Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [44]
During the meal Huygens was presented to the King by his host, who drew particular attention to the young man’s virtuosity on the lute (Constantijn may have been invited to provide the background music while the royal party ate). According to Constantijn, writing proudly to his parents to keep them informed of his linguistic progress and social successes overseas, James was so delighted by his playing that he insisted that Caron must have Constantijn entertain him on the lute at length on a future occasion, at Bagshot, the grace-and-favour hunting lodge given by James to Caron for his use during his residence in England.19
That later occasion (towards the end of September 1618) made such an impression on the young and impressionable Constantijn that he committed it to verse in a poem entitled ‘Being about to sing to the lute in the presence of the King of Britain’:
Thrice the greatest among Kings lends a majestic ear;
Grant, O skilful Thalia, more than my usual strains…
Kingly glory, I admit, dazzles the eye.
In the Divine presence the tongue stiffens and is numb.20
‘But shall he who speaks the Batavian [Dutch] language despair of pleasing the English Gods?’ Huygens concludes, with youthful enthusiasm. The question was a rhetorical one.
On that second occasion also, James engaged the charming young Dutchman in private, informal conversation. Although at the very moment they were talking together, the Dutch Stadholder Maurits of Nassau was in the process of effecting a very public coup in the United Provinces to take control of the States General (a power play in which Constantijn’s father, as secretary to the governing council of the States General, was necessarily heavily involved), the exchange consisted entirely of politesse and social banter. Still, Huygens was well pleased to have made a good impression on the English monarch. When, heady with excitement at his proximity to the monarch, he was dismissed from the royal presence, he felt ‘delighted with the excellent success of my humble affairs’.21
Constantijn’s father, Christiaan Huygens senior (to whom Constantijn was dutifully writing almost daily), must have been particularly gratified that it was Constantijn’s musical talents which had brought him to the attention of the English King. His son had begun lessons on the ‘English viol’, with an English music teacher, when he was barely six years old, the beginning of a systematic training in elegance to equip him for a career in the service of one of Holland’s great dynastic families (the career of a ‘courtier’). Unaccompanied solo performance on the viol – known as playing ‘lyraway’ – was a peculiarly English speciality in the early seventeenth century. In fact, it was as a solo instrument as much as in consorts that the viol became established as the performance instrument of the English (the lute was similarly regarded as particularly ‘French’). Huygens had met and been greatly impressed by one of the pioneers of the English style of viol-playing at The Hague in 1613.22
Constantijn, who had shown early musical promise (his mother discovered that he could hold a tune when he sang a psalm melody back to her faultlessly at the age of two), had later been encouraged to perfect his skills in the company of members of the household of the English Ambassador at The Hague. Sir Henry Wotton,