Original Reviews

          In 1688 William of Orange handed on the southern coast of England with and marched on London with 15,000 troups. He was occupying the ‘vacant’ crown of England after James II had ‘abdicated.’ William’s claim to the English crown was through both his wife Mary, James’ daughter by his first marriage, and William’s mother, a sister of Charles I of England.

         James II had scared English protestatnts with his ‘toleration’ of all religions. He was a practicing Roman Catholic, as was his second wife, and they had recently produced a male heir who would have perpetuated the catholicism of the British royals in a decidedly protestant British Isles. William of Orange was a protestant from a decidedly protestant Dutch Republic.

          William had counted on the English protestant gentry and the parliamentary leadership to rally around his ‘liberation’ of England from a catholic tyranny. He had devised a propaganda effort to convince the English of his good intentions. The gentry, however, hung back from joining his Dutch troops, waiting to see an outcome. So William’s carefully planned intervention looked like an invasion and occupation.

          As a background for William and Mary’s reign, Lisa Jardine has described the many interactions between the Dutch and British royals in the seventeenth century. She casts them as celebrities, much like the surviving European royalty of our time. The were enormously rich, relative to their fellow countrymen, patrons of art, music, and seventeenth-century science, or natural history as it was then called.

          There was a lively market for Dutch and Flemish art on both sides of the Channel. The elite of London, Antwerp, and the Hague were also interest in formal gardens of the French variety. Music and popular dances easily crossed borders as they do today.

          Much of Jardine’s story centers around the illustrious career of the Huygens family. Constantijn Huygens senior, a Dutchman, was what you might call an art facilitator. The Dutch and British royals wanted advice on art and crafted objects. They were patrons and connoisseurs but also investors. In a world of art speculation, they appreciated his guidance. Huygens’ eldest son, also Constantijn, was a political advisor to William of Orange, now William III of Britain. Another son Christiaan Huygens was a famous ‘microscopist.’ Improved lenses were allowing curious naturalists to view the microscopic world of tiny animals, like the human louse. Many gifted tinkerers, both English and Dutch, were also interested in mechanics, such as the spring-driven clock.

          Both the Dutch and British royals were emulating the vast expenditure of Louis XIV’s French court. Fortunes were spent on houses, furnishings, art, and surrounding gardens. There was an interest in city planning; the Hague with its tree-lined avenues, Jardine calls a “garden city”. They admired classical architecture, and their homes and gardens reflected its orderliness. She arranges for us an imaginery visit to Antwerp, a city of 70,000, enjoying moderate prosperity and home to a large émigré English community finding refuge from Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth.

          ‘Joint ventures’ you might call some of this borrowing back and forth between the Dutch and Flemish, but also there was rivalry and competition. Jardine includes stories of private back-biting and public controversy.           Nowhere is this rivalry and competition more in evidence than in the European commercial expansion that had begun in the previous century. The Dutch were making fortunes in trade with Asia and in the Atlantic slave trade long before the British. But with more financial resources and its North American settlement colonies, the future lay with the Brits. The word “plundered” in Jardine’s subtitle is, however, misleading. Atlantic commerce was not a zero-sum game.

          The Dutch lost their one settlement colony, New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island, when it was occupied by the British in 1664. Why the Dutch did not have other settlement colonies may be a matter of demographics. It may also have been that the Dutch were never driven from Holland by religious intoleration as were many of the original English colonists in the New World.