Earlier this year, ITV (other television channels are available!) announced its decision to commission a four-part period drama based on the events of the Great Fire of London. The forthcoming series (imaginatively entitled The Great Fire!) will no doubt present the occurrences of September 1666 as a great human tragedy that was received with universal sorrow. However, as a document in the British Library’s Dutch Language Collections reveals, there were those who rather than lamenting the fire took an altogether different view.

On 7 August 1666, during the course of the conflict between England and the Dutch Republic that would later become known as the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the English government wrote to Sir Robert Holmes, Admiral of the Restoration Navy, giving him detailed instructions for a raid upon the West Frisian islands of Vly and Terschelling, where some 150 Dutch ships were lying. As well as destroying the ships, Holmes was to take 500 men, land upon the island of Terschelling (on which was located the town of West-Terschelling) and ‘appoint such a number of men to rise and plunder the town as you shall think fit.’ Two days later, on 9 August, the instructions were carried out to considerable effect and Sir Robert was able to write to none other than King Charles II himself, narrating how he had ‘with little trouble set the fair town on fire, which consisted of at least 1000 houses.’ It may have been that the king was already well aware of this, for, as various Englishmen noted in their journals, columns of smoke were visible well out to sea.

In England, news of Holmes’ exploits was greeted with great enthusiasm, including by Charles II himself who, in a somewhat insensitive gesture, ordered celebratory bonfires to be lit. Indeed, the burning of West-Terschelling quickly became known as ‘Holmes’ Bonfire’ on the basis that, in order to signal to fellow Englishmen watching from afar that the mission had succeeded, Holmes had set-alight the town ‘as bonfires for his good success at sea.’ Unsurprisingly, there was a less celebratory reaction in Amsterdam, where various pamphlets and prints were published condemning the attack as a barbaric atrocity. An example is the print below, attributed to the well-known engraver, Harmen de Mayer.

Holmes’ Bonfire, engraving attributed to Harmen de Mayer (1650-1701). (Image from Wikimedia Commons)

If Holmes’ raid had been designed to bring about a Dutch capitulation it failed, for when just weeks later fire broke out at Thomas Farriner’s now infamous bakery on Pudding Lane, the two nations were still at war. News of the fire was quick to reach the Dutch, who were no doubt following events in England with great interest.

A sense of the Dutch reaction to the Great Fire can be gauged from a lengthy pamphlet printed in Rotterdam soon afterwards entitled, Londens Puyn-hoop. The pamphlet, copies of which are held by the British Library, is unequivocal in its explanation of events. After dismissing everyday causes it presents the fire as divine retribution against the English – and Charles II in particular – for the attack on the Vlie, as well as a warning to sinners everywhere: London had not so much been destroyed as purified.

Whilst the contents of Londens Puyn-Hoop are undoubtedly propagandist in part, they also appear to reflect a genuine belief that the Great Fire was an act carried out by God on behalf of a latter day children of Israel. Such a mind-set might well explain the relative restraint shown by Dutch forces on the towns they encountered in the Medway – something on which the diarist Samuel Pepys remarked – during the now legendary raid the following summer that brought the conflict to a conclusion in the Republic’s favour: there was no need for the Dutch to take revenge, God had already taken it for them.

The Great Fire, from S.V.V.H. Londen’s Puyn-hoop 3rd ed. (Rotterdam, 1666) 8122.ee.8.1(1.)

The image above appears as a fold-out page in one of the copies of Londens Puyn-hoop held by the British Library. (You can see another version from the Rijksmusem in Amsterdam here.) The way in which fire is represented in these prints is potentially very illuminating. In some, fire is presented in factual, almost scientific terms, the process of combustion and the idea that something is actually on fire being clearly visible. In others, the flames appear to hover miraculously above their apparent source without consuming it, in a fashion that recalls biblical fires, such as the burning bush and the pillar of flame. This duality reflects the somewhat conflicted world-view that characterised the 17th century: on the one hand a time of tremendous scientific progress and a growing recognition that the world was governed by discernible, universal laws with physical explanations but on the other an époque still dominated by superstition, powerful religious fervour and a belief that the forces of both evil and the divine were capable of interfering in everyday life. In this way, Londens Puyn-hoop – together with its associated imagery – has a great deal to tell us about the early-modern mind-set.

Robin Jacobs

References:

Downton, Peter, The Dutch Raid (Rochester, 1998)

Beer, E.S. de (ed.)The Diary of John Evelyn (Oxford, 2000). YC.2002.a.8453; Vol. 3 p. 452

Jones, J.R., The Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1996) YK.1996.a.20068

Latham, Robert (ed.), The Diary of Samuel Pepys (London, 2003) YC.2003.a.14343, entry 15 August 1666. Also available online at http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1666/08/15/

Ollard, R.L., Man of War: Sir Robert Holmes and the Restoration Navy (London, 1969) X.631/831 and W50/4391

Powell, J.R. / Timings, E.K., The Rupert & Monck Letter Book – 1666, (London, 1969) Ac.8109. [vol. 11 -2.]

Robin Jacobs is a barrister who specialises in education law. He recently completed a Graduate Diploma in Art History at the Courtauld Institute and wrote a dissertation on representations of fire in broadside prints from the Second Anglo-Dutch War.

Many English readers first make the acquaintance of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954) through the stage or film adaptations of her novella Gigi (1945; 012550.p.6.). Deliciously frothy, it captures with elegance and grace the extravagant world of the belle époque, far removed from the austerities and humiliations of wartime France under the German occupation, and might give the impression that the author was a frivolous airhead with little interest in the realities of those harsh times. Yet while she was conjuring up the vanished Parisian demi-monde to enchant her readers and, she admitted, to lift them out of the drabness and anxiety of their daily lives, she was engaged in a far more dangerous and deadly serious enterprise – rescuing and assisting Jews, including her own husband, whom she hid throughout the war.

Born in January 1873 as the daughter of a retired army officer, Colette grew up amid the countryside of Burgundy which she lyrically describes in many of her writings. Her marriage at the age of twenty to Henry Gauthier-Villars, a writer and music-critic known as Willy, who was fifteen years her senior, transplanted her to Paris and led to the publication of her first novels, the Claudine series. These four broadly autobiographical stories of a young girl’s schooldays, her marriage to a much older man, her encounters with Parisian society, visit to the Bayreuth Festival and love affair with Annie, the narrator of the last book, did not appear under her own name, however, but under that of Willy, who, she later claimed, had read her jottings in old school exercise books, encouraged her to write, and appropriated the results. He combined plagiarism with infidelity, and in 1906 Colette left him and, with the help of Mathilde de Morny, Marquise de Belbeuf, became a music-hall artiste of some notoriety and the lover of her sponsor. She recorded her experiences and her fascination with the world of the music-hall and circus in Garçon, l’audition! (1901; the British Library possesses a presentation copy signed ‘Willy’), Entre deux airs (1895; 1578/1186), whose author was given as ‘L’ouvreuse du Cirque d’été’, and Mes apprentissages (010665.df.11).

Colette, Garçon, l’audition! (Paris, 1901) 1578/1188

In 1912 Colette married Henri de Jouvenel, the editor of the newspaper Le Matin,  and the following year gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Colette. During the war she converted the de Jouvenel estate at St-Malo into a convalescent home for officers and in 1920 was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in recognition of her services. The marriage ended in 1924 when Colette divorced her husband following an affair with her stepson Bertrand de Jouvenel which is reflected in her novels Chéri (1920) and La fin de Chéri (1926), whose depiction of the relationship of the hedonistic young hero and the ageing courtesan Léa aroused considerable controversy.

Portrait of Colette by Jean Cocteau, from Colette, Le pur et l’impur (Paris, 1941) X.900/21054.

Colette enjoyed her new freedom to mingle with the Parisian circle of artists and writers surrounding Jean Cocteau in the 1920s, and rose to become acknowledged as France’s greatest female writer. As well as novels and autobiography, she wrote the libretto for Maurice Ravel’s opera L’enfant et les sortilèges (first performed in 1925), the story of a rebellious child who is punished by the objects which he has damaged in a tantrum and is finally rescued when he shows his repentance by tending a wounded squirrel. The list of characters includes a pair of cats, creatures for which Colette had a lifelong love; they feature frequently in her writings, and her novel La chatte (1933) centres on the bond between a young man and Saha, the cat who displaces his bride in his affections.

A cat looks on as Colette writes. Picture from Colette, Mes apprentissages ([Paris], 1936) 010665.df.11.

Colette’s third marriage in 1935 to Maurice Goudeket endured happily for the rest of her life, but placed her in considerable danger during the German occupation because of his Jewish origins, which compelled him to go into hiding in their attic. Remaining in Paris and continuing to write and publish, Colette made a living which enabled to help many other Jews, and in 1945 was elected to the Académie Goncourt as its first-ever female member, becoming its president in 1949. Since 1935 she had been a member of the Belgian Royal Academy, and in 1953 became a Grand Officier of the Légion d’honneur. Her work is notable for its delicate and subtly sensuous quality, evoked in such details as Claudine licking the precious ruby presented to her by her bridegroom ‘because it ought to melt and taste like a raspberry fruit-drop’, the scents of the wild herbs in Colette’s mother’s garden, the salt and sunshine of a holiday in Normandy where two adolescents discover each other in La Blé en herbe (1923, 012547.ccc.11), and the textures of fine lace or a cat’s fur.

When she died on 3 August 1954, Colette was buried in the cemetery of Père Lachaise, the first woman in France ever to be given a state funeral. Although she was denied a Roman Catholic ceremony because of her two divorces, the scandals surrounding her racy career, bisexuality and spicy early novels had long since been dispelled by recognition of her outstanding gifts as a writer.

Susan Halstead, Curator Czech and Slovak

Hundreds of books have been published in Poland about the Warsaw Uprising. However, 70 years later the Poles are still divided whether it was the right or wrong decision to launch it.

In July 1944, after almost five years of German occupation, Poland was a theatre of heavy fighting between the Red Army advancing from the east and the German forces retreating to the west.  At the order of the leadership of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa or AK)  the uprising, which aimed to liberate the capital from the departing Germans, began on 1st  August at 5 pm (called W-hour). The AK was the largest underground resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe numbering at its peak around 400,000. The timing coincided with the Red Army approaching Warsaw.  Intended to last a few days (there was ammunition in hand for three to five days), the uprising came eventually to a bitter end on 2nd October.  This was due to the unimaginable bravery of the insurgents and civilians alike. 

A network of street barricades (picture above from Wikimedia Commons) constructed by civilians, home-made grenades and guns as well as arms captured from the enemy were the insurgents’ weapon against the overwhelming German forces armed with tanks, planes and artillery.  The Red Army was idly standing on the eastern bank of the river Vistula watching the burning city from a distance. Airdrops of supplies by Allied planes were not allowed by the Soviets to reach Warsaw until mid-September. Inevitably, there were shortages of food, water, medicine and ammunition in the city. Although the living conditions were appalling, the people of Warsaw were in high spirits fighting for the freedom of their country. Life went on as much as the circumstances permitted with theatres, cinemas, post offices open and 130 newspapers and periodicals published overall. The Scout Postal Service was in operation throughout the rising.  Mail, newspapers and messages were delivered around the fighting city by 10 to 15 year-old scouts of the Gray Ranks.

Tragically, 63 days of heroic and lonely struggle resulted in the death of some 200,000 inhabitants and 18,000 insurgents with additional 6,000 wounded, not to mention the physical and cultural destruction of the city, as described in Władysław Bartoszewski and Adam Bujak’s book Abandoned heroes of the Warsaw Uprising (Kraków, 2008; LD.31.b.1915). Moreover, Polish society was deprived of a large portion of its intellectual elite.  Following the surrender of Polish forces 700,000 civilians were expelled from the city and 15,000 insurgents sent to POW camps. Before the demolition began Warsaw had been plundered. Trains laden with goods including works of art, books, manuscripts, maps, furniture dismantled factories etc. were leaving Warsaw for the Reich. Nothing of value was left. Then in the course of a few months Germans razed the rest of the city to the ground. Street after street, house after house the city of Warsaw ceased to exist.  As the result of all the fighting in the capital during the Second World War 85% of the buildings were levelled including schools, hospitals, libraries, museums and historical monuments.

Grave of Polish soldiers in Warsaw in 1945  (from Wikimedia Commons)

The tragic fate of the city was a combination of political and military miscalculations by the Polish leaders of the underground resistance and global politics played by the “Big Three” – Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 is considered one of the greatest tragedies of the Second World War.

Magda Szkuta, Curator Polish Studies

Further reading

Norman Davies, Rising ’44: ‘the battle for Warsaw’ (London, 2004) YC.2006.a.1738.