Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory (19 page)

Here, thinks Held, we have the preliminary drawings for the double portrait he has re-identified.

In the course of 1635 Huygens and van Campen met regularly to discuss the plans and construction of Huygens’s fashionable new neoclassical house in Het Plein, their shared interests in both architecture and painting bringing them increasingly close. While his neighbour Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen was abroad serving as Dutch Governor in Brazil, Huygens oversaw the completion of his house – adjacent to his own – also under construction by van Campen and Pieter Post. Although Huygens’s house was demolished in the nineteenth century, we may consider the Mauritshuis as a memorial to the Huygens–van Campen architectural partnership.

Huygens later described how actively Susanna too had been involved in planning the layout and functions of rooms for their new family home. It was natural, then, that when plague broke out in The Hague in 1635, and Susanna had taken two of their four sons to stay with her brother-in-law in Arnhem, and needed temporary accommodation for herself and the other two boys, Constantijn junior and Lodewijk, she should seek refuge with the van Campen family on their estate near Amersfoort. They in their turn were only too happy to extend their hospitality to the Huygenses. It was while they were there that van Campen made a delightful drawing of the six-year-old Constantijn in a straw hat, in red chalk – one of the few surviving examples of his artistic prowess which can be securely assigned to him. On the back Constantijn Huygens junior has written (in later life): ‘My portrait aged six or seven, drawn by Mr. van Campen’.

The sheet of manuscript music Susanna and her husband hold together in van Campen’s double portrait is the basso continuo (the running instrumental accompaniment) to an unidentified song. Of course, a couple holding a piece of music in a Dutch painting may readily be taken simply to symbolise the harmonious relationship between them.
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The painting’s subject, one historian of music writes, ‘is not that of domestic music making but the treatment of music as a mirror of matrimonial harmony’.
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LEFT:
Drawing showing the Huygenshuis and Mauritshuis adjacent to one another in the fashionable district of Het Plein in The Hague.

RIGHT:
Drawing of the six-year-old Constantijn Huygens junior by van Campen.

We may still allow that the musical reference in the double portrait is to actual musical activities shared by the young couple. The best-known portrait of Constantijn, painted by Thomas de Keyser on the occasion of Constantijn and Susanna’s 1627 wedding, which hangs in the National Gallery in London, includes a theorbo (or theorbo-lute) alongside other carefully chosen objects connoting his interests and occupations. When, in 1647, Huygens sent his song collection
Pathodia Sacra et Profana
for publication, the Latin psalms and French and Italian airs it contained had accompaniments specifically for theorbo. The publisher persuaded Huygens to replace this with a figured bass, in an easier notation (of the kind shown in the double portrait), in order that the songs could also be accompanied by a keyboard player. So the two paintings together suggest that Constantijn and Susanna are united musically, as singer and accompanist. The painting, which rediscovers the engaged, intelligent face and direct, searching gaze of Susanna Huygens, also suggests that she shared her husband’s love of music.
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It is when we begin to recover the sisters, wives and daughters in family histories during the periods of bi-directional migration of the 1640s and 1650s between England and the Netherlands that the extent of the interweaving of Anglo–Dutch social and cultural relations really becomes apparent. Because the lives of seventeenth-century women are so hard to retrieve, this has proved the most difficult part of this book by far to research. What follows is a selection of specimen examples of the kind of Anglo–Dutch marriage, forged by political circumstances in the mid-seventeenth century, which ensured that many of those moving in élite circles at the time of the Glorious Revolution – both Dutch and English – felt thoroughly comfortable and at home with the mores of the partner nation. In this, as in so many other contexts, Sir Constantijn Huygens is the source for several characteristic and telling examples.

At least one of the flirtations in which Huygens indulged during the 1640s and ’50s might have become a serious relationship – one which he could plausibly have hoped would lead to a second marriage. This was his friendship with Anna Morgan, daughter of the Governor of Bergen op Zoom, Sir Charles Morgan. Sir Charles (a Welshman) had married the Dutch heiress Elizabeth Marnix, daughter of the Protestant hero of the Dutch revolt (strategic adviser to, and personal emissary of, William the Silent), Philips Marnix, Heer van St Aldegonde, and was a member of Elizabeth of Bohemia’s innermost court circle.
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Anna Morgan was born and raised in a bilingual and bicultural household in the northern Netherlands. Her first husband was another Welshman, Sir Lewis Morgan (no relation), who died in 1635, and who, like her father, had served with English regiments in the United Provinces. However, since he was Member of Parliament for Cardiff in 1628–29, and was knighted at Whitehall in March 1629, we may assume that Anna made her home in Wales (in 1652, Huygens wrote to her thanking her for ‘the excess of civilities with which it has pleased you to shower my son [Lodewijk], extending as far as your beautiful country of Wales’).
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In 1644, Anna was once again in the United Provinces, to commission a magnificent white marble funerary monument for her father, who had died the previous year, at Bergen op Zoom. She was advised on this project, and the creation and construction of the monument by François Dieussart (completed in 1645–46), by Sir Constantijn Huygens. He and Anna were already friends,
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and in the course of their association over the funerary sculpture a romantic attachment developed between them. An elaborately conceited poem in Dutch by Huygens, ‘Aen Mevrouw Morgan’, written in 1645, on the occasion of Anna presenting him with the gift of a mosquito net to be used in the field during the annual summer military campaigning, openly affirms his passionate love for her.
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In 1646, in a gossipy letter written to Huygens around the time news broke of her impending second marriage to somebody else, Constantijn’s brother-in-law (husband of his sister Constantia) referred to Anna Morgan as ‘your would-be (or alleged) mistress’.
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The monument Huygens and Dieussart designed and erected for Anna in the Grote Kerk at Bergen op Zoom is a uniquely imposing piece of Dutch neoclassical monumental sculpture, which remains enduring testimony to the passionate, creative relationship between Huygens and ‘Mevrouw Morgan’.

Huygens remained on cordial terms with Anna Morgan after her marriage, in August 1646, to Walter Strickland, the English Parliamentary ambassador to the United Provinces between 1642 and 1651, and a prominent ally of Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s.
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Anna was naturalised by Parliamentary ordinance in 1651, and took a further oath of naturalisation at the Restoration, in 1660.
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The two old lovers continued to correspond, in a mixture of English, French and Dutch, down to the 1680s. Occasionally, as often happens, disagreements over gifts exchanged during the love affair came between them, though not apparently for long. In October 1654, Huygens returned from a three-month trip to Spa, south of Maastricht, to find a letter from Anna demanding the return of ‘some copper medals which [she] once generously gave to [him]’. Affecting amazement at the request, Huygens wrote:

I am totally astonished, Madame, that having given them to me with the sweet and kind demeanour with which you were always pleased to honour me, you are now demanding their return.
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The medals were, he confessed, now intermingled with those which formed part of his considerable collection. However, if Lady Strickland (as she now was) was determined to have her gift returned, he would ‘give her the whole cabinet, which is entirely at your service, if you should be pleased to receive it from my hand’. The abrupt communication Huygens had received from Anna – now firmly of the English Commonwealth party – was perhaps not unexpected: he had been at Spa with the Princess Royal, for weeks of court amusement with the itinerant future Charles II (to whom Huygens refers consistently as ‘the King of Great Britain’). Reporting the goings on at Spa to Amalia van Solms, Huygens told her with evident satisfaction that ‘there is a lot of dancing, and this Prince performs better than anyone else at all, since he has a true ear, and understands and loves music with a passion, just like his Royal father’.
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The Commonwealth government of Oliver Cromwell was not well pleased at the continued support for Charles on the parts of Amalia and the Princess Royal.

The intimate liaison between the Dutch Huygens and the Anglo– Dutch Anna Morgan bridged the divide between the United Provinces and the British Isles, binding the interests of the two families invisibly together – families with significant influence in their respective political administrations. In 1652, an incident at sea precipitated Commonwealth England and the United Provinces into naval confrontation, and eventually into the first Anglo–Dutch war. Required by the captain of an English ship to dip his flag as a sign of English supremacy at sea, the Dutch commander, Admiral Tromp, refused to comply. Relations were already tense between the two countries, and England immediately declared war.

The situation was extremely delicate. At the moment when hostilities were declared between the two countries, a diplomatic mission from the States General to Parliament was in London, and with it Huygens’s third son Lodewijk. Huygens wrote to his old flame, Anna Morgan, begging her, from her influential position as wife to one of Cromwell’s closest advisers, to take care of his son.

In the same letter, he did some shrewd informal diplomatic negotiating. The insult to English pride on the part of Admiral Tromp which had precipitated the crisis was, he assured Anna, nothing to do with the Dutch government:

We have just learned with great displeasure about the misunderstanding between our fleets. Whatever the reasons given by either party in this disorder, we can say with absolute certainty that the State did not authorise anybody to commit any hostile action, and to judge otherwise would be to do us wrong. However, since the authority of the government cannot always control the will of the people, in case of emergency, I commit my son to your care.
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Although Huygens in the end remained single for the fifty years of his life after Susanna’s death, in the middle decades of the century his name was frequently linked with those of his young female musician friends. Many years later his son Constantijn junior, on a visit to Antwerp, was mortified when his host hinted that his father’s relations with the ‘beautiful Duarte girls’ might not have been entirely innocent.

In the spring of 1642, on the eve of the outbreak of civil war in England, the ten-year-old Princess Mary Stuart, eldest daughter of Charles I, arrived in the Netherlands with her mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, to join her teenaged husband, Frederik Hendrik’s son Prince William of Orange, whom she had married in London the previous year. The two royal ladies established themselves at The Hague, surrounded by a large number of household servants and hangers-on. Princess Mary was attended by an entourage of eighty (the marriage agreement had stipulated only forty), while her mother, according to eyewitnesses, brought a total of three hundred followers.
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One of those who arrived at The Hague as lady-in-waiting to Princess Mary Stuart was Utricia Ogle, a spirited young woman born in Utrecht of an English father (Governor of Utrecht in 1610, and commander of the English garrison there for a number of years) and a Dutch mother, but raised in England.
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Originally a member of the household of Katherine Wotton, Lady Stanhope (an English widow who had recently met and married William of Orange’s leading negotiator in the matter of the English match), Utricia was an accomplished instrumentalist, with a lovely singing voice. She quickly became Huygens’s protégée and close personal friend, and a regular visitor to his country retreat. He composed songs especially for her, and set them to music himself, coaching her in their performance. His one surviving published compilation of songs, the
Pathodia Sacra et Profana
, is dedicated to her as its musical inspiration.

In 1645 Utricia married Sir William Swann, an English professional soldier serving in the forces of the Prince of Orange. Swann was also a musician, and it is probable that he and Utricia met at one of Huygens’s musical evenings (he and Huygens corresponded regularly – particularly, anxiously, concerning Utricia’s health). Utricia and Constantijn continued to perform together, privately and publicly. Indeed, her husband seems to have encouraged them to combine their musical talents whenever possible, probably to enhance his own prestige in court circles.
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‘My wife presents her humbel service to you,’ he writes in January 1647 from Breda, ‘and greefs much for the loss of her voice, which a great could [cold] has taken from her … But I hoope, eere long she will bee fitt againe to beare her part in musyck with your consort, which I long to heare.’
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