Chapter X: Antwerp

Duprès the skryer did not stay long in Brussels; in a short time he had spent in lavish living the greater part of the spoils he had gathered from the Nassau mansion, and, his restless spirit tiring of the Brabant capital, he began wandering through the troubled land, attaching himself, where possible, to Brederode and his party of "the beggars," who were making a noisy progress over the country.

He was at the great meeting the members of the Confederacy held at St. Trond, and joined in the noisy demonstrations and riotous feasting that "the beggars" always indulged in and which made them but a poor reed for Liberty to lean on. He went with Brederode and Culemburg to Duffel, where they met Orange and Egmont, who came on behalf of the Regent to urge the Confederates to preserve the peace of the country instead of disturbing it, as they did by their riots and armed assemblies.

To which request Brederode replied very briefly that they were there to protect the poor people who wished to worship in the fields, and that until a satisfactory answer to the Petition was brought back by the two envoys, Berghen and Montigny, they would neither disarm nor disperse.

This answer was embodied in a paper which Louis of Nassau and twelve other young nobles carried to Brussels and put before the Regent herself.

Their boldness and plain speaking inflamed Margaret to fury.

She retorted by a cold and ambiguous rebuke; and Louis, going further in his audacity, replied that the Confederacy were not without friends, either at home or abroad, and that if the Duchess still refused to convoke the States-General, as she had been often implored to do, and if, as many imagined, a Spanish invasion was preparing, they, "the beggars," would know what to do.

Soon after, the gathering at St. Trond broke up and Brederode went to Antwerp, then perhaps the most troublous spot in the Netherlands.

Duprès accompanied the train of landlopers, gentlemen, refugee Reformers, and ruined merchants who followed Brederode, and made his living by selling charms, telling fortunes, and reading the portents the fearful saw nightly in the sky.

Meghem and Aremberg, the two chief Cardinalists, were already in the city, and when Brederode arrived the situation became almost impossible. There were riots daily, and a civil war, between Papists, Calvinists, Lutherans, and Anabaptists, was considered as inevitable.

Brederode fanned the zeal of the Reformers into fury, while Aremberg and Meghem supported the loyal, or Spanish, party.

The Senate, the Council, and the Corporation implored the presence of the Prince of Orange, who was Burgrave of the city; and being further urged by the Regent, he took up the impossible task of pacification, and arrived in the city in the midst of a tumultuous scene of welcome, Brederode and his "beggars" meeting him beyond the walls with deafening shouts and hurrahs.

William had not placed himself on the side of the people, and he was acting for the Government; but there was a general confidence in him as the one man likely, or able, to bring about concord and an understanding between the King and his subjects.

In Antwerp he at once devoted himself to the task of restoring order, and spent laborious days and nights consulting with the Senate, the Council of Ancients, and even the trade guilds and the chambers of rhetoric, in inducing Brederode to keep quiet, and in reasoning with Meghem and Aremberg to suspend their bitterness against the Reformers.

He had succeeded in establishing some measure of tranquillity, though no one was better aware than himself that this tranquillity could not be long maintained, when he received a summons from the Regent to attend a meeting of the Knights of the Golden Fleece.

He represented to Margaret the dangerous situation within the city, and that probably tumults would follow his departure; but she insisted on his presence in Brussels, and he accordingly prepared to leave Antwerp.

For a day or so all was quiet, but the 18th of August was approaching, and that date was the feast of the "Ommegang," when the sacred image of the Virgin was taken from her place in the Cathedral and carried in triumphant procession through the streets; and the city senate, wards, and guilds, as those responsible for the safety of the city, as well as the Burgrave, looked forward with dread to this event, which was sure to raise the passions of the Reformers to the bitterest pitch.

Others, such as many of the "beggars" and such-like adventurers who remained in the city, looked forward with pleasure to a riot, in which there would be a chance to break a few heads and perhaps snatch a little plunder in the fray.

Among these was Duprès. Nothing delighted him so much as disorder and confusion; in troubled waters he was always able to swim to the surface—in calm seas he generally sank.

And to this selfish and mischievous desire for riot and storm was joined some sincere loathing of the Papists, and some sincere sympathy with the persecuted Reformers.

Duprès was no theologian, and could not have argued on either side of the religious question; but during his stay in the Netherlands he had seen some executions, the horrors of which made his hair rise and his blood run cold to think of, and which had sent him for ever into the ranks of Philip's enemies.

On the morning of the 18th, Duprès was early in the streets and had early taken up his position near the Cathedral.

The temper of the people was silent and dangerous; but the sacred image was suffered to make her procession in peace, assailed only by a few coarse jibes and a few cries of "Long live the beggars"; and the day ended without a tumult, to the great vexation of Duprès. That evening the Prince left Antwerp. The next morning it was discovered that the image, instead of being stood, as was usual, in the centre of the church, had been placed behind iron railings in the choir.

This soon brought together an excited and contemptuous crowd, who passed in and out of the great church all day, scoffing at the images and the altars.

Towards evening, a Papist sailor, who indignantly protested against this irreverent behaviour, provoked a scuffle in which blows were exchanged and swords drawn.

The priests and custodians of the church managed, however, to clear the building of the rioters and to close the Cathedral at the usual hour.

Duprès, who had stationed himself in the porch all day to exchange pleasantries with those of his acquaintances who came and went, had to return home without having seen the riots he had anticipated; but as he made his way through the crowded street he met one of Brederode's followers, a member of the Rhetoric Chamber of the "Marigold," who told him that the Senate was in consultation with the Margrave of Antwerp, that they were issuing a notice calling on the citizens to preserve law and order, and that an express had been sent to Brussels to implore the Prince of Orange to return.

So it seemed as if those in authority feared worse than the riot which Duprès had been so disappointed in not beholding. While he was eating his supper in one of the small sailors' inns on the quay of the Scheldt, he heard that the Senate was proposing to call to arms the city companies.

The next morning, the second after the feast of the Ommegang, Duprès rose in the early midsummer's dawn and proceeded to the Cathedral, which seemed to be the centre about which all the deep passions of Antwerp gathered.

As he had protected himself in Brussels by wearing Egmont's famous livery, so now he donned the popular costume of the "beggars," a plain suit of grey camlet, a mendicant's hat, a wallet and bowl at his waist, and one of the "beggar" medals hung round his neck.

Early as it was when he reached the Cathedral square, there were many already abroad—indeed, some had not been to bed at all. Artisans, apprentices, tradesmen, clerks, gentlemen, peasantry, women, girls, and boys stood about in groups, talking earnestly.

They all seemed emboldened by the fact that the Senate had, after all, done nothing: no proclamation had been issued, no companies called to arms, and the Cathedral was open as usual.

Duprès, wandering about the square from one knot of people to the other, was suddenly moved to glance up at the great church. He had often thought how seldom men lift their eyes from the level of their fellows; whenever he did so himself, he was conscious, as now, of a certain shock.

The sky was not yet wholly filled with the sun; the dark purple hue of the August night still lingered in the west, and the church was in shadow save for the exquisite spire which soared up erect into the upper air and light and into the sunbeams now passing over the roofs of the surrounding houses.

The beautiful tower, rising so high above the city, as delicate as a flower and as strong as iron, was a noble object that symbolized the loftiest feeling of which, perhaps, man is capable—the spiritual desire to reach up to escape the earth.

Duprès, always alive to the grand and the lovely, was moved by the sight of the marvellous spire, so high above all this passion, and turmoil, fury and bitterness which beat and lashed below it; he felt a desire to enter the building, though Romish churches were usually hateful to him, and he considered them dangerous also for one of his party.

To-day, however, he was emboldened by the general fearlessness of the crowd and by the number of Reformers, or heretics, abroad.

So he went up to the great bronze doors; before them sat an old woman selling candles, tapers, and little trivial pictures and images.

To-day a little group was gathered round her, threatening that her trade was nearly at an end, and hurling at her pungent gibes to which she replied by fierce and voluble abuse.

Duprès slipped by these, lifted the heavy curtain which hung before the inner door, and stepped into the church.

At first the immense size, the immense height, bewildered him, he and the others there seemed like dwarfs lost in an immense twilight forest.

A forest strewn with jewels instead of flowers, and lit with priceless lamps of gold and silver instead of by sun and stars and moon.

It was indeed the richest church in the Netherlands, and one of the most sumptuous in Christendom.

Over four centuries of lavish labour, of infinite care, of prodigal expenditure had gone to the adornment of the building, the entire art expression of a nation had gone to the decoration, all the finest inspirations of the best artists, all the most painful and wonderful work of the best craftsmen were contained within these lofty walls, and all was sanctioned and hallowed by unending prayers and devotions, unending tears and penitences, unending humiliations before God.

Like a closed box of precious jewels the magnificent church, containing the utmost of man's efforts towards beauty and splendour, lay humbly before the feet of the Lord.

The mystical aspect of this material splendour touched and moved Duprès; he stood inside the door, looking down the vistas of the five aisles which were all enveloped in a wine-coloured dusk, broken here and there by vivid burning beams of light as the sun struck the fiery windows where the glass blazed orange, purple, violet, and azure with the uttermost strength of which colour is capable, and which seemed to melt into infinite grey-green distance behind the altar.

In between the pillars of the naves were gorgeous tombs on which ladies and cavaliers in alabaster, marble, brass, and painted wood lay with humble hands pointing upwards, while the glow from the windows fell on the silk and brocaded banners which hung above them.

The walls were lined with chapels and altars, each sparkling like a cluster of brilliant gems; among them were conspicuous those of the twenty-seven city guilds whose banners and escutcheons were fastened above the entrance grilles.

The vista was closed by a huge sculptured group of white marble which rose above the High Altar; against the soft mysterious shadows and flickering lights of the Lady Chapel the colossal figures representing Christ and the two thieves on the Cross showed with a luminous glow—half-rose, half-amber—which rendered the outlines impalpable and the hue like the soft substance of flesh. Behind was dimly visible the exquisite outline of the tabernacle or repository, the shrine for the mystical body of Christ, which rose on a single pillar in a series of beautiful arches and columns till lost in the deep warm shadows of the roof.

Duprès moved slowly down the centre aisle; the air was heavy with the drowsy perfumes of myrrh and spikenard, and misty with the perpetual fumes of incense; the eternal lamps and the perfumed candles which burnt before shrines and altars gleamed on wrought gold, embossed silver, splendid paintings, silk tapestries, beaten bronze, carved wood, and all the marvellous details of the crooked stone of columns and roof and walls, which were rich with a thousand forms of birds, beasts, flowers, and creations of pure fantasy.

Duprès began to notice his fellow-companions who were walking in twos and threes round the aisles; they were mostly of the poorer sort, and their behaviour was rude and noisy.

A considerable crowd was gathered in the choir, where the sacred image stared at them from behind her iron bars.

A few priests hurried to and fro; they looked, Duprès thought, frightened.

He wandered back to the main entrance and stared out.

The sun was now blazing hot and dry on the dusty square, and Duprès started to see what an enormous number of people had collected. In the church porch a fight had begun round the ancient pedlar, whose goods had been flung on the ground, and who was defending herself with sticks and stones.

Pistol shots were fired, sticks brandished; blood began to flow, and the temper of the people was fast rising with fury.

Duprès quickly withdrew into the church again, and slipped into the first chapel inside the door which was empty, and where he could observe unmolested.

People began to throng into the cathedral; they surged to and fro, muttering together; the priests had all disappeared.

Duprès was becoming stiff and tired, the marble step of the chapel altar was hard; the air became stifling hot with the increase of the sun without. But the skryer seldom went unprovided against bodily needs; he drew from his wallet a substantial meal of bread and meat and fruit, and devoured it gravely, blinking up at the mosaic and paintings that lined the chapel.

The crowd was meanwhile increasing; their shouts and cries, their threatening looks, promised no peaceful dispersal this time.

Duprès gently closed the gilt gates of the chapel on himself, and grinned through them at the swarming throngs.

He wondered why the authorities made no effort to check the tumult, and even as he was scorning them for their cowardice, the great doors of the church were thrown open, and a pale finely-dressed gentleman entered, attended by the two burgomasters and all the senators in their robes of office.

Duprès knew this gentleman for Jan van Immerzeel, Margrave of Antwerp, who had evidently come in person to endeavour to quell the riot.

Peering through the gilt bars Duprès watched him as he made his way, with dignity and calm, into the centre of the church, watched his gestures as he entreated the people to disperse.

"If it was the Prince of Orange now!" smiled Duprès, "but who will stir for _him_?"

The presence of the Margrave and the senators seemed, however, to have some effect; many of the people left the church, the others became more tranquil.

So the day wore on; Duprès, tired of the little chapel but willing to see events to a finish, yawned and wearied and presently fell asleep on the red damask cloth which covered the altar steps. He was roused to the sound of the renewed tumult of a surging crowd refusing to leave, declaring they would wait for vespers.

The Margrave, speaking from the High Altar, said there would be no vespers that night; the people then pointed out that the senators should quit first, leaving them to follow, and the magistrates, weary with their long vigil, departed, closing after them all the doors save one.

Duprès now crept out of his hiding and stretched his stiff limbs.

He noticed the Margrave was still there, standing by the High Altar—a small brilliant figure beneath the colossal marble ones of Christ and the thieves.

He held his cap with a heron's feather in his ungloved hand and kept his eyes on the crowd. Though the magistrates had some while since left the building, no one followed them, but a considerable number began to stream in steadily through the one door left open for egress.

The Margrave, seeing this, sprang quickly on to the altar steps and, raising his voice, commanded, and then besought, the people to disperse.

No sooner was his voice heard than a party of men, as if in answer to a given signal, rushed on him and drove him and his attendants towards the door.

There was but a brief struggle; Duprès saw the nobleman's sword wrenched from his hand and sent whirling and glittering into dusky air, then he was forced into the street.

Now with one accord the people ran to all the doors, slipped back the bolts, and opened them; those waiting without at once thronged into the church with the force and swiftness of the sea across a broken dike.

Duprès, driven before this resistless throng of humanity, darted into the choir and clung to the back of the altar; all Antwerp seemed within the church, and now there was no one to restrain or threaten, to implore or coerce.

The skryer shivered a little; through the open doors of the Sacristy he had a glimpse of frightened priests and treasurers with gold and jewels in their hands; then they cast down the precious objects and fled.

Duprès' blood warmed at the sight of the gold, his eyes glittered.

"Are they going to plunder the church?" he asked himself, and he gazed round the unspeakable splendour of the building with lustful eyes.

An ominous lull, a deadly silence reigned over the crowd, then with sudden fierceness there rose the passionate rhythm of a Protestant psalm breaking harshly on the air that still seemed full of the chantings of the priests and full of echoes of Latin prayers; the strong Flemish words, rising from lusty Flemish throats, sprang forth like a battle-cry, and with a movement that was also like the movement of a battle, a number of men and women threw themselves on the iron cage containing the image of the Virgin.

In an incredibly few minutes the figure was dragged out, torn into shreds, and cast into the air and along the floor.

A deep roar of triumph followed, and Duprès, who could scarcely believe his eyes, saw that they were beginning to destroy everything in the cathedral.

A shiver shook him, a sense of dread and terror, as if he knew he was going to be a witness of something horrible; he cowered down behind the lofty marble group of the Crucifixion which rose so high above the heaving, surging throng.

The sound of blows began to mingle with the staves of the psalms, and the shout of "Long live the beggars!"

The crowd began to tear the tapestries from the walls, to drag down the pictures and slash them with knives, to knock over the images, and hurl the statues from the niches.

Duprès drew his breath sharply, his head began to reel at the sight of this fury of desecration; then a lust, a madness, an exaltation crept into his veins; he sprang out from his hiding-place and drew the stout cudgel he kept at his belt.

For once the Reformers were in power, for once there was no creature of Philip's to protect Philip's God—the Romish Church which had persecuted the heretics so unfalteringly, so bitterly, so persistently, had now no champion here to protect her temple.

A woman whose red hair fell on a white neck and rough kerchief leapt up the altar steps, dashed open the golden doors of the sanctuary with her fists, dragged out the Eucharist, and flung it down to be trampled under foot; a number of youths sprang to her side, and in a moment the altar was cleared of all the costly furniture.

A great and extreme fury now seized the rioters; it was as if they would revenge on the Papists' church all the blood the Papists had shed, all the misery they had caused; there were fifty thousand executions in the Netherlands to be remembered against the Romish Church.

The magistrates came down once more to the cathedral, but on hearing the terrible, almost inhuman, noise that issued from the building, they fled back to the town hall without attempting an entrance.

It was now so dark in the church, that the women took the lamps and candles from the altars and lit the men at their work; the beautiful column supporting the repository was shattered under a hundred blows; as arch on arch, pillar on pillar, crashed to the ground they were pounded with mallets into a thousand pieces.

Seventy chapels were utterly wrecked; there was not a picture nor a tapestry left in place; with incredible speed and incredible strength stone, marble, bronze, brass, wood were hurled down, broken, hammered, defaced.

The figures on the tombs were beaten out of all likeness to humanity, the banners were torn down and slit to shreds, knives and spears were driven into the mosaics and wall painting, fragments of alabaster were hurled through the gorgeous glass window. The inspiration, the labour, the riches of four hundred years were in a few hours destroyed; the incalculable wealth, the perfect flower of art which had come to perfection and could never be again, the industry, the patience of entire lives, the offerings of generations, the worshipped treasures of thousands—all these were, in the space of a few hours, reduced to utter ruin, to broken fragments, and tattered rags by those who saw nothing in what they destroyed but the symbols of a monstrous tyranny and the pageantry that disguised all cruelty and wickedness.

The madness got into Duprès' blood; he struck right and left, he shouted, he sang, he scaled up the pillars to strike down the sculptures above them; he dashed into the chapels to tear out the relics and leap on them; he split the painted panels of altar-pieces, and dug out the inlay and mosaic on the walls.

He was one of the party who burst into the Sacristy, who poured out the communion wine, and stamped on the wafers, who rubbed their shoes with the holy oil and hung the priests' priceless copes and chasubles on their own shoulders.

Then they broke into the treasury; choice illuminated missals and chorals, robes, staffs, and chalices were hurled right and left, the elaborate cupboards and beautiful chests being ruthlessly smashed.

The wealth of the church was immense, the hoarded gatherings of centuries, and, it seemed to Duprès in his madness, as if he had at last found the Philosopher's Stone: was not everything gold and precious stones?

For as chest after chest was burst open and the contents scattered on the floor, the rioters stood ankle-deep in riches.

Crystal goblets, candlesticks, pattens, lamps, chains, reliquaries of fine gold; ewers, caskets, rings and staffs set with pearl, with sapphire, with ruby and emerald; vases and dishes of glowing enamel; statues and images in ivory and silver; rosaries in rare gems; lace vestures worth as much as gold; stoles, gloves, and staffs all of incomparable workmanship and all sparkling with jewels; books with gold covers; censers of pierced gold, lamps of pure gold, candlesticks six foot high of gold; altar cloths worked in gold thread, in silver thread, in magnificent silk embroidery, in women's hair—all these were cast out and defaced, torn and broken, dashed against the walls, and spurned with the feet.

But nothing was taken; stronger passions then cupidity were governing men. The ragged Protestants, many of whom had not the price of a supper in their pockets, scorned to pilfer the priests' treasure; with one accord they left the desecrated splendour and dashed back to the church.

Duprès would willingly have enriched himself, but dare not so much as take a single article.

In the cathedral the last outrage was being offered to the Romanist Faith.

Round the High Altar, now bare and broken, stood a circle of women holding aloft the flaring, smoking, perfumed holy candles to light a group of men who, by means of ropes and axes, were dragging the great marble Christ from His position.

St. John, the Maries, and St. Joseph had been already hurled to the ground, where they lay shattered on the marble pavement, and soon the colossal cross shivered and swayed against the background of murky shadows, fell forward within the ropes, and pitched on to the altar steps.

A dozen furious hammers soon dashed man and cross to pieces.

There was now nothing left standing in the church but the two huge figures of the malefactors hanging on their crosses.

Awful and ghostly they looked with that blank space between them, behind them darkness stained with the red candlelight, around them ruin, and above them the mysterious dark loftiness of the mighty roof.

With bitter irony the heretics left the two thieves in their places, then, having completely devastated and destroyed everything within the cathedral, they swept out into the summer darkness.

The night was yet young, and there were thirty more churches in Antwerp; triumphantly singing a hymn of praise they dashed to the nearest, from which the trembling priests had already fled.

As Duprès left the church, overcome by irresistible temptation, he snatched up a gold vessel from the floor.

Before he could conceal the treasure a man near him saw it and smote it out of his hand, at the same time striking the skryer a blow that made him stagger.

"No thieves in this company!" he shouted; "we are not thieves but avengers!"