• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1105 0

English Commonwealth years. It was a soirée of glamour and revelry staged for Charles II and his court in February 1658, shortly after the death of Oliver Cromwell, when Europe was buzzing with rumours of the possibility of the English King’s return to the throne. In the event, it was to be another two years before the continuing Commonwealth failed under Cromwell’s son Richard, and Charles II was restored to power, but the premature celebration reminds us that those who eventually returned had developed their own characteristic, lavish forms of recreation in exile, whose fashions were closely linked to Dutch ‘royal’ circles in The Hague, and whose influence persisted when the participants returned to London.38

The occasion for the entertainment at the Cavendishes’ Antwerp home was the installing of General Marchin as a Knight of the Order of the Garter, followed by a ball in his honour. A verse panegyric ‘of the highest hyperbole’ written by Cavendish was delivered by a former actor, ‘Major Mohun’, who wore ‘a black satin robe and garland of bays’. There was dancing, and a performance by sixteen of the King’s gentlemen. The high point of the evening was a song by ‘Lady Moore, dressed in feathers’, who sang one of Cavendish’s songs set to music by Nicholas Lanier.

Here, yet again, we have the threads of English and Dutch cultural activity becoming wound together in intricately complicated ways. As we saw in the previous chapter, the English musician Nicholas Lanier was an old friend of Sir Constantijn Huygens, whom he had met in London at the home of Sir Robert Killigrew in 1622, when Huygens was a young diplomat, dazzled by the cultural and social life of James I’s court in England, and Lanier was a rising court star as musician and instrumentalist, destined to become the Keeper of the King’s Music when Charles I ascended the throne.

In addition to taking charge of Charles I’s music and instruments, Lanier become one of his key art procurers, brokering international deals to build up his fabulous collection of Italianate paintings and statuary – a lynchpin in the courtly web of patronage and acquisitions which shaped seventeenth-century European art connoisseurship, shuttling around Europe in search of costly treasures to enhance the courtly magnificence of his royal employer.39

In the 1650s, the exiled Lanier frequented the émigré community in Antwerp, helping to provide cultural continuity between those fallen on hard times from the élites of the houses of Orange and Stuart together. The guest list on this occasion was impressive. ‘Along with the King and his entourage were his sister Mary (the Princess Royal), the Duke of York (later James II) and the youngest royal brother, Henry, Duke of Gloucester. In addition to the Stuarts, Béatrice de Cusance and her two children attended, a Danish nobleman, Hannibal Sehested and his wife (a Danish Princess), and members of the Duarte family.’40 The context for the entertainment, its conception and execution, were strictly Dutch, and closely related to comparable documented performances at The Hague, at the court of Elizabeth of Bohemia, Charles I’s widowed sister, of the kind we saw earlier. The occasion itself was resolutely ‘English’.

Not all the Cavendishes’ entertaining was musical. During his frequent visits to the Rubens House in the 1650s, Sir Constantijn Huygens and Margaret Cavendish developed an intense intellectual friendship, spending hours absorbed in conversation on scientific and philosophical matters.

In 1653, Huygens was one of those to whom Margaret and William sent the poems she had published in London. ‘A wonderful book, whose extravagant atoms kept me from sleeping a great part of last night in this my little solitude,’ he wrote to Utricia Swann from his country house at Hofwijk.41 On his visits to Antwerp, Huygens often stayed at the Duarte family’s house and kept the company of the Duchess of Lorraine. When he called at the Rubens House, conversation turned to learning, and in particular philosophy. He questioned Margaret closely about her own theory