Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [79]
In 1641, John Evelyn recorded in his diary a concert held at the Duartes’ home: ‘In the evening I was invited to Signor Duerts [Duarte], a Portuguese by nation, an exceeding rich merchant, whose palace I found to be furnish’d like a prince’s; and here his three daughters, entertain’d us with rare musick, both vocal and instrumental, which was finish’d with a handsome collation.’
More palatial than any other house in Antwerp, the home of the Duartes was where both Mary Stuart, Princess Royal, and her brother Prince Charles stayed when they were visiting, as befitting their royal status, although they might be lavishly entertained by the English community elsewhere in town.
Gaspar Duarte and his family’s musical virtuosity made of their house and its circle a genuine ‘salon’ where connoisseurs assembled for concerts. Occasions on which Duarte’s musically gifted daughters performed with voice and instruments brought together cultivated and influential individuals like Sir Constantijn Huygens, Frederik Hendrik and his wife Amalia van Solms, and subsequently their son Prince William and his wife Princess Mary Stuart. Huygens senior became a good personal friend of Gaspar Duarte, and his sons became equally close to the diamond merchant’s children (one of Diego Duarte’s daughters was named Constantia, after Sir Constantijn).
The intimate friendship and the musical soirées were part of an elaborate system of interdependencies among the individuals and families involved, which also extended to include a much more robustly commercial relationship between Huygens (representing the house of Orange) and Duarte as a powerful and extremely influential Antwerp merchant and international businessman.
Huygens regularly did business with the Duartes on behalf of his Stadholder employer. A single, delightful example of a transaction organised and carried out by them on Frederik Hendrik’s behalf begins to reveal the hidden tendrils of influence in matters of cultural exchange in the 1640s, originating in Antwerp, and extending across the water between England and the United Provinces – and, indeed, back again.
In March 1641, Gaspar Duarte wrote from Antwerp to Sir Constantijn Huygens in The Hague. The letter (in French) contains an appropriate amount of musical small talk (the two men are exchanging the scores of Italian songs for one or more voices), but a substantive item of Stadholder business occupies most of its space.
Duarte writes to let Huygens know that, as requested by representatives of Frederik Hendrik, his son Jacob in London has located a particularly striking (and expensive) piece of jewellery – an elaborate brooch in the latest fashionable style, comprising four individual diamonds in a complicated setting, and designed to be worn on the stomacher of a woman’s dress.
It emerges that the piece is to be a sensational gift for Frederik Hendrik’s teenaged son William to present to his bride-to-be, the nine-year-old Mary Stuart, on the occasion of their marriage in London in May, the details of which have just been negotiated and settled in London by Dutch ambassadors. Duarte in Antwerp tells Huygens in The Hague that he has identified the perfect piece for this purpose in London:
One of my friends, Sir Arnout Lundi, has asked me for an important jewel [‘joiau’] worth 80,000 florins, on behalf of His Highness, the Prince of Orange. I had delivered to the said Sir Lundi a mock-up [plomb] and pattern of a rich jewel, a fortnight ago, to show to His Highness, by way of a gentleman, a friend of the aforementioned Lundi, called Mr. Joachim