Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory (10 page)

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Designing Dutch Princely Rule: The Cultural Diplomacy of ‘Mr Huggins’

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n 1667, Thomas Sprat, the first official biographer of the Royal Society in London, praised the ingenuity and inventiveness of the Dutch, and stressed the importance for the development of their science and technology of the many intellectual migrants drawn to the Republic by its reputation for toleration. The hub of this activity, he reported, was at The Hague – equal to Sir Francis Bacon’s ‘New Atlantis’ as a catalyst for intellectual endeavour:

They have all things imaginable to stirr them up: they have the Examples of the greatest Wits of other Countreys, who have left their own homes, to retire thither, for the freedom of their Philosophical Studies: they have one place (I mean the Hague) which may be soon made the very Copy of a Town in the New Atlantis; which for its pleasantness, and for the concourse of men of all conditions to it, may be counted above all others (except London) the most advantagiously seated for this service.
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In the mid-seventeenth century, the elegant small town of The Hague on the north-west coast of Holland, a comparatively easy journey across the water from London (embarking from Gravesend), had indeed been for many years a destination for Englishmen fleeing persecution or simply civil unrest at home.

Furthermore, in the first half of the seventeenth century, at the end of Holland’s Golden Age (the high point of its financial power), it housed no fewer than three princely courts. Two of these were, as far as visitors from England were concerned, reassuringly English in culture and ambience. These were the court of Prince William II of Orange and his wife, Princess Mary Stuart (the Princess Royal), and the court of Mary’s aunt (Charles I’s sister), Elizabeth of Bohemia, Electress Palatine, the ill-fated ‘Winter Queen’.

The official focus of courtly activity at The Hague after 1625, however, was the residence in The Hague of the Orange Stadholder Frederik Hendrik himself. His wife Amalia van Solms, whose acute sensitivity to the shades and nuances of European courtly conventions had – like those of the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth Stuart – been strongly influenced by English tastes and court practice during her pre-marriage period as lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth of Bohemia, presided over a court designed in emulation of that of her former royal Stuart mistress. The Orange Stadholder’s court was thus as congenial for élite English visitors as the less politically powerful courts that flanked it (in all three, English and French were the languages of everyday use, alongside Dutch).
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Almost as soon as Frederik Hendrik assumed the Stadholdership in 1625, after the death of his half-brother Maurits, he and Amalia embarked on a programme of ostentatious expenditure on luxury objects and works of art, to create a cultural and artistic context which would put the house of Orange in the United Provinces on the European ‘royal’ map. Although the Orange court was small by the standards of the French, by the 1640s it was comparable with the courts of the German Princes, or that of the Elector Palatine at Heidelberg. The programme of expensive purchases and newly established courtly rituals and occasions was designed and put in place with the close guidance of the Stadholder’s trusted secretary, Sir Constantijn Huygens, in his capacity as art adviser (the cultivated and anglophile Sir Constantijn was particularly close to Amalia). The process of designing a princely milieu for the house of Orange paid homage to the Stuart court in London, whose tastes and social habits were self-consciously adopted. What made this strategy for glorifying the Orange house by ostentatious expenditure and design unusual was that the family in question were Stadholders (nominated officers) rather than a significant, dynastic royal line – in theory at least, the state could (and for a short time in mid-century did) overrule the appointment of the next in line to the position of head of state.

Descriptions of the grand sweep of aspirational purchasing and display by the Stadholder and his wife, however, do not do justice to the way Frederik Hendrik and Amalia were intimately involved in the process of building up the collection, with Amalia taking a particularly close interest in acquisition. Like collectors throughout the ages, she may have paid exorbitant sums for individual items, and accumulated art objects at a phenomenal speed, but she was nevertheless passionate about what she bought, and took lasting pleasure in paintings and decorations which it had taken time and effort for her adviser, Sir Constantijn, to acquire on her behalf.

Somewhere between 1625 and 1626, for example, shortly after her marriage, and at the very beginning of her activities as prominent patron and connoisseur, Amalia took a close interest in the purchasing of a painting by Rubens, depicting the marriage of Alexander the Great and Roxane – a nice compliment, perhaps, to her new husband, who like Alexander had raised a wife from among his imperial conquests to princely rank, while she had obediently complied with his royal command. The negotiator acting on Amalia’s behalf for the purchase was Sir Constantijn Huygens, the agent and intermediary was Michel le Blon, who was also responsible for commissioning and purchasing Rubens paintings for James I’s favourite the Duke of Buckingham. A memorandum in Rubens’s handwriting, found among Huygens’s papers, formed part of the negotiations leading to the purchase by Amalia, and reminds us how many decisions had to be taken, by her advisers, to ensure that she as patron was satisfied (financially and aesthetically) with the outcome.
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In 1632 Rubens’s
Alexander Crowning Roxane
hung in pride of place over the chimneypiece in Amalia van Solms’s private cabinet, or withdrawing room, in the Stadholder’s quarters in the Binnenhof (the seat of government) at The Hague. A surviving inventory of effects in the royal palaces at the time allows us to visualise the painting in its original, intimate setting – not just a great painting by a great Flemish artist, but a beloved possession of a Princess, memorialising an emotional crux in her own life. The cabinet was entirely hung with rich green velvet, braided with gold. The same braided green velvet covered the table in the centre of the room, and the three chairs and large couch. The swagged curtains were of matching green silk. The wooden over-mantel on which
Alexander Crowning Roxane
hung was gilt on a green ground.

As well as
Alexander Crowning Roxane
, the cabinet also contained an oblong painting by Rubens, placed ‘before’ the chimney, depicting ‘the courage of Cloelia’ – a young Roman woman taken captive by the Etruscans, who led other young girls to safety in a daring escape – along with portraits of Henry IV on horseback, the Winter Queen and the Count of Hanau. There was also a profile of the Princess herself, painted by the young Rembrandt.
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Frederik Hendrik and Amalia’s efforts to match the lavishness and grandeur of long-established royal households benefited, in its early stages, from a piece of sheer good fortune, in the form of a financial ‘windfall’ from the buoyant Dutch commercial sector. In September 1628, a Dutch West India Company fleet under the command of Admiral Piet Hein captured a Spanish convoy off the coast of present-day Cuba, in the Bay of Matanzas. To the amazement of the Dutch, the convoy turned out to be carrying a cargo of silver worth approximately twelve million guilders. This was a stroke of luck not only for the nineteen directors of the Dutch West India Company, but also for Frederik Hendrik and Amalia van Solms. Under Dutch plunder law, the Stadholder, in his position as both admiral and commander-in-chief of the fleet, could claim 10 per cent of the value of the cargo of captured enemy ships. In the account books recording disbursement of sums for the construction and embellishment of the Stadholder’s residences over the next ten years, the expenditure is often ordered to be taken from the seized cargo money. For instance: ‘to be paid from the Sea Prince’s monies to Gerard van Honthorst the sum of 6,800 carolus guilders for painting the large room at Huis ter Nieuburg in Rijswijk […] 16 May 1639’.
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The programme of deliberately extravagant expenditure was carried out with speed and efficiency. In the course of the 1630s, the house and garden of the Orange country estate at Honselaarsdijk were extended and the house lavishly refurnished. A new palace was built at Rijswijk, while the official residence of the Stadholder in the Binnenhof in The Hague was substantially added to and renovated. The castle of Buren was provided with handsome gardens in the 1630s and its interior modernised and refurbished. The Noordeinde palace in The Hague was almost entirely rebuilt during the same period. All these ‘royal’ houses were filled with paintings, tapestries, sculptures, hangings and other objets d’art in unprecedented quantities. Sir Constantijn Huygens saw to it that all of these were items of quality, guaranteed to provoke the admiration and envy of the more established crowned heads of Europe.
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The arrival of King Charles I’s daughter from London, as the child-bride of Frederik Hendrik and Amalia’s only son, was the occasion for a further round of expenditure, particularly since the match significantly enhanced the family’s ‘royal’ standing. From 1642, the court of Princess Mary Stuart and her husband Prince William II of Orange at The Hague rivalled that of William’s parents for its lavishness and conspicuous consumption of all and every available luxury. The adolescent Prince and Princess of Orange, having turned down their traditional quarters at the Binnenhof as insufficiently luxurious, settled into the newly renovated and refurbished Noordeinde palace, which Frederik Hendrik and Amalia decorated and equipped for them in a manner befitting a royal couple.
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Prince William and Princess Mary introduced a lifestyle and level of princely display at The Hague that deliberately emulated and sought to compete with established royal courts like those in London and Paris – developing her mother-in-law’s strategy for enhancing the standing of the house of Orange. The pampered pair rapidly acquired an international reputation for their extravagant lifestyle and the luxury and spectacle of their courtly entertainments.

The third court at The Hague was that of the ‘Winter Queen’, Elizabeth of Bohemia, and her husband, Frederick of Bohemia. The marriage of Charles I’s sister to Frederick, Count Palatine of the Rhine and Elector of the Holy Roman Empire, on 14 February 1613, had been celebrated enthusiastically across Protestant Europe. On the way to her new home in Heidelberg, the new Electress had been fêted in The Hague, with a series of banquets, ceremonial progresses and theatrical performances. To the Dutch the match symbolised the realisation of their hopes for a securely Protestant European royal dynasty. Elizabeth herself – elegant, expensively dressed and altogether glamorous – was their ‘Queen of hearts’, and retained their affection throughout her turbulent life.

Once they reached Heidelberg, the new Electress Palatine, whose large entourage of servants and retainers had accompanied her from England, insisted on living in Stuart style, filling the palace with her luxury possessions, including her small dogs and tame monkeys. Under her and Frederick’s influence, Heidelberg came to be clearly distinguished from other minor European princely courts by an altogether grander way of life, which while ostentatiously extravagant and frivolous, claimed nevertheless to be infused with the ideals of chivalry, humanism and committed Protestantism. From its fabulous gardens designed by Salomon de Caus, to the sumptuous decoration of its interiors, it set the tone for seventeenth-century court fashion across Europe.

In 1619 Frederick accepted the crown of Bohemia, on behalf of Protestant Europe, and in direct opposition to the wishes of Hapsburg Spain. He and Elizabeth were crowned in Prague in December 1619, but their glittering reign as King and Queen was abruptly brought to a halt early the following year, after only one winter in power, when Spain issued a declaration of war (hence their lasting title of ‘Winter King and Queen’). By October 1620 Catholic forces had advanced on Prague, and on 8 November Frederick’s army suffered a devastating defeat at the battle of the White Mountain. The royal couple fled via Breslau, Berlin and Wolfenbüttel to the United Provinces. They arrived in The Hague in April 1621, and the States General granted Frederick, Elizabeth and their five children asylum and generous financial support, providing them with a residence in keeping with their (by Dutch standards) elevated royal status. Although Frederick continued to try to regain possession of his Palatinate territories – seized by the Spanish after his loss of the crown of Bohemia – these were only eventually partially returned to his son Karl Ludwig (Charles Lewis or Louis to the English) under the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648.

The continuing indulgence of the States General of the United Provinces towards the Winter King and Queen’s lifestyle and its excessive costs depended to no small extent on the fact that until the birth of Prince Charles (later Charles II) in 1630, Elizabeth and her determinedly Protestant family were next in line to the English throne. Hers was also a family which included – unusually for the Stuarts – four healthy sons (though the eldest died in a boating accident in 1629). Throughout the 1620s, Elizabeth and Frederick continued to live in The Hague ‘with all the trappings of royalty and little regard to the costs this entailed’.
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Hunting, dances and spectacles dominated life at the Palatine court in exile. Elizabeth was an enthusiastic supporter of Netherlandish artists, and had herself and her family painted by some of the leading Dutch portrait painters of the period, in particular Gerrit van Honthorst and Michiel van Mierevelt. Many of the portraits were sent as gifts to her supporters in the Netherlands and abroad, spreading the fashion for Dutch portraiture across Europe.