Mengele by David G. Marwell

 

Given Mengele’s ambition, his pursuit of his Habilitation , and his patronage from  Baron Otmar von Verschuer*,  it is clear he pursued his science not as some renegade propelled solely by evil and bizarre impulses but rather in a manner that his mentors and his peers could judge as meeting the highest standards ( and takwe advantage of unique ‘experimental opportunities’ for them.) Historian Massin writes, ‘Mengele is sometimes portrayed as the embodiment of the pseudoscientific SS physician, who, in complete isolation, carries out  his abstruse experiments. In fact, Mengele was very tightly connected to the scientific community.’ For this reason, he sought to ‘recruit’ the very best practitioners from the inmate population and kept, reportedly, comprehensive records of his scientific work. For the same reason, it is difficult to accept testimony about some of his experiments and their rationale, such as claims that Mengele attempted to create a Siamese twin by ‘sewing together’ two twins, or that he sought to ‘make boys into girls and girls into boys’ through ‘cross transfusions,’ or even connected the urinary tract of a 7-year-old girl to her own colon.’

The notion of Mengele as unhinged, driven by demons, and indulging grotesque and sadistic impulses should be replaced by something even more unsettling. Mengele was, in fact, in the scientific vanguard, enjoying the confidence and mentorship of the leaders in his field. The science he pursed in Auschwitz, to the extent that we can reconstruct it, was not anomalous but rather consistent with research carried out by others in what was considered a scientific establishment. That research was criminal –and monstrous – because of the absence of all barriers that ordinarily contain and regulate the temptations and ambitions that can push scientific research across ethical boundaries. Relegating Mengele and his research to the ranks of the anomalous and bizarre is perhaps more palatable than understanding that he was a product – and promise- of a much larger system of thought and practice. It is easier to dismiss an individual monster than recognize the monstrous that can emerge from otherwise respected and enshrined institutions. . .

A totem of regrettable inaction, unanswered-for crimes, and unfinished business, Mengele robbed both his victims and his pursuers of their day in court.

But shortly before his death, Mengele did have a sort of confrontation that so many had hoped for: with his son, Rolf, who pressed his father for answers about what he ha done. AS an adult, Rolf Mengele came face to face with his father only when he was thirty-three years old, the same age his father had been in the summer of 1944. The 1977 visit had been long planned, and it came after Mengele had suffered a stroke. It would be their first and likely last chance to meet as father and son and man to man.

Although Rolf had met Josef Mengele before, when he was twelve, Mengele had been known to him then as his entertaining and dashing ‘Uncle Fritz’ visiting from South America and not as his father, who – he thought – had been killed during the war. Not until the time of the Eichmann trial, when the name Mengele began to appear in the press, did his step father reveal to him the real identity of Uncle Fritz. It was a double shock. He learned that is father was not only alive but was charged with horrific crimes.

When Mengele learned that Rolf had been informed of his true identity, he wrote in his diary:

It is painful that I do not even have the faintest idea of R.s reaction to the ‘Enlightenment’  . . . If I imagine the middle-class and pseudo-cosmopolitan world in which my growing son now has to live, then I am dizzy at the thought of ‘Enlightenment’ at this time.

Rolf’s family told him that the accusations that his father was a murderer was not true. As he later explained to Gerald Posner, ‘It was not murder in the sense of murdering with his own hand personally . . .they just said to me that he was a cog in the system, in the machinery, and this time – I was 15, 16 – I accepted it.’ But of course the revelation took its toll on the young Rolf, who began an awkward correspondence with the man he now knew as his father, receiving and sending letters from a to Mengele trough the elaborate cutout system that Sedmeirer had devised with Mengele’s protectors in Brazil.

I got letters from him, and my mother forced me to answer his letters. I didn’t like it. So I wrote to him in a sense you write to someone who is a prisoner. I just wrote him . . . as my mother told me, to help him. You must have these human feelings somehow . . .it was an obligation for me.

[Born in 1944, Rolf grew up in a Germany that was consumed with understanding the past and its impact on the generation that came of age after the war spawned its own literary genre – Vaterliterature. Rolf and his story played an unanticipated role in one exemplar of this highly personal category. Peter Schneider, the German writer, after reading the five-part series that appeared in Bunte magazine in the summer of 1985 featuring Rolf ad his relationship with his father, wrote a novel that so mirrored  the circumstances and language of the Bunte story that Schneider was taken to court for plagiarism. Although no names were revealed, it is  absolutely clear that the novel deals with Josef Mengele and Rolf. Schneider even used the same literary  approach tat Mengele used in his own autobiographical novel as a vehicle to examine  larger, more universal themes. Schneider’s novel, in turn, became the basis for a 2003 feature film starring Charlton Heston, in his final role, as Mengele, and Thomas Kretschmer  playing Rolf. The film, My Father, Rua Alguem 5555, also includes a character, played by F. Murray Abraham, who appears to be a composite of Gerald Posner and Marvin Hier.]

In their correspondence, Mengele claimed a role in his son’s life, offering comments on life events, correcting grammar, opining on family relationships, and  providing updates on his health and the complicated relationships he maintained with his Brazilian friends and protectors.. With only one side of the correspondence, it is difficult to assess the full complexity between Mengele and his son. A leitmotif in Mengele’s letters was certainly his frustration at Rolf’s inattention, and one can see, increasingly, that Rolf seemed to be most interested in engaging his father about the past. In the latter half of 1975, perhaps to broach the subject of the Nazi period, Rolf mentioned in a letter to his father the newly published book by Albert Speer, Spandau Diaries. Mengele responded that he’d read Speer’s first book, Inside the  Third Reich, the year before, and launched with some bitterness into a critical review:

Concerning his memoirs, I’d like to say that it’s a pity that so little of the greatness of the time has stayed in the memory of a man who was allowed to play in the game in such a preferred position . . .

 

He made his contribution as an opportunistic technocrat, which is how he describes himself, but he gives a totally insufficient, at times, half-true and mostly falsified description of the epoch, which can be compared with that of Alexander the Great, Charles XII of Sweden, Fredrick the Great or Napoleon. . .

He takes on guilt which at times he isn’t even accused of, and then he believes, or so he hopes, that this can be amended by sitting in a prison for a few years, now that his head has been pulled out of the noose. But such ‘admissions of guilt’ should lead normally to different consequences. To be a ‘Schinkel’ of one’s times, one also simply needs  the qualities of a great artist and not just technical knowhow.

Mengele’s letters included long discussions into politics, history, economics, science, and occasionally – and carefully – his own experience, with no expression of remorse. . .

 

After much planning and a postponement, Rolf boarded a Varig Airlines jet in Frankfurt departing for Rio de Janeiro on October 10, 1977. To make the trip Rolf used the passport of a friend, Wilfred Busse, who bore close resemblance to him. He had swiped the passport earlier in the year, never revealing to Busse that he had done so or the reason why. Rolf traveled with another friend, who carried Rolf’s real passport should the need for it arise and, leaving him in Ro ‘to find girls on Copacabana beach, ‘ flew on to Sao Paolo. Upon arrival, taking three taxis to throw off any surveillance, he made his way to the Bossert’s home. Mr. Bossert then drove him to his father’s place, located not too far away.


Mengele tried to explain Auschwitz politically and sociologically, claiming that when he came there, he ‘had to do his duty, to carry out orders. Everybody had to do so to survive . . .He was not a shirker.’

From his point of view, he is not personally responsible for the incidents there. He didn’t ‘invent’ Auschwitz. It already existed. He couldn’t help anyone. On the platform, for instance. What was he to do, when half-dead and infected people arrived? It was beyond imagination to describe the circumstances there. His job was to clarify only: ‘able to work’ and ‘unable to work.’ He tried to grade the people ‘able to work’ as often as possible. He thinks he saved the lives of thousands of people that way. He hasn’t order extermination and he is not responsible. Also the twins owe their lives to him. He never harmed anybody personally.

Rolf described his father as getting very excited, angry, and even crying, asking whether ‘I –his son believe in lies told in the newspapers?’ At this point the conversation ended. There was nothing to be gained for either father or son in continuing. Rolf would not get the answers he needed from his father. There would be no admission of guilt or responsibility. Mengele must have realized that his son could not be convinced  that his actions had been justified or even understandable. A tense standoff replaced the raised voices and raw emotion. Rolf summed up what he believed his father felt about the visit:

He was proud of his son, like a soldier after a successful reconnaissance patrol. After all he was his son; even if different, pigheaded and spoiled by the post-war propaganda and by the step-fatherly home and education. All that will settle down.

At last the son had found the right wife. Soon he’ll become a grandfather. That visit gave a fresh impetus and hope to him.


Reclaiming the calm and dispassionate mien of the letter writer, Mengele wrote to Rolf after the visit:

 

In the weeks following your departure, I kept asking myself whether I am happier or, to put it another way, whether I can die more easily . . .On the basis of my worldview and my specific profession, I attach, more than most, of course, special meaning to the terms offspring, inheritance, son. On the other hand, I understand, as well, the power of environment. If the laws of heredity can produce a significant difference in psycho-physical characteristics between father and son, this dissimilarity can be intensified by a completely different milieu, especially during the period of development. A man of my fate, especially, tens to hope too much for the fulfillment in his son of all that he had failed to do. That may range from the simplest details of life to great professional and public success. Against this – and in our own case drastically so – is the disruption (encouraged by the Zeitgeist) of the father’s experience of the son. Apart from the material security provided by my paternal inheritance, there is nothing significant in my life that could have a favorable influence on your relationship with me. Not because such . . achievements were lacking, but because they were pushed into into obscurity by a larger event, and you could not recognize them. Inherited qualities, as well as education and environmental influences, force you to view the content of my life incorrectly, if not intentionally negatively. In and of itself, this does not bother me all that much since, given the circumstances, I can understand it, but where it should have objectively or subjectively impeded your material or spiritual progress, it causes me a tormenting pain.

If, on one hand, I cannot hope for understanding and empathy from you, on the other hand, I am not moved in the slightest  to ‘justify’ or excuse any decisions, actions, or behavior in my life beyond the objective explanation. I have already expressed this to you and others in unmistakable words. If you have recognized – even to your amusement – our only ‘inherited’ similarity in ‘unconditionally defending our respective positions and ideas,’ that’s not much. But perhaps it is the reality. My tolerance really has a limit, and that is where my tolerance rally has a limit, and that is where unquestionably traditional values are concerned and where I fear threats to those close to me or to my volkische community.

Among the last written words of his life, Mengele was unrepentant to the end and expressed no remorse. His Weltanschauung, or world view, was little changed from that summer day when he stalked the ramp at Auschwitz- Birkenau.

* Head of the genetics division of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics – supported by the Rockefeller Foundation -and the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene at the University of Frankfurt

The Writer in the Neutral by Gustav Janouch

 

In May 1921, I wrote a sonnet which was published by Ludwig Winder in the Sunday supplement of Bohemia.

Kafka said on this occasion: ‘You describe the poet as a great and wonderful man whose feet are on the ground, while his head disappears in the clouds. Of course, that is a perfectly ordinary image drawn within the intellectual framework of lower-middle-class convention. It is an illusion based on wish fulfillment, which has nothing in common with reality. In fact, the poet is always much smaller and weaker than the social average. Therefore he feels the burden of earthly existence much more intensely and strongly than other men. For him personally his song is only a scream. Art for the artist is only suffering, through which he releases himself for further suffering. He is not a giant, but only a more or less brightly plumaged bird in the cage of his existence.’

“You too?’ I asked.

 

‘I am a quite impossible bird,’ says Franz Kafka. “I am a  jackdaw –a kavka. The coal merchant in the close of the Tein cathedral has one. Have you seen it?

‘Yes, it flies around outside his shop.’

 

“Yes my relative is better off than I am. It is true, of course, that his wings have been clipped. As for me, this was not in any case necessary, as my wings are atrophied. For this reason there are no heights or distances for me. I hop about bewildered among my fellow men. The regard me with deep suspicion. And indeed I am a dangerous bird, a thief, a jackdaw. But that is only an illusion. In fact, I lack all feeling for shiny objects. For that reason I do not even have glossy black plumage. I am gray, like ash. A jackdaw who longs to disappear between the stones. But this is only joking, so that you will not notice how badly things are going with me today.’

Supplement VI; The Neutral by Roland Barthes

The Sense of History by Myron P. Gilmore

 

By the eve of the Reformation the European world of learning had been supplied with editions and commentaries on the Old and New Testaments which represented the application to scripture of the humanistic techniques of criticism. Upon this achievement rested the hopes of a whole generation of elites for the purification and restoration of the Christian Church.

The common denominator between Greek and Hebrew scholarship was a new understanding of history. The development of a sense of perspective on the past, the ability to place oneself in time with respect to an age as a whole, the awareness of historic distance, all this  was a contribution build on the Christian heritage, which stressed the linear evolution in which the Incarnation was the most important event and the Last Judgment was the  goal towards which society was tending. But in spite of this historic element in Christian thought the Middle Ages had singularly lacked a sense of the reality of time. Countless representations of biblical; and classical scenes on manuscripts and portals testify to the fact that these distant events were thought to have happened only yesterday. The Flight to Egypt is the peasant family in the next village on their mule.

This tradition had a powerful hold on men’s minds and indeed in many ways was not completely shaken off until the triumph of historicism in the nineteenth century. No popular representation today of Imperial Rome or of the Old Testament Judea such as Hollywood has from time to time given us would be attempted without all the apparatus that archeology and history, fake or real, could supply. But down through the eighteenth century popular audiences were not bothered by the fact that Greeks of the Age of Pericles appeared in the costumes of Versailles. Yet the attainment of a sense of distance in time and space which is one kind of reality has been accomplished at the sacrifice of another kind of reality. Today the process goes so far that we feel self-conscious about trotting out characters dressed in historical costumes as if for a fancy  dress ball. Shakespeare in modern dress or St. Joan in modern talk may come with a greater shock of recognition.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century this sense of history, which was subsequently to triumph*, was only beginning  to manifest humanist thought. The tradition of the medieval chronicle continued in many forms. Whether such chronicles purported to give the history of a national group, a political entity, a city or a monastery, they began with the history of creation and pretended to universal scope Among the famous examples of this genre was the Nurnberg Chronicle of Hartmann von Schedel, published in 1493 and illustrated with woodcuts by Wohlgemut, the father-in-law of Durer. Mixed with the realistic portrayal of German cities were representations of biblical; events and wonderful prodigies. A work of this kind, still essentially medieval, exemplified the philosophy of history shared by the greatest number of the contemporaries of Columbus.

Side by side with these interpretations of the past, however, there appeared increasing numbers of direct personal accounts of contemporary episodes and experiences. The Memoirs of Commines remain perhaps the most famous example, but diaries such as those of Burchard, Infessura and Marino Sanudo belong in the same category. Personal, secular, limited to the life span of the individual, these accounts are at the opposite extreme from the world chronicle. To those who were connected with a more remote past they opened the possibilities of a more individualistic and realistic treatment of history.

In still another category was the formal humanist historiography modeled on ancient examples. The tradition which had begun in Italy with Bruni and Poggio was carried on in most of the Italian Courts. Rucellai wrote his History of the invasion of Charles VIII, which Erasmus thought worthy to be compared with Sallust and Polydore Vergil had begun as early as 1505 the collection of materials for his history of England which was finally published only in 1533. The chief contribution of the Italian school of humanists was to limit history to past politics and treat it as an autonomous area of study. The emphasis was on the pedagogic value of history and upon the belief that the record of the past was in reality philosophy teaching by example. In many of the most formal humanist histories the chief figures were described as personifications of abstract and traditional virtues and vices, and this approach was replaced only in the sixteenth century with the more realistic observation of the age of Machiavelli and Guicciardini. Divine intervention and prodigies of all sorts might still be allowed – and even in some cases recommended –but the thread of political action could be followed by the interpretation of human motives.

Works of this kind were bound to raise by implication the question how far man controlled his own history. What areas in the past could be understood in terms of a secular understanding of men’s behavior and so what could be learned from history? The question preoccupied the historical work of Machiavelli and Guicciardini and it frequently received a pessimistic answer. Yes in the long run these histories were written in the faith that men could learn from them. In the twenty-fifth chapter of The Prince Machiavelli considered how much fortune can do in  human affairs and how it might be opposed. He felt that

 

‘Fortune is the ruler of half our actions, but that she allows the other half or thereabouts to be governed by us . . .

I compare her to an impetuous river, that when the turbulent, inundates  the plains, cuts down trees and buildings, removes the earth from tis side and places it on the other, everyone flees before it and everything yields to its fury without being opposed to it, and yet though it is of such a kind, still when it is quiet men can make provision against it by dykes and banks, so that when it rises it will either go into a canal, or its rush will not be so wild and dangerous. So it is with fortune .  .  .’

If even the pessimistic Machiavelli could see that the study of the past might enable men to make this much provision for the future, the hopes of those who studied the distant classical and Christian pasts were still more comprehensive. Both antiquity and early Christianity were now seen as remote eras, but they could be known through the proper application of historical; techniques and the fruit of knowledge would be the restoration of piety and learning that lay at the roots of western civilization.





*Seems like a bit of  Post-World War Two optimism from the standpoint of 2022.

The New Broom by Jervis Wegg

Philip II was a ‘new broom’ to sweep out heresy and bent on the task but peace with his all enemies was essential before he could do more than take preliminary steps.  Just before his abdication in 1559 Charles V had taken further measures against heretics and in his farewell speech before the States and again in a codicil to his will just before his death, he pointed out the importance of stamping out heresy. Now his son was left to achieve that which his father had desired to accomplish. Philip hastened to reaffirm and reissue his father’s Placards dealing with heresy. But the Magistrates of Antwerp complained that the concessions granted to their town were being violated and pointed out that the Placard of 1550 had not been published in any of the four great towns of Brabant. Again,  however, war came to hamper the  persecution and Philip’s bankrupt condition made him dependent on the goodwill of his subjects.. In August 1556, however, the Placards dealing with the Anabaptists were republished in Antwerp in spite of protests. While Philip was in Antwerp in January 1556 five persons – two old men and three young girls- were arrested for infringing the Placards but obtained pardon on account of the King’s visit.

The religious truce reached at Augsburg in February 1555 was the cause of the  Netherlands being flooded with books on Luther’s doctrines. Many considered that the preaching of the chaplains who came with Lazaraus Swendi’s German mercenaries in 1555 and the liberty to live as Lutherans which was permitted to the German troops themselves, did much to strengthen  the growth of these doctrines in the town Also many Protestants came from England at Queen Mary’s accession and spread them further. It was, no doubt, to stem the wave of heresy that Philip, during his stay at Antwerp in 1556, gave permission to the Jesuit Fathers to establish themselves in the town. But a new teaching had by this time reached Antwerp, though few observedi t. It was one that moved the people  much more than the ‘damned teaching’ of Martin Luther or that of the ‘horrible sect’ of the Anabaptists, as two Catholic contemporaries called them, and was that of Calvin. It entered the Netherlands from France soon after the crushing of Ghent, and Antwerp gradually became its headquarters. Calvinism aimed at reforming the State, and on its appearance in the Netherlands the whole aspect of the Reformation changed, its aim being henceforth revolutionary. Its devotees were found mostly among the poorer class and and they sought political liberty in rebellion. The first Calvinists was put to death in the Netherlands suffered at Tournal in 1545. It was from such places as Tournal that the doctrines were brought by Walloons to Antwerp. Yet those put to death in Antwerp under Philip prior to the treaty of Gateau Cambresis do not seem to have included many Calvinists. In 1556 an Anabaptist named Abraham was sentenced o death and executed at the Market Place  .  .  .

In 1559 about forty Anabaptists were executed in the Netherlands, of whom eighteen suffered at Antwerp. Feelings ran very high among the crowd but nothing happened, though in one instance the Schoul was seen to turn white as a sheet when he saw that his guards had fled. Most of these Antwerp victims appear to have been Anabaptists. They seem to have been inoffensive men and women whose chief sin related to baptism, there being  no suggestion that they inclined towards communism or polygamy. Their heads were full of the Bible story and they regarded themselves as the reincarnation of Bible heroes. They particularly admired the oppressed and likened all oppressors to Egyptians or Babylonians. Usually they refused to abjure their opinions and awaited the extreme penalty attached to such obduracy  even in spite of advice of their counsel to plead guilty and say they were led into heresy  by others.

Certain fact are noticeable about these prosecutions. Lutherans seem no longer to have been hunted down, and Anabaptists seem to have lost the characteristic excesses of those who had held Munster, and to have appealed to a very harmless sort of folk of the artisan class. The Venetian Ambassador, writing in 1557, expressed surprise at the courage displayed by all those who suffered martyrdom in the Netherlands. In truth it was becoming evident that the blood of the many men and women had not been spilt in vain, and the secret drownings and beheadings in the Steen and the gagging of victims on the scaffold show how much the spectators sympathized with the victims.

A French Calvinist Congregation was established in the town in 1554 by the minister Francois Perucel with which Calvin corresponded, and in 1556 he was urging the necessity of assembling together to give each other courage, and was exhorting his followers not to be content with solitary devotion. The advice seems to have been followed, for an Ordinance was issued by the Magistrates on the 1st of March, 1557,  which mentioned evangelical meetings which were being held in and outside the town and forbids them in the future. At the same time a closer inquisition into the character of the newcomers to the town was made, and in 1558 the Duke of Savoy ordered the Magistrates to stop the secret meetings which were being held, especially at night. Preaching both in and outside the town had always been common in Antwerp, but it was the Calvinists who made the practice popular. We find recorded in the accounts of the Scout that Jehan des Champs, school master of Berghen-in- Hainut, was arrested and confessed that he had fallen into evil opinions and had got mixed up with some of the sects, particularly Calvinism.. He persisted in his error and was burnt alive. So during the war that was ended by the Treaty of Cateau Cambresis the burnings and the drownings of heretics were many in Antwerp, and the Calvinism which was to teach men how to make head against Philip’s tyranny was already on foot in the town.

The teaching of Calvin as to man’s relation to the State and the fervor aroused by the palm-singing advocated by the ministers of the meetings opened a new era of the Reformation in the Netherlands, and the peculiar circumstances of unscrupulous aristocracy on the one side and stubborn resistance on the other made the Netherlands the field on which many battles were fought for freedom in the second half of the sixteenth century. The gatherings to hear the preachers grew until in 1566 thousands trooped from the town with arms in their hands. Upon to 1559 the persecution in Antwerp had been of a sort less severe than that carried out in the Netherlands beyond the borders of Brabant. This was due to the anxiety of the Magistrates to judge the town themselves in such affairs to the exclusion of Inquisitors and to the natural fear of upsetting the trade which proved to lucrative to the Government Treasury. The citizens who acted reasonably –reasonably, that is to say, for an age in which most men were bigots- were little interfered with, and those who suffered were such as could not keep their mouths shut and advertised their views on matters, forcing their opinions before the public, and preferring martyrdom to relinquishing the notoriety they had gained by their singularity. The man or woman of mediocre intellect who has picked up ideas from others, which are not shared by and perhaps abhorrent to the rest of the race – too easygoing or too self-conscious to see themselves against their neighbors – has commonly believed his idea to to be mainly of his own coining and has arrogated to himself the right to ridicule the rest of the world or to pay the extreme penalty of martyrdom in the endeavor to prove the superiority of his arguments over all others.

 

The conduct of the Magistrates was remarkably tolerant for the age both in their administrative and their judicial function, and they were reluctant to share with the contemplative  Orders of monks the duty of suppressing heresy. The Carthusians were not allowed to rebuild their cloister after its destruction in 1542, but Dominicans and Franciscans were sometimes empowered to collect evidence, and they worked under the Court and the Inquisitor- General;. Brandt tells how at this time one of the Magistrates named Gaspar de Realme was struck with pity while hearing charges against heretics and was carried home in a fever crying that he was guilty of shedding innocent blood.  We have seen the opposition the Magistrates offered to the Placard of 1550 which mentioned an Inquisitor as if he was a recognized official in the city. Those accused of heresy were brought before the Vierschare  and sentenced by it if found guilty, but the Magistrates were often anxious to set the prisoner free if he would turn over a new leaf. As it was, poorters and foreign merchants were not often arrested; the victims being rather fugitives from infected paces, and the Magistrates had no jurisdiction to inquire into matters of conscience only, so that those who did not publicaly offend against the Placards were left alone.

 

The Treaty of Cateau Cambresis set Philip and the French king free to take repressive measures, against Calvinism and revolution, which go to make up the history of France and the Netherlands during the latter half of the sixteenth century. Persecution in Antwerp became much heavier just before Philip left  the Netherlands . . .

Whatever chagrin Philip may have felt at the loss of Calais by the English was assuaged by his victory at Graveline in late 1558. Negotiations for peace were opened although hostilities did not cease, and Mary was dead before the deliberations were concluded. When the Treaty  of  Cateau Cambresis was published in Antwerp on the 7^th of April, there was great rejoicing, for it was anticipated that a marriage between Philip and one of the French princesses would assure amity between the two nations. The great bell played, the Tower of Our Lady’s was hung with lamps, prizes were put up for competition, arches were set up, bonfires were lighted, wine flowed freely, and among the novelties introduced were greasy poles (the falls of those trying to get the prize at the top provoking much laughter), while blindfolded men  hunted pigs and women ran races. Among the foreign merchants  who took part in these celebrations were the English, but very little reflection shows their joy must have been assumed if they felt their prosperity depended on peace between England and the Netherlands. When the negotiations which led up to the Treaty were opened, Philip had been the husband of the English Queen and the restoration of Calais to the English had been one of the objects  Philip’s commissioners kept in view.. When the Treaty was signed Mary was dead and Elizabeth was on the throne, and all talk of such restoration was forgotten, so that with  the Treaty of Cataeau Cambresis the long amity which had extended between England and the House of Burgundy came to an end.  Her championship of the Protestant cause threw Elizabeth into stronger opposition to Philip, but she became at the same time the idol of the supporters of the new doctrines among the merchants and citizens at Antwerp.

Many in the provinces, like Pontus Payen, hailed the treaty as the harbinger of a Golden Age, and poets sang of the closing of the doors of the Temple of Janus, foretelling that, since Mars was enchained and the Furies put to flight, Rhetoric and Music would join hands for the solace of the Provinces.

The exhausted condition of Philip’s treasury had made him anxious to end war with France and devote himself to combating Islam in the Mediterranean and Protestantism in his own dominions. The crushing of the latter seemed to him vital to the safety of his throne, and in his resolve he had the sympathy of the Pope. He had formed the opinion that the interest of the State  was so bound up with the maintenance of the religion that neither the authority of princes nor concord between subjects, nor the public peace could exist if two religions lived side by side in one country. Both he and Henry II had the crushing of heresy in their minds when they signed the Treaty and both were actuated rather by fear of a revolt than by any anxiety for the souls of their subjects. Neither could contemplate with equanimity a complete alteration in established institutions, knowing well the effect it would have in men’s attitudes towards the State. Indeed the Treaty of Cateau Cambresis was regarded by them rather as a league for the suppression of Calvinism and other heresy than as a mere cessation of war. The means adopted by the two monarchs to attain these ends for te history of the Revolt of the Netherlands and of the Huguenot Wars in France, while the measures applied to Antwerp and the resistance offered to them by the Magistrates and the inhabitants make memorable the period of decline of Antwerp from the prosperity in which she was in  1559 to her ruined condition after the siege by Parma in 1586.

No doubt many realized what was in store, and Sir Thomas Challoner, writing to Cecil from Brussels in January 1560  of the marriage feast of Philip and Isabella, the French Princess whom the Treaty gave to him, says:

‘The inquisition like the hangman shall shut up the tale of the feast with more than  hundred carbonades.’