Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [116]
Blathwayt did choose and purchase the Delft ware, the ornamental tiles and fine china himself – as well as Oriental silks and large quantities of tea – whenever he accompanied King William to The Hague on royal business. But he made sure that he paid absolutely no customs duties on them, remonstrating in indignation should anybody so much as try to make him do so.
Determinedly ferrying their precious cargoes of exotic plants and elaborate garden designs across broad and narrow seas, the industrious Dutch distributed their own peculiar, highly developed system of cultural and aesthetic ideas, carried more or less explicitly along with the material objects themselves. Long before the house of Orange set its sights on the throne of England, the British Isles had absorbed, and come to take delight in, a controlled garden landscape and the associated idea of a conscientious struggle to master the forces of nature.
When William III interrupted his military campaign, breaking off from the march to conquer London to walk in the gardens at Wilton, he must have felt in familiar surroundings, and an accompanying sense of comfort and relief. In terms of ambiance and lifestyle, he was coming home. The outstretched hands of the welcoming orange-sellers among the crowds thronging the streets of London, as he made his way along Knightsbridge towards Whitehall, will have reassured him further: the studied, self- conscious garden symbolism of the house of Orange was already recognisable and in place in England.
Mutual recognition cushioned the impact of the Dutch invasion of England. Retrospectively, it blurred and diffused the national memory: here was no conquest, here was an affinity – a meeting of minds and sensibilities.
10
Anglo–Dutch Exchange and the New Science: A Chapter of Accidents
When William III of Orange regained his place as Stadholder of the United Provinces in 1672, Sir Constantijn Huygens’s eldest son, Constantijn junior, was installed in his father’s place as the Prince’s trusted personal secretary.
In 1676, while campaigning with William of Orange in military operations against the French on the Dutch–French border, Constantijn Huygens junior wrote home to his wife to get her to order one of his brother Christiaan’s new balance-spring watches at The Hague, and to have it sent to him in the field:
Wednesday. 17 [June 1676]. I presented Monsieur the Prince with a letter to the Court in favour of my brother [Christiaan], but he set it aside together with other things that he was delaying signing. I wrote to my father telling him this, and to my wife concerning my watch.1
His new timepiece reached him a month later:
Saturday. 18 [July 1676]. This evening we began trench engagement. Major de Beaumont, called Merode, and the Surgeon of Rhinegrave were killed there. His Excellency’s attack was undertaken by the regiment of guards; the Duke of Osnaburg’s was undertaken by the regiments of Offelen, Beaumont and Hofwegen. It is openly said that His Excellency ought to rejoin the other army. My watch, that I had had made at The Hague, arrived.2
Already this adds a curious edge to a familiar period of early-modern scientific discovery: at the same time Constantijn was corresponding with Christiaan and other members of his family about the new ‘monstre’, he was procuring safe-conducts for Christiaan and Lodewijk to travel from France (where Christiaan’s presence was increasingly an embarrassment as tensions rose between France and the United Provinces), through Spanish- governed territory, to The Hague. While England, France and the United Provinces were on a war footing with one another on-and-off throughout the second half of the seventeenth century, national boundaries in no way inhibited,