The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (50 page)

It was harder and harder to know who could
be trusted, and it would get worse.

Nobody went home after Vespers. The crowd
stayed around the Cathedral of Our Lady. The city guard came to move them on, but more
and more people kept arriving and standing and waiting. Most of them wanted to see
something break the tension in the city like rain does in a thunderstorm. Some of them
wanted to make something happen. They carried axes, heavy hammers, ropes and ladders,
pulleys and levers.

20 August 1566, in Antwerp. Two days before,
the statue of the Virgin Mary was booed in the streets and pelted with rubbish, but the
statue got back safely to the cathedral. One day before, a crowd had come to jeer at the
statue as it stood in its proper place. On 20 August things got worse, as everyone
expected.
³⁸

A few street girls clambered onto the altars
and brought down wax tapers, which they lit so everyone could see. The men went to work.
They found all the painted images, wood or canvas, and tore them down from the walls and
cut them up. They hooked down the statues and images, saints and martyrs slammed on the
floor and cracked open. They broke the bright painted glass in the windows. First there
was the dry sound of breaking glass, incident by incident, and then a sound like some
great factory: axe-blows and hammering. Every image was brought as close to dust as the
men could manage.

After the cathedral they moved on, chapel
after chapel, thirty churches in all before dawn. The crowd ran howling alongside
through the streets, torches flaring. They broke into sacristies and tried on the heavy
silk robes of the priests, downed wine from gold chalices, burned missals and shined
their shoes with holy oil. They burned monastery libraries and broached the barrels in
the cellars; monks and nuns went scrambling in panic.

At the end of the night nobody was hurt.
Nothing was stolen. A
few works of art did
survive. But everything else was broken, not just the magnificence of the cathedral but
the possibility of any civic peace between factions. No harm was done to town halls, so
the issue was not taxes, nor to any official or military building, so the point of the
mob’s fury was not the ruling Hapsburgs. A war was starting, and for the next
eighty years the frontier ran between Calvinist and Catholic, Dutch and Spanish, in the
Netherlands.

It was a campaign of sieges which made whole
cities change sides one year and then change back the next, going hungry in the
meantime: a war of attrition broken by moments of horror. Antwerp suffered in a dozen
ways, its markets disrupted, its trust spoiled, its stock of silver exhausted by 1575 by
taxes raised to pay for the war. The system in the Bourse was ruined. Exchange rates
went wild. City creditors went bust. Everyone was paid late, if at all, and everyone
borrowed what he could at higher and higher rates of interest. Nobody could assume the
good credit or even the good intentions of the other men at the Bourse; everyone had to
pay attention all the time to individual merchants and the amounts they wanted to trade.
The market was just that bit more abstract, more dependent on a subtle kind of
information: more minute by minute, more modern.

There was worse. The royal finances were
frozen shut and the army went unpaid. The starving veterans of that army turned on their
paymasters. They came into Antwerp for three long days of killing, stealing, raping,
burning down some six hundred houses and the glorious new Town Hall with all its
archives. They also demanded ransom from the merchants left in the city, unsettling the
few English merchants left there by using ‘naked swords and daggers’ to get
money from the head of the English House, the headquarters of the Merchant Adventurers;
naturally, being an Antwerp veteran himself, he paid partly in promissory bills rather
than cash.
³⁹
The Bourse, that elegant palace for playing with money, insurance,
shares, was invaded by soldiers dressed in velvet and satin stolen from merchant
wardrobes who set out tables to play their own games with dice.

Merchants hate to be parodied almost more
than they hate to be threatened or robbed; many left. They went north to get away from
the warzone, and they were right to do so since it would be almost
twenty years before Antwerp began to recover,
⁴⁰
and
in the meantime even the river worked against them, filling with silt. There were
blockades by the Dutch, one more siege by the Spanish, a purge of all Calvinist
citizens, who had to get out at once. Those refugees treasured their anger against the
Spanish, against a regime that defined them by denomination, and they defined themselves
by anti-Catholic feeling: Protestant and right.

They took with them a new and strong idea of
what they needed to know to do business: information as the richest commodity of all.
They carried ideas about deals, about taking shares in a ship or an insurance, about
arbitrage between markets, about how paper could be almost more valuable than freight,
and how the world could be written down, bought and sold. They knew how to deal in the
future because the Antwerp wool trade had instant deals on future supplies even before
the same kind of futures market opened in Amsterdam (where it balanced the value of fish
going north with the likely value of grain being shipped south from the Baltic). They
carried to the Protestant north most of the equipment needed for what we would come to
know, after a while, as capitalism.

This great shaking of markets confused
matters for centuries, made capitalism seem somehow Protestant by nature. Yet the
Antwerp markets spoke Italian, were driven by the need to raise money for a Spanish
overlord, did business constantly with the Portuguese and every other Catholic power.
Capitalism came out of circumstances long before the divide over theology complicated
the picture.

Catholics cannot try to look all moral and
innocent. Protestants need not be unduly proud. As trade expanded and more money had to
be found for bigger ships and bigger loads, as ambition crashed through frontiers,
capitalism was happening anyway. It depended on, and it brought along, a world expressed
in numbers, not images or legends or metaphors, in which mathematics had the power to
change reality; and an industry of information long before our kind of newspapers,
websites or broadcasts. It was making us modern.

There were a dozen reasons for going north.
The war was very rarely fought as far north as Leiden, let alone Amsterdam: and a bit of
order
is always welcome when you have a
living to make. Artists who could no longer make a living went north with all their
ideas alongside Calvinists who could not tolerate being forcibly led astray by Spanish
bullies, Catholics who had seen everything holy torn apart in a single night, merchants
who might find everything changed day to day in their home port depending on the
progress of the war. Those merchants had long memories; in 1621 they formed the West
Indies Company with the special purpose of revenge on the Spanish in the Caribbean, a
company with two sets of books, one for trade and one for war.

Simon Stevin went north and enrolled in
Leiden University: a taxman from Bruges, one-time cashier in a merchant house, the kind
of man who might usually have gone south to university at Louvain, where Erasmus once
studied. Louvain was distinguished enough for him and practical enough; its mathematics
had to do with surveying, and Jesuits took an interest in architecture and military
science. And Stevin always thought of himself as a southerner; book after book, the
title page calls him ‘Simon Stevin of Bruges’ even when he was in the
service of the
stadhouder
of the north. Still, he did go north and he left
behind his connections.
⁴¹

He was the natural child of Cathelyne van
der Poort, whose own connections were mostly in bed, and Anthonis Stevin, who was a
bolter and leaves few traces on any records except when his sister pays up to protect
his inheritance, ‘her brother having been a long time out of the country without
having any news from him’. Simon was raised with Cathelyne’s other children,
whose father was the grand burgomaster, alderman and magistrate Noel de Caron, a strict
Calvinist in most other ways. He also had the protection of the one man Cathelyne did
remember to marry, the merchant Joost Sayon, who made silk at the sign of ‘the
French Arms’.

Stevin was perhaps a teacher and then, as he
wrote himself, ‘well-versed in mercantile book-keeping and being a cashier; and
later on in the matter of finance’. His business years were in Antwerp: if he
didn’t work for some partnership with offices in Venice, Augsburg, London, Cologne
and Antwerp, he was certainly familiar with how such an office worked. He saw how one of
the partners never did
keep proper records,
which meant he had to accept what the other partners decided.

At twenty-eight, which is not so very late
for the time, he was officially declared an adult and not a dependent orphan any more;
was staked some money by relatives; and went to work for the financial administration in
Bruges, a settled job in an insecure world. That was 1577; the Calvinists were still in
power four years later when he left for the new and deeply Protestant university at
Leiden. He moved far too early to be a religious refugee. Most likely, he moved for
ambition, away from the disorder and uncertainty of the south.

Even before he registered as a student at
Leiden in 1583, he was putting out books: the southerner teaching business to the north.
He produced a book on double-entry book-keeping, the system that balances out what you
spend and what you have and get, which was not familiar but not unknown in the north. He
also produced a little book on working out how much interest is to be paid on borrowed
money. He knew how subversive he was being by publishing that information; ‘such
tables are to be found in writing with some people,’ he wrote in the preface,
‘but they remain hidden as great secrets with those who have got them and they
cannot be obtained without great expense.’

He had started his revolution: making
mathematics work in the everyday world.

Refugees went both ways: running out of
Flanders for safety and advancement, but also running there for refuge and work. Richard
Verstegan left England because he was in danger of being hanged, and in Antwerp he set
up as a kind of dealer in a new kind of commodity: information. He wrote books, made
brilliantly gruesome propaganda for his Catholic cause, wrote for the news sheets; he
was one of the first newspaper humorists. He also worked on the hidden side of his
business. In his coded letters and reports Richard Verstegan became ‘181’: a
spy.
⁴²

Information was already something to buy,
sell and trade across the sea, like cloth or salt or wheat or silver; a necessity with a
cash value. It could be hoarded like a treasure, or put about ostentatiously;
it could be secret knowledge of amazing
alchemical transformations, smuggled very discreetly by couriers from court to court, or
the boastful stories of battle and triumph in the new public news sheets. It could get
you a living or get you hanged.

Printing put information in books, and sent
it everywhere, but information also travelled in secret letters and open letters, in
maps of newly explored countries, specimens of fruits and cuttings from unfamiliar
plants, even the bones of strange animals. Letters were work in progress, long-distance
discussions across the sea: the conversation of the times.

The idea of a ‘fact’ was
beginning to move out from courts of law into the world. Judges were used to hearing
witnesses who said what they did or what they saw or what they knew, and coming on that
basis to an official kind of truth about what happened, and why. A ‘fact’ is
a ‘factum’ – an event, something that has been done.
⁴³
Outside the law,
truth rested on authority: the great book, the great power, the Church’s teaching.
Now the idea of the ‘fact’ began to corrode that notion of truth. It would
soon affect the natural sciences: Francis Bacon famously told his readers to put away
ancient books, and then to make their words as simple as stones piled up for building, a
clear, functional account of solid things. For a world used to studying the great
theories of Aristotle, the nature of the spheres of heaven, Bacon prescribed something
different: all things ‘numbered, weighed, measured and determined’.
Everything had to be tested. The instincts of Robert Grosseteste were becoming
seventeenth-century practice.

Facts began to appear in news sheets, the
pictures of battles so carefully drawn they turned the reader into a witness. When
Verstegan wrote about his Catholic martyrs, he also showed pictures of them so the
reader would be convinced. Facts had a money value which allowed Verstegan to work in
various markets, including the black.

He had the right unsettled background for a
spy: his family improvised their lives, running from wars in the Rhineland, remaking
their lives across the sea in England, slipping social class and clambering back again.
They knew how to play at belonging. Young Richard even seemed likely for a while to slip
away from the Catholic Church.
He worked his
way through Oxford as servant to Thomas Bernard, a hardline Protestant; he was around
men who talked about things like ‘predestination’. He must have known how
convenient it would be to turn Protestant and be eligible to be a soldier, a lawyer, to
hold a government job or even be a priest; but being Catholic had its own glamour for
rebellious undergraduates. It was the risky, radical position. It showed deep doubts
about the Church of England, and the whole reordering of the state under Queen
Elizabeth; it was a chance to claim a certain purity of mind. So instead of bending,
Verstegan left the university ‘to avoid oaths’ of loyalty.