Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory

by Lisa Jardine

  On 7 April, Gaspar Duarte’s son Jacob arrived in Antwerp with the jewel, and the following day Huygens examined it.8 A fortnight later, with Huygens discreetly facilitating the process, the deal had made progress. Huygens has agreed to take the jewel to The Hague, but the Stadholder’s suggested best offer for it is still too low to be acceptable:

  I remain greatly indebted to you [Duarte wrote to Huygens] for the great affection you have shown towards my son Jacob Duarte, by tomorrow showing His Highness that beautiful jewel which I mentioned to you previously. And although I understand that Mr. Alonse de Lope has already managed to sell His Highness four other pieces [of expensive jewellery], nevertheless I hope that your particular favour will have the power to be successful in this matter, since this is such an extraordinarily rare piece. It would be most gracious of you to represent [to His Highness] how thus far I see small appearance [of successful completion], not having been made an offer which is reasonable, [but] one much lower than what it cost me.

  Which disappoints me, not thereby being able to serve His Highness. I was assured that His Majesty [the King] of England would have been more delighted with this piece than with all the other jewels, since he had already made an offer for it himself to my younger son, by way of Milord Chamberlain, if his brother had arrived in time. For His Majesty had even offered 6,500 pounds sterling, and would never imagine that His Highness could have acquired it for less.9

  Duarte’s suggestion that the English King had almost obtained the piece himself, and that he had offered a sum in excess of the one being proposed by the Dutch Stadholder, was a shrewd piece of commercial pressuring. It apparently clinched the deal. On 9 May, Duarte acknowledged receipt of payment by Huygens on the Stadholder’s behalf.10

  These exchanges of letters present us with the intriguing picture of a luxury object whose value – both financial and in terms of current taste and fashion – is being established by reference to the object’s desirability in two locations, inside two fashionable societies. The Dutch Stadholder needs a gift which will greatly impress the English King. His agent has identified a suitable candidate which is actually in London, conveniently in the possession of a Dutch diamond dealer who also operates out of England. The piece has already been seen and admired by the English King, who has allegedly tried to acquire it.

  The Duartes are suppliers of gems and made-up pieces of jewellery to Charles I in London and Frederik Hendrik in The Hague. They also, again conveniently, have close family friends in place to help facilitate the deal – Joachim of Wicquefort, otherwise known as Joachim Factor, was a friend of Gaspar Duarte’s daughter Francesca, and part of the ‘firm’.11 Huygens, who moves freely between England and the United Provinces, is fluent in English, and frequents the English and Dutch courts, provides his expert imprimatur to the deal.

  On 19 April 1641, Prince William, with an entourage of 250 people, arrived at Gravesend for his ‘royal’ wedding. Some days later he was received in Whitehall Palace, where he presented members of the royal party with diamonds, pearls and other jewellery, worth close on £23,000.12 These included the spectacular jewel for his bride which Huygens had helped negotiate the purchase of in London, and which she wore on the front of her silver wedding dress.13 Less than a year later, when Princess Mary and her mother joined her husband in The Hague, the jewel went with them. Thus in the space of a year, this distinctive, exquisitely crafted, expensive piece of jewellery crossed the Narrow Sea three times.

  Cash settlement of this highly satisfactory piece of brokered purchasing was ingeniously executed using a second Duarte–Huygens business deal, this time carried out on Huygens’s own behalf, which occupies a further part of the exchange of letters we have been looking at between the two men. Huygens, who had family in Antwerp, had a house just outside the town which he wanted to sell to finance the ambitious country house and garden he was in the process of creating at Hofwijk, outside The Hague.14 This business was already under way, with Gaspar Duarte acting as Huygens’s agent for the house sale in Antwerp, when the ‘jewel affair’ arose.

  In the letter proposing the London jewel for Frederik Hendrik, Duarte asked permission to take ‘the person who desires to purchase’ around Huygens’s house. This person, Duarte informed Huygens, ‘has already two days ago bought a large house here in town for 45,000 florins, which still needs building work’, and had made it clear to him that he wanted two such houses, one in town and ‘yours in the country’. On 21 April he told Huygens that negotiations for the house sale were going well. When Huygens settled payment for the Stadholder’s jewel purchase in early May, the sum sent was the total, less the agreed sale price on Huygens’s property.

  By the 1650s the Duartes had also acquired a considerable reputation as connoisseurs and collectors of fine art – and exactly as in the case of the gemstones and jewels, the dividing line between their activities as private collectors and dealers is blurred. Again, Sir Constantijn Huygens, this time together with his son Constantijn junior, is our witness. Between 1640 and the 1670s, both men regularly visited the Duarte picture gallery in their house in the Meir whenever they were passing through Antwerp. In the 1670s, Constantijn junior records in his diary how he would take time off from accompanying William III of Orange on his summer military campaigns against the French, in his capacity as secretary to the Prince, to look at the Duarte paintings and prints, to request Diego Duarte to appraise potential items for purchase he had himself located in the area, and to buy from him himself. The pictures would then be shipped by the Duarte ‘shop’ to The Hague.

  A 1683 inventory of the stock of paintings in the Duartes’ home reveals a valuable collection, assembled by a discerning connoisseur of contemporary art, within which several outstanding items are identified as having been acquired from named aristocratic art collectors – particularly English émigrés. This ought not to surprise us. The Duartes bought pictures for much-needed cash from families who had carried the more portable of their valuable possessions out of England in the late 1640s, as well as paintings from the collections of those (like the Duke of Buckingham and the Earl of Arundel) whose collections had been broken up and sold as their political fortunes waned. The result is that the Duarte collection contains a striking number of portraits of English sitters by artists fashionable across the Channel – thereby in turn creating a demand in the Netherlands for such pictures.

  At least one of the entries from this inventory, however, gives us a second insight into dealing and exchange strategies in Antwerp. It reveals an intriguing cross-over between the gem business and the art-dealing business. It also, incidentally, reminds us that the sums of money changing hands for gems in this period are generally in the region of ten times those being expended on artworks.

  The first, and by far the most valuable, item in the Duarte 1683 inventory is a painting by Raphael of a Madonna and child with Joseph and St Anne (probably actually St Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist). The inventory notes that the painting was acquired from ‘Don Emanuel Prince of Portugal’ (the husband of one of Prince William the Silent’s daughters by his second marriage), in exchange for a diamond ring, the agreed value of which was 2,200 guilders.15 The diamond alone, Duarte notes, cost two thousand guilders, and the elaborate setting included other stones, among them an engraved sapphire (together valued by him at two hundred guilders).

  In other words, the Duarte ‘shop’ offered facilities for providing the agreed purchase price for an item for which a sale was being negotiated – in this case, an elaborate jewel – in the form of other expensive goods for which the Duartes were competent to provide a valuation. They thus performed a particular service for those with disposable income who liked to follow fashion. Last year’s piece of jewellery could be traded for a number of fashionable works of art (the Raphael was unusual in being a match for Don Emmanuel’s ring).

  One area of court culture over which Constantijn Huygens exerted particularly strong influence because it was close to his own h
eart was music – both instrumental and for voices. An enthusiastic composer and performer himself (although, unfortunately, very few of his many known compositions survive), Huygens remained actively involved in music in the Low Countries throughout his entire life, absorbing influences from England, France and Italy and reshaping them into a quintessentially Dutch style and sentiment. He was also responsible for identifying, and helping the careers of, individual talented performers, just as he did those of talented painters. After William II’s death in 1650, he clearly used his position as an influential and well-connected music connoisseur and practitioner in the same way as he did that in fine art, to sustain the cultural reputation of the house of Orange during its period of exclusion from public office.

  In 1648, Sir Constantijn got wind of the fact that a young French singer, Anne de la Barre, daughter of the French court organist, who had already gained a considerable reputation in Paris, had been invited to travel to the court of Queen Christina of Sweden to perform (accompanied on various instruments by at least one of her younger siblings). In July, Huygens wrote to Anne, to persuade her to break her journey at the Stadholder’s court in Holland:

  I beg you to accept this invitation to relax for a couple of weeks at my home, which is not perhaps the least convenient or least well-appointed at The Hague. There you would find lutes, theorbos, viols, spinets, clavichords and organs to divert you – almost as many as you could be provided with in the whole of Sweden.16

  To encourage her to take up his invitation, Huygens enclosed a copy of his own recently published book of psalm settings and airs for soprano voice, Pathodia Sacra et Profana. Anne and her father, court organist to the French King, replied immediately (in separate letters). Anne had already performed several of Huygens’s new songs, to general acclaim. ‘I believe that you understand perfectly all the languages you compose in,’ she adds, ‘judging from the beautifully expressive use of words, which I have tried hard to express in my performances.’17

  More pragmatically, Anne’s father asked Huygens to put in a word with the Prince and Princess of Orange, in the hope that they too might invite Anne to sing for them:

  We passionately desire to visit The Hague, in order to converse with someone of your merit and discernment … I make this request because, as my children have tried to acquire the Science of music, all that remains is for them to find some prince whom they may please, who will reward their endeavours. The Queen of England [Henrietta Maria] and the Prince of Wales [the future Charles II], who have heard us, bestowed on us as much honour as one could wish for. The said Queen [in exile] hoped to be back in power in England, so that she could bring us there.18

  Anne’s planned trip to Sweden in 1648 did not take place, and in the meantime, disaster struck Huygens in the form of the death of his Orange employer – he wrote in his diary: ‘miserere populi hujus et mei, o Magnus Deus’ (’have mercy upon this people and upon myself, o Great God’). So by the time Anne did embark on her European tour in 1653, Huygens had yet stronger motivation for persuading her to spend some time in The Hague, frequenting the courts of Amalia and the Princess Royal, and performing for the city’s élite. Huygens and Anne’s father had kept in close touch during the intervening five years, and had formed a professional relationship. Just as painters were happy to secure the continuing favour of their clients and patrons by supplying them with works by other artists, la Barre acted as agent for Huygens, commissioning and procuring sought-after state-of-the-art musical instruments for him in Paris. These were shipped from France via Gasper Duarte in Antwerp, to add to the collection of fine instruments Huygens had boasted of to la Barre’s daughter.

  The la Barres did indeed eventually break their journey to Sweden at The Hague. As he had promised, Constantijn Huygens entertained Anne and her accompanying family members in his own home, ‘so that I am able to see her often, as far as my official responsibilities allow’. And true to his word, he recommended Anne enthusiastically whenever he had the opportunity, penning several eulogistic poems to her musical prowess, and preparing the way for her rapturous welcome at the court of Queen Christina, where the la Barres stayed for a year. ‘Amarinthe [Anne],’ he wrote, ‘is admired and cherished here as she deserves’:

  The Queen of Bohemia [Elizabeth] and her royal niece [Princess Mary Stuart] cannot get enough of her, and for the first time Madame la Princesse Mere [Amalia van Solms, widow of Stadholder Frederik Hendrik] attended a gathering which included the Queen [the exiled Henrietta Maria of England]. There that illustrious young singer had a solemn audience, at which she was a marvellous success.19

  This meant, of course, that by the time the la Barres continued on their way, their stories of sophisticated musical soirées in The Hague, where the Princess Royal, her mother-in-law and her aunt all participated as ‘a solemn audience’, gratifyingly spread the word that all was continuing to prosper with the houses of Stuart and Orange in the United Provinces.

  Music featured prominently in the masques and ballets which were a regular feature of the soirées and entertainments of the courts at The Hague, particularly as encouraged and patronised by Elizabeth of Bohemia. Spectacular combinations of theatre, elaborate scenery, song (solo and choral), dance and orchestral accompaniment, they were occasions for competition between royal patrons.

  In 1624, the young Sir Constantijn Huygens himself wrote a verse introduction to a ‘ballet’ performed before Elizabeth, in which ‘Amor’ and a series of suitors played poetic court to the exiled Queen.20 Such entertainments were popular at the English and French courts also, and by the 1650s the English exiles were vying with one another in their reports of elaborate entertainments in music and dance performed at the courts of Europe. Princess Mary, in Paris visiting her mother in 1655, reported, ‘I have seen the masque again, and in the entry of the performances received another present, which was a petticoat of cloth of silver … Monday next there is a little ball at the Louvre, where I must dance.’ While in 1656, James, Duke of York wrote to his brother from Paris: ‘I saw the ballett practis’d yesterday, in which there is some very fine entries; it will be danced on Sunday, and I will send the book on’t; and the tunes of Baptist making, so soone as I can gett them.’21

  A number of English writers migrated to The Hague in the later 1650s, to provide masques and entertainments in English for the exiles there. They included Sir William Lower, whose Enchanted Lovers was printed and published at The Hague in 1658. In 1659 he dedicated his English translation of the French romance The Noble Ingratitude to Elizabeth of Bohemia, in the hope that it would delight her enough to have it performed: ‘Were I not fully perswaded that this Dramatick Piece in the Original is one of the best that hath been presented upon the French Stage, I should not have presumed to Offer the Copy to the best of Queens, and indeed the most Juditious of Women.’

  One example of such a court masque for the performance of which we have an unusually full record shows the way in which the activities and interests of the three English-influenced courts were intertwined and interactive. On 17 January 1655, Elizabeth of Bohemia wrote to her nephew, Charles II (himself in exile), describing an entertainment at The Hague at which ‘your sister [Princess Mary] was very well dressed, like an Amazon’. A portrait by Hanneman of the Princess Royal survives, which perhaps recalls this occasion, in which she is fabulously turned out in an Amazonian feather cloak, with sumptuous pearls and an elaborately exotic headdress, attended by an African boy page.

  This masque or ‘ballet’ was conceived and performed during a particularly difficult period for both the house of Orange and, above all, the Stuarts. In July 1653, under renewed pressure from the government in England, the Estates of Holland and the States General passed resolutions decreeing that neither members of the Stuart royal family nor their loyal supporters should any longer be afforded shelter, assistance or maintenance on Dutch soil. The Ballet de la Carmesse was therefore carefully ‘French’ in taste and style – its music and verse devised in fashiona
ble French style (Princess Mary had recently returned from a stay with her mother, Henrietta Maria, in Paris). At the same time, the entertainment was performed at a time when Mary was fighting for the survival of her five-year-old son’s rights, as Prince of Orange, to the privileges of the Stadholdership and command of the Dutch military. The continuing presence in The Hague of Mary’s aunt, Elizabeth of Bohemia, was of the utmost importance to this campaign, and the masque’s affirmation of the ‘triumph’ of the masquers over adversity was understood as a mark of Elizabeth’s public support for Prince William.22 La Carmesse provided an opportunity for a public display of support for Princess Mary and her son by leading Dutch nobility, at just the moment when the dynasty could well use a public acknowledgement of Dutch élite backing for the Orange– Stuart cause against the Dutch Republic.

  The entertainment is a romance in verse, in which the gentlemen charm the beautiful ladies, and the ladies confess that their souls have been ravished by the dashing young men and their dancing, and was printed for immediate circulation among the participants (two copies survive). Significantly (since traditionally historians tell us that the three royal Princesses and their entourages were constantly at odds with one another), it was an occasion for shared enjoyment between the three courts – Princess Mary attended, as did the Dowager Amalia’s daughter, suitably chaperoned.

  The ballet had the desired effect – its performance was reported with enthusiasm in the European capitals, and its success equated with the continued buoyancy of the Orange–Stuart cause. Sir Alexander Hume, the Princess Royal, Mary Stuart’s head of household, described the event to Sir Edward Nicholas, Charles II’s Secretary of State in exile: