Michiel de Ruyter
Ferdinand Bol. Michiel de Ruyter. 1667
Okay, so I went to see Michiel de Ruyter tonight. It’s a Dutch movie about one of our best known admirals, back in the 17th century. As a lover of history, I had been intrigued about the movie ever since I saw trailers, so Gert and I decided we had to go see.
I didn’t remember a lot about Michiel de Ruyter himself from my history classes. I recognised some names of characters, and I remembered the brothers De Witt as I’d seen a painting of them last year at the Rijksmuseum.
The movie starts with a sea battle in which fleet admiral Maarten Tromp dies, witnessed by Michiel de Ruyter. After, when Michiel comes home he has been on the road out on the oceans for the better part of the last fifteen years with only occasional breaks and he’s tired of it. As Michiel gets used to home life again with Anna, his wife, and his three remaining children (an older boy and two young girls) we cut to politics. And from here on out, there be many spoilers. Be forewarned!
Johan de Witt is named the Grand Pensionary of the States of Holland, and as a consequence of that, due to the power of Holland, the de facto leader of the whole of the United Provinces. At this time, the Anglo-Dutch War is going on, and Johan realises they need a strong man to lead their navy. Unfortunately, with the admiral of the fleet dead, he needs a new one.
Cue Michiel de Ruyter. Michiel doesn’t want to, he wants to retire. But Johan is his friend, and Michiel is dedicated to his fatherland so he relents and accepts the commission. We then get shown, in quick succession, a number of sea battles Michiel leads, winning most of them. Taking pointers from The Matrix, every time a cannon ball hits a ship we see sailors and crewmen flying around the decks in slow-motion, accompanied by a blast of sawdust and splinters.
While well-shot battle scenes, using replicas of period ships for the main action and filling it in with CGI for background, this sequence got tiresome as it was very repetitive, and besides on screen titles naming the battles, there were no dates to indicate flow of time.
Peter van de Velde. The Dutch burn down the English fleet before Chatham, June 20, 1667. ca. 1670
During one of these battles his second in command Cornelis Tromp snaps and disobeys an order. As the son of the previous admiral, who was a hero to his men, he fully expected to take over the job. He doesn’t like Michiel and doesn’t trust his strategies. So he breaks formation to pursue two straggler ships and as a consequence, the battle is lost. Michiel is furious and fires him on the spot.
On the whole, though, the Dutch are decimating the English, culminating in a sneak attack on the Medway near London where they burn part of the English fleet anchored there, and steal the flagship. This is also the founding of the Dutch Marine Corps. The English are then somewhat willing to sign a peace treaty. Charles II of England (very well played by Charles Dance, aka Tywin Lannister) is pissed of at this, though, and conspires with the French.
At the same time, in the United Provinces, William III of Orange (nephew of Charles) is unhappy because he isn’t Stadtholder yet, and there are continuing clashes between republicans (anti-him) and orangists (pro-him). He is also a bit of a wet blanket. However, the peace treaty also comes with a demand by Charles for a better position for William so he ends up Stadtholder after all.
Jan de Baen. De lijken van de gebroeders De Witt. ca. 1672-1675
As time goes on, the unrest grows, the peace is broken, battles keep on happening. Political scheming also increases greatly. Meanwhile, the French are knocking at our doors in the south and Louis XIV‘s armies invade, secretly helped by Charles II. The orangists are getting really sick of Johan de Witt and his brother and conspire to have them killed. This is done in a rather gruesome way, matching the earlier mentioned, and shown here, painting.
Michiel is devastated, Johan was his best friend, but he remains first and foremost loyal to his country. Despite being a republican, William likes De Ruyter and wants to keep him on as Admiral. He reinstates Tromp and orders them to put on their big boy pants, suck it up and work together. Despite no love between them, they shake hands and seal the deal. As strategies are devised and battles planned, Tromp begins to see that Michiel is a really brilliant strategist with an excellent grasp of battle dynamics, and the role the ocean plays.
William is influenced by his power-hungry orangist retinue and starts to distrust Michiel. After a glorious victory, William announces it was thanks to Tromp’s achievements they won and Michiel realises he’s pretty fucked. He tries to retire again, so he and his wife and kids can live out their lives in (relative) peace. William has other ideas, however. After a wee shouting match in the hallways, they part. Only for William to stop him at the last minute. Michiel has declared his continuing loyalty to the land and has reaffirmed he will follow orders during the argument. So William sends him, severely outgunned, to the Mediterranean to fight.
There, Michiel and his men, knowing they will not survive, engage the enemy. When indeed he gets shot down and dies, the French they are fighting stop and give him a gun salute. Michiel is brought back home, and given a state funeral.
Overall I really enjoyed the movie. It is of an un-Dutch style and grandeur and evokes patriotism in an almost American way (think lots of flags flying and grand-standing speeches). I am personally rather allergic to patriotism, but even I could not escape it wholly while watching the film. And I don’t think I would’ve wanted it any other way. Michiel de Ruyter is, after all, one of the heroes of our tiny country. There’s some ruckus about this now, because he also did things that we now see as bad (slavery, whaling) so some people are clamoring we shouldn’t see him as a hero.
But we must keep in mind that this is centuries ago, in a society, a world, with different morals, different laws, and frankly, a different reality. Within that context, Michiel gave everything for our country and worked tirelessly to keep us free, free to trade, free to live. Looking back on that now, we should realise that, as morality and ethics have changed over the years, so has our reality. We enacted new laws, stopped practices we now deem wrong. So yes, definitely acknowledge our history, good ánd bad, so we can learn from that, but stop overlaying (y)our current moral viewpoint on a time and place where it is not (fully) applicable.
The actors are good, with one or two exceptions, and I liked most of the characterisations. I especially enjoyed Frank Lammers (Michiel), Sanne Langelaar (Anna) and Barry Atsma (Johan de Witt). I found William III (Egbert Jan Weeber) and his boy-toy Hans William Bentinck (Jelle de Jong) to be played rather as if they were prissy weaklings, which annoyed me.
Other than that, the movie is rife with historical inaccuracies. The writer(s) played loose and fast with the timeline, both compressing it, and rearranging events as they liked it. Historically speaking, the movie covers a period of about 25 years. In the movie, it can’t be more than about three years. And even that is a stretch. There are never any dates shown, but his children at the beginning of the movie are played by the same actors as at the end, and none of them are aged in any way. Therefore, it can’t be more than just a few years.
Jurriaen Jacobsz. Michiel de Ruyter and his family. 1662. In the back: Engel (with falcon), Michiel, his wife Anna, her son from an earlier marriage Jan, Alida (with flowers) and on the right Cornelia and her husband Jan. In the front are the two daughters from Michiel and Anna playing with their cousin Cornelis (son of Cornelia and Jan).
And speaking of his children, as an example of things changed in the movie, Michiel de Ruyter married and then lost that wife, as well as the child, in childbirth. He then later married again and, with that wife, had a son named Adriaen, a daughter named Cornelia (Neeltje), a child that died a few days old, another daughter named Alida (Aaltje), and another son named Engel. His wife then died about a year later, and two years after that, in 1652, he marries Anna. This is the wife he has in the movie.
Anna was a widow at that time, with a son and a daughter from a previous marriage. Together, they have two more daughters, Margaretha in 1652 and Anna in 1655. Also in 1655, his oldest son Adriaen dies, leaving them with six or seven living children between them (I couldn’t find if the daughter is still alive at this point).
In the movie, Anna is pregnant at the beginning. She gives birth and loses that baby. Beyond that, they have a son, Engel, and two daughters, Neeltje and Greetje. So, the number of kids is wrong, the order of the kids is wrong, and the names of the kids are wrong. And none of these kids have aged in any way at the end of the movie… This while Engel in actuality also went out to sea, fought alongside his father and separately, rising to a rank of vice-admiral two years after his father’s death.
Having said that, I recommend you watch the movie, and then spent an hour or two reading up on Actual History. The Wikipedia articles I linked are an excellent starting point. If you read Dutch, though, I recommend the nl varieties of he Wikipedia links, they are more in depth.
Hensema started out by singing old songs adapted to be about places in the province. He then did dress-up as a character and started doing a sketch-like story, which morphed into another story, as another character and so on. As he made his way through characters, repeating some, and stories, it became an interconnected whole showing this big slice-of-life of all these characters. All to make the point that life isn’t this grand tale, it is everything in between, and so it is also for the people around you. Everyone influences everyone, and you’re a part of more lives than you think. So look around you at your life and don’t pass it by waiting for special occasions, grand accomplishments or other extraordinary things. As the saying goes: “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans”
The show itself is a two player piece done by McFadden (in the flesh) and Jeroen Willems (on projected video) about the biblical Lilith. In Jewish folklore, she became the first wife of Adam, created at the same time as him, who later left him (as she would not be submissive to him) for the archangel Samael.
Yesterday, Mom and I went to see the theater production of War Horse. It was beyond amazing.
Wrote Holiday cards with Mom yesterday as we usually do.
Yesterday I went to see the play Mary Stuart, written by Friedrich Schiller. It was performed by 
The moment where Elizabeth and Mary meet, even though they never did in real life, is the the best part, performance wise. They speak of their lives as ruling women in a men’s world. About power, about responsibility, loneliness, strength and the perception of weakness, and about personal and public lives. About knowing that they are more than just Elizabeth and Mary, they know these are the moments of History. What they do then and there, is what History will reduce them to.
The only thing I couldn’t really get into was a bit in the middle where Elizabeth goes a walking, and dances in the park with one of her underlings. And since they chose, for the music, an electronic rendition of music of that period, the dance is also a weird, modern thing that I didn’t really like.
We then headed for the Oosterpoort and, once there, found ourselves some good seats. Most people were seating themselves near the stage or standing in front, but we went for a little further away and up. Since he was playing the small room, this was still close enough to see everything, and by sitting a bit higher up, we could see over the rest.
Met up with Gert today to play games and have general fun. He has recently acquired Star Trek Catan, and as trekkie, I, of course, must play this 😀