Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory

by Lisa Jardine

  Grant O Gracious God that all of us, may be turning to thee with our whole hearts; Repenting us truly of all our past sins, and solemnly vowing to thee, as wee now doe, that wee will in all time coming amend our lives, and endeavour to carry our selves as becomes Reformed Christians. And that wee will show our Zeal for our holy Religion by living in all things suteably to it.18

  Burnet was equally at home in London and The Hague, and his interventions were carefully judged and coloured so as to resonate with the attitudes and beliefs of the inhabitants of both.

  William’s Declaration, like almost all the other documents issued and circulated during and after the invasion, was countersigned and authenticated by his secretary, Constantijn Huygens junior.

  Huygens junior, we recall, was one of the group who stood with the Prince on the clifftop at Brixham, watching the Dutch forces disembark, and who accompanied him every step of the way to his triumphal reception in London, drafting his letters of instruction in English, Dutch and French as they went along. After the Glorious Revolution he remained in England in the service of the new King and Queen.

  His presence as part of that defining scene for our historical exploration allows us to make our first acquaintance with the Huygens family – a dynasty of advisers and administrators to the house of Orange, whose cultivation and aesthetic sensitivity, combined with their political acumen and dedicated service, helped transform the fortunes of the Dutch Stadholders. In the story that follows, several members of this prominent and respected family will be among our most reliable guides to understanding the unfolding, curious relationship between the seventeenth-century British Isles and the seventeenth-century Low Countries.

  The Prince of Orange arrived in England in November 1688 with a formidable army. But he also came prepared for his encounter with the English, with a fully-formed outlook and set of attitudes. A robust set of common interests and commitments had developed over at least the preceding half-century between a certain sort of Englishman and his Dutch counterpart. While there was always an edge of suspicion (there had, after all, been three Anglo–Dutch wars since the 1650s), there was also a great deal of recognisably shared experience, particularly in the realm of arts and letters.

  A small episode on the road leading from Torbay to London and the English throne underlines the importance of this shared ‘mentality’. Constantijn Huygens junior records in his diary that in the course of the often arduous and demanding forced march from Torbay to London, Prince William of Orange took some time off from military affairs to do a bit of tourism, and encouraged his secretary to do likewise.

  On 4 December, as the Prince travelled towards London at the head of his massive Dutch army, he insisted on making a detour to admire Wilton House near Salisbury, the country seat of the Earl of Pembroke. Wilton was renowned for its architecture, its art, but most of all for its magnificent gardens, designed in the 1640s by Isaac de Caus.

  Engravings of the Wilton gardens had appeared in a lavishly illustrated book entitled Hortus Pembrochianus (Garden of the Earl of Pembroke), first published in 1645–46, and reprinted several times thereafter – in one case, without any of the accompanying text, but simply as a set of engravings.19 The book is closely modelled on a famous volume brought out twenty-five years earlier by Isaac de Caus’s brother Salomon, depicting the fabulous gardens he had designed at Heidelberg for the ‘Winter King and Queen’ – the Elector Palatine Frederick and his wife, Charles I’s sister, Elizabeth of Bohemia. Both books are likely to have been familiar to a keen enthusiast for gardens like Prince William. Heidelberg’s gardens had been destroyed during the Thirty Years War, along with the city’s great university and its library.

  In the midst of a military campaign, on foreign soil, William took the earliest possible opportunity to inspect the Pembroke gardens in all their glory, and at some length. Constantijn Huygens junior records the detour made for this purpose:

  We marched from Hendon to Salisbury, 13 miles, a good way through Salisbury plain, but for a long time we had a cold, sharp wind blowing directly in our faces.

  A mile from Salisbury we passed an undistinguished village (which nevertheless sends two representatives to Parliament), called Wilton, where the Earl of Pembroke has a rather beautiful house which is moderately beautiful, because there are some very notable paintings by van Dyck. His Highness went to see it, but I did not – I was in a hurry to get to the town to get warm.20

  William may have been anxious to see the van Dycks, at least one of which showed his mother as a child, with her siblings, but the gardens were far more impressive than the house. Laid out and planted before the house itself was built, as was customary for the period, the Wilton gardens had been designed to complement a classical villa on a grand scale, as de Caus’s original drawings clearly show. By the time the house was constructed, the 4th Earl’s fortunes had faded, and a more modest house eventually presided over the parterres and wildernesses, statues and elaborate fountains.

  Wilton House’s architecture, interior decoration, artworks and gardens were entirely to the monarch-to-be’s Dutch taste. The weather was abominable, but that in no way dampened the Stadholder’s enthusiasm. Rejoining Huygens the following day, William told Constantijn that the house and garden were as outstanding as he had been led to believe: ‘In the evening the Prince was in his room coughing violently, having caught cold. He told me I absolutely must go and see the house at Wilton.’21 Huygens ‘did want to go to Wilton, but my horses were not available’.22 He went on foot to see Salisbury Cathedral instead:

  The Cathedral at Salisbury is huge, with many ancient tombs. There is a place where the members of the clergy meet, a round chapel, very neatly built in a gothic style, more than 40 feet in diameter, the ceiling vaulting of which is supported in the middle on a pillar, which is like all other pillars of a greyish polished stone, apparently natural.23

  But if Huygens did not choose to admire Wilton’s gardens, it is entirely likely that Hans Willem Bentinck did, and that he, in contrast to Huygens, chose to accompany Prince William on that cold afternoon tour. It may even have been he who proposed the sightseeing detour. Bentinck was himself a lifelong gardening enthusiast, whose own country estate at Sorgvliet – purchased from the heirs of the cultivated Dutch statesman Jacob Cats in 1675 – was considered in Dutch court circles to be an outstanding example of garden design, in which architecture and statuary perfectly complemented formal landscaping and topiary.24 His passion for horticulture and expertise in garden design were recognised when, immediately after William and Mary ascended the English throne, the royal favourite was appointed to the official post of Superintendent of the Royal Gardens.

  It was Bentinck who designed key features of the gardens at Hampton Court and Kensington Palace, and he too who was responsible for the realisation of the magnificent gardens at William and Mary’s favourite palace at Het Loo, near Apeldoorn – both monarchs’ favourite retreat. From his correspondence we know that he often combined business with horticultural pleasure – requesting rare plant specimens and seeds from fellow enthusiasts, and exchanging advice and expertise.

  During the period when Bentinck was gathering intelligence in the first half of 1688, he observed to one of his key pro-William informants, Charles Mordaunt, that their letters were undoubtedly being read by James’s agents, who would be likely to read sedition into anything that passed between them, however innocent: ‘If, enthusiastic gardeners that we are, we were to talk only of plants and flowers, the eavesdropper would want to find some sinister meaning in it.’25

  I bring this early chapter in our exploration of the world of seventeenth-century Anglo–Dutch relations to a close with a last, suggestive example of the complex and subtle ways in which ‘talk of plants and flowers’ did indeed, in the circle of William of Orange, acquire cultural significance beyond the simple act of exchange of desirable material objects. Freighted with symbolic meaning, such shared cultural pursuits bridge any notional divide between the
United Provinces and the British Isles.

  The elaborate, clandestine preparations for the 1688 invasion would not have been possible without loans of almost unimaginable size from wealthy supporters of the Orangists in The Hague. Foremost amongst these was the Portuguese Jewish banker Francisco Lopes Suasso, who provided the massive sum of two million guilders, lent without any collateral security. Effectively, William’s entire expedition was underwritten by Suasso.26 Following the successful invasion, now installed as the English King, William III presented Suasso – a man of considerable cultivation, at whose house the élite of The Hague regularly congregated for concerts and recitals – with a fine contemporary painting, as a thanks offering. The painting is of an orange tree, in an exquisite blue faïence container, with orange blossom and vibrantly coloured fruits appearing together amid the vividly green foliage.27

  It needs little imagination, even today, to recognise the thriving little orange tree as a symbol of the success of the house of Orange, supported financially in its ambitions by men of business like Suasso. I shall return later to the way in which the meticulously depicted porcelain container also refers directly to the global ambitions – territorial and commercial – of the Dutch under William’s leadership. Collecting porcelain became a passion of Queen Mary, whose example created an Anglo–Dutch rage for acquiring exquisite blue-and-white Chinese-style porcelain ware which lasted well beyond her death in 1697. So the grateful King, newly settled in his English kingdom, rewards his financial backer with a small, tasteful token of his gratitude, an enduring sign of the mutual respect that underpinned the financial commitment, in the form of a Dutch painting of an exotic potted plant. This shared passion for the art of gardens, and garden-related fine art, reminds us that the cultural landscape into which William of Orange stepped when he landed on English soil was one in which he already felt comfortably at home. In what follows we shall pursue some of the paths of cultural, artistic and intellectual interest which crisscrossed the Low Countries and the British Isles during the preceding century, and which prepared the way for the arrival of an English-speaking Dutch Stadholder, accompanied by his resolutely English wife, to take their places jointly upon the throne of England.

  3

  Royal and Almost-Royal Families: ‘How England Came to be Ruled by an Orange’

  There was an event I barely mentioned in my opening account of the Dutch invasion which, to anyone familiar with traditional accounts of the unfolding of England’s ‘Glorious Revolution’, might have been expected to have figured more centrally. In summer 1688, Maria of Modena, Catholic wife of the Catholic English King, James II, gave birth to a healthy male heir. The arrival of Prince James Francis Edward Stuart upset long-established Europe-wide expectations for the English succession, and contributed its own momentum to the unfolding events which culminated in the arrival of William III of Orange in London.

  Until summer 1688, James’s eldest daughter by his first wife Anne Hyde, Princess Mary Stuart, was heir to the English throne. In 1677 Mary married the Dutch Stadholder William of Orange, and went to reside at The Hague. So in the second half of the 1680s it was confidently expected across Europe that the English monarchy would pass after James’s death to a Protestant Englishwoman, married to a Protestant Dutchman. The Protestant succession seemed to have been secured, and after the brief, unfortunate interlude of James II’s Catholic monarchy, England appeared once again about to be safely in Protestant hands. And although the Princesses in the Protestant line were proving remarkably unsuccessful at producing healthy heirs, it was devoutly hoped that competing Catholic claimants – notably the Italian house of Savoy – could be consigned to the margins of English history.1

  James’s second wife, Maria of Modena, had been pregnant a number of times since their marriage in 1673, and several of these had been brought to term. All her living children, however, had died in infancy. Rumours of another pregnancy began to circulate in January 1688, but they occasioned only a little serious speculation that the English dynastic situation might be altered – another miscarriage or stillbirth was confidently predicted. As the pregnancy advanced, however, and the Queen remained in good health, the possibility of a Catholic Stuart heir once more became a real possibility, and on 10 June (old style) Maria was delivered of a healthy boy, James Francis Edward Stuart.

  It was this event that forced the hands of the Dutch Stadholder and his wife, eventually compelling them to lay claim to the English throne by force. So, before we go any further, we need to interrupt this exploration of the patterns of influence and exchange between England and the Dutch Republic to look more closely at royalty, dynasties and the accidents of succession, as these are woven into the social and political fabric of seventeenth-century Anglo–Dutch affairs. Close family connections between the English royal family and their faction, and the Dutch Orange Stadholders and theirs, meant that an unexpectedly close eye was kept by both parties on political developments in the territory presided over by their cousins. As we shall discover, Anglo–Dutch marriages provide many of the clues in this period to the often unexpectedly intimate liaisons between things British and things Dutch.

  With the arrival of the Stuart line at the beginning of the seventeenth century, after the death of the husbandless and childless ‘Virgin Queen’, Elizabeth I, the English succession once again looked secure. To the relief of the English public and Parliament, the Protestant King James I, son of Mary Queen of Scots, was married with children, and the Anglo-Scottish house of Stuart looked set to provide a lasting dynastic line for the English throne. Yet by the 1680s the direct Stuart line had already effectively petered out. Charles II, though married for over twenty years to Catherine of Braganza, and with a palace full of illegitimate sons and daughters by his many mistresses, had no legitimate heirs. His brother James had two adult daughters by his first marriage to Anne Hyde (commoner daughter of Edward Hyde, later created Earl of Clarendon), both of whom were married but childless, and he had no surviving children by his second wife.

  The sense of dynastic disarray is probably best captured by a phenomenon which tends to be ignored by traditional historians – the extraordinarily high number of known miscarriages, stillbirths and infant deaths among the increasingly desperate Stuart royals. Dynastic succession is both the boon and the bane of monarchy. All the royal wives and Princesses in the direct line of succession to the English throne were in some state of pregnancy for most of their adult lives, yet none succeeded in producing a healthy heir, whether male or female, who lived to adulthood.

  With no direct line of Stuart inheritance, the country once again held its breath in anticipation of a likely descent into disorder and political chaos, of the kind that had been widely feared towards the end of the reign of Elizabeth I. The future political direction of the nation depended on the outcome of the next dynastic roll of the dice. Since Charles II’s brother James had declared himself a practising Catholic, the whole of Europe waited expectantly, too. If James’s line should successfully take control of the English throne long-term, the alliance of European Protestant nations against the might of Spanish and French Catholicism would be dangerously weakened.

  Across the water, the Dutch Stadholder was equally concerned at the prospect of a line of Catholic monarchs on the English throne. The proximity of the two nations, and their apparently closely compatible social structure and religious convictions, had led to attempts at close political union on several occasions in the course of the seventeenth century. Catholic rule in England would leave the United Provinces acutely vulnerable to being engulfed and overrun, as a result of the French King Louis XIV’s expansionist ambitions. Dutch and English dynastic ambitions were thus separately concentrated on the immediate future of the English crown, the Stuarts and the Oranges both directly implicated because of their dynastic history.

  Scandalous rumours began circulating in England even before the official announcement in January 1688 that after a gap of six years, James II’s wife was
once again pregnant.2 They reached King James’s eldest daughter Mary in The Hague in December 1687.3 On 15 January Henry Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, wrote that ‘the Queen’s great belly is everywhere ridiculed, as if scarce anybody believed it to be true’. To those associated with James II’s first Protestant wife, Anne Hyde, and her family (Henry Hyde was her brother), it simply seemed too politically convenient that the Catholic King and his Catholic Queen Consort should at this moment produce a Catholic heir (already anticipated to be a boy), just as it seemed settled that the succession was bound to pass eventually to one of James’s adult, Protestant daughters.

  Following the announcement, those closest to the Protestant line of succession naturally reacted most readily to the suggestion that the Queen’s condition might be feigned – a ruse to secure an enduring Catholic succession. On 13 March, William Cavendish, Earl of Devonshire, writing to Prince William of Orange, husband of Princess Mary Stuart, at their court in the Low Countries, reported that ‘the Roman Catholics incline absolutely that it should be a son’. The next day, Mary’s sister, Princess Anne, wrote to her with even greater candour:

  I can’t help thinking [the King’s] wife’s great belly is a little suspicious. It is true indeed she is very big, but she looks better than ever she did, which is not usual: for people when they are so far gone, for the most part look very ill. Besides, it is very odd that [her visit to] Bath, that all the best doctors thought would do her a great deal of harm, should have had so very good effect so soon, as that she should prove with child from the first minute she and [the King] met, after her coming from thence. Her being so positive it will be a son, and the principles of that religion being such that they will stick at nothing, be it never so wicked, if it will promote their interest, give some cause to fear there may be foul play intended.4