by Stephen Bann as a fertile environment for the shaping and unpick- ing of historical representation.12 All these sources and more are taken up here: caricatures, letters, romances, historical fiction, professionaliz- ing historiography, national and private museums and galleries, literature, representations of artists, ballads, newspapers, and history paintings are all investigated in this collection in order to offer as broad as possible a range of comment on generalized notions of historical representation, and to evoke a nuanced refinement of the subtlety and detailed hybridity of the historical imagination in the nineteenth century.13 Further we

9 White, Metahistory, p. x. 10 Berger, et al. (eds.), Narrating the Nation, p. 7. 11 See e.g. Theodore K. Rabb & J. Brown, ‘The Evidence of Art: Images and Meaning in History’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 17/1 (1986), 1–6; Daniel Fulda, Wissenschaft aus Kunst. Die Entstehung der modernen deutschen Geschichtsschreibung 1760–1860 (Berlin, De Gruyter, 1996), section (pp. 390–404) on ‘Visual material, eyewitnessing and the historical novel’); and more recently, Michael Wintle, The Image of Europe. Visualizing Europe in Cartography and Iconography throughout the Ages (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009). 12 Bann, The Clothing of Clio, p. 3. 13 See also Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History, pp. 4–7. The list of possible genres is potentially very large, and although we do it some justice in this volume, we underex- pose, only for reasons of space, public spectacles and commemorations, and virtually the whole field of music. While much work has been done on the role of music in evoking a vision of the past of many individual nations, a new five-year project, ‘National Music’, was launched in 2011 by Joep Leerssen’s SPIN (Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms) an introduction 7 endeavour to highlight its transnationality, as it moved—often intermedi- ally—between nations and regions. Besides direct comparisons between the processes in Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands, there is attention to the migration across borders of the components of these imaginings. As Leerssen remarks in Chapter 5, ‘mnemonic communities need not be confined within the boundaries of a single national society’, and in the arts there were transnational communities of painters and writers which transmitted and developed their ideas across the borders, as did the history painters investigated by Hugh Dunthorne in Chapter 10. Fur- thermore there is the question of the influence across national borders of large migrant groups, seeking their own assurances from their history in their new but often long-lived cultural environment: Tom Verschaffel and Saartje Vanden Borre tease out the intricacies of such processes in Chap- ter 9, with a Belgian migrant population located in northern France. Inevitably, though, the national framework is almost always a condition- ing variable in the subject matter of this collection, even when it is temporarily relegated to the wings: the flags of nations, as it were, are always waving, whether in the foreground or to the side. Many of the chapters deal directly with the specifically national historical imagination: Marnix Beyen on the Netherlands and Belgium in the 1830s and 1840s, for example, and Joanne Parker on the Victorian national identity, to pick out but two. However, it is the variation, subtlety and hybridity of nationalism in the historical imagination which receives most of our attention. Niek van Sas deals with the caricaturing and even mocking of Dutch nationalism by Jacob van Lennep and its effects, Andrew Mycock scrutinizes the divided nature of British nationalist imperialism, Jenny Graham pays broad attention to civic pride within nationalistic traditions, Tom Verschaffel and Saartje Vanden Borre unpick the immensely complicated quasi-national allegiances of Flemish migrants in northern France, and Leerssen takes on the convoluted identifications of literary historicism in the Netherlands and especially Belgium, while endlessly conflicting and interacting local and transnational loyalties ebbed and flowed, some of them quite unexpected. It is by means of this commentary on the established thematic debates in the light of new combinations of territories and sources, and the transmediality and transnationalism of the formation and working of historical imagination in the nineteenth century, that this collection

research network, in order to look at the issue on a European scale. See http://www.spinnet .eu/news (consulted 12 March 2012). 8 michael wintle makes its contribution to the ongoing scholarly debate. Thus while we acknowledge the primacy of nationalism, we are constantly problematiz- ing it, by highlighting both the ambiguity, porosity and internal divisions behind national borders, and the evolving and on occasional diverging behaviour of historical imaginings of the nation. The nineteenth century by general agreement is the Age of History. Its culture was a historical culture, transcending history proper or professional history as it slowly came into being. History permeated literature and the arts and was at the heart of that very nineteenth-century creation, the nation state. To address the problem of nineteenth-century historical imagination the first chapter, by Niek van Sas, examines three important authors—Walter Scott, Jacob van Lennep and Georges Rodenbach—hail- ing from Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium respectively. All are best known as writers of fiction. Here their work is scrutinized with the eye of the professional historian, revisiting the border territory between history and fiction. Walter Scott through his historical novels was a major inspiration for the romantic historical imagination of the first half of the century, but he also wrote history proper, experimenting with the dialectics and interplay between objective history and subjective memory. His account of the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo, Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk (1816), may be seen as an important stage in Scott’s learning process which made him such a consummate writer of historical novels and an inspiration to all practitioners of romantic history-writing. The Dutch author Jacob van Lennep, apart from writing many historical novels, invented a strange series of historical caricatures (Tafereelen uit de geschiedenis des vaderlands, 1854), used here as a historical source in its own right. After an initially favourable reception, his ironical representation of Dutch history evoked considerable criticism. Instead of following the dominant narrative of Dutch history in the nineteenth century, where centuries of internal and external conflict became finally reconciled in the national present, Van Lennep used his caricatures of Dutch historical episodes to emphasize the divisions. In the third case-study, Bruges-la-Morte at the end of the century (1892), the French-speaking Flemish symbolist writer Georges Rodenbach was ostensibly not using his powerful imagination to any historical purpose: rather he tried to do away with history altogether. In their very different ways, however, all three authors present exciting opportunities for ‘proper historians’ to use the imagination of writers of fiction in reconstructing the nineteenth century’s view of the past. In the age of romantic historical imagination all nation states were framing and refining their national master narratives. This was a broad transnational an introduction 9 trend in which similar rhetorical strategies in fact helped to highlight national differences. In England Macaulay canonized the Whig interpretation of history, wanting ‘to make the past present’.14 In the Netherlands for similar reasons, the Golden Age of the seventeenth century became the touchstone of national pride, but this was crucially linked with the imperative of conciliation for the present. In Belgium, history writing in the national mode was a new pastime because of the novelty of the state itself. In the second section, three authors examine the scope and language of national history, from the point of view of professional history in Britain, the rhetorical and linguistic devices in Dutch and Belgian national historiography, and the management and evolution of collections in Dutch museums. In Chapter 2, Andrew Mycock explores the borders of nation and empire in nineteenth-century British historiography, observing how contemporary issues such as Englishness, empire, race, and governance were being worked out. The historiography of the English or British Empire highlights the complicated relationship between nation and empire. The orthodox view is that, until the late nineteenth century, most British historians simply omitted a colonial or imperial focus in favour of a narrow and often Whiggish focus on English national history. J.R. Seeley, in The Expansion of England (1883), is seen by many as the first to raise the idea that the history of the nation and the history of the empire were intimately connected: he famously rejected the dominant focus on English constitutional history. Before that, empire was not the only or principal causal force in shaping ‘Englishness’ or ‘Britishness’. In this chapter, however, Mycock seeks to challenge the orthodox view by arguing that British national and imperial history were often considered concurrently within key texts. First, he probes the notion of an ‘internal empire’ within the British Isles, considering how England was historically constructed and the extent to which Scotland, Wales and to a lesser extent Ireland were acknowledged as distinct nations. For most national historians during the nineteenth century, England and Britain were synonymous. Second, he examines how the ‘external empire’ was understood, whether the empire was considered English or British, and what the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion were. For most, empire, at its core, was explicitly English, with only a peripheral position reserved for the Irish, Scots and Welsh. Race was also a reference parameter, more so as the century progressed,

14 Peter Mandler, History and National Life (London, Profile Books, 2002), p. 34. 10 michael wintle and was often linked to civilization and superiority. The chapter estab- lishes the extent to which historians during the nineteenth century viewed England as both a ‘nation’ and an ‘empire’, both within the British Isles and across its colonies. In Chapter 3, Marnix Beyen then conducts a linguistic analysis of a sample of national histories in Belgium and the Netherlands in the years between 1830 and 1850. Scholars studying the construction of nineteenth-century national identities tend to emphasize the crucial role of national historiography. By selectively assembling fragments of the past into a coherent master narrative, national historians of the time sought to strengthen their fellow-citizens in the conviction of belonging to a transhistorical community. Beyen, however, focuses here on concrete linguistic details rather than on master narratives, to probe the character of the relationship between national historiography and national identity. Examples of crucial language use include the use of implicit exhortation in the employment of the first person plural, the way in which generic and proper names are used to denote the nation, whether in adjectival or substantival form, and the occurrence of terms such as ‘people’, ‘nation’ and ‘fatherland’. Combining insights from conceptual historiography and from the study of pragmatic linguistics, Beyen examines first how the nation is constituted as an object and/or agent of these histories, and secondly how the authors of the texts present themselves and their readers as members of the nation they describe. In general, the Belgian historians also allowed for a plural agency. Hence, their attempts to create the image of a homogeneous and active historical nation were less stable than those of their northern Dutch contemporaries. The attempts of the two selected Belgian authors to reach that goal were less successful, since their image of the nation allowed for more plurality, and they situated the agency of their stories less univocally in ‘the nation’. As such, the analysis suggests that patriotic enthusiasm in Belgium after the Revolution of 1830 rested on a relatively weak basis, whereas the national trauma in the Netherlands after the loss of Belgium did not unsettle a broad nationalist consensus. In Chapter 4, Ellinoor Bergvelt discusses the place of the colonies in various Dutch national museums from the Batavian Revolution (1795–1806) to the opening of the new Rijksmuseum in 1885 in Amsterdam. She compares the development of those national or state-sponsored institutions with the efforts of private individuals to acquire and display collections relating to the arts, archaeology and natural history of the colonies of the Netherlands. Judging from the amounts of money invested in different an introduction 11 kinds of museums and at different periods during the century, it seems that natural history collections received more than museums of antiquities. Perhaps contrary to expectations, almost no interest in the history and culture of the colonies was shown by the Ministry of the Interior, by successive kings of the Netherlands, or even by the national museums themselves. The King, his Ministers and his civil servants were certainly not thinking of using the museums to further national unity, or that works of art should in some way arouse a ‘feeling for the fatherland’ in the viewers’ breasts. Rather, the historical aspect was subordinated to the artistic merits of the paintings, for example in the old masters. This was partly affected by a generally perceived human hierarchy in the Western world ranging from the very primitive to the highly sophisticated, with the Euro- peans at the top and various forms of ‘aboriginals’ at the bottom. In this scheme of things the cultures of Japan and China were considered to be much higher than the cultures of the Dutch East Indies. The original Indo- nesian Hindu-Buddhist culture, represented for example by the Borobudur monument, was esteemed much more highly than the subsequent Islamic culture. It seems that there were few master narratives in the national museums, and government had no master-plan for the national art and history museums to that end. The new, consolidated Rijksmuseum of the 1880s did not offer an overview of Dutch history, and certainly not one of Dutch colonial history. This period of ‘national indifference’ in the middle decades of the nineteenth century was a difficult one for the national museums, and indeed they barely survived. Private collectors and museums, on the other hand, were much more active, especially when after the Belgian Secession the Dutch government stopped almost all spending on the arts. Two private zoological gardens with ethnographical collections were established: Artis in Amsterdam, and Blijdorp in Rotterdam. At the same time several private museums were set up: in Haarlem, the Colo- nial Museum, later (in 1926) to be nationalized as the Tropics Museum in Amsterdam; in Rotterdam, the Museum of Ethnology; and in Delft, a municipal collection now known as Nusantara. The third section, on historical fiction and collective identity, con- centrates on the role played by historical novels of all sorts in contribut- ing to the outlining of a national self-awareness in Britain and the Low Countries. In Chapter 5 Joep Leerssen unpicks the surprising complexities of nationalist and regional adherence present in the historical novel in Flanders and the Netherlands. Making reference to a touchstone for many of the chapters, he observes that historical fiction in the wake of Sir Walter 12 michael wintle

Scott formed an important vehicle of national historicism in all European countries. Its impact in the (northern) Netherlands15 has generally been under-emphasized for two reasons: on the one hand, the pre-1880 generation of writers was de-canonized in twentieth-century literary history, and is only in recent decades being retrieved from critical neglect; on the other hand, historians in the Netherlands have traditionally been reluc- tant to see their country as being a participant in, or affected by, nineteenth-century nationalism and nation-building processes. In Flanders, however, the influence of nationalism, national historicism and historical fiction has been closely traced. Hendrik Conscience’s De Leeuw van Vlaan- deren (1838) is often cited as the prime example of Scott’s influence in Netherlandic literature, where defeat of the external enemy in the Middle Ages provides a strong moral lesson to modern-day readers. In this chapter, Leerssen tries to set the record straight by looking at historical fiction across the Low Countries from 1830 onwards, including Walloon and Dutch examples (among the latter, especially Van Lennep’s De Roos van Dekama and Bosboom-Toussaint’s Het Huis Lauernesse), and traces how the disintegration of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, first into Dutch and Belgian halves, and the latter subsequently into Flemish and Walloon subdivisions, can be traced in literary production. The notion that myths and history underpin and rationalize a given national identity transpires to be a simplification, and even the three-way split is often further fragmented by the special position of smaller units, for example the former Prince-bishopric of Liège. Nonetheless, the historical imagination as channelled through literature stands out as being important and influential, albeit in complex and unpredictable ways. In Chapter 6, Joanne Parker focuses upon the interaction of Danes and Saxons in British nineteenth-century historical fiction. The Victorians effectively invented the Vikings, and in the process a newly invigorated cult of King Alfred. The lessons to be drawn about the essential qualities of English national identity were clear, and they concerned liberty, justice,

15 The geographical terminology is complex, and not always consistent. ‘The Nether- lands’ or sometimes ‘the northern Netherlands’, and ‘Belgium’, generally refer to the countries of today’s boundaries (with some small changes); ‘Holland’ should refer to a province (split into two, north and south) in the northwest of the Netherlands, but it is also used to refer to the entire country; ‘Flanders’ is the northern, Dutch-speaking half of Belgium, while francophone Wallonia is the southern half. The term ‘Netherlandic’ or even ‘Neth- erlandish’ is usually employed to refer to the language spoken in the Netherlands and Flanders, with ‘Dutch’ and ‘Flemish’ as regional variations within that area. See Tilmans et al. (eds.), Performing the Past, pp. 253–254, note 10. an introduction 13 the jury system, naval supremacy, imperial prowess, representative legislature, fair play, vigour, and straightforwardness. Parker examines how depictions of Danes developed during the course of the century, from featuring simply as an exotic or dangerous Other in early Victorian texts to having a more complicated relationship with representations of Saxon figures by the last decades of the nineteenth century. She investigates whether negative images of Danes in early Anglo-Saxonist fictional texts might complicate simple readings of those works as triumphally progressive, suggesting instead the existence of cultural anxieties about the stability of British union and the hybridity of the English population. Parker goes on to make a case for reading such negative images of Vikings as a means of displacing onto the Danish nation from the Saxons those worry- ing negative qualities which had been associated generally with northern nations in the late eighteenth century. Conversely, she also considers the extent to which positive images of Danes in later texts (Alexandra was the Danish bride of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales) complicate or challenge Victorian claims about a distinct Saxon ‘type’ which was supposedly identical with an imagined English character. Such texts suggest a growing awareness of the hybridity of the English population, and show that various different groups were implicit in the process of English Othering. Victorian Anglo-Saxonism was thus by no means a wholly negative cultural phenomenon, associated with racial supremacy, and cultural intolerance. If Anglo-Saxonist texts are analysed longitudinally it is possible to observe not a simplistic nationalism, but rather the newly forged nation of ‘Great Britain’ gradually coming to terms with its own hybridity and developing a more complex sense of national identity. Anna Vaninskaya takes on the subject of the historical imagination in late-Victorian historical romances in Chapter 7. By the end of the nineteenth century historical fiction dominated the British literary market: minor authors made entire careers from its production, major novelists also tried their hands at the genre, and enterprising publishers brought out title after title, aimed at both children and adults and dealing with every conceivable period of the past. When it came to constructing national identity, tales of Egyptian priests or Christians in the Roman Empire could be moulded to the author’s ideological ends as easily as the adventures of Elizabethan seafarers, but the English Middle Ages loomed particularly large. Vaninskaya considers two Victorians, William Morris and Arthur Conan Doyle, who both produced highly distinctive medieval historical romances, but who approached the task of ‘making the past part of the present’ in very different ways. These novels intended to push 14 michael wintle particular agendas: political, religious, or otherwise. For if Morris’s tale of the fourteenth-century Peasants’ Revolt, A Dream of John Ball, embodied 1880s socialism, Conan Doyle’s The White Company, set in the same period, helped underpin 1890s Greater Britain imperialism. What brought these and similar texts together, however, was their infusion of typically Victorian concerns into imaginative reconstructions of a national past. Each author shaped the cultural memory of the Middle Ages in accordance with his own, ideologically embedded ‘true conception of history’. The classical past had served this purpose for the elite since at least the eighteenth century; now it was time to marshal the Middle Ages for the enlightenment of a wider readership. The past was seen to be the origin of the present, and was always interpreted through a contemporary lens. Interestingly, despite the prevalence of certain majority discourses, the past was used differently by different political persuasions with their own separate public spheres (socialist, imperialist) in Britain, just as it was in the ‘pillarized’ Netherlands (Calvinist, Catholic, Liberal, Socialist). While Morris addressed himself primarily to a minority socialist constituency, Doyle’s ode to imperial patriotism was meant for the nation at large. In the final section three essays address the past as it was imagined in the visual arts. In Chapter 8, Jenny Graham focuses on the image of the artist-hero in Britain and the Low Countries in the nineteenth century. In the public spaces of the major cities, the image of the artist is all around us. Carved effigies in stone and inscriptions upon the elevations of public buildings bear witness to the rise of a particular product of the historical imagination in the nineteenth century: the public commemoration in nationalist contexts of the artists of the past. With this phenomenon, a new form of historical genre flourished in a variety of forms—salon and mural painting, popular engraving, public pageantry—which depicted patriotic episodes and anecdotes from the lives of the artists. Nowhere was that more the case than in the new Belgian state after 1830, where it functioned as a counterweight to the traditional idea of Belgium as the battlefield of Europe. Focusing on a particularly celebrated epoch, artists in Belgium turned to Van Eyck, Memling and Quentin Matsys as exemplary forebears, inscribing these figures from the national past with the values of the present. The proliferation of these images reveals a common ideological function, underlined by their local and municipal, as well as national, settings: to emphasize the contribution of the artist to the social and political life of the state. Artistic history became an exemplary account of the city as ideal civic community, peopled by good burghers and enfranchised citizens, and of their allegiance to local rights and customs. Graham argues an introduction 15 for a reassessment of the modernity of these images from an age that witnessed the increased social mobility of artists, contrary to the received myths about Romanticism. In Chapter 9, Tom Verschaffel and Saartje Vanden Borre take the unusual case of a migrant population to challenge generalized assumptions about the use of the historical imagination in the nineteenth century. During the second half of the century large numbers of Belgian workers and their families (both Flemish and Walloon) settled in northern France, in the Départements of the Nord and the Pas-de-Calais. The city of Rou- baix became an important centre of the textile industry and its population multiplied fifteenfold between 1800 and 1900, by which date about half of its inhabitants were Belgian. They were accepted and welcomed both by the local population and by local government and officialdom; there was a high degree of integration, not so much in the nation as in the locality. The integration was achieved mainly by the accommodation of the receiving community and its officials, rather than by the adapta- tion of the immigrants to local conditions. This chapter focuses on the historical culture and consciousness of these Belgian immigrants, in Lille as well as Roubaix, and discusses various perspectives from which their sense of historical identity can be examined: from the lives and works of ‘spokesmen’, that is to say writers and artists of Belgian origin; from folk texts written and sung by immigrants; from performances organized by members and associations of the migrant community (and their implied discourses); from their awareness that the Département du Nord had once, in a shared past, been part of the medieval county of Flanders and therefore part of the Netherlands; and from the immigrants’ readi- ness to become part of the history of their adopted country, national as well as local. Each of these avenues is explored by means of one or more case studies and examples. Special attention is paid to the painters J.J. Weerts and R. Cogghe, both immigrants, following more or less opposite paths of integration, yet equally revealing of the cultural strategies open to the migrant community. These cases and perspectives foreground the specificity of Roubaix and the Nord as determined by its large migrant community, while also adding nuanced specificity to the use of categories like nationality and history as a means of identity formation. In the final chapter, Hugh Dunthorne takes as his approach to the historical imagination the subject of national history painting and engraving in Britain and the Low Countries during the nineteenth century. Although seldom displayed in museums today, images of key episodes from national history were produced in large numbers in nineteenth-century Europe 16 michael wintle and in many different formats: paintings, prints, book illustrations, statues. Enormously popular in their own day, these works are now increasingly attracting the attention of scholars. Dunthorne adopts a comparative approach to the subject, tracing the rise and fall of ‘historical art’ in the neighbouring states of Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium. He considers first how the fashion for history painting began, stimulated both by writing about the past and (in the Low Countries especially) by the revolutionary events of 1780–1830; and he identifies the mechanisms of patronage and popularization which sustained this kind of art. Secondly, the chapter examines the themes which artists chose as subject-matter. As far as Belgium and Britain are concerned, the dominant theme is of continuous historical, Whiggish progress from past to present, culminating (in the Belgian case) in the achievement of national independence by the Revolution of 1830, and (in the British one) in the extension of parliamentary democracy by the Great Reform Act of 1832. In the Nether- lands, however, nostalgia for a past heroic or Golden Age determined the elements of historical research and imagination which went into Dutch historical picture-making, featuring admirals Tromp and De Ruyter, and other national heroes, embodying all that was best in the Dutch character. Finally, Dunthorne considers the reasons why national history painting lost both self-confidence and public esteem, gradually fading from view in the last decades of the nineteenth century. They include less enthusiasm amongst artists for such a prescribed and didactic role, new and more professional approaches to the study of history, and technological changes in transport and photography which brought the objects of historical imagination much closer to the public without the necessary intervention of artists. Thus in the age of classic romantic nationalism, the nineteenth century, we can see as we might have expected that the nation was the dominant characteristic and target of the historical imagination: mass national identity was being crafted, reworked and democratized, and the understanding of the past was one of the instrumental vectors of communicating those national ideas. The breadth and variety of the media employed, from ballads and cartoons to professional historiography, was also to be predicted, although it has here perhaps been explored to a greater extent and to greater effect than before. The nation supreme, then, in all media. But the most significant conclusion of this collection on the historical imagination in Belgium, the Netherlands and Britain has actually been to question and problematize that domination of the nation. In the first place we have constantly alluded to the transnational nature of that awareness an introduction 17 of the past, of its travel across borders: this nationalism was at the very least international, and often transnational. And then there is the subna- tional complexity of this historical imagination: the complicated subtlety and nuance of so much of historical awareness is a dominant feature of these essays, to the point where it has become clear that a straightforward association between national feelings and identity on the one hand, and the historical imagination on the other, is evidently not on the cards. The interaction of the nineteenth century with its imagined past was far richer and more complex.

References

Akker, Chiel van den, ‘Historische representatie en de betekenis van het verleden’, Tijd- schrift voor Geschiedenis, 123/3 (2010), pp. 430–40. Bann, Stephen, The Clothing of Clio. A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth- Century Britain and France (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984). ——, Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York, Twayne, 1995). Berger, Stefan, ‘Introduction. Narrating the Nation: Historiography and Other Genres’, in Narrating the Nation: Representations in History, Media and the Arts, edited by S. Berger, L. Eriksonas & A. Mycock (Oxford, Berghahn, 2008), pp. 1–16. Berger, Stefan, L. Eriksonas and A. Mycock (eds.), Narrating the Nation. Representations in History, Media and the Arts (Oxford, Berghahn, 2008). Bhabha, Homi K., ‘Introduction: Narrating the Nation’, in Nation and Narration, edited by H.K. Bhabha (London, Routledge, 1990), pp. 1–7. Connerton, Paul, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989). Fulda, Daniel, Wissenschaft aus Kunst: die Entstehung der modernen deutschen Geschichts schreibung 1760–1860 (Berlin, De Gruyter, 1996). Lowenthal, David, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985). Mandler, Peter, History and National Life (London, Profile Books, 2002). Rabb, Theodore K. & J. Brown, ‘The Evidence of Art: Images and Meaning in History’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 17/1 (1986), pp. 1–6. Rigney, Ann, Imperfect Histories. The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2001). ——, The Rhetoric of Historical Representation. Three Narrative Histories of the French Revo- lution (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990). Tilmans, Karin, Frank van Vree & Jay Winter (eds.), Performing the Past. Memory, History and Identity in Modern Europe (Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2010). White, Hayden, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Bal- timore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). Wintle, Michael, The Image of Europe. Visualizing Europe in Cartography and Iconography throughout the Ages (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009).

CHAPTER ONE

FROM WATERLOO FIELD TO BRUGES-LA-MORTE. HISTORICAL IMAGINATION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Niek van Sas

The nineteenth century is by general agreement the Age of History. Its culture was a historical culture, transcending history proper or professional history, as it slowly came into being. History permeated literature and the arts, and was at the heart of that very nineteenth-century creation: the nation state. In a phrase, the nineteenth century was History Unlimited. In the first half of the century an almost symbiotic relationship existed between Romanticism and historical culture, which has received much attention over the past decades, particularly, as it happens, in that country which is perhaps exemplary of the age: Belgium.1 This new creation of 1830—an accident of international politics—proved to be the most romantic nation state of all, exuberantly flaunting its birthright with all available means, not least historical and cultural. The pivotal role of the nation in historical culture has been a focus of attention for many years now, including how history writing was a way of writing the nation.2 The historical narrative as such had already been under close scrutiny since the publication in 1973 of Hayden White’s Metahistory, subtitled The His- torical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe.3 In England the Whig

1 This approach is epitomized in R. Hoozee, J. Tollebeek and T. Verschaffel (eds.), Mise- en-scène. Keizer Karel en de verbeelding van de negentiende eeuw (Antwerp, Mercatorfonds, 1999). Cf. J. Tollebeek, F. Ankersmit and W. Krul (eds.), Romantiek en historische cultuur (Groningen, Historische Uitgeverij, 1996); S. Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York, Twayne, 1995); P. Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present. Modern Time and the Mel- ancholy of History (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2004). 2 Cf. C. Conrad and S. Conrad (eds.), Die Nation schreiben. Geschichtswissenschaft im internationalen Vergleich (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002); S. Berger, M. Dono- van and K. Passmore (eds.), Writing National Histories. Western Europe since 1800 (London, Routledge, 1999). See also the Writing the Nation Series which is presently being published as the outcome of the European Science Foundation programme ‘Representations of the Past. The Writing of National Histories in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe’. 3 H. White, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 20 niek van sas interpretation of history was given a new lease of life in historiography,4 to be compared with the national narratives of well-established romantic nations such as Germany and—somewhat surprisingly rediscovered in that capacity—France.5 In this essay I will not attempt to give an overview or a detailed comparison of the impact and manifestations of historical imagination in the three countries to be dealt with: Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium. By merely adding to these equations the ‘master narratives’ of Holland and Belgium, I would run the risk of doing a mere blanks exercise, or even producing routine history in Kuhnian terms: filling in the gaps of a story that is already well-rehearsed, especially where France and Germany are concerned. Instead I will present three case studies examining three texts, all dealing with nineteenth-century historical imagination. Their authors— my expert witnesses—are best known as writers of fiction. Scrutinizing their work with the eye of the professional historian I will be visiting the border territory between history and fiction which has become quite popular recently. I will not limit myself to the first half of the century, the heyday of Romanticism, but go well beyond that. My case-studies date from 1816, 1854 and 1892 respectively, their authors coming from Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Walter Scott My first witness is Sir Walter Scott. Two months after the Battle of Water- loo on 18 June 1815 Scott visited the battefield, ‘this celebrated scene of the greatest event of modern times’, as he aptly called it. At 44 years of

4 P.B.M. Blaas, Continuity and Anachronism. Parliamentary and Constitutional Develop- ment in Whig Historiography and in the Anti-Whig Reaction between 1890 and 1930 (The Hague, Nijhoff, 1978); J.W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent. Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981). In the wake of Hayden White these studies in intellectual history have been criticized for failing to historicize the historians themselves and their poetics: J. Vernon, ‘Narrating the Constitution: the Discourse of ‘the Real’ and the Fantasies of Nineteenth-Century Constitutional History’, in J. Vernon (ed.), Re-reading the Constitution. New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nine- teenth Century (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 207–8: ‘Despite the subtlety of Burrow, his work often typifies that peculiarly English (or Cambridge) version of the history of ideas, with its concern for tracing the development of intellectual continuities and coherence, approaching the work of Macaulay, Stubbs and Maitland as reflections of wider intellectual and social contexts. Such an approach [. . .] remains trapped within the essentialist prison-house of the English historiographical tradition. Instead of historicising that tradition, it invariably reproduces its realist tropes and categories.’ 5 J. Tollebeek, De illusionisten. Geschiedenis en cultuur in de Franse Romantiek (Leuven, Universitaire Pers Leuven, 2000). from waterloo field to bruges-la-morte 21 age this was his first trip abroad. He recounted his experiences during this journey to the Netherlands and France in Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk (1816).6 These were apparently only slightly reworked versions of real letters home, written at the time when Scott turned to writing prose instead of poetry. They can therefore also be seen as an exercise in the art of prose- writing. By changing his own persona into a bachelor and addressing his letters to different persons, he was able—as a fiction writer would—to introduce some variation in style and subject matter.7 However, despite the fictional gloss, Paul’s Letters give the overall impression of a truthful report of a real journey. Arriving on the scene a few weeks after the event Paul could already introduce into his story some reflection, mixing as it were the reporter’s straightforward narrative with observations of a more historical kind, standing back a little in the pursuit of historical judgement. Indeed, as he explicitly writes to his sister Margaret, he will not repeat all details of the battle which she has already been able to read in the newspapers. Upon landing in Flanders Paul is overcome by strange emotions. The Flemish constantly remind him of the Scots but they seem at least a century behind in costume and in manners. Everywhere he is struck by this ‘appearance of antiquity’,8 displaying a romantic sensibility to difference and otherness. His first letters home (addressed to his military cousin the Major) contain a detailed account of the run-up to the battles of Quatre- Bras and Waterloo and of the battle itself, based on information gathered from others, no doubt including published sources. It is intertwined, however, with personal observations, lending authenticity and liveliness to the story. For instance he notices the emphatic inscriptions Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité on guns left on the battlefield, and the names of Voltaire, Rous- seau and ‘other writers of deistical eminence’.9 While recounting this, Paul subtly associates the twin wonders of Enlightenment and Revolution with their terrifying outcome at Waterloo. The pièce de résistance of the series is the ninth letter, written to his sister Margaret and containing a detailed description of the actual field

6 [Sir W. Scott], Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk, third ed. (Edinburgh, A. Constable, 1816). The quotation is from the beginning of Letter IX, p. 194. 7 G. Dekker, The Fictions of Romantic Tourism. Radcliffe, Scott and Mary Shelley (Stan- ford, Ca., Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 188. 8 Ibid., pp. 8–9. 9 Ibid., p. 76. 22 niek van sas of Waterloo.10 In writing this account Scott is combining various roles: the eye-witness, the more objective reporter, the travel writer and indeed the historian.11 It is taking it perhaps too far to see him here chiefly as a tourist writer, as has been suggested,12 though Waterloo instantly became the world’s prime tourist attraction, the locus classicus of disaster tourism. Scott’s account is in fact a very full one, lending itself to all sorts of interpretations, not least in terms of a dialectical interplay of history and memory. As regards memory, there is also an interesting religious ring to his vocabulary and his metaphors, devoid though of real religious feeling. Like Byron in Childe Harold Paul speaks of his visit to the battlefield as a ‘pilgrimage’. The debris on the scene is inevitably dubbed ‘relics’. More notable perhaps is the way he describes Napoleon’s actual progress during the battle, closely following his footsteps, being shown the way by the same John de Coster who had supposedly guided the Emperor himself. Paul speaks in true Calvary mode of the ‘precise stations which had been successively occupied by the fallen monarch on that eventful day’.13 To stand on exactly the same spot where Napoleon ‘beheld his hopes crushed and his power destroyed’ gave him ‘a deep and inexpressible feeling of awe’. He was overcome by the sense of place of a ‘landscape, now soli- tary and peaceful around me’, which had ‘presented so lately a scene of such horrid magnificence’. It was almost beyond comprehension that the man who was now standing beside him ‘had then stood by [the side] of Napoleon and witnessed every change in his countenance, from hope to anxiety, from anxiety to fear and to despair’. ‘To recollect all this oppressed me with sensations which I find it impossible to describe.’ Indeed, Paul can hardly cope with the stark contrast between then and now. ‘The scene seemed to have shifted so rapidly that even while I stood on the very stage where it was exhibited, I felt an inclination to doubt the reality of what had passed.’14

10 Ibid., pp. 202–28. Typically the magazine Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen review- ing the Dutch translation of Paul’s Letters considered Letter IX long-winded and not very important: Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen, 1818, pp. 535–542. 11 On the ‘hybridity’ of Scott’s historical writing A. Rigney, Imperfect Histories. The Elu- sive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2001), ch. 1. 12 Dekker, Fictions of Romantic Tourism, pp. 188–197. 13 Ibid., p. 204. 14 Ibid., pp. 205–6. Note also the theatrical metaphor. from waterloo field to bruges-la-morte 23

Paul is fascinated by the amount of debris he comes across on the battlefield, which he memorably compares to a ‘a common a few days after a great fair’.15 There are not just horse carcases, uniforms and weapons lying about, but also—and clearly of much interest to him—all sorts of paper remnants such as the livrets, the memorandum books of individual French soldiers, containing all particulars of their military career, distinctions received and punishments incurred. But also the recipe for a good soup, as Scott notices with his unerring eye for historical detail. He picks up a livret which had belonged to a Sieur Mallet, of the second batallion of the eighth regiment of the line, who had been in service from 1791 till that terrible 18 June 1815, ‘which day probably closed his account’, Scott wryly notes.16 Though overcome by this intense experience, Paul is still quite capable of adding some down-to-earth remarks, especially when observing the locals. ‘To say truth, the honest Flemings were at first altogether at a loss to comprehend the eagerness and enthusiasm by which the English made their pilgrimages.’ ‘With them a battle fought and won is a battle forgotten, and the peasant resumes his ordinary labours [. . .] with as little interest in recollecting the conflict, as if it had been a thunderstorm which had passed away.’17 He is struck, we might say, by what Reinhart Koselleck has called ‘die Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen’, the ‘contemporane- ity of the non-contemporaneous’. In this case: the modernity of the Eng- lish tourists compared with the traditionalism of the Flemish farmers. Thinking in terms of remembering and forgetting, in Paul’s view the farmers are a little too quick in obliterating the memory of the battle, even as he is standing there. The ‘transitory memorials’ of the battle ‘were in a rapid course of disappearing, for the plough was already at work in several parts of the field’. ‘There is, perhaps, more feeling than wisdom in the wish,’ he sighed, ‘if, for one season at least, the field where, in imagination, the ploughshare was coming in frequent contact with the corpses of the gallant dead, had been suffered to remain fallow. But the corn which must soon wave there will be itself a temporary protection to their humble graves, while it will speedily remove from the face of nature the melancholy traces of the strife of man.’18

15 Ibid., p. 209. 16 Ibid., p. 208. 17 Ibid., p. 203. 18 Ibid., pp. 209–210. My italics. 24 niek van sas

Souvenir hunting was the order of the day. Bricks were taken from the farmhouse La Belle Alliance and even a whole door, making Paul wonder what use could possibly be made of that. He saw more sense in the gathering of peaches, hazel-nuts and filberts by the English, ‘with the pious purpose of planting, when they returned to England, trees, which might remind them and their posterity of this remarkable spot.’19 Paul’s Letters have obviously been a source for Scott’s biography, but recently they have attracted critical attention in their own right as a rich, multi-layered text. George Dekker has looked at the book from the point of view of romantic tourism, seeing it as a high-grade travelogue, albeit ‘amounting at times to sheer jingoism’.20 Yoon Sun Lee has given it a central place in her complex interpretation of the immediate postwar atmosphere during which Scott, in her view, was trying to carry over the unifying spirit of wartime patriotism to the much laxer conditions of peace.21 She rightly stresses the quintessential modernity of Scott’s world view (though himself a political conservative), judging from the way he looks at Waterloo with a commercial eye: the battlefield as a marketplace, relics being traded as commercial commodities and the locals making money out of their experiences, prompted also by Paul himself.22 Scott, almost as a matter of course, brings to bear upon his description of the field of Waterloo the values of modern commercial society which he, as a child of the Scottish Enlightenment, has grown up with.23 In this instance, I shall analyse Paul’s Letters perhaps slightly more straightforwardly, as a conscious interplay of history and memory. Paul’s account of the battle, based on hearsay and secondary sources and seen with the eye of the historian, is invested with highly personal impres- sions of the battlefield, couched in terms of memory and remembrance. Apparently it is this detailed, ‘thick’ description of the battlefield which prompts Yoon Sun Lee to see Scott as a typical antiquarian, though this interpretation seems also influenced by her reading of The Antiquary, the novel Scott was to write after completing Paul’s Letters.24 However, Paul’s supposedly antiquarian pursuits on the battlefield are not in the true antiquarian spirit in the sense of lacking purpose or method. They are in fact

19 Ibid., p. 213. 20 Ibid., p. 189. 21 Y.S. Lee, Nationalism and Irony. Burke, Scott, Carlyle (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004), ch. 3. 22 Cf. Lee, Nationalism and Irony, p. 86. 23 Ibid., p. 88. 24 Ibid., pp. 90–104. from waterloo field to bruges-la-morte 25 closely linked to the history of the battle he has just been writing about, and to the sublimity—the overawing importance—of the event the world has just witnessed. Scott is trying to re-enact this for himself, using his powerful historical imagination and gathering illustrative detail, not at random as an antiquary would, but selecting it with a purpose and even with a vengeance. Scott may well be looking forward in time and trying to visualize the transition from war to peace. But rather more important is his looking backward, trying to come to terms with the enormity of recent events, the trauma of war and revolution, which had only just ended with that horrifying and still hardly comprehensible carnage at Waterloo. Though this provided a sense of finality to a quarter of a century of bloodshed, the world was still in shock.25 In dealing with this Scott is acting as a true historian in one of his most challenging guises: putting the most recent events in what is already a ‘historical’ perspective.26 Mixing this with his personal observations of the battlefield, recounted moreover in a letter from Paul to his sister Margaret and thus lending them all the intimacy of a brother/sister relationship, Scott exploits to the full the interplay between objective history and subjective memory. Walter Scott duly went on to become the godfather of romantic historical imagination, influencing not just historical novelists everywhere and creating a veritable Scottomanie, but also inspiring ‘proper’ historians, such as Barante, Thierry and Macaulay.27 The importance of Paul’s Letters, immediately preceding the sequence of Waverley novels which made Scott famous, is perhaps that he is seen experimenting with writing proper history, in a manner moreover which we—due to our present memory boom—can perhaps appreciate better than earlier generations of historians. Scott in this instance is not a typical provider of authentic detail, beat- ing historians at their own game or rather suggesting a different game on another playing-field. He is mixing history and memory, trying to cope with the most traumatic event of the era, indeed a deep rift in the very experience of time. Neither is he simply letting the past speak for itself

25 In that sense Paul’s Letters is another case fitting the framework of Peter Fritzsche’s Stranded in the Present. 26 Cf. the reflections from 1847 of the young Dutch author Gerrit de Clercq on ‘simultaneous history writing’: N.C.F. van Sas, ‘Grote verhalen en kleine lettertjes. 1830 in de Nederlandse geschiedschrijving’, in P. Rietbergen and T. Verschaffel (eds.), De erfenis van 1830 (Leuven, Acco, 2006), pp. 53–56. 27 Cf. Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History, ch. 3; Tollebeek, De illusionisten, ch. 3. 26 niek van sas

(as he was often to do in his historical novels) but providing analysis and passing judgement. During the Scottomanie of the 1820s one spoke of the ‘chiastic’ relationship between Walter Scott and a historian such as Barante.28 In Paul’s Letters this chiasm can even be detected in Scott’s own bosom, as we see him mixing the narrative technique and imagination of the novelist with more straightforward historical analysis. Though this may sound somewhat schizophrenic, he was trying to strike a creative balance between various impulses—history, memory, imagination, narrative technique. Paul’s Letters may therefore be seen as an important stage in the learning process of Scott’s which made him such a consummate writer of historical novels and an inspiration to all practitioners of romantic history writing.

Jacob van Lennep Genuine Scottomanie hit the Netherlands only in the 1830s.29 Jacob van Lennep was hailed as the Dutch Walter Scott with the publication of De Roos van Dekama (1836), a historical novel set in fourteenth-century Fries land. This book, interlacing a real expedition against the Frisians with an imagined love story and brimming with authentic detail, was almost universally acclaimed. There was just one exception: the young, brazen historian Reinier Bakhuizen van den Brink. Bakhuizen turned his review in De Gids into a set of guidelines for writing historical novels. In his opinion Van Lennep had erred in his choice of subject matter by publishing a novel about the Middle Ages, a period irrelevant for Dutch history and also for the present. A historical novel should be truly national, according to Bakhuizen. Only then could the patriotism of the writer foster the patriotism of the reader, showing the ‘character of the nation’ to its best advantage. English and French historical novelists had taken this lesson to heart as Bakhuizen’s examples showed. By focusing on the chivalrous Count William IV, Van Lennep had not, for chivalry was not quite what Dutch history was about. Walter Scott, that unalloyed Scottish Jacobite, could be forgiven his chivalric pride. ‘But though our fatherland has known its chivalric times, it has lost all memories of them: and the Sea Beggar on the Zuyderzee, the explorer of the oceans and the burgher statesman, who

28 Tollebeek, De illusionisten, p. 93. 29 Cf. J.R. van der Wiel, De geschiedenis in balkostuum. De historische roman in de Nederlandse literaire kritiek (1808–1874) (Leuven, Garant, 1999). from waterloo field to bruges-la-morte 27 decides over peace or war in all Europe, will attract more national interest than the most perfect knight or the most glittering tournament.’30 Twenty years later Van Lennep erred again and rather more spectacu- larly, exposing himself once more to the criticism of writing unpatrioti- cally. In 1854 he published a series of ‘Tableaux from the history of the Fatherland for the benefit of old and young’ (Figure 1.1).31 It was a curious construction, consisting of a run of thirty-seven caricatures, accompanied by short doggerel rhymes. It started as a family joke: the main series of rhymes was by Van Lennep himself, the distinctive caricatures were drawn by his brother-in-law Pieter van Loon, whilst others had added some doggerel of their own. The only name on the cover was that of Van Lennep himself, who thus lent the venture his considerable literary prestige. In the preface he set out the reasons for publication: images were much more powerful than words, especially when depicting either something horrible or something funny. He wanted to teach history by enter- taining and to put the Dutch past in an unfamiliar perspective. The effect, however, was not quite what he had expected. At first everyone seemed enthusiastic and the book sold very well, but then there was a backlash and Van Lennep and his collaborators were heavily criticized, so much so that Van Lennep felt compelled to issue a substantial apology. It is now almost impossible to look at these caricatures without bias, without the knowledge of the subsequent furore. It is also quite difficult to make sense of the series as such, for it is a rather disjointed selection of historical events, arranged in chronological order. On closer inspection a pattern nonetheless emerges, and this is perhaps also what happened to the readers, after their initial positive response. Incidentally the Middle Ages once again dominate the book, it being the first part of a planned series of three. The image presented of the Middle Ages is one of unending mur- der and mayhem. Counts and gentlemen are continuously at each other’s throats. In Plate VI (Figure 1.2) Count Dirk IV is killed in Dordrecht by several arrows, one in a delicate place (1049). In Plate VII (Figure 1.3) Floris I is murdered in his bed (1061). In Plate VIII (Figure 1.4) Bishop Coenraad of Zwaben is skewered ‘as an eel on the spit’ by his own architect (1099). In Plate X (Figure 1.5) William II, the Emperor-elect, is killed by the Frisians after his coronation in Aix-la-Chapelle (1256) (more typically French than

30 Uit de werkplaats van R.C. Bakhuizen van den Brink (Amsterdam, Elsevier, 1951), p. 40. 31 Mr. J. van Lennep & Compagnie, Tafereelen uit de geschiedenis des vaderlands tot nut van groot en klein (Amsterdam, 1854). 28 niek van sas

Figure 1.1. J. van Lennep & Compagnie, Tafereelen uit de geschiedenis des vaderlands tot nut van groot en klein (Amsterdam, 1854), title page.

Figure 1.2. Van Lennep, Tafereelen, plate VI.

Figure 1.3. Van Lennep, Tafereelen, plate VII. from waterloo field to bruges-la-morte 29

Figure 1.4. Van Lennep, Tafereelen, plate VIII.

Figure 1.5. Van Lennep, Tafereelen, plate X.

Frisian behaviour, the caption cheekily suggests). Plate XII (Figure 1.6) sees Count Floris V, the ‘God of the yokels’, famously killed by his noble- men ‘as you would decapitate a haddock’ (1296). (His death also made it to the recent, government-inspired Canon of Dutch history, with a semi- official version illustrated by the renowned ‘Fokke & Sukke’ cartoonists.) The overall impression of the fourteenth century is again one of incessant strife and conflict, such as the dynastic quarrel between William IV and his mother, erupting into the well-known Hoekse and Kabeljauwse (Hook and Cod) struggles in Holland (Plate XV, Figure 1.7). Guelders meanwhile was torn apart by the feud between Heeckerens and Bronkhorsten (Plate XVI, Figure 1.8), and Friesland by the discord between Schieringers and Vetko pers (Plate XVII, Figure 1.9). Here even Van Lennep gives up explaining. The names of the parties are now as incomprehensible as the cause of their quarrels, which is—he suggests—probably to be found with the two female waffle bakers standing to one side. 30 niek van sas

Figure 1.6. Van Lennep, Tafereelen, plate XII.

Figure 1.7. Van Lennep, Tafereelen, plate XV.

Figure 1.8. Van Lennep, Tafereelen, plate XVI. from waterloo field to bruges-la-morte 31

Figure 1.9. Van Lennep, Tafereelen, plate XVII.

Figure 1.10. Van Lennep, Tafereelen, plate IX.

As many of these quarrels were dynastically motivated there is a strong hint of a family romance, which is given due emphasis by Van Lennep. Mothers are at odds with their sons, brothers are after each other’s blood, fathers are put in prison by their undeserving sons. The weaker sex is habitually taken advantage of by unscrupulous male relatives, as when the unfortunate Countess Ada is banished to the Isle of Texel by her uncle William (1201), who declares, ‘You do the spinning, I do the fighting, everyone his trade!’ (Plate IX, Figure 1.10). The accompanying doggerel contains some decidedly piscine metaphors, referring perhaps to the fishy nature of Dutch national character. Sometimes the presentation is teasingly anachronistic, as when comments are added by La Fontaine or even Talleyrand, or when some authentic 32 niek van sas

historical detail is purposely left out because it would have made the picture less ‘Romantic’! Van Lennep was baffled by the furore the album caused.32 The otherwise obscure Groningen Professor W. Hecker published a clumsy ‘punitive poem’, as he called it, in which he castigated Van Lennep for lowering Dutch history to a gallery of caricatures, committing sacrilege, courting base popularity and damaging the honour of both Fatherland and history by reducing them to the buffoonery of a funfair, a kermis.33 This wave of criticism prompted Van Lennep to write a substantial (though, to his credit, not grovelling) apology, carefully worded as befit- ted the lawyer he was in daily life. Convincingly he denied any evil intent. Indeed, he could hardly make out what had angered his critics most: the caricatures or the attendant verse. He even wondered whether his accusers had seen the irony of it all, however difficult this might seem to overlook.34 Perhaps he had used the wrong type of irony, belonging to an enlightened rather than a romantic age. As to the plates, they were rightly said to be inspired by the crude, wooden shapes of harlequins, puppets played at the kermis. In Van Len- nep’s own view they created a powerful, just and truthful image. With hindsight they certainly were unusual and original, an inspired invention perhaps of the amateur artist Van Loon. The stylized forms of the puppets prefigure by half a century the work of Menso Kamerlingh Onnes and Bart van der Leck. But the contemporary angry onlooker was merely reminded of the theatricals of the funfair, seeing twenty centuries of national glory reduced to the world-turned-upside-down of the kermis. Van Lennep vehemently denied any intention to ridicule the ancestors, though he admitted it had never been his wish to idolize them. But he thoroughly accepted that he had not taken Fatherland history seriously enough, and he announced that the two planned sequels would not be published. This is a pity, because they would presumably have dealt with Dutch history from the Revolt onwards—the truly heroic phase in Bakhuizen’s view—

32 M.F. van Lennep, Het leven van Mr Jacob van Lennep, second ed., 2 vols. (Amsterdam, Van Kampen, 1910), vol. II, pp. 84–97. Cf. also L. Jensen, De verheerlijking van het verleden. Helden, literatuur en natievorming in de negentiende eeuw (Nijmegen, Vantilt, 2008), pp. 104–5. Van Lennep was not alone at this time in poking fun at national history: see Daumier’s cartoon of 1852 (reproduced below, Figure 10.1), ridiculing the public’s response to the patriotic history painting of the Belgian artist, Louis Gallait. 33 W. Hecker, Strafdicht aan Mr. J. van Lennep, second ed. (Groningen, 1854). 34 J. van Lennep, Verantwoording over de uitgave der ‘Tafereelen uit de geschiedenis des vaderlands’ (Amsterdam, 1854). from waterloo field to bruges-la-morte 33 and might even have included the recent Patriot and Batavian Revolts, a period of history which in Van Lennep’s time was generally enveloped in silence. Van Lennep atoned for his sins by publishing in 1856 an altogether conventional (even canonical) series of pictures taken from the history of the Fatherland, again with accompanying verse.35 But it is thought that the publication of the Tableaux was partly responsible for his not being re-elected as Member of Parliament in 1856. Building upon Van Lennep’s apology, let us examine the furore of 1854 a little further. In the Tableaux he presents a loose, disjointed sequence of Dutch history, paradoxically only understandable to those already pos- sessing a working knowledge of it, despite the book’s professed educational purpose. On no account can it be seen as the success story of a Fatherland in the making; on the contrary, it was treating history as an extended joke. This is probably what offended his readership most: going against the grain of historical imagination in the national mode. More specifically, in the Netherlands of the nineteenth century this master narrative (whether in serious history, popular history, or historical fiction) was generally following a narrative scheme of remembering and forgetting, in which historical conflicts were analysed with their final reconciliation already in mind. More often than not this was also some sort of national reconciliation.36 This was the prevailing national self-image, after many centuries of internecine conflict: the medieval Hoekse and Kabeljauwse struggles, Orangists vs. the States Party during the Republic, and—most recently—the struggle between Patriots and Orangists, which had nearly caused the extinction of the Fatherland. By contrast the Tableaux presented one conflict after another, without any palpable sense, without any coming together and with no edi- fying lessons. In publishing these Tableaux Van Lennep may have been caught off-guard, betraying more of himself than he intended, as can be inferred from his protesting-too-much apology. In what has been dubbed the ‘masked’ nineteenth century (in which things are seldom what they seem, and often have a dark downside),37 Jacob van Lennep, that pillar of the establishment, Land’s Advocate, Member of Parliament, is at the same

35 J. van Lennep, De geschiedenis des vaderlands in schetsen en afbeeldingen (Amster- dam, 1856). 36 Cf. N.C.F. van Sas, De metamorfose van Nederland. Van oude orde naar moderniteit, 1750–1900 (Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2004), pp. 526–31. 37 M. Mathijsen, De gemaskerde eeuw (Amsterdam, Querido, 2002). 34 niek van sas time a closet upper-class rake, cherishing (for his class only) some of the vices of the eighteenth century and loving a joke.38 On the other hand the Tableaux is also distinctly modern. Allusion has been made to the unusual way the caricatures are drawn. But the series is also innovative in the sense that it is an attempt at serial imagination of national history, of which the second half of the nineteenth century was to see many examples and variations. Either in the form of a long series of illustrations accompanying a written narrative, or—more interestingly perhaps—as a stand-alone sequence of images, such as the historical picture gallery commissioned by the Amsterdam merchant Jacob de Vos39 or indeed Van Lennep’s new series of 1856. Van Lennep in 1854—the novelist playing at caricatures—was an inad- vertent debunker of the nation, almost presenting an anti-history of it. By going against the grain, caricatures have the interpretative potential of actually highlighting the characteristics of mainstream thinking. Van Lennep unwittingly went against the norm of national history with regard to conciliation. He reverted to the antics of the narrowest histoire bataille and blatant dynasticism, which had supposedly been superseded since the French Revolution. When presenting history in images the salient moments need to be chosen with care, for such is the point of history painting altogether. Van Lennep failed dismally in this respect. In his Tableaux of 1854, not only were most of the choices unfortunate, but the underlying principle of selection was also at fault. At first sight one might suppose he had just turned the prevailing mode of conciliation upside-down, as any good caricaturist might, but that would be giving him too much credit. Van Lennep in fact signally and serially misjudged the national mood. His view was also decidedly unromantic, even considering the Netherlands’ reputation as a proverbially unromantic country. In the age of romantic historical imagination all nation states were framing and polishing their national master narratives. This was a broad transnational trend in which similar rhetorical strategies in fact helped to highlight national differences. In England Macaulay canonized the Whig interpretation of history, wanting ‘to make the past present’.40 In

38 For Van Lennep’s chameleonic and contradictory personality, see M. Mathijsen, Het uitwendige schrijverschap. Jacob van Lennep als publieke figuur (Amsterdam, Februari Boekhandels, 2011). 39 D. Carasso (ed.), Helden van het vaderland. Onze geschiedenis in 19de-eeuwse taferelen verbeeld (Amsterdam, Amsterdam Historical Museum, 1991). On De Vos’s gallery, see also below, Chapter 10. 40 P. Mandler, History and National Life (London, Profile Books, 2002), p. 34. from waterloo field to bruges-la-morte 35 the Netherlands for similar reasons, the Golden seventeenth century became the touchstone of national pride (just as Bakhuizen had wished), but this was crucially linked with the imperative of conciliation for the present. In Belgium history writing in the national mode was a new pastime, for the nation had only recently become an independent actor on the international scene. This stimulated the trope of writing Belgian history in terms of twenty centuries of occupation—the Dutch being merely the last of a long sequence starting with Caesar;41 quite understandably the Belgians had to do some historical catching-up. In the process they tended to overemphasize their heroism in the past, and to gloss over their not particularly heroic ‘struggle’ for national independence in 1830–1831. The so-called glorious September Days of 1830 were in fact a messy urban guerilla struggle, as the Dutch had been quick to point out. When it came to regular field battle in the Ten Day Campaign of 1831, the Belgians were decisively beaten by the Dutch army, which only withdrew (by mutual understanding) when a large French army crossed the Belgian border, allowing the Dutch to retreat with honour.42 These different self-images produced a sharp contrast between romantic history writing in Belgium and the Netherlands. The Dutch, feeling historically secure with a national past of undoubted greatness, could convincingly preach conciliation in the present. The Belgians, who initially were not even certain about the sustainability of their independence, were more or less compelled to shore up their self-confidence by exaggerating past heroism.

Georges Rodenbach Perhaps the final text is the most surprising one, not because it is unfamiliar, but rather the contrary. It comes from Belgium: Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte, a short novel, novella or perhaps prose-poem of 1892. Bruges- la-Morte is perhaps the most over-worked lieu-de-mémoire of Belgian (or Flemish) history, with the city and the book almost converging. However, we shall not be dealing with that topographical, even tourist Flemish discourse, focussing on the city itself.43 For there is another exciting and sophisticated discourse on Bruges-la-Morte emerging in recent French

41 Cf. J. Tollebeek, ‘Historical Representation and the Nation-State in Romantic Bel- gium (1830–1850)’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 59 (1998), pp. 329–353. 42 N. van Sas, ‘1830 en de Tiendaagse Veldtocht’, in J. Tollebeek and H. te Velde (eds.), Het geheugen van de Lage Landen (Rekkem, Ons Erfdeel, 2009), pp. 147–153. 43 This is the subject of H. Vandevoorde, ‘Brugge: de binnenstad. Van Bruges-la-Morte tot Bruges-le-Cadavre’, in J. Tollebeek et al. (eds.), België. Een parcours van herinnering, 36 niek van sas studies, the duality being perhaps symptomatic of the present fragmented state of Belgium. The past few decades have seen a notable revival of Bruges-la-Morte as a literary classic, the epitome of Franco-Flemish literature and a model of fin-de-siècle symbolism. There have been any number of critical appreciations,44 to which I will add a few remarks of my own, reading as a historian always and using it as a source for the régime d’historicité45 of the fin de siècle. Bruges-la-Morte—like Paul’s Letters—is a rich, multi-layered text, open to many interpretations. Bruges-la-Morte was first published as a newspaper serial, appearing between 4 and 14 February 1892 in the Paris Figaro.46 The city itself is the main character, as Rodenbach is quick to point out in his preface. Its âme—a vogue word of the time—is brilliantly evoked during the long crepuscular walks of the chief character, Hugues Viane, who came to live in Bruges after his wife had died, finding for instance the ‘caractère mortuaire’ of its Notre-Dame perfectly suited to his own mood. He is overcome by ‘la tristesse tombale du lieu’: ‘Bruges où tous les jours ont l’air de la Toussaint!’47 Hugues strolls along the medieval streets and the quays lining the canals, his thoughts punctuated by the endless ringing of church bells, used to similar effect as subsequently by Johan Huizinga in the opening pages of The Waning of the Middle Ages. This is, of course, the Bruges-la-Morte we know so well and which irritated the Bruges authorities (as a smear on the city’s image) so much that after Rodenbach’s death they refused to erect a statue for him in 1899. Notoriously in his book Rodenbach—the Brugeois gentilhomme, as the aesthete Robert de Montesquiou called him—makes no reference whatever to the Flemish speaking people of Bruges. There is precisely one word of Dutch in the whole book: the admittedly wonderful Minnewater, the

2 vols. (Amsterdam, B. Bakker, 2008), vol. II, pp. 364–377. Cf. F. Bonneure, M. van Houtryve, K. Puype, Het stille Brugge. 100 jaar Bruges-la-Morte (Brugge, Stichting Kunstboek, 1992). 44 Cf. P. Gorceix, Georges Rodenbach (1855–1898) (Paris, Champion, 2006); C. de Grève, Georges Rodenbach (Bruxelles, Labor, 1987); P. Gorceix, Réalités flamandes et symbolisme fantastique. Bruges-la-Morte et Le Carillonneur de Georges Rodenbach (Paris, Lettres Mod- ernes, 1992); J.-P. Bertrand (ed.), Le monde de Rodenbach (Bruxelles, Labor, 1999); P. Mosley (ed.), Georges Rodenbach. Critical Essays (Madison, NJ, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996). 45 Cf. F. Hartog, Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expérience du temps (Paris, Seuil, 2003). 46 I have consulted an early edition, the ‘huitième mille’ (223 pp.; Paris, Ernest Flam- marion, n.d.), containing the 35 photographs in similigravure, but not the Fernand Khnopff frontispice of the first edition, published by Marpon & Flammarion. For the significance of these photographs, see P. Edwards, ‘The Photograph in Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la- Morte (1892)’, Journal of European Studies, 30 (2000), pp. 71–89. 47 Quotations chs. II, p. 22; XI, p. 152; VI, p. 79. from waterloo field to bruges-la-morte 37 elegiac lake where swans are forever floating. But linguistics apart the âme of Flanders is all-pervasive. In a peculiar way it is also present in the person of the old, illiterate female servant Barbe, who embodies all that is Flemish in the local populace, their time-honoured qualities, and their catholicity (apart from the tension between imported Spanish severity and a more easy-going native flexibility). Barbe’s virtues are linked to the timeless values of the peasant village where Barbe was born and raised. The narrator—Rodenbach—exudes respect for La Flandre profonde which she manifestly represents. Close to the dénouement of the book there is an explication between servant and master in which Barbe for a fleeting moment sees herself as the mother of her tragically fallen (though still beloved) master. But Bruges-la-Morte is not just the evocation of a city, it is also a novel of suspense, reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe. When not walking the streets, Hugues Viane venerates his late wife in a veritable death-cult, with a sequence of photographs of her at various ages serving as stations of the cross (his words), culminating in a glass reliquary shrine containing tresses of her hair. Then, one evening in the street, Hugues comes across a perfect likeness of his deceased wife. She appears to be a danseuse in the theatre called Jane Scott, and Hugues—in typical nineteenth-century bourgeois fashion—sets her up as his mistress in a house on the outskirts of town, recalling Collingwood’s definition of historical imagination as re-enactment of the past. Hugues’ thoughts constantly dwell upon the relationship between past and present, between the dead city and himself, and particularly between his late wife and her living presence as his mistress. His ruminations on the theme of remembering and forgetting, of mémoire and oubli, have gained new relevance in our present memory boom with the accompanying theoretical reflection. Thinking about time, Hugues attempts to suppress the distance—and the distinction—between past and present, to do away with time in fact, and so with history altogether. His re-enactment of the past reveals itself as a tract against time, and proves to be profoundly anti- historical. It is from this perspective that it will be considered here, com- menting as it does on the contemporary sense of time and on the régime d’historicité of the fin de siècle, which brought the Age of History to an end. When Hugues wants to dress up his mistress in some old, carefully preserved robes of his late wife, his playing with time starts falling apart.48

48 Cf. R. Ziegler, ‘Resurrected Time in Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte’, Studi Francesi, 97 (1989), pp. 97–102. 38 niek van sas

It is Barbe who reminds him of it, recounting an old Flemish legend that either you get rid of a dead person’s clothes immediately or you hang on to them forever. Throwing them away later will only keep the deceased in Purgatory. When handed the dresses, Jane mocks Hugues, scathingly pointing out that these clothes are terribly out of fashion, of which she— an incessant shopper—is acutely aware. The concept of fashion itself is almost a metaphor for the passing and transitoriness of time. Hugues now realizes that far from the past and the present conflating, the differences in fact start showing. The resemblance was only superficial. Looking more closely, the dissimilarities stand out. In the dramatic ending of the book, the by now unbearable tension (also between past and present) is resolved when Hugues strangles Jane with the tresses of his late wife’s hair. It has been suggested that a convincing psychological case could be made of Hugues being a hair fetishist. A striking feature of the book is the absence of modernity. There are no cafés, no salons de thé, no restaurants so typical of modern city life.49 There is only the theatre where Jane Scott works as a danseuse. But then it is precisely Jane herself who represents modernity, personified as a femme fatale. Jane as a type has been more or less lifted by Rodenbach from the naturalist novel: she is in fact the little sister of Zola’s Nana.50 In that sense too, Bruges-la-Morte is a book about time and of the time; about the dangerous times and the so-called Great Acceleration of the fin de siècle, about its terrifying modernity which can only be confronted by creating a stark contrast. In negative terms Bruges-la-Morte is also a book about Paris or Brussels, the avatars of modernity. Playing with life and death, with mémoire and oubli, Rodenbach is probing and questioning the very notion of time itself. He avails himself as a superior handler of time. Removing the distinction between past and present, he makes the past present and the present past. This frightening meta-historical juggling act accounts for the suspense of the novel. The dramatic crisis—the parox- ysm as Rodenbach himself calls it—at the end of the book is the crisis of history. In the fin de siècle—in the eyes of the likes of Rodenbach—there is no room for historical imagination any more. Imagination has finally killed off history.

49 De Grève, Rodenbach, 63. 50 P. Aron, ‘Jane, entre Nana et Nini’, in Bertrand (ed.), Le monde de Rodenbach, pp. 171–175. from waterloo field to bruges-la-morte 39

Border-crossing We have looked at nineteenth-century historical imagination with the help of three expert witnesses: Walter Scott, Jacob van Lennep and Georges Rodenbach. Walter Scott through his historical novels was a major inspiration for romantic historical imagination in the first half of the century. But he was also writing history proper, experimenting with the dialectics between history and memory. Jacob van Lennep in that strange series of caricatures (drawn by Pieter van Loon) demonstrated in spite of himself that the image can be a valuable historical source in its own right. My reading of Georges Rodenbach may seem somewhat more problematical. For this symbolist writer was certainly not using his powerful imagination with a historical purpose. Indeed, as I have suggested, he tried to do away with history altogether. It is no accident that I have hardly discussed history proper or professional history, but concentrated instead on writers of fiction. In my view there are still great opportunities for ‘proper historians’ to make more, better and more creative use of the imagination—historical and otherwise—of writers of fiction, including even the likes of Rodenbach. Their creative imagination is still much underused in interpreting, representing or re-enacting the past. The literature of some periods is better suited to this purpose than that of others, and it particularly applies to times when the memory imperative (as it has been called, inevitably in Germany) was playing up. The nineteenth-century fin de siècle of Rodenbach and many other writers is one such period, even in countries like the Netherlands where the fin-de-siècle experience was quite different, not doom-laden but rather forward-looking. Another such period where fiction can be an important (and sometimes unique) historical source are the years immediately following World War II. In the Netherlands the postwar atmosphere of eerie disillusion is nowhere better described than in the fiction of W.F. Hermans, G.K. van het Reve and others. In Germany the historical image of Flucht und Ver- treibung at the end of the War, the mass migration to the West ahead of the Red Army, has been more or less hijacked by the organizations of the Vertriebene with their indelible right-wing bias. But a far more rounded, more personal, indeed more humane picture of these traumatic experiences can be found in a number of novels.51

51 E. Hahn and H.H. Hahn, ‘Flucht und Vertreibung’, in E. François and H. Schulze (eds.), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, 3 vols. (Munich, Beck, 2001), vol. I, pp. 335–351. 40 niek van sas

In his day Walter Scott, through his historical novels, showed the way to broaden history writing. In our present historical culture we are experiencing a memory boom which sometimes challenges history proper, to the dismay of some professionals. Perhaps we should take up the gauntlet and rethink the relationship between history and memory (for now, but also in the past), for instance by using creative fiction as a primary source. For there is nothing like a good boundary dispute to stir up historical imagination.

References

Aron, P., ‘Jane, entre Nana et Nini’, in Bertrand (ed.), Le monde de Rodenbach, pp. 171–175. [Bakhuizen van den Brink, R.C.], Uit de werkplaats van R.C. Bakhuizen van den Brink (Amsterdam, Elsevier, 1951). Bann, S., Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York, Twayne, 1995). Berger, S., M. Donovan and K. Passmore (eds.), Writing National Histories. Western Europe since 1800 (London, Routledge, 1999). Bertrand, J.-P. (ed.), Le monde de Rodenbach (Bruxelles, Labor, 1999). Blaas, P.B.M., Continuity and Anachronism. Parliamentary and Constitutional Development in Whig Historiography and in the Anti-Whig Reaction between 1890 and 1930 (The Hague, Nijhoff, 1978). Burrow, J.W., A Liberal Descent. Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, Cam- bridge University Press, 1981). Carasso, D. (ed.), Helden van het Vaderland. Onze geschiedenis in 19de-eeuwse taferelen verbeeld (Amsterdam, Amsterdam Historical Museum, 1991). Conrad, C. and S. Conrad (eds.), Die Nation schreiben. Geschichtswissenschaft im internationalen Vergleich (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002). Dekker, G., The Fictions of Romantic Tourism. Radcliffe, Scott and Mary Shelley (Stanford, Ca., Stanford University Press, 2005). Edwards, P., ‘The Photograph in George Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte (1892)’, Journal of European Studies, 30 (2000), pp. 71–89. Fritzsche, P., Stranded in the Present. Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cam- bridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2004). Gorceix, P., Georges Rodenbach (1855–1898) (Paris, Champion, 2006). ——, Réalités flamandes et symbolisme fantastique. Bruges-la-Morte et Le Carillonneur de Georges Rodenbach (Paris, Lettres Modernes, 1992). Grève, C. de, Georges Rodenbach (Bruxelles, Labor, 1987). Hahn, E. and H.H. Hahn, ‘Flucht und Vertreibung’, in E. François and H. Schulze (eds.), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, 3 vols. (Munich, Beck, 2001), vol. I, pp. 335–351. Hartog, F., Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expérience du temps (Paris, Seuil, 2003). Hecker, W., Strafdicht aan Mr. J. van Lennep, second ed. (Groningen, 1854). Hoozee, R., J. Tollebeek and T. Verschaffel, (eds.), Mise-en-scène. Keizer Karel en de verbeelding van de negentiende eeuw (Antwerp, Mercatorfonds, 1999). Jensen, L., De verheerlijking van het verleden. Helden, literatuur en natievorming in de negentiende eeuw (Nijmegen, Vantilt, 2008). Lee, Y.S., Nationalism and Irony. Burke, Scott, Carlyle (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004). Lennep, J. van, De geschiedenis des vaderlands in schetsen en afbeeldingen (Amsterdam, 1856). from waterloo field to bruges-la-morte 41

——, Verantwoording over de uitgave der ‘Tafereelen uit de geschiedenis des vaderlands’ (Amsterdam, 1854). Lennep, Mr. J. van & Compagnie, Tafereelen uit de geschiedenis des vaderlands tot nut van groot en klein (Amsterdam, 1854). Lennep, M.F. van, Het leven van Mr. Jacob van Lennep, second ed., 2 vols. (Amsterdam, Van Kampen, 1910). Mandler, P., History and National Life (London, Profile Books, 2002). Mathijsen, M., De gemaskerde eeuw (Amsterdam, Querido, 2002). ——, Het uitwendige schrijverschap. Jacob van Lennep als publieke figuur (Amsterdam, Feb- ruari Boekhandels, 2011). Mosley, P. (ed.), Georges Rodenbach. Critical Essays (Madison, NJ, Farleigh Dickinson Uni- versity Press, 1996). Rigney, A., Imperfect Histories. The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2001). Rodenbach, G., Bruges-la-Morte, huitième mille (Paris, Ernest Flammarion, s.a.). Sas, N. van, ‘1830 en de Tiendaagse Veldtocht’, in J. Tollebeek and H. te Velde (eds.), Het geheugen van de Lage Landen (Rekkem, Ons Erfdeel, 2009), pp. 147–153. Sas, N.C.F. van, De metamorfose van Nederland. Van oude orde naar moderniteit 1750–1900 (Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2004). ——, ‘Grote verhalen en kleine lettertjes. 1830 in de Nederlandse geschiedschrijving’, in P. Rietbergen and T. Verschaffel (eds.), De erfenis van 1830 (Leuven, Acco, 2006), pp. 53–74. [Scott, Sir W.], Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk, third ed. (Edinburgh, A. Constable, 1816). Tollebeek, J., ‘Historical Representation and the Nation-State in Romantic Belgium (1830– 1850)’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 59 (1998), pp. 329–53. ——, De illusionisten. Geschiedenis en cultuur in de Franse Romantiek (Leuven, Universi- taire Pers Leuven, 2000). Tollebeek, J., F. Ankersmit and W. Krul (eds.), Romantiek en historische cultuur (Groningen, Historische Uitgeverij, 1996). Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen, Amsterdam, 1818. Vandevoorde, H., ‘Brugge: de binnenstad. Van Bruges-la-Morte tot Bruges-le-Cadavre’, in J. Tollebeek et al. (eds.), België. Een parcours van herinnering, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, B. Bakker, 2008), vol. II, pp. 364–377. Vernon, J., ‘Narrating the Constitution: the Discourse of ‘the Real’ and the Fantasies of Nineteenth-Century Constitutional History’, in J. Vernon (ed.), Re-reading the Constitu- tion. New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century (Cam- bridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 207–8. White, H., Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Balti- more, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). Wiel, J.R. van der, De geschiedenis in balkostuum. De historische roman in de Nederlandse literaire kritiek (1808–1874) (Leuven, Garant, 1999). Ziegler, R., ‘Resurrected Time in Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte’, Studi Francesi, 97 (1989), pp. 97–102.

part two

THE SCOPE AND LANGUAGE OF NATIONAL HISTORY

CHAPTER TWO

A VERY ENGLISH AFFAIR? DEFINING THE BORDERS OF EMPIRE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH HISTORIOGRAPHY

Andrew Mycock

During the past thirty years or so intense debate has emerged as to the relationship between—and potential confluence of—British national and imperial history and its associated historiography. In response to often impassioned calls to challenge what are seen as outdated national meth- odologies, a generation of ‘new imperial historians’ has sought to extend the boundaries of imperial history and recognize the interconnected and overlapping histories of metropole and periphery.1 Such shifts have also encouraged greater recognition of the extent to which empire influenced metropolitan public consciousness, particularly during the nineteenth century, thus moulding attitudes to imperial patriotism and British national identity.2 These claims have not, however, been accepted universally, and a number of historians contest, often vociferously, the impact of empire on British national culture or identity.3 Key to such criticisms is not that empire was wholly without influence in British society, more that its impact was sporadic, being only prevalent at particular junctures and in particular places, and was not the only causal force in shaping

1 This trend was highlighted in a number of key articles. See, for example, J.G.A. Pocock, ‘The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown Subject’, American Historical Review, 87 (1982), pp. 311–336; S. Marks, ‘History, the Nation and Empire: Snip- ing from the Periphery’, History Workshop Journal, 29 (1990), pp. 111–119; A. Burton, ‘Rules of Thumb: British History and “Imperial Culture” in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Britain’, Women’s History Review, 3 (1994), pp. 483–500. For a review of the emergent ‘new imperial’ historiography, see J. Thompson, ‘Modern Britain and New Imperial History’, His- tory Compass, 5 (2007), pp. 455–462. 2 See, for example, J.M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire. The Manipulation of Brit- ish Public Opinion 1880-1960 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984); A. Thomp- son, Imperial Britain. The Empire in British Politics c. 1880–1932 (Harlow, Longman, 2000). 3 See, amongst others, B. Porter, Absent-minded Imperialists. Empire, Society and Culture (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005); R. Price, ‘One Big Thing: Britain, Its Empire and Their Imperial Culture’, Journal of British Studies, 45 (2006), pp. 602–627. 46 andrew mycock

‘Englishness’ or ‘Britishness’.4 Wilson suggests this debate is strongly influenced by two opposing views of the nation. ‘New imperialists’ would appear to accept the homogeneity of the nation and stability of national identity in their efforts to acknowledge the influence of empire. Empiri- cist scholars (often British) are more critical of such sweeping general- izations, though Wilson notes that their scepticism raises issues about whether it is possible to identify anything coherent about the empire and nation during the nineteenth century.5 Recent studies, though, offer new directions which acknowledge the ‘entanglement’ of histories within and between empires, thus recognizing the layered complexities of imperial interactions.6 Central to such debates has been the contested ‘making’ of the Brit- ish Empire, with scholars raising important questions as to its ideological origins and the extent to which such motivations shifted in response to challenges such as the loss of the American colonies, the settlement of the White Dominions (i.e. Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa), and its rapid expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.7 It is widely accepted that during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, empire, together with Protestantism, almost continual war, and monarchy, was key in forming a national-imperial British identity.8 However, this emergent Britishness is seen to draw on established Eng- lish themes which emphasized the maritime foundations of empire, its commercial ingenuity, and the protection of political and economic free- doms—‘the classically incompatible ideals of liberty and empire’.9 This raises an interesting question as to whether the empire was ‘English’ or ‘British’ in origin; was it predominantly a vehicle for English imperialism

4 See P.J. Marshall, ‘No Fatal Impact? The Elusive History of Imperial Britain’, Times Literary Supplement, 12 March 1993, pp. 8–10; P.J. Marshall, ‘Imperial Britain?’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 23/iii (1995), pp. 374–94. 5 J. Wilson, ‘Metropolitan Savages’, History Workshop Journal, 61 (2006), pp. 287–91 (quotation at p. 288). 6 E.H. Gould, ‘Entangled Atlantic Histories: A Response from the Anglo-American Periphery’. The American Historical Review, 112/5 (2007), pp. 1–9. 7 See D. Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000); P.J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires. Britain, India and America c. 1750–1783 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005). 8 L. Colley, Britons. Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1992). Brantlinger suggests the end-date in Colley’s title implies that, by the start of Queen Victoria’s reign, the thoroughly modern and modernizing, industrializing and imperial- izing nation state of Great Britain had been ‘forged’: P. Brantlinger, ‘Imaging the Nation, Inventing the Empire’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 23 (1995), pp. 329–338. 9 Armitage, Ideological Origins, p. 8. a very english affair? 47 which subjugated national peoples both across the British Isles and further afield or was it a product of multinational collaboration between the Eng- lish, Scots, Welsh and Irish that was mutually-rewarding? Kumar adopts a consensual approach, suggesting the origins of empire were indeed born largely from English self-interest.10 Therefore union with Scotland and latterly Ireland constituted the Anglo-colonization of the Atlantic archipelago to create an inner empire providing security and trade, which were supplemented by the colonizing of the North American east coast and the Caribbean. However, he argues, the expansion of empire, particularly after the loss of the American colonies, was very much a British affair. This would suggest that empire was first English and then British. This ‘untidiness of empire’ is reflected in how it has been understood and explained.11 R.R. Davies suggests the first ‘English Empire’ emerged between 1093 and 1343, founded on the expansion of the English political state to parts of Wales and Ireland, thus encouraging the conflation of England and Britain.12 Hechter sees this English ‘internal colonization’ as an ongoing process across the British Isles only after the formal annexation of Wales in 1536.13 This raises compelling questions as to the national origins of an empire that is typically understood to emanate from the uncoordinated growth of the Tudor English state from the mid-sixteenth century across the British Isles, but which also involved the settlement of the West Indies, North America and the unregulated exploitation of India and other territories. Whether this could be accurately described as a second ‘English Empire’ or the first ‘British Empire’ is a matter of conjecture. Moreover, if we accept that empire before the American Revolution is indeed the ‘first British Empire’, then this raises further questions as to when it gave way to a ‘second British Empire’. The nineteenth-century historiography of the English and/or British Empire(s) reflects these complexities. The orthodox view is that, until the late nineteenth century, most historians overlooked empire in favour of a narrow and often Whiggish focus on English national history, a disjuncture

10 K. Kumar, ‘Nation and Empire: English and British National Identity in Comparative Perspective’, Theory and Society, 29 (2000), pp. 575–608. 11 J. Darwin, ‘Britain’s Empire’, in S. Stockwell (ed.), The British Empire. Themes and Perspectives (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 3. 12 R.R. Davies, The First English Empire. Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093–1343 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002), esp. pp. 202–3. 13 M. Hechter, Internal Colonialism. The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (Berkeley, University of California, 1975). 48 andrew mycock which Armitage describes as ‘peculiarly abrupt and enduring’.14 J.R. Seeley is seen by many as the first to raise the idea that the history of nation and the history of empire are intimately connected. In his The Expansion of England, based on a series of lectures and published in 1883, Seeley famously rejected the dominant focus on English constitutional history, insisting that ‘the history of England is not in England but in America and Asia’.15 He provided a more expansive view of British history that was considered a ‘novel and striking perception’, which ‘awakened’ interest in the study of ‘the expansionist phases’ of English history.16 This noted, Armitage rightly argues that ‘instead of promoting a new imperial synthesis among British historians, Seeley’s work inspired the creation of the new and separate subfield of Imperial history’.17 This chapter seeks to argue that British national and imperial histories were often considered concurrently within key texts. It will explore how empire, nation and state were framed and understood within nineteenth- century British historiography. It will consider the notion of the ‘internal empire’ within the British Isles, examining how England was historically constructed and the extent to which Scotland, Wales and to a lesser extent Ireland were acknowledged as distinct nations. It will then assess how the ‘external empire’ was understood, how the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion were expressed, and the extent to which the empire was considered English or British. The chapter will conclude by arguing that, during the nineteenth century, British national historians (both English and non-English) viewed England as a ‘nation’, a ‘state’ and an ‘empire’, both within the British Isles and across its colonies.

Nation and Empire in the British Imperial State It is broadly accepted that nationalism and national history are, in most modern nation states, a complicated confluence of ethnic and civic dynamics that differ from state to state but which highlight the interrelation and merging of the constructed and the imagined with the organic and the primordial. The intimate relationship between national ideologies and

14 Armitage, Ideological Origins, p. 15. 15 J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England. Two Courses of Lectures (1883; second ed., Lon- don, Macmillan, 1931), p. 10. 16 L. Colley, ‘The difficulties of empire—past, present and future’, Historical Research, 79/205 (2006), pp. 367–382 (quotation at p.375); W.F. Craven, ‘Historical Study of the Brit- ish Empire’, Journal of Modern History, 6 (1934), pp. 40–69. 17 Armitage, Ideological Origins, p. 17. a very english affair? 49 historical narratives, and their institutional or discursive ability to suppress or integrate (and subsume) rival claims, has proved key to modern nation and state-building. Stefan Berger draws attention to the importance of historical myths in legitimating the nation and its attendant national identity, even during the nineteenth century when historians began to adopt more ‘scientific’ methodological approaches to history writing. He suggests that such myths were powerful and critical factors in establishing the origins of the nation, noting that nations professing extended historical lineages were accorded higher standing. However, some modern historians drew attention to re-foundational moments, such as the French Revolution of 1789, when nations were seen to be re-born.18 During the nineteenth century many national historians sought specifically to justify statehood. Here the challenge was often how to tie the national past to the present (or even the future) nation state. This presented particular challenges to national historians who sought to legitimate the British state and empire, the origins of which were interconnected and overlapping but both lay in England. Kumar notes that ‘the English were an imperial nation in a double sense’, whose history was both national and imperial but who crucially saw both as suitable to cele brate their political and ethno-cultural values and institutions.19 There- fore the historical origins of statehood lay in the simultaneous expansion of an ‘internal’ empire, founded on an English state but projected within a broader British multinational framework , and an ‘external’ empire, tied to the settlement of some acquired territories but strongly shaped by a second parallel historical discourse founded on the Otherness of imperial rivals and non-British colonial peoples.20 Pagden suggests that Britain was never very clear about the relationship between ‘mother country’ and the colonies, making no ‘serious attempt to come to terms with what the possession of overseas colonies implied, whether politically, economically, or morally’.21 The boundaries between

18 S. Berger, ‘On the Role of Myths and History in the Construction of National Identity in Modern Europe’, European History Quarterly, 39 (2009), pp. 490–502. 19 K. Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 35. 20 Pagden notes that whilst Spanish and French historians tended to consider colonies inseparable from the sovereign, the British increasingly saw them as distinct, voluntar- ily formed, internally autonomous societies: A. Pagden, Lords of all the World. Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500–c. 1800 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1995). 21 A. Pagden, ‘The Empire’s New Clothes: From Empire to Federation, Yesterday and Today’, Common Knowledge, 12/i (2006), pp. 36–46 (quotation at p. 42). 50 andrew mycock the British nation and empire were significant but uncertain from their inception. They were significant in that they had considerable influence on a vast range of issues tied to modes of colonial rule, citizenship rights and socio-economic conditions.22 They were uncertain in that the borders of the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ empires were ill-defined and fluid, with extensive settlement of some parts of the empire extending political, economic and cultural commonalities for many within Britain, but also underlining that imperial citizenship was differentiated and tiered. Brit- ish national-imperial identity therefore developed as an extension of the English national group, founded on Whiggish narratives which stressed the continuity of freedom, liberty and often the importance of English ‘stock’. This afforded some acknowledged commonality for certain other national groups, such as the Scots, Welsh and Irish, though the messianic ‘civilizing’ qualities of the English were continually stressed. The intensity of British national-imperial identity was therefore substantially defined by the degree of national, ethnic and religious commonality acknowledged and the perceived proximity of imperial subjects to the English core.23 Kumar understands this to be a form of ‘missionary nationalism’ which drew on key ethno-national attributes, such as language, history and culture, but sought expression within the broader national-imperial political state.24 The multinational and imperial composition of the British state had implications for English and non-English British historians attempting to ‘write the nation’. Pocock suggests that the Anglo-centric foundations of British national history writing allowed historians to distinguish between

22 See K. McClelland and S.O. Rose, ‘Citizenship and Empire, 1867–1928’, in C. Hall and S.O. Rose (eds.), At Home with the Empire. Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 275–97; D. Gorman, Imperial Citizen- ship. Empire and the Question of Belonging (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2006); P. Poddar, ‘Passports, Empire and Subjecthood’, in G. MacPhee and P. Poddar (eds.), Empire and After. Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective (Oxford, Berghahn, 2007), pp. 73–86. 23 See A. Stoler, ‘On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty’, Public Culture, 18 (2006), pp. 125–146. 24 Kumar, ‘Nation and Empire’, p. 580. A more accurate term would be ‘missionary imperialism’ as Kumar’s thesis contravenes the norms of nationalism theory, namely the centrality of a defined territory or ‘national homeland’, by suggesting its dilution within transnational contexts. For a more detailed consideration of ‘missionary nationalism’, see A. Mycock with M. Loskoutova, ‘Nation, State and Empire: The Historiography of “High Imperialism” in the British and Russian Empires’, in S. Berger and C. Lorenz (eds.), Natio- nalizing The Past. Historians as Nation Builders in Modern Europe (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2011), pp. 233–58. a very english affair? 51 the Anglo-British nation and the empire.25 Hopkins concurs, noting that ‘one of the most striking features of the study of modern British history is the way in which the history of the nation state has been separated from the history of the empire’.26 This meant that, if and when the imperial project failed, the history of the nation state, particularly its focus on liberty, provided the ideological means of surviving the loss of empire. Pocock argues that this ensured that the emerging national-imperial historiography reflected a lack of uniformity, not only in how the British Empire was conceived and understood, but also in its impact on historical consciousness.27 Robbins suggests that British historiography was more complex and multi-layered, much like its empire. This means it was ‘shifting, contested and enduringly problematic’, drawing on different spatial paradigms which highlighted global, imperial, continental and at least four-nation dynamics.28 As we shall see, the historiography of nineteenth- century Britain reflects this complex and often chaotic set of interrelations whilst never fully rejecting the duality of English national-imperialism.

A Very English Affair? David Cannadine notes that the British histories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may well have witnessed the zenith of the British nation state, of the United Kingdom, and of the British Empire, but the nation whose history they recounted and whose identity they helped to proclaim was England. [. . .] these books were almost without exception in praise of England.29 For most national historians during the nineteenth century, England and Britain were synonymous. The political nation to which many felt they belonged was England, and so the history which they wrote was English too. This conviction about how the past should be construed stemmed from a confidence in English exceptionalism and a Whiggish belief in the

25 J.G.A. Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, Journal of Modern History, 47/iv, (1975), pp. 601–21. 26 A.G. Hopkins, ‘Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History’, Past and Present, 164 (1999), pp. 198–243 (quotation at p. 207). 27 Pocock, ‘Limits and Divisions’, p. 321. 28 K. Robbins, ‘The “British Space”: World-Empire-Continent-Nation-Region-Locality: A Historiographical Problem’, History Compass, 7 (2009), pp. 66–94. 29 D. Cannadine, ‘ “British History as a “New Subject”: Politics, Prospects and Problems’, in A. Grant and K.J. Stringer (eds.), Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London, Routledge, 1995), pp. 12–30 (quotation at p. 16). 52 andrew mycock values and morality of England. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Sir James Mackintosh, Samuel R. Gardiner, John R. Green and William Lecky all wrote multi-volume histories of England focusing on the constitutional development of the English state during the sixteenth and particularly the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For them, the Civil War and the ‘English Revolution’ were key in emphasizing the organic constitutional, political and religious development of England towards liberal democracy and religious toleration. However, most English national historians, including non-English authors, were uncertain about the limits of the English national-imperial state and its history. Many circumvented the challenge to write concise and delineated histories of England by instead producing broader Anglo-British historical narratives that covered much if not all of the British Isles. Wales was typically a peripheral influence on English national historiography during this period, particularly when compared with the ‘kingdoms’ of Ireland and Scotland. The wholesale absorption of Wales into the English state in the early sixteenth century, and its lack of a significant Catholic population, encouraged many historians to overlook Welsh linguistic and cultural distinctiveness or claims to Welsh nationhood. Although Ireland and Scotland were more prominent, authors did not seek to write a recognizably pluralist multinational British history. Most often they were only acknowledged when events in either nation were considered central to the development of the English political nation and the preordained coming together of the British state. Some popular historians, such as Macaulay and Green, saw Scotland as key to the history of England. Macaulay saw the Union of the Crowns in 1603 as a progressive merger: ‘for the first time all the British Isles were peaceably united under one sceptre’. Scotland had ‘preserved her dignity’ in this union: having ‘courageously withstood the English arms, she was now joined to her stronger neighbour on the most honourable terms’.30 This joining of the monarchies of Scotland and England, according to Green, was confirmed in 1707, since when ‘the two nations whom the Union brought together have ever [. . .] remained one’.31 Missionary themes were strongly evident for many authors, however, simultaneously suggesting that Scotland and Ireland were uncivilized,

30 T.B. Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second (1849– 61; ed. C.H. Firth, 6 vols., London, Macmillan, 1913–14), vol. I, pp. 57–8. 31 J.R. Green, History of the English People, 4 vols. (London, Macmillan, 1877–80), p. 92. a very english affair? 53 being culturally backward or retarded, whilst also politically and economically underdeveloped prior to union. Distinctions were sometimes made which highlighted divergence in the process of union with England. James Mackintosh, a prominent Scottish-born jurist, scholar and parliamentarian, argued that ‘the Scots were, to all intents, an independent nation’. As such, Scotland was incorporated through ‘a forced union’.32 This suggests that some implicitly saw Scotland’s claims to nationhood as more legitimate than those of Ireland. For J.R. Seeley, English altruism meant Scotland had gained access to imperial wealth thanks to the Union, thus affording relief from ‘the poverty of the country’: ‘no nation has since, in proportion to its numbers, reaped so much profit from the New World as the Scotch’.33 William Lecky, however, saw the ‘Colonies and Scotland’ as one and the same. Only union with England ‘raised Scotland from one of the most wretched and barbarous into one of the most civilised and happy nations in Europe’. Though ‘it was many years before the English level of civilisation was altogether attained’, Lecky believed that Scotland ‘now ranks in social, industrial and political virtues at the very head of the British Empire’.34 This colonial view was though more readily applied to Ireland. Mackin- tosh asserted that ‘Ireland was an ancient appanage of the English crown [. . .] incorporated with the commonwealth by subjugation’.35 Macaulay suggested that Ireland was ‘undisguisedly governed as a dependency won by the sword’.36 This was largely due to the coercive colonisation, settler plantation and often violent English rule in Ulster. England’s relationship with Ireland was therefore not easily explained by historians. The question for many was whether Ireland was part of the English state or a colony within the English/British Empire.37 This Irish dilemma was succinctly expressed by Green who noted that ‘England has shrunk from carrying out either a national or an imperial policy’ in Ireland, failing to integrate the country fully, as with Scotland, or to develop an expressly colonial or federal approach. He saw monarchy as key, suggesting that ‘England and

32 J. Mackintosh et al., The History of England, 10 vols. (London, Longman, 1830–40), vol. VI, p. 159. 33 Seeley, Expansion, pp. 152–3. 34 W.E.H. Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, 8 vols. (London, Long- mans, 1878–90), vol. II, pp. 40, 74. 35 Mackintosh et al., History of England, vol. VI, p. 159. 36 Macaulay, History of England, vol. I, p. 57. 37 For an excellent overview of this debate, see S. Howe, ‘Questioning the (Bad) Ques- tion: Was Ireland a Colony?’, Irish Historical Studies, 37/142 (2008), pp. 1–15. 54 andrew mycock

Ireland were simply held together by the fact that the sovereign of the one island was also the sovereign of the other’. However, ‘Ireland was absolutely subject to Britain but she formed no part of it, she shared neither in its liberty nor its wealth’.38 This sense of union was not universally shared however. Macaulay believed that Ireland was an ‘English colony’, but one populated by ‘aboriginal Celts and the degenerate English’.39 James A. Froude, an Eng- lish-born novelist and historian, even doubted the purpose of the imperial mission in Ireland, noting that ‘never anywhere were there institutions more ripe for destruction than those which England had planted in the unfortunate island which to their common misfortune had been made part of her dominions’.40 Lecky was however critical of the English and Scottish planters in Ulster, who he believed took Irish land ‘without much more scruple than the land over which the Red Indian roves’.41 Green disagreed, claiming the ‘colonization of Ulster’ provided evidence of the supremacy of the English and of the Protestant faith.42 Froude concurred, asserting that the Catholic faith ‘assimilates ill with visions of political liberty’.43 Religion therefore underlined a common Protestant religious and political community between England, Scotland and Ulster which also differentiated Ireland from the rest of the ‘United Kingdom’. Gardiner also viewed Ireland as a colony but sympathized with the Irish who ‘were in bondage to an alien race’.44 Race proved an important factor in distinguishing the English from the other nations of the British Isles, often deployed to emphasize superiority and civilization. As Lecky noted, ‘the English cared much more for the suppression of the Irish race than for the suppression of its religion’.45 Mackintosh noted that ‘the superior importance of the Teutonic race, in our eyes, may be plausibly and in part imputed to the greater antiquity and obscurity of the Celtic contests with civilized nations’.46 Examining the ‘state of the English colony’, Macaulay

38 Green, History of the English People, vol. IV, pp. 263–7. 39 Macaulay, History of England, vol. II, p. 785. 40 J.A. Froude, The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (1872–74; 3 vols., London, Longmans, 1881), vol. I, p. 5. 41 Lecky, History of England, vol. II, p. 257. 42 Green, History of the English People, vol. IV, pp. 217–30. 43 Froude, English in Ireland, vol. I, p. 6. 44 S.R. Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War, 1603–1642 (1863–82; revised ed., 10 vols., London, Longmans, 1883–84), vol. I, p. 441. 45 Lecky, History of England, vol. II, p. 99. 46 Mackintosh et al., History of England, vol. I, p. 5. a very english affair? 55 considered Irishmen a ‘degraded race’ who ‘were in an almost savage state’. He observed that in their midst were ‘about two hundred thousand colonists, proud of their Saxon blood and their Protestant faith’. Although there was a ‘great preponderance of numbers on one side’, racial superiority meant this ‘was more than compensated by a great superiority of intelligence’.47 The national origin of historians did have some influence on their view of the ‘internal’ empire and the expansion of the English state. Lecky, born in Dublin, noted that ‘this [Irish] portion of the history of the empire has usually been treated by English historians in a very superficial and perfunc- tory manner’.48 He highlighted the lack of public support for the Union of 1801, which ‘was demanded by no considerable section of the Irish people’ and was ‘accompanied by no signal political or material benefit that could mitigate or counteract its unpopularity’.49 Lecky also questioned claims of English racial purity and messianism, suggesting that the invasions and settlement of Ireland ‘have produced such a mixture of races that no infer- ence about the connection between race and national character could be safely drawn from English experience’. English settlement in Ireland, particularly by Puritans in the seventeenth century, had meant that the ‘original Celtic stock’ had been ‘tinctured’. This accounted for the ‘aggressive and turbulent qualities’ of Irishmen in some counties bordering Ulster. However, ‘no parts of the British Empire have been more peaceful, more easy to govern, and more free from crime than some of the purely Celtic districts in the west or in the south’.50 The Scottish-born Mackintosh similarly adopted a more sympathetic view of Scotland than some English historians. He acknowledged Scottish claims to nationhood and highlighted widespread opposition to the Union of 1707 which ‘deprived the Scotch of that which is most cherished by a proud, fierce and ancient people—their independence’.51 Lecky concurred, suggesting in Scotland ‘the majority of the nation were certainly opposed to the Union’.52 This noted, there was scant support for Home Rule in Ireland or elsewhere as the nineteenth century came to a close. Though Froude and Lecky held differing views on the nature of English rule in Ireland, they

47 Macaulay, History of England, vol. II, p. 783. 48 Lecky, History of England, vol. II, p. 92. 49 Lecky, History of England, vol. II, p. 60. 50 Lecky, History of England, vol. II, pp. 381–2. 51 Mackintosh et al., History of England, vol. IX, p. 201. 52 Lecky, History of England, vol. II, p. 59. 56 andrew mycock agreed Home Rule was neither desirable nor feasible due to the unfit- ness of most Irishmen for such responsibilities. As Harkness notes, both believed union was necessary for the good of Ireland and England and also the empire.53 Underpinning such views was an acceptance of the primacy of the English political state within the ‘internal empire’. For most British historians, Whiggish confidence in the ascendancy of English constitutional progression legitimated its expansion across the British Isles. Although the ‘history of England’ was often consciously multinational, it was seldom considered within explicitly British contexts. Scotland and Ireland provided opportunities to emphasize the civilizing political and cultural influence of the English but were also seen to contribute a more expansive sense of Anglo-British nationhood and identity. Nevertheless, key delineators such as race and religion were deployed to establish borders of inclusion and exclusion, thus suggesting that, if a common sense of multinational Britishness was apparent in nineteenth-century society, many historians did not actively seek to promote it.

The Borders of Nation and Empire As noted earlier, J.R. Seeley has been identified by some contemporary imperial historians as the architect of modern British imperial history. Seeley professed to wish to expand the remit of Anglo-British historiography by rejecting the influential ‘Whiggish’ constitutional themes in favour of a history of imperial expansion: ‘to look at things from a greater distance and more comprehensively [. . .] the extension of the English name into other countries of the globe’.54 However, many historians who wrote histories of England in the nineteenth century also engaged with colonial matters outside the British Isles. Where empire was seen to shape the English constitutional narrative it was frequently explored, particularly with regard to North America but also focusing on the colonization of India, the failures of Scottish imperialism in Darien, and military successes which ‘extended the sovereignty of England over remoter dominions’.55 For most, empire, at its core, was explicitly English, while the Irish, Scots and Welsh were peripheral at best and often wholly absent: as

53 D. Harkness, ‘Ireland’, in R.W. Winks (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 5, Historiography (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 114–33, esp. p. 120. 54 Seeley, Expansion, p. 9. See also M. Lee, ‘The Story of Greater Britain: What Lessons does it Teach?’, National Identities, 6 (2004), pp. 126–42. 55 Mackintosh et al., The History of England, vol. X, p. 376. a very english affair? 57

Froude noted ‘the people of England made the colonies’.56 For Green, ‘it was to England that the colonists owed not their blood only, but the free institutions under which they had grown to greatness’.57 The English were, according to Seeley, ‘not merely of a ruling but of an educating and civilising race’ who provided a ‘common nationality, common religion and common interest’.58 Many historians sought to identify the origins and expansion of this English empire-nation as organic. Patrick Colquhoun, a Scottish merchant and historian, saw England as ‘the parent state’,59 which, for Seeley, meant that the expansion of England should be seen ‘in a certain natural sense’ to be a ‘full-grown giant developed out of the sturdy boy’.60 This patriarchal metaphor was also deployed by Macaulay, but he suggested that this relationship was liable to change with regard to the colonies: ‘no sensible parent deals with a son of twenty in the same way as with a son of ten’.61 The role of war in empire-building was influential in some texts. Mack- intosh’s claim that English ships ‘commanded nearly all the practicable waters of the world and were everywhere triumphant’62 was typical of such self-congratulatory themes. But, in contrast to many nation-building narratives, imperial expansion and colonial rule was often portrayed as largely benign and non-violent. Seeley believed that the English only ‘occupied parts of the globe which were so empty that they offered an unbounded scope for new settlement’.63 Its peaceful origins were evident in that ‘our Empire is not an empire at all in the ordinary sense of the word. It does not consist of a congeries of nations held together by force’.64 At the same time, several writers expressed concern at the continuing failure of public opinion to appreciate the importance of national-imperial community and identity in Britain. As John Arthur Roebuck, an Indian- born British parliamentarian and commentator on empire, complained in 1849, ‘there is so much ignorance respecting everything connected

56 J.A. Froude, Oceana, or England and her Colonies (London, Longmans, 1886), p. 14. 57 Green, History of the English People, vol. IV, p. 199. 58 Seeley, Expansion, pp. 302, 59. 59 P. Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Wealth, Power and Resources of the British Empire in Every Quarter of the World, (London, Joseph Mawman, 1814), p. 21. 60 Seeley, Expansion, p. 190. 61 Macaulay, History of England, vol. VI, p. 2773. 62 Mackintosh et al., History of England, vol. X, p. 366. 63 Seeley, Expansion, p. 55. 64 Seeley, Expansion, p. 60. 58 andrew mycock with our Colonies’.65 Such sentiment chimed with Seeley’s later and more famous assertion that the English ‘have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind’ but ‘did not reckon our colonies as really belonging to us’. Seeley was troubled that the English lacked pride in their empire and were uncertain as to ‘whether our increase is a matter for exultation or for regret’.66 According to Taylor, many who discussed the value of empire were concerned about ‘how dominion over distant territories affected English character and English institutions’.67 In the wake of the Indian mutiny of 1857, there was increased emphasis on issues allied to over-expansion and imperial competition, the failure to export English political values successfully, and the morality of empire itself. Debate also drew attention to the distinctiveness of the ‘settler’ and ‘colonial’ systems. This often reflected domestic concerns about the purpose of empire rather than its development and governance. It did, however, reveal tensions about how nation and empire were conceived, what the borders were of inclusion and exclusion between colony and dominion, and whether the limits of imperial expansion had been reached. As an example of the ‘colonial’ system, the position of India was central to debates and the conflicting views of Alfred Lyall, a British colonial civil servant and historian, and Seeley are particularly instructive. For Lyall, British involvement in India was to be celebrated. The British in India had ‘imported from a great distance the principles of civilized polity’ but had secured ‘the expansion of a first-class territorial sovereignty’.68 How- ever, Seeley was convinced that British imperial focus on the expansion of the Indian Empire was ill-judged, incurring ‘vast responsibilities, which were compensated by no advantages’.69 Colonial India highlighted the potential problems of over-expansion, being a ‘crowded territory with an ancient civilization, with languages, religions, philosophies and literatures of its own’.70 It was ‘both constitutionally and financially an independent

65 J.A. Roebuck, The Colonies of England. A Plan for the Government of some Portion of our Colonial Possessions (London, J. W. Parker, 1849), p. 3. 66 Seeley, Expansion, pp. 10–14. Compare the case of the Netherlands, where a lack of pride and of interest in the colonies, especially in the culture of Indonesia, was even more pronounced: below, Chapter 4. 67 M. Taylor, ‘Imperium et Libertas? Rethinking the Radical Critique of Imperialism during the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 19 (1991), pp. 1–23 (quotation at pp. 3–4). 68 A. Lyall, The Rise and Expansion of the British Dominion in India (London, John Mur- ray, 1893), pp. 171, 352. 69 Seeley, Expansion, p. 304. 70 Seeley, Expansion, p. 217. a very english affair? 59

Empire’, ‘only bound to us by the tie of conquest’—the colony ‘least capable of evolving out of itself a stable government’.71 The distinction between ‘settler’ and ‘colonial’ empires also reflected the growing importance of race in conceptions of empire, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century.72 Though seen as rivals in their understanding of empire, E.A. Freeman and Seeley both were concerned about the ‘deterioration of the national type by barbaric inter-mixture’ which had proved the undoing of the Spanish and French empires.73 Freeman, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford from 1884 to 1892, was certain that ‘in no case have English settlers mingled to any important extent with the native races’,74 though Seeley was pragmatic about the presence of such groups, noting that ‘in the Empire a good many French and Dutch and a good many Caffres and Maories may be admitted without marring the ethnological unity of the whole’.75 Freeman disagreed, noting ‘real assimilation is impossible’, not only for ‘barbarians whom the English found dwelling in the settled lands’ but also for the ‘race of barbarians whom they afterwards imported for their own ends’.76 Seeley was clear that there was ‘no question about the general fact that the ruling race in British India has a higher more vigorous civilisation than the native races’. India was seen to possess ‘no community of race or religion’, and ‘has no tie of blood whatever with the population of England’.77 Religion was also important in establishing commonality and difference across the English empire-nation. Seeley noted that ‘religion seems to me to be the strongest and most important of all the elements which go to constitute nationality’, with Christianity in general, and Protestantism in particular, promoting ‘a certain unity’. He asserted that the English ‘have always declared that we held sacred the principle of religious toleration’, though this was qualified on the ‘understanding we are obeyed’.78 How- ever, Roebuck argued claims of English civility were hypocritical, noting

71 Seeley, Expansion, p. 295. 72 C. Hall, Civilising Subjects. Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 (Cambridge, Polity, 2002). 73 Seeley, Expansion, p. 161. 74 E.A. Freeman, Greater Greece and Greater Britain, and, George Washington, the Expander of England. Two Lectures (London, Macmillan, 1886), p. 9. 75 Seeley, Expansion, p. 59. 76 Freeman, Greater Greece, p. 9. 77 Seeley, Expansion, pp. 204, 214. 78 Seeley, Expansion, pp. 261, 322. 60 andrew mycock that ‘when the European comes in contact with any other type of man, that other type disappears’.79 But concerns about relationships with the ‘settler’ colonies were also evident, particularly in the light of American independence, highlighting a shared belief in the need to learn from past mistakes to ensure that the settler colonies of the second empire did not go their own way too. Many agreed with Macaulay that their loss had been caused by over-zealous English government, in particular attempts at taxation, and by imperial neglect. For Green, such separation was proof of the positive English colonial legacy: ‘England had given them her system of self-government, as she had given them her law, her language, her religion and her blood’.80 Indeed, Lecky believed colonists in America were ‘proud of their English lineage, of English greatness and of English liberty’ though he also suggested that independence meant ‘the political unity of the English race was for ever at an end’.81 Concern for future schisms led Seeley to propose that ‘the mother country’ should cease in making ‘unjust claims’ or imposing ‘annoying restrictions’ on the colonies, and also to emphasize that ‘there is risk, not to say also intellectual impoverishment, in independence’.82 Froude noted a growing independence in the settler colonies which had been ‘used as convict stations till they rose in wrath and refused to receive our refuse any more’.83 He drew attention to asymmetry in citizenship rights between the ‘mother country’ and settler colonies: One free people cannot govern another free people. The inhabitants of a province retain the instincts which they brought with them. They can ill bear that their kindred at home shall have rights and liberties from which they are excluded. The mother country struggles to retain its authority, while it is jealous of extending its privileges of citizenship.84 Green suggested that ‘while its law had remained national, England had grown from a nation into an empire’.85 The solution, according to Seeley, was the construction of a ‘Greater Britain’ to reorder the Empire, limit further expansion, and build a ‘federal union’ founded on ‘community of race,

79 Roebuck, Colonies of England, p. 138. 80 Green, History of the English People, Vol. IV, p. 169. 81 Lecky, History of England, vol. III, pp. 460, 273. 82 Seeley, Expansion, p. 346. 83 Froude, Oceana, p. 4. 84 Froude, Oceana, pp. 2–3. 85 Green, History of the English People, Vol. IV, p. 228. a very english affair? 61 community of religion, community of interest’. He argued that racial unity was crucial, noting ‘Greater Britain is not a mere empire. [. . .] its union is of the more vital kind. It is united by blood and religion’.86 Froude agreed, proposing the creation of a new federal state, Oceana, comprised of those of English blood thus limiting the need for coercive imperial policies. The creation of a federal ‘United British Empire’ founded on an ‘organic union’ would stem potential secessionism.87 Some, such as Freeman, steadfastly opposed such federation, arguing that Seeley and others would sunder what was already united.88 Instead Freeman argued for the development of an Anglo-Saxon and Anglophone community, including the United States, ‘to lift us above this confused babble about a British Empire patched up of every race and speech under the sun, to the higher thought of the brotherhood of the English folk’.89 Freeman argued that ‘a federal union involves a certain loss of power and position on the part of the states which unite to form it’, thus raising the prospect that the British would merely become an equal partner in a broader imperial federation.90 For Macaulay such proposals were an unrealistic compromise; there could only be ‘one supreme power in a society’, meaning the mother country at some point should choose either to encourage complete incorporation if possible or separation. Federal- ism was not feasible as ‘parliamentary government cannot be carried on by two really equal and independent parliaments in one empire’.91 The experience of the loss of American colonies strongly shaped such sentiments, suggesting unease at the notion of further conflict between ‘Eng- lish peoples’. Roebuck urged that ‘every colony ought by us to be looked upon as a country destined, at some period in its existence, to govern itself ’; in this way ‘withdrawal from our metropolitan rule ought not to offend or wound us as a nation’.92

86 Seeley, Expansion, pp. 13, 60. The origins of the term ‘Greater Britain’ are credited to Sir Charles Dilke, British politician and traveller, to describe his travels in the ‘White Dominions’: see C.W. Dilke, Greater Britain. A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Coun- tries during 1866 and 1867, 2 vols. (London, Macmillan, 1868). 87 Froude, Oceana, pp. 12, 393. 88 S. Collini, D. Winch, and J. Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics. A Study in Nine- teenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 224. 89 Freeman, Greater Greece, p. 84. 90 Freeman, Greater Greece, p. 127. For criticism of Irish Home Rule as a form of ‘feder- alism’, see A.V. Dicey, ‘Home Rule from an English Point of View’, Contemporary Review, 42 (1882), pp. 66–86. 91 Macaulay, History of England, vol. VI, p. 2773. 92 Roebuck, Colonies of England, p. 175. 62 andrew mycock

For Green, such deliberations highlighted that ‘proud as England was of her imperial position she had as yet failed to grasp the difference between an empire and a nation’. He argued that a nation was ‘an aggregate of individual citizens, bound together in a common and equal relation to the state which they form’. Conversely, an empire was ‘an aggregate of political bodies, bound together by a common and equal relation to a central state’. Imperial relations varied though ‘from the closest dependency to the loosest adhesion’.93 Such views raised interesting questions about the relationship between subjects in Britain and settlers and other colonial peoples. Froude believed that empire and nation were one as ‘the people at home and the people in the colonies are one people’.94 Others, however, drew distinctions. For Seeley, England was ‘not an empire but only a very large state [. . .] because the population is English’.95 But he also argued that whilst English migrants carried their nationality and the imperium of Her Majesty with them, ‘the Canadian and the Victorian are not quite like the Englishman’.96 For Green, colonists were ‘Englishmen but they were Englishmen parted from England by three thousand miles of sea [. . .] they could not share the common political life of men at home’.97 Roebuck believed it was clear that ‘English classes’ in Canada do not have metropolitan interests as they are motivated primarily as ‘colonists’.98

Conclusions This chapter has shown that the borders between the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ Anglo-British empires were often blurred, with the result that many key national narratives were located within multinational and transnational contexts. The English and non-English British historians we have considered focused on the role of the English state and people within dually imperial contexts. Therefore the simultaneous expansion of a multinational state and empire was understood within missionary terms, affording opportunities for dissemination and inculcation of Eng- lish national political and cultural values across the British Isles and the colonies of the British Empire. But whilst the British political establishment may well have invested their energies in promoting a shared sense

93 Green, History of the English People, Vol. IV, p. 226. 94 Froude, Oceana, p. 14. 95 Seeley, Expansion, p. 350. 96 Seeley, Expansion, p. 15. 97 Green, History of the English People, Vol. IV, p. 227. 98 Roebuck, Colonies of England, p. 203. a very english affair? 63 of ‘blended’ British national identity,99 national historians unreservedly focused on its English genesis. Kumar’s assertion that, as state-bearing peoples, the English suppressed their national messianism is not borne out in much of the historiography explored in this chapter. Many historians promoted the missionary claims of the English without reservation or concern for the sensibilities of non-English imperial subjects within the British Isles or elsewhere. The English political nation that informed a sense of national-imperial Englishness was strongly underpinned by a belief in the primacy of the ethno-cultural dynamics of the English people. These were most prominent when justifying the expansion of England across the British Isles: such differences were less pronounced when discussing the expansion of empire. This merging of the English political state and the Anglo-British ethno-cultural nation ensured that romanticized myths of the nation were largely absent. As such, there are strong commonalities in the historical approaches drawn on to highlight English messianism, with race, religion and superior national political values emphasized both within ‘internal’ and ‘external’ empires. This, however, is the key to why the borders of nation and empire were so blurred. British historians of the nineteenth century ensured that empire was a very English affair across both the British Isles and the colonies, founded on a shared belief in what Seeley described as the ‘genius of the Anglo- Saxon race’.100 Green succinctly summarized such sentiment: In the centuries that lie before us, the primacy of the world will lie with the English People. English institutions, English speech, English thought, will become the main features of the political, the social, and the intellectual life of mankind.101 However, some harboured doubts about the longevity of England’s dual empires. Concerns about empire were multiple and often had their origins in the potential for instability at home and in the colonies. This led some to emphasize that political values, such as freedom and liberty, were being compromised by the actions of colonizers both within the ‘internal empire’, particularly in Ireland, and in North America, India and other colonies. The potential loss of the colonies highlighted concerns not only

99 K. Robbins, Nineteenth-Century Britain. Integration and Diversity (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988). 100 Seeley, Expansion, p. 94. 101 Green, History of the English People, Vol. IV, p. 271. 64 andrew mycock over the decline of the power of the English political state but also over the dilution of English racial stock. Empire was seen as an extension of England and Englishness and also as something distinct and different. But neither proponents of radical reform of the empire nor those who sought to defend the imperial status quo made reference to competing nationalist movements or religious schisms across the British Isles, most particularly in Ireland. And they overlooked the possibility that settler communities were also capable and willing to construct competing national ideologies that challenged the legitimacy of ‘Greater Britain’.102 Such threats would soon reshape the relationship between nation, state and empire and encourage more critical and pluralist historical accounts of the Anglo- British national-imperial state.

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WHO IS THE NATION AND WHAT DOES IT DO? THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF THE NATION IN BELGIAN AND DUTCH NATIONAL HISTORIES OF THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

Marnix Beyen

According to a growing body of academic literature, the nation is primarily a form of historical narration.1 As a result, narrative theories elaborated by scholars such as Roland Barthes and Ann Rigney directly and indirectly inform the analysis of nationalist historical discourse.2 Academic linguistics, on the contrary, has largely been absent from this undertaking. Situ- ated ‘beyond the sentence’, narrative patterns are precisely those textual features which can be conveyed through non-linguistic means.3 Signifi- cantly, the recent historiography of nineteenth-century historical imagination has been more concerned with the visual or performative ways in which historical culture reduced the past to a set of images than with the textual means through which nineteenth-century historiography tried to relate the past in its fullness.4 This focus on abridged and non-textual versions of history is highly relevant, since one can safely assume that they have been more successful

1 E.g. H.K. Bhabha, ‘Introduction: narrating the nation’, in idem (ed.), Nation and Narra- tion (London, Routledge, 1990), pp. 1–7; S. Berger, ‘Introduction. Narrating the Nation: His- toriography and Other Genres’, in idem, L. Eriksonas and A. Mycock (eds.), Narrating the Nation. Representations in History, Media and the Arts (Oxford, Berghahn, 2008), pp. 1–16. 2 See R. Barthes, ‘Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits’, in idem et al., Poé- tique du récit, second ed. (Paris, Seuil, 1977), pp. 7–57; A. Rigney, The Rhetoric of Historical Representation. Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990); idem, ‘Narrativity and Historical Representation’, Poetics Today, 12 (1991), pp. 591–605. In heightening historians’ sensitivity to narrative theories the work of Hayden White has also been seminally important: see H. White, Metahistory. The Histori- cal Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); idem, The Content of the Form. Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 3 See Barthes, ‘Introduction’, pp. 11–13. 4 Explicitly on this ambition to reduce the past: T. Verschaffel, ‘Het verleden tot weinig herleid’, in F. Ankersmit, W. Krul and J. Tollebeek (eds.), Romantiek en historische cultuur (Groningen, Historische Uitgeverij, 1996), pp. 297–320. 68 marnix beyen vehicles of nation-building than elaborate history books. At the same time, however, it tends to blur the efforts on the part of zealous intellectuals to shape their nation by assiduously writing down its history. These efforts partly consisted of gathering facts through archival research, but also required the imagination to order these facts into a consistent story. This imaginative act is situated not only at the level of the general emplot- ment of the texts, but in every sentence, in every word. Writing the history of a collective entity which has changing and often unclear boundaries implies a continuous and dynamic process of constituting that nation at different discursive levels. In the first place, nineteenth-century national history texts were discursive practices in which someone presenting himself as a member of the current nation addressed its other members. Secondly, national historiography always stages ‘the nation’ as an actor. In a dynamic and interactive way, these processes of situating oneself, addressing, and staging gradually give birth to a diachronic entity which can be called ‘the nation’. Since each of these processes can occur in a nearly endless variety, every history text constitutes a different nation. These differences rely primarily on linguistic variations, and should therefore be studied linguistically. More precisely, pragmatic linguistics—the study of language in use—can help the historian to understand better the way in which nineteenth-century historians tried to constitute nations through their texts.5 These linguistic strategies belong to the field of person deixis, or the analysis of ‘the ways in which language encodes features of the context of utterances’, more specifically focusing on the persons within that context.6 Strong markers of deictic strategies are personal and possessive pronouns. In discourses which aim at identity formation, the use of the first person plural deserves special attention. This is particularly true for the analysis of nationalism, which Michael Billig has famously called ‘an ideology of the first person plural’.7 When analysing nineteenth-century historical texts, however, the use of the ‘we’ should be subjected to close scrutiny. Most authors probably used the first person plural in order to conform to the developing standards of scientific language. In these cases,

5 For an extensive set of pragmatic guidelines for research, with history texts as cases, see J. Verschueren, Ideology in Language Use. Pragmatic Guidelines for Empirical Research (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012). 6 Y.-J. Zupnik, ‘Pragmatic Analysis of the Use of Person Deixis in Political Discourse’, Journal of Pragmatics, 21/iv (1994), pp. 339–383, esp. p. 340. 7 M. Billig, Banal Nationalism (London, Sage, 1995), p. 70. who is the nation and what does it do? 69 the ‘we’ was used to create distance between the author and his readers, rather than to forge an ‘imagined community’. But even when the first person plural is resorted to as a means of identification, this can happen in different ways. What is the extent of the group included in the ‘we’? Is it the entire nation, or a (not necessarily ‘national’) group of readers interested in the history of that nation? And if a ‘national we’ can be clearly discerned, does the author identify with the present-day nation (his national readership), or with the historical nation which is at the same time the object of his text, or with both? The ideological implications of these different linguistic options are diverse. In the first case (‘the present- day we’), he simply confirms the existence of a nation in the present, of which he traces the antecedents in the past. When using a ‘transhistorical we’ (implying author, object and readership) or a ‘historical we’ (only implying the author and the historical object), on the other hand, he turns the nation into an essential or axiomatic entity. The linguistic strategy of ‘staging the nation’ requires a mode of investigation which does not look at the text’s linguistic ‘situatedness’ in the world, but at its internal coherence. More precisely, it scrutinizes the stra tegies used to stage a complex, time-encompassing set of collective realities into the main actor of the text: the nation. The first and most evident way of doing this is by labelling and naming these realities. An analysis of these processes should start from the seemingly simple question of which generic and/or proper names are used to denote the nation. However, these simple questions only make sense when they are answered in complex and dynamic ways. First, it is important to note that processes of labelling can take the form both of adjectivation and of substantivation. Adjectives apply a common denominator to phenomena whose diversity is recognized; substantival labelling, on the contrary, tends to do away with these differences. However, the impact of subjec- tival versus adjectival labelling cannot be assessed unless it is situated in its broader semantic, syntactic and narrative context. At the semantic level, a linguistic analysis of processes of labelling should always imply a study of the words and metaphors regularly associated with the nation, or used to delimit that nation from other nations.8 If we try to understand, however, why the homogenizing force of substantival

8 E.g. N.C.F. van Sas (ed.), Vaderland. Een geschiedenis vanaf de vijftiende eeuw tot heden (Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 1999). 70 marnix beyen labelling is variable, we must transcend this semantic approach, and look at the syntactic function of the nouns involved. The homogenizing impact will be higher when a certain agency is ascribed to it than when it occu- pies an object-position in the sentence, or than when it occurs in a sentence where no agency is indicated. In order to reveal agency in texts, it does not suffice to single out the active tenses. The nation can perfectly well appear as an agent in passive sentences, whereas many active sentences convey no agency at all. Finally, these national names and labels must always be noted as occurring at specific places in the narrative. Far from replacing the narrative approach, linguistic pragmatics should therefore be situated in it. Moreover, when dealing with historiographical texts, these linguistic and narrative analyses can only be meaningfully tackled if they also take into account the question of historical accuracy. The moment when homo genizing labels appear in an historical narrative can, to a greater or lesser degree, correspond with the moment when they were generalized in the discourse of contemporaries. Hence, they can be more or less anachronistically used.

Scholarly Popularization as a Genre This chapter sets out to apply this outlined pragmatic approach to a limited set of texts, dealing with national history in the Low Countries. As historically situated social and discursive practices, these texts share a number of features. They were all written and published in the 1840s and 1850s, the first two decades after the separation between Belgium and the Netherlands. During this period, the heyday of Romanticism, the elites of both countries had to invent or reinvent their nations, and therefore also their national pasts. This programme was not carried out by academic historians, since academic history had yet to be developed. The new national histories were written by members of the intellectual élites of the nation, who were often engaged in the liberal professions or in education. Although dilettantes in historiography, they were usually keen to meet the scholarly standards of their time, even when narrating national histories for the entire nation. All the texts that are analysed here belong to the ‘interdiscursive’ genre that we might call ‘scholarly popularization’. Otherwise, however, they diverge from one another in various respects. Most obviously, two of the texts are written by Belgian authors, on Belgian history, for a primarily Belgian readership, in the language that who is the nation and what does it do? 71 dominated the emergent Belgian national culture, viz. French.9 The other two are written by Dutchmen, for Dutchmen, on Dutch history, in Dutch. This difference has an important methodological implication: whenever we encounter a linguistic difference between a French and a Dutch text, we should wonder whether it is caused by the structural linguistic differences between the two languages. Thus, the fact that the passive tense occurs more frequently in Dutch than in French, should be considered.10 However, by focusing on ‘agency’ rather than on the grammatical form, this problem has been effectively sidestepped. In the fields of person deixis and adjectival and substantival label, fundamental structural differences between Dutch and French do not appear to invalidate the analyses. The differences between the Belgian and the Dutch histories are, of course, not purely linguistic. The Belgian texts contributed to the men- tal construction of a nation which had recently gained its independence through a triumphant revolution engendered by a national alliance of former political antagonists.11 The Dutch texts, for their part, had to re-connect with the nation’s glorious past in the traumatizing context of diminished stature.12 When interpreting the linguistic differences between the texts, these diverging ‘states of the nation’ should be taken into account. How- ever, the texts cannot simply be considered as representatives of ‘national historiographies’. Although their authors held generally similar social positions, and opted for similar forms of national engagement, their ideological positions within their respective nations diverged. Of the four authors discussed in this paper, the Dutch lawyer Jacob van Lennep (1802–1868) and the Belgian civil servant Théodore Juste (1818–1888) were probably those who tried hardest to uphold a non- partisan vision of their nation. Although participating in the ‘liberal’ political culture of their time, they sided with the more conservative forces

9 Belgian national histories written in Dutch were rare in this period, although Hendrik Conscience’s Geschiedenis van België appeared in 1845. Including this work in the analysis would have further complicated the comparison, since Dutch in Belgium at that time was less standardized than in the Netherlands. 10 See L. Beheydt, ‘Is een contrastieve grammatica zinvol?’, in idem et al. (eds.), Contras- tief onderzoek Nederlands-Frans (Louvain-la-Neuve, Peeters, 2001), pp. 21–34, esp. p. 22. 11 J. Tollebeek, ‘Enthousiasme en evidentie. De negentiende-eeuwse Belgisch-nationale geschiedschrijving’, in idem (ed.), De ijkmeesters. Opstellen over de geschiedschrijving in België en Nederland (Amsterdam, Bakker, 1994), pp. 57–74. 12 See P.B.M. Blaas, ‘De prikkelbaarheid van een kleine natie met een groot verleden. Fruins en Bloks nationale geschiedschrijving’, Theoretische Geschiedenis, 9 (1982), pp. 271–303. 72 marnix beyen within that culture, most notably the monarchy.13 The other two authors defended a more clearly ‘politicized’ version of their nation: Henri George Moke (1803–1862), a Belgian school teacher and history professor at the University of Ghent, was active within the progressive aisle of the Liberal movement,14 whereas the Amsterdam lawyer Guillaume Groen van Prin- sterer (1801–1876) was one of the main architects of a Calvinist and anti- revolutionary movement in the Netherlands.15 Each of these authors practised various historical genres, from erudite source editions to (in the cases of Van Lennep and Moke) historical novels. The texts chosen for analysis here are those which correspond best to the genre description given above.16 Moke’s Abrégé de l’histoire de Belgique appeared around 1850 as an abridged version of his Histoire de la Belgique of 1840, which during the 1840s had become more or less the standard academic version of the history of Belgium. The Abrégé was intended to disseminate the basic line of its narrative, but still stressed the academic credentials of its author. Jacob Van Lennep emphasized his popularizing ambitions in the very title of his History of the Netherlands (the first edition of which appeared in 1840),17 by mentioning that it was ‘told to the Dutch people’ (De geschiedenis van Nederland, aan het Nederlandsche volk verteld). The absence of footnotes and the presence of dramatic drawings

13 Both Juste and Van Lennep occupy a central place in the literature on Romanticism in their country, but a real biography is lacking in both cases. See ‘Juste (Théodore)’, in E. de Seyn, Dictionnaire biographique des Sciences, des Lettres et des Arts en Belgique, 2 vols. (Brussels, Éditions l’Avenir, 1935–6), vol. I, p. 386; J.-J. Hesemans, Théodore Juste. Leven en Werk (unpublished Masters thesis, Leuven, 1977); M.F. van Lennep, Het leven van Mr. Jacob van Lennep, second ed., 2 vols. (Amsterdam, Van Kampen, 1910). 14 E. de Laveleye, ‘Notice sur H. Moke’, Bulletins de l’Académie Royale de Belgique, 35e jg., 2nd series, 30 (1870), pp. 142–143; C. Dujardin, De ‘Société Huet’ (1846–1851). Ideeënstudie van een progressief-liberale kring te Gent (unpublished Masters thesis, Leuven, 1983), passim. 15 See J. de Bruijn and G. Harinck (eds.), Groen van Prinsterer in Europese context (Hil- versum, Verloren, 2004). 16 References to the work of the four authors discussed in this chapter are abbrevi- ated as follows: G = G. Groen van Prinsterer, Handboek der Geschiedenis van het Vader- land (Amsterdam, H. Höveker, 1852); J = T. Juste, Histoire de Belgique (Brussels, Alexandre Jamar, s.a.); L = J. van Lennep, Geschiedenis van Nederland, aan het Nederlandsche Volk verteld, seventh ed., ed. C.H.M. Vierhout, 4 vols. (Leiden, Sijthoff, s.a.); and M = H.G. Moke, Abrégé de l’histoire de la Belgique, ninth ed. (Ghent, Bivort-Crowie, s.a.). 17 Since I did not find a copy of the original edition, I have used a later edition of c. 1885, edited by C.H.M. Vierhout (Leiden, Sijthoff, s.a.). Although this later edition contains some corrections and additions to the original text (for the sixth edition of 1880, Joannes van Vloten had already introduced some corrections), the basic linguistic features that are central to this paper have probably remained largely unaltered. In any case, the style of the seventh edition closely resembles other works by Van Lennep. who is the nation and what does it do? 73 and some fictive dialogues seemed to underpin this will to popularize history. Nonetheless, the book itself numbered nearly 1200 densely written, and largely descriptive pages, subdivided into four volumes. Unlike Moke and Van Lennep, Juste and Groen van Prinsterer expounded their ambitions in a more or less extensive introduction. Both of them expressed the wish to be both popular and scientific at once— even if they did so in very different ways. First, the scope of the audience they intended to reach varied considerably. Juste expressed his wish to ‘vulgarize’ (J/i) or to ‘popularize’ (J/iii) the history of Belgium and offered his Histoire de Belgique to his ‘co-citizens’ (J/iv), or to ‘the public’ (J/iii) in general. Groen van Prinsterer, for his part, expressly aimed at a ‘literate and cultivated public’ (G/ii) with his Handboek der geschiedenis van het vaderland. Similarly, references to science occupied a far more important place in Groen’s introduction than in Juste’s. The basic structure of all four books is plainly chronological, nearly annalistic. Nonetheless, some important differences reveal themselves even at first glance. First, the relative weight of the chronological periods is different in the two Belgian books compared to their Dutch counterparts. More specifically, the space reserved for the Ancient period and the Middle Ages is much smaller in the Dutch than in the Belgian books. Groen even acknowledged explicitly that the chapters dealing with the periods preceding the birth of the Republic of the United Netherlands should be considered as a ‘preface’ (Voorberigt) to the real history of the Netherlands (G/3). The second structural difference between the two Dutch and the two Belgian histories concerns the fact that the chronological order is less zealously respected by the Belgians than by the Dutch. In the sections on the Middle Ages in particular, both Juste and Moke deal alternately with the diverse provinces of the Southern Netherlands (the Prince-bishopric of Liège included), which means that they have to jump back and forth along the time-line. Groen and Van Lennep develop a more straightforward historical narrative, by focusing the medieval parts of their book primarily on what happened in the County of Holland (with only very short excursions into the history of the other provinces, e.g. G/21–24).

Naming Nations The countries’ proper names (Belgique and Nederland) occur in the titles of three of the four books. Nonetheless, the presence within the texts of these proper names is far from pervasive. Throughout Moke’s Abrégé, the 74 marnix beyen noun ‘Belgium’ (Belgique) appears forty-eight times, subtitles not included. Only very few of these occurrences can be situated in chapters that deal with the period before the Burgundian unification. Moreover, in these earlier parts, no agency whatsoever is ascribed to Belgium. When the Roman period is described, the word is only used to denote a geographical region. From the twelfth century onwards, ‘Belgium’ starts to appear as a passive historical persona, in sentences such as ‘la tranquillité dont jouissait la Belgique ne tarda pas à être troublée par de nouvelles com- motions’ (M/69; cf. M/73). Only at the end of the eighteenth century does Moke’s Belgium start acting autonomously. Twice, the action consists of rebellion against foreign rulers. After having related how a rebellious army had beaten the Austrian troops in Turnhout (1789), Moke adds: ‘Ce fut le signal du soulèvement de la Belgique entière’ (M/177). His description of the Belgian Revolution of 1830 suggests even more poignantly that resistance against a foreign ruler turned a passive and heterogeneous persona (‘our provinces’) into a consistent historical agent: ‘Les efforts du roi pour faire régner la langue hollandaise et pour diriger l’instruction publique, achevèrent d’irriter nos provinces, et au mois d’août 1830, la Belgique entière se souleva pour conquérir son indépendance’ (M/181). Both in absolute and relative terms, the noun ‘Belgique’ appears much more frequently in Juste’s Histoire de Belgique. Nonethelesss, the use of the word follows a similar pattern as in Moke’s Abrégé. Before the fifteenth century, ‘Belgium’ mainly functions as either a geographical framework in which divergent evolutions took place (e.g. J/19), or as a passive historical persona (J/24, 49, 110, 320, 321, 370). The first time that Belgium appears in an active construction, this happens in an ambiguous way: when writing about the reign of Philip the Good, Juste notes, ‘la Belgique fit comme la plupart des autres nations européennes; elle entra, elle aussi, soit de gré, soit de force, dans les voies de la centralisation’ (J/234). If agency is assigned to ‘Belgium’ in this sentence, it is only in order to deny its specificity or its originality. In the following centuries, the main activity ascribed to Belgium is that of stubbornly ‘conserving’ its ancient character, or of surviving the catastrophes caused by its international position (J/469, 501). The collective persona Belgium may be more present in Juste’s Histoire than in Moke’s Abrégé, it is also less active. Just like their Belgian counterparts, the two Dutch books stage ‘Neth- erland’ (Nederland) or ‘The Netherlands’ (de Nederlanden) as an homogeneous national agent only from the end of the Middle Ages. In Van Lennep’s Geschiedenis, this agent not only appears late, but also remains weak throughout the whole book. The author features it first when he who is the nation and what does it do? 75 looks back at the reign of Charles the Bold: ‘Netherland [here, the 17 Provinces are referred to] had been obliged, it is true, to deliver large amounts of money and a good number of troops for foreign wars, from which it took only little advantage; but on the other hand, it had enjoyed tranquility during his reign’ (L I/159). ‘Netherland’ does act in this sentence, but only because it is compelled to do so. After this first, rather hesitant, appearance, ‘Netherland’ does not return as an agent in Van Lennep’s book until the last decade of the eighteenth century, when the Republic’s troops tried to resist the French revolutionary armies. ‘Nether- land’, thus Van Lennep writes in this context, ‘fiercely longed for peace’ (L IV/91). Forty years later, during the Belgian Revolution of 1830, Neth- erland’s agency had grown stronger. The appeal of Prince Frederick to go to war against the rebellious Belgians was ‘welcomed and replied to with loud cheers by Netherland in its entirety’ (L IV/280). In Groen’s Handboek, the appearance of ‘Netherland’ as an historical agent occurs later, but also in a more abrupt way than in Van Len- nep’s Geschiedenis. The term is presented in the introduction, but it only starts functioning in the text when the Reformation is dealt with. It takes the stage as a well demarcated historical persona, be it initially without agency: ‘At that moment, Netherland underwent a re-creation [een her- schepping]. It did not become another Fatherland, but it was rejuvenated, renewed, ennobled, and sanctified by Faith’ (G/62). This sentence implies the pre-existence of ‘Netherland’, but one in which that entity lacked both the homogeneity and the agency to function as a true historical actor. In the course of the Eighty Years’ War, it would gain this agency in the most dramatic way. By the end of the conflict Netherland had become an active and important player on a European scale (G/114). Throughout the rest of the book, ‘Netherland’ appears as an entity whose potential for agency is taken for granted (G/951), but whose lack of actual agency after the end of the seventeenth century is often regretted (e.g. G/749). The ‘Netherland’ that Groen depicts in the final, contemporary passage of his book is one that has apparently been robbed of all agency (G/1080), and that therefore is in strong need of a return to Protestant orthodoxy. Apart from the nation as a whole, its inhabitants could also receive national labels, and provide for national agency. ‘The Belgians’, for example, appear at an earlier stage in the two Belgian national histories than ‘the Dutch’ do in their Dutch counterparts. This is not surprising, since Moke and Juste could refer, regarding the earliest period, to the Celtic tribe called ‘the Belgians’, whereas ‘Dutchmen’ (Nederlanders) as a noun only came into being during the later Middle Ages. Rarely do the two 76 marnix beyen

Belgian authors use the term ‘Belgians’ while narrating the period between the end of the Roman Empire and the start of the Burgundian unification, when the term ‘Belgian’ was re-invented in order to refer to the inhabitants of the new Burgundian empire (M/23; J/29, 121). Moreover, neither Moke nor Juste endows ‘the Belgians’ as a group with a strong agency. In both texts, the ‘Belgians’ appear rather as upholders of certain traditions, racial qualities, and institutions (M/171, 176; J/322, 469, 481) than as driving forces behind innovations or rebellions. Only in the last resort, when their very essence is threatened by foreign oppressors, can they be driven to active revolt (J/469, 588, 591; M/177). The term ‘Dutchmen’ cannot be found before the chapters on the sixteenth century in the books by Groen and Van Lennep. In Groen’s Hand- boek, its presence is actually limited to this period. The Dutchmen play an active role in those chapters where Groen deals with the first years of the Dutch Revolt (G/116, 143), but as soon as the Dutch Republic has been founded, they seem to leave the scene (at least in their plural form). Van Lennep uses the term more frequently. He does so, sporadically, to denote in a rather passive way the inhabitants of the Burgundian Nether- lands before the Dutch Revolt (L I/159, 201, 229). Only at the threshold of the Revolt do these Dutchmen become an agent in the story. Not unlike Moke’s ‘Belgians’, however, they act only in reaction against oppression. The resistance against Philip II would probably have faded away, thus Van Lennep asserts at the end of his first volume, if the king’s harsh revenge had not ‘given birth to a renewed urge for resistance on the side of the Dutchmen’. In Van Lennep’s next volumes, the ‘Dutchmen’ would play the agent’s role on a fairly regular basis. However, the term ‘Dutchmen’ is most often used as a totum pro parte, in order to indicate the Dutch troops in military battles (L II/181, L III/179, L IV/ 190), or Dutch traders and craftsmen (L II/295). Nearly always this occurs in contexts where the international relations of the Netherlands are being discussed. Adjectival labelling was an important strategy of discursive nationalization particularly in the two Belgian national histories. Moke, for instance, uses the adjective ‘Belgian’ fairly frequently, even with regard to those periods when he does not mention ‘the Belgians’. In most of these cases, the adjective has a rather neutral, more or less territorial sense, and is most often connected to a plural noun (‘the Belgian princes’, ‘the Belgian batallions’). For Moke, in other words, the adjective ‘Belgian’ functions as an umbrella bringing together diverse parts, rather than as a word with a strong meaning of its own. When looking back at the Burgundian period, however, he notes that under ‘the influence of a government that who is the nation and what does it do? 77 was foreign to the country and hostile to its institutions [. . .], the Belgian character started to lose its power’ (M/125). This sentence implies that for Moke a homogenizing and essentializing approach to ‘Belgianness’ was self-evident, even in the period before the Burgundian unification. Yet it does not play a structuring role in his narrative. Broadly speaking, Juste uses the adjective ‘Belgian’ in a similar way. More frequently than Moke, however, Juste fills the word with strongly homogenizing meaning. Thus he mentions that Philip the Good had familiarized himself with ‘la langue et les moeurs de ses sujets belges’ (J/233). Apparently, ‘belge’ in this case is applied to the inhabitants of the Seventeen Provinces. This is no longer the case when, during the reign of the Archdukes Albert and Isabella, Juste even discerns the existence of a ‘génie belge’, which ‘contribue puissamment au développement de la civilisation générale’ ( J/459), but which seemed to fade away during the later half of the seventeenth century ( J/489). Only at the end of the eighteenth century did this genius reawaken, when ‘la nation belge’ showed its sympathies for Joseph II’s policy against the Dutch Barrier Treaty’s provi- sions in the Austrian Netherlands ( J/532). In the two Dutch books, the adjective ‘Dutch’ appears less frequently. Even if Van Lennep tells his history of the Netherlands ‘to the Dutch people’, he uses that adjective in the rest of the book only sporadically, and, if he does so, most often in a territorial sense. Groen, too, is parsimonious with its use, although he does praise the ‘splendour of the Dutch weapons’ (G/274), or ‘the Dutch valour’ (G/1011, 1073). It goes without saying that an orthodox Calvinist such as Groen associated Dutchness not only with valour and bravery, but also with religious values. This association, however, rarely entered into the explicit semantic connotations of the adjective ‘Dutch’ (e.g. G/154). Proper names indicating the nation (in an adjectival or a substantival form) seem to have functioned as a vehicle of homogenization rather than as a source of agency. This picture gets more complicated when we add generic names to the analysis. Terms like ‘nation’ and ‘people’ abound in all the texts, but their function is far from univocal. Even if ‘peuple’ appears frequently throughout Moke’s Abrégé, its nationalizing impact remains weak. Until the fifteenth century, the term occurs always in a regionally defined manner. Thus, Moke writes about ‘le peuple de Lou- vain’, ‘le peuple de Gand’, or about the people of a specific province. In the latter cases, the ‘people’ is invariably presented in its complex relationship with its prince. Most often, this relationship entails both hierarchy and reciprocity: princes had to deserve the love of their people through 78 marnix beyen good governance, but thanks to this love, they could expand their power base. This is clearly expressed in the following sentence, with regard to the twelfth-century Flemish Count Thierry of Alsace: ‘Thierry était trop puissant, grâce à l’amour que lui portait son peuple, pour que le jeune Baudouin pût triompher d’un pareil adversaire’ (M/65). The people thus functions in Moke’s text as an important agent, but almost never in an autonomous way: by reacting to the agency of the prince, it determines the limits of his power. Even in later chapters, the unified people remains a locus of ‘indirect agency’ (e.g. M/124). The same holds true for the term ‘nation’, which sporadically appears in Moke’s text from the late fifteenth century onwards. Moke attributes to the nation an ‘active and working character’ (M/125), but stages it only as a reactive agent (e.g. M/130). In Juste’s Histoire de Belgique, the terms ‘nation’ and ‘people’ do not serve as univocal vectors of nationalization. More often than in Moke’s Abrégé, ‘le peuple’ functions as a socially exclusive concept, implying the non-aristocratic and non-bourgeois parts of the population. When he uses it in a socially inclusive way, he often does so at or even beneath the level of the provinces (e.g. J/159, 505). Even the word ‘nation’ and its deriva- tives could be applied by Juste to one of the ancient provinces (e.g. J/193). Nonetheless, in the later parts of the Histoire, the notions ‘nation’ and ‘people’ sporadically also appear in more homogenizing, sometimes even ethnicizing ways (e.g. J/322). For Groen and Van Lennep, too, the word ‘people’ (volk) could have different meanings. They both used it fairly often in the socially exclusive sense which also appears in Juste’s Histoire de Belgique. The agency exerted by this people, was rather destructive, and consisted largely of complaining (L I/245) and rioting (L III/218). On the other hand, however, the ‘people’ in its national or ethnic sense, was more present in the two Dutch books than in their Belgian counterparts. Both in Groen’s and in Van Lennep’s texts, the people is often humanized by ascribing to it a ‘character’ (volkskarakter, G/495, 944; L II/298, L IV/186) , a ‘spirit’ (volks- geest, G/495, 1045, LIII/10), ‘a life’ (volksbestaan G/499; volksleven, G/584), an ‘essence’ (volkswezen, G/279) or specific ‘mores’ (volkszeden, G/289, 326), while also admitting that it was exposed to ‘degeneration’ (volksver- bastering, G/381). Nonetheless, the people (or nation) in this sense only starts playing an important role in events after the outbreak of the Eighty Years’ War. As in the Belgian books, the agency of this people (or nation) is seldom fully autonomous: the people only acts when it is challenged to do so by the actions of political agents (e.g. G/557; L IV/ 186). who is the nation and what does it do? 79

Not only do the two Dutch authors use ‘people’ and ‘nation’ in more homogenizing ways than their Belgian colleagues, they also dispose of a broader array of semantic possibilities to express a sense of national unity in the past. Probably the most powerful notion in this regard was that of ‘Fatherland’. Groen puts his entire story under the umbrella of the Fatherland by introducing it in the title and on the first page. As the other homogenizing terms in his book, however, ‘Fatherland’ only really starts to function discursively with the birth of the Republic. In his Geschiedenis, on the contrary, Van Lennep mentions the Fatherland fairly frequently and with a striking self-evidence, even when dealing with the earliest times (e.g. L I/13). This happens most often in a territorial, and therefore passive sense, but its homogenizing potential is nonetheless strong. In the books by the Belgian authors, on the contrary, the notion is remarkably absent. Juste claims in his introduction that he has wanted to write ‘l’histoire de notre patrie’, which many had deemed impossible because of the sovereignty of the provinces in the Middle Ages. Nonetheless, both in his Histoire and in Moke’s Abrégé, the Fatherland appears only rarely (an exception can be found in J/550). The notion of ‘Republic’ did not even belong to the semantic potential of the Belgian authors. Precisely that concept, however, enables the Dutch authors to combine national homogeneity and agency, at least for the period between the end of the sixteenth and the start of the nineteenth century. If Van Lennep does not really exploit this potential—the Republic functions in his book rather as a framework than as an agent— Groen does. In the relevant parts of his Handboek, the ‘Republic’—or its synonym, the ‘Commonwealth’—becomes by far the most important collective agent. In the Republic, thus he states on the first page of his book, the pre-existing ‘folk-life’ (volksleven) ‘has revealed itself most gloriously’, even if it had been forced to retreat to the northern part of the Dutch territory. Most notably when dealing with international relations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he constantly stages the Repub- lic as acting for the Netherlands. On the other hand, he is also quick to criticize this Republic when it behaved lazily, passively (G/514) or badly (G/620).

Agents Outside and Within the Nation In each of the four books, the main historical agents are individual rather than collective. The actions of the princes and other political actors deter- mine the story in what can be seen as traditional dynastic and political 80 marnix beyen histories. These political agents, however, do not fundamentally threaten the homogeneity of the national framework. On the contrary, without their actions, the population’s natural tendency to entropy would have prevented the rise of national unity. Especially in Van Lennep’s Geschie- denis, this storyline becomes apparent: the potential national unity within the Netherlands is only realised because of the action of the princes. He therefore essentially recounts the consecutive vicissitudes of the Counts of Holland, the Dukes of Burgundy, and the Princes of Orange, against the background of a Dutch people that gradually becomes more homogeneous. In this storyline, the politics of resilient cities or provinces appear as dissidences without a very strong impact. This last remark holds equally true for Groen, who castigates ‘the population of the cities’, which, ‘after having transgressed the limits of justified freedom, knew no limits of excess any more’ (G/51). When dealing with the Republic, he is also severe about the attempts of the County of Hol- land to weaken the unity of the Republic (e.g. G/169–170 and 196). On the other hand, Groen does introduce a very powerful agent which is totally absent from Van Lennep’s history: God. On the first very page of the Hand- boek, he asserts that the study of history is useful because ‘it reveals God’s almightiness, wisdom, justice, and mercy in the vicissitudes of a sinful humanity’ (G/1). In theory, God is of course a non-national agent, but in Groen’s text, he functions as a strong ally rather than a competitor of the Dutch nation. God created the Netherlands, provided it with ‘mild blessings’ (G/54), planted his church on its territory and, most importantly, favoured the state that was created to maintain this church (G/83). The divine ‘super-agency’, therefore, forms the background against which the Dutch nation could evolve into a homogeneous and powerful agent. In spite of their differences, Groen’s and Van Lennep’s histories have in common that they leave little room for intermediate agents between the individual prince and the people. In that respect, their distinctness from the two Belgian texts is noteworthy. Particularly in Moke’s Abrégé, these intermediate agents, especially the provinces and the towns, are extremely important. In most cases, Moke describes the actions of these agents sepa- rately (e.g. ‘La ville de Bruges se révolta’, M/90; cf. M/112, 117, 154), but he also loads plural entities like ‘les villes’ or ‘nos provinces’ with agency. The same ‘indirect agency’, which I discussed earlier with regard to ‘le peuple’, can also be detected in Moke’s treatment of the towns (M/67; J/106). For Juste and Moke, the importance of the towns in Belgian history is a reason for national pride (explicitly so in J/iii, 108). Nonetheless, by stressing the importance of intermediate entities, these Belgian historians also who is the nation and what does it do? 81 allowed for a plural agency. Hence, their attempts to create the image of a homogeneous and active historical nation were less stable than those of Groen and Van Lennep. This can be illustrated by a passage taken from Moke’s description of the Battle of the Golden Spurs (1302): ‘Les Flamands attendirent l’ennemi de pied ferme dans la plaine de Groeninge [. . .]. La brillante cavalerie française se précipita sur les piques des bataillons belges sans parvenir à enfoncer leurs rangs.’ (M/90) The adjective ‘Belgian’ by which Moke tries to nationalize this episode cannot conceal that the true agency in the passage resides with the Flemings. Moreover, this plurality of agency does not disappear in the later parts of the Abrégé. Thus, after the already quoted sentence, ‘Ce fut le signal du soulèvement de la Belgique entière’, Moke adds, ‘Toute la Flandre chasse les Autrichiens. Le peuple de Bruxelles les attaque dans les rues et les force à la retraite’ (M/177). Once more, the strongest agency is situated with the provinces and the towns.

We, the (Historical) Nation In the four texts considered in this chapter, the first person plural functions in different ways. In Groen’s Handboek, it is only marginal. The ‘we’ he does use is most often a ‘present-day we’, through which he associates with his readership in order to look back on a common past (‘our history’, G/17, 83; ‘our Fathers’, G/85). Only once does he use a first person plural through which he creates a transhistorical bond with both his readership and the historical nation (G/283: ‘the glory of our statesmen and our sea- men’). This near absence of the first person plural is congruent with the academic character of the text, which required distance rather than proximity between author and reader. Because of the consistency of his other homogenizing strategies, however, Groen did not need this grammatical form in order to nationalize his story. The first person plural appears more frequently in the Belgian books. Moke uses the form above all in a rather formal way, applying it not so much to persons as to geographical entities (‘nos provinces’). Only when he writes about the French revolutionary period—a period which belongs to his ‘communicative memory’—does he revert to a ‘historical we’, through which he associates with the historical actors he describes. He even uses, in that context, a personal pronoun, through which he seems to transpose himself into the action he describes: ‘Les conquérants avaient déjà supprimé toutes nos institutions et nous imposèrent les leurs’ (M/180, emphasis added). Juste expresses in the introduction his wish to 82 marnix beyen

appropriate the national past by using a ‘present-day we’: ‘À nous Woerin- gen, Courtrai, Mons-en-Puelle, l’Ecluse, Guinegate! À nous Jérusalem et Constantinople!’, he exclaims with pride. Nevertheless, he only starts using this form in a transhistorical way when he is dealing with the end of the thirteenth century ( J/146). From that moment on, the transhistorical use of the first person plural appears frequently, and is also applied to groups of persons ( J/149, 159), as well as to geographical entities ( J/494) and buildings ( J/560). When he describes the communal movement of the twelfth century, Juste reverts to the more general expression ‘nos pères’, to whom he attributes a strong agency ( J/107). Only in one place, however, does he fully identify with his historical actors through the use of an ‘historical we’. With regard to the reign of Philip the Handsome, he writes, ‘L’état de nos relations avec les puissances voisines était alors rassurant; l’empire nous couvrait de sa protection’ ( J/320, emphasis added). If the ‘historical we’ is extremely rare in Moke’s and Juste’s texts, it recurs often in Van Lennep’s Geschiedenis, albeit only from the seventeenth century onwards. Moreover, Van Lennep is the only one to use this form in an active sense, thus making ‘we’ into the agent of the story. Most of these cases occur in passages dealing with international relations, both of a military and diplomatic kind (e.g. L II/265: ‘the decisive victory, which we won at sea’, emphasis added; and L III/52, 67, 70, 116, 127, 258, 275; L IV/144, 155). With this ‘historical we’ in an active tense, Van Lennep probably reached the summit of all discursive strategies for nationalizing the past, since it offered homogenization as well as agency and identification.

Conclusion Throughout the analysis, a striking difference between the Belgian and the Dutch texts emerged. The two Dutch texts succeeded in conveying to their readers, through different discursive strategies, the image of a relatively homogeneous and active nation with which they could identify. The attempts of the two Belgian authors to reach that goal were less successful, since their image of the nation allowed for more plurality, and they situated the agency of their stories less univocally in ‘the nation’. If Anton van der Lem rightly asserts that historians like Moke ‘fell into the trap of romantic panegyric’, this idealization contributed more to the sense of plurality than to a homogenization of the historical nation.18

18 A. van der Lem, ‘Het nationale epos. Geschiedenis in één greep’, in J. Tollebeek, T. Verschaffel and L.H.M. Wessels (eds.), De palimpsest. Geschiedschrijving in de Nederlan- den 1500–2000 (Hilversum, Verloren, 1996), pp. 177–196, esp. p. 179. who is the nation and what does it do? 83

These conclusions, based on the pragmatic analysis of only four national histories, cannot simply be extrapolated to the entire Dutch and Belgian national historiography of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, they con- firm the results of a broader narrative analysis carried out elsewhere.19 In Belgium, the historiography emanated from an enthusiastic elite which was trying to organize a liberal state, but was confronted with the paradox of that project. Indeed the liberalism of the Belgian revolutionary project contained a strong anti-state component. This central paradox of Belgian state-building seems to have trickled down into the national historiography of the period, which in spite of all its patriotism refrained from presenting a homogeneous nation as its driving force. The uncertainties which Evert Peeters has rightly detected in Belgian romantic historiography were not simply a reflection of the more general instability accompanying the transition from ancien régime to modernity.20 At the very least they were also caused by the specificity of the Belgian political project. If Dutch patriotism took a severe knock at the hands of the Belgian secession, the process of nation and state-building was simplified by that event. It could take shape around a relatively broad, more or less conservative consensus, which centered around the House of Orange and the state centralism it embodied.21 It was precisely this centralism which was able to save the Netherlands from the periods of chaos it had known in the past. In this context, homogenizing readings of the past flourished in different segments of the Dutch ideological landscape. Essentialist notions about ‘the people’ and idealizations of the Dutch Republic found a more fertile breeding ground in this intellectual context than in the patriotic atmosphere of freshly independent Belgium.

19 Notably in M. Beyen and B. Majerus, ‘Weak and Strong Nations in the Low Countries. National Historiography and its ‘Others’ in Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in S. Berger and K. Lorenz (eds.), The Contested Nation. Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 283–310. 20 E. Peeters, Het labyrint van het verleden. Natie, vrijheid en geweld in de Belgische geschiedschrijving (1787–1850) (Leuven, Universitaire Pers Leuven, 2003), p. 161. 21 See, for example, L. Wils, ‘Het Verenigd Koninkrijk van Koning Willem I (1815–1830) en de natievorming’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlan- den, 112 (1997), pp. 502–16. 84 marnix beyen

References

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Verschueren, J., Ideology in Language Use. Pragmatic Guidelines for Empirical Research (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012). White, H., The Content of the Form. Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Bal- timore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). White, H., Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Balti- more, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). Wils, L., ‘Het Verenigd Koninkrijk van Koning Willem I (1815–1830) en de natievorming’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 112 (1997), pp. 502–16. Zupnik, Y.-J., ‘A Pragmatic Analysis of the Use of Person Deixis in Political Discourse’, Journal of Pragmatics, 21/iv (1994), pp. 339–383.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE COLONIES IN DUTCH NATIONAL MUSEUMS FOR ART AND HISTORY (1800–1885)

Ellinoor Bergvelt

This chapter considers the question of whether the culture of the ‘colonies’ was a subject of interest in nineteenth-century Dutch museums of art and history, both at the level of government policy and within the institutions themselves. In this context the terms ‘colonies’ and ‘colonial’ refer to those non-European territories with which the Dutch had had contact from the start of the seventeenth century. The most important ones were the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia) and the West Indies—Surinam or Dutch Guiana, bordering on British and French Guiana. To answer the question we must make a distinction between history and art, as was done at the time. Objects relating to the history of the country were considered to be of less importance than art objects (mainly paintings), to judge from the amount of money that was spent on them.1 No Dutch museum offered a proper overview of Dutch history in general until the 1930s,2 let alone of the history of the colonies or of the Dutch as colonizers. The art objects of the colonies were displayed not in art

1 See E. Bergvelt, Pantheon der Gouden Eeuw. Van Nationale Konst-Gallerij tot Rijksmu- seum van Schilderijen (1798–1896) (Zwolle, Waanders, 1998), which discusses the money spent on both the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Royal Cabinet of Paintings in the Mauritshuis at The Hague. See for an English summary E. Bergvelt, ‘Potgieter’s “Rijksmu- seum” and the Public Presentation of Dutch History in the National Museum (1800–1844)’, in L. Jensen, J. Leerssen and M. Mathijsen (eds.), Free Access to the Past. Romanticism, Cultural Heritage and the Nation (Leiden, Brill, 2010), pp. 171–195. For an overview of the budget for the arts and sciences in general in the Netherlands in the period 1815–1848, see A. Hoogenboom, ‘De Rijksoverheid en de moderne beeldende kunst in Nederland 1795–1848’, Kunst en beleid in Nederland, 1 (1985), pp. 267–268; and for the period 1848– 1918, J. Hart, ‘Kunst, regeringszaak? De ontwikkeling van het regeringsbeleid ten aanzien van de eigentijdse beeldende kunst in Nederland 1848–1918’, Kunst en beleid in Nederland, 3 (1988), pp. 142–145. 2 In the Rijksmuseum the Department of Dutch History opened in 1937 and the Depart- ment of Maritime History in 1931: J. Bos, ‘ “De geschiedenis is vastgelegd in boeken, niet in musea”. Van planvorming tot realisatie. Het Nederland Museum voor Geschiedenis in het Rijksmuseum, 1922–1939’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum, 45 (1997), pp. 284–290 (maritime history) and pp. 292–295 (Dutch history). 88 ellinoor bergvelt museums in combination with European painting or sculpture, but in two other types of repository: contemporary objects in ethnographical museums and older ones in the museum of antiquities.3 The museums to be discussed here are the Rijksmuseum (and its immediate predecessors), the Museum of Modern Art in Pavilion Welgelegen near Haarlem (1838–1885) and two museums which were founded in 1816 and from 1821 were both located in the Mauritshuis at The Hague: the Royal Cabinet of Paintings and the Royal Cabinet of Rarities.4

1800–1806 The history of national museums in the Netherlands begins in 1800 with the National Art Gallery in the Huis ten Bosch (House in the Woods), a former palace of the princes of Orange, and with the remains of the collections, mainly paintings, of the Orange family (see Figure 4.1).5 This first national museum was established by the Batavian Republic, a sister state of the young French Republic. Since the middle of the eighteenth century the Dutch economy had been in decline, so the Batavian Republic was relatively poor. Nor was it helped by having to pay millions of guilders to the French for its ‘liberation’. Nevertheless, there was some money available

3 This, at any rate, was the plan (c. 1828) of Caspar Reuvens, director of the Royal Cab- inet of Antiquities in Leiden, to display the ‘Javaanse beelden’ (Javanese sculptures) in the middle of his museum: M. Hoijtink, ‘Caspar J.C. Reuvens en de Musea van Oudheden in Europa (1800–1840)’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2009), p. 80, Fig. 26 (and cover). 4 The history of the Royal Cabinet of Rarities has yet to be written and only recently have some of the historical and ethnological objects in the collection been studied. For the Chinese collections, see J. van Campen, De Haagse jurist Jean Theodore Royer (1737– 1807) en zijn verzameling Chinese voorwerpen (Hilversum, Verloren, 2000). For the Japa- nese and other ethnographic collections, R.A.H.D. Effert, Volkenkundig verzamelen. Het Koninklijk Kabinet van Zeldzaamheden en het Rijks Ethnographisch Museum 1816–1883 (PhD thesis, Leiden University, 2003); R. Effert, Royal Cabinets and Auxiliary Branches. Origins of the National Museum of Ethnology 1816–1883 (Leiden, Research School CNWS, 2008); and R. Effert, ‘The Royal Cabinet of Curiosities and the National Museum of Ethnography in the Nineteenth Century: from the Belief in the Superiority of Western Civilization to Compara- tive Ethnography’, in E. Bergvelt et al. (eds.), Museale Spezialisierung und Nationalisierung ab 1830. Das Neue Museum im internationalen Kontext/Specialisation and Consolidation of the National Museum after 1830. The Neue Museum in Berlin in International Context (Ber- liner Schriftenreihe zur Museumsforschung, vol. 29; Berlin, G + H Verlag, 2011), pp. 153–64. For the applied arts, L. Tibbe, ‘ “Kunstkammer” Objects in Museums of Industrial Arts: Banishment or Useful Destination?’, in Bergvelt et al. (eds.), Museale Spezialisierung, pp. 177–89. 5 For the National Art Gallery and its foundation, see F. Grijzenhout, ‘19 november 1798: de stichtingsdatum van het Rijksmuseum’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum, 34 (1986), pp. 215–219; also Bergvelt, Pantheon, pp. 28–54. the colonies in dutch national museums 89

Figure 4.1. Art Museums: Overview of numbers of old and contemporary paintings acquired and total expenditure in guilders. Art Museums Number of old master + Total expenditure in f contemporary paintings acquired

National Art Gallery, 129 + 5 65,040 The Hague (1800–1806)

King Louis Napoleon (1806–1810)

Royal Museum, 200 + 51 225,000 Amsterdam

King Willem I (1815–1840)

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 66 + 87 78,815 (1814–1840) [30,775 from Willem I] Royal Cabinet of Paintings, 220 + 185 295,000 Mauritshuis, The Hague [65,000 from Willem I] (1816–1840) Museums in Southern 14,000 Netherlands Antwerp 9,000 Leuven 5,000

for the national museum. That money was used partly for Dutch history and partly for the art department; some rooms of the gallery were devoted to history and others to art. Although the museum tried to purchase portraits of opponents of the House of Orange, the paintings on the museum walls could not compete with the mausoleum of one of the princes of Orange: the Oranjezaal, or Orange room, a major monument of seventeenth-century painting, decorated by Flemish and Dutch artists to honour the memory of the stadholder Frederick Henry after his untimely death in 1647. It was somewhat ironical that in the Batavian national museum memories of the Orange family, symbols of the ancien régime, were so 90 ellinoor bergvelt prominent not only in the paintings but also in this room, the culmination of the tour through the museum which could be undertaken only under the guidance of the curator. The display of Dutch history in nineteenth-century museums was not as we would expect it to be today, with objects pertaining to one subject combined together. The objects relating to the seventeenth-century admiral Michiel de Ruyter, for instance, were shown in different rooms: three-dimensional objects (a cannon and two swords) were located in the so-called ‘Monument Room’, and his painted portrait, with portraits of other admirals and other scenes of Dutch history, in the first room that was devoted to Dutch history. In its early days the museum had few objects which evoked the life of the colonies.6 There were just three paintings and three objects that could—in the broadest sense—be related to Dutch adventures overseas. A picture of St. Francis at the foot of the cross, nowadays identified as ‘in the style of Van Dyck’, was supposed to have been captured by the Dutch admiral Piet Hein in the Caribbean together with the Spanish silver fleet in 1628.7 No doubt this would have been mentioned by the curator in the course of his tour of the gallery. In one of the other rooms of the art department hung two paintings by Melchior d’Hondecoeter, depicting all kinds of non-European birds and other animals from the zoo of the former stadholder.8 These paintings had previously decorated Soestdijk, one of the other Orange palaces.9 In the Monument Room, besides the cannon and swords already mentioned, gold, silver and stone objects were on show. Captured in 1765 in Candia, Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka), they had been presented to the stadholder. After his flight from the Netherlands in 1795 they were handed over by the French to representatives of the Batavian Republic. These objects could indeed have been used to convey something of the indigenous culture of the colonies, but instead they were used to fit into quite another, more European, tale about Admiral de Ruyter, who had died in the Mediterranean and to whom the cannon and swords were thought to

6 P.J.J. van Thiel, ‘De inrichting van de Nationale Konst-Gallerij in het openingsjaar 1800’, Oud Holland, 95 (1981), pp. 170–227. 7 Van Thiel, ‘Inrichting 1800’, pp. 191–192 (no. 64 ‘Crucifix veurovering van P.P. Hein’, RM, SK-A-104). 8 M. Rikken, Melchior d’Hondecoeter. Bird Painter (Amsterdam, Rĳksmuseum/Nieuw Amsterdam, 2008). 9 Van Thiel, ‘Inrichting 1800’, p. 204 (no. 148 ‘Levendig Gevogelte door Hondecoeter’ (Living birds by Hondecoeter), RM, SK-A-173); pp. 206–207 (no. 162 ‘Levendige en Doode Vogels door M. d. Hondekoeter’ (Living and dead birds by Hondecoeter), RM, SK-A-170). the colonies in dutch national museums 91 have belonged. In the thirty-odd years since their capture in Sri Lanka, their provenance had been completely forgotten and a new one invented.10 Later, in 1804, some other objects relating to Admiral Piet Hein and the Spanish silver fleet were handed over by the West India Company.11 In the period of the Batavian Republic, then, there was just one museum in which a handful of pictures and other objects relating to colonial history were on display, drawn partly from the collections of the stadholder and partly from the West India Company. Many more colonial objects had once been in the stadholder’s possession. In his natural history collections there had been animals and plants from faraway regions, like the ones depicted by Melchior d’Hondecoeter. Ethnographical objects such as krisses, daggers indigenous to the Dutch East Indies and presented to the stadholder as diplomatic gifts, had been displayed in public from about 1759, when the first rooms of the stadholder’s gallery were opened, until 1795, when the French came.12 This combination of natural and ethnographical objects had been customary in princely collections since the sixteenth century. In most cases these objects found their way to more specialized public collections during the process of modernization of museums in the nineteenth century.13 In 1795 the most important collections of the stadholder were taken to Paris. After the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo some, though not all, of the paintings were returned; and a rather larger proportion of the natural history collections and of related non-European artefacts remained in Paris.14 The small part of their collection that the Orange family had taken

10 Van Thiel, ‘Inrichting 1800’, pp. 215–217 (no. 212 ‘Sabels van M. de Ruiter’ (De Ruiter’s sabres), RM, NM-560 and NM-7112); p. 219 (no. 219 ‘goud en zilver Kanon’ (gold and silver cannon), with the catalogue entry of 1801: ‘Een magnifiek rijk met goud en zilver opgelegd stuk kanon, zijnde een present van den keizer van Tunis aan den Staat, overgebracht door den Admiraal de Ruiter’ (A magnificent cannon richly inlaid with gold and silver, being a gift to the state from the bey of Tunis, conveyed by Admiral de Ruiter)). 11 T.H. Lunsingh Scheurleer, ‘Het Koninklijk Kabinet van Zeldzaamheden en zijn bete kenis voor het Rijksmuseum’, Oudheidkundig Jaarboek. Bulletin van den Nederlandschen Oudheidkundigen Bond, 4th series, 13/2–4 (1946), p. 53. 12 L. Smeets, ‘Door kunst gemaakt. De verzameling zeldzaamheden van Stadhouder Willem V’ (unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2010). 13 For instance, in the British Museum (open since 1759) collections of natural and manmade objects were combined until the opening of the Natural History Museum in 1881. There are still museums in which the artefacts of non-European peoples are combined with natural history collections, as in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. 14 For the return of the natural history collections, see F.J.J.M. Pieters, ‘Het schatrijke Naturaliënkabinet van stadhouder Willem V onder directoraat van topverzamelaar Arnout Vosmaer’, in B.C. Sliggers and M.H. Besselink (eds.), Het verdwenen museum. Natuurhis- 92 ellinoor bergvelt with them on their flight to England, mainly jewelry, included Indian pieces from Surat.15

1806–1810 During the period of the Kingdom of Holland (1806–1810) Louis Napoleon founded further museums: a Coin Cabinet, which in 1810 was combined with the Royal (previously the National Batavian) Library, and also gardens with collections of animals and plants and a Cabinet of Zoology and Botany (see Figure 4.2). The director of the gardens and of the Cabinet was C.G.C. Reinwardt, professor of various sciences at Harderwijk and Amsterdam. The collections ended up as the Museum of Natural History in Leiden, now called Naturalis. The Batavian museum for art and history—the National Art Gallery— was moved in 1808 to Amsterdam where it became the Royal Museum and was housed in the Royal Palace, previously Amsterdam town hall. Although Louis Napoleon ordered that paintings on historical subjects should be purchased for the museum, that was not what happened. Instead the museum came to specialize in Dutch (and to a lesser extent Flemish) paintings of the seventeenth century that were acquired for artistic reasons. The king purchased two collections of typically Dutch pictures by painters such as Gerard Terborch and Jan Steen.16 In these purchases there was certainly no emphasis on paintings of subjects from non-European countries.

torische verzamelingen 1750–1850 (Blaricum, V+K Publishing/Haarlem, Teylers Museum 2002), pp. 20–44. For non-European artefacts in the stadholder’s collection, see Van Campen, Jean Theodore Royer, pp. 208–215. A coral ‘Chinese chess set’ from this collection was found in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Cabinet des médailles et antiques: ibid., pp. 214–215, Fig. 93. 15 This Indian jewelry is now in the Rijksmuseum: Van Campen, Jean Theodore Royer, p. 214. 16 For the two collections, see T. Zeedijk, ‘ “Tot voordeel en Genoegen”: de schilde rijenverzameling van Gerrit van der Pot van Groeneveld’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum, 55 (2007), pp. 115–207; T.L.J. Verroen, ‘ “Een verstandig ryk man”: de achttiende-eeuwse verzamelaar Adriaan Leonard van Heteren’, in Achttiende-eeuwse kunst in de Nederlan- den (Leids Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 1985; Delft, Delftsche Uitgevers Maatschappĳ, 1987), pp. 17–61. See also F. Grijzenhout, Een Koninklijk Museum. Lodewijk Napoleon en het Rijksmuseum 1806–1810 (Zwolle, Waanders/Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, 2000); and, for an overview of the cultural policy of Louis Napoleon, E. Bergvelt, ‘Lodewijk Napoleon, de levende meesters en het Koninklijk Museum (1806–1810)’, in E. Koolhaas-Grosfeld et al. (ed.), Lodewijk Napoleon en de kunsten in het Koninkrijk Holland (Nederlands Kunsthisto- risch Jaarboek, 56/57, 2005–2006; Zwolle, Waanders, 2007), pp. 257–99. the colonies in dutch national museums 93

Figure 4.2. Non-art Museums under Willem I: Expenditure on acquisitions and expeditions in guilders. Non-art Museums Expenditure on acquisitions and expeditions in f [Founded by King Louis Napoleon:] 1809 Coin Cabinet, combined with Royal Library in 1810

King Willem I: 163,000 1816 Koninklijk Penningkabinet [125,000 from Willem I] (Royal Cabinet of Coins and Medals)

[Founded by King Louis Napoleon:] 1808 Botanical and Zoological Gardens and Cabinet for Natural History Director C.G.C. Reinwardt

King Willem I: 1820 Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie (National Museum of Natural History) Scientific expedition to the Dutch East Indies to collect flora and 1820 Natuurkundige Commissie fauna: (Committee for Natural History) 300,000

Founded by King Willem I: 1818 Archeologisch Kabinet 210,000 (Archaeological Cabinet) [6,470.40 from Willem I] + 47,000 (expeditions) Founded by King Willem I: 1816 Koninklijk Kabinet van Zeldzaamheden 132,000 (Royal Cabinet of Rarities) [4,262.75 from Willem I] (30,000 Cock Blomhoff) (36,000 Overmeer Fisscher) (58,500 Siebold) (1,500 Macklot-Indonesia) 94 ellinoor bergvelt

1810–1840 Between 1810 and 1813 the Netherlands became part of the French Empire, and Indonesia came under British rule (1811–1816),17 after which the Dutch East Indies really became a Dutch colony until the end of the Second World War. Under King Willem I of Orange (1815–1840), the museums of Louis Napoleon continued to exist and more were added (see Figure 4.2): for coins and medals, rarities, archaeology, and natural history,18 besides a second art museum, the Royal Cabinet of Paintings at The Hague. If the number of words used by the king in the decrees establishing these museums is indicative of the relative importance he attached to them, the art museums seem to have interested him least and the natural history collections most.19 Early in 1815 Willem I had decided that an expedition led by Reinwardt, mentioned above as the director of Louis Napoleon’s gardens and Cabinet for Natural History, should go to the Dutch East Indies. The ships reached Java in April 1816.20 The expedition was to map the colonial possessions and survey local minerals, flora and fauna.21 The questionnaire that

17 Research (including drawings) was commissioned by Nicolaas Engelhard (1761–1831), previously governor of the north-east coast of Java. This information was used by the Brit- ish governor-general Stamford Raffles in his book about Java: T.S. Raffles, The History of Java, 2 vols. (London, Black, Parbury and Allan/Murray, 1817). 18 Although a Cabinet for Natural History had been founded by Louis Napoleon in 1808, the Museum of Natural History at Leiden is usually said to have begun in 1820, which could be considered an Orangist view of the history of this institution. For the start of the Cabi- net and ‘Jardin du Roi’ in Pavillion Welgelegen, see E. van der Pool-Stofkoper, ‘Verwachting en werkelijkheid: parken en tuinen van het domein Welgelegen in de periode 1808–1832’, in Paviljoen Welgelegen 1789–1989. Van buitenplaats van de bankier Hope tot zetel van de pro- vincie Noord-Holland (Haarlem, Schuyt, 1989), pp. 125–129; and A. Gĳzen, ’s Rĳks museum van natuurlĳke historie 1820–1915 (Rotterdam, Brusse, 1938). 19 The museum which started as the National Art Gallery, and was moved to Amster- dam by Louis Napoleon in 1808, was reinstated by Willem I in 1814: Royal Decree of 3 September 1814 no. 28, Rijksarchief Noord-Holland, Haarlem, Archief van het Rijksmu- seum (access number 476), Ingekomen Stukken, inv. 5, no. 25. See also Royal Decree of 26 June 1816 no. 104, establishing the Royal Cabinet of Paintings in The Hague and appointing an honorary director: Rijksarchief Zuid-Holland, The Hague, Archief van het Mauritshuis, inv. 1, no. 1, O. Repelaer van Driel (commissioner general of the Ministry of Education, Arts and Sciences) to J. Steengracht van Oostcapelle (honorary director of the Royal Cabinet of Paintings), 1 July 1816, appendix (no. 1649). 20 Royal Decree of 11 January 1815: W.H. de Vriese (ed.), Reis naar het oostelijk gedeelte van den Indischen Archipel in het jaar 1821 door C.G.C. Reinwardt. Uit zijne nagelaten aanteekeningen opgesteld, met een levensberigt en bijlagen vermeerderd (Amsterdam, Frederik Muller, 1858), pp. 33–36. 21 For mapping in this colonial sense, see B. Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflec- tions on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised ed. (London/New York, Verso, 1991), pp. 163–185. the colonies in dutch national museums 95

Reinwardt took with him began with the mapping of the land itself (I), moving on to population (II) and products (III), in the form of minerals (A), plants (B) and animals (C). Then followed questions about the cultivation and processing of raw materials (IV), samples that were to be sent to the Netherlands (V), commerce with other countries and with the other colonial territories in the East (VI). Finally, there were questions about the arts and sciences (VII), their situation in general (1) and about the school system (2). They included questions about the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences, founded in 1778: whether it was still active (3) and about its past publications, both those printed in Batavia (4) and in other colonies in the East (5 and 6).22 The arts and sciences are of course mentioned, but even in section VII of Reinwardt’s instructions the main emphasis was on the economy. A botanical garden was founded at Bogor, south of Batavia, and collections of material were sent back to the Netherlands where they became part of the existing foundations of Louis Napoleon such as the Amster- dam Cabinet for Natural History, which was later moved to Leiden.23 The customs and languages of Java, its ways of thinking, religion and forms of government were to be studied as well. Artists were sent out to make drawings not only of animals and plants but of cultural life too.24 How- ever, the emphasis in the questionnaire was on information that could be used to further trade and industry. Arts and sciences were considered to be of much less importance, at least in the policy of Willem I. Even in the Verhandelingen, or Proceedings, of the Batavian Society, appearing from 1781 onwards, not many articles seem to have been published about purely cultural subjects.25

22 In the appendix very elaborate questions were asked, which were to be answered during the two years that Reinwardt was to spend in Java: De Vriese (ed.), Reis Indischen Archipel, pp. 37–48. 23 Ibid., art. 4, p. 34. 24 The artists were A.J. Bik, T. Bik and Antoine Payen: ibid., pp. 49–50. For some of their drawings, see P.H. Pott, Naar wijder horizon. Kaleidoscoop op ons beeld van de buitenwereld (The Hague, Mouton, 1962), pp. 94–99; and for Payen in particular, M.-O. Scalliet, Antoine Payen. Peintre des Indes Orientales. Vie et écrits d’un artiste du XIXe siècle (1792–1853) (PhD thesis, Leiden University, 1995; Leiden, Research School CNWS, 1995). 25 In the five first volumes of the Verhandelingen (1781–1827) articles were written about inoculation and illnesses in general, about sugar-mills and other crops, much about flora and fauna, besides word-lists for local languages and notes on calendars and currency in use in the Far East, including Japan, China and India. Descriptions of the islands of the archipelago sometimes mention the dress of indigenous peoples. But only later in the nineteenth century did a more sustained interest in the culture and cultural history of the region develop. 96 ellinoor bergvelt

Instead of remaining a royal institution intended to enhance the status of the king (as the collections of the eighteenth-century stadholders had been), the Cabinet for Natural History of Louis Napoleon now became part of the colonial project of government and king, of which the founding of the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij (Netherlands Trade Company) in 1824 was another important example. The Natural History Museum of Willem I became a scientific institution, but always with an economic purpose: which plants or animals could be exploited commercially? Although objects from Java entered the collections of several national museums of natural history or ethnography, none of them was called ‘colonial’.26 Tentatively, it could be suggested that only after the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, when European countries began showing off and competing with one another as colonial powers, did the word ‘colonial’ begin to gain currency in the Netherlands. Another new foundation was the Archaeological Cabinet established at Leiden in 1818, predecessor of the Royal Cabinet of Antiquities (and of today’s Rijksmuseum van Oudheden). As with the king’s natural history projects, a great deal of money was spent on this institution and it seems that he favoured archaeological objects more than European paintings. This appears, for example, from the fact that the most expensive object purchased during the nineteenth century for any national museum was an antique cameo dating from the time of Constantine the Great (c. 315 AD).27 In contrast to what is generally believed, Willem I made no attempt to acquire seventeenth-century Dutch paintings for the national museums, but rather antiquities and international paintings.28 The antiquities came primarily from European soil. Nevertheless—as by-product of the botany collections brought back from Indonesia—three Indonesian

26 The first institution to be called ‘Colonial Museum’, established in Pavilion Welgelegen near Haarlem in 1871, was the initiative not of the government but of the private Maatschappij voor Nijverheid en Handel (Company for Industry and Trade): see M.W. Kok, ‘De musea in Paviljoen Welgelegen’, in Paviljoen Welgelegen, pp. 142–145; D.A.P. van Duuren, 125 jaar verzamelen (Amsterdam, Tropenmuseum, 1990). 27 Acquired in 1823 for the Royal Coin Cabinet, the cameo was purchased by the king for 50.000 guilders, which was more than the two most expensive Dutch seventeenth- century paintings acquired during the nineteenth century: Rembrandt’s Anatomy lesson of Dr. Tulp (32.000 guilders, 1828; Mauritshuis) and Vermeer’s Loveletter (45.000 guilders, 1893; Rijksmuseum): Bergvelt, Pantheon, p. 94. 28 E. Bergvelt, ‘Koning Willem I als verzamelaar, opdrachtgever en weldoener van de Noordnederlandse musea’, in C.A. Tamse and E. Witte (eds.), Staats- en natievorming in Willem I’s koninkrijk (1815–1830) (Brussels, Vubpress/Baarn, Bosch and Keuning, 1992), pp. 261–285; Bergvelt, ‘Potgieter’s “Rijksmuseum”, pp. 186–189, 192–195. the colonies in dutch national museums 97 antique sculptures were also sent over by Reinwardt to the Third Depart- ment (for classical languages) of the Royal Dutch Institute of Arts and Sci- ences. Interestingly, they were not sent to the Fourth Department (for the Fine, i.e. European, Arts). One of the sculptures is still in the Trippenhuis, the seat of the Institute (where its modern successor, the Royal Academy of Sciences, is based), one was returned to Indonesia in the twentieth century, and one is still in the Leiden Museum Volkenkunde, the National Museum of Ethnology.29 Also newly established—two years before the Archaeological Cabinet— was the Royal Cabinet of Rarities, a rather peculiar and somewhat old- fashioned institution. While nineteenth-century foundations tended to be specialized, here it looked as if the eighteenth century was not yet over. In its five rooms the museum showed a curious combination of objects from China (in two rooms), Japan (the third and central room) and other parts of the world (the fourth), besides objects relating to Dutch history and the applied arts (the fifth). What we can call ‘colonial’ objects, from the Dutch East Indies and Surinam, but also from South Africa (‘Hotten- totten’), Australia and Turkey, were combined in the fourth room with, for instance, Roman portrait-medals and a kayak from Iceland suspended from the ceiling.30 The Cabinet of Rarities began with a Chinese collection, a bequest made in 1814 by Mrs Royer ‘to whoever from the House of Orange should be the first to return and set foot on Dutch soil’.31 Her husband, Jean Theodore Royer, had tried to compile a Chinese dictionary and had formed this collection, which consisted of sculptures, vases, objects of gold and silver, coins, porcelain, paintings, prints and drawings, writing utensils and other tools, instruments, models of fruits and insects, lacquer ware, clothes and jewelry from China and Japan.

29 For the sculpture from the temple of Singasari and Payen’s drawing of it, see Pott, Naar wijder horizon, pp. 102–103. For the history of the three sculptures, see Hoijtink, ‘Reuvens’, pp. 105–114. 30 See the catalogues compiled by the director of the Cabinet of Rarities, R.P. van de Kasteele, after the collection had been transferred to the ground floor of the Mauritshuis in 1821: Handleiding tot de bezigtiging van het Koninklijk Kabinet van Zeldzaamheden op Mauritshuis, in ’s Gravenhage ([The Hague], 1823); Korte handleiding ter bezigtiging der verzameling van zeldzaamheden in het Koninklijk Kabinet op het Mauritshuis in ’s Graven- hage [429 nos.] ([The Hague], s.a.); Korte handleiding ter bezigtiging der verzameling van zeldzaamheden in het Koninklijk Kabinet op het Mauritshuis in ’s Gravenhage [767 nos.] (The Hague, s.a.). Cf. C. van Dijk, ‘Tussen koloniale handel en wetenschap. De volkenkundige musea in de negentiende eeuw’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 105 (1992), pp. 346–366; Effert, ‘The Royal Cabinet of Curiosities’. 31 This rather dramatic formulation seems to have been a later invention of the director of the Royal Cabinet of Rarities: Van Campen, Jean Theodore Royer, p. 50, n. 116. 98 ellinoor bergvelt

Since the seventeenth century the Dutch had developed a special relationship with Japan through the trading post at Deshima near Nagasaki, of which a model was on show in the central room of the Cabinet. No other country was allowed such a trading post. The Japanese collections had been brought together by European settlers in Deshima, of whom the last was the physician and scholar Philip von Siebold.32 Siebold’s collections gave an overview of contemporary customs and traditions in Japan, with for instance textiles, minerals, dolls and all kinds of models. It could be argued that those collections were directed to economic use, although one might wonder what direct economic use could have been made of some of the objects. It is nevertheless remarkable that on three occasions collections of Japanese objects were purchased, two of them after 1830 during the period of so-called ‘national indifference’, when for forty years other Dutch museums were largely starved of funds to make acquisitions.33 In the West during the nineteenth century the general view of world culture was hierarchical, with ‘primitive’ cultures having the lowest status and European ones the highest. In ethnographical museums artefacts were displayed so as to show the earlier stages of European culture, as it was assumed that all cultures had a comparable history and passed through the same stages. Somehow China and Japan did not fit into this hierarchy: in Berlin they were considered to be ‘Hochkulturen’, almost as high as European cultures and certainly higher than any other non- European culture.34 In his 1837 memorandum, pleading for the establishment of an ethnographical museum in the Netherlands, Siebold said

32 Three Japanese collections were purchased for the Cabinet of Rarities: in 1826 the collection of Jan Cock Blomhoff (Deshima 1809–1813; 1817–1824); in 1832 that of Johan Gerard Frederik van Overmeer Fisscher (Deshima 1820–29); and in 1831–1837 that of Philipp Franz von Siebold (Deshima 1823–1829): Effert, Volkenkundig verzamelen, pp. 64, 75 (Cock Blomhoff ), 98 (Overmeer Fisscher), 134–136 (Von Siebold). See also Effert, Royal cabinets, and S. Legêne, De bagage van Blomhoff en Van Breugel. Japan, Java, Tripoli en Suriname in de negentiende-eeuwse Nederlandse cultuur van het imperialisme (Amsterdam, Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, 1998). 33 Bergvelt, ‘Potgieter’s “Rijksmuseum” ’, pp. 189–195. 34 For the Berlin ethnological collections, see P. Bolz, ‘Wie man die aussereuropäische Welt in drei Räumen unterbringt: die ethnologische Sammlung im Neuen Museum’, and E. van Wezel, ‘Ein Paar Kinderschuhe der Menschheit: Die vaterländische und ethnogra- phische Abteilung im Neuen Museum’, both in Bergvelt et al. (eds.), Museale Spezialisierung, Museale Spezialisierung, pp. 119–35, 137–52. For Victorian Britain’s rather different view of the hierarchy of world cultures—distinguishing, for example, between ‘civilized’ Japan and ‘barbarous’ China and showing a growing appreciation of Indian, Islamic and Afri- can art and design—see J.M. MacKenzie (ed.), The Victorian Vision. Inventing New Britain (London, V&A Publications, 2001), pp. 138–9, 258–63, 297–333. the colonies in dutch national museums 99 that Japan had just taken a different course from Europe.35 In any case, it seems that the cultures of Japan and China were considered to be much higher than those of the Dutch East Indies,36 so the Dutch colonies were not assigned their own rooms in the Cabinet of Rarities. Contemporary Indonesian culture was seen by nineteenth-century Dutch scholars as less important than that of British India, as Islam had destroyed the original Hindu-Buddhist culture of Indonesia of which the ninth-century temple Borobudur was the leading example. This original Indonesian culture was considered much more important than what followed under Islamic influence.37 Meanwhile, the former Royal Museum was now called ’s-Rijksmuseum and moved from the Royal Palace to the Trippenhuis on the Kloveniers- burgwal, the largest canal house in Amsterdam at the time. It had to share the building with the Royal Dutch Institute of Arts and Sciences. In 1816, moreover, a second art museum was established to house the Orange family’s collection of paintings which—in part, at least—had been brought back from Paris following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. That museum was called Royal Cabinet of Paintings, and from 1822 was publicly displayed on the first floor of the Mauritshuis. The fact that there were now two national Dutch art museums reflects the two previous centres of power in the Republic: on the one hand the power of the stadholder in The Hague, and on the other hand the power of the city of Amsterdam, where the national museum also stemmed from the Batavian Republic

35 ‘Zelfs kunst en wetenschap, welke de Europeër tot nu toe alleen in zijne oude klas- sische landen te huis geloofde, zijn der van ons verst afgelegene volken niet vreemd; de geestesontwikkeling heeft daar slegts eene andere rigting als bij ons aangenomen’ (Even art and science, which up to now Europeans believed had originated only in their own classical lands, are to be found among the most faraway peoples; their intellectual development has simply taken a different direction from ours): P.F.B. von Siebold, ‘Kort begrip en ontwikkeling van de doelmatigheid en van het nut van een Ethnographisch Museum in Nederland’, in [C.C.F.M. le Roux], Overzicht van de geschiedenis van het Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde 1837–1937 (Leiden, Sijthoff, 1937), pp. 63–69. 36 This is suggested by the introductions to some of the museum’s catalogues. See, for instance, Van de Kasteele, Handleiding, 1823, pp. iii–iv: ‘waarbij wij hier met welgevallen op de eenvoudigheid der Zuidzee-eilanders nederzien, daar met verbazing aan de pracht en rijkdom, zoo wel als aan de vlijt en het kunstvermogen der Sinezen en Japanners denken’ (whereas here we are happy to look down at the simplicity of the South-Sea Islanders, there we are astonished by the splendour and richness of Chinese and Japanese culture, as well as by its technical ingenuity and artistsic sophistication). 37 See P. Lunsingh Scheurleer, ‘Collecting Javanese Antiquities. The appropriation of a newly discovered Hindu-Buddhist civilization’, in P. ter Keurs (ed.), Colonial Collections Revisited (Mededelingen van het Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde Leiden, 36; Leiden, CNWS Publications, 2007), pp. 71–114. 100 ellinoor bergvelt and from Louis Napoleon—all, in one way or another, enemies of the House of Orange. Only in the Netherlands do we see the strange phenomenon of two national art museums. During the years 1815 to 1830 no-one suggested combining the two in one building, still less amalgamating them with the museums of the Southern Netherlands.38 If there was a government project to foster cultural nationalism within the new Kingdom of the Netherlands, neither the king, his ministers or civil servants thought of using museums for this purpose. Nor was the public, or at least the collectors among them, yet thinking nationally. It took a long time before the central role of cities in cultural life yielded to a national way of thinking. Only after 1870 did private individuals begin to make bequests to the national art museums. Before that time they favoured the cities and founded municipal museums. In 1825 the Minister of Education, Arts and Sciences decided that all national museums collections should be rearranged. For instance, all three-dimensional objects were to be removed from the Rijksmuseum and transferred either to the Royal Cabinet of Archaeology in Leiden or to the Cabinet of Rarities at The Hague. The Rijksmuseum thus became a gallery of paintings only, though with a print room attached. Thus, of the objects connected with Michiel de Ruyter, the ones from Sri Lanka were transferred from Amsterdam to The Hague, while his painted portrait, along with those of other admirals, remained in the Rijksmuseum. The removal of the objects meant that the museum became even more of an art gallery than it already was. This can be illustrated by the new catalogue entry written around this time for the picture of St. Francis at the foot of the cross. In the older catalogue the Spanish silver fleet had been mentioned, but the newer one referred only to the artistic aspects of the picture: its design and chiaroscuro.39

38 During the reign of Willem I both in Antwerp and in Brussels the museums were municipal: see Bergvelt, Pantheon, pp. 90–91. 39 [C. Apostool], Catalogus der Schilderijen, Oudheden, enz. op het Koninklijk Museum te Amsterdam (Amsterdam, Van Cleef, 1809), no. 451, ‘Altaarstuk gevonden aan boord van het Spaansch Admiraalschip van de Zilver-Vloot.’ (Altarpiece found on board the flagship of the Spanish silver fleet); [C. Apostool], Catalogus der schilderijen, oudheden, enz. op ’s Rijks Museum te Amsterdam berustende, 4th ed. (Amsterdam, Pieper and Ipenbuur [c. 1820]), no. 88, ‘Christus, aan het Kruis stervende verbeelt, aan deszelfs voet bevindt zich de heilige Franciscus. Goed van teekening en licht en bruin’ (Christ depicted dying on the cross with St Francis at its foot. Good drawing and light and shade). the colonies in dutch national museums 101

In the two national art museums the staff were attempting an overview of all known Dutch (and some Flemish) artists. In that respect the Mauritshuis was no different from the Rijksmuseum. In its early catalogues the Mauritshuis made no reference to the non-European territories with which the Netherlands was connected. In the sphere of contemporary art, too, both museums tried to have at least one work by each master in its collection, but lack of space soon made this impossible. Modern pictures were therefore moved to Pavilion Welgelegen near Haarlem, where they hung from 1838 to 1885. Acquisitions made under Willem I and after 1860 were generally of paintings considered to be artistically important rather than of works that would in some way arouse a ‘feeling for the fatherland’ in the viewers’ breasts.40 The historical aspect was subordinated to the artistic merits of the paintings, as it was with the old masters.

Figure 4.3. Antoine Payen, De Borobudur, 1835. Oil on canvas, 80 × 110 cm. Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden, RMV 200–26.

40 E. Bergvelt, ‘Kunst, musea en Oranje. Een geschiedenis van wankelmoedige relaties’, De Negentiende Eeuw, 23 (1999), pp. 57–75. For the difference between art and history in the Rijksmuseum, see Bergvelt, ‘Potgieter’s “Rijksmuseum” ’, pp. 192–195. 102 ellinoor bergvelt

The painter Antoine Payen (1792–1853) had been one of the artists sent by King Willem I to the Dutch East Indies in 1815 with the botanical and zoological expedition led by Reinwardt. His assignment was to make drawings from nature and then produce paintings from them when he returned. Payen duly did so once he was back in the Netherlands, but nobody knew what to do with the paintings. They were landscapes, evoking the natural and to some extent the cultural life of the Dutch East Indies. Most of them were similar to other mountain scenes painted in Europe at the time, except that Payen’s pictures included ancient Bud- dhist or Hindu temples like the Borobudur (Figure 4.3) and Prambanan.41 At first the paintings were placed in the Royal Cabinet of Rarities, where they did not fit into the few, crowded rooms on the ground floor of the Mauritshuis. Then, when the Museum of Modern Masters was opened in 1838 near Haarlem, Payen’s paintings were sent there. They were not welcome, however, as they were thought too historical (or too colonial?) and not sufficiently artistic. So they ended up in the Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, where they still are. In Willem I’s time there was no difference in status or funding between the museums that were called ’s-Rijksmuseum—or National Museum— and those that were called Royal Cabinet. All were funded, or subsidized, by the Ministry of Education, Arts and Sciences and sometimes, if government funds were exhausted, by the king himself, either from special funds which he had at his disposal or from his own income paid by the state.42 In this he acted as a paternalistic ruler in the eighteenth-century style. Under Willem I the Mauritshuis was regarded as the national art museum. From what was spent on different kinds of museum during his reign (Figure 4.2), it seems that the largest share of funding went to the Natural History Committee (and Museum), although the Mauritshuis was second in line. In the rhetoric of cultural policy the economic importance of tourism, of artists and of art museums was repeatedly emphasized, but after 1830 all expenditure on art museums stopped because funds were diverted to deal with the Belgian Revolution of that year. Only for the Cabinet of Rarities was some money still available, at least to purchase Japanese collections.

41 The website of the Museum Volkenkunde (http://www.rmv.nl/collections/zoeken) gives 20 paintings for Payen and Asia (2 August 2011). The Borobudur (Figure 4.3) is no. 200–26, Prambanan no. 200–23. It would be interesting to know if there are other paintings like no. 200–9, Javanese landscape at the foot of the volcano Goenoeng Goentoer, showing people at work in the fields. 42 Bergvelt, ‘Koning Willem I’. the colonies in dutch national museums 103

Otherwise, national museums were starved of funds—and of ideas too. At government level ministers showed no interest in them; and museum directors, to whom the initiative increasingly shifted, simply lacked the means to plan beyond the day-to-day running of their institutions.

1840–1870

During the period of ‘national indifference’ the state art museums barely survived. This was the time that private museums flourished, because they were much better endowed than national institutions.43 The private foundation Natura Artis Magistra (today the Amsterdam Zoo) could build several museums, an aquarium and a library,44 while Teylers Museum in Haarlem had enough money to build extensions (Figure 4.4).45 The national art museum, on the other hand, had to wait for better accommodation until the construction of P.J.H. Cuypers’ new building in the 1880s. In the state-owned Pavilion Welgelegen near Haarlem one could find both a national collection (the Museum of Modern Art) and two private ones: the Museum for Applied Art, and the Colonial Museum, which in 1926 was moved to Amsterdam, to become what is now the Tropenmuseum (Museum of the Tropics).

1870–1885 In 1877 it was finally decided that a new and larger home for the Rijksmu- seum should be built. A great deal of money was spent on this building, and without profits from the Dutch East Indies it would not have been possible to complete the project. Yet it did not offer an overview of Dutch history, let alone one of the Dutch colonial experience. A careful reader of the catalogue and guidebooks might have found the occasional reference to historical events outside Europe—in Brazil, West Africa or the

43 For an overview of the sorry state of the national museums c. 1870, see F.J. Duparc, with a contribution by W.A. van Es, Een eeuw strijd voor Nederlands cultureel erfgoed. Ter herdenking van een eeuw rijksbeleid ten aanzien van musea, oudheidkundig bodemonderzoek en archieven 1875–1975 (The Hague, Staatsuitgeverij, 1975), pp. 51–69. Cf. The satirical article by V. de Stuers, ‘Holland op zijn smalst’ (1873), in C. Peeters et al. (eds.), Victor de Stuers. Holland op zijn smalst (Bussum, de Haan, [1975]). 44 D. Mehos, Science and Culture for Members only. The Amsterdam Zoo Artis in the Nine- teenth Century (Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2006). 45 ‘Teyler’ 1778–1978. Studies en bijdragen over Teylers Stichting naar aanleiding van het tweede eeuwfeest (Haarlem/Antwerpen, Schuyt, 1978). 104 ellinoor bergvelt

Figure 4.4. Private Museums. Amsterdam 1838 1855 Groote (Large) Zoological Natura Artis Magistra Museum garden, museums, 1868 Library ethnographical 1879–1882 Aquarium collections and Zoological Garden Haarlem Teylers Museum Teylers Stichting Extensions in 1838 and (1779–1784 Oval Room) (Foundation) 1878 Haarlem Pavilion Welgelegen Maatschappij voor 1. Koloniaal (Colonial) Nijverheid en Handel Museum (1871–1923) (Company for Industry 2. Museum voor and Trade) Kunstnijverheid (Applied Art) (1877–1926)

West and East Indies.46 An observant visitor to the new building might notice the occasional object relating to the colonies. In the eastern court- yard a model for a sculpture commemorating the war in Sumatra (the Aceh War, which had begun in 1873) was displayed alongside commemorations of other wars and battles, incongruously combined with musical instruments, carriages and other vehicles, and a Hindeloopen period room.47 But the visitor would have to look hard to find pictures of the colonial world. There was one of a market in Jakarta by the seventeenth- century artist Andries Beeckman, a work originating with the East India Company.48 And around the time the new Rijksmuseum opened, a few mid-seventeenth-century paintings by Frans Post of scenes in Brazil were

46 J.W. Kaiser, Beschrijving der schilderijen van het Rijksmuseum te Amsterdam met historische aanteekeningen en facsimile’s der naamteekens (The Hague, Algemeene Lands- drukkerij, 1880), biographical notes on nos. 121 (Aart van Nes) and 161 (Mattheüs van den Broucke, Raad van Indië); [F.D.O. Obreen], Wegwijzer door ’s Rijks Museum te Amsterdam met teekeningen door Wilm Steelink en plattegronden (Schiedam, Roelants, 1887), pp. 90–94. On Kaiser’s catalogue, written when the museum was still housed in the Trippenhuis and the first to contain historical information, see Bergvelt, Pantheon, pp. 218–223. 47 Obreen, Wegwijzer, pp. 104–108. 48 Kaiser, Beschrijving, pp. 40–41 (no. 16). the colonies in dutch national museums 105 acquired and were probably hung in the room with landscapes.49 But none of the remarkable Brazilian pictures painted by Post’s contemporary, Albert Eckhout, could be seen—because they were not in the Neth- erlands. Some had been given away as diplomatic presents by the former governor of the Dutch colony in Brazil, Count Johan Maurits of Nassau- Siegen, after he returned to Europe in 1644.50 And of those that remained in the count’s possession at his death, many were lost in the fire which gutted the Mauritshuis in 1704. By the later nineteenth century the only work with even an indirect colonial connection to be seen in the Royal Cabinet of Pictures was Ludolf Bakhuizen’s painting of the shipyard of the East India Company in Amsterdam.51 It did not remain there, but was handed over to the Maritime Museum in Amsterdam and then to the city’s Amsterdam Museum, where it is today. What conclusions can be drawn from this discussion? Despite the abundance of material available, it is clear that an interest in colonial culture was not a prominent feature of national museums of art in the Netherlands during the nineteenth century. The same could be said of an interest in history, which was hardly represented in these institutions except in the portraits of marine heroes and of a few other prominent figures from the national past. Even when objects related to the colonies were displayed, their significance was obscured by the unsystematic way in which museum rooms were arranged.52 Moreover, the culture of those parts of south-east Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, where Dutch colonial

49 SK-A-742 was purchased in 1881; SK-A-1486 in 1889; SK-A-1585 in 1892. Paintings by Post were also acquired for the Nederlandsch Museum voor Geschiedenis en Kunst (Neth- erlands Museum for History and Art), which was founded in 1876 and became part of the Rijksmuseum in 1887. 50 The most important, a collection including life-size portraits of the indigenous peoples of north-eastern Brazil, were presented by Johan Maurits to his cousin, Frederik III of Denmark, and are now in the National Museum in Copenhagen. Another group of Eckhout’s pictures were presented to Louis XIV as designs for a series of tapestries, the Anciennes at nouvelles Indes. For Johan Maurits’s patronage of artists and scholars, see E. van den Boogaart (ed.), Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen 1604–1679. A Humanist Prince in Europe and Brazil (The Hague, Johan Maurits van Nassau Stichtung, 1979), and Q. Buvelot (ed.), Albert Eckhout. A Dutch Artist in Brazil (The Hague, Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis/Zwolle, Waanders, 2004). 51 ‘No. 7, Vue du chantier de la Compagnie des Indes Orientales à Amsterdam (. . .) Ce tableau qui a probablement été peint pour la Compagnie des Indes, se trouvait au Ministère des Colonies, lorsqu’un arête royal du 24 Déc. 1842 le fit place au Musée’: V. de Stuers, Notice historique et descriptive des tableaux et des sculptures (The Hague, Nijhoff, 1874). 52 On this aspect of the new Rijksmuseum, see Bergvelt, Pantheon, pp. 235–239; Bergvelt, ‘The Decoration Programmes of Cuypers’ Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam’, in Bergvelt et al. (eds.), Museale Spezialisierung, pp. 311–23. 106 ellinoor bergvelt

settlements had developed, tended to be overshadowed by the higher status and more prominent position given—most obviously in the Royal Cabinet of Rarities in the Mauritshuis—to the cultures of China and Japan. The lack of system in the arrangement of major Dutch museums reflected the fact that for much of the nineteenth century public discussion of museum matters was almost non-existent in the Netherlands. In this respect the country was rather backward, or at any rate different from other European states where debate over the purpose and organization of museum display can be found much earlier.53 E.J. Potgieter’s article in De Gids in 1844, arguing for a more historically orientated Rijksmuseum, was exceptional and prompted little immediate response.54 It was only from the 1870s, when journalism expanded following the abolition of the dagbladzegel or stamp tax, that press debates over the reform of Dutch museums began in earnest. The leading contributor to these was the civil servant Victor de Stuers, much of whose energy went into regulating museums (from 1877 national museums were required to publish annual reports) and arranging displays in the period rooms of the Netherlands Museum of History and Art and the new Rijksmuseum. The more politically contentious possibility of mounting a broader overview of Dutch domestic or colonial history was not something which De Stuers wished to pursue. But others were willing to do so, particularly in more specialized institutions such as the Ethnographic Museum set up by Siebold at Leiden and the Colonial Museum in Pavilion Welgelegen near Haarlem, which in the 1920s joined Amsterdam’s Ethnographic Museum to form the Tropenmuseum. It was in these institutions that the culture and history of Dutch colonies could be properly displayed, and here too—in the Tropenmuseum’s exhibition Oostwaarts! of 2003—that an overview of Dutch activity in the Far East was finally mounted.55

53 For the plans to reform the National Gallery in the 1830s, which were discussed in the British press, see J. Conlin, The Nation’s Mantlepiece. A History of the National Gal- lery (London, Pallas Athene, 2006), pp. 57–72; for the museum plans of the Belgian politician Karel Buls (1837–1914) in the 1870s, see Liesbet Nys, ‘De intrede van het publiek. Museumbezoek in België’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2009), pp. 183–196. 54 Bergvelt, ‘Potgieter’s “Rijksmuseum”’, pp. 171–195. 55 See also the catalogue of an exhibition mounted five years earlier in the Tropenmu- seum: M.-O. Scalliet et al., Pictures from the Tropics. Paintings by Western Artists during the Dutch Colonial Period in Indonesia (Amsterdam, Wijk and Aalburg/Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, 1999). the colonies in dutch national museums 107

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Raffles, T.S., The History of Java, 2 vols. (London, Murray, 1817). Rikken, M., Melchior d’Hondecoeter. Bird Painter (Amsterdam, Rĳksmuseum, 2008). Scalliet, M.-O., Antoine Payen. Peintre des Indes Orientales. Vie et écrits d’un artiste du XIXe siècle (1792–1853) (PhD thesis, Leiden University, 1995; Leiden, Research School CNWS, 1995). ——, et al., Pictures from the Tropics. Paintings by Western Artists during the Dutch Colonial Period in Indonesia (Amsterdam, Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, 1999). Siebold, P.F.B. von, ‘Kort begrip en ontwikkeling van de doelmatigheid en van het nut van een Ethnographisch Museum in Nederland’, in [C.C.F.M. le Roux,] Overzicht van de geschiedenis van het Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde 1837–1937 (Leiden, Sijthoff, 1937), pp. 63–69. Smeets, L., ‘Door kunst gemaakt: de verzameling zeldzaamheden van Stadhouder Willem V’ (unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2010). Stuers, V. de, ‘Holland op zijn smalst’ (1873), in C. Peeters et al. (eds.), Victor de Stuers. Hol- land op zijn smalst (Bussum, De Haan, [1975]). ——, Notice historique et descriptive des tableaux et des sculptures (The Hague, Nijhoff, 1874). ‘Teyler’ 1778–1978. Studies en bijdragen over Teylers Stichting naar aanleiding van het tweede eeuwfeest (Haarlem, Schuyt, 1978). Thiel, P.J.J. van, ‘De inrichting van de Nationale Konst-Gallerij in het openingsjaar 1800’, Oud Holland, 95 (1981), pp. 170–227. Tibbe, L., ‘ “Kunstkammer” Objects in Museums of Industrial Arts: Banishment or Useful Destination?’, in Bergvelt et al. (eds.), Museale Spezialisierung, pp. 177–89. Verhandelingen van het Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen, vols. 1–5 (1779–1827). Verroen, T.L.J., ‘ “Een verstandig ryk man”, de achttiende-eeuwse verzamelaar Adriaan Leonard van Heteren’, in Achttiende-eeuwse kunst in de Nederlanden (Leids Kunsthisto- risch Jaarboek, 1985), pp. 17–61. Vriese, W.H. de (ed.), Reis naar het oostelijk gedeelte van den Indischen Archipel in het jaar 1821 door C.G.C. Reinwardt. Uit zijne nagelaten aanteekeningen opgesteld, met een levensberigt en bijlagen vermeerderd (Amsterdam, Frederik Muller, 1858). Wezel, E. van, ‘Ein Paar Kinderschuhe der Menschheit: die vaterländische und ethnogra- phische Abteilung im Neuen Museum’, in Bergvelt et al. (eds.), Museale Spezialisierung, pp. 137–52. Zeedijk, T., ‘ “Tot voordeel en Genoegen”: de schilderijenverzameling van Gerrit van der Pot van Groeneveld’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum, 55 (2007), pp. 115–207.

PART three

HISTORICAL FICTION AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY

CHAPTER FIVE

‘RETRO-FITTING THE PAST’: LITERARY HISTORICISM BETWEEN THE GOLDEN SPURS AND WATERLOO

Joep Leerssen

Frames of Identification, Mnemonic Communities From Ernest Renan to Anthony Smith, there is universal agreement that a shared historical sense is a core ingredient of national consciousness. Conversely, divisons within the nation’s body politic will invoke different, even inimical historical frames of reference and identification.1 Historical memories and myths provide role models and shared points of recognition for contemporary society. One of the most potent ways for societies to take account of what they stand for and where they come from lies in the actualization of such memories—by commemoration, history-writing, historical narratives in novels, poems, drama, or opera; by rituals of remembrance and commemoration; by the monumental or architectural investment of public spaces with historical significance.2 After the rise of ‘memory studies’ we may take the insight as a given that this type of collective memory is not the preserve or monopoly of academic historians; indeed, that the scholarly pursuit of history is only one element in a multi-faceted cultural preoccupation with the past. Various modes and media of commemoration and recycling will mesh, like cog-wheels in a complex machine, in keeping the memory of the past alive and instilling it with significance—or rather instilling it with various different, often competing modes of significance, depending on

1 A. Rigney, The Rhetoric of Historical Representation. Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990). 2 Besides the ‘classics’ in memory studies (Halbwachs, Nora, Assmann), one may also mention Edward Shils’ insightful and unjustly neglected Tradition (London, Faber, 1981). On the literary aspect of memory studies, A. Rigney, Imperfect Histories. The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2001); idem, ‘Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory’, Journal of European Studies, 35 (2005), pp. 11–28; idem, ‘Fiction as Mediator in National Remembrance’, in S. Berger, L. Eriksonas and A. Mycock (eds.), Narrating the Nation. Representations in History, Media and the Arts (Oxford, Berghahn, 2008), pp. 79–96. 114 joep leerssen the constituency involved. Society-at-large may contain different constituencies or ‘mnemonic communities’ with different allegiances and frames of identification. The past not only provides an ancestral identification, it also feeds contemporary conflicts and confrontations with competing, antagonistic reservoirs of remembrance.3 The diversity of memory culture takes on added complexity, and interest, if we realize that mnemonic communities need not be confined within the boundaries of a single national society—witness the spread of the Jeanne d’Arc myth to Catholic Europe beyond France, the symbolic appeal of Cyrill and Method in various Slavic-Orthodox countries, the myth of the foundation of Prague in German/Austrian and in Czech historical culture, or the figure of Zrinyi/Zrinski in Croatian and Hungarian.4 Also, those ‘boundaries of a single national society’, so airily mentioned in the preceding sentence, are anything but straightforward. Nations and states wax and wane, fuse and fission, and their boundaries shift across the map accordingly. What does this mean for the shifting frames of identification of certain historical memories and their ‘mnemonic communities’? In what follows, I shall make that problem more concrete by offering some observations on memories and memory cultures in the making and breaking of the Low Countries.5 The Benelux countries, firmly established civil societies in Northwest- ern Europe, are not usually thematized as a hotspot of national rivalry and ethnic antagonism, and to be sure the different national allegiances competing for predominance in this area have not, thankfully, led to the endemic violence and bloodshed of the Balkans, the Basque Country or Northern Ireland. But the lack of violence does not mean that the complexities are not as profound and bewildering as in any European area.

3 For a paradigmatic example, see A. Rigney, ‘Divided pasts: A Premature Memorial and the Dynamics of Collective Remembrance’, Memory Studies, 1 (2008), pp. 89–97. Also, more generally, K. Hodgkin and S. Radstone (eds.), Contested Pasts. The Politics of Memory (London, Routledge, 2003). 4 On this last, see J. Neubauer, ‘Zrinyi, Zriny, Zrinsky, or: In Which Direction does the Gate of Vienna Open?’, Neohelicon, 29 (2002), pp. 219–23. 5 The phraseology echoes, deliberately and gratefully so, Andrew Wachtel’s Yugoslavia- related study Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation. Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugo- slavia (Stanford, Ca., Stanford University Press, 1998). The complexities and problematics of national integration and disintegration such as we see them at work in the former Yugo- slavia are not peculiar to that South-East European region, but ran a highly similar, albeit less violent, course in the Low Countries between 1800 and 1920. I have explored the role of literary culture in that process more amply in my De bronnen van het vaderland. Taal, literatuur en de afbakening van Nederland 1806–1890 (Nijmegen, Vantilt, 2006). ‘retro-fitting the past’ 115

The Netherlandic language area embraces both the Netherlands itself (colloquially known as ‘Holland’ where the language goes by the name of ‘Dutch’), and the northern half of Belgium (‘Flanders’, where the language goes by the name of ‘Flemish’). The largest city within that language area, Brussels, is bilingual with a preponderance of French speakers, and within the Netherlandic language area there is an enclave of Frisian. Within Belgium, Flemish is a co-official language alongside French and German (spoken on the Eastern border, which was renegotiated repeatedly between Belgium and Germany in the course of the twentieth century). In the course of the last two centuries national/cultural allegiances have spawned an entire gamut of national or regionalist movements besides the state-endorsed and state-promoted ‘official’ patriotisms: the Frisian movement, the nascent Flemish, Walloon and Luxemburgish movements (this last one precariously poised on the overlapping Francophone and German spheres of influence), and an uneasily negotiated Limburg regionalism on the volatile demarcation between Holland, Belgium and Germany. All these movements took shape during a period (1815–1920) when the internal and external borders of the Low Countries were subject to debate and change. The division between Holland and Belgium; the position of Luxembourg and Limburg (as well as the neutral territory of Moresnet) between Holland, Belgium and the German Confederation; the irredentist claims and counter-claims involving Zeeuws-Vlaanderen and Limburg (between Belgium and Holland, in 1919) and the Eupen- Malmédy area (between Belgium and Germany): all this offers a picture that does not suggest geopolitical stability. The very existence and via- bility of the states of Belgium and the Netherlands between France and Germany was repeatedly placed in doubt between 1830 and 1945. Thus various cultural communities or ‘mnemonic communities’ that remem- branced a shared or contested national past did so in considerable instability as to what precisely constituted one’s political-territorial framework (the ‘nation state’).

Attempts at an Integrated Netherlandic Memory Culture: 1815–1830 The United Kingdom of the Netherlands was created in 1815 and covered the present-day Benelux countries. It was an amalgamation of countries which had been united as the Burgundian Circle in 1548 and broken apart as the Northern Provinces opted out in the 1580s: countries, in other words, which had had very little common history. What is more, the new United Kingdom included important territories which had not participated at all 116 joep leerssen in that shared history: the former Prince-Bishopric of Liège and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The breakup of the united Netherlands (marked by the 1830 Belgian Secession) has often been traced and analysed, and is generally blamed on the thoughtless way in which the Dutch (northern) elite imposed its Dutch-speaking, Orangist, Protestant stamp on what was in fact a linguistically and religiously heterogeneous country. There is an interesting literary source reflecting this hegemonic process. In 1823, Walter Scott set one of his historical novels in the newly formed Netherlands, Quentin Durward, which revolves around a fifteenth-century feudal quarrel over the city of Liège. Remarkably, Scott, the author universally celebrated as the man who put history into the historical novel, manages to misrepre- sent that city completely. Liège, historically French-speaking, known for the rebellious nature of its inhabitants as the cité ardente, situated on the steep-banked confluence of the Meuse and the Ourthe where those rivers emerge from the craggy foothills of the Ardennes, is in Scott’s book made to look more like Bruges or Delft. Its citizens are here called burghers, address each other as mynheer, carry Dutch-sounding names like ‘Nikkel Blok’, ‘Hans Glover’, ‘Peterkin, and ‘Carl’, and pride themselves on their ‘honest Flemish hearts’. A girl called (of all things) Trudchen is called a yung frou, the mayor is called burgomaster and resides in a stadthouse. In his own auctorial voice, Scott calls Liège ‘one of the richest [cities] in Flanders’. The cité ardente is travestied into an uncongenial and plain wrong Flemish-Dutch character.6 Such must have been the image of the Netherlands, including Liège, as it broadcast itself to the Scottish author in the 1820s. There were, to be sure, attempts to create a cultural sense of common identity in the newly united Netherlands. To some extent these involved hamfisted hegemonistic Gleichschaltung—the attempts, for instance, to establish Dutch as a language of education throughout the realm, even in its French-speaking portions such as Liège (where the Amsterdam philosopher Johannes Kinker was appointed to a chair of philosophy in 1817). Other initiatives bespeak a desire to ‘win hearts and minds’. A new national anthem was established in 1816, with lyrics by the highly regarded Rotterdam poet Hendrik Tollens, Wien Neerlands bloed in d’aders vloeit

6 Cf. my ‘Image and reality—and Belgium’, in J. Leerssen and K.U. Syndram (eds.), Europa provincia mundi. Essays in Comparative Literature and European Studies offered to Hugo Dyserinck on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1992), pp. 281–92. ‘retro-fitting the past’ 117

(‘where Netherlandic blood flows in the veins’). Characteristically, it was only later that French lyrics were devised, almost as an afterthought: an ‘Imitation du Chant National par Tollens’ appeared in 1824, beginning ‘Le noble sang de nos aïeux’.7 And the myth of Waterloo was assiduously exploited by the Orange- Nassau dynasty: here, the dauntless Netherlanders had (with some assistance from Wellington and Blücher) defeated Napoleon: here the Crown Prince had received a bullet wound. The monstrous mound on Waterloo plain, near Brussels, with the Nassau lion growling in the general direction of France, marks the spot where Netherlandic blood had flowed from the Orange-Nassau veins. Still visible from the Brussels orbital motorway, it was erected in the early 1820s, when regular Waterloo commemorations had begun to mark the Dutch-Belgian calendar. As early as 1816, a competition was organized by the ‘Koninglyke Maetschappy der Fraeie Kon- sten en Letterkunde’ (Royal Society for Fine Arts and Literature) of Ghent, requesting poetical and artistic tributes to the victory of Waterloo, whose ‘first and most eminent benefit was the independence of our fatherland’.8 Fifteen effusions in Dutch were submitted, and fourteen in French. The Dutch prize was given to Catharina Wilhelmina Bilderdijk (wife of the grand old man of Dutch letters, Willem Bilderdijk), with honourable mentions for, among others, Petronella Moens, the less well known Pieter Rut- ger Feith ( judge in Almelo and later a regular contributor to De Gids), and Johannes Bosscha (later biographer of King Willem II).9 Among the francophone laureates, the prize was awarded to Philippe Lesbroussaert, with honourable mentions for Pieter Lebrocquy and Miss C.J. Hugo de Raveschot. One cantata in French (by a composer from Ghent) and one in Flemish (by a composer from Antwerp) were honoured, and submissions for painting, sculpture and a funerary moment to the fallen heroes were also acknowledged.

7 In the Annales Belgiques des sciences, des lettres et des arts, vol. 14/iv–v (1824); I am indebted for this reference to Karin Hoogeland. The full text of both versions is online in the Anthology of Patriotic and Nationalist Verse, www.spinnet.eu/spiki. 8 ‘Het eerste en uitmuntendste der weldaden van den zegeprael van Waterloo was de onafhanglykheid van ons Vaderland’: Introduction (unpaginated) to Verzameling der Zangstukken bekroond door de Koninklyke Maetschappy van Fraeie Konsten en Letterkunde te Gent, den 18 van Weimaend 1816 (Ghent, P.F. de Goesin-Verhaeghe, [1816]). 9 Information on these literati is in the Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren [hereafter referred to as DBNL], www.dbnl.org. 118 joep leerssen

Literary commemorations of Waterloo in Willem I’s United Kingdom offer an interesting topic for future research.10 In the present context, I shall highlight the literary debut of Prudens van Duyse. Around the time of the Waterloo Lion construction, in 1824, he obtained a prize (donated by none other than the king himself and awarded by the ‘Letterkun- dige Maatschappij’ of Brugge) for a historical tableau on a battle which evidently was considered to prefigure 1815: the Heroic Courage of the Flemings under Guy of Dampierre.11 This is one of the earliest ‘national’ commemorations of a battle now better known as the Battle of Courtrai, or the Battle of the Golden Spurs. The commemoration history of that formative event and political myth in Belgium is well-known12—from the historical edition of archival references to the event by Auguste Voi- sin, by way of Gustave Wappers’ large painting to Hendrik Conscience’s De Leeuw van Vlaanderen (1838). But most of that is dated post-1830, that is, after Belgium’s secession from the united Netherlands, and it has tended to obscure from our view the pre-1830 episode involving King Willem I and Prudens van Duyse. The anti-French nature of the medieval Battle of Courtrai as celebrated by Van Duyse in 1824 is unavoidably aligned with the more recent, intensely commemorated anti-Napoleonic Battle of Waterloo of 1815. The union between lord and subjects is stressed in

10 The present status quaestionis is sketched deftly by Marita Mathijsen in the course of her Relatiebemiddelaars na de scheiding van tafel en bed. De gevolgen van 1830 voor de Nederlandse en Vlaamse literatuur (Pacificatielezing; Gent: Academia Press, 2010). For a recent study of the literary-political instrumentalization of the Waterloo myth in the period 1815–1825, see Janneke Weijermars, ‘Stiefbroeders. De Zuid-Nederlandse literatuur en het literaire bedrijf in het Verenigd Koninkrijk der Nederlanden (1814–1834)’ (doctoral thesis, Universiteit Antwerpen, 2012). 11 Gedichten van Prudentius van Duyse (The Hague, Immerzeel, 1831), p. xiii. The tableau appeared in print in 1825 in Dendermonde. The ‘Koninklyke Maetschappy van Vad- erlandsche Tael- en Letterkunde’ was established in Brugge in 1819, yet another example of Greater Netherlandic sociability propagated by royal support. Van Duyse made a career of garnering prizes offered by the many literary societies of the time; see the biographical sketch by J. Micheels, Prudens van Duyse. Zijn leven en zijne werken (Ghent, Siffer, 1893), and J. Weijermars, ‘Twee prijsvragen, twee strategieën: Jan Frans Willems, Prudens Van Duyse en het Brusselse genootschap Concordia (1818–1830)’, in N. Bemong et al. (eds.), Naties in een spanningsveld. Tegenstrijdige bewegingen in de identiteitsvorming in negentiende- eeuws Vlaanderen en Nederland (Hilversum, Verloren, 2010), pp. 79–95. 12 G.H. Nörtemann, Im Spiegelkabinett der Historie. Der Mythos der Schlacht von Kortrijk und die Erfindung Flanderns im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, Logos, 2002); J. Tollebeek, ‘La bataille des Éperons d’Or’, in A. Morelli (ed.), Les grands mythes de l’histoire de Belgi que, de Flandre et de Wallonie (Brussels, Vie ouvrière, 1995), pp. 205–218; J. Tollebeek and T. Verschaffel, ‘Guldensporenslag’, Nieuwe Encyclopedie van de Vlaamse Beweging [hereafter referred to as NEVB], ed. A. de Ridder et al., 3 vols. (Tielt, Lannoo, 1998), vol. II, pp. 1382–6. ‘retro-fitting the past’ 119 both, the presence of the Prince of Orange at Waterloo in 1815 being an echo of the leadership of Guy of Dampierre, Count of Flanders. The topic was taken up again in one of the very earliest historical novels in the country, Henri-Guillaume Moke’s Philippine van Vlaenderen of de gevangenen der Louvre (which appeared, significantly, bilingually, the French edition carrying the title Philippine de Flandre), thematizing yet again the medieval struggle against France.13 That book appeared in the very year that the United Kingdom of Willem I was rent asunder by the Belgian secession. Dutch reviewers accordingly read it with beady eyes: The mutinous spirit of the Flemings, which led them (as a result of largely imaginary grievances against their benevolent Count Guy, followed by quarrels between the Bruges weavers’ and butchers’ guilds) even to allow France to seize hold of their fatherland before they violently reclaimed it—that spirit, which persists even in these days, is here depicted with historical accuracy. One must also, involuntarily, admire in the Flemish of that period (the late 13th, early 14th century) a certain chivalric nobility of spirit and a patriotism which, though blind at times, is always ardent.14 Moke himself (1803–1862) was to become one of the figureheads of the newly independent Belgian state. However, the run-up to his Philippine de Flandres must still be situated in a ‘united Netherlandic’ context and ‘Greater Netherlandic’ memory culture, something in which Moke himself had participated with his earlier historical tales, Le Gueux de mer (1827) et Le Gueux des bois (1828). The same applies to a volume of historical ballads and verse by Prudens van Duyse that appeared in the same fate- ful year 1830. Prudens Van Duyse’s volume of Gedichten, many of them on Flemish-historical topics, appeared in The Hague mere months after the Belgian secession, the poet himself proclaiming himself to be a

13 Cf. K. Wauters, ‘Tweemaal de Guldensporenslag: Consciences Leeuw van Vlaanderen (1838) in het licht van Henri-Guillaume Mokes Philippine de Flandre (1830)’, Verslagen en mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, 109/ii–iii (1999), pp. 263–317. 14 Review in the Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen, Amsterdam, 1831, online at the DBNL, www.dbnl.org. In the original: ‘Den woelzieken geest der Vlamingen, waardoor zij zelfs, eerst wegens eenige, grootendeels in hunne verbeelding bestaande, grieven tegen hun- nen volklievenden Graaf Guy, en naderhand wegens twisten tusschen het gilde der laken wevers en dat der slagters te Brugge, hun vaderland aan de Franschen in handen speelden, om het straks daarna hun met geweld weder te ontrukken; dezen geest, in onze dagen nog geenszins uitgestorven, vindt men hier met historische waarheid geschilderd. Tevens moet men zekere ridderlijke edelmoedigheid, en eene wel eens blinde, maar echter altijd vurige vaderlandsliefde, in de Vlamingen van dien tijd, (de laatste helft der 13de en het begin der 14de eeuw) onwillekeurig bewonderen.’ 120 joep leerssen committed Greater Netherlander despite recent turns of events. As such, the volume is symbolic for the arrested development of a fledgling ‘Greater Netherlandic’ literary historicism.

Belgian Literature and National Historicism, 1830–1838 After the break-up of the United Kingdom of Netherlands in 1830 we see the memory cultures of the various portions fission, and begin to cultivate different pasts. What we witness is in fact a three-way split, involving ‘Hol- land’, and a Belgium which itself would soon break into two competing frames of identification: Flanders and Wallonia. But at least in its early years, the newly established Belgian state evinced a pan-Belgian nationalism loyal to the entire state, beyond linguistic clea vages between French and Flemish.15 This is amply borne out at the literary level by Nele Bemong’s study on the early historical novel in post-1830 Belgium: many of these appeared simultaneously in Flemish and French.16 Henri-Guillaume Moke’s bilingual publishing of Philippine de Flandre proved paradigmatic even after 1830, and Moke became the figurehead of the new country’s literary culture. In 1835 he was appointed Professor of Ancient History and French Literature (an interesting job description) at the University of Gent, and like many of his generation combined historiography with historical novel-writing. Among the former are his popular and influential textbook Histoire de la Belgique (1839) and various studies expounding his views of Belgium’s ethnic roots: Histoire des Francs (1835) and Des principales branches de la race Germanique (1837). Among the latter features his Herman (1832, set in the time of the collapsing Roman Empire). In all these writings, Belgium is seen as the modern embodiment of a Frankish race which, though Germanic in origins, is Romance in civilization. This new view of a Belgian identity and national tradition was dominant in the 1830s and influential even later. Book printers in Flanders-situated Bruges were described by 1830s trav- ellers as working, in French and against the memory of the ousted Orange- Nassaus, for a nationally Belgian literature in French, and the spirit of

15 Chantal Kesteloot, ‘Eerst Belg, dan Vlaming en Waal. De Vlaamse en Waalse beweging en de Revolutie van 1830’, in P. Rietbergen and T. Verschaffel (eds.), De erfenis van 1830 (Leuven, Acco, 2006), pp. 91–120; and Els Witte, De Constructie van België 1828–1847 (Leuven, Lannoo, 2006). 16 N. Bemong, ‘Vormen en functies van de Belgische historische roman (1827–1850). Een poëticale en chronotopisch-narratologische genrestudie’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Katho- lieke Universiteit Leuven, 2007). ‘retro-fitting the past’ 121

Moke is never far away. Thus, in 1835, a good decade after Scott’s Quentin Durward, Lady Morgan published a novel set in newly independent Bel- gium: The Princess. Or, The Beguine.17 The author celebrates the country’s independence, and in a Bruges printing shop the following exchange takes place: ‘Some specimen of our national literature?’ asked Monsieur Bogaert. The young Brugeois observed a smile which curled the English traveller’s lip, at the idea. ‘We are beginning to have a national literature’, he said. ‘Here is Les Gueux des Bois, and here Les Gueux de Mer. Here is Herman, ou Civilisa- tion et Barbarie; and above all, Philippine de Flandres. They are all national novels.’ ‘But French productions,’ said Sir Frederick. ‘Excuse me, they are Belgian; nay more, written here in Bruges. The author Monsieur Mock [. . .] has stepped in next door to attend a sitting of the Société de la Littérature Nationale.’ ‘And the subjects?’ asked Sir Frederick. ‘All intimately connected with national history,’ replied the Brugeois. ‘You have not been long in starting this new career;—I never heard of Bel- gian literature before.’ ‘The reason is obvious,’ said the gentleman who had been reading, and who now came forward: ‘we have never been a nation since the European intellect took that direction to which the term literature has been applied.’ (pp. 148–9) Medieval-Flemish topics as treated by Moke, illustrative of Belgian nationality, written in French: Belgium developed a historical culture that worked on the cultural heritage of Flanders and Brabant, and did so through either Flemish or the predominant language, French. The Com- mission royale d’histoire as an institution was, like all Belgian institutions at the time, solidly French-speaking, but published editions of texts like Jan van Heelu’s rhyme chronicle and the Brabantsche Yeesten as Chro- nique en vers de Jean van Heelu (ed. J.F. Willems, 1836) and as Les gestes des Ducs de Brabant, par Jean de Klerk, d’Anvers. De Brabantsche Yeesten, of Rymkronyk van Braband, door Jan de Klerk van Antwerpen (ed. J.F. Willems with J.H. Bormans, 1839–1869). Indeed the use of French was seen—at least in some circles and at least in these years—as the proper mark of nationality which the Dutch king in his fifteen-year reign had vainly tried to stamp out. Lady Morgan again:

17 Lady Morgan, The Princess. Or, The Beguine (Paris, Baudry’s European Library, 1835). The author (née Sydney Owenson), a Whig of the Lord Holland circle, is mainly famous for her Ireland-related ‘National Tales’. 122 joep leerssen

‘But how long has French been the language of Belgium?’ ‘As long as we have been a branch of the Franc family. Since the fourteenth century, when the Dukes of Burgundy became our sovereigns, it has been the exclusive language of our educated society, of the arts, of literature, and of gallantry [. . .]’ (ibid., p. 151).

Flanders: The Lion From the later 1830s onwards the historical novel, and literary historicism in general, developed a more assertively Flemish aspect, which, as the century moved on, came to mean more and more assertiveness within the Flemish Movement and against the French language imposed by the Belgian state. The Flemish Movement has been extensively described and analysed, and has a widely ramified ideological and historical root system. The work of Hendrik Conscience is one important element, and I single it out here because it once again returns to that episode of the Battle of Courtrai, forming the climax of Conscience’s Leeuw van Vlaanderen, ‘The Lion of Flanders’.18 Although it draws on the medievalism and the novelistic style patented by Walter Scott and already applied by Moke (moral-sentimental narrative with adventurous incidents and a wealth of historical detail), Conscience emphatically does not follows Scott’s narrative arc, which always locates a happy end in the transcendence of old enmities and indicates a way forward towards national conciliation.19 Against this novelistic resolution, Conscience places another type which may be called, more properly, epic: the no-holds-barred obliteration of the enemy threat and the firm moral lesson that this feisty stance of the ancestors ought to be an example to modern-day readers.20 The novel’s closing lines, famously, read: You, Fleming, who are reading these pages, reflect, in view of the glorious deeds here recounted, what Flanders once was, and what it is now; and even

18 K. Wauters, ‘Conscience, Hendrik’, NEVB, vol. I, pp. 783–787; E. Willekens (ed.), Hij leerde zijn volk lezen. Profiel van Hendrik Conscience 1812–1883 (Antwerp, Esco, 1982), and L. Simons, ‘“Hij leerde zijn volk lezen”: Conscience, een groot schrijver of een mythe?’, in K. Wauters (ed.), Verhalen voor Vlaanderen. Aspecten van het Vlaamse fictionele proza tot aan de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Kapellen, Pelckmans, 1997), pp. 11–32. 19 On Scott, see M. Pittock (ed.), The reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe (London, Continuum, 2006) and A. Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott. Memory on the Move (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012). 20 W. Gobbers, ‘Consciences Leeuw van Vlaenderen als historische roman en nationaal epos: een genrestudie in Europees perspectief ’, in A. Deprez and W. Gobbers (eds.), Vlaamse literatuur van de negentiende eeuw. Dertien verkenningen (Utrecht, HES, 1990), pp. 45–69. ‘retro-fitting the past’ 123

more, what it will become if you should forget the sacred example of your forefathers!21 In the process, Conscience also wrests the ‘sacred example of the forefathers’ from the monarchical, proto-Orangist reading of Van Duyse and Moke: in his treatment of the conflict culminating in the Battle of the Golden Spurs, the Count of Flanders is shown as a weak old man, and the true heroes of the tale are the urban merchants of Bruges, in particular the deans of the weavers’ and butchers’ guilds, Pieter de Coninck and Jan Breydel.22 What they resist is, in one and the same gesture, both the haughtiness and the Frenchness of their feudal overlords. That bifocal resistance constitutes their ‘sacred example’, and aptly enough became a rallying call for the Flemish Movement against arrogant francophone exclusivism in the Belgian state. The Lion of Flanders itself did its share of transmut- ing the memories of a medieval conflict between crown and town into a nineteenth-century culture clash between French and Flemish. In 1887, the two leaders of the 1302 insurrection (the guildmasters Breydel and De Coninck) were given a huge statue on the Bruges market square; the committee behind it had been under the patronage of the ageing Con- science. By 1883, Conscience himself had already been given a statue in his native Antwerp, and the commemoration of 11 July (the day of the Battle of the Golden Spurs) was beginning to be an annual consciousness-raiser in various Flemish cities. The sixth centenary of the battle, in 1902, was considered a nationally Flemish event, and related centenaries have punctuated the growth of Flemish nationalism ever since: that of Conscience’s birth (1912) and of the appearance of The Lion of Flanders (1938). The book was adapted into commedia dell’arte-style puppet shows and comic strips (both of these genres being important popular art forms in Flanders), into plays more than once, and into a film (by Hugo Claus in 1985).23 Now in the twenty-first century, 11 July, the day of the Battle of Courtrai (which

21 My translation; the original is online at the DBNL, www.dbnl.org. 22 The young count, Robrecht van Bethune, plays, it is true, a deus ex machina role as a noble and mighty warrior in support of the Flemings, but only in a brief and incognito cameo performance at the end of the book, in which on the whole his role had been largely passive. 23 Cf. my ‘Novels and their Readers, Memories and their Social Frameworks’, in K. Tilmans, F. van Vree, and J.M. Winter (eds.), Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe (Amsterdam, Amsterdam UP, 2009). The ‘embracing’ of Con- science by Claus took place in a literal sense when young Hugo Claus embraced the statue of Conscience in Antwerp (reproduced in NEVB). His filming of The Lion of Flanders tellingly cast Belgian actors, with Flemish accents, in the ‘good/Flemish’ roles, while casting Dutch actors, with northern accents, in the ‘bad/French’ roles. 124 joep leerssen had been largely forgotten until Conscience’s book enshrined it as a festival date) is the national feast day of Belgium’s Flemish Community—a decision announced in 2002, the year of the battle’s seventh centenary. In short, Conscience’s take on the 1302 battle has permeated all of the Flemish public sphere. How all-pervasive that influence was can be gathered not only from the novel’s impact as a political symbol, but also from its recycling in narrative and literary culture. A pivotal chapter in Ernest Claes’s autobiographical De Witte (1920), itself an oft-reprinted and filmed Flemish classic, recounts how the Lion was available for reading even in poor villages in the opposite (Eastern) end of the country, and how the young protagonist was fired with the medieval glories of Flanders as a result of his reading. In his later memoirs, entitled Jeugd (1940), Ernest Claes himself recalls, in propria persona and in more factual and general terms, the tenuous beginnings of literacy in the poor peasant family from which he came, the important role of the moral-sentimental and historical tales of Conscience, in this early popular literacy, and (worth emphasizing here) the growth, in that same process, of a ‘Flemish’ historical awareness among this new, working-class readership. Later in the century, the avant- garde author Hugo Claus, for all his denunciations of Flemish narcissism and smugness, embraced the example of Conscience and directed the Lion’s 1985 film version. All these instances demonstrate how canonicity typically involves the recirculation and recycling of a text through different renderings and media. It also illustrates how ‘the man who taught his nation to read’ (as Conscience’s epithet has it) in the process turned his readership into a mnemonic community.

Holland and Belgium, Flanders and Wallonia: Two, Three, Many Mnemonic Communities Meanwhile, in Holland, Conscience’s book was read as literature, but none of the historical consciousness-raising took place that was so fer- vently attached to it in Flanders. The reading public may have been one more-or-less continuous whole across the Netherlandic language area, but the mnemonic communities were sharply divided along the national border between Belgium and the Netherlands. For its frame of identification, the Dutch reading public fastened on Dutch history, and from 1830 onwards that firmly excluded Belgium or Flanders. Under the influence of Scott, the historical novel in Holland initially activated a few medieval topics: Jacob van Lennep’s De Roos van Dekama (1836) or Jan Frederik Oltmans’s De Schaapdrijver, een verhaal uit den Utrechtschen oorlog van ‘retro-fitting the past’ 125

1480–’83 (1838). But soon the literary repertoire reverted to the historical memories already canonized in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century poetry and history-writing: the rebellion against Spain, the Geuzen guerilla campaign and the rise of naval supremacy and colonial affluence in the Golden Age.24 This was the historical frame of identification in the novels of Geertruida Bosboom-Toussaint, and in the one paradigmatic ally canonical novel from this otherwise largely neglected period: Jacob van Lennep’s Ferdinand Huyck (1840). The wider memory culture in the northern Netherlands likewise testifies to this slant: commemorations and statues invoke the rebellion against Spain and the naval glories set in the period 1580–1670; and when, here as in other countries, the historical novel recedes towards a juvenile target audience, young boys in Holland, unlike Ernest Claes, are fed on a maritime Golden Age tradition: from Johan Been’s Paddeltje; de scheepsjongen van Michiel de Ruyter (1908) to Johan Fabricius’s De scheepsjongens van Bontekoe (1924). South of the border, these constituency shifts between reading public and mnemonic community took a sharply different turn. The emphasis, from Moke to Conscience, on the northern parts of Belgium as the main reservoir of the country’s historical antecedents seems to have irked literati from Liège—that place which, as we have seen, had known a long and highly profiled separate history as an independent prince-bishopric, and which now was on the rebound from being subordinated to a Netherlan- dic kingdom (and lumped into a pan-Netherlandic imagery as per Quentin Durward). Liège intellectuals had in 1830, months before the secessionist tumult in Brussels, founded a Revue belge for precisely this purpose, and it was in the new Belgium that this literary review came into its own.25 Now no longer subordinate to an Orange-Nassau dynasty, but instead to the newly established capital of Brussels, Liège felt the need to vindi- cate its regional identity within the new Belgian state and the Flemish- Brabantine orientation of its historicism.26 Liège authors began to add

24 Generally L. Jensen, De verheerlijking van het verleden. Helden, literatuur en natievorming in de negentiende eeuw (Nijmegen, Vantilt, 2008). 25 L. D’hulst, ‘Comment “construire” une littérature nationale? À propos des deux premières Revue belge (1830 et 1835–1843)’, Contextes, 4 (posted online 28 October 2008), URL: http://contextes.revues.org/document3853.html, accessed 18 February 2009. Also V. Nachtergaele, ‘D’une littérature deux autres’, Revue de littérature comparée, 299 (2001), pp. 363–77. 26 The Walloon Movement is usually seen as a twentieth-century political movement. Its nineteenth-century cultural antecedents are treated in various articles in the Encyclopédie du Mouvement Wallon [hereafter EMW], 4 vols. (Charleroi, Centre Jules Destrée, 2000–10) and in 126 joep leerssen their particular Liège-Ardennes local colour to the Belgian historical culture. In 1834 the circle around the Revue belge founded the Association nationale pour l’encouragement et le développement de la littérature en Bel- gique; and the next year, the Revue belge carried Joseph Grandgagnage’s heroic-historical poem, ‘Franchimont et Waterloo’. Squarely against the anti-French treatments of Van Duyse and Conscience, Waterloo is here seen as the heroic fight of a doomed good cause—a beginning, in other words, of the Napoleonic myth in francophone Belgium.27 Waterloo is compared not to the Battle of Courtrai, but to an episode in Liège history, the heroic struggle of the 600 men from Franchimont to raise Charles the Bold’s siege of Liège in 1468—part of that crisis first thematized in (yes) Quentin Durward. That episode was to be thematized over and over again, becoming in the process a veritable myth:28 the Liège counterpart to the Flemish Golden Spurs. Cases in point are F. Thys, Les six cents Franchimontois (1837–42); Polain’s own Esquisses historiques de l’ancien pays de Liège (1842); A. Ras- toul de Mongeot, Liège et Franchimont: héroïsme, amour et malheur (1844); and J. Collin de Plancy, Le Sanglier des Ardennes (1844). All this evinces a sense that, within the French-reading Belgian public, a competition between mnemonic Flemish and Liègeois communities was taking shape even before the linguistic clashes gathered steam. The francophone Liège camp found a name for itself in 1845. In that year, Charles Grandgagnage (nephew of the Joseph we have just seen as author of ‘Franchimont et Waterloo’) published a series of Wallonnades, humorous sketches teasingly taking issue with contemporary cultural politics. The title wallonnade may perhaps be interpreted as a boutade, tirade or ‘sounding off ’ essay from a rustic-provincial, no-nonsense vantage point (cf. gauloiserie). Among the targets of Grandgagnage’s wit are contemporary authors from the Liège area, but also Jan Frans Willems, the eminent Flemish philologist and early advocate of Flemish rights in Belgium, as

M. van Ginderachter and J. Leerssen, ‘Denied Ethnicism: on the Walloon Movement in Belgium’, Nations and Nationalism, 18/2 (2012), pp. 230–46. 27 This emerged in full force shortly after 1900, in the writings of Albert Du Bois, e.g. his tendentious novel on the Battle of Waterloo, ‘Belges’ ou français (1903) and a poem clamouring for the destruction of the Waterloo monument (1907: La destruction du lion de Waterloo). Cf. M. Watelet and P. Couvreur (eds.). Waterloo, lieu de mémoire européenne. Histoires et controverses (Louvain-la-Neuve, Bruylant-Academia, 2000). 28 S. Rottiers, ‘L’honneur des 600 Franchimontois’, in A. Morelli (ed.), Les grands mythes de l’histoire de Belgique, de Flandre et de Wallonie (Brussels, Vie ouvrière, 1995), pp. 67–82. ‘retro-fitting the past’ 127 well as Jules Michelet, the romantic French-nationalist historian who saw Liège as a mere outpost of Greater France. Wedged between Flemish Wil- lems and French Michelet, Grandgagnage takes up a feisty intermediate stance for a francophone, no-nonsense Belgium, with wallon denoting a moral quality of bold, rustic-provincial frankness as much as a territory or culture. The adjective wallon had been in use since the Middle Ages and originally referred to the speakers of Romance dialects within the Low Coun- tries. After Belgian independence, wallon received the additional meaning of all speakers of French in Belgium wherever they lived. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, the term wallon acquired an ethnic- territorial meaning. In 1850, Charles Grandgagnage published a linguistic study on the dialects of the Liège region, now given the philological name wallon. His Dictionnaire de la langue wallonne (1850) was followed by his essay ‘De l’origine des Wallons’, in the Bulletin de l’Institut archéologique liégeois (1852).29 Uncle Joseph meanwhile re-founded the older Associa- tion nationale pour l’encouragement et le développement de la littérature en Belgique as (tellingly) the Société liégeoise de littérature wallonne, together with one Nicholas Defrecheux, who published a collection of Chansons wallons in 1860. Subsequent developments belong to the early, culturally oriented history of the Walloon Movement. In the present context, the case is most telling because it offers, in addition to the well-known Flemish-Dutch mnemonic split, a lesser known Walloon-Flemish counterpart. Nor should we lose from sight the development, in the context of the making and breaking of Belgian/Flemish/Walloon cultural and historical identifications in this period 1830–1860, the beginnings of a Luxembourgish sense of identity.30 The first poems in the Luxembourg dialect (now, since 1982, the official language of the Grand Duchy, which gained political sovereignty after the dissolution of its personal union under the Dutch crown in 1890) were written by men whose career took them into independent

29 This was more than the hobby-horse of a provincial amateur: the great patriarch of Romance Philology, Grimm’s pupil Friedrich Diez, would dedicate his Altromanische Glos- sare of 1865 to Charles Grandgagnage. 30 A brief mention in passing must suffice here. The growth of a Luxembourg historical consciousness in the course of the later nineteenth century is admirably charted in P. Péporté et al. (eds.), Inventing Luxembourg. Representations of the Past, Space and Lan- guage from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Leiden, Brill, 2010) and S. Kmec et al. (eds.), Lieux de mémoire au Luxembourg—Erinnerungsorte in Luxembourg (Luxem- bourg, Saint-Paul, 2007). 128 joep leerssen post-1830 Belgium. Anton Meyer (1801–1857), author of E Schréck op de Lët- zebuerger Parnassus (1829, the title is best translated into the underlying Latin phrase ‘Gradus ad Parnassum’, in this case a Luxembourg Parnassus) ultimately was appointed professor at the University of Liège, where he was inspired by the thriving Walloon dialect culture there; Jacques Die- denhoven (1809–1866), author of De Bittgank no Conter (‘The Pilgrimage to Contern’) became an officer in the Belgian army. To contextualize such figures properly it would be necessary to study the emigration, between 1830 and 1839, of anti-Orangist intellectuals from Luxembourg and Lim- burg (areas that unwillingly remained under Dutch rule) to Belgium, as well as the post-1840 revival of Walloon (especially Liégeois) dialect literature.31 But that leads us to the border zone between national and regional movements—yet another vexed issue in nationalism studies, for which the Low Countries can furnish exemplary test cases.

Conclusion In the fragmentation of the Low Countries, first into Dutch and Belgian halves and subsequently into a Flemish-Walloon antagonism within Bel- gium, the role of the historical imagination as channelled through literature stands out as being important and influential, albeit in complex and unpredictable ways. Literature is an important vehicle for the cultural retrieval, appropriation and transmission of the past towards a contemporary audience; and by its language of expression, literature will address its readership first and foremost as a language community. However, both the audience and the reservoir of cultural memories are at the same time also constituted along lines defined by state or region. Those two categories, linguistic and mnemonic community, need not be congruent; the interaction

31 Among the anti-Orangist Limburg authors who emigrated to Belgium and who gained a place in the literature of that new country are Dautzenberg and Ecrevisse (who wrote in Netherlandic, and who are noted in the DBNL and the NEVB) and André van Hasselt and Theodoor Weustenraad (who wrote in French and, in Weustenraad’s case, in the Maastricht dialect). On such figures, including comparisons with Luxembourg, see my De Bronnen and various publications by Lou Spronck, such as ‘De Maastrichtse dialectliteratuur vóór 1840’, in H.H.E. Wouters et al. (eds.), Miscellanea Trajectensia. Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis van Maastricht (Maastricht, Limburgs Geschied- en Oudheidkundig Genootschap, 1962), pp. 435–96, and ‘De Bittgank no Conter & De Percessie van Scherpen- heuvel, twee negentiende-eeuwse satires in de streektaal’, Veldeke Jaarboek, 2010, pp. 21–49. On Walloon dialect literature, see, besides the relevant entries in the EMW, D. Droixhe, ‘Les lettres dialectales: Le théâtre wallon’, in La Wallonie. Le pays et les hommes (Lettres— arts—culture) (Brussels, La Renaissance du Livre, 1976), vol. II, pp. 481–496. ‘retro-fitting the past’ 129 between them presents various tensions and dynamics. Flemish literature is set apart from Dutch literature (with which it shares a language) by its Belgian state context, Walloon from Flemish (with which its shares the Belgian state) by its language. Such complexities require closer analysis; but even in this initial outline, one thing becomes obvious. The notion that myths and history merely underpin and rationalize a given national identity is a simplification. The rivalry and mutual counterpositioning of different national groups begins in, and relies upon, opposing reconfigurations and divisions, retrievals and appropriations, of the past. Nations are made and unmade by changing the past.

References

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Wauters, K., ‘Conscience, Hendrik’, NEVB, vol. I, pp. 783–787. ——, ‘Tweemaal de Guldensporenslag: Consciences Leeuw van Vlaanderen (1838) in het licht van Henri-Guillaume Mokes Philippine de Flandre (1830)’, Verslagen en mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, 109/ii–iii (1999), pp. 263–317. Weijermars, J., ‘Stiefbroeders. De Zuid-Nederlandse literatuur en het literaire bedrijf in het Verenigd Koninkrijk der Nederlanden (1814–1834)’ (doctoral thesis, Universiteit Antwer- pen, 2012). ——, ‘Twee prijsvragen, twee strategieën: Jan Frans Willems, Prudens Van Duyse en het Brusselse genootschap Concordia (1818–1830)’, in N. Bemong et al. (eds.), Naties in een spanningsveld. Tegenstrijdige bewegingen in de identiteitsvorming in negentiende-eeuws Vlaanderen en Nederland (Hilversum, Verloren, 2010), pp. 79–95. Willekens, E. (ed.), Hij leerde zijn volk lezen. Profiel van Hendrik Conscience 1812–1883 (Antwerp, Esco, 1982).

CHAPTER SIX

THE VICTORIANS, THE DARK AGES AND ENGLISH NATIONAL IDENTITY

Joanne Parker

During the last two decades, as Britain has moved increasingly towards devolution, there has been a growth of interest among cultural historians in the development of various British national identities in the nineteenth century. As part of this work, much attention has been allotted to Victorian Anglo-Saxonism—to the ways in which the Saxons were identified with the modern English, and were juxtaposed with the Normans, in the Victorian imagination.1 Interesting research has also focused on the Victorian fascination with Britain’s Norse heritage. As Andrew Wawn has ably demonstrated in his landmark study of the subject, the Victorians effectively ‘invented the Vikings’.2 However, it is by no means simple to ascertain how clearly Saxon and Viking were differentiated in Victorian culture. On the one hand, the nineteenth century inherited a tradition of dis- criminating carefully between the two nations. Sharon Turner, in his 1799 History of the Anglo-Saxons, had dismissed any notion of kinship between the Saxons and ‘the Vandals of Scandinavia’.3 On the other hand, Thomas Percy, in the preface and notes to his 1770 translation of Mallet’s North- ern Antiquities, had classed Saxons and Scandinavians together as Gothic tribes, stressing that they ‘used two not very different dialects of the same language’, while Mallet himself had argued that the Angles had originally been Danes and consequently ‘they waged war with the descendants of their own ancestors’.4

1 See, in particular, C. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest. History and Myth in Nineteenth- Century British Literature (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1990). 2 A. Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians. Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2000), p. 3. 3 S. Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons, 4 vols. (London, T. Cadell, W. Davies and Longman, 1799–1805), vol. I, p. 12. 4 P.H. Mallet, Northern Antiquities. Or, a Description of the Manners, Customs, Religion and Laws of the Ancient Danes, and other Northern Nations, ed. T. Percy, 2 vols. (London, T. Carnan, 1770), vol. II, pp. iv, 196, 261. 134 joanne parker

Each of these attitudes can be located in Victorian texts. In the 1840s, the scientist and explorer John Thomas Stanley conflated Scandinavians and Saxons, lamenting that the ‘Vikings’ had never ‘conquered Ireland and peopled [it] with Norwegians, Danes or Anglo-Saxons’.5 By contrast, Samuel Laing—writing in the same decade—hotly contested that there was any affinity between Germans and Scandinavians and criticized scholars for searching for the roots of pre-Conquest England in Tacitus’s Germania.6 Nineteenth-century linguists and literary scholars argued vociferously over the relationship between Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon, particularly in the second half of the century. While some maintained that the languages were unrelated, others insisted that they were simply dialects or variants of one language. A minority of Scandinavian enthusiasts towards the close of the century also developed a third position which echoed the views of Mallet, contending that not just the Anglo-Saxon language but the whole of Anglo-Saxon culture had simply been a degenerate form of Viking society.7 In Paul du Chaillu’s 1889 study The Viking Age, for instance, the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain was dismissed as a myth, and the so-called Saxons identified as merely early Norse invaders, while in the 1850s, the historian and philologist George Stephens rejected the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’, coining his own description ‘Anglo-Scandic’ for Brit- ain’s population.8 Such views often carried a political subtext in the 1850s and 1860s when Britain was witnessing a contemporary clash between ‘Saxon’ and ‘Viking’ over the governance of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, situated on the borders of Prussia and Denmark. For those Brit- ish authors critical of Palmerston’s intervention, demonstrating that their country’s ancestry was more Norse than Germanic could be an indirect means of campaigning for Britain’s support of Denmark in that conflict.9 These scholarly and political debates also seem to have filtered through to popular culture. This is suggested by Charles Kingsley’s description of the modern English as the ‘free Norse-Saxon race’, in a letter dated 1851, and also by the seemingly deliberate confusion of Saxons with Danes in Rider Haggard’s 1885 adventure novel King Solomon’s Mines, in which the narrator and a fictional editor quarrel over whether the Danes or the Saxons

5 Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians, p. 48. 6 Ibid., p. 99. 7 Ibid., p. 63, 48. 8 Ibid., p. 330. 9 Ibid., pp. 232–3. the victorians, the dark ages and english national identity 135 were blonde-haired.10 Another fictional text which investigated the links between Saxons and Danes was Lytton’s Harold. The Last of the Saxon Kings. In his study The Victorians and the Vikings, Andrew Wawn remarks that there is ‘stern Saxon criticism of [Old Northern] piracy, idolatry, and horse-flesh eating’ in the novel, but that nevertheless ‘the narrator reminds the reader constantly that old northern sea-kings’ blood still flows in Teu- tonic veins’.11 Indeed, in this text the most important differences between Saxon and Dane seem to be understandable in terms of Norman accultur- ation: minstrelsy has been forgotten in Anglo-Saxon England, for instance, because of the sway of the Norman-influenced King Edward. The other novels which Wawn discusses in which Saxons and Danes interact— Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake and Walter Scott’s Count Robert of Paris— are, like Lytton’s text, situated around the date of the Norman Conquest of England.12 Such a setting, at a period when Saxons and Danes had co-habited in England for many years, seems to have allowed novelists at least partially to dispense with the cultural and political complexities which many must have realised were involved in distinguishing between Saxon and Viking. This approach was not available, however, to those who chose to set historical narratives more firmly in the Dark Ages—during the period of eighth-, ninth- and tenth-century Viking invasions, when Old Northern and Saxon cultures interacted in more inescapably hostile modes, and without any obviously anti-heroic Norman presence as a foil. For such authors, decisions about national heritage, regional loyalties and personal identity were forced more starkly to the fore—yet little research has focused on how they handled this dilemma. Among the nineteenth-century fictional texts to deal with Britain’s Dark Ages are several treatments of the battle of Brunanburh, and a few novels set around the attacks on Lindisfarne in 793 AD. By far the largest grouping of literature, however, is the substantial body of works dealing with the Viking incursions during the reign of King Alfred the Great. During the nineteenth century, as I have argued elsewhere, a veritable cult of King Alfred developed in Britain, with numerous works of art produced and over one hundred texts written about the king, including poetry, plays, novels, children’s stories and popular histories. The majority of these focused on Alfred’s interactions with Viking raiders. Just as

10 H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines (Oxford, Oxford World Classics, 1998), p. 11. On Kingsley’s letter, see Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians, p. xv. 11 Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians, p. 316. 12 Ibid., pp. 317–9. 136 joanne parker the battle of Hastings has provided a focus for considering the Saxon- Norman dichotomy in the nineteenth century, Alfred’s struggles against the Danes—and in particular the successful Danish invasion of Wessex in 878 AD—can provide a useful nexus for investigating the relationship of Saxon to Viking in the Victorian imagination. It is not simply the quantity of nineteenth-century Alfredian material available which makes Alfred and the Vikings the chosen focus of this study, however. Images of Alfred in Victorian literature do bear important intertextual relationships with earlier images of Normans, and claims about Alfred’s stereotypically Saxon—and English—love of liberty, justice, and so on, need to be read in relation to an established rhetoric which placed the Normans in juxtaposition to those cultural values. However, more interestingly, many of the specific British institutions attributed in the nineteenth century to King Alfred were almost contemporaneously also claimed by Old Northernists to have had Viking origins. So where Sir George MacKenzie and Sir Walter Scott in the second decade of the nineteenth century reiterated Danish claims that Britain’s jury system derived from the Vikings, in plays performed in 1831 and 1838 it was Alfred who was credited with instituting that practice.13 Likewise, where Samuel Laing contended in 1844 that the Vikings were the origin of Britain’s naval supremacy, imperial prowess and representative legislature, in the same decade the poet Martin Farquhar Tupper made identical claims for Alfred, proclaiming in one of his many Alfredian poems: Sailors, ten centuries our British boast, He sent you first afloat on every coast and in another describing the Saxon king as the source of ‘half the best we boast in British liberties and laws’.14 In succeeding decades, these claims continued to be made both for Alfred and for the Vikings. The author of boys’ adventure stories R.M. Bal- lantyne asserted in his 1869 novel Erling the Bold that the Norsemen were responsible for ‘much of what is good in our laws’, but the same children who read his work may well have also come across Charles Dickens’ assertion in his 1852 Child’s History of England that Alfred’s spirit ‘still inspires

13 Ibid., p. 86; J. Magnus, Alfred the Great, in idem, Woloski, a Tragedy; Alfred the Great, a Play; and Poems (London, privately printed, 1838), p. 155; J.S. Knowles, Alfred the Great. Or, the Patriot King (London, James Ridgeway, 1831), p. 84. 14 M.F. Tupper, ‘The Order of Alfred’, in idem, Ballads for the Times (London, Arthur Hall, Virtue, 1851), p. 253. the victorians, the dark ages and english national identity 137 some of our best English laws’.15 Ballantyne not only praised the Vikings for their legislature, he also hailed them for introducing to the British character ‘much of what is manly and vigorous [. . .] much of our intense love of freedom and fair-play’, praising the Northmen’s ‘pith, pluck, enterprise and sense of justice’.16 In a similar vein, it was claimed that in Alfred’s supposed character the finest traits of English national identity could be identified. Just two years before Ballantyne’s Viking-age novel was published, Edward Augustus Freeman’s multi-volume History of the Norman Conquest appeared, claiming that Alfred was ‘the most perfect character in history’.17 Among the qualities which Freeman praised in the Saxon king were his ‘simple, straight-forward discharge of the duty of the moment’, and his ‘pure, simple, almost childlike disinterestedness’.18 The popularity of racialist theories of identity in Victorian Britain meant that a flurry of later writers followed Freeman’s example. For Conan Doyle, Alfred was ‘the man who combined in his person all the virtues which go to make up the best type of Englishman. He was sturdy, resolute, persevering, and for- midable in action’.19 For the British prime minister Lord Rosebery, Alfred was ‘the ideal Englishman [. . .] the embodiment of our civilization [. . .] the highest and best type of the qualities which we cherish in our national character’.20 The Vikings and the Saxons seem to have competed, in the nineteenth century, for identification as the source of those masculine qualities— fairness, vigour, and straightforwardness—which were considered to lie at the heart of British national identity, and which were repeatedly invoked in pro-imperial rhetoric. On some occasions, rhetoricians seem to have been self-conscious in this use of the past. At the celebrations held to celebrate the thousandth anniversary of Alfred’s death, Lord Rosebery mused, ‘Does it not show a great sign of the times? A quarter of a century ago there was not the same passion for raising memorials of our historic heroes. How does that come about? [. . .] Is it not the growing sense of

15 R.M. Ballantyne, Erling the Bold (London, James Nisbet, 1869), p. 305; C. Dickens, A Child’s History of England (London, Bradbury and Evans, 1852), p. 24. 16 Ballantyne, Erling the Bold, p. 305. 17 E.A. Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1867), p. 51. 18 Freeman, History of the Norman Conquest, p. 51. 19 Quoted in A. Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary. A Record of the National Commemo- ration (London, Macmillan, 1902), p. 20. 20 Quoted in The Times, 21 Sept. 1901, p. 10. 138 joanne parker

British Empire? [. . .] we dignify and sanctify our own aspirations by referring them to the historic past.’21 With such self-consciousness about the uses to which history was being put by the late Victorian period, it seems improbable that Alfre- dian authors could have been unaware that their claims for Alfred as national prototype faced competing assertions from Old Northernists, as well as from admirers of the Normans. In his 1900 history Alfred to Vic- toria, George Eayrs, while celebrating Alfred, acknowledged that he represented only one of ‘several strains which have combined to produce that distinctive type, the Englishman’.22 With this context in mind, it is of interest to investigate the different ways in which Alfredian authors dealt with the Viking characters who featured in their texts, at different cultural moments in the nineteenth century. Besides hordes of anonymous Vikings, those nineteenth-century writers could choose to include several named Danish leaders in their works. These are identified in the two earliest sources for Alfred’s reign—the ninth-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and Asser’s 893 biography, the Life of King Alfred. Principal among those mentioned by Asser are Halfdan (who invaded Northumbria and ravaged Strathclyde); Oscetel and Anwend (who made and then broke a treaty with Alfred); and Guthrum (another oath-breaker, but one who eventually ‘promised to accept Christianity and to receive baptism at King Alfred’s hand’).23 This account of Guthrum is confirmed by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which adds that his ‘baptismal name was Æthelstan’ and that he afterwards ‘lived in East Anglia, and was the first to settle that land’.24 The Chronicle also names a further Viking king who invaded Alfred’s kingdom—Hastein, who in 893 ‘went plunder- ing’ on the land belonging to his own son’s Saxon godfather.25 Given such accounts of Viking plunder, faithlessness and treachery in Saxon sources which were in print by the start of the eighteenth century and readily available a century later, it is perhaps unsurprising that in many nineteenth-century Alfredian texts the Vikings function primarily

21 Quoted in The Times 21 Sept. 1901, p. 10. 22 G. Eayrs, Alfred to Victoria. Hands Across a Thousand Years (London, Swan Sonnen- schein, 1902), p. 19. 23 S. Keynes and M. Lapidge (eds.), Alfred the Great. Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1983), p. 84. 24 Keynes and Lapidge (eds.), Alfred the Great, p. 113. 25 Keynes and Lapidge (eds.), Alfred the Great, p. 116. the victorians, the dark ages and english national identity 139 as an exotic and dangerous Other.26 This tendency began in the Geor- gian period. In David Mallet and James Thomson’s Alfred. A Masque, for instance (first performed in 1740, thirty years before a very different Mallet’s Northern Antiquities was translated into English) the Danes are ‘foreign ruffians’, ‘inhuman pirates’, and ‘haughty, cruel [. . .] robbers/ That violate the sanctity of leagues,/The reverend seal of oaths’.27 In this play, there is no truce with any Danes, none are converted by Alfred to Christianity, and there is much jubilation when ‘twice six hundred’ are slaughtered in their beds along with their leader.28 Likewise, in the anonymous 1753 play Alfred the Great. Deliverer of his Country, the Vikings are treacherous oath-breakers who are riven by internal disputes and kill Alfred’s outnumbered son by stabbing him from behind in a ‘base’ and ‘cowardly’ fashion (though, in this play, Guthrum is baptized).29 John Home’s 1778 Alfred. A Tragedy, provides a similarly negative image of the Danes, but with far more colour—presumably influenced by the publication of the 1768 Norse Odes of Thomas Gray and Thomas Percy’s 1763 Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, as well perhaps as Percy’s translation of Northern Antiquities. Home’s Vikings are bigamous ‘infidels’ who swear ‘by Loda’s altar, stain’d with human blood’, take women by force when they are frustrated in love, and die cheerfully—assured that they are going ‘to the Valkyrian maids [. . .] to Odin and the hall of joy’.30 And in Anne Fuller’s 1789 novel, The Son of Ethelwulf, the Vikings live in tents where precious ornaments are ‘scattered in wild profusion’, and are reduced to a ‘senseless condition’ at bacchanalian feasts.31 In some of these texts, it seems that there may be a case for reading such negative images of the Vikings as a means of displacing onto the Danish nation from the Saxons any of the negative qualities associated generally with northern nations in that period prior to the publication of Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons—lust for battle, alcohol- ism, avarice, rough manners, and so on. A less problematic idealization

26 See J. Parker, England’s Darling. The Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 47, 50. 27 Mallet, Northern Antiquities, pp. 39, 11. 28 Mallet, Northern Antiquities, p. 37. 29 Alfred the Great. Deliverer of his Country. A Tragedy (London, privately printed, 1753), pp. 9, 20, 68. 30 J. Home, Alfred. A Tragedy (London, T. Beckett, 1778), pp. 29, 76. See also A. Bicknell, The Patriot King. Or Alfred and Elvida. An Historical Tragedy (London, privately printed, 1788) in which the Vikings battle over women, weave (ineffectual) magic spells, and die cursing. It was first performed in 1788. 31 A. Fuller, The Son of Ethelwolf (London, G.G.J. & J. Robinson, 1789), pp. 33, 43. 140 joanne parker of Alfred as a Saxon king could thereby be achieved. That this might have been the case is suggested by references to the ninth century in general by these authors as ‘a remote and barbarous age’ and a time ‘involved in clouds and darkness’.32 Such depictions of the Danes continued to prevail in the early nineteenth century and seem still to have been a means of displacing from the Saxons to the Danes the most negative aspects of a period still partially remembered as one ‘before true civilization’, when men ‘were large feeders and drank heavily’.33 In Ancient Times. A Drama by Joseph Strutt (better known for his books on costume), the Viking king ‘Godrun’ proclaims that he ‘delights in war’, and drinks alcohol from the ‘skulls of those I hate’.34 The Vikings drink from the skulls of their enemies with equal enthusiasm in James Magnus’s 1838 play Alfred the Great, in which they also plot and commit acts of both uxoricide and patricide, and in M. Lonsdale’s 1865 Alfredian ballet, they fight over women, suc- cumb to drunkenness, and sacrifice virgins.35 That such depictions were becoming clichéd stock devices by the middle of the nineteenth century is suggested not simply by their appearance in ballet, but also by Robert Brough’s parodic 1860 Alfred the Great. Or, The Minstrel King. An Historical Extravaganza in which Guthrum is so drunk as to see double and plans to sacrifice a virgin with farcical ineptitude.36 By the second half of the nineteenth century, the dominant attitude to Vikings among Alfredian authors seems to have shifted to one of greater understanding and tolerance—perhaps in part because of the growing British contact with non-Christian native tribes in different parts of the empire and an increasing stress on the value of education and accultura- tion of the colonized, rather than conquest. That this might have been an important factor is suggested by Stratford Canning’s 1876 play Alfred the Great in Athelnay, in which the Danes are explicitly likened to ‘Ethiops’,37

32 Home, Alfred. A Tragedy, p. x. 33 E. Kerr, Two Saxon Maidens. Gytha, a Story of the Time of Baeda. Elgiva, a Story of the Time of Alfred the Great (London, Wesleyan Methodist Sunday School Union, 1885), p. 242; G.A. Henty, The Dragon and the Raven. Or, The Days of King Alfred (London, Blackie, 1886), p. 64, see also p. 20. 34 J. Strutt, Ancient Times. A Drama (Edinburgh, J. Murray, 1808), p. 105. 35 M. Lonsdale, Sketch of Alfred the Great. Or, The Danish Invasion. A Grand Historical Ballet (London, privately printed, 1865), pp. 5, 6. 36 R.B. Brough, Alfred the Great. Or, The Minstrel King. An Historical Extravaganza (Lon- don, Thomas Hailes, 1860), pp. 12, 46. 37 S. Canning, Alfred the Great in Athelnay. An Historical Play (London, Bernard Quar- itch, 1876), p. 174. the victorians, the dark ages and english national identity 141 and by G.A. Henty’s observation in his novel for boys that the Danes were ‘very dark, as much so as modern gypsies’.38 Certainly, by the time that Edmund Hill’s Alfred the Great. A Drama was published, Alfred’s Saxon wife would pray for the Danes as ‘poor unbelievers’ who ‘must to damna- tion go in ignorance’, while Alfred himself could muse: How well they bear themselves! [. . .] This is fine metal and it ringeth true; Rough and unminted, yet of purest gold [. . .] To make them friends and servants of our God Were victory indeed.39 Julian D. Richards has recently argued that in the nineteenth century ‘when Vikings were described by English historians, they appeared as treacherous barbarians, and as foils for the great hero Alfred’.40 This claim is certainly true of the early part of the century, but is too simplistic if works of historical fiction from later in the period are taken into account. Indeed, some sympathy for the Vikings can be detected in a few texts written before 1850. In Magnus’s Alfred the Great, the Saxon captive and bride of the Viking king Hubba bewails her dead husband: ‘He was a Dane, and o’er his mind/Religion had not shed her chast’ning influence:/Nor from his breast had Education drawn/The rank and overgrowing weeds of Passion’.41 Magnus’s Alfred (while in disguise) also saves Guthrum from an assassin and later, when he offers a pardon to the Viking, promises that he is ‘as much your friend’ as when dressed as a minstrel.42 For those Alfredian authors like Magnus who wished to present the Vikings with some degree of sympathy, the late-medieval tale that Alfred had entered the Viking camp in disguise provided an opportunity to investigate more deeply the character of the king’s Danish enemies. For a few authors, the brief episode in the Viking camp was developed into the main interest of their text—R. Kelsey’s 1852 epic poem Alfred of Wessex allots almost forty pages to describing the Danes’ behaviour in their own camp. The story of Alfred’s disguised foray into the Viking camp derives from the early-twelfth-century History of the Kings of England by William of Malmesbury. This relates how, during his time in hiding from the Danes in 878 AD, Alfred

38 Henty, The Dragon and the Raven, p. 36. 39 E.L. Hill, Alfred the Great. A Drama (London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1901), pp. 61, 73. 40 J.D. Richards, The Vikings (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 123. 41 Magnus, Alfred the Great, p. 151. 42 Magnus, Alfred the Great, p. 154. 142 joanne parker

hazarded an experiment of consummate art. Accompanied only by one of his faithful adherents, he entered the tent of the Danish king under the disguise of a mimic; and being admitted, in his assumed capacity of jester, to every corner of the banqueting-room, there was no object of secrecy that he did not minutely attend to both with eyes and ears. Remaining there several days, till he had satisfied his mind on every matter which he wished to know, he returned to Adelingai; and assembling his companions, pointed out the indolence of the enemy, and the easiness of their defeat.43 The Malmesbury chronicle was published as early as 1596 and was translated into English in 1815, so it was well known and easily available to the authors of Victorian Alfrediana. The story was also included in Thomas Percy’s 1765 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, in which account Alfred dresses as a minstrel rather than as a jester—a version which became dominant in the nineteenth century, in part because of the cult of minstrelsy at that time.44 In William of Malmesbury’s narrative, the Danish king before whom Alfred appears is unnamed, and it is the ‘indolence’ of the enemy which attracts Alfred’s notice. Increasingly in the nineteenth century, however, the king was identified as Guthrum and given a speaking part in the narrative. In earlier texts, this seems to have been done largely as a means of assuaging anxiety about the speed of the Danish king’s later conversion to Christianity. In John Fitchett’s lengthy 1842 King Alfred. A Poem, Book XXXVII is devoted to relating how Alfred, in his character of a minstrel, sings in compliance with Guthrun’s request, the revelation of the last day, according to the Christian belief, and afterwards further explains to Guthrun the system of Christianity, thereby laying the foundations of the future conversion of the Danish monarch.45 Other writers imagined that the foundations for the conversion might have been laid by means of some personal fraternity being established between Guthrum and Alfred while the latter was disguised. In the 1831 play Alfred the Great. Or, The Patriot King by James Sheridan Knowles, Guthrum is ‘struck by the deportment’ of the disguised Alfred, while the Saxon king, in his turn, advises Guthrum on how to deal with his

43 William of Malmesbury, The History of the Kings of England, in J. Stevenson (ed.), The Church Historians of England, vol. III/i (London, Seeleys, 1854), p. 101. 44 See C.M. Jackson-Houlston, Ballads, Songs and Snatches. The Appropriation of Folk Song and Popular Culture in British Nineteenth-Century Realist Prose (Aldershot, Ashgate, 1999), pp. 1–5. 45 J. Fitchett, King Alfred. A Poem, ed. R. Roscoe, 6 vols. (London, William Pickering, 1842), vol. V, p. 242. the victorians, the dark ages and english national identity 143 petulant daughter and muses ‘A regal nature his!/There’s something in thee, Guthrum, I could claim close kindred with’.46 As the nineteenth century progressed, the notion of some ‘close kindred’ between Alfred and Guthrum seems to have been imagined less in personal and domestic terms, and more in racial terms, as a generalized identity between Saxon and Dane as North European nations. In many works, Alfred’s minstrelsy and Guthrum’s appreciation of this suggests shared cultural values, along the lines argued by Percy and Mallet in Northern Antiquities. Indeed, in Stratford Canning’s 1876 Alfred the Great in Athelnay, the Danes view the Saxons as merely ‘those/who, like ourselves, came with the tides’.47 Such texts suggest a growing awareness of the hybridity of the English population. They also seem to indicate some level of cultural anxiety about the stability of the union of Great Britain, however. In many texts, the friendship between Alfred and Guthrum is geared towards not Christian conversion, but rather political union. In Canning’s text, the Saxon king looks forward with Guthrum to Britain as a nation ‘haply formed of parts distinct, but welded into one’ and Guthrum concurs, ‘Dane and Saxon should be one’.48 The contemporary relevance of depicting a positive union between Saxon and Dane is made more explicit in Martin Tupper’s Alfred. A Patri- otic Play, which ends with ‘Guthrom’ marrying Alfred’s sister ‘Bertha’ at the nationally symbolic location of Glastonbury, to the sound of the national anthem, and against a backdrop of ‘crowds of Danes and English, as in amicable union of the two nations, their flags and emblems mixed’.49 This was, after all, only half a century after the cross of St Patrick had been conjoined with the English flag at the 1801 Act of Union. Maintaining the union of Great Britain is also a concern of Alfred Aus- tin’s 1896 play England’s Darling, in which Alfred writes ‘tales and charters’ as an attempt to ‘weld in one/Jute, Angle, Frisian, aye and these fierce Danes’.50 Austin seems to have seen his own literary mission as something similar. In the play, the Vikings stand proxy for the peripheral nations of the United Kingdom. Although Alfred’s enemies are invading Danes, when the king prays for help, his wish is that

46 Knowles, Alfred the Great, pp. 42, 52, 62. 47 Canning, Alfred the Great in Athelnay, p. 43. 48 Canning, Alfred the Great in Athelnay, pp. 170, 168. 49 M.F. Tupper, Alfred. A Patriotic Play (Westminster, privately printed, 1850), p. 49. 50 A. Austin, England’s Darling, fifth ed. (London, Macmillan, 1896), p. 16. 144 joanne parker

I Alfred, your weak servant, yet may be Law to North Wales and terror to Strathclyde.51 Although Austin was writing long after the 1801 Act of Union, there seems some recognition here that British nationality was still an unstable construct. In particular, he may have been aware of the Welsh nationalist furore that arose in the wake of the 1870 Government Education Act (which made English the medium of communication in all Welsh schools), since the play includes several Welsh characters—‘dark outlandish men/ That hang upon your heel as though afeard’—who come to Alfred’s court to ‘crave’ his overlordship.’52 It seems, then, that the Vikings could stand in for the Irish, the Scots or the Welsh in nineteenth-century fictions of union. At the same time, though, they were also used to celebrate the increasingly multicultural nature of Britain’s royal family. Much critical work has focused on the uses of Saxonism to promote the Hanoverians in Britain. Austin’s play, however, is dedicated to ‘her Royal Highness Alexandra, Princess of Wales, daughter of vanished Vikings and mother of English kings to be’.53 Alexandra was the Danish bride of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales and had been welcomed by Alfred Tennyson at her 1863 coronation as a ‘Sea King’s daughter from over the sea’, with the promise: ‘Saxon and Norman and Dane are we,/But all of us Danes in our welcome of thee’.54 She is invoked at the end of Austen’s play in the figure of ‘Edgiva’ the daughter of Guthrum, who marries Alfred’s son. In his 2005 study The Vikings, Richards claims that in the nineteenth century, ‘the Anglo-Saxons were the ancestral us, while the Vikings were them’.55 Alexandra’s popularity as Princess of Wales was just one factor which makes this too simplistic a reading. Not only does the figure of Guthrum complicate notions of a distinct Saxon type in many Alfredian texts, but in a few works the equation of Saxon with English, and Viking with Other seems almost to be inverted. In Daniel Maclise’s 1852 painting of Alfred, the Saxon King, Disguised as a Minstrel, in the Tent of Guthrum the Dane a bond seems to be suggested between Alfred and Guthrum,

51 Austin, England’s Darling, p. 16. 52 Austin, England’s Darling, pp. 48, 49. On Welsh nationalism see J.A. Davies, Edu- cation in a Welsh Rural Community 1870–1873 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1973), pp. 19–27. 53 Austin, England’s Darling, p. v. 54 Austin, England’s Darling, p. v. 55 Richards, The Vikings, p. 123. the victorians, the dark ages and english national identity 145 who gaze at each other, are facially similar, and both have longer, fairer hair than the welter of intoxicated Danes around them. The racial politics of the painting are even more complicated than this merging of national types suggests, though. The image is striking as the only representation of Alfred as red-haired. To understand the likely significance of this, it is necessary to consider Maclise’s other works. Born in Cork and a member of the Irish Society in London during the 1850s, Maclise showed an interest in ‘Celtic’ cultural nationalism in many of his paintings. Both his depiction of Edward I Presenting his Infant Son to the Welsh People and The Mar- riage of Strongbow and Eva are works that are critical of military invasion.56 There is therefore a good case for reading Alfred in his depiction of the Danish camp not as English but as Irish or more broadly ‘Celtic’, and the Danes, on the other hand, as the English. The identity of the Saxons as ‘us’ is also complicated in Jacob Abbott’s 1898 popular history, Alfred the Great, which celebrates Alfred’s treaty with Guthrum in terms that are strikingly sympathetic to the Vikings: There were two races in the same island that had been engaged for many years in a fierce and bloody struggle, each gaining at times a temporary victory. The Danes had for many years settled in Britain. Large numbers had quietly settled on agricultural lands. They had become peaceful inhabitants. They had intermarried in some cases with Saxons. Alfred determined to [. . .] allow those peaceably disposed to remain in quiet possession of such lands [. . .] as they already occupied.57 In this case, it is instructive to learn that Abbott was resident in India at the time that the book was written, and that it was published in Madras, for Indian readers, by the Christian Literature Society for India. Clearly, then, this British author identified not with Alfred and the Saxons but rather with the colonizing Danes, and his promotion of peace and inter- racial tolerance should be read in relation to the growing influence of the Indian National Congress in the late nineteenth century. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, several Alfredian novelists also seem to have identified with Alfred’s Viking opponents. Gordon Stables’ 1898 adventure novel ’Twixt Daydawn and Light begins with a framing narrative in which he and an Irish friend sail to Iceland. There they learn from an Icelander,

56 J. Turpin, ‘Daniel Maclise’, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2004), www.oxforddnb.com.lib.exeter.ac.uk/view/article/17682, accessed 30 Jan. 2009. 57 J. Abbott, Alfred the Great (Madras, Christian Literature Society, 1898), p. 36. 146 joanne parker

Your Anglese, or English, would ignore us, and expunge from the list of their ancestors those very men to whom, as the greatest naval nation in the world, they owe so much, those Vikings stern who first taught Britannia to rule the ocean waves.58 This point is reiterated several times in the main narrative, which relates the Viking invasions of 878. The Vikings, Stables asserts, were ‘neither so cruel nor so vile as the Anglo-Saxons in their chronicles make them out to be’; rather they should be viewed as ‘the germs of all that is best and boldest in our present-day civilisation’.59 The Anglo-Saxon, on the other hand, was ‘easily swayed by superstitious reverence for the unknown and invisible power [. . .] was greedy of money [. . . and] had the vices of a barbarian—gluttony and drunkenness’.60 Alfred is admired—but largely, it seems, on the grounds of the treaty that he forged with Guthrum which Stables claims gave the Vikings ‘one half of the country’.61 The reasons for Stables’ affiliation with the Vikings seem to have been twofold. On the one hand, having spent several years in the Royal Navy and then the merchant service, he admired the Vikings for their nautical accomplishments.62 So he could not ‘feel myself altogether in order while calling them pirates. They were simply privateering’.63 And he commends their ‘brave hearts’ as ‘the forerunners of those that at the present day beat in the bosoms of every brave and British sailor’.64 Secondly, although an inhabitant of England for most of his adult life, Stables was born and raised in Scotland, and for this reason seems to have identified with the Danes as a nation which had, like Scotland, been absorbed in the creation of an ‘Anglo-British’ national identity. The two nations are equated in the novel when Stables remarks that ‘The English [. . .] termed the Vikings heathen; well, they were certainly not Christians, but they were soldiers. The Scottish Highlanders were also considered barbarians.’65 And in the novel’s preface he scoffs at earlier Anglo-Saxonism and introduces his own position:

58 G. Stables, ’Twixt Daydawn and Light. A Tale of the Times of Alfred the Great (London, J.F. Shaw, 1898), p. 144. 59 Stables, ’Twixt Daydawn and Light, pp. 245, 224. 60 Ibid., p. 215. 61 Ibid., p. 342. 62 G.S. Woods, ‘William Gordon Stables’, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36229, accessed 30 Jan. 2009. 63 Stables, ’Twixt Daydawn and Light, p. 369. 64 Ibid., p. 224. 65 Ibid., p. 293. the victorians, the dark ages and english national identity 147

[. . .] in the books of English history I have read, I find the authors wax- ing hysterically happy over every victory they can claim from the ancient Vikings, or “heathen Norsemen”. I smile, because they quite forget that we owe some of the best blood that warms our veins to these “tameless spirits of the past”. [. . .] In my present tale, then, I have tried—in a pleasant way I hope—to work up to the history of Alfred the Great through the principal foes to his kingdom, the Picts, the Scots, and the so-called Danes.66 In the two years following the publication of Stables’ novel, a further two Alfredian novelists depicted the events of 878 from a Viking perspective. Charles Whistler’s 1899 King Alfred’s Viking is narrated by a Norwegian, Ranald, who fights for Alfred and teaches the Saxons to establish and command a naval force. More importantly, though, he acts as a cultural intermediary, explaining to the Saxons the social structures of the Vikings. When the Vikings seem to break a treaty with Alfred and ‘the king’s rage is cold and dreadful’, Ranald explains: Surely you do not look for the men of one chief to be bound by what another promises? [. . .] If Guthrum chooses to make peace, that is not Halfdan’s business, or Hubba’s, or that of any chief who likes it not. One is as free as the other [. . .] If they swore by the holy ring, there is no doubt that they who swore would keep the oath. But that does not bind those who were against the peace-making.67 Alfred is appeased and amazed by this insight—and the reader too is nurtured away from a view of the Vikings as oath-breakers, derived from Asser and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The novel is a parable of cultural tolerance, and when Ranald is rewarded for his diplomacy at its conclusion by being made ‘leader of the King’s Wessex sea-levies, offering me the rank and fee of an English Ealdorman’, the parallels with the nineteenth- century Scots and Irish who served in the British navy and colonial administration are difficult to ignore.68 Paul Creswick’s In Ælfred’s Days. A Story of Saga the Dane also focuses on a figure with divided loyalties. Creswick’s Saga is a Viking child who is adopted by Alfred and brought up with his own son Edward. Like Ranald he acts as a mediator, arguing that ‘the Saxons, just like the Danes, snatched England’.69 And like both Ranald and Stables’ Vikings he brings hot-blooded spirit and martial prowess to the Saxon side. He and

66 Ibid., p. x. 67 C. Whistler, King Alfred’s Viking (London, T. Nelson, 1899), p. 97. 68 Whistler, King Alfred’s Viking, p. 284. 69 P. Creswick, In Ælfred’s Days (London, Ernest Nister, 1900), p. 120. 148 joanne parker

Alfred’s natural son have complementary qualities—Creswick relates that ‘Edward might plan a scheme well, but Saga would be there to administer it’.70 As an author, Creswick was clearly more attracted to Saga, with his mixed heritage, than to Alfred: when he wrote a sequel to the novel a year later, in which Saga visits the country of his birth, the Saxon king was included only as a bit-part in the final chapter. In the absence of any information about Creswick’s own background, it can only be stated with cer- tainty that he was interested in questions of union, hybridity, and mixed nationality—Saga must resist the temptation to betray the Saxons when he learns of his true birth and remain loyal to his adopted nation. The novels of Creswick, Whistler and Stables make it abundantly clear that by the late nineteenth century—even in English literature about the king celebrated as the acme of Anglo-Saxon culture—the Saxons were not always simply represented as ‘us’. In the twentieth century, in the wake of the First and Second World Wars, the Anglo-Saxonism of the Victorian period came to be viewed retrospectively as a wholly negative cultural phenomena—associated with racial supremacy, cultural intolerance, and the rise of fascism, and those World Wars were identified as having spelled the end of Britain’s unfortunate fascination with the Saxons.71 However, if the cult of King Alfred is viewed diachronically across the nineteenth century, I would argue that through the representation of Viking figures in Alfredian texts it is possible to observe not a simplistic nationalism, but rather the newly-forged nation ‘Great Britain’ gradually coming to terms with its own hybridity and developing a more complex sense of national identity. In particular, the often revisited narrative of Alfred’s treaty with Guthrum seems to have led the re-writers inexorably towards investigation of British multiculturalism, so that half a century before the First World War, Anglo-Saxonism was already developing in more culturally inclusive directions. Without those two world wars, it is arguable that British Anglo- Saxonism might have been resolved into an engagement with Britain’s past which embraced the notion of multiple histories, and which could still be viewed in positive terms today. The two world wars did, however, interrupt this development. Today, in consequence, Britain remains a country that celebrates its ‘Celtic’ ancestry, its Viking roots, and the history of its Middle Ages yet is still unwilling to celebrate the Saxon part

70 Creswick, In Ælfred’s Days, p. 118. 71 See Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, p. 202. the victorians, the dark ages and english national identity 149 of its heritage. Between 1914 and 2000, fewer than thirty Alfredian texts were published—while works on Celtic and Viking themes numbered in the thousands.72 It was only at the close of the twentieth century that any real attempt was made to revive King Alfred as a subject of popular interest—in the series of novels by Bernard Cornwell. Cornwell’s approach is carefully distant from triumphal Anglo-Saxonism—his Alfred is first encountered moaning and vomiting in an attack of post-coital guilt and his Saxons in general are rule-bound, pale figures who contrast sadly with the colour and joie-de-vivre of the Danes.73 Yet at the same time his culturally confused Saxon hero who has been raised by the Danes is clearly the offspring of Creswick’s Saga, Whistler’s Ranald and, yet further back, the Danish-Saxon marriages that conclude so many mid-nineteenth-century Alfredian texts. And the questions which this post-modern hero asks are really not so very different from those posed by those earlier mediators, or even by Maclise’s pensive Guthrum: ‘Northumbrian or Dane? Which was I? What did I want to be?’74

References

Abbott, J., Alfred the Great (Madras, Christian Literature Society, 1898). Alfred the Great. Deliverer of his Country. A Tragedy (London, privately printed, 1753). Austin, A., England’s Darling, fifth ed. (London, Macmillan, 1896). Ballantyne, R.M., Erling the Bold (London, James Nisbet, 1869). Bicknell, A., The Patriot King. Or Alfred and Elvida. An Historical Tragedy (London, privately printed, 1788). Bowker, A., The King Alfred Millenary. A Record of the National Commemoration (London, Macmillan, 1902). Brough, R.B., Alfred the Great. Or, The Minstrel King. An Historical Extravaganza (London, Thomas Hailes, 1860). Canning, S., Alfred the Great in Athelnay. An Historical Play (London, Bernard Quaritch, 1876). Cornwell, B., The Last Kingdom (London, Harper Collins, 2005). Creswick, P., In Ælfred’s Days. A Story of Saga the Dane. (London, Ernest Nister, 1900). Davies, J.A., Education in a Welsh Rural Community 1870–1873 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1973). Dickens, C., A Child’s History of England (London, Bradbury and Evans, 1852). Eayrs, G., Alfred to Victoria. Hands Across a Thousand Years (London, Swan Sonnenschein, 1902). Fitchett, J., King Alfred. A Poem, ed. R. Roscoe, 6 vols. (London, William Pickering, 1842). Freeman, E.A., The History of the Norman Conquest of England, 6 vols. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1867–79).

72 Between 1965 and 1985 alone, over 8,000 books were published concerned with some aspect of the Arthurian legend, for instance. 73 B. Cornwell, The Last Kingdom (London, Harper Collins, 2005), p. 79. 74 Cornwell, The Last Kingdom, p. 55. 150 joanne parker

Fuller, A., The Son of Ethelwolf (London, G.G.J. & J. Robinson, 1789). Haggard, H. Rider, King Solomon’s Mines (Oxford, Oxford World’s Classics, 1998). Henty, G.A., The Dragon and the Raven. Or, The Days of King Alfred (London, Blackie, 1886). Hill, E.L., Alfred the Great. A Drama (London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1901). Home, J., Alfred. A Tragedy (London, T. Beckett, 1778). Jackson-Houlston, C.M., Ballads, Songs and Snatches. The Appropriation of Folk Song and Popular Culture in British Nineteenth-Century Realist Prose (Aldershot, Ashgate, 1999). Kerr, E., Two Saxon Maidens. Gytha, a Story of the Time of Baeda. Elgiva, a Story of the Time of Alfred the Great (London, Wesleyan Methodist Sunday School Union, 1885). Keynes, S., and M. Lapidge (eds.), Alfred the Great. Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1983). Knowles, J.S., Alfred the Great. Or, the Patriot King (London, James Ridgeway, 1831). Lonsdale, M., Sketch of Alfred the Great. Or, The Danish Invasion. A Grand Historical Ballet (London, privately printed, 1865). Magnus, J., Alfred the Great, in idem, Woloski, a Tragedy; Alfred the Great, a Play; and Poems (London, privately printed, 1838). Mallet, P.H., Northern Antiquities. Or, a Description of the Manners, Customs, Religion and Laws of the Ancient Danes, and other Northern Nations, ed. T. Percy, 2 vols. (London, T. Carnan, 1770). Parker, J., England’s Darling. The Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007). Richards, J.D., The Vikings (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005). Simmons, C., Reversing the Conquest. History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Litera- ture (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1990). Stables, G., ’Twixt Daydawn and Light. A Tale of the Times of Alfred the Great (London, J.F. Shaw, 1898). Strutt, J., Ancient Times. A Drama (Edinburgh, J. Murray, 1808). Tupper, M.F., Alfred. A Patriotic Play (Westminster, privately printed, 1850). ——, ‘The Order of Alfred’, in idem, Ballads for the Times (London, Arthur Hall, Virtue, 1851), pp. 252–256. Turner, S., The History of the Anglo-Saxons, 4 vols. (London, T. Cadell, W. Davies and Long- man, 1799–1805). Turpin, J., ‘Daniel Maclise’, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, Claren don Press, 2004), www.oxforddnb.com.lib.exeter.ac.uk/view/article/17682, accessed 30 Jan. 2009. Wawn, A., The Vikings and the Victorians. Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2000). Whistler, C., King Alfred’s Viking (London, T. Nelson, 1899). William of Malmesbury, The History of the Kings of England, in J. Stevenson (ed.), The Church Historians of England, vol. III/i (London, Seeleys, 1854). Woods, G.S., ‘William Gordon Stables’, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36229, accessed 30 Jan. 2009. CHAPTER SEVEN

‘A TRUE CONCEPTION OF HISTORY’: ‘MAKING THE PAST PART OF THE PRESENT’ IN LATE VICTORIAN HISTORICAL ROMANCES

Anna Vaninskaya

In his address to the twelfth annual meeting of the Society for the Protec- tion of Ancient Buildings in 1889, William Morris defined ‘romance’ as ‘the capacity for a true conception of history, a power of making the past part of the present’. The immediate context of the phrase was a discussion of the necessity of seeing beauty in daily life, but the statement could equally well have served as the beginning of a literary manifesto, for by 1889 Morris was devoting more and more time to the composition of historical romances.1 When he turned from epic poetry to prose in the 1880s, Morris joined a large cohort of writers who earned their daily bread by peddling different ‘conceptions of history’ in romance form. By the end of the nineteenth century historical fiction dominated the British literary market: minor authors (now largely unread) made entire careers from its production; major novelists also tried their hands at the genre first popularized by Scott; and enterprising publishers brought out title after title, aimed at children and adults and dealing with every conceivable period of the past. Some sold in hundreds, others in hundreds of thousands; some became the staple fare of school textbooks, others remained in limited editions on the shelves of a few appreciative aesthetes; still others appeared and disappeared with the rest of the serialized ephemera of cheap print. The historical romance was not a rigidly defined form: it could commence with theoretical prefaces and introductions or plunge directly into the action;

1 Romance is notoriously difficult to define, but in the period in question it could refer to almost any type of narrative distinguished from the realist novel of contemporary everyday life by the use of exotic settings, adventure, and supernatural or improbable incident. In this chapter I use ‘historical romance’ more or less interchangeably with ‘historical novel’, following the practice of many late Victorians, but it should be borne in mind that not all of them regarded the two terms as synonymous. For a discussion of the generic issues involved see A. Vaninskaya, ‘The Late-Victorian Romance Revival: a Generic Excur- sus’, English Literature in Transition, 51 (2008), pp. 57–79. 152 anna vaninskaya it could draw on any number of related genres, from Gothic to travel writing; it could make an ostentatious display of research and erudition with lists of sources, footnotes, and detailed archaeological descriptions, or present itself as a flight of fancy, seemingly unencumbered by documentary accuracy. Nor did British authors feel obliged to confine themselves to the island past—the whole world was fair game, and everything was a matter of interpretation. When it came to constructing British national identity, tales of Egyptian priests or Christians in the Roman Empire could be moulded to the author’s ideological ends as easily as the adventures of Elizabethan seafarers. Rome, of course, offered a widely recognized precedent for the British Empire, but some novels went so far as to claim that Christianity itself had originated in England, and conflations of this sort were commonplace (the Anglo-Saxons were reputed to be one of the lost tribes of Israel, for instance). The Middle Ages also loomed large: Vikings and Normans were as much a part of collective memory as Arthur and the Anglo-Saxons, and for Morris even Gothic tribes and Flemish craftsmen became grist to the mill of English history. In fact, the nation’s very mongrelism—the familiar mixture of Celts, Romans, Saxons, Norsemen, and Normans—gave licence to the most geographically wide- ranging interpretations of national origins. This chapter takes as its subject two Victorians, William Morris and Arthur Conan Doyle, who both produced highly distinctive historical romances, but who approached the task of making the medieval past part of the Victorian present—or rather, the Victorian present part of the medieval past—in very different ways. By the last two decades of the century, the genre had developed considerably, and the output of historical fiction increased dramatically in the context of the end-of-century publishing boom. Simon Goldhill, in his study of Victorian novels of ancient Rome, offers several striking estimates: over two hundred novels on Roman themes were published in the century prior to the Great War; a significant jump occurred in the 1870s, and another in the 1890s. In fact, half of the texts in question appeared in the three decades after 1890, while eleven earlier novels were reprinted and repackaged, especially for the newly flourishing American market.2 These are only the Roman novels, of course, and a tally of romances set in other historical periods

2 S. Goldhill, ‘Virgins, Lions and Honest Pluck: Victorian Novels of Ancient Rome’, in idem, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity. Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 218. ‘a true conception of history’ 153 would likely yield similar results.3 One is dealing, then, with a generic category of over a thousand titles, many of which—as one would expect when faced with such data—could be classified as formula fiction or hack-work, self-consciously operating within a strictly circumscribed set of established conventions. This is quite a significant caveat to the claim made above that the form was not rigidly defined. Certainly if one con- fines the discussion to texts produced in bulk for a juvenile audience— G.A. Henty, say, who sold tens of millions of copies of nearly a hundred historical adventure titles—formal experimentation would not be a prominent feature. And one has to keep that bulk in mind: for every famous name that one encounters—Bulwer-Lytton, Ainsworth, Thackeray, Charles Reade, George Eliot, Dickens, Stevenson, or Haggard—there are scores of unknowns. Many of them, to be sure, were reprinted numerous times in the Victorian period, perhaps even offered as school prizes into the early twentieth century, but have since then been consigned to the oblivion of research libraries. Of course, one should not assume that the famous names necessarily achieved a greater level of sophistication than the deservedly forgotten. It is a critical cliché that the historical novels of the major mid-Victorian realists were comparative failures, and formal innovation could be found in the most unexpected quarters.4 Another important point flagged up by Goldhill’s study is the occu- pational provenance of the historical novelists, most of whom were not full-time historical novelists at all, but (if they were men) politicians, clergymen, professional scholars, headmasters or other educationalists.5 Whatever impact this fact might have had on the literary quality of the romances, it did guarantee their ideological instrumentality: these were novels designed to push particular agendas, political, religious, or other wise. In analysing even the most aesthetically sophisticated work of fiction one has to take account of its ideological dimension, of its engagement with contemporary debates and preoccupations. But when it comes to the pedestrian bulk of what was in essence a mass genre, especially the products aimed at children, the ideological skeleton is less likely to be hid- den in the folds of art: one can expect it to be harder, clearer, simpler, and

3 The best known contemporary bibliographies, such as Jonathan Nield’s A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales, 2nd ed. (London, Elkin Mathews, 1902) and subsequent editions, only show the tip of the iceberg. 4 See, e.g., J. Bowen, ‘The Historical Novel’, in P. Brantlinger and W.B. Thesig (eds.), A Companion to the Victorian Novel (Oxford, Blackwell, 2002), pp. 244–59. 5 Nele Bemong has uncovered a similar background in the professions for nineteenth- century Belgian and Dutch historical novelists. 154 anna vaninskaya more apparent on the surface. In literature produced for educational purposes this was always the case, especially as the late nineteenth-century emphasis on the inculcation of patriotism and citizenship through English history teaching superseded the earlier focus on religious indoctrination. From the 1880s onwards, the reliance on the fictionalized historical exem- plum, the stirring tale of national heroics from the hardy Anglo-Saxon to the honourable General Gordon, was as evident in the elementary textbook as in the teacher-training manual.6 Of course, the classical past had served that purpose for the elite since the previous century, and whether English or Roman, working class or public school, educational uses of the past have long been a subject of study. But historical fiction has not been combed over with the same degree of commitment, though as Goldhill’s research shows, even a sub-genre as seemingly narrow as first-century romance offers a rich seam for historians of national identity in its portrayal of Englishness, its racial stereotyp- ing, its theological and political polemics, and its intimate engagement with the scholarly tradition of historical writing. The past in these works is a source of contrasts, parallels, continuities, and genealogies, models and warnings, ‘reproof’ and ‘edification’; it is the progenitor, the origin of the present and it is always interpreted through a contemporary lens. Whether one is looking at an evangelical Christian tale of martyrs in ancient Rome or an imperialist adventure on the Spanish Main, modern controversies and expectations inevitably come to the forefront, often in an explicitly didactic form. For many writers—Charles Kingsley and Cardinal Newman are probably the most famous—historical fiction was but one weapon in an arsenal which also contained many other forms of expression, from sermons to pamphlets, honed to make their ideological point in polemical battle. Kingsley’s triumphalist Victorian Teutonism was inextricable from his anti-Catholicism, so when he came to write Hereward the Wake (1866), he ensured his character’s muscular Viking virtues emerged against the background of eleventh-century priestly inadequacy—and that was quite a sophisticated handling when placed beside the astonishing crudeness of the analogies and clichés analysed by Goldhill. As the ideological

6 See S. Heathorn, For Home, Country, and Race. Constructing Gender, Class, and English- ness in the Elementary School 1880–1914 (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2000); and P. Yeandle, ‘Empire, Englishness and Elementary School History Education, c. 1880–1914’, International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research, 3 (2003), pp. 59–72; and idem, ‘Englishness in Retrospect: Rewriting the National Past for Children of the English Working Classes, c. 1880–1920’, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 6 (2006), pp. 9–26. ‘a true conception of history’ 155 controversies and historiographical assumptions succeeded each other over the course of the century, so did their representation in romance form. The Goths and Romans of Wilkie Collins’s Antonina, published in 1850, are very different beings indeed from William Morris’s Goths and Romans in The House of the Wolfings of the late 1880s. But there is another important imperative—also ideologically inflected, but ultimately transcending every local context—which has to be considered in any discussion of historical fiction, and that is the basic impulse towards reconstruction. The Victorian historical novel’s persistent frame- breaking was a double-edged habit. The appeal to the reader, the allusion to contemporary realities, the intertextual reference to Scott, Macaulay, or Freeman, the footnote arguing with previous scholarly authorities: all this brought the past rudely into the present, but it could also serve to buttress the audacious reconstruction of a bygone reality that no actual records preserved. The quest for accuracy, faithfulness, antiquarian preci- sion, was never incompatible with the wildest speculation; on the contrary, the greater the display of the author’s learning, the more liberties, it seems, could be taken to fill in the gaping holes of the historical record. Reconstruction worked on both planes: its end result may not have been a closer approximation to what we would recognize as ‘real history’, but for the serious artist it always entailed the creation of a self-sufficient and internally coherent world. In the lower reaches of the market generic convention often proved stronger than either historical accuracy or integ- rity of conception: as Goldhill observes, ‘scenes [were] self-consciously repeated with variation from book to book [. . .] other literary forms, such as the school novel, provide[d] a narrative framework’.7 But if school- girl fiction in togas, which dusted its clichés with the barest sprinkling of scholarship, was not the surest guide to historical truth, adult novels which suffocated under a weight of research which their narratives could hardly bear were no more plausible in purely scholarly terms. Kingsley, in the footnotes to Hereward the Wake, indulged in much abstruse geneal- ogy and quoting of medieval manuscripts, only to let his imagination run wild whenever he came to a gap in the record (which was often). The pleasures of imaginative reconstruction, of the reinvention of a lost world, were enabled but never encumbered by the autonomous demands of the historiographical material.

7 Goldhill, Victorian Culture, p. 231. 156 anna vaninskaya

And few late Victorians could match William Morris for fecundity of imagination. In the late 1880s and 1890s he wrote a series of ‘medievalist’ romances of which three are identifiably historical, despite their fantastic elements. Two of these, The House of the Wolfings (1889) and The Roots of the Mountains (1890), are set among the barbarian Germanic tribes of Central Europe, and furnish perfect models of the interaction between Victorian socialist ideology and historiographically informed reconstruction of the highest order. This chapter will focus on the third: the shorter, better known, but also significantly cruder and more instrumental A Dream of John Ball (1888), the tale of a Victorian socialist who wakes up in fourteenth-century Kent and witnesses the beginning of the Peasants’ Revolt. Morris brought up the Revolt more than once in his publications for the socialist periodical press, and though A Dream of John Ball was a short romance, not a historical commentary, it also first appeared as a serial in a socialist newspaper (The Commonweal). It was different from the two tales of Germanic tribes—in terms of length and subject matter most obviously, but also in its use of actual historical events, and, as Morris’s daughter observed, ‘in the mood in which it was written, and in the fire and concentration felt behind the easy flow of the narrative. It is [. . .] a Confession of Faith’.8 Indeed, Morris seems to have identified with Ball, the charismatic rebel priest, more than with most of his other characters. In an 1884 letter to the Manchester Guardian he proclaimed that John Ball ‘lives still, though I am but a part, and not the whole of him [. . .]. Nor will he quite die as long as he has work to do’.9 But when it came to turning historical fiction to political purposes, A Dream of John Ball established the pattern for the later romances, infusing certain ideologically kindred aspects of the nationalist historical discourse with the socialist ethic. Thematically speaking, the tale has two core sections: John Ball’s speech at the village cross, and the concluding dialogue between Ball and the dreamer-narrator. But if the latter is significant for its Marxist exposition of economic development, the earlier, more lyrical address is one of the best known Victorian descriptions of socialist communal values. It is also, unlike the conversation at the end, partially grounded in historical record, although the ‘Fellowship is heaven, lack of fellowship is hell’ peroration—

8 William Morris, Collected Works, ed. M. Morris, 24 vols. (London, Longmans, 1910–15), vol. XVII, p. xiii. Hereafter cited in the text as CW. 9 N. Kelvin (ed.), The Collected Letters of William Morris, 4 vols. (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1984–1996), vol. II, p. 326. Morris makes much of John Ball’s relevance throughout the letter. ‘a true conception of history’ 157 the most distinctive part of Ball’s sermon from the socialist standpoint— is not found in Froissart’s original chronicle upon which Morris drew for Ball’s more familiar lines.10 In this supplementary section Morris’s Ball proclaims, ‘he who doeth well in fellowship, and because of fellowship, shall not fail though he seem to fail to-day, but in days hereafter shall he and his work yet be alive, and men be holpen by them to strive again and yet again’ (CW, vol. XVI, p. 233). The presence of this new, forward- looking element in Ball’s speech is explicitly tied to Morris’s political agenda. ‘Transposed into modern terms, this sermon could be heard weekly at the socialists’ outdoor pitch’ in London: Ball’s ‘medieval sermon’ to the men of Kent and Morris’s ‘socialist lecture[s]’ delivered to Victorian workers emphasized the same kind of unity and preached the same hope.11 But the historically spurious focus on fellowship was not just Morris’s way of endowing the uprising with modern socialist overtones. The parallel between the fourteenth and the nineteenth century both depended upon and enabled a much broader dialectical model of development to which the Marxist Morris subscribed, and which becomes the subject of the final and entirely fictional dialogue between Ball and the dreamer-narrator. The illusions fostered by capitalist false consciousness, the narrator tells the priest in the concluding section, must inevitably intervene between the imperfect communal ethic of the Middle Ages and its more ideal incarnation in the socialism that would grow out of the struggles of the late 1800s. The historical movement is one of negation followed by transcendence: ‘Then shall those things, which to thee seem follies, and to the men between thee and me mere wisdom and the bond of stability, seem follies once again.’ For nothing can permanently hinder the ‘Host of the Fellowship’: ‘yet shall all bring about the end, till thy deeming of folly and ours shall be one, and thy hope and our hope; and then—the Day will have come.’ The convergence of medieval and Victorian world views

10 The Chronicle of Froissart, trans. Sir John Bourchier Lord Berners, 6 vols. (London, David Nutt, 1901), vol. III, p. 224. See M. Holzman, ‘The Encouragement and Warning of History: William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball’, in F. Boos and C.G. Silver (eds.), Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris (Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 1990), p. 102. 11 M.R. Grennan, William Morris. Medievalist and Revolutionary (New York, King’s Crown Press, 1945), pp. 81–2. Cf. S.F. Eisenman, ‘Communism in Furs: a Dream of Prehistory in William Morris’s John Ball’, Art Bulletin 87 (2005), p. 100: ‘With just a few changes, Morris’s words might have described a march of unemployed British working men and women through Trafalgar Square.’ Near-contemporaries also recognized the parallel: James Boyle in What is Socialism? (New York, The Shakespeare Press, 1912), p. 211, claimed that Ball’s preaching sounded like ‘an extract from a speech by a Modern Socialist orator’. 158 anna vaninskaya which this passage anticipates is part of the same historical spiral that also links the dream-vision of the past to the utopia of the future, and the gathering of the armed freemen of Kent about the cross in this romance to the earlier Germanic folk-moots in the forests of Central Europe in Wolfings and Roots. For the fourteenth-century English rebels were not the origina- tors of the communal ethic in Morris’s theory of history. They were simply the descendants of the Teutonic tribes who fought against Roman domination, and whose resistance was re-enacted in the medieval struggle of the peasants and artisans against feudalism, and of the workers against capitalism on the final ring of the historical spiral. More than a thousand years separated the assembly of the Mark-men around their leader in Wolfings from its mirror image in the countryside of Kent, but the Fel- lowship preached by Ball was as much a re-embodiment of the principles of the tribal constitution as an anticipation of the socialism of the nineteenth century. As the symbolic day dawns John Ball tells the narrator, ‘scarce do I know whether to wish thee some dream of the days beyond thine to tell what shall be, as thou hast told me’. The dreamer wakes up in his bed in Hammersmith, just as he does again a few years later after having had another dream: not of the fourteenth century this time, but of the ‘new day of fellowship, and rest, and happiness’, otherwise known as News from Nowhere, Morris’s famous utopian romance. And it is this dreamer who stands at the crossroads of the past and the future, who is able to assure the priest: ‘the time shall come, John Ball, when that dream of thine that this shall one day be, shall be a thing that men shall talk of soberly, and as a thing soon to come about.’ The vision of communism ful- filled can only become reality because the socialists of Morris’s time have inherited John Ball’s dream of the Fellowship of Man, handed across the yawning gulf of commercialism: for, in the words of the narrator of News from Nowhere, ‘if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream’ (CW, vol. XVI, pp. 285–6, 211).12 But not everyone shared Morris’s vision; in fact, his interpretation was just one of many available to historical novelists interested in this side of the Middle Ages. When it came to the fourteenth-century revolt, authors had as many choices as there were political or religious ideologies on offer, and as these evolved over the course of the century (e.g. from

12 For a more detailed consideration of A Dream of John Ball, see A. Vaninskaya, William Morris and the Idea of Community. Romance, History and Propaganda 1880–1914 (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 119–30. ‘a true conception of history’ 159 radicalism to socialism), or varied from one constituency to another (between Anglicans and Catholics, for instance), so the literary adaptations changed with them.13 Morris’s romance reflected and embodied 1880s socialism; Arthur Conan Doyle’s The White Company, a ‘little chronicle of our common ancestry’, as the dedication puts it, inscribed ‘to the hope of the future[:] the reunion of the English-speaking races’, inaugurated 1890s Greater Britain imperialism.14 It was published just a few years after A Dream of John Ball, and was as full of patriotic bombast as the former was of socialist speculation. So they lived, these men in their own lusty, cheery fashion—rude and rough, but honest, kindly, and true. Let us thank God if we have outgrown their vices. Let us pray to God that we may ever hold their virtues. The sky may darken, and the clouds may gather, and again the day may come when Britain may have sore need of her children, on whatever shore of the sea they be found. Shall they not muster at her call? (WC, p. 561.) If the military-nationalistic overtones are not fully apparent from this concluding passage, they emerge clearly enough from the foregoing pages, and one may even detect a hint of Doyle’s Anglo-American agenda. This is historical romance used for conservative rather than radical propaganda, and its handling of national identity is particularly instructive. Doyle’s Englishmen are honest and law-abiding, but also manly and ‘a race of war- riors’ with whose ‘fame’ and ‘wonder’ ‘the whole world ring[s]’. ‘It is not in nature that an English-born man should love a Scot or a Frenchman’, and indeed, unlike the French, the English fight fairly and honourably, spar- ing the women and children (WC, pp. 226, 189, 192, 172–3). The heroes of the book—the gentle and intelligent Alleyne, the gruff and sturdy Hordle John, the chivalrous and generous Sir Nigel—are the quintessence of the different sides of the English character, and, at the end, West Saxon and Anglo-Norman are reconciled and national unity is vouchsafed by the marriage of the thane-descended Alleyne Edricson to Sir Nigel’s daughter. A preference for narratives of unification was not limited to Doyle, or to portrayals of the fourteenth century: as Joanne Parker shows elsewhere in this volume, late-Victorian historical fiction dealing with the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons in England also advocated a welding of the constituent

13 For a detailed treatment of various adaptations see A. Vaninskaya, ‘Dreams of John Ball: Reading the Peasants’ Revolt in the Nineteenth Century’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 31 (2009), pp. 45–57. 14 A. Conan Doyle, The White Company (1891; London, T. Nelson & Sons [c. 1907]), front matter. Hereafter cited in the text as WC. 160 anna vaninskaya nationalities, and imperialist writers like Kipling carried the impulse into the Edwardian period.15 But if a nationalistically motivated union concludes Doyle’s romance, the archer Aylward—a mercenary from the French wars who peppers his speech with many a ‘mon ami’ and ‘ma petite’—strikes a strident nationalist note at its very beginning. As soon as he comes on stage he calls for ‘some good English ale’ and swears he is ‘a true English bowman’ who ‘kissed the good brown earth’ of the ‘dear old land’ when he disembarked at Hythe. He listens with approval to a tritely patriotic, not to say jingo- istic, song of English bowmen ‘bred in England [. . .] the land where the true hearts dwell’, and is thoroughly disrespectful of the Pope. Character- istically, the only occasion when the narrative wholeheartedly takes the side of the poor against the rich is when a patriot tries to demonstrate the inferiority of the spiritless French peasant to his free English counterpart: a familiar theme in nationalist historical writing. The ‘common folk’ of the continent are a ‘sorry’, downtrodden race, ‘crushed down’ by the law- yers and nobles. The ‘poor commoner of England’, on the other hand, knows ‘something of charters, liberties, franchises, usages, privileges, customs and the like. If these be broken, then all men know that it is time to buy arrow-heads [. . .]. It would scarce pass in England, but they are quiet folk over the water’ (WC, pp. 72, 77, 111–12). Doyle’s comparison is less about social justice than national superiority premised on virility and the military virtues, with the obligatory nod to Old English liberties. If Morris were dealing with the same material, he would immediately latch on to those charters and franchises as the seeds of socialism in the medieval community, but Doyle is not concerned with the structures and underlying processes of history, nor with tracing how its development cul- minates in the ideal political state. He is working with a much more traditional understanding of the ‘historical’: antiquarian, particularizing rather than generalizing, preoccupied with individual personalities rather than with abstract social forces. He is meticulous in ferreting out details—from the geographical to the ecclesiastical—and careful about displaying his knowledge of obsolete vocabulary and appropriate terminology, whether it is types of boats or the intricacies of scholastic argument. His unflag- ging pursuit of authenticity, however, is thwarted by the derivative nature

15 Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) is a very good example of the tendency which, with its focus on Saxon-Norman reconciliation, goes all the way back to Scott. See also Joanne Parker’s account of this medieval reference, above, in Chapter 6. ‘a true conception of history’ 161 of his language. Anachronistically seasoned with Elizabethan expressions (for greater ‘Ye Olde England’ effect), full of clichés, tired metaphors, and stagy, mock-medieval turns of phrase on the lines of ‘ “Bethink you again, mon ami,” quoth Aylward, “that you might do much good yonder” ’, Doyle’s style is a cacophonous mixture of the second-hand and the faux- archaic (WC, pp. 114–15). An ungenerous observer might say the same of his entire picture of the Middle Ages, and that is why his rare treatments of economic history are all the more interesting, and none more so than his references to the Peasants’ Revolt and the labour question. Although Doyle has a relish for painting the grotesque sides of medieval life, and cannot be accused of focusing solely on knights and castles, his carnivalesque procession of jugglers, soldiers, criminals, burghers, beggars, milkmaids, and self-flagellating priests does not betray any deep awareness of the economic dimensions of medieval society. The reader’s only glimpse of serfs, copyholders, free labourers, or any other representatives of the country working population is restricted to the brawling drunkards and sullen escapee whom Alleyne meets in a tavern, and there is an equivalent gap in the portrayal of town life. Of colourful personages met by the roadside there is no end, but of Morris’s nameless artisans, the builders of village churches and authors of communal ballads—not one. Nobody works in Doyle’s England, though everyone can fight, and the existence of agriculture and the handicrafts is only to be guessed at. When some reference to the nobility of labour is made, it comes from the lips of an idealistic maiden calling on the monks to ‘do men’s work in the world’ by joining in the life of the ‘common people’ and fighting wickedness, and thus only serves to reinforce Doyle’s masculinist bias. This is exactly what Alleyne the clerk accomplishes by setting out on his path to knighthood, but though he fulfils the ‘ideal of duty’ there is no question of him toiling together with the ‘borel folks’ (WC, pp. 182, 194). The author is aware of class only insofar as it is expressed by rank or caste. His England is relentlessly hierarchical, and there is no place in it for what Morris regarded as the defining characteristic of the Middle Ages—the spirit of association. The guilds (Morris’s champions of medieval democratic egalitarianism) are non-existent, and though the White Company itself is a martial fellowship of sorts, it still maintains ingrained social divisions. But it is no wonder that the innocent Alleyne is surprised to behold ‘the hate which class appeared to bear to class’, for Doyle himself acknowledges only one cause for such ingratitude, and that a misguided one. The escaped villein in the tavern resents the fact that his superiors are of French origin as much as, if not more than the fact of his 162 anna vaninskaya exploitation, and the roots of the hatred that Alleyne laments apparently go no deeper than national resentment. The serf ’s invective is directed mainly against the ‘Norman Yoke’, the ‘French robber[s]’ who dared to ‘set foot in free England’, and he seems far less likely to engage in a class war than in a war of liberation against foreign invaders. He does not acknowledge king or noble, and answers to no one except the local Saxon socman.16 Not only does the serf stand in the way of national unity, he is also guilty of class insubordination, and everything in his portrayal indicates that the narrator does not approve. He is a bitter, ‘wild, masterless man’, one of a group of ‘outlaws’, ‘a party against the State’ gathered, to Alleyne’s distress, under the leadership of his brother. Treasonous associations mount with the introduction of the future Peasants’ Revolt: a ‘widespread mutiny’, ‘breaking out into local tumult and outrage’, in which the fugitive serf will no doubt play a part. But why should the commons be so discontented? Is it not because, as Morris and the contemporary historians upon whom he drew maintained, the feudal lords had decided to reverse the inevitable break-up of villeinage and reassert their economic mastery? Is it due, perhaps, to the strains of the French wars, Wycliffite subversion, John of Gaunt, the Statute of Labourers, or the poll tax? No, according to Doyle, the peasants are discontented because, having won Crécy and Poitiers, they have realized their power and so sent ‘the whole fabric of the feudal system [. . .] tottering to a fall’. The ‘fierce mutterings of the lower classes [. . .] culminating some years later in the great rising of Tyler’ are due solely to the fact that the knights and barons have lost their claim to being the indisputable guardians of the kingdom (WC, pp. 123–5). Thus at a single stroke Doyle dispenses with economic, social, and political causes, reasserts his muscular nationalist agenda, and reduces everything to the level of patriotic military pride. Martial virtues are indeed the proper stuff of romance, and there is no shortage of swordplay and ‘man’s work’ in The White Company, but nothing could be further from the historical modelling of A Dream of John Ball. In taking such an approach, Doyle was following in the footsteps of illustrious predecessors: as Joep Leerssen points out in his essay in this collection, the foundational Belgian historical novel of the fourteenth century, The Lion of Flanders (1838), also transmuted a medieval conflict

16 A socman, according to Doyle, was a farmer who had no feudal superior and was answerable only to the king. ‘a true conception of history’ 163 between Crown and Town into a culture clash between French and Flemish in line with contemporary nationalistic imperatives. Yet Doyle was too conscientious to confine himself to Norman Yoke clichés and details of armour and heraldry. If not through the narrator, then speaking with the voice of the dissatisfied social elements, he did reveal his reading of economic history, or at the very least of its popularizations. But he laid the accents differently from Morris in A Dream of John Ball, where the discussion of shifts in the modes of production and of the historical dialectic was the ideological heart of the piece. Doyle simply took the opportunity to demonstrate his wide-ranging research on various aspects of medieval life, leaving the reader to judge what relevance, if any, it might have to the narrative. In the context of a discussion about using raw rats to treat the bubonic plague, intended to showcase the ignorance and credulity of the time, a labourer—already identified as a malcontent and a member of the ‘dis- loyal party’, a ‘rough’ and ‘unkempt fellow’ with a ‘tangled beard and mat- ted hair’—blurts out the following textbook fact of fourteenth-century economic history: ‘The black death is the best friend that ever the common folk had in England’ because it increased the workers’ bargaining power and wages. Hordle John questions the callous assertion (profiting from other people’s deaths), and another workman reminds the speaker that the plague also leads to the development of commercial sheep farming and the displacement of men from the soil which is turned into pasturage. A tooth-drawer then remarks that this in turn provides work for folk of other professions, and the subject is dismissed with a laugh (WC, pp. 66, 59, 67–8). Unless it is meant to imply that the fireside conversation of fourteenth-century labourers consisted of excerpts from the relevant sections of J.R. Green’s histories, the purpose of this brief exchange remains uncertain. Telescoping several centuries of historical development as drastically as if it were written for the benefit of a reader whose only interest is Hordle John’s next wrestling match, the passage leaves the narrator’s intent strangely unclear. Are the setting and attribution of the words supposed to discredit the opinions expressed? What value sign is attached to the emancipation of labour and the destruction of peasant communities? No resolution to these doubts is provided, and the polemical opportunity is lost. Morris handles the issue very differently. His dreamer-narrator sets the transition to sheep farming firmly in the future of his 1381 time-frame, in the days of the development of international trade, when wool would become the primary commodity. The expropria- tion of land and proto-capitalist enclosures do not follow vaguely from 164 anna vaninskaya the Black Death, but are attributed directly to the lords’ desire for profit (CW, vol. XVI, p. 271). The overall place of the episode in the narrator’s historical argument is clear, and the explanation itself rigorous. But when Doyle is not quoting facts inconclusively, he is advancing his conservative sympathies. Earlier in the same scene, the runaway serf launches into a subversive, class-breaking speech worthy of one of Morris’s revolutionary Kentishmen. Together with the labourer Jenkin he recapitulates many of the points that Morris himself raises in Dream, and that would have been familiar from the standard nineteenth-century accounts of the Peasants’ Revolt and from the Froissart version of John Ball’s propaganda. ‘The castle has thrown its shadow upon the cottage over long. For three hundred years my folk have swinked and sweated’ for the lord, the villein rages: let him now work for himself! ‘Are we not all from Adam’s loins [. . .]?’ asks Jenkins: ‘Where all this difference, then, between the ermine cloak and the leathern tunic [. . .]?’ Allusions to the Norman Yoke aside, this is still entirely Morrisian. But it does not take long for a different note to creep into the conversation. After describing the sale of human livestock, the serf reveals his (literally) incendiary ten- dencies by fantasizing about setting fire to the lord’s dwelling. A labourer then declares that priests as much as nobles are the foes of the poor man and thieves who live upon his labour. A forester accuses him of indolence and the two fall to squabbling, insulting the king for not speaking English in the process. At this point the patriotic Hordle John intervenes, saving the king’s name by declaring that ‘he can fight like an Englishman’, and showing up the cowardly worthlessness of the speakers (WC, pp. 63–4, 66). So again, what ostensibly starts out as a protest against exploitation and an appeal for equality quickly degenerates into rabble-rousing and disloyalty—naturally to be condemned and rebuked with reference to the manly qualities of the true patriot. The political discussion between the serf and the labourers takes place in the common room of an inn, which serves as a microcosm of Doyle’s vision of medieval society, and an apt symbol of his estimation of the social potential of the lower orders (apart from their skill with the long- bow). A comparison of this scene with its counterpart in A Dream of John Ball will illustrate the difference between Doyle’s and Morris’s takes on the medieval predicament. Both Alleyne Edricson and Morris’s narrator are clerks, and early on in the books both find themselves in a tavern. But nothing could be more unlike Doyle’s ‘Pied Merlin’ than the ‘Rose’ of Morris’s dream. The room the dreamer walks into is beautiful, and skilfully if roughly decorated, quite in the fashion, needless to say, of ‘a true conception of history’ 165

Morris & Co. The patrons are earnest and serious yeomen, warlike enough, and served by a comely maid; there is no sign of drunkenness or uncouth behaviour, and children play about their feet. When it comes to music, a young man with a clear voice sings a ballad of Robin Hood ‘concerning the struggle against tyranny for the freedom of life’, and the men take it up with their strong musical voices (CW, vol. XVI, p. 224). The communal singing is only interrupted by the arrival of the rebel priest, whom the insurgents have been awaiting with impatience, and who proceeds to deliver his rousing speech on fellowship. The room Alleyne beholds, however, seems to belong to a different world. It is a dingy and ‘smoke- blackened’ stable, bare, unpainted, dark and malodorous, lighted by flick- ering torches—the very opposite of Morris’s bright and lovingly decorated interior. The people inhabiting this nightmarish den are suited to their surroundings, though they are also meant to represent a cross-section of society: in addition to the escaped villein and the free labourers, there are some verderers, a gleeman, a physician, a limner, and a Cambridge scholar. But the doctor is a quack, the painter a talentless parasite, the scholar a snob who leaves without paying, and the minstrel a ‘swollen and coarse’ drunkard. His singing of a ‘gross’ song is interrupted by nothing so edify- ing as a socialist sermon on the importance of community, but by the ‘pure-minded’ Alleyne’s outraged exclamation (WC, pp. 58, 68). There is fighting, foul language, and plenty of drinking, and the sustained point- by-point inversion of Morris’s scene only serves to highlight the opposing ideological tendency of the romance as a whole. This motley tavern crew is hardly the stuff of a Morrisian medieval community, but even the company of noble friends who emerge triumphant at the end of Doyle’s book do not resemble John Ball’s idea of a Fellowship. Both Morris and Doyle were engaged, as Leerssen puts it in his chapter in this volume, in ‘retro-fitting’ the past, not in line with the kind of national, linguistic, or religious splits in historical memory which shaped the historical fiction of Flanders and Holland, but in accordance with political commitments that could lead just as easily to ideologically incompatible adaptations of historical material. Different ideologies, like new events, could trigger re-assessments of the usefulness of established memories, and the late Victorian historical romance both reflected already existing memories and helped to mould new ones within a community as internally riven (though not subject to the same linguistic and constitutional tur- moil) as the Low Countries. By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain, like the Netherlands, possessed numerous ‘denominations’ with their own separate public spheres, though certain majority discourses—thanks to 166 anna vaninskaya their institutional backing (in education, mainstream political rhetoric, and so on)—permeated them all to some extent. In A Dream of John Ball, Morris addressed himself primarily to a minority socialist constituency, while Doyle’s paean to imperial patriotism, propagated via colonial and adapted school editions, was meant for the nation at large. Their respective sales figures reflected the two types of audience, but what brought them together despite these differences was the inevitable meshing of past and present, the infusion of typically Victorian concerns into imaginative reconstructions of a national past. Neither Morris’s short romance nor Doyle’s three-volume historical novel can be classed with the general run of formulaic fiction invoked at the beginning of the chapter, but only because the subsequent reception of the two works has ensured for them a more secure place in literary history than for their less influential (and therefore forgotten) counterparts. Considered on a purely literary level, Morris’s propagandistic parable is not that far removed from the typical ephemeral sermonizing which took the Peasants’ Revolt for its text,17 while Doyle’s popular narrative is closer to a cheap and sensational action-adventure in its prolixity, derivativeness, and adherence to generic convention than one might expect.18 But whatever their intrinsic literary ‘worth’, both texts shaped the Victorian cultural memory of the Middle Ages in accordance with their authors’ own ‘true conception of history’.

References

Bowen, J., ‘The Historical Novel’, in P. Brantlinger and W.B. Thesig (eds.), A Companion to the Victorian Novel (Oxford, Blackwell, 2002), pp. 244–59. Boyle, J., What is Socialism? (New York, The Shakespeare Press, 1912). Doyle, A. Conan, The White Company (1891; London, T. Nelson & Sons, [c. 1907]). Egan, P., Wat Tyler (London, F. Hextall, 1841). Eisenman, S.F., ‘Communism in Furs: a Dream of Prehistory in William Morris’s John Ball’, Art Bulletin, 87 (2005), pp. 92–110. Froissart, J., The Chronicle of Froissart, trans. Sir John Bourchier Lord Berners, 6 vols. (Lon- don, David Nutt, 1901). Goldhill, S., Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity. Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclama- tion of Modernity (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2011). Grennan, M.R., William Morris. Medievalist and Revolutionary (New York, King’s Crown Press, 1945).

17 A good example of this is the Rev. William Edward Heygate’s piece of High Church propaganda: Alice of Fobbing. Or, The Times of Jack Straw and Wat Tyler (London, J.H. & J. Parker [1860]). 18 It could be compared, for instance, with Pierce Egan’s fifty-five part Wat Tyler (Lon- don, F. Hextall, 1841). ‘a true conception of history’ 167

Heathorn, S., For Home, Country, and Race. Constructing Gender, Class, and Englishness in the Elementary School 1880–1914 (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2000). Heygate, Rev. W.E., Alice of Fobbing. Or, The Times of Jack Straw and Wat Tyler (London, J.H. & J. Parker [1860]). Holzman, M., ‘The Encouragement and Warning of History: William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball’, in F. Boos and C.G. Silver (eds.), Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris (Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 1990), pp. 98–116. [Morris, William], The Collected Letters of William Morris, ed. N. Kelvin, 4 vols. (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1984–1996). Morris, William, Collected Works, ed. M. Morris, 24 vols. (London, Longmans, 1910–15). Nield, J., A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales, 2nd ed. (London, Elkin Mathews, 1902). Vaninskaya, A., ‘Dreams of John Ball: Reading the Peasants’ Revolt in the Nineteenth Cen- tury’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 31 (2009), pp. 45–57. ——, ‘The Late-Victorian Romance Revival: a Generic Excursus’, English Literature in Tran- sition, 51 (2008), pp. 57–79. ——, William Morris and the Idea of Community. Romance, History and Propaganda 1880–1914 (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2010). Yeandle, P., ‘Empire, Englishness and Elementary School History Education, c. 1880–1914’, International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research, 3 (2003), pp. 59–72. ——, ‘Englishness in Retrospect: Rewriting the National Past for Children of the English Working Classes, c. 1880–1920’, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 6 (2006), pp. 9–26.

PART four

THE PAST IMAGINED IN THE VISUAL ARTS

CHAPTER EIGHT

PICTURING PATRIOTISM: THE IMAGE OF THE ARTIST-HERO AND THE BELGIAN NATION STATE, 1830–1900

Jenny Graham

In the cities of the Low Countries, the image of the artist is all around us. Carved effigies in bronze and stone, statues, busts and low relief portraits of Van Dyck, Rubens and Rembrandt, and the Flemish primitives gaze out over town squares or stare down from the grand edifices of national museums (see Figure 8.1). Tooled inscriptions grace cathedral walls, cere monial friezes and modest townhouses alike, while even the panorama of the everyday—street names, hotel fronts, the crest on the local beer— pays tribute to the old masters in word and image. But even if this fabric of city life has become background noise to us, these material traces bear witness to the rise of a distinctive product of the historical imagination in the nineteenth century: the public commemoration in national and patri otic contexts of the artists of the past. These homages to the old masters appeared in a variety of official and popular contexts in Holland and Bel gium during the nineteenth century and the representation took many forms. They included statues, mural cycles and salon paintings, as well as commemorative speeches and feasts, costume pageants, musical perfor mances, and character roles in historical fiction and albums pittoresques. In Belgium, whose case will be the focus of this chapter, the desire to commemorate the national past was felt particularly urgently follow ing the country’s independence in 1830. In particular, the epoch of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the age of the Van Eycks, Hans Memling and Quentin Matsys, previously overshadowed by the patriotic veneration of Rubens, was enthusiastically revived in the spirit of Roman tic nationalism. To the Golden Age of Rubens was added a new chapter, a prehistory which provided the new nation state with an even longer ancestral past reaching back to the Middle Ages. In Belgium’s patriotic new nation state it was a question not so much of which artists were to be honoured, as of those who weren’t. In Antwerp alone, public statues, not including the busts for the loggia of the new museum, were erected to Rubens in 1840, Van Dyck in 1856, David Teniers 172 jenny graham

Figure 8.1. Statue of Hans Memling (c. 1430–1494) by Hendrik Pickery, 1871. Woensdagmarkt, Bruges. Author’s photograph. picturing patriotism 173 in 1867, Quentin Matsys in 1881 and Jacob Jordaens in 1886. In Bruges, Jan van Eyck and Memling were commemorated by statues in 1856 and 1871, with Van Eyck’s statue in the place de l’Académie was replaced by a grander example in 1878. Jan and his brother Hubert were also claimed by Maaseik, their birthplace, where an imposing monument depicting both brothers was placed in the town square in 1864, while Brussels made the most of its own artistic son with a statue of Bernard van Orley in 1889.1 Indeed, by 1849, ‘statuemania’ was already such in Belgium that one news paper could mock that the country was running out of places to put them.2 The particular zeal which attended such tributes in Belgium is pointedly evoked by foreign responses to the Rubens festivities of 1840 at Antwerp. Despite the splendid array of spectacles and entertainments taking place to mark the artist’s bicentenary—fireworks, a historical pageant, the Bur gomaster’s ball, a state dinner, performances by the William Tell and St Cecilia musical societies, or of a play in Dutch by the Flemish Association De Hoop—it was the fête’s more colourful scenes that irked, for example, the English Art-Union. A cavalcade of dolphins and whales, a Venetian night scene performed by the city’s riverboats, city fountains that ran ale and wine! Puerility, remarked the phlegmatic correspondent, unworthy of the occasion.3 The French painter Gustave Courbet was blunter still, writ ing to his father in 1861 following the week-long festivities of the Universal Exhibition at Antwerp. Two more days, he wrote, and ‘we’d all be dead. No one could take any more.’4 The use of the artistic past in Belgium had specific ideological under pinnings. For a start, it formed a significant part of the wholesale reinven tion of the national history that took place following the Revolution of 1830. For a small and newly formed nation state whose critical mass fell below what Eric Hobsbawm termed the ‘threshold principle’ on the larger European stage, the use of the past was critical in bolstering Belgium’s political autonomy and assuaging any doubts over the existence of an

1 See P. Verbraeken et al. (eds.), Après & d’après Van Dyck. La récupération romantique au XIXe siècle (Antwerp, Hessenhuis, 1999), pp. 25–33. 2 J. Tollebeek and T. Verschaffel, ‘Group Portraits with National Heroes: The Pantheon as an Historical Genre in Nineteenth-Century Belgium’, National Identities, 6 (2004), pp. 91–106: p. 99. 3 The Art Union, 15 September 1840, pp. 147–148. 4 The Letters of Gustave Courbet, ed. P. ten-Doesschate Chu (Chicago, University of Chi cago Press, 1992), p. 200. 174 jenny graham independent Belgian identity.5 Where the French Encylopédie nouvelle of 1836, for example, accused Belgium of having no history, no heart, of being a country in name only, historians and cultural figures associated with the beginnings of the Flemish Movement were keen to stress (as Hendrik Conscience did in his Geschiedenis van België of 1845) that what Belgium was experiencing was not the creation of their nation but its reawakening as if from a deep slumber.6 Historians in the new state faced particular problems of representation regarding a nation not only made up of for merly independent regions, but whose history seemed to be marked by a succession of foreign rule and invasion.7 The figure of the artist was par ticularly well represented in the Belgian national pantheon, then, because it functioned as a counterweight to the idea of Belgium as the battlefield of Europe, and provided the young state with a truly native history.

Making History The recuperation of the earlier artistic period of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries benefited from several nuances of this cultural agenda. Firstly, it re-entered the national consciousness at a time when the Middle Ages were coming to occupy a special place in Belgium’s nostalgic iden tity. Van Eyck and his successors joined roughly contemporary historical figures like Mary of Burgundy and Charles V as cultural icons of a period in which the national interest was perceived to have flourished. Secondly, they did so at a time before history-writing became a more scientific enter prise. In the first decades of the state’s existence, historians dealt with the unruly national past, for example, either by reducing it to a monolithic and mythologizing narrative of tyranny and emancipation, or by lighting upon a set of colourful origin myths for the nation. These were the high- water marks in the country’s history, like the boyhood of Charles V, and they became the privileged subjects of Romantic nationalism in Belgium.8 Likewise, the lives of the early Flemish painters were notoriously steeped in myth and associated with certain legends told in colourful fashion by early modern art-historical biographers from Vasari and Van Mander to

5 J. Tollebeek, ‘Historical Representation and the Nation-State in Romantic Belgium (1830–1850)’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 59 (1998), pp. 329–53: p. 335. 6 Tollebeek, ‘Historical Representation’, pp. 335, 338. 7 Tollebeek, ‘Historical Representation’, p. 338. 8 R. Hoozee, J. Tollebeek and T. Verschaffel (eds.), Mise-en-scène. Keizer Karel en de verbeelding van de negentiende eeuw (Antwerp, Mercatorfonds, 1999), esp. pp. 118–129; see also Tollebeek, ‘Historical Representation’, p. 338. picturing patriotism 175

Jean-Baptiste Descamps. The Van Eycks had long been mythologized as the inventors of oil painting, a fable which at once lent itself to the nationalist agendas of the nineteenth century, allowing the young Bel gian state to claim its place in the international story of art, and which caught the imagination of the Romantics, eager for scenes of invention and intrigue in the cloistered art studios of the past. The legends attached to the lives of Hans Memling and Quentin Matsys were even more sug gestive to the nineteenth-century imagination, since both artists could be recast in terms entirely in tune with the Romantic Zeitgeist. Memling became the monkish painter famous for his mystical altarpiece of St. John and the wooden painted shrine of St. Ursula housed in the historic Hos pital of St. John in Bruges, it was said, only after he sought refuge there in the fifteenth century as a lowly soldier, mortally wounded, and was healed by the hospital’s nuns. Along the same lines, Quentin Matsys transformed himself from a humble artisan blacksmith to a great painter, according to the tale, to win the hand in marriage of a girl whose father (oftentimes a painter himself in the story) would only grant his permission to an artist. Thus anecdotes of this sort provided painters of the nineteenth century with scope for promotion of their own importance in cultural life, and joined up more generally with a culture of story-telling in which histori cal writing—particularly that of the medievalizing turn—comprised a rousing combination of myth, stock types and set pieces, and nationalist rhetoric. Finally, and most importantly, these artists hailed from Flanders, the region of Belgium which for many historians constituted the sum of its cultural identity, bound up as it was with the glory days of Antwerp, Ghent and Bruges in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These were the cultural politics around which the school of Van Eyck came to be invested with new significance during the early years of the Belgian state. Moreover, this was a chapter in the nation’s past that was ripe for rediscovery because, although the name of Van Eyck himself had never entirely disappeared during the intervening centuries, the epoch and its objects had largely gathered dust until the French brought them back into circulation during the revolutionary period. Thus, now a matter of re-staking cultural ownership in the face of international competition, the early Flemish painters became interesting to the Flemish again with the beginnings of nationalism around 1800. From the start, and even before the process was intensified by the coun try’s independence in 1830, the recuperation of these artists was shaped by the same cultures of commemoration that drove the national history during the period. The Romantic scouring of their legends and haunts, the 176 jenny graham turn to the archive, the beginnings of a specialist scholarship, restoration, even, all of which began before 1830, was patriotically motivated. Impor tantly, however, such activities were configured along regional lines, prac tically and politically, a situation which would ramify rather than abate with unification. It was a local act, or rather two acts, of memory that first brought the early Flemish painters back into focus for the Flemish, when the Bruges Academy marked its centenary in 1818 with a speech to commemorate 400 years since the time of the invention of oil painting by the Van Eycks. And two memorials became three when the speaker, historian and Governor of Antwerp Baron Charles de Keverberg de Kessel, spent two hours talking about the unknown Memling instead of the Van Eycks, thereby creating the beginnings of a canon from a simple act of commemoration. The illustrious Memling belongs to you by birth, he told the Bruges academicians, ‘envious as I am in claiming this advantage for your hometown’.9 At Ghent, on account of the city’s celebrated altarpiece, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb by Hubert and Jan van Eyck (1432, Ghent, Sint Baafskathedraal), a bust of Van Eyck was recorded as early as 1803 in a series of Flamands célèbres for the Stadsbibliotheek. In 1824 the nationally important vehicle founded in 1823 by Ghent’s learned societies, the Mes- sager des Sciences et des Arts, carried the important news that the site of the former home of the Van Eycks had been identified in the city, which prompted yet more commemorations. Demonstrating the extent to which the historical imagination could be governed by memory cultures at this time, the local cognoscenti had in fact taken a line backwards until they hit a wall, figuratively speaking, from a street view of Ghent thought to be depicted on a wing of the altarpiece. Hence a building on the corner of the city’s Vogelmarkt and Koenstraat came to be heavily restored in 1828, and mounted with relief portraits of Hubert and Jan.10 And it was before the Revolution of 1830, too, that the so-called father of the Flemish Move ment, Jan Frans Willems, an early campaigner for equal language rights, was inspired in 1816 by the return of Antwerp’s art treasures from Paris to write his theatre play in two acts, Quinten Matsys of Wat doet de liefde niet! (Quentin Matsys, or What Love Can’t Do!).11

9 Charles Louis Guillaume Joseph, Baron de Keverberg de Kessel, Ursula, princesse bri- tannique, d’après la légende et les peintures d’Hemling (Ghent, 1818), p. 113. 10 Messager des Sciences et des Arts, 2 (1824–1825); E. Dhanens, De iconografie der Van Eycks (Brugge, Genootschap voor Geschiedenis, 1982), pp. 21, 47. 11 J.F. Willems, Quinten Matsys of Wat doet de liefde niet! Tooneelspel in 2 Bedryven (Ant werp, Schoesetters, 1816); see also Verbraeken (ed.), Après & d’après Van Dyck, p. 314. picturing patriotism 177

Where the figure of the artist was concerned, and no doubt for historical figures of all kinds, these vicissitudes of appropriation and counter-appro priation would play out in Belgium throughout the nineteenth century to suit regional, national and internationalist agendas. And of course recy clings and exchanges across different constituencies—and media—were increased by a miscellany of historical practices which gave rise to hybrid forms of history-making itself where fact and fiction were combined. The cultures of literary Romanticism, various nationalisms, and the newly intensified efforts of historians on national subjects overlapped under the heavier freight of identity politics. Moreover it was in the art and visual cultures of the period—painting, the theatre, popular illustration and entertainments—that such mythologies (literally) gained legs.

Fathers and Forefathers Artists took their cue from a particular type of illustrated book which flourished in Belgium following the independence of 1830: collections of heroic biographies of national figures which abounded in Romantic illustrations of tunic-and-hose-garbed figures, working to emphasize the very pastness of the past in order to elevate the present, in edification of the institutions which sponsored them. These included, for example, the three volumes published at Brussels in the series Panthéon national, Les Belges illustres (1844–1845), which contained essays on Hubert and Jan van Eyck, Memling and Matsys, and Jean-Baptiste Madou’s Scènes de la vie des peintres de l’école flamande et hollandaise (1842), an explicitly nationalist volume dedicated to Leopold I and published by the Société des Beaux- Arts at Brussels.12 According to fashion the latter book largely celebrated the artists of the Golden Age—Rubens, Van Dyck, Adriaen Brouwer—but it was the inclusion of the earlier period in art, the ‘fathers of painting’, as the Van Eycks, Memling and Matsys were often described, which was especially in tune with the revivalist politics of the new nation state.13 Such books were important sources, then, for the stories which, in turn, provided the nineteenth century with basic typologies of represen tation for these artists through certain objects associated with their leg ends. These included Memling’s shrine of St. Ursula, the medieval flasks that denoted the invention of oil painting by the Van Eycks, for example,

12 J.B. Madou, Scènes de la vie des peintres de l’école flamande et hollandaise (Brussels, Société des Beaux-Arts, 1842). 13 Madou, Scènes de la vie des peintres, preface. 178 jenny graham

Figure 8.2. Jean-Baptiste Madou, ‘Quentin Matsys—Le Portrait’. Lithograph, 30.5 × 40.6 cm. From Scènes de la vie des peintres de l’école flamande et hollandaise (Brussels, Société des Beaux-Arts, 1842). Image by courtesy of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. or the blacksmith’s anvil and bellows of Quentin Matsys, all of which were later realised in three dimensions as part of their statues at Bruges and Antwerp (see, for example, Figure 8.1). On another level, and not sur prisingly (since Madou was formerly an assistant to the Brussels history painter Ignace Brice), Madou’s Scènes de la vie des peintres was also influ ential in the development of these figures as national historical subjects for history painters. Madou’s engraving of Memling, for example, which elaborated the artist’s monkish mythology by showing him in the Hospi tal of St John, looking on modestly while the nuns crowded around his painted shrine of St Ursula, inaugurated a scene that was taken up by a number of salon painters in Belgium in the succeeding period, as we shall see. Madou also set up images of these artists which animated them as historical portraits rather than as simply generic figures from the past. The image of artists like Quentin Matsys, in his distinctive hat, that we see in Madou’s representation of the artist (Figure 8.2) and many later ones, such as the one in the grand cycle of paintings by Nicaise de Keyser for the ves tibule of the museum in the Antwerp Academy (Figure 8.3). They were first picturing patriotism 179

Figure 8.3. Nicaise De Keyser, Albrecht Dürer visits Quentin Matsys, c. 1862–1872. Oil on canvas, 29 × 18 cm. Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten. © Lukas—Art in Flanders VZW. 180 jenny graham

Figure 8.4. Richard Redgrave, R.A., Quentin Matsys, the blacksmith of Antwerp, 1839. Oil on canvas 101.6 × 127 cm. Private collection. © Christie’s Images Limited 2012. popularized by Romantic engravers like Madou, who adapted them from the antiquarian sources of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The most well-known of these books was by the French writer Jean-Baptiste Descamps, who reproduced the sixteenth-century engraved portrait of Matsys which originally depicted him in that guise.14 It was this concern, of course, shared by Madou and his ilk, to fix a historically specific image for these artists, which enabled their transfor mation into national icons in their native Belgium. An interesting com parison underlines the distinctively national character of the revivification of these artists in Belgium: the legend of Quentin Matsys, the blacksmith of Antwerp, also had some currency in Britain during the nineteenth cen tury, in connection with the celebrated painting at Windsor Castle, The Misers. Attributed at that time to Matsys, and probably acquired during

14 J.-B. Descamps, La vie des peintres flamands, allemands et hollandais, 4 vols. (Paris, Libraire du Roi, 1753–1764), vol. I, p. 17. picturing patriotism 181 the reign of Queen Anne, the picture gained added interest, according to the connoisseurs, from the legend attached to its maker in the annals of art. The anecdote was turned into a painting by Richard Redgrave in 1839 (Figure 8.4), for example, something which can be contextualized by the tale’s appearance in (inter alia) the Penny Magazine (1833); as a novel, The Blacksmith of Antwerp (1839), by Pierce Egan, who also wrote Wat Tyler and other epic stories of slaughter and romance; and, even as a dramati zation for the stage by John O’Keeffe, written in 1795.15 Redgrave’s British example, however, bears none of the markers of the representation of a specific national hero-figure. The pastness matters, to be sure—witness the historical costumes, the cloistered atmosphere, the armour on top of the cabinet—but Quentin Matsys the historical figure does not. What we see is a broad-spectrum evocation of the scene to suit a general taste for literary anecdotes and troubadour subjects, which, if anything, espouses local chauvinism by placing The Misers centre stage. The more specific historicism of Redgrave’s peers across the English Channel, however, not only underlines the patriotic character of their project, but also the role, as they saw it, that the visual could play in mediating history: there was a sense that the visual artist could negotiate the currencies of debate and information–flow, just as well as the historian could. After all, as Dew asme wrote in the preface to Scènes de la vie des peintres, is not Madou the most true, the most careful of historians?16 Naturally, such claims for art were not exclusive to Belgium in the nine teenth century. But the patriotic fever that particularly marked out the development there of national history painting made this historicist posi tion one that salon painters in Belgium would increasingly adopt.

National Icons, Local Heroes The nationalist dimension to the revival of the Van Eycks and their fol lowers accrues especially with the traffic between different media, and the presence of these figures in the magnetic field of popular culture. Dur ing the 1840s the subject of the Van Eycks and their sister Margaret, for example, entered the repertoire of the many state pageants and historical processions that were celebrated in the new regime as notably Belgian forms of culture. In 1846, a temporary sculpture of the three siblings was placed in the Bruges market square along the route of the royal procession

15 ‘Quintin Messys, or Matsys’, The Penny Magazine, 28 December 1833, pp. 497–8. 16 Madou, Scènes des la vie des peintres, preface. 182 jenny graham which took place as part of the festivities in honour of Simon Stevin. The same model was used in historic pageants at Bruges in 1850 and 1853, while a lithograph of it in the accompanying Notice biographique des hommes illustres rendered the threesome back into two dimensions and more into permanent memory. At Ghent in 1849, a historical parade in honour of the Counts of Flanders included a lavishly festooned float dedicated to the siblings, represented by three players in medieval dress holding aloft sprigs of laurel. The Van Eycks were also included in the city’s costume pageant of 1894, ‘Ghent Through the Ages’. 17 Likewise, the story of Quentin Matsys entered the realm of the theatre, where, naturally, the subject fared better at home than abroad. In John O’Keeffe’s British example, not even the comic antics of the thoroughly Dutchish father figure Old Dipembeck, and his protégé Dunderman, were enough to save it on opening night (‘The hisses of disapprobation com menced early and continued violently’, noted The Theatrical Inquisitor).18 But in Belgium blacksmiths flourished on the stage at Antwerp and else where. The patriotic subject had multiple manifestations: an overture by the Romantic composer Léon de Burbure in 1840; a ‘comédie flamande, Quintin Metsys’ in 1850; a comic opera by Pierre Demol in 1859; a so-called ‘opéra-légende’ in one act by Léon Jouret in 1864; and two further operas in 1884 and 1899.19 Hence these other forms of historical representation— the walking tableaux vivants of the historical parade, stage plays, opera— were often more influential in rousing the national spirit and stimulating the historical imagination than history on the page or a single painting. Famously, of course, it was the performance of an opera—Auber’s patriotic La muette de Portici, set in Naples at the time of the city’s uprising against Spanish rule in 1647—which prompted the riots that led to the Belgian Revolution of 1830. Correspondingly, in the same climate of influence, it was no accident that the idea behind Jean-Baptiste Madou’s Scènes de la vie des peintres was to bring new life to the tired old biographical sources of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, like the Van Manders, the Houbrakens, and the Descamps of the world, and to ‘stage’ (mettre en scène) the lives of the old masters in more colourful fashion. The example of the theatre raises the important question of how far a patriotic play or an opera, or indeed any of the forms of historical repre sentation under discussion here, can be read as exertions of nationalism

17 Dhanens, Iconografie, pp. 28–30; pp. 58–61. 18 The Theatrical Inquisitor, or Monthly Mirror, 9 (October 1816), pp. 303–304. 19 Verbraeken (ed.), Après & d’après Van Dyck, pp. 314–315. picturing patriotism 183 in the genuine sense, or should more accurately be read as expressions of regionalist chauvinism. Certainly, during the first decades of the new state, cultural acts were carried out unequivocally under the banner of a unified Belgian identity as part of the state-led process of the national reinven tion. Leopold I himself ordered one hundred copies of Les Belges illustres, took part in historic processions and presided over the inaugurations of statues, including Van Eyck’s at Bruges in 1856, where he marked his silver jubilee.20 Equally, as historical cultures became the vehicle in the new state for various contestations and resistances, Flemish subjects became increasingly bound up with Flemish rather than Belgian nationalism. Of the theatre plays and operas on the theme of Quentin Matsys, for exam ple, several were directly associated with the Flemish Movement, such as the performance at Antwerp during the Rubens festivities of 1877 of a play version by Jozef van Hoorde, who was one of the first editors of the Flemish weekly Het Volksbelang. Also on the bill was the work of another well known flamingant, the play Jan Steen uit vrijen by Domien Sleeckx. In the same way, when Emile Wambach scored an opera version of the Matsys legend in 1899, a hugely patriotic affair in three acts which painted a vivid picture of Antwerp as a thriving commercial metropolis, it was per formed in the city’s Nederlandsch Schouwburg, the venue opened in 1874 for the production of Flemish plays and opera by the ‘Nationaal Toneel’ theatre company.21 And even before this, in the early days of the Flemish Movement, no doubt bolstered by Antwerp’s position as a major centre for the campaign,22 the story of Quentin Matsys found some take-up among its literati in the manner of a national folk tale. Hendrik Conscience him self wrote a ‘Tale of Quentin Matsys’ for his short story collection of 1846, Avondstonden. Verhalen, zedeschetsen en zinnebeelden (Eventide. Stories, signs and symbols); ten years later, the legend was woven into the plot of a novel by the same Domien Sleeckx.23 The mythology of Quentin Matsys evidently suited the populist liberal values of the Flemish Movement, as a heroic story of the ordinary man, and provided the local colour vital to its cause.

20 Dhanens, Iconografie, p. 20. 21 Verbraeken (ed.), Après & d’après Van Dyck, p. 315. 22 S. Goddard, ‘Investigating and Celebrating the “Golden Age” in Nineteenth-Century Antwerp, 1854–1894’, in L.S. Dixon (ed.), In Detail. New Studies of Northern Renaissance Art in Honor of Walter S. Gibson (Turnhout, Brepols, 1998), pp. 151–164. 23 H. Conscience, Avondstonden. Verhalen, zedeschetsen en zinnebeelden (Antwerp, Buschmann, 1846); and J.L.D. Sleeckx, In ’t schipperskwartier. Tafereelen uit het Vlaamsche volksleven (Antwerp, 1861; first published 1856). 184 jenny graham

It was Antwerp chauvinism rather than nationalism per se which punc tuated other uses of the artistic past, too, such as the four-hundredth anni versary celebrations of the artists’ guild of Saint Luke in 1854, a series of cultural events with strong ties to the Flemish Movement. These included an essay competition on the subject of the Flemish old masters, which counted Hendrik Conscience among its judges.24 In keeping with the Zeit- geist, the subject of the winning entry, by the Antwerp novelist Eugeen Zetternam, was the early Flemish painters. A new journal of the arts fol lowed in 1855, De Vlaemsche School, which carried the prize-winning essay and another, by the city archivist Petrus Génard, on Quentin Matsys. Not surprisingly, heavy criticism of French and francophone contributions to the subject was common in this circle. Much of this regionalist character, and, indeed, the changing shape of his torical knowledge surrounding the early Flemish painters, can be tracked in the historical genre paintings dealing with the subject. The theme which unites the genre as a whole, of course, from every Mary of Burgundy and Egmont and Hoorn to the many Battles of the Golden Spurs or Septembers of 1830, is nationalism. Not far beneath all this patriotic ardour, however, lies a more complicated mesh of civic commemoration and allegiance. To take the case of the genre scenes which honour the early painters, they exhibit a marked loyalty to the Flemish regions. Most were produced by history painters proper, in the north of the country, as part of larger repertoires of Flemish historical episodes. Examples include Nicaise De Keyser’s Memling, patient in the Hospital of Saint John (1851, Lier, Musée Communal),25 and the wonderfully apocryphal Mary of Burgundy visits Memling in the Hospital of Saint John by Edouard Wallays (Figure 8.5). Wallays was a Bruges artist specializing in subjects concerning his native city, who became director of the Bruges Academy in 1865. His typical his torical fare, for example, included such locally specific gems as Jean de Nesle transfers the Castellany of Bruges to Jeanne of Constantinople in 1234 (1846, Bruges, Palais Provincial).26 Indeed, these kinds of patriotic images can often be read on a municipal level, as cities which saw themselves as regional capitals vied for cultural prestige. Bruges painters painted Bru ges painters: examples include Joseph Ducq’s Antonello da Messina visits the studio of Van Eyck (c. 1820–1829, Bourg-en-Bresse, Musée de Brou),

24 Goddard, ‘Investigating and Celebrating’, pp. 152–155. 25 His famous historical painting, The Battle of the Golden Spurs (1836), inspired Hendrik Conscience’s novel The Lion of Flanders (1838). 26 Verbraeken (ed.), Après & d’après Van Dyck, p. 56. picturing patriotism 185

Figure 8.5. Edouard Wallays, Mary of Burgundy visits Memling in the Hospital of Saint John, c. 1861–1872. Oil on canvas, 94 × 148.5 cm. Groeningemuseum, Bruges. © Lukas—Art in Flanders VZW.

Henri Dobbelaere’s Memling paints the shrine of Saint Ursula in the Hos- pital at Bruges (1857, Kortrijk, Stedelijk Museum), or another of Wallays’s Bruges subjects, his Philip the Good visits the studio of Van Eyck (1850, Bruges, Groeningemuseum). It was the same at Antwerp, where Quentin Matsys was the subject of paintings by Henri Leys and Eugène Siberdt, for example, while others produced a host of Rubenses and Van Dycks. This civic patriotism was formalized during the second half of the cen tury by De Keyser’s cycle of paintings in the Antwerp Academy, which, as we have noticed, included Quentin Matsys (Figure 8.3), and Albrecht de Vriendt’s murals for the gothic chambers of Bruges town hall, which included Memling and Van Eyck.27

Critical Regionalism Many of these images share common features, particular formulas of rep resentation which underline their patriotic function. The first is the use

27 For an illustration of Albrecht de Vriendt’s Van Eyck mural, see Dhanens, Iconografie, p. 56. 186 jenny graham by some artists of the device, learned from Ingres and others, of referenc ing real works of art by the old masters in these imagined scenes, usually by showing them on an easel in the artist’s studio. Generally, this was a historicist stratagem which lent the work an air of authenticity and had to do with the Romantic veneration of the artists of the past. When Ingres paints Raphael and his mistress the Fornarina with the real portrait of her visible on the easel, he confers a sense of historical ‘truth’ on the rep resentation of the glorious artistic past whilst self-consciously declaring himself a worthy successor in the chain of art. Belgian painters, however, added a patriotic twist to the motif by showing off the national heritage, creating scenes of this sort around their own national artists and works of art. And here again, the use of this formula can be read not simply on a national but also on a municipal level. Bruges paintings referenced Bru ges paintings, Ghent painters showed Ghent paintings, and so on. These are images which are about the cultivation of civic identity, within—or even against—the larger workings of nationalism. Van Eyck’s famous Ghent altarpiece was the subject of several Ghent pictures during the nineteenth century, but it was the Madonna with Canon van der Paele, then in the Bruges Academy, which was shown in the master’s workshop in the studio scene by Joseph Ducq, who was director of the Bruges Acad emy between 1815 and 1829.28 Albrecht de Vriendt made the same refer ence to the Madonna with Canon van der Paele in his mural painting for Bruges town hall. And in the many representations of Memling and his painted reliquary of Saint Ursula, the work of art within the work of art becomes a genuine mise-en-abyme, a symbolic means of illuminating the larger narrative in play in images like these, in which historical figures are effectively turned into cultural saints. Indeed it is hard to imagine a better case in point than Memling’s, which offers an almost endless play of sig nification and reduplication around the notion of sainthood. The story of Saint Ursula’s sacralization becomes the story of Memling’s sacralization; the reliquary becomes as much a relic of Memling as Saint Ursula; and the image of Memling—medieval, devout, Flemish—becomes the image of the Hospital of Saint John, and ultimately of Bruges itself. Certainly, this was the image of the city, suffused with Memling’s ghost, which came to define it in the nineteenth century, and which lingered long afterwards. It reached its apogee in Georges Rodenbach’s novel Bruges-la-Morte (1892),

28 For Ducq’s painting, see F. Leen (ed.), Le romantisme en Belgique (Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique/Racine, 2005), pp. 102–103. picturing patriotism 187 in which Memling’s reliquary is a central motif, with its painted martyrs, whose blood falls from their chests, as Rodenbach puts it, like petals and leaves.29 Even before Rodenbach’s book, these relics of Memling found their way into foreign novels as ciphers for the city’s identity, such as Rosa N. Carey’s Mary St. John of 1882. It was a Victorian tale of travelling young English girls captivated by the exoticism of Catholic Bruges—by vespers and incense, black-cloaked priests in shovel hats, and the long airy wards and curtained beds of the Hospital of Saint John.30 In the genre paintings of Memling by Nicaise De Keyser and Henri Dobbelaere, the imagery of Catholic sainthood is further reinforced by the figure of a nun bearing offerings of fruit to Memling. Clearly, such images register a sense of place, as well as a person. In these details of signification, the city becomes the true protagonist. The emphasis on municipal patriotism is also present in the other theme which links many of these genre scenes, one that pays tribute to the status of the artist in civic life. This is the trope of the high-ranking visit, by officials or royalty, say, who pay their respects to the great masters of the past in public displays of esteem. Again, this was a popular scenario internationally among artists which Belgian painters adapted to suit their own patriotic concerns. Across Europe, the most commonly depicted subjects along these lines came from famous biographical anecdotes, like Vasari’s tale of François I at the deathbed of Leonardo, or Ridolfi’s story of Charles V picking up Titian’s paintbrush for him when he drops it during the emperor’s portrait sitting.31 No doubt these particular anecdotes were popular because they labour the crucial point about the proper order of rank when it comes to paying homage to artistic genius. As Charles V tells the demurring artist in Ridolfi’s invented scene, as he hands over the paint brush, ‘Titian is worthy to be served by Caesar’.32 Artists found endless mileage in the idea of these richly dressed monarchs perching on rumpled bedclothes at Leonardo’s side or leaping up from chairs to Titian’s aid.33

29 G. Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte and The Death Throes of Towns, trans. M. Mitchell and W. Stone (Sawtry, Dedalus, 2005), pp. 96–99. See Niek van Sas’s chapter in this collection. 30 R.N. Carey, Mary St. John. A Novel, 3 vols. (London, Richard Bentley & Son, 1882), vol. I, pp. 157–163. 31 See, for example, M. Levey, The Painter Depicted. Painters as a Subject in Painting (London, Thames and Hudson, 1981), esp. pp. 46–50. 32 C. Ridolfi, Le maraviglie dell’arte. Ovvero le vite degli illustri pittori Veneti e dello stato, 2 vols. (Padua, 1835–8). 33 See the examples illustrated in Hoozee, Tollebeek and Verschaffel (eds.), Mise-en- scène, pp. 225–231. 188 jenny graham

Other iterations of the trope were more national in character—German artists liked to picture the encounter between Dürer and the Emperor Maximilian, for example, or Dutch painters the Princess of Orange in the studio of Van der Helst.34 In the case of the Belgians, the emphasis was more local still in scenes which reflected glory not just onto the nation but onto particular cities, whose native artists were depicted receiving the great and the good. In Albrecht de Vriendt’s mural painting for Bruges town hall, it is the city magistrates—the mayor and aldermen—who visit Van Eyck in his workshop, a procession of solemn dignitaries who come forward to shake the master’s hand. In Eduoard Wallays’s painting of 1850, it is Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy and Van Eyck’s patron, who pays his call to the artist’s studio. And when the Antwerp artist Eugène Siberdt shows Quentin Matsys playing host to the great humanist Erasmus, whose portrait Matsys was known to have painted at Antwerp in 1517, the point about the social rank enjoyed by the artists of the past is made abundantly clear by the bourgeois interior of the master’s home. Perhaps the most resonant pairing in Belgian scenes of this kind was that of Memling with Mary of Burgundy, a scenario that not only bears the double aura of two national heroes brought together, but which takes on added meaning if we read it as being not just about nationalism, but about Bruges patriotism. First depicted by Nicaise De Keyser in 1847, the scene was taken up again by the Bruges painter Eduoard Wallays at some time during the 1860s (it is uncertain precisely when) (Figure 8.5). Wal lays was probably inspired by renewed interest in Memling in that same period—showing how close was the gap between history and its interpre tation at this time—when the archives revealed the artist to have been an ordinary citizen with a family and two houses, who was paid for his work in the normal way.35 The Memling legend was nevertheless high in the historical consciousness again, and its ideological significance remained strong. Both Memling and Mary of Burgundy were powerful icons of a golden age of Bruges in the fifteenth century, when the House of Bur gundy held court there, and commerce and the arts flourished under its patronage. The figure of Mary of Burgundy bore the added weight of being the last royal link to this gilded period of Bruges’s history, before her early death in 1482 contributed to the city’s decline when the court departed,

34 Levey, Painter Depicted, p. 50. 35 D. de Vos, Hans Memling. The Complete Works (London, Thames and Hudson, 1994), p. 71. picturing patriotism 189 taking most of the mercantile trade with it. Hence, like Memling, Mary of Burgundy would have been regarded during the nineteenth century as something of a local hero at Bruges, where she was buried in the Church of Our Lady. However, the scenario depicted by De Keyser and Wallays, in which Mary of Burgundy visits the artist in the Hospital of Saint John—for which there is no historical basis—suggests another link between the two pro tagonists, one which may indeed have been apparent to contemporary viewers well-versed in the local mythologies. Evidently this scene is meant to take place in 1477, shortly after Mary’s marriage to Maximilian of Aus tria and following her accession as ruler of the Burgundian empire on the death of her father Charles the Bold. We can see Maximilian in Wallays’s painting just a few steps behind Mary, regally dressed and engaging an onlooker in conversation. Just a few months earlier in this scenario, it had been the last of the Burgundian Wars, at the Battle of Nancy, which brought Mary to power when her father was defeated and killed: that was the very same crusade which, according to the famous mythology, left none other than Hans Memling a casualty.36 Thus the legends of two national figures could be made to interlock, and it was but a small step for the Romantics to imagine the young duchess visiting this most celebrated of artist-heroes among her new subjects, at the particular historical moment when Bruges was at the heart of the cultural and political life of the Low Countries. Nor would Mary’s association with Flemish identity politics have been lost on those thinking along regional rather than national lines, since it was well noted during the nineteenth century that it was she who had signed the famous treaty during that same year of 1477, which returned to the regions the local and communal rights denied them by the Dukes of Burgundy in their efforts to establish a single state on the French model. Indeed, Mary’s primary legacy for the Belgians was that her rule could be con strued, together with other historic episodes like the Battle of the Golden Spurs, as a moment of Flemish triumph over the French, since it was she also who pulled out of traditional Burgundian relations with France in favour of the support of the Low Countries. During the nineteenth cen tury, when Belgium was once again wary of annexation by the French—a driving force in the shoring up of the national identity, especially in the early years of the state—the continuity between the politics of the past and the present did not go unnoticed. Emile Wauters was one artist, for

36 Madou, Scènes de la vie des peintres, p. 3. 190 jenny graham example, who scored a great success in the national arena with a history painting drawn from these episodes in Mary’s political life. His Mary of Burgundy entreating the Sheriffs of Ghent to pardon the Councillors Hugo- net and Humbercourt (1870, Museum of Modern Art, Liège), which was shown at the Brussels salon and the London international exhibition of 1871, invoked another historic show of strength against the French, when two of Mary’s advisers were executed at Ghent for being found to be in correspondence with the French king in the months immediately follow ing her pledge to the regions of the Low Countries.37 The potential for political suggestion in the realm of historical repre sentation in the aftermath of the age of revolutions was acute, perhaps nowhere more so than in Belgium when notions of national and regional historical identity were continuously in tension following the unification of the old principalities into the single nation state in 1830. Indeed, one way of thinking about the level of local signification that we encounter in many of the anecdotal paintings under discussion here, is to view it as a form of critical regionalism, that is to say, to see it through the lens of a modern theoretical perspective which allows us to chip away further at the idea of a monolithic nationalism. Such a view sees the construction of local identity in relation to nationalism not as the dutiful observance of a ‘one-way hegemonic process’, nor as something inherently inward- looking and provincial, but as a self-conscious assertion of agency acted out in conversation with larger influences. As Rosina S. Miller has put it, a critical regionalist approach to local culture ‘envisions social beings act ing in time and space in relation to neighbors, the nation state, and global forces.’38 In the case of Belgium during the nineteenth century, we might think of the many regional movements which expressed themselves in cultural terms which fit this model: the novels and plays of the Flemish Movement, of course, or the vast decorative schemes for the restoration of town halls, inside and out, from Antwerp to Liège, broadcasting local difference in the wake of unification. But we might think also of the more subtle forms of identity production picked up in these genre pictures, which reflect a similar preoccupation with the tensions of the moment

37 Illustrated in Hoozee, Tollebeek and Verschaffel (eds.), Mise-en-scène, p. 39; see also p. 152. 38 R.S. Miller, ‘Unhaunting the Village: Critical Regionalism and “Luminous Place” at the Village of Arts and Humanities’, Journal of American Folklore, 117/466 (Autumn 2004), pp. 446–454: p. 446; and J. Butler and G.C. Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging (New York, Seagull Books, 2007). picturing patriotism 191 between regional identity and life on a larger stage, issues which were absolutely consonant with the expanding internationalism of the nine teenth century on the one hand, and continuing patterns of local patron age and institutional infrastructure on the other. A particularly significant protagonist in this respect, who appears in a number of these Flemish anecdotal scenes, is the figure of Albrecht Dürer, the German Renaissance painter and another quintessential father of art. It is Dürer, we recall, who appears with Quentin Matsys in Nicaise de Key ser’s portrait of the artist for his cycle for the Antwerp Academy (Figure 8.3). Images of this kind, however, represent more than just examples of pan-European sociability between the artists of the past. The subject of Dürer’s visit to the Low Countries in 1520–1521 provided Belgian artists with the opportunity to demonstrate the significance of their heritage in an international context. In so doing, they fashionably participated in a cult of Dürer which was transnational, whilst bending it to suit their own ideological concerns. Evidently, at the top of their list was the assimilation of the international Dürer not just to a national but a regional agenda. Dürer had usefully written in admiring terms of the cities of Antwerp and Ghent in his journal during his travels, and artists of the nineteenth cen tury were quick to add the subject of his visit to the local repertoire of episodes from the past for representation, especially following the appear ance in 1840 of a Dutch translation of Dürer’s diary in the Low Countries by the Antwerp city archivist Frederic Verachter.39 But even before this, artists in Ghent invested the subject of Dürer’s visit with added patriotic significance, because they were feeling the fresh loss to the Germans of the wings of the Van Eyck altarpiece—the masterpiece which was par ticularly admired by Dürer during his trip—in the aftermath of the Napo leonic period. In 1816, when the centrepiece panels were returned from Paris, the wings, still in storage, were sold by the cathedral at Ghent to a dealer in something of a clerical error (so to speak) in the absence of the bishop.40 Around 1825, just a few years after the wings were acquired for the collection of the king of Prussia, and the loss seemed permanent, the Ghent artist Jozef Geirnaert painted a rather mournful, imaginary scene which showed Dürer at the tombstone of Hubert van Eyck in the cathedral.41 Meanwhile Pieter Frans de Noter—another Ghent painter—

39 F. Verachter, Albrecht Dürer in de Nederlanden (Antwerp, 1840). 40 E. Dhanens, Van Eyck. The Ghent Altarpiece (New York, Viking Press, 1973), p. 133. 41 Reproduced in Messager des Sciences et des Arts (1824–1825), p. 442; see also Dha nens, Iconografie, p. 24. 192 jenny graham portrayed Dürer’s visit to the altarpiece in an altogether more ceremonial fashion around the time of Verachter’s Dürer in de Nederlanden: he added a properly historicizing title (Albrecht Dürer visits the polyptych with the worship of the lamb by Hubert and Jan van Eyck in the Cathedral of Saint Bavo at Ghent on 10 April 1521), as well as a more forceful expression of the political message at stake. Accompanied by his wife and her maidservant, as mentioned in the diary, and a halberdier to denote his status, the old master is nonetheless dwarfed by the grand polyptych in its monumental (for which we might read, ‘rightful’) setting.42 At Antwerp, the commemoration of Dürer’s visit was more intensive still because of the details provided by the diary of his stay in the city, and the picture it paints of an artistic centre steeped in history and culture. Artists could cite the meeting of Dürer and Quentin Matsys, the scene chosen by Nicaise De Keyser for his portrait of Matsys, of course (Figure 8.3), or the hospitality shown to Dürer by the city magistrates, as illus trated by Godfried Guffens as part of a series of wall paintings of 1875 for the Hotel van de Werve, the grand residence of one of Antwerp’s oldest patrician families.43 These were subjects, in other words, which reinforced the image of a city with art in its blood. The theme of Dürer’s visit was even given a part in the costume parade with chariots which took place at Antwerp in 1892, under the sub-heading ‘Albrecht Dürer in Antwerp in 1520’.44 Another of the chosen themes, ‘Foreigners offering homage to the city of Antwerp’, confirms the outward- as well as inward-facing agenda at stake in such commemorations. Perhaps the most significant example of an artistic restaging of this kind, however, is the large painting of 1855 by Henri Leys, The Visit of Dürer to Antwerp in 1520 (Figure 8.6), an image which brings together several of the ideas discussed here: the notion of municipal patriotism, the commemo ration of the earlier period, and the citation of Dürer. Relying closely on the account given in Dürer’s journal, Leys illustrates the occasion of the historic Procession of Our Lady through Antwerp’s Wolstraat in order to celebrate the civic traditions of the city as they were witnessed by the for eign artist during his stay. Indeed, the general case of Dürer’s representa tion in this period calls attention to a growing sea change which occurred

42 Illustrated in O. ter Kuile, Catalogus van de schilderijen (Enschede, Rijksmuseum Twenthe, 1974–1976), pp. 82–84, 252. See also Dhanens, Iconografie, p. 24. 43 L. Pil, ‘De metropool herzien: de creatie van een Gouden Eeuw’, in Antwerpen verhaal van een metropool. 16de–17de eeuw (Antwerp, Hessenhuis, 1993), pp. 129–137; esp. pp. 134–135. 44 Goddard, ‘Investigating and Celebrating’, p. 157. picturing patriotism 193

Figure 8.6. Henri Leys, The Visit of Dürer to Antwerp in 1520, 1855. Oil on panel, 140 × 210 × 14.5 cm. Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten. © Lukas—Art in Flanders VZW. during the second half of the nineteenth century, in Belgium at any rate, in the historical representation of the figure of the artist. On the way out were the earlier Romantic subjects based on legend, to be replaced by more sober, documentary re-enactments of real historical events, as art ists took an active role in the larger rise of patriotic history-making as it came into a new scientific age. By mediating the new archival history for a public audience, they carved out a significant status in municipal life for themselves and their profession at the same time. While some responded to the overturning of the legends by revivifying them all over again, as we saw in the case of Eduoard Wallays and Memling, others worked in con cert with the turning tide by producing a different kind of image of the artist, taking their subjects from recently discovered documentary sources in keeping with the new fashion. At Antwerp, the city archivist Frans Josef van den Branden provided the subject of Quentin Matsys being received by the Guild of Saint Luke for Eduard de Jans’s mural painting for the town hall in 1899, for example, while Albrecht de Vriendt’s wall painting of the Bruges magistrates in the workshop of Van Eyck (1888–1893) was based on an entry recorded in 1432 in the Bruges city archives, published by Louis Gilliodts van Severen in 1876.45

45 I am grateful to Jan Lampo for providing me with this information regarding Eduard de Jans’s mural painting of Matsys; for the archival subject of De Vriendt’s mural painting of Van Eyck, see Dhanens, Iconografie, p. 27. 194 jenny graham

The boundaries between Romanticism and historicism were far from clear cut, however, and in 1855, Leys’s The Visit of Dürer to Antwerp can be seen to sit on the cusp between a Romantic and a more archaeological historicism. Leys shows Dürer watching the procession in the company of several historical personalities who can be identified. There is Erasmus, the pointing figure dressed in black to the rear of the painting, for exam ple, whose portrait Dürer was known to have sketched during his travels in the Low Countries; and Quentin Matsys, who, as Antwerp’s leading painter of the day, is seen acting as Dürer’s guide. Dürer’s wife Agnes Frey stands to the front of the party, richly dressed and apparently listening to Erasmus, and it is her maidservant Susanna who appears in the middle of the painting with a child. Leys includes many other details which exem plify the more scientific, archaeological approach to history-telling at this time. The guild of crossbowmen and the tall Polish candles depicted in the procession come straight from Dürer’s account, for instance, while Leys based his image of Erasmus on a portrait in the Antwerp Museum, which was thought at the time to be a painting of Erasmus by Holbein.46 We now know this to be a portrait of the Antwerp town clerk Pieter Gillis by a follower of Quentin Matsys, in fact, but it is evident from a sketch Leys made of the picture in preparation for another of his Erasmus subject pic tures that he definitely thought he was painting Erasmus.47 On the other hand, Leys’s inclusion of Erasmus and Quentin Matsys at the scene of the procession was an invention much more along Romantic lines, since there is no mention of these figures being at the scene in Dürer’s account. Their addition was designed, like so many of the historical evocations we have seen here, to venerate the artistic pre-eminence of a particular city. Artis tic history becomes an exemplary history of the regional city as ideal civic community, peopled by good burghers and enfranchized citizens, and of their allegiance to local rights and customs. The significance of such forms

46 See, for example, the Catalogue du Musée d’Anvers. Musée d’Anvers. Académie royale des beaux-arts. Conseil d’administration [Anvers], 2nd ed. (Antwerp, Imprimerie Busch mann, 1857), p. 208, number 198: ‘Hans Holbein, Portrait de Didier Erasme’; reprinted in 1863 and 1890 (with supplements). I am grateful to Nanny Schrijvers at the Musée royal des beaux-arts, Antwerp, for her assistance in locating this information. 47 Prentenkabinet, Antwerp, M.A. CXIII, 32, crayon on paper, 20.4 × 30.4 cm. Leys also painted an Erasmus in his study in 1853 and Albrecht Dürer sketching the portrait of Erasmus in 1857. The change of attribution to a portrait of Pieter Gillis by Quentin Matsys was first published in the catalogue of the Antwerp Museum in 1905; see the Catalogue descriptif. Musée royal des beaux-arts [Anvers], 2 vols. (Antwerp, Boucherij, 1905), vol. I, p. 203, no. 198. picturing patriotism 195 of remembrance in the context of Belgium’s unification in the nineteenth century need hardly be stressed.

Conclusion There is still much to be discovered about the particular networks of patronage and consumption that fed this artistic climate, as well as the political context in which it unfolded. But even in the brief picture sketched here we have seen that, following unification, honouring ‘Belgian’ painters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had as much to do with a revival of civic patriotism as with the emergence (after 1830) of a newer brand of national patriotism. The rise of nationalism in nineteenth-century Bel gium revealed, as is so often the case, as many conflicting as unifiying elements in the so-called national consciousness. But what happened to these forms of artistic patriotism in the long term? Did they gradually fade away with the ending of the nineteenth century and the decline of history painting? Or to return to our point of departure, and the many statues and other examples of artistic commemoration that live on in the regional cities of modern Belgium, are they still around, although now perhaps assuming different forms? The place where these cultural forms have truly faded from view, of course, is in our own historical imagination, dislodged, it might be said, by the narratives of Modernism and the fact that the art ists who participated in the rise of historicism are, in what is perhaps the greatest irony given the self-promoting agenda of their project, no longer remembered themselves. This was not the case in their own day, when the currency of these images and the political climate of cultural national ism which lay behind them was well understood. If it is true that there is no greater measure of canonicity than satire, then the case of a cartoon by the Belgian symbolist artist Félicien Rops, published in 1857, suggests something of the currency of this kind of revivalism in the nineteenth century.48 Rops’s caricature also troubles our own boundaries between modernism and historicism studies, and certainly our assumptions about major/minor art and artists in the narratives of the nineteenth century. Subtitled, ‘Memling has cholera. A homeopath-nun offers him some fruit’, Rop’s cartoon uses the currency of the Memling legend as it was depicted by contemporary painters to critique contemporary debates surrounding the treatment of cholera, of which there had been a particularly bad epidemic

48 For Rop’s caricature, see Uylenspiegel au salon, par les auteurs des cosaques. Revue de l’exposition de 1857 (Brussels, Imprimerie de F. Parent, 1857), no. 368. 196 jenny graham in Belgium in 1854. Without a cure in sight, homeopathy was gaining some credibility as a treatment for cholera but not, as Rop’s cartoon suggests, without controversy among those who might feel that the idea was as medieval as Memling, and as fanciful as his legend. And therein perhaps lies the key to the decline of historical genre painting at the end of the nineteenth century: Rops painted modernity; these forgotten artists tried to forge theirs under the sign of the past.

References

The Art Union, 15 September 1840. Butler, J., and G.C. Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging (New York, Seagull Books, 2007). Carey, R.N., Mary St. John. A Novel, 3 vols. (London, Richard Bentley & Son, 1882). Catalogue descriptif. Musée royal des beaux-arts [Anvers], 2 vols. (Antwerp, Boucherij, 1905). Catalogue du Musée d’Anvers. Musée d’Anvers. Académie royale des beaux-arts. Conseil d’administration [Anvers], 2nd ed. (Antwerp, Imprimerie Buschmann, 1857). Conscience, H., Avondstonden. Verhalen, zedeschetsen en zinnebeelden (Antwerp, Busch mann, 1846). The Letters of Gustave Courbet, ed. P. ten-Doesschate Chu (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992). Descamps, J.-B., La vie des peintres flamands, allemands et hollandais, 4 vols. (Paris, Libraire du Roi, 1753–1764). Dhanens, E., De iconografie der Van Eycks (Brugge, Genootschap voor Geschiedenis, 1982). ——, Van Eyck. The Ghent Altarpiece (New York, Viking Press, 1973). Goddard, S., ‘Investigating and Celebrating the “Golden Age” in Nineteenth-Century Antwerp, 1854–1894’, in L.S. Dixon (ed.), In Detail. New Studies of Northern Renaissance Art in Honor of Walter S. Gibson (Turnhout, Brepols, 1998), pp. 151–164. Hoozee, R., J. Tollebeek and T. Verschaffel, (eds.), Mise-en-scène. Keizer Karel en de verbeelding van de negentiende eeuw (Antwerp, Mercatorfonds, 1999). Keverberg de Kessel, Charles Louis Guillaume Joseph, Baron de, Ursula, princesse britan- nique, d’après la légende et les peintures d’Hemling (Ghent, 1818). Kuile, O. ter, Catalogus van de schilderijen (Enschede, Rijksmuseum Twenthe, 1974–1976). Leen, F. (ed.), Le romantisme en Belgique (Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Bel gique/Racine, 2005). Levey, M., The Painter Depicted. Painters as a Subject in Painting (London, Thames and Hudson, 1981). Madou, J.B., Scènes de la vie des peintres de l’école flamande et hollandaise (Brussels, Société des Beaux-Arts, 1842). Messager des Sciences et des Arts (1824–1825). ‘Quintin Messys, or Matsys’, The Penny Magazine, 28 December 1833, pp. 497–8. Miller, R.S., ‘Unhaunting the Village: Critical Regionalism and “Luminous Place” at the Village of Arts and Humanities’, Journal of American Folklore, 117/466 (Autumn 2004), pp. 446–454. Pil, L., ‘De metropool herzien: de creatie van een Gouden Eeuw’, in Antwerpen verhaal van een metropool. 16de–17de eeuw (Antwerp, Hessenhuis, 1993), pp. 129–137. Ridolfi, C., Le maraviglie dell’arte. Ovvero le vite degli illustri pittori Veneti e dello stato, 2 vols. (Padua, 1835–8). Rodenbach, G., Bruges-la-Morte and The Death Throes of Towns, trans. M. Mitchell and W. Stone (Sawtry, Dedalus, 2005). picturing patriotism 197

Sleeckx, J.L.D., In ’t schipperskwartier. Tafereelen uit het Vlaamsche volksleven (Antwerp, 1861; first published 1856). The Theatrical Inquisitor, or Monthly Mirror, 9 (October 1816). Tollebeek, J., ‘Historical Representation and the Nation-State in Romantic Belgium (1830– 1850)’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 59 (1998), pp. 329–53. Tollebeek, J., and T. Verschaffel, ‘Group Portraits with National Heroes: The Pantheon as an Historical Genre in Nineteenth-Century Belgium’, National Identities, 6 (2004), pp. 91–106. Uylenspiegel au salon, par les auteurs des cosaques. Revue de l’exposition de 1857 (Brussels, Imprimerie de F. Parent, 1857). Verachter, F., Albrecht Dürer in de Nederlanden (Antwerp, 1840). Verbraeken, P., et al. (eds.), Après & d’après Van Dyck. La récupération romantique au XIXe siècle (Antwerp, Hessenhuis, 1999). Vos, D. de, Hans Memling. The Complete Works (London, Thames and Hudson, 1994). Willems, J.F., Quinten Matsys of Wat doet de liefde niet! Tooneelspel in 2 Bedryven (Antwerp, Schoesetters, 1816).

CHAPTER NINE

a few painters, a few heroes and many factory workers: IN SEARCH OF THE HISTORICAL CULTURE OF BELGIAN IMMIGRANTS IN NORTHERN FRANCE, 1850–19141

Tom Verschaffel and Saartje Vanden Borre

In 1952 the Syndicat d’Initiatives: Les Amis de Roubaix published a small brochure in which the city of Roubaix, in Northern France, close to the border with Belgium, presented itself to the wider public.2 Since the size, prosperity and reputation of the city were all due to its growth and development as an industrial centre in the nineteenth century, the self- representation set out in the brochure was strongly influenced by Rou- baix’s industrial character. Much attention was paid to its industry, past and present, but the geographical situation and the general history of the city were also discussed, with special attention to the very recent Sec- ond World War and the Resistance Movement (‘modest but practical, the people of Roubaix have made every effort in the cause of the fatherland’). Cultural history hardly featured in all of this, but that does not mean that reference to culture and an implicit appeal to the prestige derived from it were entirely absent. In the brochure one and a half pages were devoted to the famous men (‘hommes célèbres’) the city could call its own. For the most part they were princes from the distant past, and politicians, but a number of writers and artists were also mentioned. The representation of Roubaix as a city of the arts was very limited and was treated, as is usual in a publication of this sort, by citing certain individual artists with the implication that these were ‘great’ artists, or at any rate the greatest the city could lay claim to, and that their importance naturally added to its prestige. ‘Painters and sculptors such as J.J. Weerts, Rémy Cooghe, Dejae- ghere have honoured it’, the brochure read. In the passage concerned—one and a half lines—Roubaix appealed to three artists: Jean-Joseph Weerts (1847–1927), Remy Cogghe (1854–1935)

1 Our thanks to Han van der Vegt for the translation. 2 Syndicat d’Initiatives ‘Les Amis de Roubaix’, Guide de Roubaix (Roubaix, 1952). 200 tom verschaffel and saartje vanden borre and Albert de Jaeger (1908–1992). It is striking that all three had a Flemish family name (two of them misspelled in the brochure, incidentally) and were, indeed, of Belgian extraction. We will not concern ourselves here with De Jaeger, a sculptor and medal engraver. He lived outside the time- frame of this chapter and is not especially well-known, except among engraving specialists. We will take a closer look at the two others, both of them painters and more or less contemporaries. They were both children of immigrants, sons of Belgians who had settled in Roubaix to work in its factories. That the artists of which Roubaix professed itself so proud were Bel- gians (or at least were of Belgian extraction) is no coincidence, and comes as no surprise. During their active period, the second half of the nineteenth century, Belgians constituted a very significant part of the city’s population.3 Around 1870 more than half the population was of Belgian nationality. This was the largest concentration in a much broader migration movement. During the whole of the nineteenth century Belgians were the largest immigrant group in France, and during the second half of the century they constituted approximately half of all foreigners settled there. Not until 1900 did Italians outnumber Belgians. The lion’s share of Belgian immigrants settled in the Department of the North, on the border with Belgium. In 1872, about 15 percent of the population of this department was Belgian. That this percentage did not increase appreciably thereafter is due to the fact that many children of immigrants had adopted French nationality, and were therefore no longer registered as foreigners or Bel- gians. The categories ‘Belgian’ and ‘foreigner’ were more or less inter- changeable in the North: Belgians accounted for almost 98 percent of all foreigners living in that department. In absolute numbers, this amounted to approximately a quarter of a million people. These immigrants originated mostly from the nearby Belgian provinces of West-Flanders, East-Flanders and Hainault, and therefore came from both Dutch-speaking and French- speaking areas (in fact they usually spoke Flemish or Walloon dialects).

3 For the information supplied hereafter, see among other things: A. Faidherbe, Étude statistique et critique sur le mouvement de la population de Roubaix (1469–1744–1893) (Rou- baix, 1896); F. Lentacker, La frontière franco-belge. Étude géographique des effets d’une fron- tière internationale sur la vie de relations (Lille, Morel and Corduant, 1974); J. Dupâquier, ‘La contribution des Belges à la formation de la population française (1851–1940): étude quantitative’, in Historiens et populations. Liber amicorum Étienne Hélin, ed. Société Belge de Démographie (Louvain-la-Neuve, Academia, 1991), pp. 331–347; C. Petillon, La population de Roubaix. Industrialisation, démographie et société 1750–1880 (Villeneuve d’Ascq, Presses Universitaires de Septentrion, 2006). a few painters, a few heroes and many factory workers 201

They settled in cities in an area which, although it had historically belonged to the old County of Flanders, had for many centuries—and long before its incorporation into France at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century—been French-speaking. The distribution of these large numbers of Belgian immigrants living in the Department of the North was uneven. Some started off working in agriculture, but the vast majority were factory workers employed in the industrial triangle of Lille, Roubaix and Tourcoing. The largest group lived in Lille, but because this was by far the largest city, the Belgians constituted only some twenty percent of its population. In the smaller municipalities in the neighbourhood, such as Halluin or Wattrelos, the proportion could increase to sixty or seventy percent. The most remarkable concentration, though, was in Roubaix. It numbered about 8,000 inhabitants around 1800, and then experienced a real transformation into an industrial city of 100,000 inhabitants. This population explosion, a fifteen-fold increase, was to a very large extent due to the influx of workers and their families from across the border, who would eventually amount to half the population. Even in a city such as Roubaix, the immigrants lived close together in their own districts, although it could also be said, in view of their huge numbers, that nearly all working-class neighbourhoods were actually Belgian ones. These were characterized by courées (closed streets) and by estaminets, or pubs, which were extremely numerous. They could literally be found on every street corner, and according to some estimates in 1900 Roubaix numbered 2,500 estaminets, or one for every fifty inhabitants including women and children. This is the Roubaix where the fathers of Remy Cogghe and Jean-Joseph Weerts settled in the middle of the nineteenth century. Weerts was born there. Cogghe was born in Mouscron, in Hainault, no more than ten kilometres from Roubaix, but across the border. An investigation of the cultural history of Belgian immigrants in northern France, and more especially of their historical culture and historical consciousness and of the role that they may have played in forming a specific collective identity, is a difficult matter. They were predominantly factory workers, who left few or no written documents, let alone autobiographical or political writings. As far as we know, writings of this sort, which might reflect their opinions and mentality directly, simply do not survive. We know the songs they sang (we even know the identity of members of the immigrant community who wrote songs), and we know a few local newspapers featuring articles from which a few historical opinions can be distilled. But it is all very limited and leads to the assumption, which may be obvious, that the 202 tom verschaffel and saartje vanden borre historical consciousness of these immigrants was vague and unsophisti- cated and that there was hardly any ‘historical culture’. Cogghe and Weerts were artists and intellectuals, and since they produced works which—in Cogghe’s case with some good will—can be interpreted as ‘historical’, they can be represented as spokesmen for the immigrant community. However, we hope to establish that the greatest insight they offer us does not lie in this capacity nor in the artistic significance of their work. It will be maintained here that their lives and careers are in themselves revealing, and that through their lives, notwithstanding or perhaps even due to the substantial differences between them, the particularity of Roubaix in this period can be uncovered, a particularity which was a consequence of the presence of so many immigrants. Jean-Joseph Weerts (1807–1883), the father of the painter of the same name, was a colourful figure.4 He came from Antwerp, had been a soldier there, first in the regular army of the Kingdom of the Netherlands of Willem I, and then, after the revolution of 1830, in that of independent Belgium. He had been trained as an artist in Antwerp, but in 1843 he settled in Roubaix, where he found employment as a labourer, but also as a sort of mécanicien who succeeded in rising to the level of contremaître, or foreman. Soon, he made the acquaintance of Stephanie Deleu (1825–1874), a West-Flemish young woman, who in 1845 had come to Roubaix to find work, first as a maid, then as a labourer (a dévideuse or reeler) in the textile industry. The two got on well, but there was a problem. Weerts was already married and had a wife and children in Antwerp. He therefore was unable to marry Deleu, but that did not stop them from starting a relationship and having children, the first of whom was the future painter. Still, the situation spelled trouble for the family. At one point, Weerts lost his job, and Deleu, as his mistress, was expelled from the country on the charge of adultery. She settled across the border in Comines, where another child was born. Later the couple were reunited in Roubaix, where four more children came along. But they never married and when Deleu died in 1874 her death was registered by a member of her family (perhaps a brother) who also lived in Roubaix, and by Weerts, who is referred to

4 The biographical information about Weerts and his family is derived from C. Acheré- Lenoir, Vie et oeuvre du peintre Jean-Joseph Weerts (1846–1927) (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Université de Lille III, 2007), and idem, ‘Une image si célèbre qu’elle est devenue anonyme: l’oeuvre du peintre Jean-Joseph Weerts (1846–1927)’, De Franse Nederlanden / Les Pays-Bas Français, 34 (2009), pp. 137–145. a few painters, a few heroes and many factory workers 203 on the certificate as a ‘neighbour’. Not until 1866 did he acknowledge his many children, but since this step was only a formality, not too much significance needs to be attached to the fact that he waited so long. At the time of his birth in 1846, young Jean-Joseph was given his mother’s surname, but was already called ‘Weerts’ before he was officially recognized by his father, whose identity was no secret. Although Weerts senior never married his long-time companion, on his death he was referred to as Deleu’s widower. This family situation was no hindrance to young Jean-Joseph during his early schooling. The fact that he was the son of immigrants, of Belgian nationality and moreover an illegitimate child of parents who had ignored the formalities and legislation of both France and Belgium, did not prevent him from being educated at an established institution in the city, nor from achieving success and receiving recognition there, even from the town council. From the age of twelve Weerts attended the art academy in Roubaix, where he joined the painting class of Constantin Mils. He won awards and was noticed in the local press. In 1866, when he was twenty years old and had probably learned all that Roubaix could teach him, he prepared to continue his education, as was usual, at the École des Beaux- Arts in Paris. For this purpose he was accepted into the studio of Alexan- dre Cabanel, perhaps because Mils and Cabanel had studied together in the studio of François-Édouard Picot and thus knew each other well. To complete his studies in Paris, moreover, Weerts was awarded a financial allowance or pension by the city council of Roubaix, the first time that it had made a grant for this purpose. Then a problem arose. Weerts’s background and situation, which had hitherto been unexceptionable, now threatened to undermine his prospects at the École des Beaux-Arts and in Cabanel’s studio. To be able to compete for the Grand Prix de Rome, the goal of every artist’s education at this time, French nationality was required. The promising painter and the proud city council were thus in danger of missing the chance of the ultimate prize. Immediately, a plan of action was launched: in December 1866, several months after the city council had awarded the grant, Weerts senior hurriedly acknowledged paternity of his children. Soon afterwards, the young artist acquired French nationality. When the Surintendant des Beaux-Arts, responsible for the institution during the Second Empire, enquired of the city council about Weerts’s enrolment for the École Impéri- ale des Beaux-Arts (as it was now called), the mayor was able to respond ‘that the young man, born in Roubaix to a foreigner, was enrolled as a 204 tom verschaffel and saartje vanden borre volunteer for [military] recruitment in 1867 and that he, as born and resident in Roubaix, desired to be French and had therefore been naturalized’.5 The reference to military service was to emphasize the ‘honesty’ of the new Frenchman. In order to escape military service, many children of Bel- gian immigrants avoided adopting French nationality if they could. Remy Cogghe’s story is different, but comparable.6 He was born in 1854 and was therefore a decade younger than Weerts, but especially in its early years his career developed along similar lines. After the Cogghe family had crossed the border several times for prolonged periods, they moved permanently from the Belgian town of Mouscron to the nearby French city of Roubaix, where the father could find employment as a labourer. Like Weerts before him, young Remy was educated at the art academy there, taking painting classes with Mils with a view to more advanced training in Paris with Cabanel. For this purpose he too received a grant, though in his case it came from a local industrial firm rather than from the city council. It was at this point, as in Weerts’s case, that nationality became an issue, threatening to prevent him competing for the Prix de Rome. Cogghe solved the problem differently from Weerts. Instead of adopting French nationality, Cogghe temporarily returned to Belgium. He moved back to Mouscron (in reality only registering there, with a friend of his, a doctor who supported his career) and began his training, first at the art academy in Brussels and afterwards at the academy in Antwerp. In due course he entered for the Prix de Rome—the Belgian prize rather than the French—and in 1880, after several abortive attempts, he won it. His success was celebrated in August 1880 with an official banquet in Roubaix, for which Weerts came over from Paris. Thanks to the award, Cogghe spent the period 1881–85 abroad, but as with his previous return to Belgium this was only an interlude in his career. By 1885 he had again settled in Rou- baix, where he would remain. Home-loving to a fault, this immigrant’s son would become the most Roubaixian artist imaginable. It was in this respect that he most differed from Weerts. The latter did not win the Prix de Rome in Paris, as Cogghe had done in Belgium, but this did not prevent him from pursuing a successful artistic career in the nation’s capital city. He proved himself to be a truly ‘French’ artist, living,

5 Acheré-Lenoir, Vie et oeuvre du peintre Jean-Joseph Weerts, p. 29. 6 The information on Cogghe is predominantly derived from Remy Cogghe (1854– 1935). Catalogue de l’exposition, Roubaix-France, du 16 novembre 1985 au 24 décembre 1985, Mouscron-Belgique, du 10 janvier 1986 au 26 janvier 1986 (Roubaix, 1985) [unpaginated], especially from the contributions by Didier Schulman, Laurent Marty and Vincent Brausch. a few painters, a few heroes and many factory workers 205

Figure 9.1. Jean-Joseph Weerts, L’assassinat de Marat, 1880. Oil on canvas. © RMN, Alain Leprince, Musée La Piscine, Roubaix. working and eventually dying in Paris, receiving commissions from the French state and from city councils all over the country, and producing works which found their way to a number of French museums and town halls. Appointed a chevalier and later an officier of the Légion d’Honneur (an honour open to foreigners), his paintings were exclusively French in subject matter and explicitly patriotic in style. Weerts devoted the first of his monumental history scenes to L’assassinat de Marat (Figure 9.1, 1880), a theme which had already been made famous by other painters including Jacques-Louis David (1793) and Paul Baudry (1860). With this scene, characterized by all the pathetic exaggeration he can muster, he fully engages in the national historical culture of France. Indeed he succeeded in attracting attention with this work, which was bought by the French state and assigned to the museum of Evreux. More- over, Weerts received a prestigious commission from the government for La mort de Joseph Bara, still his most famous work. Joseph Bara was a fourteen-year-old who volunteered to fight in the Vendée in defence of 206 tom verschaffel and saartje vanden borre the French Revolution against the revolt which had broken out there in 1793. He was killed following his attackers’ demand that he shout ‘Vive le Roi’, to which he responded with a fervent ‘Vive la République’. Robespi- erre immediately made use of his example in revolutionary propaganda and he became a subject for the visual arts, including an unfinished work by Jacques-Louis David. A few years later the Bara cult stalled, but was revived in the 1880s during the Third Republic. Instrumental in this revival were a work by Charles Morea-Vauthier (1880) and Weerts’s painting of the same year, which was not only very successful when first shown at the Musée de Luxembourg in Paris (at that time the most important museum for contemporary art), but continued to be influential long afterwards. The work was reproduced as a postcard in an edition of 300,000 for distribution to French schools, and was later reproduced in countless history books. For the schoolchildren of the Third Republic, Joseph Bara once again became an example of patriotism and heroism. Weerts also demonstrated his patriotism by means of allegorical representations. In Pour l’humanité, pour la patrie (1895), painted for the chapel of the Sorbonne, he linked patriotism to faith, and with France!! Ou l’Alsace et la Lorraine désespérées (1906) he commented on France’s loss of these regions to Ger- many. The immigrant’s son had become the most ardent propagandist of French nationalism. The choice of Paris and France does not imply that Weerts did not maintain a bond with his native city. He retained his association with Roubaix, as Roubaix did with him. In Paris, he was active in La Bette rave, an ‘Association amicale des enfants du Nord et du Pas-de-Calais’, and developed his Roubaix network in the capital by taking on many pupils from the North. His successes were extensively reported in the local press and he maintained his contacts in the town. He was vice-president of the Union artistique et littéraire de Roubaix-Tourcoing, and regularly showed his work at the salon which both cities organized. He evidently profited from this local and regional support. For instance, he received commissions from the city council and, like Cogghe, kept up a steady production of portraits of the local elite. In the 1920s, when Weerts was past seventy, a plan was hatched to make a large donation of his works to the city of Rou- baix, for a museum which was to be created in his honour. In 1924, a few years before his death, the museum duly opened its doors, in a room of the comparatively new, monumental city hall. Today, these works belong to the collection of the municipal museum ‘La Piscine’ in Roubaix. The lives of Weerts and Cogghe make a number of things clear. First, that their situation as immigrants’ children was no hindrance to the pursuit of an a few painters, a few heroes and many factory workers 207 education and a career in Roubaix itself, even though it did pose problems when they wished to further that career in Paris and on a national level. In other words, the situation in Roubaix (and perhaps in other, comparable cities in the North) was fundamentally different from the situation elsewhere, its distinctiveness determined by the large number of immigrants in the region and by the consequences of their presence. Accepted informally by the local population as a whole, they were equally accepted and supported in official circles (up to the city council and the mayor himself ) and by the economic and social elite of the city. Roubaix was a city where Belgian workers were to a large extent regarded as ‘normal’. How could they not be, given that they constituted half the population, and sometimes even more? This indicates an advanced integration of Belgian immigrants, not so much in their new country, but in the city and region where they had settled. It was an integration shaped not by immigrants adjusting to the national culture of their host country, but rather by the local or regional environment adapting or transforming itself in response to the presence of a growing community of incomers. In Roubaix and elsewhere in the Department of the North, then, Bel- gian immigrants scarcely formed a specific community, separate from the local population. Even though they can be seen as atypical because of their ability to escape the worker’s existence, Weerts and Cogghe both originated from the Belgian immigrant community of Roubaix and were actually immigrants themselves. In 1888, Weerts even returned to Bel- gium, travelling through the country ‘à la recherche de ses racines’ (in search of his roots).7 Yet neither of them was a ‘migration painter’ in the true sense of the word. Notwithstanding his link to his native city and the fact that the largest collection of his work can still be found there, Weerts undoubtedly became a French and a national painter. Cogghe, on the other hand, concentrated on local life, documenting the specific community and environment which had been coloured by the presence of Belgian immigrants. Ignoring factories and labour, his sketches of folk life mostly depict leisure activities, including for example cock fights (Combat de coqs en Flandre, 1889), ball games ( Jeu de Boules en Flandre française, 1897) and pub scenes. The best known of the latter is Le bain de pieds inattendu—scène de cabaret en Flandre (‘The unexpected foot bath—pub scene in Flanders’, 1895 (Figure 9.2)), in which the regulars make fun of a naïve comrade. The scene has a flavour of light-heartedness and social

7 Acheré-Lenoir, Vie et oeuvre du peintre Jean-Joseph Weerts, p. 61. 208 tom verschaffel and saartje vanden borre

Figure 9.2. Remy Cogghe, Le bain de pieds inattendu—scène de cabaret en Flandre, 1895. Oil on canvas. © RMN, Alain Leprince, Musée La Piscine, Roubaix. harmony, including not only the workers involved in the prank, but also some pipe-smoking bourgeois on the left, a few women in the background and a little girl. With scenes like this Cogghe offers a view of certain aspects of immigrants’ lives, but he never develops the immigrants’ presence or position as a theme. He does not distinguish them from other people, nor does he single out matters of specific importance to them. He served and portrayed the local community as a whole, including the bourgeoisie. Commissioned by bourgeois and local dignitaries, he painted their portraits. Although himself of working-class background, Cogghe eventually belonged to the upper middle class of Roubaix. The meaning and the message of his work are saturated with bourgeois ideology, as for instance in his sketches of women trying to prevent their husbands from going to the café. Cogghe recorded a world where immigrants lived, but did not present the immigrants as a separate category. This image of a specific context, strongly determined by the presence of huge numbers of Belgian immigrants yet with little sense of a separate immigrant community and apparently no desire to construct a collective immigrant identity, is confirmed by other traces of historical culture which we can find. On the face of it, these traces are relatively few. We are, after all, investigating an industrial region and the working population there. a few painters, a few heroes and many factory workers 209

Memory of the past and connection to it did not play an explicit part in working-class culture. In so far as it existed at all, an interest in history was directed towards the region (the North and/or Flanders) and to individual cities in which the prominent presence of Belgian immigrants was integrated, but it was never thematized or seen as requiring special attention. The immigrant presence was largely taken for granted. The extent to which immigrants were concerned with their own specific history must be connected to the extent to which they presented themselves as a specific group. Initially, they hardly did this at all, since there was no need or reason for it. When Belgians did present themselves as a group, it was not because of some inner drive or because as immigrants they had spontaneously developed a concern with their national identity, but rather in reaction to external factors and changing circumstances. The best example of this is a demonstration that paraded through the streets of Lille on 10 February 1889, a cold and snowy winter’s day: a ‘manifestation des Belges habitant Lille en l’honneur de la France’ (demonstration of Belgians living in Lille in honour of France), as Le nouvelliste du Nord et du Pas-de-Calais, a local newspaper, called it. The message was double, but still clear. On the one hand, it was an expression of the national consciousness of Belgians in France; the participants wanted to express pride in their roots and country of origin. On the other hand, they wished to show themselves good inhabitants of France, loyal to their adopted country. That they should feel the necessity to broadcast this message appears among other things from the fact that the demonstration in Lille was not unique. A few months earlier, in November 1888, Belgians had protested in Paris and Dunkirk, also cities with a considerable number of Belgian inhabitants. This Belgian upsurge was caused by certain social developments and political discussions prevalent at the time, which had the effect of forcing the immigrants to clarify their position on the question of nationality. Of particular importance here was the matter of military service. ‘Foreigners’ had neither the right nor the obligation to under- take this service. It was reserved for full citizens, since only their loyalty to France could be taken for granted. This led to what was perceived as unfair competition on the job market. Immigrants’ sons not only enjoyed the simple privilege of not having to fulfil military service, but, on top of that, they were absolved from going to the training camps (the ‘28 days’) for reservists. For employers, the hiring of foreigners meant labour continuity and was thus advantageous. The refusal of many immigrants’ sons to apply for French nationality, even when they could acquire this easily or even automatically, was interpreted as a lack of respect for and loyalty to 210 tom verschaffel and saartje vanden borre their host country. The Belgians also had to deal with the rumour circulat- ing in the middle of 1888 that the Belgian King Leopold II had concluded a secret pact with Bismarck, and that Belgium had given up its neutrality for an alliance with Germany. These various developments contributed to a growing distrust of Bel- gians and of foreign immigrants in general. At the same time, during the last decades of the nineteenth century, there were broader shifts in the attitude of French authorities and of the population as a whole towards the presence of foreigners in the country.8 The loss of national self-esteem as a consequence of defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) contributed to this, while increasing the fear of ‘internal enemies’. Especially in the late 1880s, a need was felt to reform the law on nationality and naturalization, and on the registration of foreigners. In October 1888 a decree determined that migrant workers should register with the town hall of their place of residence. This was a retroactive measure, and thus applied to all foreigners already present in France, which led to great logistical problems in Lille and other cities. In addition, fees which they had to pay for the procedure spelled trouble for many immigrants. The Paris demonstration of 11 November 1888 was an initiative on the part of left-wing, republican and socialist activists. They wished to show the gratitude of Belgian republicans in Paris to their host country, while at the same time criticizing the Belgian king and his government (‘À bas Léopold!’). The demonstration in Lille, by contrast, sprang much more from the immigrant community as a whole. It was organized by a committee led by a dentist, a frame-maker and a bookkeeper. They belonged to the middle class and were not average members of the Belgian immigrant community, but had put themselves forward as its spokesmen. From the way the event was prepared, through a network of local committees in the neighbourhoods, and from the fact that (depending on the estimates) between 6,000 and 8,000 people took part, we can deduce that they succeeded in doing so. The Belgian demonstration in Lille also differed from that in Paris in the sense that the immigrants in the North linked their love for Belgium (and its king) to that for their new fatherland. The two could be reconciled and were assigned an equal place in ‘the heart’ of the immigrants. For instance, souvenir buttons were handed out with both Belgian and

8 Cf. G. Noiriel, Le creuset français. Histoire de l’immigration XIXe–XXe siècle (Paris, Seuil, 1988). a few painters, a few heroes and many factory workers 211

French national colours. Along the route, both Belgian and French flags were displayed and the Fanfare franco-belge played a potpourri in which the national anthems of both countries, the Marseillaise and the Bra- bançonne, were mixed. There were of course also slogans and speeches explaining the purpose of the demonstration and identifying the key issues. The immigrants themselves were encouraged to raise their children ‘in the love of the country where we live’, so that ‘when they reach adulthood, they will, inspired by your advice, have themselves entered in the lists of army recruits at the town hall of Lille’. That was ‘the best, the only right way to become good Frenchmen’, according to one of the organizers in his speech.9 This was balanced by a call to the authorities to reduce the costs of registration and naturalization. (At the demonstration in Paris, free naturalization for Belgian immigrants was advocated.) This demand was framed within a more general and abstract discourse of gratitude and understanding, loyalty and patriotism. In a song written specially for the occasion, entitled À la France—les Belges reconnaissants (To France—the grateful Belgians), the friendship of Belgians and French was explicitly professed: ‘Belges et Français, soyons tous bons amis’ (Bel- gians and Frenchmen, let us all be good friends). The last stanza gives a summary of the main points of the participants. Puisqu’en ce jour la France hospitalière Reconnaît bien tous nos bons sentiments, Rangeons-nous donc sous sa noble bannière! Comptons-nous au nombre de ses enfants; Et si plus tard, nos coeurs pleins d’espérance, Nous obtenions les droits de tous Français, Nous remercerions, de tous ces bienfaits, Ce bon pays qu’on appelle la France!10 The image of itself and of its position within France which the Belgian community presented in these demonstrations contains not only a vision of the future, of a desired evolution, but also a sense of history, however vague and underdeveloped it may have been. It was the story of immigration itself, with a clear division of roles, in which the central idea was that

9 ‘Manifestation des Belges habitant Lille en l’honneur de la France’, Le Nouvelliste du Nord et du Pas-de-Calais, 12 February 1889. 10 ‘Since hospitable France today / recognizes our good intentions, / let us rally to its flag! / Let us count ourselves among its children. / And if with hearts full of hope / we later acquire the rights of all Frenchmen / we will thank the good nation called France for all its blessings!’: E. Baetens, À la France. Les Belges reconnaissants (printed handbill, Lille, 1889), Lille, Archives Départementales du Nord, inv. no. 162/2. 212 tom verschaffel and saartje vanden borre the Belgians who had come to France had been well received and were grateful for that. This gratitude was expressed, according to the speech of one of the organizers, through the willingness of the immigrants to take on French nationality and through ‘l’engagement formel de verser, avec eux, notre sang pour la patrie française!’ (the formal commitment to join them in shedding our blood for the French fatherland).11 That was obviously one answer to the xenophobic irritation provoked by the issue of military service, but the Belgians also insisted that they were willing to take their place in French history. As part of the Lille demonstration, flowers were laid at the base of the column in the middle of the Grand Place, the central square of the city. This column is a monument dedicated to the memory of the siege of Lille by the Austrian army in 1792, during the French Revolutionary Wars. Thus the demonstrators honoured the indomitability of the city’s inhabitants and their refusal to surrender. As the president of the organizing committee (the dentist) stated in his speech, the Belgian immigrants recognized them as model citizens: ‘we would like to follow the example of these fierce French patriots who in the face of danger swore to die at their post to defend the fatherland’. The Belgian demonstration of 1889 in Lille was responding to the requirements of a specific historic moment. Yet its organizers also sought to capitalize on the enthusiasm which the event had aroused, and main tain it. Some months later, the Société Philanthropique des Belges was founded and officially recognized, a society with much the same aims as those of the demonstrators. As laid down in the statutes, the Société existed ‘to defend Belgian national honour by gathering all honest Bel- gians living in Lille and its suburbs’ and ‘to do, in a word, all that might further the appreciation of Belgians living in France and enhance the sympathy existing between Belgians and French’. The society, which was only open to those of Belgian nationality or origin, hoped to accomplish its aims by financially supporting French families whose breadwinner had suffered an accident or was obliged to serve his ‘28 days’ as a reservist, and so had become destitute. But the Société Philanthropique des Belges was not a success. It lacked members and consequently also the necessary funds for good deeds, and so had to be disbanded as early as 1893. Officially, the reason given was that the reception by the French population had been so cordial that a separate Belgian society was considered unnecessary and undesirable. That was correct, for Belgian immigrants

11 ‘La manifestation des Belges à Lille’, L’Écho du Nord, 12 February 1889. a few painters, a few heroes and many factory workers 213 could and did join all manner of societies, many of which were indeed mixed. But a more important reason was that new legislation on nationality and naturalization had become effective from the middle of 1889. It did not meet the demands of the immigrants (naturalization, for instance, carried high registration costs), but, for better or worse, the matter had been concluded. The need for the Belgian immigrant community to present itself and to speak out largely disappeared, and with it went the drive to adopt a specific collective identity. Consequently, it felt no need to write its own history. In the recent studies which Stephane Gerson, Timothy Baycroft and Benoît Mihaïl have devoted to the efforts to create a regional identity in French Flanders and the North, Belgian immigrants hardly get a mention, and their presence is not cited as a factor in regional particularity.12 That is hardly surprising, for French Flanders and the bordering area in Belgium (from which most immigrants originated) had always constituted a single area, namely the old County of Flanders. The state border which the immigrants crossed was no more than two centuries old at the time. As Baycroft especially has emphasized, the Belgian Provinces of East and West Flanders on the one hand and French Flanders on the other were culturally very similar, and the boundary had virtually no meaning for the inhabitants of the border area, and was hardly perceived as such. In other words, the immigrants lived in an area which hardly differed in any fundamental way from their place of origin. Baycroft probably overstates this cultural similarity and its impact in the nineteenth century, but it is undeniable that Flemish immigrants and French Flemings shared a large part of their history and a huge number of traditions. The North is the region of belfries and carillons, of historical processions and the cult of giants. In the national context of France, these things are typical of ‘la Flandre’, distinguishing it from the rest of the country, just as they are also typical of ‘the Low Countries’. Their presence in the North can therefore be attributed to the fact that this region had for centuries been part of the Netherlands. The Belgian immigrants and the area of France in which they had settled had a common past—the history of Flanders. Whenever this was evoked in the North, it was largely

12 S. Gerson, The Pride of Place. Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth- Century France (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2003); T. Baycroft, Culture, Identity and Nationalism. French Flanders in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Woodbridge, Boydell, 2004); and B. Mihaïl, Une Flandre à la française. L’identité régionale à l’épreuve du modèle républicain (Loverval, Éditions Labor, 2006). 214 tom verschaffel and saartje vanden borre the same history as was celebrated on similar occasions on the Belgian side of the border. In 1951, for instance, on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the establishment of Lille Chamber of Commerce and of the inauguration of the city’s inland harbour, there were grand festivities. A long historical procession was organized, Fastes de Lille, itself a revival of the Fastes of 1852. The procession evoked the first ceremonial meeting of the Golden Fleece which assembled in Lille in 1431, and was a reconstruction of the entry of Philip the Good and Isabella of Portugal on that occasion. The order of the procession was traditional, hardly differing from many similar processions held all over in Belgium or from numerous national and local festivities: those taking part evoked the ‘serments’ (oaths), the guilds, merchants, ‘burghers’, the magistrates of the city, nobility and clergy, and so on. Foreign groups participated too, including British and Belgians, organized for example by the Society of the ‘Ommegang’ of Brussels, by then specializing in personifications of this kind, all culminating in the ‘ducal court of Burgundy’, the Order of the Golden Fleece, and the duke and duchess.13 A very striking example of the cult of this common past is the Fête historique des Louches (Historical Festival of the Ladle), celebrated annu- ally at Comines since 1884.14 A city on the River Lys, Comines was split in two by the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) and since then has consisted of two municipalities, one in France (Comines-France) and one in Belgium (the bilingual Comines/Komen, an enclave of the province of Hainault in the province of West-Flanders, and therefore also of the Walloon provinces in Flanders). The Festival of the Ladle cultivates the local past, paying attention, among other things, to the institution of a fair or free market in the city by Philip the Good in 1456, and to its most illustrious inhabitant, the historian Philippe de Commynes (1447–1511).15 The name of the festival refers to a local legend, an event which is supposed to have happened in the sixteenth century: a young man, locked up in a cell in the castle, attracted the attention of those outside by throwing from the window the wooden ladles that were allowed him for eating—and in doing so secured his liberation.

13 Fastes de Lille du 3 au 6 mai 1951. Programme officiel (Lille, 1951). 14 A. Schoonheere, ‘La fête des Louches: miroire de l’histoire de Comines’, Mémoires de la Société d’Histoire de Comines-Warneton, 16 (1986), pp. 125–246. 15 See L’Echo du Nord, 8 March 1885. a few painters, a few heroes and many factory workers 215

Although the festival was a French initiative, organized in French Comines, from the very start it made an appeal to the public across the border, as is suggested by the following song: Accourez tous gens d’la Belgique Voir la belle fête historique du Château. Accourez gens de Warneton, Quesnoy, Wervicq et Deûlémont au Château.16 On occasion, the festival was organized by mixed committees, or expressly as a franco-belge event. The brass bands always play both the Marseillaise and the Brabançonne, and shop windows are adorned with representations of the famous louche, with both French and Belgian colours. Tradi- tionally, the main event of the festivities is a procession, devoted to local history and traditions, with tableaux of historical and folk figures, and naturally a number of giants. The tailpiece is a float with the members of the Confrérie de la Franche Louche, throwing wooden ladles into the crowd. It is remarkable that this procession moves through both Belgian and French Comines and so crosses the international border. No mention is made of migration or migrants during these festivities, which are largely concerned with the common past, that is with a period prior to the drawing of the national frontier and the migration across it. The question of whether Belgian immigrants have received a place in the written history of the more recent past needs to be further investigated, but several indications suggest that they have. Weerts and Cogghe have certainly not been forgotten in Roubaix: Weerts has received his own museum, Cogghe’s house has been restored and carries a memorial plaque, streets have been named after them, their busts are displayed in public places, they are the artists who—at this moment—receive the most attention in the city museum. We have seen that they belong to the ‘hommes célèbres’ of the city. And it is immediately apparent that they are presented as artists ‘of Roubaix’, not as Belgians, as immigrants’ children, as foreigners. Nor, incidentally, are they presented as French. Other more recent examples of Belgian immigrants honoured locally can also be found. In the memory and the cult of the First World War, a

16 From the songsheet in Schoonheere, ‘La fête des Louches’, p. 144. ‘Hurry, people of Belgium, / Come and see the beautiful historic festival / of the castle. / Hurry, people of Warneton, / Quesnoy, Wervicq and Deûlémont / come to the castle.’ 216 tom verschaffel and saartje vanden borre most striking character is Léon Trulin (1897–1915). This new ‘Joseph Bara’ was a Belgian, born in Ath, who, after his father died, moved to Lille with the rest of his family to start working in a factory at the age of thirteen. When he was severely injured in an industrial incident, he used his con- valescence to read and study. Following the outbreak of the First World War he went to England in 1915, at the age of eighteen, to enrol in the army—the Belgian army. Due to his poor health, he was turned down, but, together with a friend of the same age, he set up an information network active both in Northern France and on Belgian territory. After a few months, the boys were caught on the Dutch border, imprisoned in Antwerp and finally transported to Lille, where Trulin was executed by firing-squad. In his diary, Trulin wrote, ‘j’ai fait ça pour ma patrie’ (I have done this for my fatherland). And on the day before his execution: ‘je meurs pour la patrie et sans regret’ (I die for the fatherland, without regret).17 He died for his country, but which one, Belgium or France? Or perhaps both? What- ever the answer, he became a central figure in the collective memory and history of Lille. A street was named in his honour, in 1934 a statue was erected to him in the town centre, and he also featured in an impres- sive collective monument, erected in 1929, with which Lille honoured its heroes of the First World War. Both monuments were destroyed during the Second World War, but were later reconstructed. The collective monument consists of a wall, before which four life-size figures stand; next to them, a boy lies on the ground: Trulin. The standing figures are Georges Maertens, Ernest Deconynck, Sylvère Verhulst and Eugène Jacquet, all of them members of a local resistance group, who were executed on the 22 September 1915. Some of them were Belgian, some French.18 Immigrants or people of Belgian extraction have thus been integrated into the history and the historical self-image of the Department of the North and its principal cities, emerging in some cases as leading protago- nists in the region’s history. This has happened naturally, moreover, without their presence and participation in the social life of the region being treated as a separate theme. If referred to at all, their immigrant status is

17 These quotations are repeated time and again, e.g. in Emile Paquet, Un petit Belge. Léon Trulin (Brussels, 1921) p. 13; in Philippe Kah, L’adolescent chargé de gloire. Léon Trulin (Lille, 1932); and more recently in Yves Smague, ‘Léon Trulin fusillé, à 18 ans, par les Alle- mands’, La Voix du Nord, 28 November 2010. 18 For an account, see H. McPhail, The Long Silence. Civilian Life under the German Occu- pation of Northern France, 1914–1918 (London, I.B. Tauris, 2001), esp. pp. 117–124. a few painters, a few heroes and many factory workers 217 mentioned only in passing, and their role has never been made the basis of a specific history of Belgian immigration. This confirms the conclusions drawn from the history of Weerts and Cogghe, namely that the Belgian presence in the North was considered an essential part of contemporary history, and a determining factor of local identity as it was constructed and perceived. In 2009, Christophe Drugy, a Lille professor and himself a French ‘northerner’, published a book in Paris entitled Retrouver ses ancêtres belges.19 It is a practical guide for Frenchmen wishing to conduct gene- alogical research into their antecedents’ identity, when those familial roots turn out to be in Belgium. Perhaps this constitutes at least a partial recognition of the Belgian character of Le Nord.

References

Acheré-Lenoir, C., ‘Une image si célèbre qu’elle est devenue anonyme: l’oeuvre du peintre Jean-Joseph Weerts (1846–1927)’, De Franse Nederlanden / Les Pays-Bas Français, 34 (2009), pp. 137–145. Acheré-Lenoir, C., Vie et oeuvre du peintre Jean-Joseph Weerts (1846–1927) (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Université de Lille III, 2007). Baetens, E., À la France. Les Belges reconnaissants (printed handbill, Lille, 1889), Lille, Archives Départementales du Nord, inv. no. 162/2. Baycroft, T., Culture, Identity and Nationalism. French Flanders in the Nineteenth and Twen- tieth Centuries (Woodbridge, Boydell, 2004). Remy Cogghe (1854–1935). Catalogue de l’exposition, Roubaix-France, du 16 novembre 1985 au 24 décembre 1985, Mouscron-Belgique, du 10 janvier 1986 au 26 janvier 1986 (Roubaix, 1985). Drugy, C., Retrouver ses ancêtres belges (Paris, Archives & Culture, 2009). Dupâquier, J., ‘La contribution des Belges à la formation de la population française (1851–1940): étude quantitative’, in Historiens et populations. Liber amicorum Étienne Hélin, ed. Société Belge de Démographie (Louvain-la-Neuve, Academia, 1991), pp. 331–347. Faidherbe, A., Étude statistique et critique sur le mouvement de la population de Roubaix (1469–1744–1893) (Roubaix, 1896). Fastes de Lille du 3 au 6 mai 1951. Programme officiel (Lille, 1951). Gerson, S., The Pride of Place. Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2003). Kah, P., L’adolescent chargé de gloire. Léon Trulin (Lille, 1932). Lentacker, F., La frontière franco-belge. Étude géographique des effets d’une frontière internationale sur la vie de relations (Lille, Morel and Corduant, 1974). McPhail, H., The Long Silence. Civilian Life under the German Occupation of Northern France 1914–1918 (London, I.B. Tauris, 2001). ‘La manifestation des Belges à Lille’, L’Écho du Nord, 12 February 1889. ‘Manifestation des Belges habitant Lille en l’honneur de la France’, Le Nouvelliste du Nord et du Pas-de-Calais, 12 February 1889.

19 C. Drugy, Retrouver ses ancêtres belges (Paris, Archives & Culture, 2009). 218 tom verschaffel and saartje vanden borre

Mihaïl, B., Une Flandre à la française. L’identité régionale à l’épreuve du modèle républicain (Loverval, Éditions Labor, 2006). Noiriel, G., Le creuset français. Histoire de l’immigration XIXe–XXe siècle (Paris, Seuil, 1988). Paquet, E., Un petit Belge. Léon Trulin (Brussels, 1921). Petillon, C., La population de Roubaix. Industrialisation, démographie et société 1750–1880 (Villeneuve d’Ascq, Presses Universitaires de Septentrion, 2006). [Roubaix], Syndicat d’Initiatives ‘Les Amis de Roubaix’, Guide de Roubaix (Roubaix, 1952). Schoonheere, A., ‘La fête des Louches: miroire de l’histoire de Comines’, Mémoires de la Société d’Histoire de Comines-Warneton, 16 (1986), pp. 125–246. Smague, Y., ‘Léon Trulin fusillé, à 18 ans, par les Allemands’, La Voix du Nord, 28 November 2010. CHAPTER TEN

‘RETRACING THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY’: NATIONAL HISTORY PAINTING AND ENGRAVING IN BRITAIN AND THE LOW COUNTRIES IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Hugh Dunthorne

Historical pictures are, I believe, pieces of canvas from twelve to thirty feet long, representing for the most part personages who never existed (at least in such a shape), performing actions that never occurred, and dressed in costumes that they never could have worn.1 Thus, wittily and not altogether unfairly, William Makepeace Thackeray defined history painting as he encountered it in March 1838 at the Paris Salon, the exhibition of new French painting and sculpture held every year in the palace of the Louvre. As a pictorial category, history painting was of course not new at this time. It had existed since the Renaissance; and in subsequent centuries its defining characteristics had been codified in the teaching of art academies and in academic writing on art. Drawing its narrative subject-matter from the books of the Bible or from the historical and mythological literature of ancient Greece and Rome, a history picture was required to be monumental in scale, idealized in form (for example in the dress and gestures of the figures), and morally uplifting in its effect on the viewer. Since all this was difficult to achieve, moreover, and since the themes of history painting were thought to be of timeless significance, it was placed at the top of the hierarchy of different types of art—above landscape, portraiture and still-life—and was recognized as the most elevated work that a painter could aspire to. Traditional history painting of this kind continued to be produced for much of the nineteenth century. Yet by the time that Thackeray wrote his review in 1838 it had been challenged and was increasingly being overshadowed by a new strain of historical art for which a new term had been coined: ‘national history painting’. In Britain this expression seems to have been first used in the 1820s to describe the art of the Scot,

1 [W.M. Thackeray], The Times, 5 April 1838, p. 5. 220 hugh dunthorne

Figure 10.1. Honoré Daumier, The Public at the Salon: the danger of taking impressionable children to see Monsieur Gallait’s picture [‘Last Honours rendered to Counts Egmont and Hoorn’] and of reading out to them the notice on the execution of Count Egmont. Lithograph, 25 × 21 cm. Le Charivari, 28 April 1852. © The British Library Board. ‘retracing the history of our country’ 221

William Allan.2 But the term could be applied equally well to the work of painters in neighbouring countries, in England, the Netherlands, France and Germany.3 It was by depicting key moments in French and English history from the late Middle Ages onwards that Paul Delaroche made his name at successive Paris Salons from 1824 to 1837. And within a year or two of Delaroche’s success his younger contemporary in Berlin, Adolph Menzel, was applying similar methods of meticulous research to the task of depicting the life of Frederick the Great of Prussia, first in small wood- cuts and lithographs and then, during the 1850s, in a sequence of larger oil paintings. The new approach which the work of these artists exempli- fies retained some of the features of conventional history painting. For one thing, it remained text-based, drawing its subject-matter from written accounts of medieval and early modern times and often from the history of the artist’s own country. In the printed catalogues which accompanied exhibitions of new work, painters inserted quotations from their literary and historical sources, and visitors to exhibitions (if we may believe the evidence of contemporary caricaturists like Daumier (Figure 10.1)) enjoyed reading these texts as they walked from one picture to the next. Secondly, much national history painting retained the sense of moral purpose which had been associated with traditional depictions of biblical and classical subjects. Images of the nation’s past were seen in didactic terms, providing what one artist called ‘invaluable lessons of religion, love of country, and morality’ for the benefit of each ‘rising generation’.4 The difference was that these lessons were now taught not by means of idealized figures in timeless settings but by real-life, flesh-and-blood people, depicted in the dress and physical surroundings of their time and at some decisive moment in their country’s history. As it developed and became more popular in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the new history painting displayed both national and

2 J. Howard et al., William Allan. Artist Adventurer (Edinburgh, City of Edinburgh Muse- ums and Galleries, 2001), p. 18 and n. 11. 3 In Dutch the term ‘nationale historische stukken’ was used in the decree of 1808 which established the Royal Museum in Amsterdam: quoted in E. Bergvelt, ‘Nationale, levende en moderne meesters: Rijksmusea en eigentijdse kunst (1800–1848)’, in E. de Jong et al. (eds.), Het Rijksmuseum. Opstellen over de geschiedenis van een nationale instelling (Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 35, 1984; Weesp, Fibula-Van Dishoeck, 1985), p. 84. I am grateful to Ellinoor Bergvelt for sending me a copy of this and other articles, as also to Jenny Graham, Frans Grijzenhout, Peter Mandler, Prys Morgan, Jo Tollebeek and Tom Verschaffel for help and advice. 4 Benjamin West to C.W. Peale, 1809, quoted R. Strong, Painting the Past. The Victorian Painter and British History (London, Pimlico, 2004), p. 16. 222 hugh dunthorne transnational characteristics. Intensely patriotic in focus, it was universal in appeal; and while the production of national history pictures was undoubtedly driven by rivalry between states, it also benefited from the shared expertise of a European community of artists that transcended national divisions. Pioneering initiatives—such as the museum devoted ‘to all the glories of France’ which Louis Philippe opened at Versailles in 1833 (and for which many new French history pictures were commissioned), and the ambitious programme of public building and mural painting undertaken around the same time by Ludwig of Bavaria in Munich—prompted rival initiatives elsewhere. The newly built Palace of Westminster, with its decorative scheme of scenes from British history; the ‘historical gallery’ opened in 1854 by the Dutch entrepreneur, Jacob de Vos, beside his house in Amsterdam (a ‘little Versailles’ on the Herengracht, as the writer Carol Vosmaer called it); the musée historique established in Brussels a year later as part of the State Museum of Belgian Painting and Sculpture—all these were attempts to match, if not to outdo, France’s new national history collection.5 Yet the driving force behind the Westminster scheme was not a British politician but a young German prince, Albert of Saxe-Coburg, who in 1841 invited the Nazarene fresco painter (and director of Munich’s Academy of Art), Peter von Cornelius, to London in order to advise the parliamentary Fine Art Commission on its plans.6 Shortly afterwards, the Belgian Minister of Public Works, Charles Rogier, made almost the same journey in reverse, travelling south to see the transformation of the Bavar- ian capital for himself: inspired by the example of Munich, Rogier set about developing a policy of state sponsorship to encourage mural painting in the civic buildings of his own country.7 Public taste in historical art could be equally cosmopolitan. History paintings praised in the salons of Ghent or Brussels might attract just as much enthusiasm (though not always for the same reasons) when shown at the Louvre or toured around the galleries of Germany.8 And history painters and sculptors travelled abroad,

5 C. Riding and J. Riding (eds.), The Houses of Parliament. History, Art, Architecture (Lon- don, Merrell, 2000), pp. 229–30; D. Carasso (ed.), Helden van het Vaderland. Onze geschiedenis in 19de-eeuwse taferelen verbeeld (Amsterdam, Amsterdam Historical Museum, 1991), p. 17; F. Leen (ed.), Le romantisme en Belgique (Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique/Racine, 2005), pp. 66–7. 6 Riding and Riding (eds.), Parliament, p. 218. 7 J. Ogonovszky-Steffens, La peinture monumentale d’histoire dans les édifices civils en Belgique (1830–1914) (Académie Royale de Belgique, Classe des Beaux Arts, xvi; Brussels, 1999), chs. 2, 4, 7. 8 Leen (ed.), Romantisme, pp. 39–43, 59, 92. ‘retracing the history of our country’ 223 too, often out of professional necessity. The chief sculptor at Westmin- ster, John Evan Thomas, was sent to Belgium in 1841 to study ornamental carving on the restored Gothic town halls of Leuven, Bruges, Ypres and Ghent.9 Four years later William Dyce, the first painter commissioned to decorate part of the Lords Chamber in the new Houses of Parliament, was sent to Italy and Germany to report to Prince Albert’s Fine Art Commis- sion on fresco techniques old and new; and the Belgian mural painters, Godfried Guffens and Jan Swerts were dispatched on a similar mission in 1850 to investigate the new German technique of waterglass.10 By the 1850s and 1860s when national history painting was at the height of its reputation, it had spread beyond France and France’s immediate neighbours to encompass Europe as a whole. A transnational phenomenon, it was taken up by artists from Russia to Spain and from Scandinavia to the states of Italy. Yet for all the breadth of its appeal, it is still worth concentrating on the way in which this trend developed in Britain, Bel- gium and the Netherlands. These three countries were among the first to produce schools of national history painting in the decades around 1800, and they did so from strikingly different starting points. As a Catholic state which for three centuries had been ruled by Habsburg princes, the southern Netherlands still possessed a tradition of history painting as the term was understood in conventional academic theory. And it was not, perhaps, a major step to adapt this to the subject-matter of post-classical and post-biblical history—in other words, to the kind of history that appealed to an age of nationalism. The Protestant northern Netherlands, on the other hand, seemed less fortunate. Of course, the country had its distinctive traditions of art. Dutch schools of landscape, portrait, genre and still-life painting survived, even flourished, in the eighteenth century, and Dutch pictures (especially those painted before 1700) were increasingly admired by connoisseurs and collectors abroad. But conventional academic history painting of classical subjects had largely died out by this time, to the alarm of those who considered themselves guardians of Dutch national culture. In 1807 Teyler’s Second Society in Haarlem ran an essay competition to discover ‘the reasons for the small number of Dutch

9 Riding and Riding (eds.), Parliament, pp. 253–5, 264. 10 M. Poynton, William Dyce. A Critical Biography (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1979) pp. 89–91; Leen (ed.), Romantisme, p. 45. The waterglass technique involved brushing a solution of sodium silicate over a plaster-based mural painting in order to seal it and pro- tect it from damp. 224 hugh dunthorne history painters’ and to suggest ‘means of redressing this deficiency’.11 Similar laments were heard in Britain, where the situation seemed even worse. It was not just that ‘the noblest part of the art—historical painting—is much neglected’, as the engraver and publisher John Boydell complained in 1789.12 Britain scarcely had a native pictorial tradition of any kind, at least before the mid-eighteenth century. From Holbein in the sixteenth century to Van Dyck and Lely in the seventeenth and Kneller in the eighteenth, all its major painters had been immigrants from Germany or the Low Countries. Which explains why, when Victorian painters wanted to recall the cultural achievements of their country in earlier times, they focused on its writers—on Chaucer, Tyndale, Shakespeare, Milton— leaving its painters conspicuous by their absence. Against this background, then, the question arises of why national history painting was taken up and became popular in Britain and its Dutch and Belgian neighbours during the nineteenth century. How did the fashion begin, and what were the mechanisms of patronage and popularization which sustained it? What historical themes did artists choose as their subjects, and how should the quality of their work be judged? Finally, why did the popularity of national history painting eventually wane in the last decades of the nineteenth century?—so that today, more than a hundred years on, its products can often seem so banal and cliché-ridden that it requires an effort of our own historical imagination to understand why they were once the object of so much enthusiasm. One of the defining traits of historical art, as we have seen, is that it was text-based. Depicting the past depended upon writing about it. So it is significant that, in all three of the countries we are concerned with, the eighteenth century had seen a marked rise in the popularity of national history as literature and drama. This was not entirely a new development. National history had been popular in the late sixteenth century, when the continuing Revolt of the Netherlands and the outbreak of Elizabethan England’s war against Spain had prompted on both sides of the North Sea a flurry of patriotic narratives and stage pieces, including the great sequence of English history plays which Shakespeare wrote during the 1590s. A hundred and fifty years on, the nation’s history became popular once more, animated now by the political struggles of the age of party and

11 J. Kloek and W. Mijnhardt, 1800. Blueprints for a National Community (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan/Assen, Royal van Gorcum, 2004), p. 499. 12 J. Boydell, A Catalogue of the Pictures in the Shakspeare [sic] Gallery, Pall-Mall (Lon- don, 1789), pp. viii–ix. ‘retracing the history of our country’ 225

(in Britain’s case) by the military and naval successes of the mid-century wars. David Garrick’s naturalistic production of Richard III in 1741 sparked a Shakespeare revival in which the history plays loomed large. Those plays, wrote the critic Joseph Warton in 1757, ‘are always particularly grateful to the spectator, who loves to see and hear our own Harrys and Edwards better than all the Achilleses and Caesars that ever existed.’13 And in the United Provinces too, by the 1780s, two-thirds of new tragedies performed were on themes drawn from national or vaderlandse history.14 Alongside pieces for the theatre, a new generation of substantial histories of the national past was making its mark, including histories of Britain by Rapin- Thoyras, Hume and Robertson, of the Dutch Republic by Wagenaar and of the southern Netherlands by Jan (or Jean) Des Roches.15 Together with the many popularizations and imitations that they spawned, these volumes not only provided artists and their patrons with an inexhaustible supply of themes for historical art but also helped to create a more informed public, capable of looking at history pictures with some knowledge of the subjects portrayed. What is more, since several of the new histories were published, or republished, in editions illustrated with engravings, these works encouraged artists to appeal to a public which was beginning to think of the past as a story to be told not just in printed paragraphs but in pictures and dramatic tableaux.16 Thus when the British Society of Art- ists began to hold annual exhibitions in 1760, it offered two prizes each year for pictures of subjects taken from English history.17 A generation later, in 1789, John Boydell opened his ‘Shakespeare Gallery’ on Pall Mall in London, showing pictures of scenes from the plays (including the English

13 J. Warton, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (London, M. Cooper, 1756), p. 277. 14 E. Muller, ‘ “Kopieën van Schouwburg repetities”? Nederlandse historieschilderkunst en toneel in de negentiende eeuw’, in J. Tollebeek et al. (eds.), Romantiek en historische cultuur (Groningen, Historische Uitgeverij, 1996), p. 233. 15 P. de Rapin-Thoyras, Histoire d’Angleterre, 10 vols. (The Hague, 1724–27; Eng. trs. N. Tindal, 15 vols., London, 1725–31); D. Hume, The History of Great Britain, 6 vols. (Edinburgh/ London, 1754–62), of which vols. 3–6 were entitled History of England; W. Robertson, The History of Scotland, 2 vols. (London, 1759); [J. Wagenaar,] Vaderlandsche Historie, 21 vols. (Amsterdam, 1749–59); J. Des Roches, Histoire ancienne des Pays-Bas autrichiens (Antwerp, 1787), the first part of a projected Histoire générale des Pays-Bas autrichiens. 16 The first illustrated edition of Rapin’s History, seven folio volumes with engravings by George Vertue and others, appeared in London 1743–47 and its success led to a succession of other illustrated histories of England. As a genre, illustrated history was new in Britain, whereas in the Low Countries such volumes had been appearing since the late sixteenth century. 17 Strong, Painting, p. 16. 226 hugh dunthorne history plays), and offering engravings of them for sale. Another artist- publisher, Robert Bowyer, followed suit in 1792, using his house on the same street to launch a ‘Historic Gallery’, for which almost two hundred pictures of medieval and modern subjects were commissioned and then engraved as illustrations for a new edition of Hume’s History. By this time, too, the Royal Academy’s annual summer exhibitions in Somerset House had established themselves as a regular feature of London’s cultural calendar, exhibitions which included on their walls a steadily growing number of national history pictures. All this activity may seem surprising for a country which (as I have suggested) scarcely had a native tradition of painting at all before the mid- eighteenth century. But absence of tradition can be an advantage when adopting a new genre, as national history painting clearly was. It is significant that the first widely admired British history pictures to be exhibited in London at this time were the work not of British artists but of the Ameri- cans Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, painters who had learned their trade away from the classical conventions of European academic art and who were therefore more ready when they arrived in Britain to break the rules and experiment in new fields. Besides tackling subjects from the very recent past (West’s celebrated Death of General Wolfe, for example, and Copley’s equally successful Death of Chatham), both were pioneers in developing new ways of marketing their work through one-man exhibitions and the sale of engravings.18 In the northern and southern Neth- erlands, on the other hand, where traditions of painting and of the art market were more entrenched, artists and patrons were slower to respond to the stimulus provided by Wagenaar and other vaderlandse historians. Only under the revolutionary Batavian Republic, when the northern provinces were caught up in a process of ‘nationalization’ stemming from the formation of the new unitary Dutch state—only then, in 1803, did the art section of Amsterdam’s Felix Meritis Society decide to offer a prize for the best new painting of a subject from early seventeenth-century Dutch history; and a similar competition, with a substantial prize of f3,000, formed part of the first national ‘exhibition of living masters’, organized on the initiative of King Louis Napoleon in 1808.19 The exhibition was in effect

18 P. Cannon-Brookes (ed.), The Painted Word. British History Painting 1750–1830 (Wood- bridge, Boydell, 1991), pp. 17–21, 31–2. 19 N.C.F. van Sas, ‘Dutch Nationality in the Shadow of the Golden Age: National Culture and the Nation’s Past, 1780–1914’, in F. Grijzenhout and H. van Veen (eds.), The Golden Age of Dutch Painting in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, ‘retracing the history of our country’ 227 a Dutch salon, and in setting it up Louis Napoleon was imposing on the Kingdom of Holland (as the former republic was now called) a characteristically French institution of state patronage. But he was also working in collaboration with his new subjects. Mounted regularly from 1810 onwards not only in the north, where they alternated between Amsterdam and The Hague, but also in the south, where they were shared in successive years by Brussels, Antwerp and Ghent, the salons were organized by artists for artists. Management of the 1808 exhibition in Amsterdam was delegated to a group of leading artists and collectors within the newly established Royal Institute of Sciences, Literature and Fine Arts; and a comparable system operated in the southern Netherlands, now annexed to France. The salons helped artists to market their work, enabling them to sell to public institutions as well as private collectors. They opened art up to a wider public—old art as well as new, since the annual exhibitions were often held in buildings (like the recently established royal or state museums in Amsterdam and Brussels) which also housed collections of pictures from the seventeenth century and earlier. And as major social events the salons stimulated public discussion of art in the press, prompting in Holland the first theoretical justifications of national history painting as a distinctively Dutch and therefore patriotic alternative to traditional classical history painting.20 Louis Napoleon purchased nine pictures at the exhibition of 1808, including the winning history piece. Soon afterwards he commissioned frescos of scenes from Dutch history to decorate his newly acquired palace of Welgelegen in Haarlem, a project planned but never carried out; and in 1808 and 1809 he bought two large collections of seventeenth- century Dutch art for the Royal Museum (precursor of the Rijksmuseum) in Amsterdam.21 By taking a personal interest in Dutch history and culture he was of course commending himself to the people of his adopted country, establishing his credentials. Hanoverian rulers of Britain had done the

1999), pp. 54–6; P. Knolle, ‘Het departement der tekenkunde van Felix Meritis, 1777–1889’, Documentatieblad Werkgroep Achttiende Eeuw, 15 (1983), pp. 169–70; E. Bergvelt, ‘Lodewijk Napoleon, de levende meesters en het Koninklijk Museum (1806–1810)’, in E. Koolhaas- Grosfeld et al. (eds.), Louis Napoleon and the Arts in the Kingdom of Holland (Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 56/57, 2005–6; Zwolle, Waanders, 2007), pp. 271–6. 20 Kloek and Mijnhardt, 1800, pp. 382–7, 422–3, 500–6, 512; J. Colla, De salons en het verleden. De historieschilderkunst op de Belgische driejaarlijkse salons 1832–1867 (unpublished Licentiate dissertation, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2006), pp. 15–30. 21 Bergvelt, ‘Nationale, levende en moderne meesters’, pp. 83, 88, 90 and n. 80, 91. Com- missioned from the French painter, Philippe-Auguste Hennequin, the Haarlem project foundered partly because of the difficulty of agreeing on suitable historical subjects. 228 hugh dunthorne

Figure 10.2. Mathieu-Ignace van Brée, William Prince of Orange interceding in 1578 with the Magistrates of Ghent on behalf of Catholics arrested and detained in defiance of the Pacification, 1819. Oil on canvas, 430 × 620 cm. Ghent, Town Hall. © IRPA-KIK, Brussels. same—for example Queen Caroline of Anspach in the earlier eighteenth century, and her grandson George III fifty years later—by buying or com- missioning for the royal collection pictures relating to British history. And after Napoleon’s fall and the establishment of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1814–15, a similar policy was adopted by the new King Willem I to bolster his standing with all his subjects, Belgian as well as Dutch. Seeking to reconcile the Catholic south of the country with the Protestant north and with his own rule, he commissioned in 1817 from the Antwerp artist, Mathieu-Ignace van Brée, a picture of an episode from the sixteenth-century siege of Leiden, The Self-Sacrifice of Burgomaster van der Werff. Drawing on Lucretia van Merken’s tragedy Het beleg der stad Leyden (first performed in 1774), it presented the burgomaster as the epitome of humane concern for his fellow-citizens.22

22 Although the siege of Leiden had often been dramatized before, Van Merken’s play was the first to give a philosophical dimension to the character of Van der Werff: H. Slechte, ‘retracing the history of our country’ 229

In 1819 Van Brée returned to the theme of enlightened leadership in a second royal commission, this time showing the king’s own ancestor William Prince of Orange (to quote the picture’s long-winded title) interceding in 1578 with the magistrates of Ghent on behalf of Catholics arrested and detained in defiance of the Pacification (Figure 10.2). The implication, of course, was that King Willem would be equally well-disposed towards southern Catholics. Whether the Belgians were persuaded by such historical parallels is doubtful. But limited though the political impact of these pictures may have been, they were admired as examples of the emerging genre of national history painting, and their success in the salons of Antwerp and Ghent encouraged Van Brée to urge pupils and fellow-artists to follow his example in exploring the new field. In an address of 1821 he argued that, instead of relying on well worn themes from Christian scripture and classical mythology, painters should seek inspiration ‘by retracing the history of our country’.23 An increasing number did so, especially after the secession of Belgium from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1830 and the growth of distinct nationalist movements in north and south. In the northern Netherlands, it is true, state patronage dwindled from the early 1830s, leaving artists dependent on private collectors and art societies. But in the newly independent Kingdom of Belgium public funds to purchase or subsidize national history painting and sculpture were better sustained, thanks to the advocacy of energetic ministers like Rogier and to the support of King Leopold, a ‘foreign’ ruler as eager to promote the culture of his adopted country as his nephew Prince Albert was in Britain.24

So much for the emergence of national history painting and the systems of patronage which sustained it and brought it to a wider public. But what of its content and quality? Which historical themes did artists take up as the subject-matter of their pictures? And how successful were they in evoking the past? Anyone tackling these questions is struck by the sheer volume and variety of surviving material, an abundance which seems

‘Niederlande’, in M. Flacke (ed.), Mythen der Nationen. Ein europäisches Panorama (Berlin, Deutsches Historisches Museum, 1998), pp. 231–3. 23 G. Jansen, ‘De vergankelijke glorie van Matthijs van Bree (1773–1839)’, Oud Holland, 95 (1981), pp. 228–31, 251–4 (quotation at p. 253). 24 Ogonovszky-Steffens, Peinture monumentale, pp. 60, 65, 181–215; H. Balthazar and J. Stengers (eds.), La dynastie et la culture en Belgique (Antwerp, Mercatorfonds, 1990), pp. 28–9, 307. For declining state support of modern painting in the Netherlands, cf. Bergvelt, ‘Nationale, levende en moderne meesters’, pp. 80, 105, 110. 230 hugh dunthorne almost to defy coherent analysis. The historical topics depicted by artists in Britain and the Low Countries extend across eighteen centuries, from Boadicea and Claudius Civilis to the battle of Waterloo. They include the great events and leading actors of the past, but also the ordinary and the anonymous. Reflecting the impact of historical novels and antiquarian studies, anecdotal genre pictures of customs and manners ‘in the olden time’ became especially fashionable in the 1840s and 1850s. What is more, the artistic forms in which the past was presented are equally varied, ranging from murals in public buildings, through salon pictures large and small, to book illustrations and prints to pin up in school classrooms, not to mention statues in public spaces and living re-enactments of the past such as pageants, tableaux vivants and costume balls. Making sense of such a mass of material is not easy. Yet, at the risk of oversimplifying, it is possible to see certain broad themes emerging from the welter of images and formats. So far as Belgium and Britain are concerned, the dominant theme is of continuous historical progress from past to present, culminating (in the Belgian case) in the achievement of national independence by the Revolution of 1830, and (in the British one) in the extension of parliamentary democracy by the Great Reform Act, passed two years later. This progressive, ‘Whig’ view of the past is what animates narratives of British history from Rapin to Hallam and Macaulay. It is present in the patriotic writings of early Belgian historians such as Etienne-Constantin de Gerlache and Théodore Juste.25 And it is the view that artists in both countries sought to convey by capturing decisive moments and key figures in their nation’s evolving story. Thus, at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1832, Turner’s painting of The Prince of Orange, William III, embarked from Holland, and landed at Torbay, Novem- ber 4th, 1688, after a Stormy Passage evoked one revolution while allud- ing to its modern sequel, the ‘stormy passage’ of the Reform Bill. And in the patriotic enthusiasm that followed the Belgian uprising of 1830 Nic- aise de Keyser looked back to the Middle Ages, picturing the battles of Woeringen and the Golden Spurs (victories, respectively, over German and French forces) as early successes in the Netherlands’ long struggle against foreign domination.26 More elaborate pictorial narratives followed.

25 J. Tollebeek, ‘Historical Representation and the Nation-State in Romantic Belgium (1830–1850)’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 59 (1998), pp. 329–53. 26 T. Verschaffel and J. Tollebeek, ‘De grote momenten: een romantisch verhaal’, in R. Hoozee, J. Tollebeek and T. Verschaffel (eds.), Mise-en-scène: Keizer Karel en de verbeelding van de negentiende eeuw (Antwerp, Mercatorfonds, 1999), pp. 37–9. ‘retracing the history of our country’ 231

Figure 10.3. William Dyce, The Baptism of King Ethelbert, 1846. Fresco, 499 × 286 cm. London, Palace of Westminster, Lords Chamber. © Palace of Westminster Collection, WOA 2964. 232 hugh dunthorne

Carried out between the late 1840s and early 1860s, the decorative scheme of the new Palace of Westminster (for which Hallam and Macaulay were the historical advisers) traced the country’s constitutional ancestry from the free, self-governing Anglo-Saxons (Figure 10.3) to the conflicts of the seventeenth century in which parliamentary government was defended and preserved.27 In 1865 Louis Gallait embarked on a similarly forward- looking sequence of historical portraits for the hall of the Senate building in Brussels. It included Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy, the Emperor Charles V, Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella, and the Empress Maria Theresa—those ‘benevolent rulers’ of the Netherlands who had respected the provinces’ constitutional traditions and whose wise government anticipated that of King Leopold himself.28 Grand narratives of this kind were not only to be found in capital cities either. During the later nineteenth century leading provincial towns commissioned series of historical murals for their own public buildings—Antwerp and Ypres beginning in the 1860s, Manchester in 1878, Glasgow a decade later—picturing in the commercial and cultural traditions of the urban past the foundations of their present wealth and growth.29 The sense of growing power and prosperity, which in their different ways both Belgium and Britain experienced during the nineteenth century, was of course what made this progressive, linear view of history seem convincing. But it was not a view that fitted the experience of the northern Netherlands. There the high point of the nation’s history lay not in the present but the past—in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the period which would come to be called the Golden Age. Since those heroic times, more recent Dutch history had been an anti-climax, a story of economic decline and political corruption, of loss of world status and diminishing self-confidence. So in evoking their country’s past, Dutch artists of the nineteenth century had to do something rather different from their Belgian and British counterparts. They were not so much marking the decisive stages on a road which led up to the triumphant present, but rather seeking to bring back to life certain key figures of ‘golden

27 Riding and Riding (eds.), Parliament, chs. 14 and 16. 28 J. Tollebeek and T. Verschaffel, ‘Het pantheon: de geschiedenis tot weinigen herleid’, in Hoozee, Tollebeek and Verschaffel (eds.), Mise-en-Scène, pp. 47–57; Tollebeek, ‘Histori- cal Representation’, pp. 346, 348. 29 Ogonovszky-Steffens, Peinture monumentale, pp. 200, 214, 218, 229–42, 310–21; J. Treuherz, ‘Ford Madox Brown and the Manchester Murals’, in J. Archer (ed.), Art and architecture in Victorian Manchester (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 162–207. ‘retracing the history of our country’ 233

Figure 10.4. Hendrik Breukelaar, Van Speijk at the Tomb of De Ruyter in the Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam, 1832. Oil on canvas, 77 × 62 cm. Amsterdam Museum, loan from Stichting Het Burgerweeshuis—Rooms Katholiek Jongens Weeshuis. Shown in his early teens, Van Speijk is dressed in the black and red uniform of Amsterdam’s municipal orphanage where he was educated. 234 hugh dunthorne age’ history whose sterling character and achievements would somehow inspire and revive the flagging energies of the present. In an age of war and revolution such as the early nineteenth century acts of national heroism could still occur, even in the unheroic Netherlands. And when they did, they were naturally seized on by the public. Hence the many pictures and prints devoted to the life and courageous death of a young Dutch naval lieutenant, Jan van Speijk, who in February 1831 had chosen to blow up his gunboat on the Scheldt—sacrificing his own life in the process—rather than surrender it to the rebel Belgians. What made this stirring episode instructive was Van Speijk’s sense of history, for in pursuing his naval career he had been encouraged by the example of the great seventeenth-century commander, Admiral de Ruyter, who had also risen through the ranks from modest beginnings (Figure 10.4).30 Knowledge of the heroic past, in other words, could breed emulation of it in the present. Expressed in more general cultural terms, this was the message that the author and editor, E.J. Potgieter, developed in an influential article of 1844, ‘The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam’. Just as visitors to the national collection are impressed by its seventeenth-century portraits and history pieces, Potgieter argued, so artists of the present age have a duty to match those pictures in their own work: ‘to revive and strengthen by their brush the impression made by the great and the good in our history’.31 Who among the great and good of the past should modern national history painters choose? The admirals, Tromp and De Ruyter, made obvious subjects. But so too, with a little artistic licence, did the civil leaders of the Dutch Republic during the time of its rise and greatness. Thus William the Silent and Prince Maurits, Oldenbarnevelt and Grotius, Johan and Cornelis de Witt—men who in their own time had been sectional figures in a divided political system—were now presented as national heroes, embodying all that was best in the Dutch character and capable by their example of unifying and reinvigorating the modern Kingdom of the Netherlands.32 A little artistic licence . . . but how much licence was permissible? And how should the quality of the resulting work be judged? From early in

30 Van Sas, ‘Dutch Nationality’, p. 58; Slechte, ‘Niederlande’, pp. 242–7. 31 E.J. Potgieter, Werken ed. J.C. Zimmerman, 19 vols. (Haarlem, Tjeenk Willink, 1885– 90), vol. II, pp. 100–96 (quotation at p. 192). 32 P.J.J. van Thiel (ed.), Het vaderlandsch gevoel. Vergeten negentiende-eeuwse schilderijen over onze geschiedenis (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, 1978), pp. 18–22; E. Bergvelt, ‘Koning Willem I als verzamelaar, opdrachtgever and weldoener van de Noordnederlandse Musea’, in C.A. Tamse and E. Witte (eds.), Staats- en natievorming in Willem I’s koninkrijk (1815–1830) (Brussels, Vubpress/Baarn, Bosch and Keuning, 1992), pp. 266–9. ‘retracing the history of our country’ 235 the nineteenth century, history painters were expected to be historical researchers too, as indeed many were. They visited old buildings, sought out contemporary portraits, walked across ancient landscapes. They asked advice from scholars and archivists, read primary sources and the best modern historians—and quoted these in exhibition catalogues. Not least, they were guided by the numerous books on historical costume and architecture which were published in the late eighteenth century and first half of the nineteenth, books partly intended (as Joseph Strutt announced in his pioneering Regal and Ecclesiastical Antiquities) for those of ‘our artists’ that ‘have occasion to represent scenes from the ancient English history’.33 Admittedly, fewer guides of this sort appeared in the Low Countries than in Britain, and those which did seem to have been less used.34 But Dutch and Belgian artists had an advantage over their British counterparts in being able to draw on a far richer repertoire of paintings and engravings from the late Middle Ages onwards, material now increasingly accessible in museums and private print collections. Historical research was clearly important. But it had attendant disad- vantages. Too much sartorial correctness tended to produce paintings resembling theatrical tableaux enacted by costumed players. And it was for being ‘theatrical’, with overelaborate settings and melodramatic gestures, that nineteenth-century history paintings were often criticized.35 One way of avoiding this tendency was to adopt a deliberately restrained, unemotional style, as Louis Gallait did. Another was to evoke a style of the past appropriate to the historical subject depicted, as Menzel had done in his ‘rococo’ pictures of the life of Frederick the Great. Influenced by members of the Nazarene brotherhood whom he had met in Rome, Wil- liam Dyce evolved a style echoing Mantegna and other fifteenth-century Italians, exemplified in his Baptism of King Ethelbert for the new House of Lords (Figure 10.3). Dyce’s Belgian contemporary, Henri Leys, drew on the art of sixteenth-century Flanders and Germany, developing a sober, realistic vision which matched the sixteenth-century subject-matter of his work (Figure 8.6). In a similar way, younger Dutch historical genre painters such as Herman ten Kate and Hendrik Scholten revived the style of their seventeenth-century predecessors.

33 J. Strutt, The Regal and Ecclesiastical Antiquities of England (1773; later editions 1793, 1842), quoted Strong, Painting, p. 70. 34 T. Verschaffel, Beeld en geschiedenis. Het Belgische en Vlaamse verleden in de romantische boekillustraties (Turnhout, Brepols, 1987), pp. 95–102. 35 Muller, ‘Nederlandse historieschilderkunst’, pp. 223–4. 236 hugh dunthorne

Figure 10.5. Ford Madox Brown, Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois, 1877. Oil on canvas, 86 × 107 cm. © Manchester City Galleries.

But was it possible for a painter to be dramatic without being theatrical, and without retreating into stylistic antiquarianism?—to paint history, while keeping an eye on modernity? During the 1830s David Wilkie had evoked episodes from the life of John Knox—Knox Preaching, exhibited in 1832, and later Knox Administering the Sacrament—in images that were carefully researched (drawing, for example, on M’Crie’s recent Life of Knox) yet alive to the current predicament of the Scottish Kirk as its democratic practices were undermined by the effects of the Union with England.36 And a generation later the Pre-Raphaelite Ford Madox Brown achieved a similar fusion of past and present in depicting the life of Oliver Cromwell. His Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois recalled events of 1655, when the Protector had rallied the states of Protestant Europe to protest at the persecution of a Reformed minority in Catholic Piedmont-Savoy (Figure 10.5). Drawing on seventeenth-century portraits and on Carlyle’s

36 D. Macmillan, Scottish Art 1460–1990 (Edinburgh, Mainstream, 1990), pp. 186–94. ‘retracing the history of our country’ 237 edition of the Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (the first study to document properly Cromwell’s puritan convictions), the picture imag- ines Cromwell, with the map of Piedmont-Savoy spread out before him, dictating a letter to Milton, Latin Secretary to the Council of State, and between them, with pen poised, the joint-secretary Andrew Marvell. But while Brown’s picture had sound historical foundations, it was also a tract for the times, implicitly criticizing the failure of Disraeli’s government to respond decisively to the so-called Bulgarian horrors of 1876, when thousands of Christians had been massacred in the Ottoman Empire. A decade after completing his last Cromwellian picture, Madox Brown wrote an article for the Universal Review in which he surveyed the achievements of history painters over the previous half century and noted the current decline in the production and appeal of this ‘highest kind of art’.37 That decline should not be exaggerated. In public buildings like town halls (and in the Palace of Westminster, too) national history painting continued well into the twentieth century. So did historical illustration, at least in history textbooks intended for schoolchildren. More recently the task of bringing the past visually to life has been taken up by makers of television and film costume dramas and by designers of computer games. Yet it remains true that national history painting of the conventional kind did indeed decline in volume and popularity during the last decades of the nineteenth century. In Amsterdam the historical galleries established by Jacob de Vos and later by the Arti et Amicitiae Society were attracting little public interest by the 1880s, and in 1895 both collections were sold.38 Fewer history paintings were shown at the annual exhibitions of living masters, at the Belgian salons and at the Royal Academy in London; and those which were displayed were no longer the centre of attention as they had been once. Why then, for consumers as well as producers, did the appeal of national history painting wane? In part, the decline reflected changing priorities among painters. By the 1860s and 1870s a growing number were reacting against the demands of historical correctness. Responding to a municipal archivist who had pointed out anachronisms in his murals for Leuven town hall, the Tournai painter André Hennebicq argued that the artist ‘must remain free’ to paint whatever seemed to him ‘characteristic’ and ‘convincing’.39 To breathe life

37 F. Madox Brown, ‘Historic Art’, Universal Review, 2/v (Sept. 1888), pp. 38–55 (quotation at p. 42). 38 Carasso, Helden, pp. 7, 29–32. 39 Ogonovszky-Steffens, Peinture monumentale, pp. 348–50 (quotation at p. 349). 238 hugh dunthorne into his vision of the past he could draw on the life of his own time. Art did not have to be subservient to historical or literary narrative either. Increasingly during the 1880s and 1890s history painting found itself pushed aside by the work of modernizing groups—The Hague School, realist and impressionist colonies in Amsterdam and in Flanders and Bra- bant, the group known as Les Vingt in Brussels and the New English Art Club in London—all in one way or another asserting art’s independence and its concern with the present, not the past. The study of history was changing too. It was now more profession- alized and specialist, the province of university professors and learned journals rather than of metropolitan men of letters. The new professionals—men like S.R. Gardiner at Oxford—saw no need for illustrations in their books. Gardiner’s contemporary and fellow-professor at Leiden, Robert Fruin, strongly disapproved of modern illustrations in historical studies: if there were to be images at all, they should be the work of eye- witnesses or at least of artists contemporary with the subject depicted.40 Under the impact of this more austere approach, later Victorian textbooks of national history were shorn of many of their illustrations, while those that remained were of authentic artefacts (architecture, tombstone effigies, medals and coins) or drawn from recognized authorities such as Planché’s History of British Costume.41 Finally, just as changes in aesthetic taste and in the study of history undermined national history painting and engraving, so also did certain technical changes. Railways revolutionized travel, not least to historic buildings and monuments and to Europe’s proliferating national and municipal museums. The collections of those museums could now be more accurately reproduced and published, thanks to the development of lithography, steel and wood engraving and (during the last quarter of the century) to photomechanical processes such as carbon printing and heliogravure. And as direct or indirect access to the art and architecture of earlier centuries increased, there seemed less need to recreate the past by depicting it in the present. Confronted by the ‘real thing’, the modern history painter began to feel that his whole project was superficial and somehow pointless. As one English artist, Adolphus Storey, put it in

40 Van Thiel (ed.), Vaderlandsch gevoel, pp. 27–8. 41 R. Mitchell, Picturing the Past. English History in Text and Image 1830–1870 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 52–3, 67–9, 73–4, 77–9, 82. ‘retracing the history of our country’ 239 the 1890s, after travelling to Madrid to study Velázquez’s great painting of The Surrender of Breda, In the work of Velázquez I knew that not only were the costumes correct, but the actual men of the time were there before me, the period stamped, not only on the dress, but on every face, in the very attitudes even of the figures; the whole belonging so completely to its own day, even as the hand that wrought it, that I felt I had a true page of history before me, and not a theatrical make-up of a scene dimly realised in the pages of some book written many years after the event.42 Storey may not have known that this picture too was theatrical, deriving from Calderón’s play of 1625, The Siege of Breda. Yet if Velázquez conveyed the drama of surrender, he did it in a way that avoided histrionics. Not only were his characters men of his own time, some of whom he knew personally. Their emotions were natural, understated, even private, caught in a passing moment. And, as the Victorian traveller recognized, this gave the work an immediacy which no modern reconstruction, however pains- taking and scholarly, could match. Once pictures like Velázquez’s became accessible in public galleries and could be reproduced photographically, the nineteenth-century fashion for national history painting was bound to fade away.

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FIFTY YEARS OF ANGLO-DUTCH HISTORICAL CONFERENCES AND BRITAIN AND THE NETHERLANDS PUBLISHED VOLUMES, 1959–2012

1. 1959 St Antony’s College Oxford Britain and the Netherlands: Papers Delivered to the Oxford-Netherlands Historical Conference 1959, edited by J.S. Bromley and E.H. Kossmann, with an introduction by Pieter Geyl (London, 1960).

2. 1962 Utrecht Britain and the Netherlands, vol. II: Papers delivered to the Anglo-Dutch His- torical Conference 1962, edited by J.S. Bromley and E.H. Kossmann (Gron- ingen, 1964).

3. 1966 London Britain and the Netherlands in Europe and Asia Britain and the Netherlands in Europe and Asia. Papers Delivered to the Third Anglo-Dutch Historical Conference, edited by J.S. Bromley and E.H. Kossmann (London, 1968).

4. 1969 Groningen Metropolis, Dominion and Province Britain and the Netherlands, vol. IV: Metropolis, Dominion and Province. Papers Delivered to the Fourth Anglo-Dutch Historical Conference, edited by J.S. Bromley and E.H. Kossmann (The Hague, 1971).

5. 1973 Southampton Some Political Mythologies Britain and the Netherlands, vol. V: Some Political Mythologies. Papers Deliv- ered to the Fifth Anglo-Dutch Historical Conference, edited by J.S. Bromley and E.H. Kossmann (The Hague, 1975).

6. 1976 Kasteel Oud Poelgeest (Leiden) War and Society Britain and the Netherlands, vol. VI: War and Society. Papers Delivered to the Sixth Anglo-Dutch Historical Conference, edited by A.C. Duke and C.A. Tamse (The Hague, 1977).

7. 1980 Sheffield Church and State since the Reformation Britain and the Netherlands, vol. VII: Church and State since the Reforma- tion. Papers Delivered to the Seventh Anglo-Dutch Historical Conference, edited by A.C. Duke and C.A. Tamse (The Hague, 1981). 260 fifty years of anglo-dutch historical conferences

8. 1985 Amsterdam Historiography in Britain and the Netherlands Clio’s Mirror. Historiography in Britain and the Netherlands, Britain and the Netherlands vol. VIII, edited by A.C. Duke and C.A. Tamse (Zutphen, 1985).

9. 1987 London Censorship and the Press in Britain and the Nether- lands Too Mighty to be Free. Censorship and the Press in Britain and the Nether- lands, Britain and the Netherlands vol. IX, edited by A.C. Duke and C.A. Tamse (Zutphen, 1987).

10. 1988 Nijmegen State and Trade State and Trade. Government and the Economy in Britain and the Nether- lands since the Middle Ages, Britain and the Netherlands vol. X, edited by Simon Groenveld and Michael Wintle (Zutphen, 1992).

11. 1991 Oxford The Exchange of Ideas The Exchange of Ideas. Religion, Scholarship and Art in Anglo-Dutch Rela- tions in the Seventeenth Century, Britain and the Netherlands vol. XI, edited by Simon Groenveld and Michael Wintle (Zutphen, 1994).

12. 1994 Rotterdam Under the Sign of Liberalism Under the Sign of Liberalism: Varieties of European Liberalism in Past and Present, Britain and the Netherlands vol. XII, edited by Simon Groenveld & Michael Wintle (Zutphen, 1997).

13. 1997 St Andrews The Reformation The Education of a Christian Society: Humanism and the Reformation in Britain and the Netherlands, Papers Delivered to the Thirteenth Anglo- Dutch Historical Conference, edited by N. Scott Amos, Andrew Pettegree and Henk van Nierop (Aldershot, 1999).

14. 2000 Utrecht Colonial Empires Compared Colonial Empires Compared 1750–1850, Papers Delivered to the Fourteenth Anglo-Dutch Historical Conference, edited by Bob Moore and Henk van Nierop (Aldershot, 2003).

15. 2003 Swansea Mass Society in the Twentieth Century Twentieth-Century Mass Society in Britain and the Netherlands, edited by Bob Moore and Henk van Nierop (Oxford, 2006). fifty years of anglo-dutch historical conferences 261

16. 2006 Amsterdam/Leiden Catholic Communities in Protestant States Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands 1580–1720, edited by Bob Moore, Henk van Nierop, Benjamin Kaplan and Judith Pollmann (Manchester, 2009).

17. 2009 Sheffield The Historical Imagination in the Nineteenth Century The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Low Coun- tries, Britain and the Netherlands vol. XVII, edited by Hugh Dunthorne and Michael Wintle (Leiden, 2012).

Index

Certain ubiquitous terms, such as Europe, the Netherlands, Belgium, Holland and Britain have been omitted from the index. Personal names with a prefix are listed under the main stem, e.g. Witt, Johan de.

Abbott, Jacob 145 Benelux 114–115 Aceh War (1873) 104 Berger, Stefan 49 Act of Union (1801) 143–144 Berlin 98, 221 Africa 105 Bilderdijk, Catharina Wilhelmina 117 Albert Edward, Prince of Wales 144 Bilderdijk, Willem 117 Albert of Saxe-Coburg 222–223, 229 Billig, Michael 68 Albert, Archduke 77, 232 Bismarck, Otto von 210 Alexandra, Princess of Wales 144 Bogor 95 Alfred the Great 12, 135–149 Bosboom-Toussaint, Geertruida 12, 125 Allan, William 221 Bosscha, Johannes 117 Almelo 117 Bowyer, Robert 226 Alsace 206 Boydell, John 224–225 America 60 Brabant 121, 238 Amsterdam 10–11, 34, 92, 95, 99–100, 106, Branden, Frans Josef van den 193 116, 222, 226–227, 234, 237–238 Brazil 103–105 Antwerp 117, 171, 173, 175–176, 178, 180, Brée, Mathieu-Ignace van 228–229 182–185, 190–194, 202, 204, 216, 227–229, Breukelaar, Hendrik 233 232 Breydel, Jan 123 Arc, Jeanne d’ 114 British Empire 9, 46–47, 51, 55, 61–62, Armitage, David 48 138, 152 Asser, Bishop of Sherborne 138, 147 Brough, Robert 140 Auber, Daniel 182 Brouwer, Adriaen 177 Austin, Alfred 143–144 Brown, Ford Madox 236–237 Australia 46, 97 Bruges 36, 80, 116, 118–121, 123, 173, 175–176, 178, 181–189, 193, 223 Bakhuizen van den Brink, Reinier 26, 32 Brunanburh, Battle of 135 Bakhuizen, Ludolf 105 Brussels 38, 115, 117, 125, 173, 177, 190, 204, Balkans 114 214, 222, 227, 232, 238 Ballantyne, Robert Michael 136–137 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George 135, 153 Bann, Stephen 3, 6 Burgundian Circle 74, 76–77, 115 Bara, Joseph 205–206 Byron, Lord 22 Barante, Prosper de 5, 25–26 Barthes, Roland 67 Cabanel, Alexandre 203–204 Basque Country 114 Calderón, Pedro 239 Batavia 95 Cambridge 165 Batavian Revolution 10 Canada 46, 62 Baudry, Paul 205 Cannadine, David 51 Baycroft, Timothy 213 Canning, Stratford 140, 143 Beeckman, Andries 104 Carey, Rosa Nouchette 187 Been, Johan 125 Caribbean 47, 90, 105 Belgian Revolution/Secession 10–11, 16, Carlyle, Thomas 236–237 35, 74–75, 102, 116, 118–119, 173, 175–176, Ceylon 90 182, 190, 230 Chaillu, Paul du 134 Bemong, Nele 120 Charles the Bold 75, 126, 189 264 index

Charles V 174, 187, 232 Dunkirk 209 China 11, 97–99, 106 Dutch East Indies 11, 87, 91, 94, 97, 99, Civil War, English 52 102–104 Claes, Ernest 124–125 Duyse, Prudens van 118–119, 123, 126 Claus, Hugo 123–124 Dyce, William 223, 231, 235 Cogghe, Remy 15, 199, 201–202, 204, Dyck, Anthony van 171, 177, 185, 224 206–208, 215, 217 Collin de Plancy, Jacques 126 East India Company, Dutch 104–105 Collins, Wilkie 155 Eayrs, George 138 Colonial Museum (Haarlem) 11 Eckhout, Albert 105 Colquhoun, Patrick 57 Education Act (1870) 144 Comines 202, 214–215 Edward the Confessor, King (England) Commynes, Philippe de 214 135 Coninck, Pieter de 123 Edward the Elder, King (England) Conscience, Hendrik 12, 118, 122–126, 147–148 183–184 Egan, Pierce 181 Constantine the Great 96 Eighty Years’ War 75, 78 Contern 128 Eliot, George 153 Copley, John Singleton 226 Erasmus, Desiderius 188, 194 Cornelius, Peter von 222 Eupen-Malmédy 115 Cornwell, Bernard 149 Eyck, Hubert van 173, 175–177, 181–183, Coster, John de 22 191 Courbet, Gustave 173 Eyck, Jan van 14, 171, 173–177, 181–183, Courtrai, Battle of See under ‘Golden 185–186, 188, 191, 193 Spurs’ Creswick, Paul 147–149 Fabricius, Johan 125 Cromwell, Oliver 237 Feith, Pieter Rutger 117 Cuypers, Pierre 103 Fitchett, John 142 Flanders 5, 11–12, 15, 21, 37, 115–116, Dampierre, Guy de 119 120–124, 165, 175, 200, 209, 213–214, 235, Daumier, Honoré 220–221 238 David, Jacques-Louis 205 France 7, 14, 20–21, 114–115, 117, 119, 127, Davies, R.R. 47 201, 205–206, 209–214, 221–223, 227 Deconynck, Ernest 216 Franchimont 126 Defrecheux, Nicholas 127 Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) 210 Dekker, George 24 Frederick the Great 221, 235 Delaroche, Paul 221 Freeman, Edward Augustus 59, 61, 137, Deleu, Stephanie 202 155 Delft 11, 116 Frey, Agnes 194 Denmark 5, 134 Friesland 26 Descamps, Jean-Baptiste 175, 180 Froissart, Jean 156 Deshima 98 Froude, James Anthony 54–55, 57, 60–62 Dickens, Charles 136, 153 Fruin, Robert 238 Diedenhoven, Jacques 128 Fuller, Anne 139 Disraeli, Benjamin 237 Dobbelaere, Henri 185, 187 Gallait, Louis 232, 235 Doyle, Arthur Conan 13–14, 137, 152, Gardiner, Samuel Rawson 52, 54, 238 159–165, 166 Garrick, David 225 Drugy, Christophe 217 Geirnaert, Jozef 191 Dublin 55 Génard, Petrus 184 Ducq, Joseph 184, 186 Gerlache, Etienne-Constantin de 230 Dürer, Albrecht 188, 191–192, 194 Germany 5, 20, 39, 115, 210, 221–224, 235 index 265

Gerson, Stephane 213 Iceland 97 Ghent 72, 117, 120, 175–176, 182, 186, India 47, 58–59, 63, 99, 145 190–191, 222–223, 227, 229 Indian Mutiny (1857) 58 Gilliodts van Severen, Louis 193 Indonesia 87, 94, 96–97, 99 Gillis, Pieter 194 Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique 186 Glasgow 232 Ireland 9, 47–48, 52–56, 64 Golden Age, Dutch 9, 16, 125, 171, 177, 232 Isabella of Portugal 214 Golden Spurs, Battle of the 5, 81, 113, 118, Isabella, Archduchess 77, 232 122–123, 126, 189, 230 Israel 152 Goldhill, Simon 152–155 Italy 223 Gordon, Charles George 154 Grandgagnage, Charles 126–127 Jacquet, Eugène 216 Grandgagnage, Joseph 126–127 Jaeger, Albert de 200 Gray, Thomas 139 Jakarta 104 Great Exhibition, London (1851) 96 Jans, Edward de 193 Great Reform Act (UK) 230 Japan 11, 97–99, 106 Greece 219 Java 94–96 Green, John R. 52–54, 57, 60, 62–63, 163 Jordaens, Jacob 173 Groen van Prinsterer, Guillaume 72–73, Joseph II 77 75–81 Juste, Théodore 71, 73–82, 230 Groningen 32 Grotius, Hugo 234 Kamerlingh Onnes, Menso 32 Guffens, Godfried 192, 223 Kate, Herman ten 235 Guiana 87 Kelsey, Richard 141 Kent 156–158 Haarlem 11, 88, 101–103, 223, 227 Keverberg de Kessel, Baron Charles de Haggard, Henry Rider 134, 153 176 Hague, The 88, 94, 99–100, 119, 227 Keyser, Nicaise de 178, 184–185, 187–189, Hainault 200–201, 214 191–192, 230 Haley, K.H.D. xvii–xxi Kingsley, Charles 134–135, 154 Hallam, Henry 230, 232 Kinker, Johannes 116 Harderwijk 92 Kipling, Rudyard 160 Harkness, Deborah 56 Knowles, James Sheridan 142 Hastings, Battle of 136 Kumar, Krishan 47–49, 63 Hechter, Michael 47 Heelu, Jan van 121 Laing, Samuel 134, 136 Hein, Piet 90 Lebrocquy, Pieter 117 Hennebicq, André 237 Leck, Bart van der 32 Henry, Frederick 89 Lecky, William 52–55, 60 Henty, George Alfred 141, 153 Lee, Yoon Sun 24 Hermans, Willem Frederik 39 Leerssen, Joep 162 Hill, Edmund 141 Leiden 92, 95–97, 100, 102, 106, 228, Hobsbawm, Eric 173 238 Holbein, Hans 224 Lely, Peter 224 Holstein 5, 134 Lem, Anton van der 82 Home, John 139 Lennep, Jacob van 7, 8, 12, 26–34, 39, Hondecoeter, Melchior de 90–91 71–82, 124–125 Hoorde, Jozef van 183 Leopold I 177, 183, 229, 232 Hopkins, A.G. 51 Leopold II 210 Hugo de Raveschot, C.J. 117 Lesbroussaert, Philippe 117 Huizinga, Johan 36 Leuven 223, 237 Hume, David 225–226 Leys, Henri 185, 192, 194, 235 266 index

Liège 12, 73, 116, 125–128, 190 Moresnet 115 Lille 15, 201, 209–212, 214, 216–217 Morgan, Lady 121–122 Limburg 115, 128 Morris, William 13–14, 151–152, 155–166 London 96, 157, 190, 222, 225–226, Munich 222 237–238 Museum of Ethnology (Leiden) 11, 97, 102 Lonsdale, M. 140 Loon, Pieter van 27, 32, 39 Nagasaki 98 Lorraine 206 Nancy, Battle of 189 Louis Philippe, King 222 Naples 182 Louvre (Paris) 219, 222 Napoleon 22, 91, 99, 117 Low Countries 11–12, 14–16, 70, 114–115, Napoleon, Louis 92, 94–96, 99–100, 127–128, 165, 171, 189–191, 194, 213, 219, 226–227 224, 230, 235 National Art Gallery (Huis ten Bosch) 88 Ludwig of Bavaria 222 Natura Artis Magistra (Amsterdam Luxembourg 116, 127–128 Zoo) 103 Lyall, Alfred Comyn 58 Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij 96 New Zealand 46 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 9, 25, 34, Nord, Le 15, 199–201, 209–210, 216–217 52–54, 57, 60–61, 155, 230, 232 North America 47, 56, 63 MacKenzie, Sir George 136 Northern Ireland 114 Mackintosh, Sir James 52–55, 57 Noter, Pieter Frans de 191 Maclise, Daniel 144–145, 149 Nusantara (Delft) 11 Madou, Jean-Baptiste 177–178, 180–182 Madras 145 O’Keeffe, John 181–182 Madrid 239 Oldenbarnevelt, Johan van 234 Maertens, Georges 216 Oltmans, Jan Frederik 124 Magnus, James 140–141 Orange, House of 83, 88–89, 91, 97, Mallet, David 139 99–100, 117, 120, 125 Mallet, Paul Henri 133–134, 139, 143 Orley, Bernard van 173 Malmesbury, William of 141–142 Oxford 238 Manchester 232 Mander, Karel van 174 Pagden, Antony 49 Marvell, Andrew 237 Palmerston, Lord 134 Mary of Burgundy 174, 184, 188–189 Paris 38, 91, 99, 203–207, 209–211, 217, Matsys, Quentin 14, 171, 173, 175, 177–178, 220–221 180–185, 188, 191–194 Parker, Joanne 159 Mauritshuis (The Hague) 88, 99, 101–102, Pas-de-Calais 15 105–106 Pavilion Welgelegen (Haarlem) 88, 101, M’Crie, Thomas 236 103, 106, 227 Memling, Hans 14, 171, 173, 175–178, Payen, Antoine 102 185–189, 193, 195–196 Peasants’ Revolt 161–162, 164, 166 Menzel, Adolph 221, 235 Peeters, Evert 83 Merken, Lucretia van 228 Percy, Thomas 139, 142, 143 Meyer, Anton 128 Philip II 76 Michelet, Jules 127 Philip the Good 74, 77, 188, 214, 232 Mihaïl, Benoît 213 Philip the Handsome 82 Miller, Rosina S. 190 Picot, François-Edouard 203 Mils, Constantin 203–204 Planché, James 238 Milton, John 237 Pocock, J.G.A. 50–51 Moens, Petronella 117 Polain, Mathieu Lambert 126 Moke, Henri-Guillaume 72–82, 119–123, Post, Frans 104–105 125 Potgieter, Everhardus Johannes 106, 234 Montesquiou, Robert de 36 Prague 114 Morea-Vauthier, Charles 206 Prussia 134 index 267

Quatre-Bras, Battle of 21 Soestdijk 90 South Africa 46, 97 Rapin-Thoyras, Paul de 225, 230 South-East Asia 105 Rastoul de Mongeot, Alphonse 126 Spain 125, 223 Reade, Charles 153 Speijk, Jan van 234 Redgrave, Richard 181 Sri Lanka 90–91, 100 Reinwardt, C.G.C. 92, 94, 95, 97, 102 Stables, Gordon 145–148 Rembrandt van Rijn 171 Stanley, John Thomas 134 Renaissance 219 Steen, Jan 92 Renan, Ernest 113 Stephens, George 134 Reve, Gerard Kornelis van het 39 Stevenson, Robert Louis 153 Richards, Julian D. 141, 144 Stevin, Simon 182 Ridolfi, Carlo 187 Storey, Adolphus 238–239 Rigney, Ann 67 Strutt, Joseph 140, 235 Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) 10–11, 88, 99, Stuers, Victor de 106 100–104, 106, 227, 234 Sumatra 104 Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (Leiden) 96 Surat 92 Robespierre, Maximilien de 206 Surinam 87, 97 Roches, Jean des 225 Swerts, Jan 223 Rodenbach, Georges 8, 35, 37–39, 186–187 Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice de Roebuck, John Arthur 57, 59, 61–62 31 Rogier, Charles 222, 229 Taylor, Miles 58 Roman Empire 13, 76, 120, 152 Ten Day Campaign (1831) 35 Rome 152, 154, 219, 235 Teniers, David 171 Rops, Félicien 195–196 Terborch, Gerard 92 Rosebery, Lord 4, 137 Teylers Museum (Haarlem) 103 Rotterdam 11, 116 Thackeray, William Makepeace 153, 219 Roubaix 15, 199–204, 206–208, 214 Thierry, Augustin 25 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 21 Thomas, John Evan 223 Royal Cabinet of Archaeology (Leiden) Thomson, James 139 100 Tollens, Hendrik 116 Royal Cabinet of Paintings (The Hague) Tourcoing 201 88, 94, 99 Tromp, Maarten Harpertszoon 16, 234 Royal Cabinet of Rarities (The Hague) Tropenmuseum (Amsterdam) 11, 103, 88, 97, 99, 100, 102, 106 106 Royer, Jean Theodore 97 Trulin, Léon 216 Rubens, Peter Paul 171, 173, 177, 183, 185 Tupper, Martin Farquhar 136, 143 Russia 223 Turkey 97 Ruyter, Michiel de 16, 90, 100, 234 Turner, J.M.W. 230 Turner, Sharon 133, 139, 230 Scandinavia 223 Turnhout 74 Schleswig 5, 134 Scholten, Hendrik 235 Ulster 53, 55 Scotland 9, 47–48, 52–56, 146 United States 61 Scott, Sir Walter 8, 11–12, 20–26, 39–40, 116, 121–122, 135–136, 155 Vasari, Giorgio 174, 187 Scottish Enlightenment 24 Velázquez, Diego 239 Seeley, John Robert 9, 48, 53, 56–63 Verachter, Frederic 191–192 Shakespeare, William 224 Verhulst, Sylvère 216 Siberdt, Eugène 185, 188 Versailles 222 Siebold, Philip von 98, 106 Voisin, Auguste 118 Sleeckx, Domien 183 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de 21 Smith, Antony 113 Vos, Jacob de 34, 222, 237 268 index

Vosmaer, Carol 222 West, Benjamin 226 Vriendt, Albrecht de 185–186, 188, 193 Westminster, Palace of 222–223, 232, 237 Whistler, Charles 147–149 Wagenaar, Jan 225–226 White, Hayden 4, 6, 19 Wales 9, 47–48, 52 Wilkie, David 236 Wallays, Edouard 184–186, 188–189, 193 Willem I, King 94–96, 101–102, 118–119, Wallonia 120, 124 202, 228 Wambach, Emile 183 Willem II, King 117 Wappers, Gustave 118 Willems, Jan Frans 126–127, 176 Warton, Joseph 225 William the Silent, Prince of Orange 234 Waterloo 8, 19, 21–22, 24, 91, 99, 113, Wilson, James 46 117–119, 126 Witt, Cornelis de 234 Waterloo, Battle of 8, 20–21, 113, 118–119, Witt, Johan de 234 228, 230 Woeringen, Battle of 230 Wauters, Emile 189 World War I 148, 152, 215, 216 Wawn, Andrew 133, 135 World War II 39, 94, 148, 199, 216 Weerts, Jean-Joseph 15, 199, 201–203, 205–207, 215, 217 Ypres 223, 232 Weerts, Joseph 202–203 Wessex 136, 147 Zeeuws-Vlaanderen 115 West India Company, Dutch 91 Zetternam, Eugeen 184 West Indies 47, 87, 104