Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [157]
Conclusion
Ibegan my story with an invasion, a violent interruption of the historical narrative of a nation, theatrical, unexpected and disruptive. Yet it was an invasion whose political and cultural consequences were accommodated and smoothed over with extraordinary rapidity, melding the life-worlds of invader and invaded into an unbeatable blend of tough political realism and commercial acumen – with a dose of tolerance thrown in – which within little more than a generation would turn the conquered nation into a great power.
Because by 1688 England and Holland were already so closely intertwined, culturally, intellectually, dynastically and politically, that the invasion was more like a merger. It had after all been attempted by treaty before, in the 1650s, when the United Provinces took the initiative, and tried to persuade Cromwell that the shared interests of the two nations made a political union obvious. Although that attempt failed – England had all too recently freed itself from the dominion of the Stuarts to be prepared to give up its independence – the idea was revived more than once over the following decades. The two East India Companies (Dutch and English) made several attempts prior to 1688 to bring about a political union which might rationalise their seaborne activities and commercial operations, making them one company under one flag. It was one of the many ironies of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ that William III chose to keep his lucrative English and Dutch maritime enterprises separate and in competition.
So deep ran the connections between England and Holland in the runup to the invasion that the subsequent merger of dynasties and cultures was almost seamless. Constantijn Huygens junior’s delight, as he recorded Prince William’s enthusiastic welcome from the ‘ordinary folk’ of England, was the delight of recognition:
Alongside the roads the people had gathered, as on the previous day, women, men, and children alike, all shouting: ‘God bless you’ and waving to us a hundred good wishes. They gave the Prince and his entourage apples, and an old lady was waiting with a bottle of mead and wanted to pour his Highness a glass.
That, at least, is what I have argued here. I am also of the opinion that in excavating the subterranean ties that bound the English and the Dutch in the seventeenth century, I have barely scratched the surface of my subject. Once we discard history’s customary petty nationalism, and survey fields like art, music, science and medicine more broadly, we find ourselves returning again and again to close collaborations between individuals and groups separated (but only sometimes) by the Narrow Sea.
So I bring this story to a close with a couple of decidedly odd examples of Anglo–Dutch collaboration (as usual, involving that assiduous facilitator Sir Constantijn Huygens, father of the diarist who witnessed the 1688 invasion from start to finish from the Dutch side). They may stand here for all the other unexpected connections I am confident readers will begin to find all around, once they begin to look.
Between early November 1670 and mid-September 1671, Sir Constantijn Huygens, at the age of seventy-two, was in London with his twenty-year- old charge, Prince William of Orange, attempting to retrieve monies owed to William by his uncle Charles II.1 It was William’s first visit to his mother Mary Stuart’s country of birth. Strictly speaking he travelled as a commoner. He had not yet regained the position of Stadholder of the Low Countries, of which he had