The Wheel of Heusden

The arms of Heusden are plain: on gold a red wheel with six spokes, crowned with a golden coronet of five leaves. What that wheel means, nobody knows for certain — and precisely for that reason a legend lives around it. Tradition holds that a lord of Heusden carried off an English king’s daughter named Sophia. The king sent his servants to bring her home. They found her not in a dungeon but sitting quietly at a spinning wheel, and the wheel of that spindle is said to have stood in the town seal ever since.

Folklorists have never taken the tale for truth. The spinning wheel had not yet been invented in the period the legend describes, and the likeliest answer lies in the church: the wheel is the instrument of martyrdom of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, patron of the town, after whom the Great or Saint Catherine’s Church is named. Even so, the spinning-wheel story has genuinely been written down and preserved, in the Dutch Folktale Database and in the Encyclopedia of North Brabant.

The town itself is older than its legend. Heusden is mentioned as early as 722 as Hunsata super fluvium Mosam, Heusden on the river Meuse. In the twelfth century a castle rose there, and in 1384 Count Albrecht of Bavaria had the Demer dug as a town moat. From 1581 William of Orange had the medieval wall replaced by earthen ramparts in the Old Dutch fortification system, designed by Jacob Kemp.

Heusden has burned more than once. In 1572 a town fire laid almost the whole place in ashes. On 24 July 1680 lightning struck the powder tower of the castle, where sixty thousand pounds of gunpowder were stored; the explosion destroyed the castle, left a third of Heusden in ruins and cost an estimated sixty to seventy people their lives. But the heaviest blow came only in the last months of the Second World War.

In the autumn of 1944 Heusden was a front-line town. The Allies were advancing through Brabant, the Germans withdrawing behind the Bergsche Maas. Under the shellfire the inhabitants took shelter in the cellars of the town. About two hundred people had found refuge in the vaulted cellars of the late Gothic town hall, built in 1461, rebuilt after the fire of 1572, and regarded by many as one of the finest Gothic town halls in the Netherlands.

On the night of Saturday 4 to Sunday 5 November 1944 the Germans blew up the tower of that town hall without any warning. They did so to deny the advancing Allies high observation posts; the church towers and a mill came down that same night. The town hall, however, collapsed entirely. One hundred and thirty-four men, women and children died, about a tenth of the whole population. Less than four hours later the first Scottish tanks drove into Heusden.

What remained after November 1944 was a town with a hole in its heart. The town hall was not rebuilt in its old form; on the square a new municipal building by Nico van der Laan rose in 1956 in the style of the Bossche School. On the site of the old one stands a memorial to the victims, and every year around 4 and 5 November they are commemorated in Heusden.

The fortress itself had by then been purposeless for nearly a century and a half. In 1821 Heusden lost its fortress status, in 1879 the garrison left, and the ramparts ran wild. Only in 1968 did the turn come: a large-scale restoration that would last twenty years. The question was which period to rebuild to. They chose the map Joan Blaeu drew of the town in 1646, with the ramparts as Jacob Kemp had intended them.

So Heusden regained its seventeenth-century face: nine bastions, six ravelins, a wet moat, the town harbour filled in during 1904 opened up again, and the gates rebuilt on their old foundations. Between 1971 and 1975 three post mills were raised on the northern rampart. In 1980 Heusden received for this work the Urbes Nostrae prize, at the time the highest European award in the field of town restoration. And yet the fortress has not become an open-air museum: people live and work between the ramparts. Whoever walks across the Vismarkt sees the wheel again on the gables — and on the square the stone that keeps silent over one hundred and thirty-four names.