Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory

by Lisa Jardine

  In 1620, the twenty-two-year-old Huygens, with the support of his older poetic colleague Daniel Heinsius, had been given the task of composing the epitaph for the magnificent tomb of William the Silent (assassinated in 1584), erected by the States General in the New Church at Delft, designed by Hendrick de Keyser. The imposing monument was commissioned and built during the period 1618–23, as the inscription stresses, to commemorate the ‘Father of the Fatherland’, who had defended the Low Countries against the threat to freedom and Protestant religious practice. It became the key national monument to the House of Orange, a tourist destination for Netherlanders from all over the country, and was regularly depicted in fashionable ‘church interior’ paintings of the Neue Kirk in Delft by a whole range of fashionable artists.

  We might reflect on the fact that both William’s tomb and the Monument to the Great Fire were conceived of by those who erected them as standing to posterity in remembrance of such a threat to freedom, and as focal points for Protestant national fervour. Be this as it may, this book has, I hope, begun to explain how a Dutchman in his seventies, in the service of the Prince of Orange, almost came to have his most fervently patriotic (English) thoughts inscribed for posterity on the emotionally-charged memorial to a terrible calamity inflicted on the City of London, almost certainly (so it was thought at the time) at the hands of Catholic foreigners.

  I choose this episode as the foil for my concluding remarks because it would have seemed entirely unlikely to me, at the beginning of the intellectual journey which gave rise to the present book, that a man as passionate in the service of the Dutch house of Orange as Sir Constantijn Huygens, and so patriotic an Englishman as Sir Christopher Wren, should in the 1670s have unselfconsciously collaborated in a project like the London Monument to the Great Fire of 1666. Or that Huygens should have been so sensitive to English mores, and so attuned to English attitudes and beliefs, that he could confidently propose his own cultural creation, seamlessly to be incorporated into the lasting fabric of England’s memorial history.

  And this is not the end of the story of the interwoven interests and activities of Sir Constantijn Huygens and Sir Christopher Wren, and their impact on the cultural life of London in the 1670s. A second instance, dating from 1674–75, which once again came to my attention as I was conducting my research on Anglo–Dutch cultural and intellectual collaboration and exchange, is equally unexpected.

  In March 1674, Huygens wrote a letter to Wren from The Hague, which was carried to him by the eminent Sephardic rabbi and scholar from Amsterdam, Jacob Judah Leon (known, because of his expertise in ancient places of worship, as ‘Templo’):

  This bearer is a Jew by birth and profession, and I [am] bound to him for some instructions I had from him, long ago, in the Hebrew literature. This maketh me grant him the addresses he desireth of me; his intention being to shew in England a curious model of the Temple of Salomon, he hath been about to continue these manij ijears. Where bij he doth presume to haue demonstrated and corrected an infinite number of errors and paralogismes of our most learned scholars who haue meddled with the exposition of that holij fabrick, and most specfiallij of the Jesuit Villalpandus.

  Leon’s exhibition of models of the Biblical buildings was famous – Edward Browne, who we encountered sightseeing in the Netherlands in 1668, made sure to visit his ‘model of the Temple of Solomon, of Solomon’s house, the Fort of the Temple, the Tabernacle and many other curiosities’ while he was in Amsterdam.13 Now Huygens’s letter introduced Leon to Wren, in the hope that he might bring the exhibition to London:

  Before all, I have thought I was to bring him acquainted with yourself. who are able to judge of the matter upon better and surer grounds than any man liuing. I give him also Letters to the Portingal Ambassador to Mylord Arlington and Mr Oldenburg, that some notice may be taken of him both at the Court, and amongst those of the Royal Society. If you will be so good as to direct him unto Mylord Archbishop of Canterbury.14

  Huygens’s letter of introduction was written in response to a direct approach made to him at the court of William of Orange by Leon himself the previous year.15 And his intervention was successful. Through his and Wren’s efforts, the contents of Leon’s museum of architectural models, including his much-admired wooden model of the original Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, based on descriptions in the sacred texts, together with his extensive ‘museum’ of models of other historic buildings, were shipped to London. Leon died while on a return trip to the Netherlands in 1675, but his exhibition remained for many years in England.16

  The arrival of Leon’s models produced a flurry of interest in reconstructed ancient Biblical architecture. Robert Hooke recorded in his diary, early in September 1675: ‘With Sir Chr. Wren. Long Discourse with him about the module of the Temple at Jerusalem.’17A good deal has been written by Dutch historians of architecture about the influence of the reconstructions of the Biblical buildings on Dutch church architecture in the second half of the seventeenth century. It is perhaps time for a similar kind of exploration of the effect of the collection of models brought to London by Leon on Wren and his contemporaries’ ecclesiastical architecture.

  On a number of occasions while I have been writing this book, distinguished Dutch academics have expressed the hope to me that I would provide a picture of how, in the seventeenth century, Dutch fortunes declined as English fortunes grew, which was more sensitive to the Dutch side of the story.

  The Dutch have always felt aggrieved at the way in which wealth, power and influence seeped away from the United Provinces at the beginning of the eighteenth century, as those of Britain increased. They have seen their diminishing role on the international scene as directly related to England’s rise. I hope that I have shown here that they are broadly right in thinking so. William III and his wife Mary Stuart carried with them into England not just the hopes and aspirations of a generation, but much of their tax revenue and wealth. Hence the word ‘plundered’ in my subtitle, though the process was, as I hope I have shown, considerably more subtle and extended than that word perhaps implies.

  I hope I have indeed managed to paint a more colourful and varied picture of Anglo–Dutch relations and their outcome at the end of the seventeenth century, and thereby done something towards setting the record straight. It was the case then, and remains the case today, I believe, that the English and the Dutch share a remarkable amount in terms of outlook, fundamental beliefs, aspirations and sense of identity.

  In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it is fascinating to watch British and Dutch commerce continuing to share fundamental attitudes and outlooks, which have facilitated large-corporation mergers to produce major Anglo–Dutch interests – the formation of Corus Steel in 1999 by the merger of British Steel and Koninklijke Hoogovens, for instance, and most recently the ongoing negotiations towards a proposed merger between a British bank and the Dutch bank ABN Amro, to create one of the world’s biggest financial institutions.

  I have come to feel a deep sense of shared values and common purpose with the people of the Netherlands in the course of carrying out my research. In the end this book is intended to be a celebration of our equal sharing in events in history at the beginning of our modern mercantile and consumerist age – our ‘going Dutch’.

  Huygens Family Tree

  Stuart Family Tree

  House of Orange Family Tree

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