Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [4]
And beyond all of these there are my constant companions in learning – my graduate students, friends in the international academic community, artist friends and friends in the professions, too numerous to recognise by name, but all of them vital to the continuing Jardine project which is the urge to know and to change the world through knowledge. My thanks to each and every one of them. They know who they are.
Finally, while I was completing this book I spent a week in the ski resort of Val d’Isère, high in the French Alps, close to the border with Italy. While the rest of my family skied, I put the final touches to my manuscript, sitting in the cosy sitting room of the Hôtel Savoyarde. Inevitably, I found myself explaining the argument of Going Dutch to the charming young French waiter who presided there. I felt I owed him an explanation for all the mornings on which he had patiently cleaned and tidied around me.
‘Surely you mean, “when the English invaded the Dutch”?’ was his first response to my account of the huge military operation which had resulted in William III ‘conquering’ Britain and claiming the Crown on behalf of himself and his English wife. ‘Holland is far too small and insignificant a country to have been capable of such a military manoeuvre. It surely never had the power.’ And again: ‘But I thought that the English mainland had not been invaded since the Normans in 1066.’
I found his absolute disbelief faced with my account of events leading up to the Dutch invasion of November 1688 both challenging and inspiring – this must surely be a story worth telling, if it failed to agree in so many of its details with the version of northern European history my educated interlocutor had learned in a good French lycée.
Every day he would enquire how my work was doing, and ask another tentative question about how a country like Holland could have taken on, let alone profoundly and lastingly shaped, a country like Britain. It became something of a challenge for me to explain to him the various steps in my argument, and I am sure his responses helped sharpen my own understanding and frame its presentation on the page. So a small extra thank you is due here to that good-natured, patient and obliging waiter at the Hôtel Savoyarde.
Lisa Jardine
London, January 2008
1
England Invaded by the Dutch: The Conquest that Never Was
The Fame of the Intended Invasion from Holland, was spread all over the Nation, & most Men were preparing for the Generall Insurrection which ensu’d, when I was obliged to go to London to settle my accounts, in October 1688, & had not continu’d there above 3 weeks, before the News came of the Dutch Fleet’s being sail’d to the Westward, & seen off the Isle of Wight.1
The assault on the supposedly impregnable sovereign territory came out of the blue – the slickest feat of naval planning and execution ever to have been witnessed in Europe.
On 1 November 1688 (new style), Prince William of Orange, elected ruler or Stadholder of the Dutch Republic, and husband of the English King James II’s eldest daughter, Mary Stuart, embarked upon a seaborne invasion of the British Isles. His invasion force consisted of an astounding five hundred ships, an army of more than twenty thousand highly trained professional troops, and a further twenty thousand mariners and support staff. As a naval and military undertaking, the sheer scale, temerity and bold ambition of the venture captured the European imagination for years afterwards. The exact numbers of the invading forces were a matter of dispute and deliberate exaggeration (and have remained so ever since), but there was no uncertainty at all about William of Orange’s intentions – this was a redoubtable force, and it