Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [45]
By the time he performed for King James, too, his was a specifically international, Anglo-Dutch musical expertise. He had absorbed the notational practices, playing techniques and even choices of accompanying instruments from his English and Anglo-Dutch teachers and fellow musicians. His playing was flexible and adaptable, and made him much in demand as a participant in any music occasion, whether in London or The Hague. We might indeed wonder whether the ‘lute’ on which he is supposed to have played, acquitting himself well enough to attract the admiration of the King of England himself, might actually have been a theorbo (close cousin to the lute), his preferred accompaniment for his singing.24
Apart from Constantijn Huygens’s personal delight at being allowed to demonstrate his musical prowess to the King, what most impressed him on this first English trip were the guided tours of several private art galleries, including that of his host. The Huygens family were notable art-lovers and connoisseurs. The artistic skills of all members of this talented family were not confined to music. Parents and children were also accomplished practitioners of pen-and-ink sketching and watercolours. Constantijn’s mother came from the distinguished family of artists the Hoefnagels, and Constantijn (who had been trained by his uncle, Jacob Hoefnagel), and later his own children, sketched and painted with exceptional skill.
Furthermore, Huygens had the good fortune to have as travelling companion on this visit a young contemporary, Jacob de Gheyn junior, the son of more neighbours of the Huygenses in the élite residential district of The Hague. Jacob de Gheyn senior (Jacob de Gheyn II) was a renowned Dutch painter of portraits and still-lifes, and the younger Jacob would later become an artist of international standing himself. He was certainly in a position to inform young Constantijn of the importance of the works of art they had the good fortune to be able to view in the collections of prominent figures in the English court circle.
The official reason for Sir Dudley Carleton, the English Resident at The Hague’s visit to England in 1618 was to take instruction on how to handle the sensitive situation in the United Provinces, where the Dutch Stadholder was attempting to seize additional powers from the Raad of the United Provinces by force. Less officially, though, the trip was undertaken in order to sort out Carleton’s personal financial affairs.
To start with, there were his ambassadorial financial difficulties – significant sums were owing to him as arrears in his stipend (ambassadors invariably found the monarch slow in reimbursing them). To this end his wife had arrived at their London residence in Westminster two months before him, to begin lobbying for the release of monies owing to them. There were also Carleton’s continuing efforts to secure a senior position back in the English court, with more significant financial rewards.
(Eventually, in 1628, his persistent efforts to secure preferment, and to end his expensive peripatetic life as an English Resident Ambassador around Europe, were rewarded when he was appointed Secretary of State to Charles I – three years after his young protégé Constantijn Huygens senior became First Secretary to Stadholder Frederik Hendrik, across the water in the northern Netherlands.)
But there was an even more pressing personal reason for Carleton’s presence at the English court, one which explains why priceless