Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory (6 page)

The [Dutch] committed the cream of their forces to a full-scale invasion of Britain, incurring vast expenditure of money, effort, and resources, and did so, furthermore, on the eve of an almost certain outbreak of war with France. In doing so, the Dutch leadership, utterly uncharacteristically in the view of diplomatic onlookers, took a stupendous gamble.

On 9 September (new style), the French ambassador at The Hague, the comte d’Avaux, delivered a clear threat from Louis XIV to the States General: the French King knew what the Dutch preparations were for, he warned. If the Dutch attacked England, he would be obliged ‘not only to come to James’s assistance, but to regard the first hostile act committed by your troops, or your ships, against His Britannic Majesty as an open infraction of the peace and act of war against his own crown’.
¹⁵

As Jonathan Israel emphasises: ‘Outside intervention played a main role in setting the Glorious Revolution in motion. The course of the Glorious Revolution was to a great extent shaped by Dutch calculation and interests.’
¹⁶
With hindsight that intervention looks decisive and extraordinarily daring. In fact, the conditions needed for the Dutch Stadholder to take such a politically risky step with the full backing of the States General resulted from a combination of circumstances, which included errors of political judgement (like the French King’s reintroduction of punitive trade tariffs) and unexpected good fortune (like that providential wind).

Whether it was England or the Dutch Republic that was driving the political agenda, the Glorious Revolution was not a metaphorical ‘pamphlet war’, but a pivotal sequence of defining events for English and Dutch history. It was a large-scale naval and military engagement in which the ‘enemy’ (the legitimate English monarch and his government) more or less declined to participate, and in which victory went surprisingly easily to the aggressor. William and Mary’s decisive victory over Mary’s father was not achieved because of a persuasive printed justification for Dutch military intervention, or because their Protestant cause was self-evidently a just one.

Let us, then, pursue a little further the characteristics of William and Mary’s 1688 campaign which gave it a certain colour of uncontentious obviousness – a kind of union of shared beliefs, recognisable like-mindedness and common outlook – which eased the transition from Stadholder to Stadholder-King, and from adjacent, independent territories (one a monarchy, the other a republic) into an anti-Catholic collaboration of forces and finances.

We might note the extraordinarily shrewd way in which the
Declaration
brought together a characteristically Dutch, and also distinctively English, language of moral probity and individual conscience to create an emotionally compelling hybrid set of arguments justifying Dutch intervention in an English cause for a common, righteous Protestant purpose. The man behind this consummate and effective fusion of two national cultures was Gilbert Burnet. He deserves to be introduced here as our first example of what will turn out to be a recognisable genus of able and determined Britons who found themselves in the Dutch Republic at a particularly crucial stage in their lives, married Dutch wives from wealthy and powerful families, and returned later to shape the politics and culture of their homeland.

Gilbert Burnet was an Anglican cleric, born in Scotland in 1643, who entered English politics in the early 1670s through his association with the Earl of Lauderdale. In the early 1660s he studied Hebrew in Amsterdam with a Jewish rabbi, and developed a lifelong affinity for the plain doctrines and ceremonial simplicity of Dutch Protestantism. On his return he met and was befriended by Robert Boyle (youngest son of the Earl of Cork, and a prominent practitioner of the new natural philosophy), and came to the attention of Sir Robert Moray, a fellow Scot close to Charles II, and destined to play an important role in Charles’s policies in Scotland. Moray introduced Burnet to the new scientific Royal Society (of which Moray was a founder member), and he was elected as a Fellow.

Burnet began his clerical career in the Scottish kirk, but in 1675 accepted the post of chaplain to the Rolls Chapel in England. During the Exclusion Crisis he was seen as a sort of ‘honest broker’, able to talk reasonably to both sides. The Rye House Plot of 1683, however, led to the execution of two of his closest friends, Lord Essex and Lord Russell. After attending Russell throughout his trial and up to his execution, Burnet resigned his post.

At the accession of James II, Burnet’s outspoken anti-Catholic views placed him in serious danger, and he left England for the Continent. After travelling in France and Switzerland, in May 1686 he arrived in Utrecht, where he was presented with letters from Prince William and Princess Mary, inviting him to enter their personal service.

Burnet ‘found the Prince was resolved to make use of me’, and was introduced to the office of Gaspar Fagel, where from 1686 to 1688 he worked alongside Fagel ‘benefiting from the Pensionary’s network of political informants and the unrivalled power of the Dutch printing industry, to produce a number of works in support of the Orange position’.
¹⁷
Before the invasion he was responsible for several pamphlets against James II, developing a recognisable direct, persuasive voice which carries over into the
Declaration
. As a literary stylist, a native English-speaker and a person with first-hand knowledge of English politics Burnet was invaluable to William’s propaganda machine. Fagel’s death in December 1688, before William reached London, saw to it that from the beginning of the operation proper it was Burnet’s commanding voice which shaped the public face of the invasion.

Once the invasion began, Burnet became an even more key figure in Dutch strategy. As William’s chaplain he accompanied him closely from Torbay to London, using the resulting intimacy to advise his master on how to present himself to gain the support of James’s subjects. He was closely involved in the physical production of the second and third
Declarations
, issued
in situ
(and run off on the expedition’s own portable printing press) in response to the developing political situation. He spoke in William’s defence from the pulpit at vital moments, set up public occasions on which William’s message could be conveyed to the people – religious services to pray for the Prince’s success, ceremonial readings of the
Declaration
– and engineered occasions for the formal expression of support by the Prince’s English allies.

It was Burnet who preached to the troops immediately before the Dutch armada set out, emphasising the providential nature of the enterprise, and characterising the invasion as a moral crusade. It was he who devised William’s memorable entrance into Exeter on his white horse, and the service of celebration that followed. And the prayer said communally throughout the journey for the success of the undertaking was a carefully calculated continuation of the virtuous Protestant theme:

Grant O Gracious God that all of us, may be turning to thee with our whole hearts; Repenting us truly of all our past sins, and solemnly vowing to thee, as wee now doe, that wee will in all time coming amend our lives, and endeavour to carry our selves as becomes Reformed Christians. And that wee will show our Zeal for our holy Religion by living in all things suteably to it.
¹⁸

Burnet was equally at home in London and The Hague, and his interventions were carefully judged and coloured so as to resonate with the attitudes and beliefs of the inhabitants of both.

William’s
Declaration
, like almost all the other documents issued and circulated during and after the invasion, was countersigned and authenticated by his secretary, Constantijn Huygens junior.

Huygens junior, we recall, was one of the group who stood with the Prince on the clifftop at Brixham, watching the Dutch forces disembark, and who accompanied him every step of the way to his triumphal reception in London, drafting his letters of instruction in English, Dutch and French as they went along. After the Glorious Revolution he remained in England in the service of the new King and Queen.

His presence as part of that defining scene for our historical exploration allows us to make our first acquaintance with the Huygens family – a dynasty of advisers and administrators to the house of Orange, whose cultivation and aesthetic sensitivity, combined with their political acumen and dedicated service, helped transform the fortunes of the Dutch Stadholders. In the story that follows, several members of this prominent and respected family will be among our most reliable guides to understanding the unfolding, curious relationship between the seventeenth-century British Isles and the seventeenth-century Low Countries.

The Prince of Orange arrived in England in November 1688 with a formidable army. But he also came prepared for his encounter with the English, with a fully-formed outlook and set of attitudes. A robust set of common interests and commitments had developed over at least the preceding half-century between a certain sort of Englishman and his Dutch counterpart. While there was always an edge of suspicion (there had, after all, been three Anglo–Dutch wars since the 1650s), there was also a great deal of recognisably shared experience, particularly in the realm of arts and letters.

A small episode on the road leading from Torbay to London and the English throne underlines the importance of this shared ‘mentality’. Constantijn Huygens junior records in his diary that in the course of the often arduous and demanding forced march from Torbay to London, Prince William of Orange took some time off from military affairs to do a bit of tourism, and encouraged his secretary to do likewise.

On 4 December, as the Prince travelled towards London at the head of his massive Dutch army, he insisted on making a detour to admire Wilton House near Salisbury, the country seat of the Earl of Pembroke. Wilton was renowned for its architecture, its art, but most of all for its magnificent gardens, designed in the 1640s by Isaac de Caus.

Engravings of the Wilton gardens had appeared in a lavishly illustrated book entitled
Hortus Pembrochianus
(Garden of the Earl of Pembroke), first published in 1645–46, and reprinted several times thereafter – in one case, without any of the accompanying text, but simply as a set of engravings.
¹⁹
The book is closely modelled on a famous volume brought out twenty-five years earlier by Isaac de Caus’s brother Salomon, depicting the fabulous gardens he had designed at Heidelberg for the ‘Winter King and Queen’ – the Elector Palatine Frederick and his wife, Charles I’s sister, Elizabeth of Bohemia. Both books are likely to have been familiar to a keen enthusiast for gardens like Prince William. Heidelberg’s gardens had been destroyed during the Thirty Years War, along with the city’s great university and its library.

In the midst of a military campaign, on foreign soil, William took the earliest possible opportunity to inspect the Pembroke gardens in all their glory, and at some length. Constantijn Huygens junior records the detour made for this purpose:

We marched from Hendon to Salisbury, 13 miles, a good way through Salisbury plain, but for a long time we had a cold, sharp wind blowing directly in our faces.

A mile from Salisbury we passed an undistinguished village (which nevertheless sends two representatives to Parliament), called Wilton, where the Earl of Pembroke has a rather beautiful house which is moderately beautiful, because there are some very notable paintings by van Dyck. His Highness went to see it, but I did not – I was in a hurry to get to the town to get warm.
²⁰

William may have been anxious to see the van Dycks, at least one of which showed his mother as a child, with her siblings, but the gardens were far more impressive than the house. Laid out and planted before the house itself was built, as was customary for the period, the Wilton gardens had been designed to complement a classical villa on a grand scale, as de Caus’s original drawings clearly show. By the time the house was constructed, the 4th Earl’s fortunes had faded, and a more modest house eventually presided over the parterres and wildernesses, statues and elaborate fountains.

Wilton House’s architecture, interior decoration, artworks and gardens were entirely to the monarch-to-be’s Dutch taste. The weather was abominable, but that in no way dampened the Stadholder’s enthusiasm. Rejoining Huygens the following day, William told Constantijn that the house and garden were as outstanding as he had been led to believe: ‘In the evening the Prince was in his room coughing violently, having caught cold. He told me I absolutely must go and see the house at Wilton.’
²¹
Huygens ‘did want to go to Wilton, but my horses were not available’.
²²
He went on foot to see Salisbury Cathedral instead:

The Cathedral at Salisbury is huge, with many ancient tombs. There is a place where the members of the clergy meet, a round chapel, very neatly built in a gothic style, more than 40 feet in diameter, the ceiling vaulting of which is supported in the middle on a pillar, which is like all other pillars of a greyish polished stone, apparently natural.
²³

But if Huygens did not choose to admire Wilton’s gardens, it is entirely likely that Hans Willem Bentinck did, and that he, in contrast to Huygens, chose to accompany Prince William on that cold afternoon tour. It may even have been he who proposed the sightseeing detour. Bentinck was himself a lifelong gardening enthusiast, whose own country estate at Sorgvliet – purchased from the heirs of the cultivated Dutch statesman Jacob Cats in 1675 – was considered in Dutch court circles to be an outstanding example of garden design, in which architecture and statuary perfectly complemented formal landscaping and topiary.
²⁴
His passion for horticulture and expertise in garden design were recognised when, immediately after William and Mary ascended the English throne, the royal favourite was appointed to the official post of Superintendent of the Royal Gardens.