Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [24]
A small episode on the road leading from Torbay to London and the English throne underlines the importance of this shared ‘mentality’. Constantijn Huygens junior records in his diary that in the course of the often arduous and demanding forced march from Torbay to London, Prince William of Orange took some time off from military affairs to do a bit of tourism, and encouraged his secretary to do likewise.
On 4 December, as the Prince travelled towards London at the head of his massive Dutch army, he insisted on making a detour to admire Wilton House near Salisbury, the country seat of the Earl of Pembroke. Wilton was renowned for its architecture, its art, but most of all for its magnificent gardens, designed in the 1640s by Isaac de Caus.
Engravings of the Wilton gardens had appeared in a lavishly illustrated book entitled Hortus Pembrochianus (Garden of the Earl of Pembroke), first published in 1645–46, and reprinted several times thereafter – in one case, without any of the accompanying text, but simply as a set of engravings.19 The book is closely modelled on a famous volume brought out twenty-five years earlier by Isaac de Caus’s brother Salomon, depicting the fabulous gardens he had designed at Heidelberg for the ‘Winter King and Queen’ – the Elector Palatine Frederick and his wife, Charles I’s sister, Elizabeth of Bohemia. Both books are likely to have been familiar to a keen enthusiast for gardens like Prince William. Heidelberg’s gardens had been destroyed during the Thirty Years War, along with the city’s great university and its library.
In the midst of a military campaign, on foreign soil, William took the earliest possible opportunity to inspect the Pembroke gardens in all their glory, and at some length. Constantijn Huygens junior records the detour made for this purpose:
We marched from Hendon to Salisbury, 13 miles, a good way through Salisbury plain, but for a long time we had a cold, sharp wind blowing directly in our faces.
A mile from Salisbury we passed an undistinguished village (which nevertheless sends two representatives to Parliament), called Wilton, where the Earl of Pembroke has a rather beautiful house which is moderately beautiful, because there are some very notable paintings by van Dyck. His Highness went to see it, but I did not – I was in a hurry to get to the town to get warm.20
William may have been anxious to see the van Dycks, at least one of which showed his mother as a child, with her siblings, but the gardens were far more impressive than the house. Laid out and planted before the house itself was built, as was customary for the period, the Wilton gardens had been designed to complement a classical villa on a grand scale, as de Caus’s original drawings clearly show. By the time the house was constructed, the 4th Earl’s fortunes had faded, and a more modest house eventually presided over the parterres and wildernesses, statues and elaborate fountains.
Wilton House’s architecture, interior decoration, artworks and gardens were entirely to the monarch-to-be’s Dutch taste. The weather was abominable, but that in no way dampened the Stadholder’s enthusiasm. Rejoining Huygens the following day, William told Constantijn that the house and garden were as outstanding as he had been led to believe: ‘In the evening the Prince was in his room coughing violently, having caught cold. He told me I absolutely must go and see the house at Wilton.’21 Huygens ‘did want to go to Wilton, but my horses were not available’.22 He went on foot to see Salisbury Cathedral instead:
The Cathedral at Salisbury is huge, with many ancient tombs. There is a place where the members of the clergy meet, a round chapel, very neatly built in a gothic style, more than 40 feet in diameter, the ceiling vaulting of which is supported in the middle on a pillar, which is like all other pillars of a greyish polished stone, apparently natural.23
But if Huygens did not choose