Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory

T
his is a book about cultural exchange between England and the Dutch Republic – an extraordinary process of cross-fertilisation which took place in the seventeenth century, between the life and thought of two rapidly developing countries in northern Europe. The two territories, jostling for power on the world stage, politically and commercially, recognised that they had a great deal in common. Still, each of them represented itself – and has continued to do so ever since – as absolutely independent and unique.

As a historian I was prompted to write
Going Dutch
by recurrent questions I faced from readers of my previous work on the seventeenth century, including my biographies of Robert Hooke and Sir Christopher Wren, concerning the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ (neither glorious, nor a revolution) of 1688. Could I explain what that was, and how it happened? Could I also explain how two countries which regularly declared themselves sworn enemies (to the point of declarations of war) in the period should, apparently seamlessly, have merged administrations and institutions by 1700?

When I tried to provide succinct, straightforward answers I quickly realised that I could not give a halfway comprehensible account of the arrival at Torbay in November 1688 of William III, Prince of Orange, with a large fleet and a considerable army, without providing my questioners with a complicated back-story. Indeed, in the end, the story leading up to the invasion turned out to be an involved, far-reaching narrative on an almost epic scale, that needed to be told. So here it is.

Aside from such direct requests for information, as someone with an abiding interest in the way cultural currents and patterns of thought form and are sustained through time, I was drawn to thinking about Anglo– Dutch relations in the seventeenth century because in my own research I found myself increasingly unable to understand the intellectual, cultural and scientific worlds of Britain and the Netherlands if I kept them apart. Documents – letters and manuscripts – relating to the rise of science in the period, for example, regularly involved correspondents or collaborators across the water. Would British members of the Royal Society in London, including Robert Boyle, Wren and Hooke, have arrived at many of their important original scientific and technological discoveries if they had not been in continuous and mutually advantageous intellectual contact with their Dutch counterparts, among them Christiaan Huygens, Anton van Leeuwenhoek and Jan Swammerdam?

In art and music the cross-fertilisation was even more obvious as soon as one gave the matter any serious attention. Musicians moved between the courts at London and The Hague, exchanging repertoires and techniques. Almost without exception, the great painters of this period, whose works hang prominently at the National Gallery and Tate Britain in London, and include many familiar portraits of the English royal family and prominent members of the court and city circles, were of Netherlandish origin, including, most obviously, Anton van Dyck, Pieter Lely and Pieter Paul Rubens. Of course, there were other players in the cultural exchange game (France in particular), but it seemed to me that the interplay between Britain and the Low Countries deserved more attention than it had traditionally been given.

There also seemed to me to be a seductive similarity between the fortunes of the United Provinces (the seven provinces of the northern Netherlands) at the end of the Dutch Golden Age, and that state Britain finds itself in today. Visibly losing power on the world stage, and with her commercial supremacy increasingly challenged by other enterprising nations, the Dutch Republic nevertheless continued to hold its place culturally in Europe. Its style and taste, in everything from art, architecture and music to faïence, lace and tableware, permeated the European sensibility – and beyond it, the sensibilities of those settling new lands across the ocean (faïence and silverware made to the highest Dutch standards survive from the early Dutch colonies on the east coast of the United States). That Dutch sensibility continued to exert influence long after the Dutch nation had lost its last foothold on world power, and might be considered, I shall argue, still to define what we consider northern European in cultural terms today.

The most powerful stimulus for my undertaking this piece of work, though, was the way the investigations conducted as I carried out the research for it intersected again and again with a set of questions close to my own heart about family and about migration – about the ways in which communities are permeated, and their cultures altered and shaped by the ideas, skills and attitudes of those they allow in as immigrants.

I am of fairly recent immigrant stock myself. My father’s family arrived in London from Poland via Germany in 1920 – economic migrants in search of a new life. My mother’s family had arrived a generation earlier, though her father only left eastern Europe on the eve of the First World War. None of my grandparents, so far as I know, ever returned to their country of origin, not even for a family vacation. My father was the only one of his siblings ever to revisit Warsaw, the city of his beloved mother’s early life, and then, not until he was well into middle age. Uprooted and cut off from their cultural origins, just as they brought no material possessions, they carried with them only vestiges and memories of their eastern European heritage.

Historians have tended to treat the intellectual and cultural influence of migrants in the seventeenth century as though the movement of groups of Europeans displaced from their country of origin for political, religious or economic reasons in earlier periods was always thus one-directional. They might be settled residents of their adopted country, in which case they were assumed to make the culture of their new home their own, or they might be ‘visitors’, diplomats or those performing some short-term service as non-residents, in which case their ‘foreign’ contribution to the culture could be marked out as unassimilated to the growth and development of the field of their endeavour.

Because these early immigrant communities carried so little with them, historians – with good reason – tend to emphasise the identifiable differences between the arriving community and the one it joins. They lovingly uncover pockets of ‘resistance’, whose occupants live cheek by jowl with settled communities, providing exotic or unusual additions to their way of life.

The story I am about to tell will try to encourage the reader to look beyond such simple assumptions. The seventeenth century was a period of political upheaval and social turmoil in England and the Dutch Republic, resulting in repeated, voluntary and forced, movements of peoples from one to the other. Men and women moved with comparative lack of difficulty (travel by water was generally easier and safer than travel overland) between the northern Netherlands (which for our purposes will include Antwerp) and the British Isles – the proximity of the one to the other is captured in the Dutch designation of the stretch of the North Sea between Holland and England as the ‘Narrow Sea’ or ‘Narrow Seas’. If we barely register those migrations today, it is because we take for granted, as part of English or Dutch culture, the significant cultural interventions and developments each set of new arrivals contributed.

At the back of my mind while I was writing was a further consequence of the story of interwoven cultural strands. If the creative life of a nation is a whirligig or kaleidoscope of colliding influences brought in by newcomers in their capacious cultural knapsacks, might not the newcomer contribute to the cultural mix on an equal footing with the local, native practitioner? In which case, to whom does the outcome of that bipartisan engagement ‘belong’?

So one of the questions I explore in this book is: Who is entitled to lay claim to the culture of a designated nation? Does each country, as was long argued, possess a distinctive, coherent, homogeneous set of tastes, attitudes and beliefs at any given moment in history, closely contained within its national boundaries, to which new arrivals (whether economic migrants, or refugees displaced by conflict elsewhere) are allowed to contribute only within specified limits, while tailoring or reconfiguring their ‘native’ talents to clearly recognised, local norms? Or is a national culture rather a medley of influences, a rich mix of blended and intersecting tastes and styles, based on a dialogue amongst the many participating individuals who find themselves mingled at any given point on the globe, at any particular time?

The longer I go on writing, the more debts I owe to others, and the greater these are. I am unbelievably fortunate to be surrounded by people who either share my enthusiasm for the pursuit of knowledge, or are prepared to go along with me on that journey (perhaps as the line of least resistance, faced with my insistent enthusiasm).

My immediate family are now so well adjusted to my obsession with pursuing every fresh thought to a conclusion as soon as it arises, that they have all become my collaborators, rushing off to source my latest query so that we can all sit down and finish dinner. Without my husband John Hare’s constant, irrepressibly optimistic support, there are times in the past three years which I could not possibly have got through. No acknowledgement will ever do justice to the difference he has made to my life. My three children and their partners have been there for me whenever I needed encouragement, and have sustained me whenever the going was tough. My granddaughters Freya and Zoë are among my most exacting critics.

My colleagues at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary, University of London – Jan Broadway, Robyn Adams, Annie Watkins and Alan Stewart – are also now family. We have been through a lot together over the five years the centre has existed so far, and have come out the other side as a resilient, plucky little band of pioneers, with a burning desire to effect significant change in academic intellectual life. My colleagues at Queen Mary continue to support me in every possible way. Nothing I ever ask is too much for them, which I put down especially to the leadership and imagination of the senior management team – Professors Adrian Smith, Philip Ogden, Morag Shiach, Trevor Dadson and Ursula Martin. I simply could not have achieved all I have done, nor continue to hope to accomplish still more, in any other academic institution, bar none.

There are great scholars of Dutch history whose work has shaped the field in which I have been working for the past four years, and in whose footsteps I tread. The magisterial
oeuvre
of Jonathan Israel, including his extraordinarily detailed work on the Sephardic Jewish community, is the bedrock for what I write here. Peter Geyl’s groundbreaking work on Anglo–Dutch relations was also essential. Simon Schama’s bold and imaginative work on the Netherlands – the work with which his now stellar career began, and which for many of us defines the way works of impeccable scholarship can be written so as to reach a wider audience – was my inspiration. Gary Schwartz’s
Schwartzlist
kept me reminded of how vital and vibrant conversations about all things Anglo–Dutch continue to be (it was he who recommended me to read David Winner’s
Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football
, to get me in the mood). ‘If I have seen further,’ as Newton wrote, ‘it has been by standing on the shoulders of giants.’

I also owe thanks to two distinguished scholars of things Dutch, both domiciled in London, who were generous enough to share the research from forthcoming books with me while I was writing
Going Dutch
. Hal Cook let me study the manuscript of his masterful
Matters of Exchange: Commerce,
Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age
. Anne Goldgar gave me a proof copy of her definitive work on seventeenth-century Dutch life and tulips,
Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age
. Both books are now published and available, and I recommend them to those who would like to read at a level of detail beyond that which I can offer here.

In the course of my research for
Going Dutch
I have made many new friends in the Netherlands. I have a deep and long-standing affection for the people of the Low Countries – my husband took me there when first we met more than twenty-five years ago, because he had spent happy times there in his childhood, and wanted me to share that pleasure. Jean-Pierre Vander Motten and Marika Keblusek were courteously helpful with bibliography and advice, embracing my project even before we had met. At a sequence of conferences, young Dutch scholars took endless trouble to answer my questions, both during the conference sessions and over late-night drinks afterwards.

This book tries resolutely to resist the idea of national character or national stereotypes of any sort. Nevertheless, the inhabitants of the Low Countries are some of the most generous and tolerant people I have ever met. I single out Nadine Akkerman for special thanks. She and I met at a difficult time in both our lives, and we have formed a friendship which will outlast any work I do specifically on Dutch topics. I hope my thanks to her may be allowed to stand for my indebtedness to so many other scholars who have given me the benefit of their far deeper knowledge of things Dutch and Flemish, and who, without exception, have been happy freely to share the findings of their own research with me. Each of them is, of course, acknowledged in my endnotes.

It also matters to me to acknowledge here that the shocking murder of Dutch film-maker and champion of free speech Theo van Gogh in 2004, gunned down as he cycled in Amsterdam, and the subsequent exile to America of his collaborator on the controversial film
Submission
, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, cast a shadow over the early stages of writing this book.
Going Dutch
shows that the roots of tolerance run historically deep in the Netherlands, as does the Dutch people’s capacity to accommodate and be culturally enriched by successive waves of exiles and immigrants, and I am confident that in this generation once again they will, in the end, show the rest of Europe the way.

Other books

Maybe Baby Lite by Andrea Smith

The Girl with the Mermaid Hair by Delia Ephron

Unicorn School by Linda Chapman

Soul of the Fire by Eliot Pattison

Temptation by Douglas Kennedy

You'll Think of Me by Wendi Zwaduk

Miracle by Connie Willis

The White Road-CP-4 by John Connolly

Paradise: An Apocalyptic Novel by Erik, Nicholas

Escape by David McMillan