Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [108]
Susanna Huygens married her cousin Philips Doublet (son of her father’s sister, Gertruyd) in April 1660. The Doublets were hugely wealthy, and Constantijn Huygens, describing his daughter’s wedding in meticulous detail in a letter to a friend, made no attempt to hide his intense satisfaction at the match, nor how expensive the wedding celebrations had been. It was, he confided, ‘a matter of importance and serious consideration in the service of the State’. The wedding celebrations were sumptuous, and were attended by several ambassadors and personages of note. Huygens’s unusually colourful account of the lavish dining arrangements and after- dinner dancing (preceding the bedding of the bride, which her father recounts in rather excessive detail) captures the spirit of the occasion:
The dinner guests assembled in the room facing the garden, while the food was carried into the room facing the street. The ambassador escorted the bride to the table, and each gallant gentleman and his lady was served with a first course which each judged entirely to their liking, as also the second course and the dessert. The French ambassadorial party did our chef Mater Jacques the honour of declaring his culinary prowess a match for even the most able kitchen-managers in Paris.
There were forty-two complete place settings for the guests – knife, fork and spoon, as well as glassware, plate and napkin, all set out on white damask on an L-shaped table. The wedding feast consisted of a pig’s head, over 100 partridges, capons, turkeys, pheasants and hares, all stuffed and larded, followed by astonishing quantities of sugar and marzipan dainties.10
[…] While this glorious meal was taking place, yet more glorious rooms were being prepared, laid out, perfumed and lit with between five and six thousand torches, to serve as the dance floor for the young people. And after the five hours spent eating, drinking and embracing, everyone was delighted to escape from the cooking smells and the heat of such a crowd, seated for so long together. Then, after time to stretch our legs, Monsieur the Ambassador and the other older guests having taken their seats, the dancing began.11
Six hundred candles illuminated the great hall for the ball, which went on into the small hours – well after the bride and groom had been escorted to the decorated bedchamber. The whole thing cost Sir Constantijn over three thousand guilders.
A man of considerable means with a good deal of leisure time at his disposal, Philips Doublet invested extravagantly in a number of his personal enthusiasms, among them a passion for fast carriages. He corresponded at length with Susanna’s brother Christiaan Huygens in Paris, exchanging sketches and designs for ever more streamlined horse-drawn conveyances. But his gardens were the dominating passion in his life, and he became a gardening adviser to William III, at Honserlaarsdijk and his other palaces near The Hague.
The Doublet country estate at Clingendael had been designed for Philips Doublet senior and his wife (Philips junior’s parents) in the 1630s, by the same architect and garden designer – Pieter Post – who was responsible for Constantijn Huygens’s Hofwijk. Like Hofwijk it was characterised by the classical form and style of the house, standing in water at the centre of the gardens.12 Like Hofwijk, it aspired to offer shade, tranquillity, walks and groves, and eschewed ostentation, both in its layout and in the stocking of its flowerbeds.
After the death of their father, the Doublet children embarked upon an elaborate redevelopment of the parental garden, turning for inspiration to the same French models that were exerting considerable influence in England. By the later 1670s this had become an explicit plan to modify the garden layout at Clingendael to include features drawn from le Nôtre’s fabulous gardens at Versailles.