IV.] ORANGE. 69 IV. ORANGE. THERE are few foreign cities whose names are oftener, in one way or another, in the mouths of Englishmen than the name of Orange, and yet there is no place about whose geography there are wilder confusions afloat. Orange and England have had one sovereign in common, and the accident of that common sovereign has caused the name of Orange to become so familiar that men constantly utter it without the least thought what it means. Orange gave its name to a line of princes, one of whom was also a king of England, and from that Prince of Orange who was King of England a political party in the British islands and colonies has thought proper to call itself. And the further happy accident by which the name of a fruit reproduces the name of the city has supplied that political party with an appropriate party colour. Orangemen, when they go to an Orange lodge or wear orange ribbons, may possibly think of William the Tenth,* Prince of Orange; but we feel sure that they do not think of the town which gave him his princely title. And, if people stop to think where the Orange is of which William was Prince, they almost always put it in the wrong place. The later Princes of Orange were so much more famous in connexion with lands far away from their own principality that, in common belief, their principality has been carried away to the lands in which they were most famous. Ask in the Oxford Schools * The Williams of Orange are reckoned in different ways, and our William the Third appears in different reckonings as Eighth, Tenth, and Eleventh. I follow the Art de Vérifier les Dates. where Orange is, and the answer invariably places it somewhere in the Netherlands. A sect which affects more minute accuracy seems to make it displace Groningen or WestFriesland. Orange is by them defined to lie between Holland and Germany. It is a strange fate which caused this little scrap of the old kingdom of Arles to live on, side by side with its neighbours of Avignon and Venaissin, so long after the two together, Pope and Prince, were altogether surrounded by the gradual annexations of France. In the later days of the principality, the Prince of Orange, in his hill-castle, saw France on every side of him, save where the papal territory still remained to be devoured even later than his own. Lyons, Vienne, Provence, Bresse, Besançon and the Burgundian county, had all been swallowed up, while Orange still went on, often swallowed up indeed, but as often disgorged again. But it was a stranger fate still which brought the later history of Orange so near to the history of lands with which Orange had no kind of natural connexion. One prince of Orange, a too loyal vassal of the Empire, appears as the conqueror of Rome, a conqueror not after the manner of Alaric and Totila, and he meets his reward in one of the last efforts of betrayed and beleaguered Florence. Another prince, of another house, wipes out the stain; the name of Orange becomes so closely connected with the foundation of free states that we forget that it had ever borne an opposite meaning. We pass by the inglorious career of the eldest son of the Silent one, and we come to four princes of his house who were Stadholders of distant Holland, and the last and greatest of whom became the last chosen King of England, the latest English conqueror of Ireland. It is to William-William the First of Ireland, Second of Scotland, Third of England, Fourth of Normandy, and Tenth of Orange-that the old Roman and Burgundian city owes the peculiar meaning which its name has borne, ever since orange colours were first worn by his friends and rotten oranges first squeezed by his enemies. IV.] GEOGRAPHY OF ORANGE. 71 As the geographical position of Orange is thus to most minds so mysterious, it is not wonderful that the town seems not to be much frequented by English travellers. Orange has a station on one of the great highways of Europe, on the railway from Marseilles to Lyons and Paris; but the town itself lies a little off the line. The mighty wall of its theatre may be seen from the railway; but Orange is not actually on the main road, like Arles, Avignon, and Vienne. And, as it does not lie immediately on the railway, neither does it lie immediately on the great river whose course the railway so closely skirts. Arles, Avignon, and Vienne are washed by the mighty Rhone; they stand out at once as sentinels, as bulwarks of the Imperial land against the encroaching power beyond its stream. Orange is less directly on the frontier; it lies away from the great river, by the banks of an almost invisible tributary, a stream whose name seems given to it to remind us where we are, a namesake of the Main which flows by Imperial Frankfurt. Orange therefore does not force itself on the eye in the same way as the other cities of the Rhoneland; the town itself is smaller than its fellows, and, I should imagine, to the common view of tourists less attractive. In truth that Orange, or any other place, is not greatly infested by the common run of tourists is to be set down as one of its merits. I heard English at Arles, at Nîmes, and at Avignon; I heard none at Orange or at Vienne. But I would recommend every rational traveller, every one who cares for the history, the antiquities, or even the scenery, of the lands through which he passes, by no means to leave unvisited a city which has so long and so remarkable a history, which is so rich in at least one class of antiquities, and whose now vanished castle could look down at once on the city at its feet, on the wide plain around it, on the border-stream of Rhone on the one side, and on snowy Alps on the other. It is the isolated hill of the castle, rising all alone out of the plain, and at some distance from the river, which gives the key to the history of Orange. At Avignon a single hill overhung the river; at Vienne an amphitheatre of hills offered a well-sheltered site between the heights and the stream. In both these cases the advantages of the hill-fort and those of the settlement by the river could be combined. At Orange this could not be. The isolated hill was a site too precious to be passed by in the perilous times when strength of position was the first requisite in a settlement; but the settlement on the isolated hill was cut off from the advantages of the settlements by the river. In more civilized days the loss of those advantages was fatal. Arles, Avignon, Vienne, though no longer holding their old place, though no longer the seats of pontiffs, kings, and sovereign archbishops, are still undoubted cities. of men. Orange, which remained the capital of a sovereign state longer than any of them, cut off from the traffic of the river, has sunk into a mere country town. The peculiarity of the history of Orange, which it shares with the neighbouring city of Avignon and county of Venaissin, is that they together formed a small region which was surrounded by French territory, but which was not French territory itself. The position of these districts is one of the many things which are puzzling to those who read history with a mind which has not set itself free from bondage to the modern map. People are apt to wonder how a small separate state got into the midst of French territory. This question is something like the more famous question how the apple got into the dumpling. The question is not how there came to be an independent Orange in the midst of French territory, but how French territory came to surround independent Orange. Of course, given the subjection of its neighbours, it is a fair question why Orange came to escape longer than they did—why, while Lyons was swallowed up under Philip the Fair, Orange was swallowed up only under Lewis the Great. But this is not the common difficulty. As long as people IV.] HISTORY OF ORANGE. 73 conceive that there must have been from all eternity a France bounded by the Pyrenees, the Alps, and perhaps the Rhine, the position of Orange and Avignon will of course be puzzling. When the facts of history come to be rightly understood, the wonder is how a Parisian king ever came to reign between the Rhone and the Alps. The thing that needs explanation is, not why Orange was so late in becoming French, but why Provence and the Dauphiny ever became French at all. Orange, in short, is one of the members of the ancient kingdom of Burgundy, which contrived to escape French annexation longer than most of its fellows. The process of swallowing-up, which began with Lyons and which has as yet ended with Savoy, failed to reach Orange till a remarkably late time, just as it has still failed to reach Geneva, Neufchâtel, and the other Burgundian states which now form part of the Swiss Confederation. Orange indeed more than once underwent a temporary annexation; so did Geneva; so did Savoy more than once, before it was finally engulfed in our own days. The point to be borne in mind is that all these annexations, from Lyons to Savoy, from Philip the Fair to the younger Buonaparte, are all parts of one story, all scenes in one long drama. Of that drama each scene, whether laid at Lyons, at Orange, or in Savoy, represents the seizure by France of some territory which neither in nature nor in history had anything to do with France. The special interest of Orange, in this point of view, is that so small a state, so dangerously placed, was spared so long. Savoy found a certain measure of protection in the possessions of its dukes beyond the Alps. The Romance-speaking cantons of Switzerland find what we may hope is a surer protection in the fact that they are cantons of Switzerland. But Orange stood alone, with no protector, unless we hold that Orange and the Papal territory drew some slight protection from one another. Certainly each hindered the other from being wholly surrounded by the dominions of the encroaching power. |