Coleridge: "Constancy of an Ideal Object"

Coleridge in Rome (1806)





Coleridge on Idealized Love

In his biography of Coleridge, Richard Holmes addresses the matter of Coleridge's idealized image of the beloved, “ . . . what Coleridge himself came to see as the profound philosophic problem posed by the nature of human love itself; and by extension, of all intensely subjective experience. Was love a self-created, self-referring illusion? Or was it “some dear embodied Good?” Was [the beloved] in the end nothing more than “a fanciful dream,” or . . . genuinely a projection of his own best self, his conscience, his sense of beauty and power and hope?

This was the problem he faced again and again in his Notebooks in the succeeding months and years, and gradually in the slow accretions of his Confessional Poems, like “Constancy to an Ideal Object.” This was the questioning poem he had begun in Malta, . . . .” Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834, (Pantheon, New York, 1998) at p. 196.


CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL OBJECT

Since all that beat about in Nature's range,
Or veer or vanish; why should'st thou remain
The only constant in a world of change,
O yearning Thought! that liv'st but in the brain?
Call to the Hours, that in the distance play,
The faery people of the future day -- --
Fond Thought! not one of all that shining swarm
Will breathe on thee with life-enkindling breath,
Till when, like strangers shelt'ring from a storm,
Hope and Despair meet in the porch of Death!
Yet still thou haunt'st me; and though well I see,
She is not thou, and only thou art she,
Still, still as though some dear embodied Good,
Some living Love before my eyes there stood
With answering look a ready ear to lend,
I mourn to thee and say –‘Ah! loveliest friend!
That this the meed of all my toils might be,
To have a home, an English home, and thee!’
Vain repetition! Home and Thou are one.
The peacefull'st cot, the moon shall shine upon,
Lulled by the Thrush and wakened by the Lark,
Without thee were but a becalméd Bark,
Whose Helmsman on an ocean waste and wide
Sits mute and pale his mouldering helm beside.

And art thou nothing? Such thou art, as when
The woodman winding westward up the glen
At wintry dawn, where o'er the sheep-track's maze
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist'ning haze,
Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
An image¹ with a glory round its head;
The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues,
Nor knows he makes the shadow, he pursues!

[Date uncertain²]

¹ This phenomenon, which the Author has himself experienced, and of which the reader may find a description in one of the earlier volumes of the Manchester Philosophical Transactions, is applied figuratively in the following passage of the Aids to Reflection: --
‘Pindar’s fine remark respecting the different effects of Music, on different characters, holds equally true of Genius – as many as are not delighted by it are disturbed, perplexed, irritated. The beholder either recognizes it as a projected form of his own Being, that moves before him with a Glory round its head, or recoils from it as a Spectre.’ - Aids to Reflection [1825], p. 220. [S.T.C.]

² ‘. . . those lines which a long time ago I sent to Mrs. Green.’ [S.T.C., Letter, 11 June 1835.]


From Coleridge's Letter to Henry Crabb Robinson (1811):

“In short, I believe that Love . . . is always the abrupt creation of a moment – tho’ years of Dawning may have preceded. I said Dawning – for often as I have watched the Sun-rising, from the thinning, diluting Blue to the Whitening, to the fawn-coloured, the pink, the crimson, the glory, yet still the Sun itself has always started up, out of the Horizon – ! between the brightest Hues of the Dawn and the first Rim of the Sun itself there is a chasm – all before were Differences of Degrees, passing & dissolving into each other – but this is a difference of Kind – a chasm of Kind in a continuity of Time. – And as no man who has never watched for the rise of the Sun could understand what I mean, so can no man who has not been in Love, understand what Love is – tho’ he will be sure to imagine & believe, that he does.” [emphasis in original] (Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols., edited by E.L. Griggs, Oxford, 1956-71.) Vol. 3, pp. 304-5.

The 'Eros' of Centocelle

NOTES ON ROMANTICISM. PART 5: CONSTABLE

Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds, (1824-26)






















John Constable, Self Portrait (1806) Tate Gallery


Constable


John Constable (1776 – 1837) was an English painter associated with the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, an area surrounding his home—now known as "Constable Country"—which he invested with an intensity of affection. "I should paint my own places best", he wrote to his friend John Fisher, Bishop of Salisbury, in 1821, "painting is but another word for feeling."


His most famous paintings include Dedham Vale of 1802






















[click on the images to expand their size]

and The Hay Wain of 1821.


















I have chosen to focus on Constable's painting of Salisbury Cathedral, of 1825, due to its possible associations with religious controversies of the period, and hence on its value in revealing a political aspect of Romanticism, a politically conservative aspect. Although his paintings are now among the most popular and valuable in British art, he was never financially successful and did not become a member of the establishment until he was elected to the Royal Academy at the age of 52. He sold more paintings in France than in his native England. But he was not sympathetic to Radicalism in any form, and stands today as one of the prime examples of English conservatism.


The Painting: Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds, (1824-26)


The image below is the one in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, ca. 1825. A second version of 1826 is in the Frick Collection in New York, and there’s another in the Huntington Library and Art Gallery in Pasadena. It depicts the cathedral at Salisbury as seen from what was known as the Bishop’s Meadow. Bishop John Fisher, at the time the sitting bishop in this diocese and a personal friend of the artist, is seen walking with his wife in the extreme left of the painting, and he is pointing with his walking stick towards the cathedral, and most likely, although it is difficult to tell, to the tower and steeple of the church. Or perhaps, to the turbulent sky above it.




Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds (1825) Metropolitan Museum, New York

The original version of this painting is presently in the Victoria and Albert Museum. It was commissioned by the bishop of Salisbury, John Fisher in 1822. In July 1824, he asked Constable to revise it, whereupon the canvas now in the Metropolitan Museum was begun. Infrared photography reveals that it started with an outline traced from the first version, and that the artist then improvised directly on the canvas, painting in the sky and opening up the foliage arching over the south transept to give the spire a more dominant role in the composition. In Constable's estate sale, this work was described as "nearly finished." It is indeed a study for the final version, completed in 1826 (Frick Collection, New York).

The “Truth” of the Artist

One of Constable guiding assumptions was that he was motivated by an uncompromising quest for the truth, much like the physical scientist, whom the artist emulated in his quest for answers. In a letter to John Dunthorne of 1802, he says precisely this. “Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of Nature. Why, then, may not a landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?” (Letter to John Dunthorne, 1802).

The quest for truth is particularly evident in Constable’s consistent effort to depict the sky as accurately as possible. There is abundant evidence that he spent considerable time and skill on this particular effort. The same cannot be said of the foliage of his trees, which also occupy vast portions of his canvasses, but are characterized by a fuzziness and blurring that foreshadow the work of the Impressionists. The quest for truth is not altogether consistent, as the artist is selective in this pursuit and generally stands by the imperative outlined by Wordsworth to the effect that art requires the suspension of disbelief.

Whence and why this preoccupation with Truth then? “The great vice of the present day” – he wrote in 1802 -, “is bravura, an attempt to do something beyond the truth.” (Letter to John Dunthorne, 1802). Indeed, the value of “truth” therefore was that it trumped ‘bravura,’ exaggeration, bombast, and a daring venture towards the ideal. Constable would stick to the truth in his paintings, and, if possible, help turn the clock back to what he considered to have been a better age in England’s green land.


Nostalgia

Yet though Constable kept his eye on a naturalistic truth, which he considered to be an aspect of his ‘science’ of painting, he did not want to look towards the truth of the changing landscape of an increasingly industrialized England. As pointed out in Notes on Romanticism Part 3 (my blog post of April 4, 2010) with regards to the poetry of Wordsworth, one of the most telling aspects of the Romantic movement was its refusal to accept the ugliness of the new society, the scars on the land and on its people for which increasing and unbridled industrialization was responsible. Art provided a refuge for this conservative sentiment, a need for psychological soothing, and the template for this sentiment was the requirement of nostalgia.

The etymology of the word ‘nostalgia’ is well known, perhaps thanks to Homer. The word is based on the Greek nostos, returning home, and algios, a pain or ache. It is a form of longing for return, for re-visit, which causes a sweet and desired, psychologically soothing ache. In its modern conception it is arguably born in Romanticism, which is its ideology converted into fine art.

Constable stands in the cusp between ‘nostalgia’ as a purely aesthetic concept (consider, for example, the “pastoral” mood of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony) and the concept that eclipses it: nostalgia as concerns the aspirations of psychology, sociology and political philosophy. I argue that his painting of Salisbury Cathedral is both art and politics, aesthetics and ideology. Today nostalgia is all the latter: a longing for the past defined as a psychological condition, a sociological determination among certain social classes for a return to the past, and its political counterpart, fascism, or some forms of conservative reaction. But it was once simply a longing for a rural past, for a tranquility and simplicity associated with the agricultural political economy.

Patrick Gardiner has expounded on Schopenhauer’s psychological analysis of nostalgia and its relation to aesthetic contemplation: “Schopenhauer thinks that the quality of ‘will-lessness’ intrinsic to aesthetic contemplation is also characteristic of some kinds of memory experience. . . . Thus he asks why it is that particular sections or moments of our lives, recovered and recalled from the long distant past, often come back to us in so strange and enchanted a light and under an aspect quite different from that under which they appeared to us at the time. The explanation is that when we remember such events is it is only the ‘objective’ content of what was originally experienced that returns to us; the ‘individually subjective’ accompaniment, in the shape of anxieties and desires that distorted our apprehension and wrecked our enjoyment, is forgotten and absent. Hence the illusion arises that the scenes and happenings of which we were then conscious lay before us in as pure and undisturbed a form as their images stand before us now in recollection, so that far off days appear to the eyes of memory as fragments of a ‘lost paradise.’ The release from the subjective wants and cares, which in the case of memory we wrongly suppose ourselves to have enjoyed as other times by transferring to the past our present detachment from the interests that then occupied us, is in the case of aesthetic contemplation a present though transitory reality. At one point (Parerga II, 447) Schopenhauer even suggests that the main problem of philosophical aesthetics lies in the question of how it is possible to find satisfaction in something that bears no relation to our will, claiming that the question is answered once it is realized that aesthetic satisfaction consists precisely in the absence of all willing.” (Patrick Gardiner, Schopenhauer, Penguin, 1963, pp. 195-96).


The depiction of nostalgia

Is there a technique by which nostalgia can be depicted? In Constable’s paintings, it is not only their subject matter which evokes the nostalgia for the past and for a rural and green England. There is a visual effect that his paintings cause which beckons the unwary eye towards ‘greener pastures,’ i.e. towards the desired nostalgia. Directly in the foreground of the paintings there is turbulence, action, movement, busy-ness, or people, animals, objects, something distinct and objective to look at. The middle ground of the paintings, toward which the eye is directed as towards a release, is the locus amoenus, the comfortable place, usually a sunny meadow. Finally, as the eye moves upwards to the beyond of the sky, we reach the organ of sentiment. The sky is what will finally determine our mood. The nostalgic thrust finds the locus amoenus for the eye, but the eye cannot rest there. It seeks the sky as for a liberation, and there encounters the signification of the painting. If the sky is turbulent, the painting is ominous, darkened, frightful, and the nostalgic element is imperiled. If the sky is clear and sunny, a more optimistic mood is elicited. The soft clouds and sunny skies above Wivenhoe Park (below) render the mood neutral, or at worst, peaceful and tranquil. There are no threats to Wivenhoe Park or its residents.

In this painting, Constable contrasts his blue, green and gray palette to the red brick manor house, which is made to stand out by the use of warmer colors. Constable wrote about having great difficulty incorporating the thatch-roofed deer barn. In order to do so, as requested by his patrons, he sewed an inch of extra fabric to the far right of the canvas. He had to then sew an extra inch on the left side in order to restore the balance of his composition. On the left, he painted the owners’ daughter, Mary Rebow, driving a donkey cart.



Wivenhoe Park (1816)
[click on image to expand]


All of Constable’s paintings have a locus amoenus. In the painting of Salisbury Cathedral it is the meadow that surrounds the Cathedral, and the Cathedral itself, the Gothic past in its silvery medieval splendor. As well, nostalgia in Constable appears by way of the painter’s “green formula.” Constable’s paintings are characterized by their “green-ness”, the moistness, dew, rivers, ponds and water, ever-present in them. It has come to be considered the prototypical “Englishness” of Constable, and it is primarily because it is part and parcel of his nostalgic artifice. The locus amoenus is almost invariably green and watery in all of his paintings.


The Gothic Revival


The Gothic Revival is an artistic, originally an architectural, movement of the nineteenth century which is intimately associated with Romanticism, a statement that requires further elaboration and exploration. The first nostalgic imitation of Gothic architecture appeared in the 18th century, when scores of houses with castle-style battlements were built in England, but it was only toward the mid-19th century that a true Gothic Revival developed. The mere imitation of Gothic forms and details then became its least important aspect, as architects focused on creating original works based on underlying Gothic principles, primarily the Gothic skeleton structure. Though the movement began losing force toward the end of the century, Gothic-style churches, government and collegiate buildings continued to be constructed in Britain and the U.S. well into the 20th century.















Barry's and Pugin’s Houses of Parliament in London.
Construction began in 1840 and continued for over thirty years.


The Gothic Revival: Nostalgia for a Broken Age

The predilection for Gothic architecture, painting and design in the Victorian Era answers to the same dynamic of nostalgia that motivated a lot of the Romantic Movement that preceded it. In his first ‘untimely meditation’ on David Strauss (David Strauss: der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller, 'David Strauss, The Confessor and the Writer,' 1873), which is a broadside attack on the philistinism of the European culture of the mid-century, Nietzsche remarks on the prevalence of eclecticism in the modern consciousness, and he attributes this eclecticism to the lack of a pre-eminent style, a unifying principle for art and thought that could be said to characterize the entire culture and hence render it a true Culture. The way in which the nineteenth century European bourgeoisie scoured the world for cultures it could adopt and adorn itself with is, according to Nietzsche, actually a total lack of style, of taste, and, ultimately, of a God. The Gothic revival of its medieval past, which swept through Europe in the early and mid-nineteenth century, can be seen therefore as the nostalgia required by a broken age.

















City of Birmingham Law Courts (1887-1891)



The turbulent sky

English politics in the decade of the eighteen-twenties is riven by conflicts for inclusion in the electoral process, caused by persistent economic hardship after the end of the Napoleonic Wars and by reaction to the revolutionary events in France. Towards the end of the decade, a faction of the governing elite, the Liberal Tories primarily under the leadership of George Canning, was able to pass legislation that abolished all restrictions on Dissenters and Catholics from voting in parliamentary elections.

The conservative and negative reaction to these measures, which were embodied in the Test and Corporation Acts of 1829, lifting the disabilities imposed on Dissenters after the Restoration of the Monarchy in the 1660’s, and the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1828, was overwhelming. It led to a confrontation which resulted in the Great Reform Act of 1832, a political crisis that was not resolved until the 1840’s and the compromises of the Victorian Age. The gloom generated among partisans of the Establishment of the Church of England informed the politics of conservatism in England until the end of the century. It was a crucial element in Gladstone’s liberalism as well as in the High Tory ideology of Disraeli. And it influenced most intellectual discourse in the nation. Constable was a faithful supporter of the Establishment, and he counted many of its stalwarts among his friends, including Bishop Fisher of Salisbury, who is depicted in the painting of Salisbury Cathedral.

Did the cloudy sky above that Gothic pile, the characteristic “organ of sentiment” in Constable’s paintings, represent his gloomy thoughts about the threat to the Church of England posed by the abolition of disabilities on Catholics and Dissenters?










Salisbury Cathedral (1825) detail




It is impossible to prove this, but it is a fair speculation. The painting as a whole is a depiction of Old England. The figure of the Bishop, dressed in the traditional clerical black garb, wearing a three-cornered hat, stands for the conservatism of the Church, and with his walking stick, the Bishop points towards the beyond. Whether the beyond is the great steeple of the medieval church, or to the turbulent sky above it, is basically inconsequential. It points to what is threatened, to what is missed and longed for: the vanishing Past.







Salisbury Cathedral (1825) detail














John Fisher, Bishop of Salisbury, and his wife, pacing the grounds, the Bishop pointing with his cane at the tower of the cathedral, or maybe at the lowering sky



Among those who would turn the clock back in the early decades of the English nineteenth century, Constable is one. His painting of Salisbury Cathedral is indicative of his mood and of his intent. As such, this painting is a component of the Romantic Movement, and illustrates a conservative element in it which belies the usual characterization of that movement as politically radical and progressive. An alternative element in Romanticism is evident in the paintings of Delacroix, or in the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, the subject of Parts 6 and 7 of these Notes on Romanticism which I shall post shortly on my blog.



John Constable's Salisbury Cathedral

TRAVEL DIARIES: THE WALCHEREN EXPEDITION

SOUTH HOLLAND AND ZEELAND JULY 22, 2010

"The grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men.
He marched them up the hill,
and then
He marched them down again.

And when they were up, they were up.
And when they were down, they were down.
And when they were only halfway up, 
They were neither up nor down."



















John Pitt, 2nd Earl of Chatham




The Walcheren campaign was an unsuccessful British military expedition to the Netherlands in 1809, intended to capture the port of Vlissingen and destroy the French ships, arsenals and dockyards at Antwerp, during the Napoleonic Wars. Recently, I conducted my own expedition to explore the area and take some photographs. On July 22, 2010, I traveled to South Holland and Zeeland with my friend and fellow lover of the arts, the Dutch photographer Bert Algra. We began our trip at Bert’s home in Sassenheim, headed south towards the port of Rotterdam and crossed the big rivers, the Oude Maas (Old Maas) and the Nieuwe Maas (New Maas), and had some breakfast in Brielle. From Brielle we took the Dammerweg across the Hollands Diep, to head south-west towards the islands of Zeeland, and in the direction of the port of Vlissingen. We traveled across the island of Voorne-Putten, where Brielle is located, to the island of Goeree-Overflakkee, which, like Voorne-Putten, is still in South Holland, and then across the Brouwersdam to the islands of Schouwen-Duiveland, Noord Beveland and Zuid Beveland in Zeeland. All day long, our intention was to end our trip in Antwerp and have dinner there, but we never actually crossed the border into Belgium. The closest we came was Vlissingen, on the estuary of the Scheldt River, from whence we could get an idea of Belgium, though the coast we saw on the other side of the Scheldt was still The Netherlands.






Brielle




Brielle is a small harbor on the island of Voorne-Putten, located on the Nieuwe Maas, one of the two great branches of the river Meuse, (Maas) that winds its way through Belgium, through the city of Liege, and pours out into the North Sea. The importance of Brielle is based on the role of the little town during the Dutch revolt against the Spanish Hapsburgs, and the subsequent eighty years war against Spain. On April 1, 1572, the Protestant "pirates" known as Watergeuzen (Sea Beggars) captured the town in their flat-bottomed boats, thus securing a free port through which the islands of the province of Zeeland could be supplied from the North Sea. As the Protestants throughout the provinces of Holland and Zeeland realized the strategic nature of this victory, they began openly to support William of Orange and his rebel armies against the Spanish Duke of Alba, and the nature of the conflict changed, beginning to favor the rebels. The Dutch still celebrate this event every year on April 1st., and during the night before, known as "Kalknacht (chalk night)," deface the city with white chalk, and the students sing the famous rhyme: "Op 1 april verloor Alva zijn bril" which means, "On April 1st, Alva (Alvarez de Toledo, Third Duke of Alba) lost his glasses ('bril' means eye-glasses in Dutch)."


















Duke of Alba







We took several photographs there. Most interesting are the battlements around the town, built onto the canals and the tributaries of the river, for the defense of the port. It was a pleasure to watch Bert photographing, with an almost patriotic fervor, the defense works of the old city, the living testimony of the glorious Dutch Revolt of the sixteenth century.















Bert Algra photographing the defenses of the port of Brielle








The old cathedral of St. Catherine is also a fascinating treasure of memorabilia from the glorious days of the Protestant Revolt. In the church is buried the only member of the Sea Beggars that lost his life in the initial seizure of the town, Hans Onversaecht, and the stained-glass windows are a running commentary on the epic event of the town’s capture from the Spanish. From the tower of the church it is possible to see the port of Rotterdam and the green expanse of Zeeland to the west and south, and it was from the top of this tower that Charlotte van Bourbon waived good bye to her husband, William of Orange, whom she would never see again, as he would shortly be assassinated in Delft.


























The tower of St. Catherine’s Church in Brielle

















Tomb of Hans Onversaecht, Sea Beggar






















Bert’s photo of Brielle from the tower of St. Catherine’s

































Views of Brielle from the tower of St. Catherine’s Church.
















Stained glass window shows the Sea Beggars on the water.
































“In the Name of Orange!” This stained glass window at the Church of St. Catherine’s in Brielle depicts the battle of the Sea Beggars against the Spanish army in 1572.

























William of Orange and his wife Charlotte van Bourbon
















A street in Brielle





The Delta Works


From Brielle we headed south-west across the island of Voorne-Putten and towards the famous water works along the North Sea coast. The Delta Works are a series of constructions built between 1950 and 1997 along the Zeeland coast to protect a large area of land around the Rhine-Maas-Scheldt delta from the sea. The works consist of dams, sluices, locks, dikes levies and storm surge barriers, designed to shorten the Dutch coastline, thus reducing the overall number of necessary dikes. The Works have been declared one of the seven wonders of the modern world by the American Society of Civil Engineers. The map below, with the principal dams marked in blue, gives an idea of the dimensions of the project:






















Map of the islands of Zeeland and the Delta Works





































The Oosterscheldekering in the Delta Works
















Bert’s photo of the Oosterscheldekering in 1950’s postcard coloring
























The coast of Zeeland on the North Sea, very beautiful, tranquil and melancholic.
































The new windmills of the Netherlands




After crossing the Oosterschelderkering, we were on the Beveland islands. The western-most part of the island of Zuid Beveland was always known as Walcheren, and on it are the two great cities of Middelburg and Vlissingen. South Beveland and Walcheren are one island now, and they were joined to the mainland by a railway embankment in 1903, as North Beveland was joined to South Beveland by the Delta Works. In short order, we had crossed Middelburg and proceeded to the old port of Vlissingen, known by the British as Flushing: the object of the Walcheren campaign of 1809.




The Walcheren Campaign




The Walcheren Campaign was an unsuccessful British expedition to the Netherlands in 1809, intended to open another front in the Austrian Empire’s struggle against France during the war of the Fifth Coalition against Napoleon. This "formidable expedition," as it was described at the time, consisted of 40,000 men, 15,000 horses together with field artillery and two siege trains, 39 ships of the line, 36 frigates, gunboats, ‘bomb-vessels’ and other craft, which crossed the North Sea and landed at Walcheren on July 30, 1809. The objective was to first take Flushing and then destroy the French ships, arsenals and dockyards at Antwerp. It was the largest British expedition of that year, larger than the army serving in the Peninsular War in Portugal. The Walcheren Campaign involved little fighting, but heavy losses were sustained from the sickness popularly dubbed "Walcheren Fever," which is a form of malaria. Over 4,000 British troops died (only 106 in combat) and the rest withdrew on 9 December 1809.



The object of the expedition was to destroy the French fleet, which the Allies thought to be moored at the port of Flushing, and then proceed to Antwerp. It was also meant to be a diversion for the Austrians who were directly under attack by Napoleon’s armies. However, before the Walcheren expedition had gotten under way the Austrians had already been badly defeated at the battle of Wagram. Nevertheless the campaign proceeded, hoping to capture Flushing and at least neutralize Antwerp. The British army was commanded by the elder brother of the Prime Minister, John Pitt, second Earl of Chatham, and the navy by Sir Richard Strahan. In order to surround the port of Flushing, the army landed on Walcheren and marched inland. 18.000 British troops were unloaded in Flushing harbor on July 31. But no sooner had the British seized the two islands of Walcheren and South Beveland, marshy and swampy territory infested with mosquitoes, an epidemic of malaria broke out among the troops. Within a month of seizing the island there were over eight thousand cases.



By August 15, 1809, the British had captured the port of Vlissingen (Flushing) and the city of Middelburg, as well as the surrounding country. But this success had the effect of pushing the French army under Bernadotte south to Antwerp, which was reinforced and made impregnable. Thus, with its main goal out of reach, the British expedition was called off early in September. Around 12,000 troops stayed on Walcheren, but by October only 5,500 remained fit for duty. The British had spent almost £8 million on the campaign. Along with the 4,066 men that died during the campaign, 11,513 officers and men were still ill by February 1810 and many others remained permanently weakened. In London, the expedition was compared to that of the Duke of York in Flanders, ten years earlier and equally unsuccessful, which was pilloried by the famous rhyme:




The grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men.He marched them up the hill, and thenHe marched them down again.And when they were up, they were up.And when they were down, they were down.
And when they were only halfway up,They were neither up nor down.




Benjamin Harris one of the soldiers with a Rifle Brigade in the British lines, sailed to South Beveland and wrote of his experiences (from Recollections of Rifleman Harris 1848):

“...A fair wind soon carried us off Flushing, where one part of the expedition disembarked; the other made for South Beveland, among which latter I myself was. The five companies of Rifles immediately occupied a very pretty village, with rows of trees on either side of its principal streets, where we had plenty of leisure to listen to the cannonading going on amongst the companies we had left at Flushing. The appearance of the country (such as it was) was extremely pleasant, and for a few days the men enjoyed themselves much.

But at the expiration of (I think) less time than a week, an awful visitation came suddenly upon us. The first I observed of it was one day as I sat in my billet, when I beheld whole parties of our Riflemen in the street shaking with a sort of ague, to such a degree that they could hardly walk; strong and fine young men who had been but a short time in the service seemed suddenly reduced in strength to infants, unable to stand upright—so great a shaking had seized upon their whole bodies from head to heel. The company I belonged to was quartered in a barn, and I quickly perceived that hardly a man there had stomach for the bread that was served out to him, or even to taste his grog, although each man had an allowance of half-a-pint of gin per day. In fact I should say that about three weeks from the day we landed, I and two others were the only individuals who could stand upon our legs. They lay groaning in rows in the barn, amongst the heaps of lumpy black bread they were unable to eat.

This awful spectacle considerably alarmed the officers, who were also many of them attacked. The naval doctors came on shore to assist the regimental surgeons, who, indeed, had more upon their hands than they could manage; Dr. Ridgeway of the Rifles, and his assistant, having nearly five hundred patients prostrate at the same moment. In short, except myself and three or four others, the whole concern was completely floored.”

















Oxfordshire Light Infantry Regiment, 2nd Battalion, present at Walcheren












Vlissingen

We arrived at Vlissingen at noon. The Dutch character of the port-city is not much in evidence initially, as the town was bombed during the Second World War, and much of it has been rebuilt in modern styles. At the port, there is a monument to the great Dutch naval hero of the eighteenth century, Admiral De Ruyter, who was born in Vlissingen in 1607. There are a few older structures and gables in the old part of town. We did not linger there, however.




















Monument to Admiral De Ruyter (1607-1676) in Vlissingen






















Battle Council on the Zeven Provinziën, June 10, 1666, presided by Admiral De Ruyter, during the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665-67) Wilhelm van de Velde (1666)


Middelburg


Middelburg was our last stop, after which we made our way back to Sassenheim. The city of Middelburg still has the character of an old medieval Flemish town. It was during the Middle Ages that it acquired its wealth, as a center of trade between England and the cities of Flanders. It then became a headquarters for the Dutch East India Company during the Golden of Age of the Dutch Empire. On May 17, 1940, the city was heavily damaged by German bombardment, which forced the surrender of the Dutch armies in Zeeland. The city was re-built after the war, including the vast Gothic Abbey and the Town Hall (Stadhuis).

The Abbey of Our Lady is a vast complex of Late Gothic buildings, arranged around vast courtyards and with smaller cloister gardens surrounded by arched windows and graceful steeples. Onze Lieve Vrouwe Abdij, the Abbey of Our Lady complex, was built by the Counts of Flanders between 1509 and 1512, and it attests to the great wealth of the region before the period of the religious wars.



















































Three views of the great complex of the Abbey of Our Lady in Middelburg





The most interesting structure in the city, however, is the Stadhuis (Town Hall). It is one of the most beautiful Gothic secular buildings in Europe, built between 1452 and 1458 by members of a local wealthy merchant family, the Keldermans, before Flanders fell in the hands of the Habsburgs. The building is a wealth of Gothic decoration and detail. Additions in neo-classical style were made in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.




















During the war, the Town Hall was very badly damaged (left), but it was completely rebuilt after the war in the original style. On the façade are the figures of the Counts and Countesses of Zeeland and Holland under canopies surmounted by fabulous animals.

























































Three views of the Middelburg Town Hall



















Flemish aristocrats, Counts and Countesses of Holland and Zeeland, along the façade of the Town Hall in Middelburg


















Gargoyle on the façade of the Middelburg Town Hall








A vast square in front of the Town House was busy with people heading home from work or stopping off to drink some beer or have mussels and chips in the many restaurants and cafes that line the streets. There is an air of Belgium to this city, reminiscent of the Grote Markt in Brussels or the squares of Bruges and Antwerp, nearby to the south. The most beautiful women, the waitresses in their peasant outfits, the liveliness, the laughter, all rather removed and remote from the character of the Protestant north, from the grim austerity of Haarlem, for example. At about seven in the evening, still in clear daylight, we departed from Middleburg and put an end to our successful expedition.





Seven o’clock p.m., on the tower of the Middelburg Town Hall, July 22, 2010.