The Sea Beggars (5 page)

“Traitor,” Albert cried. “Spaniard!” With a swirl of his robes he stalked out of the council chamber.

The gathering stirred, as men turned to watch him go, and some even got to their feet to follow. Mies van Cleef stood facing the Prince still, his face grim and his back to where Albert had been. Many men shifted in their places and muttered and moved, but no one followed Albert out the door and the Prince took heart from this.

He said, “Your point is very well taken, Mijnheer van Cleef. I hope your son is well now.”

Van Cleef's head bobbed briefly in a kind of courtesy.

“Let us work together, then,” the Prince said, “to find some way to protect our young men from one another.”

Another man rose in the crowd behind Mies van Cleef. “Did you wish that, your Highness, you ought not to have allowed the Catholics to go ahead with their procession on Assumption Day.”

A growl went up from twenty throats, agreeing. The Prince put his hands down on the veined marble top of the table.

“I had in mind the old adage that to keep the peace it serves best to act peacefully.”

“We are not at peace,” said Mies van Cleef.

“You think the city on the verge of strife?”

Half a dozen men called, “Yes, yes—”

“Then should we not put armed men around the streets, to keep order? Will you help me keep order here?” The Prince ran his gaze from face to face. “They will listen to you—the respected and powerful men of their own faith.”

Neatly trapped, none of them said anything. Mies van Cleef sat down again. The man who had spoken against the Assumption procession stayed on his feet, and the Prince nodded to him.

“You, Master Clement, your services are uniquely necessary to this task before us.”

“You know me,” said Clement de Vere, looking startled.

The Prince smiled at him, and in a mild voice said, “I know you all.”

He looked each one in the face again, to let them feel this, that they could not escape from him in anonymity. Mies van Cleef grunted and crossed his legs, one over the other.

“Master Clement is a printer,” said the Prince. “The finest Protestant printer in Antwerp, and we shall have great need of his presses to keep the people aware of what is happening and of what is expected of them. We shall also need guards, watchmen for the city's safety. Can I rely on you? Will each of you arm yourself and undertake to give time—much time, I am afraid, knowing you all to be busy men—to keep the peace in Antwerp? To preserve Antwerp from destruction?”

Their faces were blank. They were thinking about it. Still no one had walked out. He leaned forward, ready with his most weighty argument.

“Destruction it will be, if Antwerp should rise as other cities are rising. Heavy blows will call forth heavier yet, from the Spanish monarchy—and they say that even now the King has ordered the tercios of Italy to prepare to march north under the leadership of the Duke of Alva.”

“Alva.”

That name struck them. They straightened, their faces tight with new apprehension. Mies van Cleef uncrossed his legs. Did he see his only son battling with sticks and stones against the greatest warrior in Christendom?

“Will you help me?” said the Prince of Orange.

“I will,” said Mies van Cleef, and rose, the first of all, and came forward to shake the Prince's hand.

Dressed like a doll in glittering clothes, a jeweled crown on her head, the little black image of the Virgin rode in her car at the head of the Assumption Day procession down the crowded streets of Antwerp. Hanneke watched her from the steps of the Guildhall, where standing higher than the people before her she could see over their heads. She had never seen the famous Antwerp Virgin before. It was smaller than she had supposed. Why was it black? Very old, it was, and silly in its fancy clothes. Priests pulled the car along, and other priests scattered incense before and after it. Troops of boys in white, with candles, sang in the car's wake. After them came scores of common people, praying, scourging themselves, some walking on their hands and knees, doing penance for their sins.

Hanneke bit her lip. Something in this reached even into her Calvinist heart, some ancient longing. The crowd before her stirred; the image was passing directly before them now.

“Mollykin, Mollykin,” someone called, in Dutch. “You are taking your last walk.”

Laughter in the crowd. The priests ignored it, hauling the car along with ropes over their shoulders. It seemed heavy, although the figure itself was no bigger than a baby and even the jeweled clothes could not weigh so much. Now the singing boys were going by, their candles held upright before them. Too young for discipline, they slid their gazes toward the crowd and some hurried their pace, running into the ones ahead of them. Frightened.

Now here came the penitents, and these suffered much for their faith. The crowd pelted them with rotten fruit and clods of earth and shouted curses and jibes at them. Hanneke slipped down from her vantage point and went away.

She had to be back at once, before she was discovered gone. Yet she longed to stay out here in the city. The excitement in the crowd charged her with vitality. Something great was happening here, an undercurrent of passion, of rising intensity, that she felt along all her nerves, a giddy expectation. As she went through the streets she looked curiously at the faces she passed. Into the shops and doorways. There seemed many more people than usual out in the street. She stopped on a corner, to look around her, and a boy thrust a broadside into her hand.

“I have no money—”

He was already running off. She looked down at the long heavy sheet of paper.

WAR!
the top row of print read.
WAR! WAR! WAR!

That raised every hair on her head stiff as wire. Her gaze flew down the page.

There was an army coming—two armies. A swarm of Beggars out of the west country was hurrying toward Antwerp; an army of Catholics pursued them, much outnumbering them. Her heart galloped. Folding the broadside into quarters, she stuffed it under her apron sash and went on through the streets to her home.

“Lackey!” Jan shouted. “Traitor! Spaniard!”

Mies clenched his teeth; he fought the urge to strike at his son's red contorted face. “Sit down. You'll hurt your leg.”

“My leg is perfectly well!” To prove it Jan walked in a little circle around the room. “How could you do this, Father? The fate of the whole world hangs in the balance—”

“The fate of the world,” Mies said heavily, and sat down in his chair. He leaned on the arm, looking around him at the shelves of books, and wondered again where Hanneke was. Always she was here when he came back, like a piece of the furniture, waiting for him. His son stormed across the room to face him again.

“The time has come to choose, Father—to choose between God and truth and all the evils of the past. You can't just say it's too dangerous. You can't really mean to put the factories and the piles of cloth and the money before God.”

Mies shifted in the chair, his fingers tight around the ridged wooden arm, his gaze not meeting Jan's. He said, “I see no sign that God is asking such a choice of me.” Mercilessly he refused to hear the inner voice that whispered Jan was right.

“Jan!” His wife appeared in the doorway. “My dear husband. What is this unseemly shouting? I am sure you can be heard even in the street.”

“Where is Hanneke?” Mies asked her.

“God is calling us,” Jan said, bending forward, his hands curling before him into fists, “to join the army of Christ. If we turn our backs now—”

“Jan,” his mother said. “You must not speak to your father in that tone.”

“He's a traitor!” Jan roared, and stalked away across the room. Indeed his leg seemed much sounder, although he still limped.

Mies said, “We must preserve Antwerp. Thousands of people depend on us—” Hollow these arguments, meaningless even to him; the only meaningful one the one he could hardly find expression for: his abhorrence of disorder, his vision of the world dissolving into chaos in the acids of hatred and intolerance. Downstairs the door to the street opened and shut.

“You should be in bed,” his wife was saying reproachfully to her son. “Your leg is still so sore and swollen—”

“Mama, I'm fine,” the boy bellowed, and wheeled on Mies again, his eyes shining, his cheeks streaked with tears. “You will not join us? You will not answer God's call?”

“God's call,” Mies said, “is for harmony and peace. Not for—”

“Spaniard!” Jan jerked back his head and flung it forward, and through his pursed lips flew a gout of spit that sailed across the space between them and struck Mies on the cheek.

His mother screamed. Mies gripped the arm of his chair, stiff with rage, his ears roaring, his mind at a white boil. Before him stood his son, weeping.

“Father!” Hanneke rushed into the room and sank down beside his chair. “How dare you?” she shouted at Jan.

“Do you know what he's done?” Jan said to her. “He's joined the Spaniards! He's taking arms against God—fallen in with the Prince of Orange and the Governess, the tools of this world—”

Mies sprang up from his chair, swiped at his cheek, and shouted, “Go! Get out—get away from me, you Godless impious wretched son, you ungrateful devil!”

“You've made your choice, Father.” Jan walked toward the door.

His mother threw herself on him, seized his arm, crying, “Wait! Wait!”

“Let go of him,” Mies shouted. “You saw what he did—how he treats his own father. Let him go, Griet!”

Jan was struggling to reach the door; his mother clung to him with all her strength, and he had to drag her weight along with him. Hanneke caught Mies' hand and pressed it to her cheek.

“Father, please—where will he go? Father, please.”

Mies lowered his suspicious gaze to her. “Where were you?”

“I—”

She lost her breath, but in the red flames that suddenly kindled in her cheeks, in her lowered eyes, he saw what he dreaded to see, that she too disobeyed him, that she too broke from the order of the household and did what must not be done. He thrust her away.

“God is coming,” he said. He went to the window, to the light and air, his back to his family. “And He will find impious sons and bold unruly daughters, and all system fallen away.” He put his trembling hands on the windowsill and leaned his weight on them. Unaccountably his own eyes burned with tears. He shifted his body, finding himself fearful of resting on the window frame, as if weakened by the weakness of its inhabitants the house itself would not hold up its master's weight. Behind him a door slammed. His wife burst into uncontrollable weeping. His daughter sank into a chair and began to pray.

In Antwerp all normal life stopped. The Prince of Orange and his recruits patrolled the streets, hoping to keep order by their presence and example, but in the crackling heat of an August night, with phantom armies approaching on every wind of rumor and the wretched poor turned out idle on every corner, a mob of folk shouting that Christ was coming burst into the great cathedral and tore the holy images from the walls, broke the altar, chopped open the shrine of the Virgin with an ax, and hacked the little black doll to pieces. They stole her precious clothes and the outfittings of the altar and tried to set fire to the cathedral itself, although the massive building withstood the feeble torches without a lasting mark. Then the mob ran through the streets of the city, shouting their visions of the coming of Christ and throwing pieces of the broken icons into Catholic gardens, and went to attack a monastery next.

The Prince got there first, with a few of his helpers, and they stood between the screaming Calvinists and the monks huddling and praying in the chapel, and by calm words and the power of command the Prince got the crowd going elsewhere.

Among those who stood beside him that night was Mies van Cleef, the cloth merchant, who searched the crowd with his eyes and yet seemed afraid of seeing something there.

That night passed, and the next, and the next, with no more incidents, although sometimes in the night huge crowds gathered, some Calvinist, some Catholic, and prayed and heard preaching and made loud talk in the streets. Everyone knew an army was marching toward Antwerp, the Beggar army, with a horde of harassing and tormenting Catholics at its back.

On the day when the Beggar army first came in sight of the city walls a mass of Calvinists gathered at the gate, all armed with pitchforks and clubs and pieces of stone torn up from the street pavings, prepared to go out and join them. The Prince went to put himself between them and the gate and ordered them home.

“You must not leave the city,” he shouted, trying to lift his voice above their clamorings. “You'll be destroyed. The Governess's army is twice as many as the Beggars and you combined. They are mounted, heavily armed, well led; the Beggars are a rabble. Stay here—do not destroy yourselves.”

Then came what he most dreaded, a messenger from the Beggars, asking him to open the gates of Antwerp to them, to give them refuge. From atop the wall beside the gate, the Prince of Orange looked down at the exhausted messenger, riding bareback on a farm horse, and told him no.

“You must let us in,” the messenger called, in a voice flat with fatigue and hopelessness. “They are eating us alive. We need shelter—food—we've come so far—”

“I cannot give Antwerp to you,” said the Prince. “We must preserve something of our country in the face of this madness.”

“You are our only hope.”

“Then you have no hope. Go; I cannot help you. None here can help you, but only Christ our Lord. Go, before you are pinned against these walls and slaughtered.”

“Go where?” the messenger cried.

“Go home.”

“We have no home.” The messenger reined his limping plow horse away and rode off down the slope.