Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory

by Lisa Jardine

  Constantijn’s beloved partner was gone, and for more than a year his poems – in Latin and Dutch – reveal him as mentally tormented by his loss, and virtually inconsolable. Instead of enjoying the family home he and Susanna had planned together, he had turned his mind to a country retreat – a place where he could recover, reflect upon his loss and begin to rebuild his personal life.12 The small gathering in early 1642 marked the end of this painful phase in his life, and the celebration was a muted and reflective one.

  The party of visitors consisted of his older brother Maurits, his sisters Gertruyd and Constantia, their husbands, Philips Doublet (or Doubleth) and David de Wilhem, and an unnamed ‘friend from The Hague’. There was a tour of the modest, classically inspired country house (whose designer, Pieter Post, was to become the Stadholder’s official court architect in 1645, on Huygens’s recommendation), and a much more extensive exploration of the garden, with its tree-lined avenues and canal-side walks, freshly planted ornamental flowerbeds and geometrically laid-out areas of what would one day be shady groves of trees. Over a generous meal, Huygens extolled the virtues of his garden as a source of emotional solace and a refuge from the cares of office.

  Huygens’s little garden launch-party was a small event in the studied programme of activities he had begun to orchestrate for Frederik Hendrik and his circle since 1625 – the year Frederik Henrik became Stadholder of the seven provinces, and the year of his marriage to Amalia van Solms. Huygens’s efforts were designed to set the tone for a Dutch courtly culture which would earn the respect and attention of the royal houses of Europe.

  In the summer of that same year, ten-year-old Princess Mary Stuart arrived in The Hague with her mother, Queen Henrietta Maria.13 Mary’s father, Charles I, had given Huygens a warm welcome when as a youth he had visited Charles’s father, James I’s court in the 1620s. Huygens – passionate anglophile, personally acquainted with the Stuart royals, fluent in English and French – had played a major part in brokering the Anglo–Dutch marriage, as a member of van Aerssen’s embassy to London in 1639. As the fortunes of the English royal family declined and the international standing of the house of Orange improved, he continued to proclaim his absolute loyalty and commitment to the Stuarts – ‘an utterly committed and extremely passionate servant of the Royal House of Great Britain’ (’tres-acquis et tres-passionné serviteur de la Maison Royale de la Grande Bretaigne’), as he described himself to Princess Mary’s governess Lady Stanhope.14

  Now Huygens found himself, as secretary to the Dutch ‘royals’, in charge of providing suitable entertainment for the refugee royals and their large train of followers. The royal palaces at The Hague and nearby Honselaarsdijk provided accommodation and recreation. Excursions to nearby Hofwijk for a select few were part of the programme on offer.

  Although we have no explicit account of Princess Mary or her mother being among the earliest visitors to Hofwijk, we do learn from Huygens’s correspondence that on at least one occasion during her several subsequent visits to the northern Netherlands in the course of the 1640s, trying to raise money for her husband King Charles I’s doomed military offensive against his people, Henrietta Maria spent an enjoyable afternoon there. She joined her host in an entertaining game of quilles – an ancient cross between skittles and bowls – on the beautifully manicured bowling green, and consumed a bowl of freshly picked, home-grown cherries in a spontaneous déjeuner sur l’herbe – a high-class picnic. According to Huygens, she pronounced the garden a delight.15

  Charming though the records make royal visits like Henrietta Maria’s to Hofwijk appear, there were social niceties to be observed which hampered the easy, informal atmosphere for which Huygens yearned. The house of Orange, although the most prominent family in the Northern Provinces, with claims to royal status, nevertheless ranked below the English royal Stuarts, as both Henrietta Maria and Mary were always quick to point out on Dutch formal occasions.

  Still, away from the court, in the rural idyll of Hofwijk, studied informality prevailed, and mitigated courtly anxieties concerning rank, status and the ostentatious expenditure involved in fine living. The presence in Huygens’s garden of royal Princesses and other English ladies of quality, enjoying its rustic pleasures, placed the seal of aristocratic approval on his scrupulously conceived and executed, yet comparatively modest, country retreat. Hofwijk came to stand, for him, for the difficult balancing act of remaining a person of modest aspirations and high ethical principles, a true Dutchman of integrity, while nevertheless striving to emulate and match the lifestyle of the increasingly ‘royal’ Stadholder he served. In Simon Schama’s memorable terms, it allayed his characteristically mid-century Dutch ‘embarrassment’ at his own material good fortune.16

  By a deliberate and selfconscious play on words that is entirely typical of the linguistically sharp-eared Huygens, ‘Hofwijk’, whose simplest meaning is ‘a house with a garden’, also means a place where one can ‘avoid’ (wijck) the ‘court’ (hof) of the Prince of Orange that Huygens served. The country seat’s Latin name, ‘Vitaulium’, likewise means both ‘vitae aula’ – the garden of life, or Garden of Eden – and also ‘Vitruvii aula’, the garden of Vitruvius, the ultimate classically designed garden. For the rest of Huygens’s long life, Hofwijk was where he went to recover from the buffetings of life in the political spotlight. It was where his family gathered and spent time at leisure together, to escape the summer heat of The Hague. It was also where his son Christiaan, the distinguished scientist, who had a tendency to periods of depressive collapse, found refuge in retirement, when his fragile health finally broke and he was obliged to give up his salaried place at the head of the French King Louis XIV’s Académie des sciences. Christiaan died at Hofwijk in 1695.

  We know a good deal about how intensely Sir Constantijn Huygens senior felt about his garden, because around 1650 he completed a three-thousand-line Latin poem celebrating it in loving topographical detail. When he published this in 1653, Hofwijk was still a project in process, a ten-year-old planted paradise of shrubs and young trees whose glory lay in the future, an as-yet unrealised promise of mature, shaded avenues, secluded walks walled by espaliered shrubs, parterres patterned in box, and a densely wooded wilderness landscape stretching away before the gaze of the visitor. (The delightful pen and wash drawings of the Huygens family in Hofwijk’s shady groves, by Constantijn junior and others, date from the late 1660s, by which time the trees were well-established, as Huygens senior had hoped.)

  In his poem, it is Hofwijk’s promise of future luxuriance that Huygens imagines with satisfaction and pride:

  I want to show you Hofwijk, as if it sprang by night,

  Grown sudden, like a mushroom, to maturity.

  And more than this, I want to make us walk it round

  As if our yesterday a century were past.17

  A century on (in Huygens’s poetic imagination), the trees which in 1650 have not yet fully developed into their mature splendour have become the glory of Hofwijk – a medley of varieties, framing views, providing elegant markers along the walks and avenues, and bestowing their welcome shade on the summer visitor. Huygens’s poetic emphasis is one of pleasurable investment – storing up family emotional and commercial capital for the future. No man-made work of art will stand the test of time, according to Huygens: even a garden will eventually perish. His poem, though, will preserve the memory of its prime:

  So frail are human works, paper outlasts them all,

  Time wears the shrub and stone: in time it will be said,

  ‘Here once his Hofwijk stood, now rubble, weeds and spoil.’18

  Still, insofar as the garden will outlast its creator, standing, it is to be hoped, for several generations thereafter, the trees in particular represent an enviable durability:

  So the desire for tameness is answered by four rides

  Of serviceable oaks, my avenues complete

  In thickness at their root, in eminence in air,

  For spread of branc
hes round, for cool green murmuring.

  Perhaps I called them timber: but let nobody dare

  To break my faithful refuge, fell my avenues.

  Think of invested gold, this planted capital

  Matures in centuries; grandchildren, let them stand

  And never burn the trees I planted for you here.19

  Here, according to Huygens, is art and artistry that outdoes the creations of the painter or the tapestry-maker. He describes taking his ease among the splendid trees which have grown tall and proud, sheltered from sun and sharp winds alike, surrounded by family and friends, reflecting on the important issues in life and revelling in the time for thought afforded, away from his office:

  Here I may laugh secure at sweat the mower sheds,

  Here with my canopy of elmcloth over me.

  My roof of leaves protects me from full moons

  And from the scorching sun, and from the tears of heaven.

  Here do I flee for refuge, sheltered here and cool,

  I suffer without harm the rages of the skies.

  Here is my pleasure, knowing how close my joy.20

  As in Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Garden’ and ‘On Appleton House’ (written at roughly the same time as Huygens’s ‘Hofwijk’), the out-of-town garden estate is a refuge from care, a pastoral idyll. A gentleman’s garden is a paradise of calm and tranquillity, a place of consolidation and stability. There a man can reflect, can engage in reposeful conversation and reverie, alone or with friends. There too, urban pride, pomp and ceremony are transmuted into areas for modest recreation – shaded canals, limpid pools, green arbours – and simple foods are gathered from the kitchen garden (in his poem at least, Huygens shows comparatively little interest in ornamental flower gardens).

  Hospitality is a recurrent theme in Huygens’s Hofwijk poem, as also throughout his prolific correspondence. He retains a particular place in his affection for garden-lovers like himself who have shared his enjoyment of his woods and walks: in 1680, when Huygens was an octogenarian, in a letter to the former English Ambassador to the Northern Netherlands and fellow gardener Sir William Temple, he refers to his old friend as ‘an ancient Hofwijkist’, a kindred spirit who has shared his garden pleasures over many years.21

  Accordingly, making provision for the owner’s table, and for his guests, was one of the duties made explicit in the contracts of the gardeners who kept the entire project going. A mid-seventeenth-century contract for the gardener at one of the Dutch Royal Palaces specifies:

  The gardener shall take care that sections pointed out to him in the gardens will be sowed and planted with all kinds of vegetables and Aertvruchten [fruits of the earth, perhaps the newly fashionable potato] in such a way that, depending on the season and time of year, they will daily provide the kitchen with fresh produce. The gardener is allowed to take his own share of all the Aertvruchten which the gardens and orchards will yield above the quantity necessary for the Table and Kitchen of Her Highness. But when it comes to the Artichokes, Melons, Strawberries and Asparagus, these will entirely be at the disposal of Her Highness and the gardener will not be able to enjoy them, except for what is allowed by Her Highness.22

  Huygens’s ‘Hofwijk’ includes all the familiar tropes of garden poetry, as they developed in England and Holland in the seventeenth century. But although the poem gives the illusion that the garden’s walks and groves largely maintain themselves, in fact armies of labourers were required to create the illusion of rural simplicity.

  A nice detail about the house itself at Hofwijk is to be gleaned from a letter Huygens wrote to his musical friend Utricia Ogle in 1653. He has, he writes, added two glass extensions to the original house, in which he spends most of his days. These allow him to spend even his time indoors in full sight of the garden (these ‘glass-windowed cabinets’ no longer survive):

  In this my little solitude … since your ladyship hath seene it, I have built two lovely glass-windowed cabinets at the waterside, making now more use of them than the whole castle of Hofwijck, which by this meanes is growen to a mighty and stately building, as everything in this world is great or small onely by comparison.23

  So far we have focused attention on the Dutch garden as it responded to Europe-wide initiatives in garden design in its own specific terms. But as we have already seen, the garden designers employed in the United Provinces, and particularly by the aspirational house of Orange, had already worked for similarly élite patrons in England, where the formative cultural currents influencing garden design were significantly different.

  At the very same time Constantijn Huygens was celebrating the healing effects of time spent in a well-ordered garden, lovingly salvaged from a waterlogged landscape, across the water the fame of an English garden on a far grander scale was being broadcast in a series of dramatic engraved views. First published around 1645, Thomas Rowlett’s elegant volume consisted of a series of twenty-six etchings showing the glories of the garden at Wilton, laid out between 1632 and 1635 by Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke. In 1630 Pembroke had married the notable heiress Anne Clifford (a Baroness in her own right), thereby coming into possession of her vast estates in the north of England. Although the marriage had broken down by the time work began on the house at Wilton in 1636, and its plan was much reduced in scale, the magnificent gardens went ahead as planned.24

  There are obvious affinities between the coffee-table-book version of Pembroke’s Wilton and Huygens’s literary version of Hofwijk. For one thing, we should notice that both are trying to stabilise the image and memory of what are, on the authors’ and garden-owners’ own admission, evanescent phenomena. Neither Hofwijk nor Wilton ever looked as depicted in its engraved or textual versions. As Huygens allows himself poetic licence to imagine his garden mature and fully grown, so de Caus’s Wilton is an ideal snapshot, with everything orderly and neat, and simultaneously at its optimal state of growth and flowering. In fact, it is quite possible that the Wilton garden engravings include versions of garden features that were never actually completed.

  The Wilton volume was reissued in 1654, by Peter Stent, during the English Commonwealth, with a new title page. By this time ostentatious expenditure on private ‘pleasure gardens’ was entirely out of fashion, and we may suppose that one of the points of the publication was nostalgically to recall for Royalists the ‘good old days’, when the nobility’s political and economic power was mirrored symbolically in the visible way in which they exerted control over vast tracts of the English countryside.

  The engravings of the garden at Wilton certainly recall an era of calm, leisurely pursuits and élite diversions that was by that time (as far as anyone could know in the 1650s) permanently a thing of the past. The 4th Earl of Pembroke died in 1649, and even by the time of the first issue of the Wilton garden engravings, Charles I and his close courtiers no longer visited to divert themselves, away from the pressures of London court life. (The 4th Earl had in fact taken the Parliamentary side in the Civil Wars, but like Lord Fairfax, the owner of Nunappleton House and garden in Yorkshire – celebrated in Marvell’s poem – he had retired to his country estate during the Commonwealth Period.)

  A still closer publishing parallel than Huygens’s ‘Hofwijk’ is Salomon de Caus’s book of engravings of the Palatinate gardens at Heidelberg, which came out in that same year under the title Hortus Palatinus. In the very year in which Frederick and Elizabeth forfeited their claim to the Crown of Bohemia and were driven from the Palatinate, a lavish volume of engravings of that garden was published, which circulated widely across the Continent. By the time these popular engravings were on the market in northern Europe, the gardens they depicted had been devastated and the castle plundered. The engravings were permanent memorials to the lost hope of Protestants in the region, and were purchased as such by those loyal to the memory of the Winter King and Queen.

  By the date of the second issue of the Wilton engravings, Wilton too was no longer a stately home, controlled by its noble owner.
Lacking much of its former glory, it was now one stop on the circuit of visitors around England, who could visit it for a not insignificant sum.

  In 1651, while Sir Constantijn Huygens’s third son, Lodewijk, was in England as part of the diplomatic initiative led by Jacob Cats to negotiate with the new Parliamentary government, he made the horticultural pilgrimage to Wilton. On 11 May, on his way home from a visit to Stonehenge, he paid 2s.3d to visit the house and tour its gardens, now open to the public (1s.3d for the house, 1s for the garden):

  We entered the garden, which was indeed very beautiful and symmetrical, except for the fact that it did not correspond well with the house. Near the house it was all flower garden with beautiful fountains, which, however, did not work all the time. There were cypress trees some 18 or 20 feet high in all the avenues and stone statues everywhere. On the other side of the house were groves on either side with a lovely wide stream running through them, besides ponds with fountains. At the end of all this, however, there was a little house. On its roof reached by outside steps, was a pond with fish in it filled with fresh water running in through a pipe and running out through another continually. In this house was one of the finest and most charming grottos I recall ever seeing.25

  At Wilton, once again, then, the emphasis is on a genteel struggle for stability and control of the land. But in the English case the battle is with political forces rather than with sea and sand. Driven into retirement on their country estates, deprived of office, and taxed severely for their Royalist involvement, old Royalists focused their energies into ambitious plans for their gardens. On their country estates, at least, they could continue to be masters of all they surveyed – though, fallen on hard times, they now charged the public for entrance to view their horticultural delights.