Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory

by Lisa Jardine

  Anna Morgan was born and raised in a bilingual and bicultural household in the northern Netherlands. Her first husband was another Welshman, Sir Lewis Morgan (no relation), who died in 1635, and who, like her father, had served with English regiments in the United Provinces. However, since he was Member of Parliament for Cardiff in 1628–29, and was knighted at Whitehall in March 1629, we may assume that Anna made her home in Wales (in 1652, Huygens wrote to her thanking her for ‘the excess of civilities with which it has pleased you to shower my son [Lodewijk], extending as far as your beautiful country of Wales’).24

  In 1644, Anna was once again in the United Provinces, to commission a magnificent white marble funerary monument for her father, who had died the previous year, at Bergen op Zoom. She was advised on this project, and the creation and construction of the monument by François Dieussart (completed in 1645–46), by Sir Constantijn Huygens. He and Anna were already friends,25 and in the course of their association over the funerary sculpture a romantic attachment developed between them. An elaborately conceited poem in Dutch by Huygens, ‘Aen Mevrouw Morgan’, written in 1645, on the occasion of Anna presenting him with the gift of a mosquito net to be used in the field during the annual summer military campaigning, openly affirms his passionate love for her.26 In 1646, in a gossipy letter written to Huygens around the time news broke of her impending second marriage to somebody else, Constantijn’s brother-in-law (husband of his sister Constantia) referred to Anna Morgan as ‘your would-be (or alleged) mistress’.27 The monument Huygens and Dieussart designed and erected for Anna in the Grote Kerk at Bergen op Zoom is a uniquely imposing piece of Dutch neoclassical monumental sculpture, which remains enduring testimony to the passionate, creative relationship between Huygens and ‘Mevrouw Morgan’.

  Huygens remained on cordial terms with Anna Morgan after her marriage, in August 1646, to Walter Strickland, the English Parliamentary ambassador to the United Provinces between 1642 and 1651, and a prominent ally of Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s.28 Anna was naturalised by Parliamentary ordinance in 1651, and took a further oath of naturalisation at the Restoration, in 1660.29

  The two old lovers continued to correspond, in a mixture of English, French and Dutch, down to the 1680s. Occasionally, as often happens, disagreements over gifts exchanged during the love affair came between them, though not apparently for long. In October 1654, Huygens returned from a three-month trip to Spa, south of Maastricht, to find a letter from Anna demanding the return of ‘some copper medals which [she] once generously gave to [him]’. Affecting amazement at the request, Huygens wrote:

  I am totally astonished, Madame, that having given them to me with the sweet and kind demeanour with which you were always pleased to honour me, you are now demanding their return.30

  The medals were, he confessed, now intermingled with those which formed part of his considerable collection. However, if Lady Strickland (as she now was) was determined to have her gift returned, he would ‘give her the whole cabinet, which is entirely at your service, if you should be pleased to receive it from my hand’. The abrupt communication Huygens had received from Anna – now firmly of the English Commonwealth party – was perhaps not unexpected: he had been at Spa with the Princess Royal, for weeks of court amusement with the itinerant future Charles II (to whom Huygens refers consistently as ‘the King of Great Britain’). Reporting the goings on at Spa to Amalia van Solms, Huygens told her with evident satisfaction that ‘there is a lot of dancing, and this Prince performs better than anyone else at all, since he has a true ear, and understands and loves music with a passion, just like his Royal father’.31 The Commonwealth government of Oliver Cromwell was not well pleased at the continued support for Charles on the parts of Amalia and the Princess Royal.

  The intimate liaison between the Dutch Huygens and the Anglo– Dutch Anna Morgan bridged the divide between the United Provinces and the British Isles, binding the interests of the two families invisibly together – families with significant influence in their respective political administrations. In 1652, an incident at sea precipitated Commonwealth England and the United Provinces into naval confrontation, and eventually into the first Anglo–Dutch war. Required by the captain of an English ship to dip his flag as a sign of English supremacy at sea, the Dutch commander, Admiral Tromp, refused to comply. Relations were already tense between the two countries, and England immediately declared war.

  The situation was extremely delicate. At the moment when hostilities were declared between the two countries, a diplomatic mission from the States General to Parliament was in London, and with it Huygens’s third son Lodewijk. Huygens wrote to his old flame, Anna Morgan, begging her, from her influential position as wife to one of Cromwell’s closest advisers, to take care of his son.

  In the same letter, he did some shrewd informal diplomatic negotiating. The insult to English pride on the part of Admiral Tromp which had precipitated the crisis was, he assured Anna, nothing to do with the Dutch government:

  We have just learned with great displeasure about the misunderstanding between our fleets. Whatever the reasons given by either party in this disorder, we can say with absolute certainty that the State did not authorise anybody to commit any hostile action, and to judge otherwise would be to do us wrong. However, since the authority of the government cannot always control the will of the people, in case of emergency, I commit my son to your care.32

  Although Huygens in the end remained single for the fifty years of his life after Susanna’s death, in the middle decades of the century his name was frequently linked with those of his young female musician friends. Many years later his son Constantijn junior, on a visit to Antwerp, was mortified when his host hinted that his father’s relations with the ‘beautiful Duarte girls’ might not have been entirely innocent.

  In the spring of 1642, on the eve of the outbreak of civil war in England, the ten-year-old Princess Mary Stuart, eldest daughter of Charles I, arrived in the Netherlands with her mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, to join her teenaged husband, Frederik Hendrik’s son Prince William of Orange, whom she had married in London the previous year. The two royal ladies established themselves at The Hague, surrounded by a large number of household servants and hangers-on. Princess Mary was attended by an entourage of eighty (the marriage agreement had stipulated only forty), while her mother, according to eyewitnesses, brought a total of three hundred followers.33

  One of those who arrived at The Hague as lady-in-waiting to Princess Mary Stuart was Utricia Ogle, a spirited young woman born in Utrecht of an English father (Governor of Utrecht in 1610, and commander of the English garrison there for a number of years) and a Dutch mother, but raised in England.34 Originally a member of the household of Katherine Wotton, Lady Stanhope (an English widow who had recently met and married William of Orange’s leading negotiator in the matter of the English match), Utricia was an accomplished instrumentalist, with a lovely singing voice. She quickly became Huygens’s protégée and close personal friend, and a regular visitor to his country retreat. He composed songs especially for her, and set them to music himself, coaching her in their performance. His one surviving published compilation of songs, the Pathodia Sacra et Profana, is dedicated to her as its musical inspiration.

  In 1645 Utricia married Sir William Swann, an English professional soldier serving in the forces of the Prince of Orange. Swann was also a musician, and it is probable that he and Utricia met at one of Huygens’s musical evenings (he and Huygens corresponded regularly – particularly, anxiously, concerning Utricia’s health). Utricia and Constantijn continued to perform together, privately and publicly. Indeed, her husband seems to have encouraged them to combine their musical talents whenever possible, probably to enhance his own prestige in court circles.35 ‘My wife presents her humbel service to you,’ he writes in January 1647 from Breda, ‘and greefs much for the loss of her voice, which a great could [cold] has taken from her … But I hoope, eere long she will bee fitt againe to beare her part in mu
syck with your consort, which I long to heare.’36

  Some years later, Huygens sent the English composer and lutenist Nicholas Lanier a copy of the Pathodia Sacra et Profana, flattering him with the assurance that Lanier could correct any deficiencies in his compositions as he performed them on his ‘most excelent royal tiorba’. Huygens had met Lanier in London, at the home of Sir Robert Killigrew, in 1622.37 Now Lanier, who was of Huguenot descent, was in Antwerp, jostling for some kind of place with all the other English exiles, and trying to eke out a musical living there (though he soon went north, to the more welcoming exile community at The Hague). Huygens again characterised the songs as particularly intended for Utricia:

  Or else, if you will bee so good to us one day, as to come where you may heare mylady Swanne and me make a reasonable beau bruict about some lessons on this booke. The Psalmes she most lovethe and doth use to sing are named here in the margent, as allso some of the songs.38

  In a long Latin poem published in 1651, in celebration of his country estate ‘Hofwijk’, Huygens devotes an entire section to Utricia Ogle’s musical presence there, recalling the extraordinary emotional impact of her singing, and likening her open-air performance to the thrilling sound of the nightingale in the charmed surroundings of the Hofwijk garden.

  Of women you the loveliest,

  Most worthy to be heard.

  The memory’s so strong

  That I hear your song, first heard within this greenness,

  Heard in my calm of leaves below the stormy trees,

  That I still think it true that these, my finest trees

  Were drawn into the wood, all through your voice’s power.39

  Huygens’s poetic praise for Utricia beautifully captures the interwoven contexts of English and Dutch culture and taste, within which these enchanted moments in the Hofwijk gardens need to be understood. Utricia’s singing voice ‘eclipses the nightingale’, her presence in the garden raises Huygens’s spirits above his immediate surroundings, providing him with memories which endure beyond the moment:

  I’d linger in my wood a while; for here remains

  One thing to hear, when silenced still remembered.

  Utricia and Constantijn sing in a variety of European languages (predominantly French and Italian), but they converse in English and share English experience of small consort and vocal musical performance. Both of their musical trainings and experiences are inflected with English taste and technique. All Huygens’s surviving letters to Utricia are in fluent, colloquial English, and although she spent most of her life in the Netherlands, William Swann, whom she married in 1645 – and who, to Huygens’s politely feigned annoyance, took her away from The Hague and her regular participation in his musical soirées – was an Englishman in the service of the Prince of Orange. Huygens and Swann also corresponded in English, with occasional French and Dutch interspersed. In the garden at Hofwijk, French and English Princesses, as well as Dutch gentry and nobility, joined their host in marvelling at Utricia’s accomplishment, their delight easily fusing Dutch and English sensibilities.40

  The tendrils of cultural exchange and mutual influence binding Huygens’s virtuoso command of Dutch taste and style to equivalent circles in England extend into almost every corner of the cultural life of both nations. He seems unerringly to have bonded with others with equally ambitious international artistic interests and aspirations. During his regular early visits to England, one household in particular had shaped his musical appreciation. Huygens, we recall, had formed his impressions of England and its culture early, and with enthusiasm. During a visit to London in 1622, one of those whose hospitality he enjoyed was the English courtier Sir Robert Killigrew.

  The Killigrews’ was a household full of excitement and activity – music, conversation and entertainment. There were no fewer than twelve Killigrew children, and according to Huygens everyone in the family participated in their musical soirées. It was through the Killigrews that Constantijn met Nicholas Lanier, who helped organise the musical evenings. He also encountered the philosopher and natural scientist Sir Francis Bacon (the Lord Chancellor, and Lady Killigrew’s uncle, whom Huygens disliked), the eccentric inventor and scientist Cornelius Drebbel, the poet John Donne, some of whose poetry Huygens later translated into Dutch, and possibly the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson.41 In a Latin poem entitled simply ‘My Life’, and written when Huygens was in his eighties, he recalls his time spent with the Killigrews as a formative episode in his life, when he forged lasting bonds of friendship with the whole family, ‘men and women alike’: he particularly admired, and became deeply attached to, Robert’s wife, Mary Killigrew, with whom, as a sign of intimacy, he sometimes corresponded in Dutch.42

  In fact, it seems to have been rather fashionable for ladies in England to learn Dutch, which certainly must have made the young Huygens’s life in London that much more pleasurable (though his English was becoming extremely good). By the 1620s, Charles I’s sister, Elizabeth of Bohemia, was permanently domiciled at The Hague, with regular openings in her household for English ladies of rank. In a letter to Sir Thomas Roe, Elizabeth writes that she is ‘glade [his wife] beginns to learne so good dutch’.43

  Huygens was devastated when it came to his ears at The Hague that Lady Killigrew was blaming him for the death in some kind of accident of her son Charles, for whom he had found a position in Holland as a page in the personal household of Prince William. Huygens’s first efforts on Charles’s behalf had been made while he was still residing in London in 1622. Positions as page to the Prince were much sought after, and it was 1630 before Huygens was able to notify the Killigrews that he had been successful. He had, naturally, assured his English friends that he would keep a careful eye on their son. Charles, though, fell in with bad company, and turned out to be something of a liability. Huygens wrote to both his old friends – in French to William Killigrew, in English to his wife – personal and passionate letters assuring them that he had done all he could to protect their son:

  Everyone here knows the pressure of business under which I, because of my vocation, am obliged to live. To you, who might be ignorant of it, I must insist upon the fact that … I was too busy to be able constantly to supervise pages, even if they had been sons of my own father.

  Had not Huygens written to the Killigrews with such regularity that ‘you must have been as exhausted with reading everything I entertained you with, covering so many sheets of paper, on the subject of your poor son, as I was in writing it’? He had done everything he could on their son’s behalf. He could have treated his own children no better. Surely their friendship is strong enough to withstand ‘the black and malicious calumny’ which has given such a ‘vile impression’ of him to Lady Killigrew?44

  There was also some question as to whether there was money owing between Charles Killigrew and Huygens. Nor was this the only occasion in the long Huygens–Killigrew family friendship when debts and misunderstandings troubled the otherwise cordial relationship. At some point much later on, Huygens lent the Killigrews’ daughter Elizabeth Boyle (Lady Shannon) a large sum which she apparently failed to pay back. In 1671 Hugyens wrote to her brother Thomas in some indignation at ‘this foole business’, protesting at the fact that no other member of the family seemed inclined to settle the debt:

  I would faine know, if I am to go and tell it in Holland, that the whole family of the noble Killigrews could find it in their heart to deny in the behalf of a sister what one stranger did not deny unto that sister in consideration of the whole familie.45

  His affection for Lady Killigrew in particular, however, survived the occasional frictions caused by the more feckless of her children. He sent her gifts of engravings, and after his wife’s death he extended the hospitality of his house to her. There was room enough, in the wing which had been intended for Susanna, for Lady Killigrew to stay whenever she was passing through The Hague.

  Despite their occasional difficulties, generally Huygens was quick to come to the support o
f his old friends. When their daughter Anne, lady-in-waiting to Queen Henrietta Maria, drowned in a freak accident on the Thames in August 1641 (the boat in which she was travelling attempted to shoot the turbulent waters under a bridge, and overturned, resulting in the death of all those on board), Huygens, who was away from home on military manoeuvres with the Stadholder, wrote three short poems bewailing the loss of the ‘most beautiful Anne’.

  Sir Robert was briefly appointed English Resident Ambassador to the United Provinces, though he apparently never took up the post. But in the second half of the 1640s and the 1650s, as the English Civil Wars and their aftermath unravelled the comfortable lives of many with Royalist sympathies, the fortunes of several of the Killigrew children became entwined with those of their Dutch neighbours. A letter Nicholas Lanier sent to Constantijn Huygens in 1646 captures the flavour of those unstable times. Lanier writes from Antwerp, where he and his family have just found a precarious refuge. They have been beset by calamities along the way: ‘The common calamitie of our cuntrey and of every one of us in particular – espetially servants of the King – by odd and ill accidents are even become prodigious’:

  My poore wife with her two maydes between Gand [Ghent] and Bruges by a partie of Hollands soldiers were pillaged of all they had; she lost two trunkes with her cloaths and all she had. Among others ther was one caried prisoner to Sluce; he was once Sir Antony van Dyke’s man; he is releast and sent me word that he solicited the Rynegrave for my wives two trunks, telling him that she was a frend and retayner to Mylady of Arundell.46

  The purpose of Lanier’s writing to Huygens is to secure from him a passport in the Stadholder’s name, to travel from Antwerp, which he considers a ‘prison, or denne of theeves – for myselfe was robd returning from France hither’, to the United Provinces. ‘If this favour may be obtayn’d, I most humbly desier, it may be directed for me to Mr. Dewarte [Duarte].’ He also hoped Huygens might be able to intervene in the matter of the missing trunks (these were eventually returned).47