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Now Huygens found himself, as secretary to the Dutch ‘royals’, in charge of providing suitable entertainment for the refugee royals and their large train of followers. The royal palaces at The Hague and nearby Honselaarsdijk provided accommodation and recreation. Excursions to nearby Hofwijk for a select few were part of the programme on offer.

Although we have no explicit account of Princess Mary or her mother being among the earliest visitors to Hofwijk, we do learn from Huygens’s correspondence that on at least one occasion during her several subsequent visits to the northern Netherlands in the course of the 1640s, trying to raise money for her husband King Charles I’s doomed military offensive against his people, Henrietta Maria spent an enjoyable afternoon there. She joined her host in an entertaining game of quilles – an ancient cross between skittles and bowls – on the beautifully manicured bowling green, and consumed a bowl of freshly picked, home-grown cherries in a spontaneous déjeuner sur l’herbe – a high-class picnic. According to Huygens, she pronounced the garden a delight.15

Charming though the records make royal visits like Henrietta Maria’s to Hofwijk appear, there were social niceties to be observed which hampered the easy, informal atmosphere for which Huygens yearned. The house of Orange, although the most prominent family in the Northern Provinces, with claims to royal status, nevertheless ranked below the English royal Stuarts, as both Henrietta Maria and Mary were always quick to point out on Dutch formal occasions.

Still, away from the court, in the rural idyll of Hofwijk, studied informality prevailed, and mitigated courtly anxieties concerning rank, status and the ostentatious expenditure involved in fine living. The presence in Huygens’s garden of royal Princesses and other English ladies of quality, enjoying its rustic pleasures, placed the seal of aristocratic approval on his scrupulously conceived and executed, yet comparatively modest, country retreat. Hofwijk came to stand, for him, for the difficult balancing act of remaining a person of modest aspirations and high ethical principles, a true Dutchman of integrity, while nevertheless striving to emulate and match the lifestyle of the increasingly ‘royal’ Stadholder he served. In Simon Schama’s memorable terms, it allayed his characteristically mid- century Dutch ‘embarrassment’ at his own material good fortune.16

By a deliberate and self-conscious play on words that is entirely typical of the linguistically sharp-eared Huygens, ‘Hofwijk’, whose simplest meaning is ‘a house with a garden’, also means a place where one can ‘avoid’ (wijck) the ‘court’ (hof) of the Prince of Orange that Huygens served. The country seat’s Latin name, ‘Vitaulium’, likewise means both ‘vitae aula’ – the garden of life, or Garden of Eden – and also ‘Vitruvii aula’, the garden of Vitruvius, the ultimate classically designed garden. For the rest of Huygens’s long life, Hofwijk was where he went to recover from the buffetings of life in the political spotlight. It was where his family gathered and spent time at leisure together, to escape the summer heat of The Hague. It was also where his son Christiaan, the distinguished scientist, who had a tendency to periods of depressive collapse, found refuge in retirement, when his fragile health finally broke and he was obliged to give up his salaried place at the head of the French King Louis XIV’s Académie des sciences. Christiaan died at Hofwijk in 1695.

We know a good deal about how intensely Sir Constantijn Huygens senior felt about his garden, because around 1650 he completed a three- thousand-line Latin poem celebrating it in loving topographical detail. When he published this in 1653, Hofwijk was still a project in process, a ten- year-old planted paradise of shrubs and young trees whose glory lay in the future, an as-yet unrealised promise of mature, shaded avenues, secluded walks walled by espaliered shrubs, parterres patterned in box, and a densely wooded wilderness landscape stretching away