Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [115]
Here I use the career and rise of the Englishman William Blathwayt as representative of the complicated relationship between desirable goods from overseas and money-making, the passion for collecting and the ruthless pursuit of power and office. Because he had served in the Netherlands, and was fluent in the Dutch language, Blathwayt self-consciously modelled his tastes in fine things, including art and gardens, on those of the Dutch. He also unashamedly exploited his position as controller of import-export from the colonies to amass an extraordinary profusion of luxury articles, commodities and curiosities to adorn his country house at Dyrham Park near Bath, and his magnificent gardens there, which in his day were the talk of the region.36
William Blathwayt was Clerk of the Privy Council, head of the Plantation Office, Auditor and Surveyor General of the plantation revenues, and Secretary of War, beginning in 1676 and running on into the new century. He was a somewhat prosaic government official with expensive tastes, who married a considerable heiress. William III, whom he served with exceptional efficiency as Secretary of War, and Auditor General at the Colonial Office, pronounced him ‘dull’. John Evelyn called him ‘a very proper person, and very dextrous in businesse’, adding, ‘and has besides all this married a very great fortune’. Old money looked down on him, pronouncing his expenditure on Dyrham Park excessive and unwise: ‘My Lord Scarborough thinks he lays out his money not very well.’
Blathwayt was William and Mary’s ‘imperial fixer’. His successful career was based on the way he could make things happen, at long distance, throughout English-administered territories, from the American colonies to the farthest-flung island outposts. For that he was handsomely remunerated between the 1680s and the end of the century. But Blathwayt’s salary did not stretch to cover his magnificent lifestyle at Dyrham Park. That was maintained by systematically extracting backhanders from his ‘clients’.
If you want him to act, one of Blathwayt’s agents advised the Governor of the island of St Christopher (now St Kitts) in the Caribbean in the 1680s, it will cost you: ‘Without a gratification of twenty or thirty guineas for himself at least,’ he wrote, ‘I much doubt the effect of anything else.’ The Governor duly sent thirty guineas on behalf of the colony, and added another ten of his own with an accompanying note: ‘to buy you a pair of gloves in acknowledgement of the favour you did me in my business at Court’. ‘I have not named you in the bill,’ he went on, ‘that no notice might be taken to whom the money goes.’
Which explains a good deal about Dyrham Park as it can still be found today. Even three hundred years after the original owner’s death, the surroundings are sumptuous: glorious walnut panelling and a sensational cedar and cypress staircase; gilded embossed-leather wall coverings, inlaid furniture, tapestries and rugs. On the walls are fine Dutch landscapes and perspective paintings in a manner that was enormously fashionable at the end of the seventeenth century. And there are fantastic pieces of blue-and- white Delft faïence everywhere, including a pair of waist-high pagoda-like pyramid vases designed for the display of rare tulips – another expensive seventeenth-century fad on which William Blathwayt was happy to spend a small fortune.
The receiving rooms in Blathwayt’s mansion are panelled in black walnut, courtesy of the Governor of Maryland. The cypress and cedar wood for the baluster and stair risers of the grand main staircase were a gift from the Governor of South Carolina; the walnut treads were the contribution