Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory

968 Pages·2010·2.27 MB·English

by  Lisa Jardine

GOING DUTCH

How England Plundered
Holland’s Glory

LISA JARDINE
For Moti
Contents

Preface
1 England Invaded by the Dutch:
The Conquest that Never Was
2 From Invasion to Glorious Revolution:
Editing Out the Dutch
3 Royal and Almost-Royal Families:
‘How England Came to be Ruled by an Orange’
4 Designing Dutch Princely Rule:
The Cultural Diplomacy of ‘Mr Huggins’
5 Auction, Exchange, Traffic and Trickle-Down:
Dutch Influence on English Art
6 Double Portraits:
Mixed and Companionate Marriages
7 Consorts of Viols, Theorbos and
Anglo–Dutch Voices
8 Masters of All They Survey:
Anglo–Dutch Passion for Gardens and Gardening
9 Paradise on Earth:
Garnering Riches and Bringing Them Home
10 Anglo–Dutch Exchange and the New Science:
A Chapter of Accidents
11 Science Under the Microscope:
More Anglo–Dutch Misunderstandings
12 Anglo–Dutch Influence Abroad: Competition, Market
Forces and Money Markets on a Global Scale
Conclusion
Huygens Family Tree
Stuart Family Tree
House of Orange Family Tree
Bibliography of Secondary Sources
Index
Author’s Note: Names, Money and Dates
By the same author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Notes
Preface

T
his is a book about cultural exchange between England and the Dutch
Republic – an extraordinary process of cross-fertilisation which took place in the
seventeenth century, between the life and thought of two rapidly developing
countries in northern Europe. The two territories, jostling for power on the world
stage, politically and commercially, recognised that they had a great deal in
common. Still, each of them represented itself – and has continued to do so ever
since – as absolutely independent and unique.
As a historian I was prompted to write Going Dutch by recurrent questions I
faced from readers of my previous work on the seventeenth century, including
my biographies of Robert Hooke and Sir Christopher Wren, concerning the so-
called ‘Glorious Revolution’ (neither glorious, nor a revolution) of 1688. Could I
explain what that was, and how it happened? Could I also explain how two
countries which regularly declared themselves sworn enemies (to the point of
declarations of war) in the period should, apparently seamlessly, have merged
administrations and institutions by 1700?
When I tried to provide succinct, straightforward answers I quickly realised
that I could not give a halfway comprehensible account of the arrival at Torbay
in November 1688 of William III, Prince of Orange, with a large fleet and a
considerable army, without providing my questioners with a complicated back-
story. Indeed, in the end, the story leading up to the invasion turned out to be an
involved, far-reaching narrative on an almost epic scale, that needed to be told.
So here it is.
Aside from such direct requests for information, as someone with an abiding
interest in the way cultural currents and patterns of thought form and are
sustained through time, I was drawn to thinking about Anglo– Dutch relations in
the seventeenth century because in my own research I found myself increasingly
unable to understand the intellectual, cultural and scientific worlds of Britain and
the Netherlands if I kept them apart. Documents – letters and manuscripts –
relating to the rise of science in the period, for example, regularly involved
correspondents or collaborators across the water. Would British members of the
Royal Society in London, including Robert Boyle, Wren and Hooke, have
arrived at many of their important original scientific and technological
discoveries if they had not been in continuous and mutually advantageous
intellectual contact with their Dutch counterparts, among them Christiaan
Huygens, Anton van Leeuwenhoek and Jan Swammerdam?
In art and music the cross-fertilisation was even more obvious as soon as one
gave the matter any serious attention. Musicians moved between the courts at
London and The Hague, exchanging repertoires and techniques. Almost without
exception, the great painters of this period, whose works hang prominently at the
National Gallery and Tate Britain in London, and include many familiar portraits
of the English royal family and prominent members of the court and city circles,
were of Netherlandish origin, including, most obviously, Anton van Dyck, Pieter
Lely and Pieter Paul Rubens. Of course, there were other players in the cultural
exchange game (France in particular), but it seemed to me that the interplay
between Britain and the Low Countries deserved more attention than it had
traditionally been given.
There also seemed to me to be a seductive similarity between the fortunes of
the United Provinces (the seven provinces of the northern Netherlands) at the
end of the Dutch Golden Age, and that state Britain finds itself in today. Visibly
losing power on the world stage, and with her commercial supremacy
increasingly challenged by other enterprising nations, the Dutch Republic
nevertheless continued to hold its place culturally in Europe. Its style and taste,
in everything from art, architecture and music to faïence, lace and tableware,
permeated the European sensibility – and beyond it, the sensibilities of those
settling new lands across the ocean (faïence and silverware made to the highest
Dutch standards survive from the early Dutch colonies on the east coast of the
United States). That Dutch sensibility continued to exert influence long after the
Dutch nation had lost its last foothold on world power, and might be considered,
I shall argue, still to define what we consider northern European in cultural terms
today.
The most powerful stimulus for my undertaking this piece of work, though,
was the way the investigations conducted as I carried out the research for it
intersected again and again with a set of questions close to my own heart about
family and about migration – about the ways in which communities are
permeated, and their cultures altered and shaped by the ideas, skills and attitudes
of those they allow in as immigrants.
I am of fairly recent immigrant stock myself. My father’s family arrived in
London from Poland via Germany in 1920 – economic migrants in search of a
new life. My mother’s family had arrived a generation earlier, though her father
only left eastern Europe on the eve of the First World War. None of my
grandparents, so far as I know, ever returned to their country of origin, not even
for a family vacation. My father was the only one of his siblings ever to revisit
Warsaw, the city of his beloved mother’s early life, and then, not until he was
well into middle age. Uprooted and cut off from their cultural origins, just as
they brought no material possessions, they carried with them only vestiges and
memories of their eastern European heritage.
Historians have tended to treat the intellectual and cultural influence of
migrants in the seventeenth century as though the movement of groups of
Europeans displaced from their country of origin for political, religious or
economic reasons in earlier periods was always thus one-directional. They might
be settled residents of their adopted country, in which case they were assumed to
make the culture of their new home their own, or they might be ‘visitors’,
diplomats or those performing some short-term service as non-residents, in
which case their ‘foreign’ contribution to the culture could be marked out as
unassimilated to the growth and development of the field of their endeavour.
Because these early immigrant communities carried so little with them,
historians – with good reason – tend to emphasise the identifiable differences
between the arriving community and the one it joins. They lovingly uncover
pockets of ‘resistance’, whose occupants live cheek by jowl with settled
communities, providing exotic or unusual additions to their way of life.
The story I am about to tell will try to encourage the reader to look beyond
such simple assumptions. The seventeenth century was a period of political
upheaval and social turmoil in England and the Dutch Republic, resulting in
repeated, voluntary and forced, movements of peoples from one to the other.
Men and women moved with comparative lack of difficulty (travel by water was
generally easier and safer than travel overland) between the northern
Netherlands (which for our purposes will include Antwerp) and the British Isles
– the proximity of the one to the other is captured in the Dutch designation of the
stretch of the North Sea between Holland and England as the ‘Narrow Sea’ or
‘Narrow Seas’. If we barely register those migrations today, it is because we take
for granted, as part of English or Dutch culture, the significant cultural
interventions and developments each set of new arrivals contributed.
At the back of my mind while I was writing was a further consequence of the
story of interwoven cultural strands. If the creative life of a nation is a whirligig
or kaleidoscope of colliding influences brought in by newcomers in their
capacious cultural knapsacks, might not the newcomer contribute to the cultural
mix on an equal footing with the local, native practitioner? In which case, to
whom does the outcome of that bipartisan engagement ‘belong’?
So one of the questions I explore in this book is: Who is entitled to lay claim
to the culture of a designated nation? Does each country, as was long argued,
possess a distinctive, coherent, homogeneous set of tastes, attitudes and beliefs at
any given moment in history, closely contained within its national boundaries, to
which new arrivals (whether economic migrants, or refugees displaced by
conflict elsewhere) are allowed to contribute only within specified limits, while
tailoring or reconfiguring their ‘native’ talents to clearly recognised, local
norms? Or is a national culture rather a medley of influences, a rich mix of
blended and intersecting tastes and styles, based on a dialogue amongst the many
participating individuals who find themselves mingled at any given point on the
globe, at any particular time?
The longer I go on writing, the more debts I owe to others, and the greater
these are. I am unbelievably fortunate to be surrounded by people who either
share my enthusiasm for the pursuit of knowledge, or are prepared to go along
with me on that journey (perhaps as the line of least resistance, faced with my
insistent enthusiasm).
My immediate family are now so well adjusted to my obsession with pursuing
every fresh thought to a conclusion as soon as it arises, that they have all become
my collaborators, rushing off to source my latest query so that we can all sit
down and finish dinner. Without my husband John Hare’s constant, irrepressibly
optimistic support, there are times in the past three years which I could not
possibly have got through. No acknowledgement will ever do justice to the
difference he has made to my life. My three children and their partners have
been there for me whenever I needed encouragement, and have sustained me
whenever the going was tough. My granddaughters Freya and Zoë are among
my most exacting critics.
My colleagues at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary,
University of London – Jan Broadway, Robyn Adams, Annie Watkins and Alan
Stewart – are also now family. We have been through a lot together over the five
years the centre has existed so far, and have come out the other side as a
resilient, plucky little band of pioneers, with a burning desire to effect significant
change in academic intellectual life. My colleagues at Queen Mary continue to
support me in every possible way. Nothing I ever ask is too much for them,
which I put down especially to the leadership and imagination of the senior
management team – Professors Adrian Smith, Philip Ogden, Morag Shiach,
Trevor Dadson and Ursula Martin. I simply could not have achieved all I have
done, nor continue to hope to accomplish still more, in any other academic
institution, bar none.
There are great scholars of Dutch history whose work has shaped the field in
which I have been working for the past four years, and in whose footsteps I
tread. The magisterial oeuvre of Jonathan Israel, including his extraordinarily
detailed work on the Sephardic Jewish community, is the bedrock for what I
write here. Peter Geyl’s groundbreaking work on Anglo–Dutch relations was
also essential. Simon Schama’s bold and imaginative work on the Netherlands –
the work with which his now stellar career began, and which for many of us
defines the way works of impeccable scholarship can be written so as to reach a
wider audience – was my inspiration. Gary Schwartz’s Schwartzlist kept me
reminded of how vital and vibrant conversations about all things Anglo–Dutch
continue to be (it was he who recommended me to read David Winner’s Brilliant
Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football, to get me in the mood). ‘If I
have seen further,’ as Newton wrote, ‘it has been by standing on the shoulders of
giants.’
I also owe thanks to two distinguished scholars of things Dutch, both
domiciled in London, who were generous enough to share the research from
forthcoming books with me while I was writing Going Dutch. Hal Cook let me
study the manuscript of his masterful Matters of Exchange: Commerce,
Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age. Anne Goldgar gave me a proof
copy of her definitive work on seventeenth-century Dutch life and tulips,
Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age. Both
books are now published and available, and I recommend them to those who
would like to read at a level of detail beyond that which I can offer here.
In the course of my research for Going Dutch I have made many new friends