Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory (28 page)

I close this exploration of Constantijn Huygens’s beloved Hofwijk with a charming letter, written by the ageing diplomat to his friend Sir William Temple in 1676:

Be apprised of the fact that since some time ago the Hofwijck forest has been enlarged and beautified with four new shady avenues, and extended to impressive length, the result has been judged so beautiful and surprising, that those with most taste have concluded that it would be well worthwhile if the plenipotentiaries – both men and women – from Nijmeghen, instead of amusing themselves with trifles at Cleves, would abandon all matters of state there to come and admire Hofwijk’s magnificence … This forest has been decorated with numerous bowling balls, of such an exceptional size that they roll as if by themselve the length of these grand avenues, till they are lost from view, and quite otherwise than happens on the ‘bowling alleys’ and ‘bowling greens’ by the sea at Scheveling.
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Temple and his diplomatic colleagues should therefore rush to Hofwijk, concludes Huygens. And he signs himself off: ‘the Marquis of Hofwijk, gobbler up of British ducats [won] at the game of quilles, “penny wise and pound foolish”’.

The topographically demanding conditions for Low Countries gardening coloured, consciously or unconsciously, Dutch appreciation of gardens. Dutch travellers’ admiration was especially reserved for gardens that showed visible signs of a struggle between the aspirational owner and an unpromising location. We have a telling example of this during one of Constantijn Huygens senior’s early trips abroad, in spring 1620, when he was travelling as part of a diplomatic mission to Venice in the train of François van Aerssen, Heer van Sommelsdijck.
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Huygens’s diary of the mission reveals that they visited a number of gardens on their journey, among them the celebrated ones designed by Salomon de Caus at Heidelberg, home of Frederick, Elector Palatine, and his wife Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of the English King James I.

The visit took place at a tense moment in the history of the Palatinate. In 1619, the Protestant Frederick had been persuaded to accept the Crown of Bohemia, rather than allow it to go to a Catholic claimant, and that autumn he and Elizabeth had left Heidelberg for Prague to take possession of their kingdom. Hardly had they arrived in triumph, when it became clear that the Catholic Hapsburg powers would not sanction Frederick and Elizabeth’s claim, and declared war against them. In November 1620 Frederick and his allies received a crushing defeat at the battle of the White Mountain, and the couple were forced to flee for their lives. Denied refuge by one northern state after another, they eventually arrived in The Hague, and the welcoming shelter extended by the Stadholder Frederick Hendrik to his nephew (his eldest sister’s son) and his wife. There they settled for the remainder of both of their lives, Elizabeth outliving her husband by thirty years, and becoming an increasing financial burden on and embarrassment to the house of Orange.
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Thus spring 1620 was the ominous calm before the storm, when it was all too clear how precarious was the hold of Frederick and Elizabeth upon power of any kind in the region.

When the Dutch mission reached Heidelberg, they were received in style as allies and supporters of the ‘Winter King and Queen’, as they would become known, by Frederick’s mother, Louise-Juliana of Orange-Nassau, daughter of William I of Orange (William the Silent) by his first wife, Charlotte de Bourbon-Montpensier, and sister of the Dutch Stadholder. The Orange delegation was welcomed effusively by the Dowager Electress herself, and Huygens records with pride in his journal how he was singled out for special attention:

I presented her with a letter from Madame the Princess of Orange [Louise de Coligny, third wife and widow of William the Silent], which she read, and, knowing who I was, welcomed me most warmly: asking cordially after my father, his health, his household, his children; thanking him for the affection and good will which he continued to show towards the descendants of his Excellency Monsieur the Prince her Father [i.e. the house of Orange], with all kinds of other assurances of benevolence and good will towards our family.
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Taken on a tour of the castle grounds while the Ambassador was in closed conference, Huygens expressed special admiration for the way in which its renowned gardens had been created from ‘bare rock’ – evidence of a triumphant struggle against the natural limitations of the mountainous terrain:

We were taken to see the beautiful Palace gardens, which are the more admirable for the fact that just four years ago there was nothing here but bare rock, like the rest of the mountain, which they had had to excavate to construct a fertile area of land. Which it presently is – bearing flowers, fig trees, orange trees, etc. in abundance. At the end of the garden are the grottos and fountains designed by Salomon de Caus, which are absolutely outstanding, outclassing all those in France in scale.
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So at this moment of acute political precariousness for the Palatinate ruling family in Heidelberg, Huygens turns to the similarly precariously sustained palace gardens as a kind of emotional surrogate. His admiration for the visible struggle in these dramatic gardens between art and nature substitutes for the intensity of feeling circulating in the group waiting anxiously for the outcome of events taking place in Prague – perhaps, indeed, the Dutch-born Dowager Electress and the visiting Dutch Ambassador made some kind of reference to the parallel themselves. Not long after this visit, the palace and its grounds were laid waste by enemy invading forces, the remainder of the Elector’s family driven out, and the glorious gardens destroyed.

Jacob Cats – Holland’s favourite poet and prominent politician during the coming-of-age of the Dutch Republic in the first half of the seventeenth century – claimed that it was his own clear understanding of the symbolic meaning of gardening for a nation constantly at war with the elements which led him to persuade the Orange Stadholder to make gardening his chief (and very public) recreation. When, in his poetry, he characterised Frederik Hendrik as ‘a sovereign much inclined to gardening’ (’
een vorst tot planten seer genegen
’), he meant intentionally to consolidate the propaganda image of this symbolic struggle to retain Holland as a fruitful land against the invasive forces of sea and sand. In his poetic work on ‘Age, Country Life, and Garden Thoughts’, Cats claimed that he had encouraged the Stadholder to take an interest in gardens each time he visited Cats’s own estate at Sorgvliet (also among the sand dunes close to The Hague, and like Huygens’s rural retreat, self-consciously named: ‘Flight from worldly care’). The Stadholder, Cats felt, should design great pleasure gardens, both for his own delight, and symbolically, to represent his role as guiding spirit of a nation dedicated to creating affluence and productivity out of unpromising packets of land rescued from the sea:

Prince Henry being a sovereign to gardening much inclined
Often came to see God’s great blessings here [at Sorgvliet] to find.

His Highness was amazed when he would then discover
That rich and sumptuous woods once empty grounds did cover.

I told him, mighty Sovereign, you’re buying various lands
And that at a high cost, but getting barren sands.

Do turn them into woods, and from this dust despised
Create a handsome arbour, let pleasure gardens rise.

This is true Princely work, with Holland’s good in mind,
And leads you to be praised for what you left behind.
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As one historian of Dutch gardens puts it:

The fight for land, the constant effort to keep it safe from the sea and foreign intruders, whether perceived as a real or an abstract threat, is one of the general themes and thoughts which have permeated not only Dutch culture in general but the art of Dutch gardening in particular. Land reclamation and cultivation and the creation of a peculiarly Dutch geometrical landscape interspersed with canals lay at the foundation of the art of gardening in Holland, so much so that the country itself became identified with a garden and its people with gardeners.
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In a poem less well-known and anthologised than his garden poems, Andrew Marvell, who had travelled extensively in the Low Countries during the Civil War years, characterised Holland as a hapless piece of land created by its dogged people out of the detritus and leftovers of England:

Holland, that scarce deserves the name of Land,
As but th’Off-scouring of the Brittish Sand;
And so much Earth as was contributed
By English Pilots when they heav’d the Lead;
Or what by th’ Oceans slow alluvion fell,
Of shipwrackt Cockle and the Muscle-shell;
This indigested vomit of the Sea
Fell to the Dutch by just Propriety.

Less negative commonplaces concerning the Dutch and their land suggested that with the help of ‘Hollanders’ land could be secured against the sea almost anywhere.

The Dutch garden was a triumph of endeavour and ingenuity over a fundamentally unpromising environment. As transposed to England after the Restoration, the emphasis on tree-lined avenues and walks, and the regular expanses of water (as, for instance, at Hampton Court and St James’s) were a kind of homage to Dutch resilience and persistence. In combination with engineering-based drainage works at Hatfield Chase in Yorkshire, and in the East Anglian Fens, these features of the Anglo–Dutch landscape contributed a quality to the English countryside which has lasted down to the present day.

9
Paradise on Earth: Garnering Riches and Bringing Them Home

I
n the 1630s and ’40s, in the Northern Provinces, writers like Constantijn Huygens and Jacob Cats dwell in their garden poems on the delights of rest and recreation as enjoyed by the owners of newly-fashionable garden estates and their visitors. Music and the visual arts help transform the country retreat into a place of intellectual and emotional pleasure. The topos of well-earned rest from the business of the court sustains an aesthetic of restful shade and eye-pleasing views, to be contemplated by grateful visitors and their host from a position of repose. As the century wore on, a certain competitive drive for magnificence increasingly colours the discourse of the Dutch garden, bringing it closer to its counterparts in France and England.

Nevertheless, the Horatian ideal of contemplative leisure following toil continues. And achieving a much-admired, idyllically pastoral Dutch garden did, indeed, require enormous amounts of toil, and even engineering.

In spite of the rhetoric of bucolic ease, gardening in Holland on the scale of Huygens’s Hofwijk was carried out on the comparatively recently drained and reclaimed land west of The Hague. As such, it was fraught with difficulties for the horticulturalist, from the local topography and character of the soil, to inclement weather, consistently high winds blowing across the flat, low-lying ground, and generally inhospitable conditions for ambitious gardening. In spite of Huygens’s insistence that his garden was intended for posterity, and was to be handed down from generation to generation for the delectation of his family, the odds against the enduring beauty of such a garden were high. Huygens admits in his poem that his verses are likely to outlive his beloved garden, and he was right. In fact, none of the gardens on which I concentrate here have survived. To appreciate them in all their glory we have to rely on the engravings which, fortunately for us, the proud owners had made of their country estates, and the loving recent recreations (in books, or occasionally of the gardens themselves) by garden history specialists.

Formal garden design first became fashionable in seventeenth-century France, where space was not at a premium, and elaborately executed avenues, walks, coppices, wildernesses, ornamental beds and flower gardens could be devised to fit the garden designer’s plans, however ambitious, so as to complement an attractively varied landscape. By contrast, the country house garden in the Northern Provinces was from the outset an exercise in overcoming hostile elements. Gardens like Hofwijk were fundamentally a bold public statement of a characteristically Dutch determination to secure and maintain a fertile, cultivated land in the face of decidedly unfertile sand, howling gales, and the ever-present threat of encroaching salt water.

Constantijn Huygens senior knew all about the problems of securely establishing a luxuriant garden in inhospitable terrain. Before he embarked on creating his own country retreat, he had already been closely involved with the planning of ambitious ornamental gardens at nearby Honselaarsdijk – the country estate of the Prince of Orange, where the Stadholder first experimented with an elaborate programme of building and garden-design magnificence. It was Huygens who advised Frederik Hendrik on the design and execution of a completely new landscape- gardening project to complement his recently rebuilt house there. In this case we have extensive documentation of the re-landscaping and development of the house and garden following its acquisition as an out-of-town retreat for the Prince, conveniently situated a short ride from The Hague, between there and Delft.

Frederik Hendrik acquired the old castle of Honselaarsdijk, near Naaldwijk, from the Count of Aremberg in 1612, while his brother Maurits was Stadholder. In 1621, building work started on a new palace there. Between 1621 and 1631 the old castle was pulled down in stages and replaced by an imposing modern U-shaped design which was not, however, completed during Frederik Hendrik’s lifetime. By contrast, the gardens were fully achieved by the 1630s – as with all such grand estates, the design and planting of the garden were carried out well ahead of the house, to allow it to mature.
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This was the first of Frederik Hendrik’s great ‘pleasure gardens’, and, typically for such enterprises in the flat, low-lying terrain of the United Provinces, he began with an extensive programme of drainage and making good of the land surrounding the original castle garden, and the laying of approach roads and planting of avenues of trees, for access.
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A leading historian of seventeenth-century courtly gardens in Holland has characterised the early development of the Honselaarsdijk as ‘a constant struggle with water’. As Frederik Hendrik went about enthusiastically clearing the land surrounding the house for garden development, there was mounting concern about the provision of an appropriate drainage system. It was not simply a matter of plants and trees failing to flourish, as they did in waterlogged or marshy locations. The garden’s proximity to the sea meant there was a danger of the even more devastating effect of sea water on trees’ roots – the least suspicion of salt in the water, and delicate saplings would not thrive. Without adequate drainage, in the first years of the new garden layout, most of the newly-planted trees died from exposure to salt water which had seeped into the ground.
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In the summer of 1631, just as the gardens at Honselaarsdijk seemed well established, the most recently acquired lands were spoiled by salt-water flooding, and many valuable trees were lost. The royal accounts record repeated expenditure on digging additional drainage channels and sewers in an effort to control the flow of ‘redundant water which spoils the trees’. New drains were also constructed to ‘complete the drains in the two palm gardens laying next to the house Honselaarsdijk’.

In its original form, the garden at Honselaarsdijk consisted of a rectangular plot with a moat around it. As the garden was expanded, drains and water channels had to be improved and added to accordingly. First the ground was surveyed by professional surveyors, then the areas of land were rearranged so as to straighten out the existing erratic divisions of plots, and create a neatly organised collection of squares and rectangles, bordered by canals. To achieve this, marshy ground had to be reclaimed by digging ditches and throwing up small dykes. Irregular canals and streams which crossed the land were filled with earth. Once the ground had been reorganised in this way, trees and shrubs were planted, and the garden was ready for plants, urns, garden structures and statues, to create a pleasure garden proper.

When André Mollet arrived from Charles I’s court in London to lay out the parterres (the ornamental beds constructed out of box hedges, grass and fine gravel) at Honselaarsdijk, he insisted on a further drainage system being installed in the main ornamental garden, to prevent his intricate boxwood hedges from becoming waterlogged. Nevertheless, accidents continued to happen. A late-seventeenth-century tourist, visiting Honselaarsdijk, reported the forlorn state of all the plantations in the orangery due to salt-water seepage. Throughout the lives of these coastal Dutch gardens there was a continuing need for replanting, and for the replacement of damaged or dead trees. Dutch nurserymen developed a specialism (still current today) in growing trees for transplantation. They gained an increasing reputation for being adept at successfully digging up and replanting well-grown specimens to fill gaps in avenues or formal plantings. As John Evelyn enthused in his
Sylva
:

In Flanders they have large Nurseries of [white poplar trees], which first they plant at one foot distance, the mould light, and moist. […] As they increase in bulk, their value and price advance likewise; so as the Dutch look upon a Plantation of these Trees as an ample portion for a Daughter, and none of the least effects of their good Husbandry.
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By the seventeenth century, Dutch expertise in drainage and land reclamation was recognised Europe-wide. Not only were surveyors from the northern Netherlands professionally well-qualified, on the basis of their extensive experience at home, to advise on the drainage of low-lying and flood-susceptible land abroad, but investors from the United Provinces regarded loans for such ventures as a reliable source of profit.

The Dutch surveyor and embankment engineer Cornelius Vermuyden was summoned to England in 1621 by James I when the Thames overflowed its banks near Dagenham, and settled in England, marrying an English wife (his son of the same name became a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was an investor in the Royal African Company).
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Five years later, Charles I appointed Vermuyden to drain waterlogged land at Hatfield Chase in Lincolnshire, the so-called ‘Isle of Axholme’. The project was financed by a consortium led by Vermuyden himself and Francis Russell, Earl of Bedford, whose role seems to have been to find marketable lands for Charles I, to provide much-needed funds for the royal exchequer.
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Not only did Vermuyden apply Dutch engineering techniques to the reclamation, but he employed Dutch, rather than English, workmen.

Vermuyden’s financial terms for the undertaking were well- established ones in the Netherlands. The engineer would receive one third of all lands reclaimed on his own behalf, another third went to the Crown, while the remaining third was allocated to the investors who had put money into the venture. Most of these were Dutch; their return on their investment was a significant area of reclaimed land, which they could then dispose of to realise a handsome profit. The Dutch financers included Jacob Cats, Sir Constantijn Huygens and Johan van Baerle, an Amsterdam entrepreneur from an Antwerp mercantile background who had already invested heavily in drainage projects in the Northern Provinces. Within a year of investing together at Hatfield Chase, Huygens senior married van Baerle’s sister Susanna.
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On successful completion of the drainage project at Hatfield Chase, van Baerle, Huygens and Cats each received a thousand acres of land in return for their investment. In 1630 all became English ‘denizens’, entitling them to own – and sell – land in England. Symbolically we have here the Dutch man of means laying claim to fertile land freshly recovered from the water – becoming a ‘landowner’ (in England an entitlement to rank) by literally reclaiming unusable land from flooding. Strikingly, then, acquisition of a significant tract of land as a consequence of astute, informed investment allowed Huygens to realise his youthful dream of ‘Englishness’ – he became a
bona fide
English gentleman, with estates to his name, although he and his fellow investors very shortly afterwards disposed of their land interests and realised their profits.

Vermuyden went on, under the continued direction of the Earl of Bedford, to drain the Great Fen, or Bedford Level, in Cambridgeshire. In 1642, during the English Civil War, Parliament ordered the dykes to be broken and the land flooded in order to stop a Royalist army advance. In 1649 Vermuyden was once again commissioned to reclaim the Bedford Level, this time by the Commonwealth administration, after the execution of Charles I.

In France and England, specialist garden designers undertook a project as a whole, selecting suitable locations for the various garden elements, drawing out the designs and overseeing their execution. Not so in the Low Countries, where the opinions of surveyors and drainage engineers were sought before any ambitious garden programme was undertaken. Only after the surveyor had secured the terrain and tested the possibilities for safely planting and sustaining valuable plants and trees did the garden designer take over.

Right up to the end of the century, foreign visitors to the celebrated gardens between The Hague and the dunes of the North Sea remark on a certain precariousness in the great Dutch coastal gardens, and on the ever- present danger of its being invaded by sand. Visiting the gorgeous gardens at Sorgvliet, which Hans Willem Bentinck had bought from Jacob Cats in the 1670s, and which lay conveniently just off the famous road to Scheveningen, only half an hour from the centre of The Hague, several English tourists commented on the way the gardens struggled against the natural terrain. The absence of decent paths was a drawback – ‘good gravel walks could scarcely be made without a great deal of trouble’, noted Justinian Isham, while John Leake complained that ‘the hotness and looseness of their sand is very unpleasant to the eyes and feet’. Another visitor sank up to his ankles in sand, in a place where moles had burrowed under the path.
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Altered fashions and tastes in pleasure gardens reflected changes in Dutch outlook and temperament in the latter part of the seventeenth century. After the marriage in 1677 of the Stadholder William III (reinstated officially in 1672) and Charles II’s eldest niece, Princess Mary Stuart, it was widely assumed, in the absence of direct heirs, that William would eventually ascend the English throne. Peace and prosperity in the United Provinces allowed the burgeoning commercial economy to flourish, and with it the fortunes of mercantile families and those who invested heavily in new money-making ventures at home and overseas. From the early 1680s, the growing international aspirations and economic self-confidence of the United Provinces were echoed in ever grander and more extensive garden plans on the part of Dutch country estate owners – the emerging northern Netherlandish nobility.

Meanwhile the Dutch East and West India Companies were playing an increasingly important role in international global commerce, their market aspirations exerting considerable influence over the politics of territories as far removed as Surinam and the Moluccas. Rare and unusual plants, fruits and vegetables from the new Dutch colonies became as sought-after – and as expensive to acquire – at home in the United Provinces as comparably fashionable porcelain and lacquerwork. Wealthy garden enthusiasts dealt directly with contacts at the East India Company headquarters at the Cape and, via the West India Company, at Paramaribo in Surinam, to obtain well-grown specimens, transported on Company ships at the owner’s expense, to grace their terraces and hothouses for the delight of their visitors. The practice became so widespread that the directors of the Dutch East India Company attempted (unsuccessfully) to forbid the use of their ships for the transport of private goods. In October 1677 its officials reported that the deck of a ship recently returned from the Cape was