In my previous post, I summarized a lot of 17th century Dutch history so I could make a post about The Admiral (aka Michiel de Ruyter, 2015, dir. Roel Reiné, Dutch with English subtitles). The film in question follows the career of Michiel de Ruyter (Frank Lammers) both as a naval commander and as a figure in 17th century Dutch politics. Because de Ruyter’s career is to some extent tied to the political career of Grand Pensioner Johan de Witt (Barry Atsma), the film also looks at him a good deal.
The film, which opens in 1653 with the Battle of Scheveningen during the First Anglo-Dutch War, gets the basic Dutch political tensions correct. De Witt and therefore de Ruyter are correctly shown as representing the Republican position and therefore being in conflict with the Orangists. It’s clear that the Orangists want Prince William (Egbert-Jan Weber) to have more power in government, but the film never really gets at what is at stake for these two factions beyond which group will run the country. The film makes only the briefest allusion to the conflict between the strict Calvinist and tolerant Calvinists when de Witt says during a speech that his country is free because every many is free to decide how they will worship God. This is, in fact, a loosely correct expression of de Witt’s actual position, and it’s nice to see a historical film that actually explains what it means by ‘freedom’ (cough Braveheart300 cough).
It likewise gets the basic facts about the Dutch conflicts with England correct. It makes it clear that commercial rivalry played a significant role in these wars, although it doesn’t connect de Witt’s party to the wealthy merchants who stood to benefit the most from long-range trade. Perhaps because de Witt is allied to de Ruyter, the focus of the film, de Witt’s motives are presented as being entirely good and without self-interest while the English and the Orangists other than Prince William himself as shown to be more self-serving and malicious. Charles II (a well-cast Charles Dance) at one point tried to bribe William by offering to make him king of the Netherlands, an offer William indignantly rejects.
Ever wonder what Ron Jeremy would look like if he were a 17th century Dutch admiral? Wonder no more
The film is particularly proud of the Netherlands’ Republican history. It opens with the false claim that the Netherlands is the “only republic in the world”. This ignores the fact that Venice was also a republic throughout the 17th century (and had been for centuries), and that in 1653, England was a republic as well. Given that Charles II is a key villain in the story, the film-makers probably decided to ignore the story of England’s unsuccessful experiment with republicanism simply because explaining why England is a republic at the start of the film but a monarchy a few years later would be a distraction from the main story.
Not only does William refuse to subvert the Republic, de Witt orders the execution of an Orangist who was plotting with Charles. This is a reference to Johan Kievit, but in the film it’s not Kievit who does the plotting, because Kievit (Derek de Lint) is, along with Charles, the master villain of the piece. Throughout the film, Kievit malevolently scowls at de Witt, plots to remove him in favor of Prince William, supports Tromp against de Ruyter, and orchestrates the murder of the de Witt brothers. His motives are never explained beyond general villainousness.
Kievit (de Lint) and Prince William (Weber)
The film also plays fast and loose with chronology. Although Prince William was only 3 years old in 1653, he’s an adult in the film. The film covers 23 years of actual history, but no one ages. De Ruyter’s children are still children at the end of the film. The film repeatedly compresses events, giving the sense that the First Anglo-Dutch War, the Second Anglo-Dutch War and the Third Anglo-Dutch War all took place over the course of perhaps a year, instead of the 20 years they actually took. Charles II signs of the Peace of Breda (1667) and then immediately schemes with Louis XIV to invade the Netherlands, even though that happened in 1672. This makes no sense at all, since he signs the Peace of Breda because he’s lost his whole fleet and therefore cannot continue fighting.
One of the better elements of the film is that it works hard to make naval combat intelligible. It shows a half-dozen battles, and frequently cuts to a bird’s eye view so the viewer can get a sense of how the ships are maneuvering. It spends a great deal of time on the Four Days’ Battle, showing crewmen doing a wide range of jobs and demonstrating just how terrible a problem wooden shrapnel was in naval combat. If you’re looking for a movie about wooden ships and what it takes to run them, you’ll like this movie.
Unfortunately, it also takes substantial liberties with the facts of the battles. For example, the film collapses the Four Day’s Battle and the St. James’ Day Battle into one event, moving Tromp’s decision to break the line and pursue the English from the latter battle to the former and making that decision the reason that de Ruyter lost the Four Days’ Battle, when in fact the Dutch more or less won that. In the film’s version of the Battle of Texel, de Ruyter orders Tromp to break the line, thus tricking the English into sailing too close to the Dutch coast, which causes the ships to haul over to one side, leaving them vulnerable to Dutch cannon fire and giving the Dutch a decisive victory that forced the English out of the war. That bears little resemblance to the actual Battle of Texel, which was more like a stand-off. The Raid on the Medway involved several days of cannon fire and a large group of marines, not a midnight sneak up the river with a handful of men.
So from a historical standpoint, the film is something of a mixed bag. It gets the big picture broadly correct, but fudges a lot of the details in the name of a simpler narrative. It also smacks a bit of Braveheart-style nationalistic chest-thumping, but without the histrionic speeches. However the topic is refreshing. How many movies about 17th century naval warfare have you seen?
I couldn’t find anything on Michiel de Ruyter, but if you want to know more about Johan de Witt (who was an important philosopher and mathematician as well as politician), take a look at Johan de Witt: Philosopher of ‘True Freedom’
If there’s one genre that’s absolutely been done to death, it’s the 17th Century Dutch Naval War genre. But I hope you can handle another entry into that storied category, in the form of The Admiral (aka Michiel de Ruyter, 2015, dir. Roel Reiné, Dutch with English subtitles).
The film looks at Dutch politics and conflicts with England in the mid-17th century by focusing on the life of Michiel de Ruyter, one of the Netherlands’ greatest naval leaders. In the 17th century the Dutch were one of the great naval and commercial powers of Europe, because their wide maritime commerce network made them far wealthier and more powerful than their small size would suggest. This tended to bring them into conflict another of the major naval and commercial powers of the era, Great Britain.
17th century Dutch politics revolved around the nature of their state. In 1588, after the Dutch rebelled against Spanish rule and started the Eighty Years’ War, they declared themselves a republic. Their rebellion was couched in terms of defending their medieval rights, so they needed to adapt medieval political concepts to their new situation. Each of the seven rebellious provinces was given the right to elect a Stadhouder, or Steward, to administer it, and over the course of the next half-century, there was a tendency for one man to receive the stadhouder-ship of several provinces. In the 1640s, William II of Orange was stadhouder for five of the seven provinces. In 1648, the Dutch secured a final peace with Spain that acknowledged Dutch independence, but afterward William alienated many Catholics in the country by trying to impose the strict Dutch Calvinist Church on them and by refusing to disband the large army he had maintained.
The Netherlands in the 17th Century
When William died suddenly in 1650, leaving only a posthumous son, Prince William, five provinces declined to elect the infant William as the new stadhouder and let the office fall vacant. Instead, the Grand Assembly (essentially, a Dutch Parliament) turned for leadership to the Grand Pensionary of Holland, who was technically only an administrator for the province of Holland, but in the absence of a new stadhouder, he came to function as a sort of Prime Minister for the Republic. In 1653 the office was given to Johan de Witt.
De Witt emerged as the leader of the wealthy mercantile faction in Dutch politics, who favored aggressive protection of Dutch commercial interests overseas, as well as moderate Calvinism and toleration. The opposing faction were the Orangists, mostly less wealthy businessmen who worried about the political dominance of the wealthy merchants and who therefore favored the rights of the House of Orange as a counterbalance. This faction wanted to see William III appointed as stadhouder and wanted a most strict adherence to Calvinism.
When De Witt signed a peace treaty with England in 1654 to end the First Anglo-Dutch War, there was a secret rider forbidding William III to ever be appointed as stadhouder, because England’s leader, Oliver Cromwell, worried that, since William was the grandson of the recently-executed English king Charles I, the Orangists might support a return to English monarchy. And since both countries were republics at the time, it seemed reasonable to expect that they would remain at peace and perhaps even develop an alliance.
Johan de Witt
Unfortunately for that, in 1660, the English ended their experiment with republicanism and restored their monarchy, bringing Charles II, the uncle of Prince William, to the throne. In 1665, tensions over trade resulted in the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The English fought a massive battle with the Dutch at Lowestoft; more than 100 ships were involved on each side. After the Dutch flagship exploded, killing Admiral Van Obdam, the Dutch position collapsed and the English routed them in the worst naval defeat in Dutch history.
De Witt salvaged a desperately bad situation by appointed the commoner Michiel de Ruyter as admiral, much to the irritation of the Orangists, who wanted Cornelis Tromp, the son of a previous admiral. De Ruyter proved a brilliant naval leader. De Witt also dedicated an enormous amount of money to rebuild the Dutch navy. In 1666, the Dutch navy fought the English in the Four Days’ Battle, one of the longest naval engagements in history. De Ruyter inflicted so much damage on the English fleet that they eventually had to retreat, but de Ruyter lacked the gunpowder to pursue them.
A few months later, the St James’ Day Battle went against the Dutch. De Ruyter made a tactical error and found his portion of the fleet becalmed and unable to prevent the English from destroying a large section of the fleet. Tromp, commanding the Dutch rear, avoided de Ruyter’s mistake, broke line, and destroyed the English rear, pursuing it through the night, in the process losing all sight of the Dutch fleet and nearly being captured the next morning. Only the Great Fire of London prevented Charles II from following up on the victory.
Michiel de Ruyter
After the battle, de Ruyter blamed Tromp for the defeat, faulting him for breaking from the line to pursue the English ships. The Netherlands split over the issue. Tromp allowed his brother-in-law, Johan Kievit, to publish his version of events. It was soon discovered that Kievit was plotting with Charles II to put Prince William into power; he fled the country and was sentenced to death in absentia. A Tromp supporter attempted to assassinate de Ruyter but failed.
De Ruyter brought the Second Anglo-Dutch War to an end in 1667 by launching an audacious raid on the English shipyard at Chatham on the Medway river, where the English fleet was laid up for repairs. De Ruyter and Cornelis de Witt, Johan’s brother, fought their way past several English fortifications, broke a chain across the river, destroyed 13 ships and stole the English flagship, the Royal Charles. Lacking any heavy ships, Charles had no choice but to sign the Treaty of Breda.
De Witt used this triumph to abolish the stadhouder-ship for Holland and get William declared ineligible for the office in three other provinces by instead giving him a key military office. This provoked growing Orangist outrage. In 1672, when the English and French attacked the Netherlands in what the Dutch called the Disaster Year, de Witt narrowly escaped assassination, and found it prudent to resign as Grand Pensionary, William was made stadhouder of the Netherlands soon thereafter as William III.
But this did not satisfy the Orangists. Cornelis de Witt was arrested on charges of treason, tortured, and sentenced to exile. When Johan went to the prison to bid his brother farewell, the civic militia in the Hague attacked the two men in what most scholars think was an orchestrated riot. They were shot, stripped naked, and hung up in a public square; the Orangist mob literally roasted their livers and ate them. Responsibility for the killings has never been pinned on anyone, but William III had acted to order the withdrawal of a Dutch cavalry regiment from the area just hours before, leading many to suspect that he may have known about the plot. Tromp and Kievit were certainly involved, and William later on promoted both men, including arranging for his uncle to give Tromp a baronetcy.
The corpses of the De Witt brothers hanging in a town square
In 1673, the English attempted to launch of the Netherlands, but de Ruyter and Tromp fought the English to a stalemate, inflicting enough casualties that the English were ultimately forced to sue for peace after the Spanish agreed to join the war. In 1676 de Ruyter took a Dutch fleet into the Mediterranean where he fought an encounter with the French at Stromboli. It was an inconclusive battle, but de Ruyter lost a leg to a cannon ball and died, leaving the admiralty to Tromp.
In 1688, three years after the death of Charles II, William III led a revolt against Charles’ brother James II. Crossing over to England with a small force after the English Parliament appealed to him for assistance against the openly Catholic James, William forced James to flee the country, even though he was married to James’ daughter Mary. Parliament declared that William and Mary were the new monarchs. William didn’t even have to change his numbering, since he was the third William on the English throne.
Now that I’ve summarized what actually happened, in my next post, I’ll talk about The Admiral.
I couldn’t find anything on Michiel de Ruyter, but if you want to know more about Johan de Witt (who was an important philosopher and mathematician as well as politician), take a look at Johan de Witt: Philosopher of ‘True Freedom’
“In 1660 Charles II was restored to the English Throne ending 11 years of Oliver Cromwell’s bleak Puritan rule. Thus began the age of Restoration. It was an era of scientific discovery, artistic exploration, and luxurious sensuality. It was also a time of natural disasters and archaic medical practices. Science was pitted against superstition. This is the story of one man’s journey through the light and dark of those times.”
So begins Restoration (1995, dir. Michael Hoffman, based on Rose Tremain’s 1989 novel of the same name), a modest little film about a young doctor, Robert Merivel (Robert Downey, Jr.), who earns the attention of the new king Charles II (Sam Neill) by curing Charles’ sick spaniel. Merivel is a talented young physician but also a libertine and wastrel by nature. Once ensconced at the court as the caretaker of the royal hounds, he indulges in his penchant for wine, woman, and buffoonery. Then one day, Charles tells him that one of the king’s mistresses has become jealous of another of his mistresses, and so Charles has decided to marry her off to Merivel. The marriage is to be a sham; Merivel is forbidden to sleep with his own wife, who has no real interest in him anyway, but the reward is an estate in Suffolk and a knighthood.
Unable to say no, Merivel weds Celia (Polly Walker) and begins his life as a country gentleman, but soon finds himself falling in love with his wife. Celia views her time in Suffolk as an exile and wishes to be restored to Charles’ court, while Merivel schemes to extend his wife’s absence from court in hopes that she will come to love him. But his scheme is exposed and an angry Charles evicts him from the estate and reclaims Celia.
Destitute and homeless, he seeks out an old medical student friend, John Pearce (David Thewlis), a Puritan who has opened a sanitarium for the mentally ill, where Merivel meets Katherine (a rather out-of-place Meg Ryan), an emotionally disturbed Irish woman whom he falls in love with and gets pregnant. This gets both of them kicked out and they wind up destitute in London just in time for the Bubonic Plague to hit London, and soon after that, the Great Fire of London.
The story is basically a redemption narrative. Merivel begins his fall when he succumbs to the pleasures of the court and slowly loses his passion for medicine. He bottoms out when he is evicted from his estate and slowly begins to recover his passion at the sanitarium, where he proposes treating the deranged inmates by playing music and letting them dance (in one of those stock Hollywood scenes where the skeptical authorities reluctantly allow something unconventional and it proves so transformative that even the authorities embrace it).
Downey as Merivel
Medicine repeatedly brings out the best in Merivel, even when it leads to complications. His dance therapy leads to his relationship with Katherine, who helps him emerge from his emotional deadness. But later he realizes that their baby needs to be delivered by caesarean section, a procedure that Katherine will not survive. This turns out to be the world’s prettiest c-section, with virtually no blood. Katherine controls her pain so well she doesn’t even need to be held down and a viewer coming in partway through the scene might be forgiven for thinking that her moans and writhing were signs that someone was giving her cunnilingus. Afterward, she gets a nice soft-lighting post-operative death scene. In case anyone is missing the point of what I’m saying, this is ludicrous. Pre-modern caesarean sections were horrific affairs, done without anesthetic and therefore unendurably painful for the mother, many of whom probably died from the pain alone, let alone the blood loss and organ trauma.
The birth of his daughter and the loss of his mistress force Merivel to grow up. He decides to confront the Bubonic Plague and is horrified to discover that the Royal Hospital has been filled with sick patients who have been boarded up in a large room with no medical treatment. He literally breaks down the boards to get to his patients and tenderly eases the pains of the dying and helps the rest recover.
It’s a decent little film. Downey is well-cast in the type of role he’s best known for, the charming rake who struggles with his addictions, but Restoration was made just before he began his own infamous descent in drug addiction, and so his performance lacks the knowing edge of some of his later roles. The rest of the cast is mostly quite solid, including Hugh Grant as a high-strung artist assigned to paint a portrait of Celia and Ian McKellan as the faithful steward of Merivel’s estate. Neill seems just a bit off as Charles II, lacking the real man’s self-depricating sense of humor and charm, and as I said, Meg Ryan feels totally inappropriate, like no one realized she was actually cast in the romantic comedy filming next door.
Wait, I get cut open and die? America’s Sweetheart doesn’t do that.
The Medical Details
The film wants to be a criticism of the appalling state of medicine in the late 17th century, a theme it has in common with The Madness of King George. The prologue text tells us that medicine is “archaic” and that “science was pitted against superstition”, but the film never really delves into that critique enough to really work. There’s a nice scene early on where Pearce and Merivel attend an anatomy lecture that’s being delivered in Latin; that’s accurate but it’s a passing detail, and the medical education of the time is barely commented on, other than that it requires expensive books and that Merivel should be grateful that his father, a glover, was able to arrange a medical education for him.
We only see Merivel actually practicing medicine a couple of times, mainly at the sanitarium, when he performs the caesarean section, and when he treats the Plague victims. He occasionally examines patients, listens to their heartbeat through a tube, and so on, but it’s mostly just incidental details. But the real problem is that the film really doesn’t have much idea of what 17th century medicine actually involved.
Physic, as elite learned medicine was called at the time, was essentially theoretical preventative medicine, an expensive medical practice, in contrast to surgery, which was considered a lower-status form of medical practice that involved a range of practices including the extraction of teeth, the setting of broken bones, the (rather painful) removal of bladder stones, and the like. Physic and surgery were essentially opposites; few physicians were also surgeons, the way that few neurosurgeons are also massage therapists.
Down to the early 19th century, medicine emphasized humoral theory, which held that the body had four primary fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile (what you bring up when you vomit) and black bile (exactly what they thought that was is a matter of debate); all other fluids, like sweat, semen, and urine, were secondary fluids created from one of the primary fluids. Each primary fluid was either hot or cold and either wet or dry, so that blood was hot and wet, yellow bile was hot and dry, phlegm was cold and wet, and black bile was cold and dry. Observable symptoms such as sweating, fever, clamminess, vomiting, and diarrhea were all signs that one humor had gotten out of balance; so if a patient was feverish and sweaty, he had an excess of the hot, wet humor, while if the patient had a fever without sweats, he had an excess of the hot, dry humor. The appropriate remedy was to remove the excess humor from the body, so the feverish sweaty patient could be bled, while the feverish non-sweaty patient could be given an emetic to induce vomiting. Diet was also important, because certain foods stimulated the different humors; healthy patients would be told to eat or avoid certain foods based on the disposition of their body.
The Four Humors
The humors also affected personality, and provided the basis for a theory of psychology. A patient with a frenzied, excessively fussy, or angry personality was choleric, so the treatment for those afflicted by violent outbursts might be to bleed them (that’s why King George’s doctor wants to cup him). Those who suffered from depression, sleeplessness, and the like were melancholic, because they had an excess of black bile. The leading work on the subject in the 17th century, Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, felt that social factors such as poverty, isolation, sadness, and fear were as important as humoral imbalance. He began the process of separating depression from its perceived bodily causes and its evolution into a primarily mental or spiritual condition (although modern pharmacology has started reversing that development by emphasizing the biochemical component of depression). Burton prescribed a range of treatments including drugs and herbs, work and moderate exercise, diet, sex, exposure to nature, and in very extreme cases blood-letting.
Burton’s work was extremely influential, and would probably have influenced the Puritan sanitarium, especially since Burton, as a clergyman, also feels that sin can cause melancholy. But there’s little sign of serious therapeutic efforts at the sanitarium, except in the case of Katherine. Her melancholy mostly manifests as insomnia and an obsession with walking strangely. She seems much less ill than most of the patients there, but Pearce insists on bleeding her to induce sleep. She responds well to Merivel’s dance therapy, but what really seems to put her mind back in order is getting busy with Merivel. I’m not sure what’s really dictating the plot here, Burton’s Anatomy, or the misogynistic idea that difficult women just need to get laid more.
Merivel’s dance therapy is certainly novel but it’s not exactly scientific; it’s just feel-good nonsense. (And the film seems rather confused about Pearce’s beliefs. In the novel, Pearce becomes a Quaker, basically on the far liberal end of the Christian spectrum of the time. In the movie, though, he says he’s become a Puritan, who were on the far conservative end of the Christian spectrum of the day; it’s like rewriting a vegan hippie from San Francisco as a Christian fundamentalist home-schooler from Alabama and thinking that somehow the character would be the same person either way. The idea that Puritan doctors would allow dance therapy is absurd, since they considered dancing profoundly immoral.)
Thewlis as Pearce, leading his band of Puritan doctors
Merivel’s c-section was standard medical practice at the time; the general idea was if the mother is going to die anyway (because the baby was too large for the birth canal), the surgeon might as well try to save the baby. But the c-section is a surgical procedure, and Merivel is a physician; he may have watched surgery, but he’s never performed it. Additionally, physicians of his day would have received no hands-on obstetrical training whatsoever; that was left to midwives. Having him perform a caesarean section would be like asking your chiropractor to do it.
His treatment of the quarantined patients is mostly just basic nursing; giving them food and water and helping make them comfortable. Medicine at the time had few ideas about how to actually treat the Plague, although fumigation with tobacco smoke was popular at the time (and we see that at the court of Charles II; there’s an absurdly large brazier-pendulum that swings over a bed). Because they had no clear idea how to treat the Plague, London authorities ordered the establishment of suburban pest-houses where sick patients could be quarantined; their houses were to be shut up and marked with a red cross and “Lord have mercy on us”, for forty days, after which the house could be opened up again and marked with a white cross, so that no strangers would stay there for another twenty days. The film gets this wrong, since it treats the Royal Hospital as a pest-house and marks it with a white cross, rather than a red one. (For those interested in how London responded to the Plague, the National Archives in London has a nice educational page about the issue, complete with a few primary documents.)
At one point Merivel dons a physician’s plague mask, which gives the film a great visual image, but he immediately takes the mask off when he gets to his patient, which would have defeated the whole purpose of such a mask. The beak of such masks was stuffed with aromatic herbs on the theory that they would purify the air so the physician would not get sick when treating contagious patients.
A physician in a plague mask
The result of all of this is that while the film wants to offer a critique of 17th century medicine, it can’t really muster the energy to engage with the material in any real way. Merivel is a “modern” physician only to the extent that he acts a little more like a modern doctor than Pearce does. His criticism of the medicine of his day is limited to a speech about dance therapy and his insistence on helping the Plague victims die less painfully. There’s no mention of humoral theory or Burton’s work on melancholy or anything that would give the viewer any insight into either traditional medical theories or why Merivel might think differently.
Walker as Celia, arriving at her wedding
The film works much better with its central metaphor of Restoration, which operates on multiple levels. The political restoration of the monarchy brings with it a restoration of the decadence of the English court (as Merivel quips early in the film, “rich men can go to heaven again”) after the Puritan interlude that banned pleasures such as theater and dance. Merivel loses both his true calling in life and his social position, and gradually recovers them. Celia longs for her restoration to court and the affections of the king, while Merivel restores both physical and emotional health to various patients, although in a couple of key situations he is unable to help those he loves most. He is repeatedly reunited with old friends and given a chance to fix past mistakes. While it’s not a brilliant film by any means, it’s nice to see a Hollywood film that deals so effectively with a central theme a little more sophisticated than “freedom!”
Want to Know More?
Restorationis available a couple of ways on Amazon.
Rose Tremain’s Restorationis highly regarded and worth reading if you’re a fan of historical novels.
Charles II is a very important English king, since his reign marked the re-establishment of the English monarchy. Tim Harris’ Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660-1685seeks to place Charles in the center of the political life of his reign. This is an important argument, since traditional scholarship has tended to see Charles as politically passive and at his best when he wasn’t taking action.
is available a couple of ways on Amazon.
is highly regarded and worth reading if you’re a fan of historical novels.
seeks to place Charles in the center of the political life of his reign. This is an important argument, since traditional scholarship has tended to see Charles as politically passive and at his best when he wasn’t taking action.
An Historian Goes to the Movies 