Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [72]
Although Huygens in the end remained single for the fifty years of his life after Susanna’s death, in the middle decades of the century his name was frequently linked with those of his young female musician friends. Many years later his son Constantijn junior, on a visit to Antwerp, was mortified when his host hinted that his father’s relations with the ‘beautiful Duarte girls’ might not have been entirely innocent.
In the spring of 1642, on the eve of the outbreak of civil war in England, the ten-year-old Princess Mary Stuart, eldest daughter of Charles I, arrived in the Netherlands with her mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, to join her teenaged husband, Frederik Hendrik’s son Prince William of Orange, whom she had married in London the previous year. The two royal ladies established themselves at The Hague, surrounded by a large number of household servants and hangers-on. Princess Mary was attended by an entourage of eighty (the marriage agreement had stipulated only forty), while her mother, according to eyewitnesses, brought a total of three hundred followers.33
One of those who arrived at The Hague as lady-in-waiting to Princess Mary Stuart was Utricia Ogle, a spirited young woman born in Utrecht of an English father (Governor of Utrecht in 1610, and commander of the English garrison there for a number of years) and a Dutch mother, but raised in England.34 Originally a member of the household of Katherine Wotton, Lady Stanhope (an English widow who had recently met and married William of Orange’s leading negotiator in the matter of the English match), Utricia was an accomplished instrumentalist, with a lovely singing voice. She quickly became Huygens’s protégée and close personal friend, and a regular visitor to his country retreat. He composed songs especially for her, and set them to music himself, coaching her in their performance. His one surviving published compilation of songs, the Pathodia Sacra et Profana, is dedicated to her as its musical inspiration.
In 1645 Utricia married Sir William Swann, an English professional soldier serving in the forces of the Prince of Orange. Swann was also a musician, and it is probable that he and Utricia met at one of Huygens’s musical evenings (he and Huygens corresponded regularly – particularly, anxiously, concerning Utricia’s health). Utricia and Constantijn continued to perform together, privately and publicly. Indeed, her husband seems to have encouraged them to combine their musical talents whenever possible, probably to enhance his own prestige in court circles.35 ‘My wife presents her humbel service to you,’ he writes in January 1647 from Breda, ‘and greefs much for the loss of her voice, which a great could [cold] has taken from her … But I hoope, eere long she will bee fitt againe to beare her part in musyck with your consort, which I long to heare.’36
Some years later, Huygens sent the English composer and lutenist Nicholas Lanier a copy of the Pathodia Sacra et Profana, flattering him with the assurance that Lanier could correct any deficiencies in his compositions as he performed them on his ‘most excelent royal tiorba’. Huygens had met Lanier in London, at the home of Sir Robert Killigrew, in 1622.37 Now Lanier, who was of Huguenot descent, was in Antwerp, jostling for some kind of place with all the other English exiles, and trying to eke out a musical living there (though he soon went north, to the more welcoming exile community at The Hague). Huygens again characterised the songs as particularly intended for Utricia:
Or else, if you will bee so good to us one day, as to come where you may heare mylady Swanne and me make a reasonable beau bruict about some