Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [74]
Huygens was devastated when it came to his ears at The Hague that Lady Killigrew was blaming him for the death in some kind of accident of her son Charles, for whom he had found a position in Holland as a page in the personal household of Prince William. Huygens’s first efforts on Charles’s behalf had been made while he was still residing in London in 1622. Positions as page to the Prince were much sought after, and it was 1630 before Huygens was able to notify the Killigrews that he had been successful. He had, naturally, assured his English friends that he would keep a careful eye on their son. Charles, though, fell in with bad company, and turned out to be something of a liability. Huygens wrote to both his old friends – in French to William Killigrew, in English to his wife – personal and passionate letters assuring them that he had done all he could to protect their son:
Everyone here knows the pressure of business under which I, because of my vocation, am obliged to live. To you, who might be ignorant of it, I must insist upon the fact that … I was too busy to be able constantly to supervise pages, even if they had been sons of my own father.
Had not Huygens written to the Killigrews with such regularity that ‘you must have been as exhausted with reading everything I entertained you with, covering so many sheets of paper, on the subject of your poor son, as I was in writing it’? He had done everything he could on their son’s behalf. He could have treated his own children no better. Surely their friendship is strong enough to withstand ‘the black and malicious calumny’ which has given such a ‘vile impression’ of him to Lady Killigrew?44
There was also some question as to whether there was money owing between Charles Killigrew and Huygens. Nor was this the only occasion in the long Huygens–Killigrew family friendship when debts and misunderstandings troubled the otherwise cordial relationship. At some point much later on, Huygens lent the Killigrews’ daughter Elizabeth Boyle (Lady Shannon) a large sum which she apparently failed to pay back. In 1671 Hugyens wrote to her brother Thomas in some indignation at ‘this foole business’, protesting at the fact that no other member of the family seemed inclined to settle the debt:
I would faine know, if I am to go and tell it in Holland, that the whole family of the noble Killigrews could find it in their heart to deny in the behalf of a sister what one stranger did not deny unto that sister in consideration of the whole familie.45
His affection for Lady Killigrew in particular, however, survived the occasional frictions caused by the more feckless of her children. He sent her gifts of engravings, and after his wife’s death he extended the hospitality of his house to her. There was room enough, in the wing which had been intended for Susanna, for Lady Killigrew to stay whenever she was passing through The Hague.
Despite their occasional difficulties, generally Huygens was quick to come to the support of his old friends. When their daughter Anne, lady-in-waiting to Queen Henrietta Maria, drowned in a freak accident on the Thames in August 1641 (the boat in which she was travelling attempted to shoot the turbulent waters under a bridge, and overturned, resulting in the death of all those on board), Huygens, who was away from home on military manoeuvres with the Stadholder, wrote three short poems bewailing the loss of the ‘most beautiful Anne’.
Sir Robert was briefly appointed English Resident Ambassador to the United Provinces, though he apparently never took up the post. But