Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [0]
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
This 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