Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory (31 page)

In the contemporary imagination, the ephemeral bloom of the gorgeous tulip and the high price attached to it, simply for its rarity, symbolised the moral dilemma of expenditure. If one accumulated wealth by legitimate means, was one entitled to ‘squander’ it on useless decorative rarities like paintings and tulips? Ought one not to dispense it more ethically, on good works, or invest it for the future? Dealers could soothe the conscience of their clients by surrounding themselves with the very luxuries their clients guiltily desired – as Gaspar Duarte hung the paintings he offered for sale in his own gallery, where his visitors could wander in a leisurely fashion, admiring both the works of art and the ambiance, before deciding to purchase. Market gardeners, similarly, surrounded their shops with ornamental gardens, filled with the very blooms their visitors were eager to acquire, and which they would collect only later, after the blooms had died, and the bulbs were lifted for the winter. Inflated prices for tulips were generated at auction, exactly as we saw high prices being realised for paintings in the same period.
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So it is hardly surprising to find the same individuals buying and selling both art and tulips.
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Fascination with the soaring price of tulips reminds us of the strenuous connection between wealth and fashionably ambitious gardening. Both Dutch and English gardens came at considerable expense. On top of the price of plants and labour, there was the cost of the plundering of the raw materials required to create it – and its accompanying country house – from the new territories which yielded the exotic, the rare and the sought- after for keen collectors and horticulturalists.

Here I use the career and rise of the Englishman William Blathwayt as representative of the complicated relationship between desirable goods from overseas and money-making, the passion for collecting and the ruthless pursuit of power and office. Because he had served in the Netherlands, and was fluent in the Dutch language, Blathwayt self-consciously modelled his tastes in fine things, including art and gardens, on those of the Dutch. He also unashamedly exploited his position as controller of import-export from the colonies to amass an extraordinary profusion of luxury articles, commodities and curiosities to adorn his country house at Dyrham Park near Bath, and his magnificent gardens there, which in his day were the talk of the region.
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William Blathwayt was Clerk of the Privy Council, head of the Plantation Office, Auditor and Surveyor General of the plantation revenues, and Secretary of War, beginning in 1676 and running on into the new century. He was a somewhat prosaic government official with expensive tastes, who married a considerable heiress. William III, whom he served with exceptional efficiency as Secretary of War, and Auditor General at the Colonial Office, pronounced him ‘dull’. John Evelyn called him ‘a very proper person, and very dextrous in businesse’, adding, ‘and has besides all this married a very great fortune’. Old money looked down on him, pronouncing his expenditure on Dyrham Park excessive and unwise: ‘My Lord Scarborough thinks he lays out his money not very well.’

Blathwayt was William and Mary’s ‘imperial fixer’. His successful career was based on the way he could make things happen, at long distance, throughout English-administered territories, from the American colonies to the farthest-flung island outposts. For that he was handsomely remunerated between the 1680s and the end of the century. But Blathwayt’s salary did not stretch to cover his magnificent lifestyle at Dyrham Park. That was maintained by systematically extracting backhanders from his ‘clients’.

If you want him to act, one of Blathwayt’s agents advised the Governor of the island of St Christopher (now St Kitts) in the Caribbean in the 1680s, it will cost you: ‘Without a gratification of twenty or thirty guineas for himself at least,’ he wrote, ‘I much doubt the effect of anything else.’ The Governor duly sent thirty guineas on behalf of the colony, and added another ten of his own with an accompanying note: ‘to buy you a pair of gloves in acknowledgement of the favour you did me in my business at Court’. ‘I have not named you in the bill,’ he went on, ‘that no notice might be taken to whom the money goes.’

Which explains a good deal about Dyrham Park as it can still be found today. Even three hundred years after the original owner’s death, the surroundings are sumptuous: glorious walnut panelling and a sensational cedar and cypress staircase; gilded embossed-leather wall coverings, inlaid furniture, tapestries and rugs. On the walls are fine Dutch landscapes and perspective paintings in a manner that was enormously fashionable at the end of the seventeenth century. And there are fantastic pieces of blue-and- white Delft faïence everywhere, including a pair of waist-high pagoda-like pyramid vases designed for the display of rare tulips – another expensive seventeenth-century fad on which William Blathwayt was happy to spend a small fortune.

The receiving rooms in Blathwayt’s mansion are panelled in black walnut, courtesy of the Governor of Maryland. The cypress and cedar wood for the baluster and stair risers of the grand main staircase were a gift from the Governor of South Carolina; the walnut treads were the contribution of the Governor of Virginia. The juniper floorboards came from Jamaica. The extensive gardens, which once boasted some of the most impressive fountains and cascades in England, were planted with exotic plants collected for Blathwayt by colonial officials engaged in business which needed the Secretary of State’s blessing.

Blathwayt did choose and purchase the Delft ware, the ornamental tiles and fine china himself – as well as Oriental silks and large quantities of tea – whenever he accompanied King William to The Hague on royal business. But he made sure that he paid absolutely no customs duties on them, remonstrating in indignation should anybody so much as try to make him do so.

Determinedly ferrying their precious cargoes of exotic plants and elaborate garden designs across broad and narrow seas, the industrious Dutch distributed their own peculiar, highly developed system of cultural and aesthetic ideas, carried more or less explicitly along with the material objects themselves. Long before the house of Orange set its sights on the throne of England, the British Isles had absorbed, and come to take delight in, a controlled garden landscape and the associated idea of a conscientious struggle to master the forces of nature.

When William III interrupted his military campaign, breaking off from the march to conquer London to walk in the gardens at Wilton, he must have felt in familiar surroundings, and an accompanying sense of comfort and relief. In terms of ambiance and lifestyle, he was coming home. The outstretched hands of the welcoming orange-sellers among the crowds thronging the streets of London, as he made his way along Knightsbridge towards Whitehall, will have reassured him further: the studied, self- conscious garden symbolism of the house of Orange was already recognisable and in place in England.

Mutual recognition cushioned the impact of the Dutch invasion of England. Retrospectively, it blurred and diffused the national memory: here was no conquest, here was an affinity – a meeting of minds and sensibilities.

10
Anglo–Dutch Exchange and the New Science: A Chapter of Accidents

W
hen William III of Orange regained his place as Stadholder of the United Provinces in 1672, Sir Constantijn Huygens’s eldest son, Constantijn junior, was installed in his father’s place as the Prince’s trusted personal secretary.

In 1676, while campaigning with William of Orange in military operations against the French on the Dutch–French border, Constantijn Huygens junior wrote home to his wife to get her to order one of his brother Christiaan’s new balance-spring watches at The Hague, and to have it sent to him in the field:

Wednesday. 17 [June 1676]. I presented Monsieur the Prince with a letter to the Court in favour of my brother [Christiaan], but he set it aside together with other things that he was delaying signing. I wrote to my father telling him this, and to my wife concerning my watch.
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His new timepiece reached him a month later:

Saturday. 18 [July 1676]. This evening we began trench engagement. Major de Beaumont, called Merode, and the Surgeon of Rhinegrave were killed there. His Excellency’s attack was undertaken by the regiment of guards; the Duke of Osnaburg’s was undertaken by the regiments of Offelen, Beaumont and Hofwegen. It is openly said that His Excellency ought to rejoin the other army. My watch, that I had had made at The Hague, arrived.
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Already this adds a curious edge to a familiar period of early-modern scientific discovery: at the same time Constantijn was corresponding with Christiaan and other members of his family about the new ‘
monstre
’, he was procuring safe-conducts for Christiaan and Lodewijk to travel from France (where Christiaan’s presence was increasingly an embarrassment as tensions rose between France and the United Provinces), through Spanish- governed territory, to The Hague. While England, France and the United Provinces were on a war footing with one another on-and-off throughout the second half of the seventeenth century, national boundaries in no way inhibited, apparently, the free traffic and exchange of innovative science and technology.

The picture I am painting in this book as a whole, of an ongoing to- and-fro exchange of ideas, influence and taste between the United Provinces and England throughout the seventeenth century, provides a particularly clear context for the history of science. There is a large literature on Dutch and English scientific innovation in the seventeenth century, and some work on the affinities between the two sets of practitioners.
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The contributions of outstanding Dutch scientists like the microscopists Anton van Leeuwenhoek of Delft and Jan Swammerdam, and all-round ‘virtuosi’, or scientific amateurs, like Sir Constantijn Huygens’s son Christiaan, were reported regularly to the Royal Society in London. The entrepreneurial Henry Oldenburg’s journal,
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
, was available on the Continent almost as soon as it left the London presses – individuals often requested sections of an issue they were particularly interested in, which could be sent even more easily by post.

Nor ought we to forget the tourists. In the summer of 1668, Thomas Browne’s son Edward went to the United Provinces on an extended sightseeing tour. He made a point of visiting distinguished Dutch medical men, as part of his preparation for his intended future career as a physician. In Amsterdam, he records in his diary, he saw at first hand the work of the anatomist and microscopist Frederik Ruysch, internationally famous for his invention of a method for injecting the fine vessels in cadavers with tinted wax for display purposes:

Dr Reus [Ruysch] showed us many curiosities in anatomy, as the skeleton of young children; foetuses of all ages so neatly set together and as white as your frogs’ bones which my brother Thomas prepared; the lymphatic vessels so preserved as to have the valves seen in them; the liver so excarnated as to show the minute vessels, all shining and clear; the muscles of the children dissected and kept from corruption.
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Browne also met the famous Dutch microscopist and anatomist Jan Swammerdam:

Dr Swammerdam showed us many of his experiments which he has in his book De Respiratione; he includes a bladder in a glass, the bladder represents the lungs, the glass the thorax; draw out the air out of the glass and afterward the bladder will receive no air by the greatest force whatsoever. It is hard to relate all his experiments with syringes and double vessels without figures and a long discourse. Besides these he showed us a very fair collection of insects, a stagfly of a very strange bigness, an Indian forty-foot [snake], the fly called ephemeron and many other curiosities.
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Yet Dutch and English scientists have largely been treated by historians as though they operated in separate spheres, their work intersecting or overlapping only when correspondence between parties on either side of the Narrow Sea brought information to each other’s attention. What I shall show in this chapter and the next, in two extended examples, both involving a particular scientific favourite of mine, Robert Hooke (for which I make only a mild apology), is how very much more interestingly and closely involved these activities were.

On 23 January 1675, Sir Constantijn Huygens’s second son, Christiaan, who had for almost ten years been the leading scientist at the Royal Society’s French counterpart, the Académie royale des sciences in Paris, drew in his notebook a sketch of a coiled hair-spring with one end attached to the centre of the balance of a pocket watch, and wrote underneath it, ‘eureka’. The exclamation signified his triumph at having devised a method of harnessing the isochronous properties of an oscillating balance attached to a coiled spring, to allow it to be used to regulate the mechanism of a compact timekeeper, just as a swinging pendulum could regulate a clock.
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A week later Huygens sent a letter to Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society in London, officially lodging with the Society an anagram cryptically containing the secret of his spring-driven balance. On 20 February, having heard that his French clockmaker Isaac Thuret had gone to the authorities claiming the clock he had made to Huygens’s technical specifications was his own, Huygens went public with his timekeeping breakthrough. He rapidly secured a French
privilège
, or patent, and published an account of it, with diagrams, in the next issue of the journal of the Académie royale des sciences.

On 20 February Huygens also wrote to Oldenburg disclosing the solution to the cipher: ‘The arbor of the moving ring [the balance wheel] is fixed at the centre of an iron spiral.’ He proceeded to enlarge on this with a verbal description:

The fact is, this invention consists of a spring coiled into a spiral, attached at the end of its middle [i.e. the interior end of the coil] to the arbor of a poised, circular balance which turns on its pivots; and at its other end to a piece that is fast to the watch-plate. Which spring, when the Ballance- wheel is once set a going, alternately shuts and opens its spires, and with the small help it hath from the watch-wheels, keeps up the motion of the Ballance-wheel, so as that, though it turn more or less, the times of its reciprocations are always equal to one another.
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London’s leading expert in timekeeper development, the Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society, Robert Hooke, learned of Huygens’s claim to be the first to invent a spring-regulated clock while dining with Robert Boyle (son of the Earl of Cork, and a distinguished scientist who had once employed Hooke as his laboratory assistant) on 25 February 1675 (old style). The following day Hooke lodged a formal complaint at a meeting of the Royal Society. He reminded the members that he had himself produced spring-regulated clocks at their meetings on several occasions in the 1660s, and declared that Huygens’s version was ‘not worth a farthing’. The affair rumbled on for several years. In the end, Huygens’s priority claim was by and large accepted, even in England. Although, in spite of Oldenburg’s best efforts, he was never granted an English patent for his balance-spring watch, he was issued with patents or licences in France and the northern Netherlands, and is today generally credited with this significant innovation in horology.

But was this really how it was? Instead of rushing to look for a ‘winner’ in the ‘race’ to find a precise longitude timekeeper (a clock accurate enough over long periods to allow calculation of a vessel’s east–west position on the open sea), perhaps we should take our cue from the draft notes for a lecture by Hooke delivered around 1676, responding to Huygens’s ‘eureka moment’, and preserved in the treasure-trove of Sloane scientific papers in the British Library. In it he queries Huygens’s claim to single- handed solution of the problem:

He should also have Remembred that Golden Rule to doe to others as he would have others doe to him & not to have vaine gloriously & most Disingenuously Indeavourd to Deprive others of their Inventions that he might magnify himself and with the Jack Daw pride himself in the plumes of others.
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In the spirit of which, and in the light of the fact that my story so far has shown that there was a free flow of ideas and culture to and fro between London and The Hague throughout the period in question, I propose to take another look at the evidence, to try to decide whether Hooke might have been right. Did that Anglo–Dutch exchange of ideas effectively amount to an international collaboration, and ought the two men in fact have been given the credit for a groundbreaking horological invention, the balance-spring regulator for a pocket watch? The story begins in the Netherlands in the 1650s, almost twenty years before Huygens’s eureka moment.

Almost a decade after the execution of Charles I, and at the height of the English Commonwealth, the Scottish courtier Sir Robert Moray and his old friend Alexander Bruce (later 2nd Earl of Kincardine) were both living in exile in the Low Countries.
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Bruce was attached to the itinerant court of Charles II, while Moray had settled in Maastricht, where he was part of a substantial English garrison assisting the Dutch Orangists to protect the southern Protestant Dutch border.
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The two were staunch Royalists whose families had been closely involved in the fortunes of the Stuarts. Now, cut off from familiar social circles, and with no likelihood (or so it seemed) that they would ever be able to return to Britain, both were occupying their spare time in recreational scientific activities – Moray had a chemistry laboratory complete with a number of stills, and both men were interested in pharmaceuticals and medical remedies.
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They were also interested in precision timekeepers. In April 1658, Moray wrote to Bruce (who was at this point in Bremen, where his family had salt and coal business interests):

I haue a second=watch can measure pulses, but no art can make a watch measure 2 minutes equally, unless yong Zulicom [Christiaan Huygens] at The Hague have found it out, who they say makes clocks that fail not a minute in 6 moneths. But this you will beleave as litle as I do, for I can demonstrate that it must go wrong to keep foot with the sun.
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A week later, Moray was able to tell Bruce (who had moved on to Hamburg) that he had now seen and handled one of the new pendulum clocks:

I have yet to tell you that I have this day seen an exceeding pretty invention of a new way of watch, which indeed I take to be the very exactest that ever was thought upon. The Rhyngrave shew it me. It is long since I heard of it, but did not expect what now I see. The inventor undertakes it shall not vary one minute in 6 moneths, and verily I think he is not much too bold. He is a young gentleman of 22, second son to Zulicon [Sir Constantijn Huygens], the Prince of Orange’s secretary, a rare mathematician, excellent in all the parts of it. I need not describe it to you till we meet, and then I believe I may get you a sight of it.
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Moray’s brief examination of the clock had whetted his horological appetite. The local Commander had shown it to him because it had a defect, and Moray could see what that was:

I find the greatest matter I have at hand to do it with, is that clock I told you of in my last. It is one of the prettiest tricks you ever saw. It stayed no longer here than just to let me see it, as if God had sent it hither of purpose. It was a good part of the time in my hands. It hath a defect and the Rhyngrave sent it to me to considder of, for all that buy them oblige themselves not to put them into workemen’s hands. I needed not look upon it long to know all was in it. I needed no more for that than the very first glance I had of it. The rest is but matter of adjusting of numbers for the wheels and pinions.

However, he had thought it best to advise that the clock be returned to its maker, Solomon Coster. But if Bruce were prepared to put up the money, he went on, the two of them together could easily construct an improved version of Huygens’s clock:

If I thought you had a mind to bestow 40 dollars or some less on one of them I would think to have it ready for you against you come. Never any other design made wanrests
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go so equally … If I make any, I will make it beat another time than this doeth, for it beats at the rate of 80 strokes of the wanrest or thereby to a minute, and I will make it beat just 60 which will be the seconds, and will put an index to shew them. But there is no end of tricks of this kind. When you come to the shop you may perhaps find there will and weal.
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