Privilegie de Visscherie

Present Grand Hotel Casselbergh Brugge,
was the Court building for Charles Stuart
during his exile 1659 to 1600.
Commemorative plaque on side of hotel.

An interesting tiny subset of the Brexit negotiations reveals a link back to the days of Charles 11, before he became King of England. In 1651 he was driven from Britain by Oliver Cromwell and initially 

Charles in exile, 1653, painted  by
Peter Lely.

sought refuge in Paris and then Cologne but when he attempted to reach Brussels, he was barred by Philip of Spain who wished to avoid war with Cromwell. However, Charles and Philip secretly agreed to collaborate to win back Charles’s throne and Charles was allowed to settle in Bruges ‘anonymously’. During his three years in Brugge, Charles became an active member of civil society and a member of the Sint Joris Guild through which he was able to make useful strategic friendships. After Cromwell’s death with his son Richard as Protector, Charles was able to regain his throne, returning in June 1660. In 1666 Charles’s guide and friend while he lived in Bruges, the aristocrat, Arrazola de Onate, was appointed exceptional ambassador to Charles by Philip of Spain with the intention of negotiating a trade treaty. The treaty itself has disappeared but the City of Brugge still retains an associated charter granting “eternal rights” to the fishermen of Bruges to fish in the coastal waters of Britain. In fact, there are two Privilegie, one of England and one for Scotland.

Jan d'Hondt, Chief Archivist of Bruges,
holding a Privilegie, Oct. 13th 2020

Sylvain Van de Weyer 

The charter was never really tested until 1851. In 1849 Britain initiated the first negotiation with the newly-founded Kingdom of Belgium. The aim for Britain was to keep exclusive fishing rights fos-a-vis its fishermen for up to three nautical miles from the coast. Belgium sent ex-prime minister Sylvain Van de Weyer as special envoy to London with the aim of preserving Belgium’s status quo vis-a-vis the Privilegie. The strength of the Belgian case was reinforced by the head of the Bruges Chamber of Commerce who introduced to London the Fisheries Privilege of 1666, the existence of which the British Government had been totally unaware. H.J.Temple, the British Foreign Minister replied suggesting that the Belgian Government pursue a legal route in the Law Courts of England and Scotland [ there being, in fact, two documents conferring the privileges on each of the two countries’ fishermen.] The Belgian Government decided not to take matters to the British courts but prioritised a fishing convention covering all Belgian fishermen and proceeded with establishing a treaty with the U.K. [March 1852] but making clear that the Fishing Privilege of 1666 was not affected by any subsequent treaty.

“ ..[la convention] attribue aux pecheurs des deux Etats le traitement de la nation la plus favorisee pour l’exercise de la peche sur les cotes de chaque pays, sans prejudice de droits que les pecheurs belge pourraient tirer des chartes du roi Charles 11.”

Victor dePaepe 1963 [centre]

It looks likely that no firm conclusion was reached and the matter lay dormant until 1963 when a Belgian owner of a fishing fleet, Victor dePaepe, wrote to Harold MacMillan the Prime Minister, and to the Queen, saying that he wished to avail himself of the rights conferred under the 1666 Charter. He informed them of his sailing date so that he could be arrested at sea and thus, he believed, empowered to press his claim in the British courts. He was duly arrested on his re-named boat, King Charles the Second, on July 8^th, by the Royal Navy off the coast of East Sussex, near Seaford. The case never came to court but it was revealed in papers released in 1993 that the British legal team had advised the Agriculture Minister to avoid a court case because if was possible that the Charter was still legally 

enforceable.

Hilde Crevits, Minister of Economy
and Agriculture.

This year, 2020, under the never-ending Brexit negotiations, the Belgian Ambassador Extraordinaire to the E.U. Willem Van De Voorde cited the treaty and the Privilegie during a discussion of the future access of E.U. fishing fleets to British coastal waters. The Minister of Economy and Agriculture, Hilde Crevits, confirmed during a Radio One interview that a legal team was looking into the treaty as a back-up plan although the E..U. would prefer an agreement between the United Kingdom and the European Union.

This is a most entertaining story which shows how a 1666 comet can have a Very Long Tail. Let us hope that the generosity of Charles 11 can be seen to be effective for the Belgians today during Brexit negotiations.

Post Script

Below is a current announcement of a lecture by Paul dePaepe, son of Victor:

Lectures are currently free. Reservation and wearing of a mouth mask is mandatory. Best to arrive 15 minutes earlier. The entrance for the lecture is on the playground of GBS Het Anker. 

Lecture on Sunday November 22, 2020 by Paul Depaepe

Unfortunately the 10 o'clock lecture is fully booked.

A second session was organized at 1.30 pm on the same day. Reservation is mandatory, reserve your place on 050 530 730.

AND here is the man who effectively started this whole saga.

The famous 1653 portrait of Oliver Cromwell
by Peter Lely who was instructed by the sitter
to paint a true likeness, "warts and all".

Simon Stevin: A Life.

 I had lived in Brugge for some time before I learned that the statue in Simon Stevinplein commemorated a person of great distinction. I discovered more today when I visited a small exhibition in the Stadsarchief in the Burg which includes a detailed and excellent introductory video giving lots of information on Simon Stevin.

Simon Stevin
1567 Brugge-
1620 The Hague.

Prins Maurits van Nassau
1567-1625.

Simon’s father, Anthusensis Stevin, estranged from his family and described as the cadet son of the mayor of Veurne, moved to Brugge where he met Cathelijne van der Poort, daughter of a burgher family from Ypres. The couple did not marry despite her pregnancy but she eventually did marry a merchant in the silk and carpet trade who happened to be a Calvinist. Thus it is likely that Simon was brought up in the Calvinist tradition. When an adult, Simon was an avid student but his early jobs seem superficially, ordinary, given his talents and history: a book-keeper and cashier in Antwerp though he travelled in Poland, Prussia and Norway between 1571 and 1577 when he took a job in the tax office in Brugge eventually moving to Leiden in 1581 to attend the Latin school after which, at the mature age of 35, he entered the University of Leiden in 1583. While a student there, he met Maurits, Count of Nassau, the second son of William of Orange and the two became close friends. Simon became both mathematics tutor to the young Prince as well as close advisor. William of Orange effectively ruled the North Netherlands, [newly independent from Spain in 1581] which was predominantly Calvinist but he was assassinated in Delft on 10 July 1584 by a religious fanatic, and his younger son was appointed Stadhouder of Holland and Zeeland, the United Provinces of the Netherlands in 1584.

Crane at work in wine market
in Brugge, 200 years before
Stevin's work.

 A series of military triumphs over Spain followed the elevation of Maurits who understood the importance of military strategy, tactics and engineering. In 1600 he asked Simon to set up an engineering school in the University of Leiden, with courses conducted in Dutch, a progressive and popular move. Recent discovery in the Public Record Office in The Hague recording Simon’s salary at 600 Dutch guilders in 1604 confirms his high position then. Simon was Quartermaster-General of the army from 1604 and during this period he suggested the idea of flooding the lowlands in the path of an invading army by opening selected sluices in dykes. He had become an outstanding engineer who advised, and wrote extensively, on designing cranes, windmills, locks and ports. He advised Prince Maurits on building fortifications for the ongoing war with Spain and wrote detailed descriptions of the military innovations adopted by the army. The seemingly perpetual war with Spain was halted by the Twelve Years’ Truce in 1609 and soon after this, in 1612 Simon bought a house in Raamstraat in The Hague [again showing high social status] and married Catherine Krai. The couple had four children one of whom, Hendrik, also went on to attend the University of Leiden, becoming a famous scientist in his own right and eventually editing his father’s collected works.

T

The author of 11 books, Simon Stevin made significant contributions to trigonometry, geometry,  decimal fractions, mechanics, architecture, musical theory, geography, fortifications, and navigation. His first book, Tafelen Van Interest, was published in 1582. Before presenting the numerical tables, Stevin gave rules for simple and compound interest with many examples of their use, thus making them accessible to many. Before this publication, unpublished manuscript interest tables were commonly used by bankers but treated as special and secret, unavailable to others outside the charmed banking circles.

The following year, 1583, in Problemata Geometrica, Stevin presented geometry based on the

Sterctenbouwing 1594
endearingly labelled as by
Simon Stevin van Brugghe.

teachings of Euclid and Archimedes with problem-solving heavily influenced by Durer. The book was in Latin, the only one of his books to be so, for he became a strong advocate of publishing scientific works in Dutch. In 1585, he published La Thiende, a twenty nine page booklet in which he presented an elementary and thorough account of decimal fractions. He said that he wrote this small book for the benefit of “stargazers, surveyors, carpet-makers, wine-gangers, mint-masters and all kinds of merchants.”

And almost two centuries later, in 1782, in America, Thomas Jefferson argued for a decimal currency system, based on America’s First Silver Dollar, to be adopted as standard for the U.S.A. He had studied, and was inspired by, “Disme: The Art of Tenths or Decimal Arithmetike” [1608] the English version by Robert Norton, of La Thiende by Simon Stevin where the use of decimals for all activities was actively promoted. It is accepted by many that the term, ‘dime’ for a tenth of a dollar could well be an echo of the title of Stevin’s book!

Although Simon Stevin did not invent decimals [they had been in use by the Arabs and the Chinese long before Simon’s time]j he did introduce their use in Mathematics in Europe and influenced important currency decisions for the fledgling U.S.A. He stated definitively that the universal introduction of decimal coinage, measures and weights would only be a matter of time although he was not universally correct in this! However, his important vision for, and writings on, decimals probably rate as his most momentous achievements in a field crowded with notable accomplishments.

Statue in Simon Stevinplein, Brugge

Announcement of the Inauguration of 
Stevin's statue in July 1846 amid 
a programme of celebratory events.