Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [37]
Devoted lifelong servant of the house of Orange (both in and out of power), and unashamed anglophile, Sir Constantijn could think of no more glorious future for his young Orange protégé, on the threshold of regaining his royal standing in the Low Countries, than to consolidate still further the bonds between his family and the similarly restored Stuarts. In spite of his age and infirmity, Huygens senior worked unstintingly during his London visit to develop a strong and durable relationship between Charles II and the young nephew who would, though neither of them could know it, one day ascend the English throne as King William III.
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Designing Dutch Princely Rule: The Cultural Diplomacy of ‘Mr Huggins’
In 1667, Thomas Sprat, the first official biographer of the Royal Society in London, praised the ingenuity and inventiveness of the Dutch, and stressed the importance for the development of their science and technology of the many intellectual migrants drawn to the Republic by its reputation for toleration. The hub of this activity, he reported, was at The Hague – equal to Sir Francis Bacon’s ‘New Atlantis’ as a catalyst for intellectual endeavour:
They have all things imaginable to stirr them up: they have the Examples of the greatest Wits of other Countreys, who have left their own homes, to retire thither, for the freedom of their Philosophical Studies: they have one place (I mean the Hague) which may be soon made the very Copy of a Town in the New Atlantis; which for its pleasantness, and for the concourse of men of all conditions to it, may be counted above all others (except London) the most advantagiously seated for this service.1
In the mid-seventeenth century, the elegant small town of The Hague on the north-west coast of Holland, a comparatively easy journey across the water from London (embarking from Gravesend), had indeed been for many years a destination for Englishmen fleeing persecution or simply civil unrest at home.
Furthermore, in the first half of the seventeenth century, at the end of Holland’s Golden Age (the high point of its financial power), it housed no fewer than three princely courts. Two of these were, as far as visitors from England were concerned, reassuringly English in culture and ambience. These were the court of Prince William II of Orange and his wife, Princess Mary Stuart (the Princess Royal), and the court of Mary’s aunt (Charles I’s sister), Elizabeth of Bohemia, Electress Palatine, the ill-fated ‘Winter Queen’.
The official focus of courtly activity at The Hague after 1625, however, was the residence in The Hague of the Orange Stadholder Frederik Hendrik himself. His wife Amalia van Solms, whose acute sensitivity to the shades and nuances of European courtly conventions had – like those of the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth Stuart – been strongly influenced by English tastes and court practice during her pre-marriage period as lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth of Bohemia, presided over a court designed in emulation of that of her former royal Stuart mistress. The Orange Stadholder’s court was thus as congenial for élite English visitors as the less politically powerful courts that flanked it (in all three, English and French were the languages of everyday use, alongside Dutch).2
Almost as soon as Frederik Hendrik assumed the Stadholdership in 1625, after the death of his half-brother Maurits, he and Amalia embarked on a programme of ostentatious expenditure on luxury objects and works of art, to create a cultural and artistic context which would put the house of Orange in the United Provinces on the European ‘royal’ map. Although the Orange court was small by the standards of the French, by the 1640s it was comparable with the courts of the German Princes, or that of the Elector Palatine at Heidelberg. The programme of expensive purchases and newly established courtly rituals and occasions was designed and put in place with the close guidance