• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1781 0

shocked by the disrespect shown to masters, husbands, and nobles by servants, wives, and commoners. The German Heinrich Benthem, visiting the republic in the 1690s, scoffed that Dutch servant girls dressed and acted so much like their mistresses that he could not tell them apart. He noted too that whereas German husbands walked to church together, with their wives behind them minding the children, it was just the opposite in Holland: “Here the hen crows and the cock merely cackles,” he said. More generally, women in the Dutch Republic—young and old, of all classes— were famously independent, “free to come and go, unaccompanied and unchaperoned, to work, conduct business, and engage in conversation almost like men.”

Worse still, there were no limits on who could get rich in the Dutch Republic—or so it seemed to European contemporaries used to a far more rigid social hierarchy. Upstart traders and sons of cheese makers lived in sumptuous palaces “with splendid marble and alabaster columns” and “floors inlaid with gold.” They dressed luxuriously and bedecked their wives in Spanish taffeta, Brazilian emeralds, and East Indian sapphires. Even “base-born” shopkeepers and cobblers owned costly linens and wore velvet and damask. “Mr. Everyman thinks he is entitled to wear what he likes so long as he can pay for it,” sputtered one indignant critic. “Can you bear it when you see that a tailor has a room or a parlour hung with gold leather or tapestry? Or here and there, a mercer or an artisan who decorates his house as if it was a gentleman's or a burgomaster's?”

The republic's religious tolerance and high wages attracted skilled and highly talented individuals from all over Europe, including Germans, French, English, Scots, and even Turks and Armenians. The Huguenots who arrived after France's 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes were particularly successful in Holland's silk, dressmaking, hatmaking, wig-making, and watchmaking industries. Holland's major towns and universities became the most cosmopolitan in Europe. In 1700, an estimated one-third of the University of Leiden's students were British; thousands of Scottish and English scholars flocked to Groningen and Utrecht as well. By 1685, immigrants or descendants of immigrants formed a majority of Holland's population.29

Like Tang China in its golden age, the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century saw a burst of extraordinary cultural, artistic, and intellectual creativity. The Dutch painters of this era—Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Jacob van Ruisdael—are among the most famous artists of all time. Eschewing the sacred figures of traditional art, the Dutch Masters painted in a new, intensely realistic style, giving an unprecedented luminosity to domestic and middle-class subjects previously forbidden in great painting. (Rembrandt chose to live in Amsterdam's Jewish quarter.) Dutchmen of this period also flourished in other areas of cultural and intellectual achievement: The polymath and humanist Hugo de Groot, known today as Grotius, laid down the foundations of modem international law in the 1600s, while he was still in his twenties.

Finally, some of the most brilliant thinkers of the Enlightenment wrote or lived in Holland, attracted by the republic's intellectual liberty. Among these were René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and John Locke, “the three great luminaries of seventeenth-century thought.” Descartes was a French Catholic squire who found tran-quility in Holland and wrote his most famous work there. (He also wrote, of commerce-obsessed Amsterdam: “In this great town, where apart from myself there dwells no one who is not engaged in trade, everyone is so much out for his own advantage that I should be able to live my whole life here without ever meeting a mortal being.”) Spinoza was a Jewish philosopher whose family came to the Netherlands in the 1620s; his radically modern ideas on reason and individualism eventually got him banished from his own Sephardic community. John Locke was an Englishman ejected by James II; his greatest writings—on government