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By Root 1100 0

been stripped as an infant, following his father’s death in 1650, but now that he had declared himself ‘of age’, complex political manoeuvring by the Orange faction seemed likely to achieve that end.2 As far as Charles II was concerned, his young Dutch relative was a potential bit-part player in his complicated power-brokering negotiations with France and the Dutch Republic: ‘According to the Sommier Verhael [“Summary Relation”] of William’s journey, Charles II had repeatedly kissed his nephew when he arrived in England in early November 1670.’3 The King was particularly insistent that William be treated with all ceremony.

When the Prince of Orange was to dine with the lord mayor [of London] in [January] 1671, there was much consideration of the seating arrangements; the King was consulted and he gave his ruling on the matter – that the Prince should rank before the mayor. A fifteenth-century precedent was then unearthed which, showing Henry V’s brothers had ceded place to the lord mayor, apparently contradicted Charles’s decision on the matter, but ‘notwithstanding the King kept his first opinion; alledg- ing that forms of Ceremonies were changed in the world since that time; & that those Dukes were the Kings own brothers; yet they were his subjects; which the Prince of Orange was not’.4

When the City of London refused to give way on the matter, the King simply declined to attend and the dinner was cancelled.

Still an ‘ordinary’ visitor, though a nephew of the King, William was fortunate to have with him the elder statesman who had served both his father and his grandfather as secretary, and who was as thoroughly conversant with English court ways as Huygens.

The debts owing to the House of Orange which Huygens undertook to recover included the dowry Charles I had contracted to pay William’s grandfather when William’s father and mother were married (hastily, on the eve of the first English Civil War, in 1642), and substantial sums later advanced to Queen Henrietta Maria for ships and weapons to assist the Royalist cause: ‘The English King owed [William] 2,797,859 guilders, a debt which included the unpaid dowry of his mother, worth 900,000 guilders … From the financial viewpoint William’s journey had little result. The King and his nephew agreed to reduce the debt to 1,800,000 guilders, but the English King again proved to be a bad payer.’5

Among the Huygens letters in the Royal Collection at The Hague is a copy of the final letter from Charles II to William, who had returned to the Low Countries ahead of his old retainer, written during that residency. It displays real affection for the elderly diplomat, whom the English King has known from boyhood, which is presumably why Huygens carefully kept a copy among his papers:

I am not a little ashamed that I have delayd Monsieur de Zulichem from time to time with promise of a speedy dispatch, and according to what I haue written to you in my former letters. The funds giuen me by the Parliament haue fallen infinitely short of their first computations which hath disturbed and made almost ineffectuall all my orders; so that it were to abuse you to giue you any of them.

In spite of Huygens’s best efforts, Charles is evasive about the repayment. But he lets Prince William know that Huygens has been tireless in pursuit of the debt:

I cannot finish this letter, which I meane to communicate to the bearer before I seal it up, before I lett you know how troublesome a sollicitor he hath been to me, though a most zealous one for you and consequently how worthy he is of the continuance of your esteem and good will.

Charles writes to William in English, which Huygens spoke and wrote with almost native fluency. In his archive, Huygens heads it in French, the language of the Dutch élite. The exchange is clear evidence of Stuart– Orange understanding at a ‘family’ or domestic level, and of Huygens’s pivotal role in crafting that relationship, vital to William’s national and international political future.

The money, as I said, was never forthcoming (Charles II rarely settled