Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory (24 page)

One entertainment at the Cavendishes’ Antwerp home for which records survive may serve to capture the scale and sophistication of the diversions on offer there during the English Commonwealth years. It was a soirée of glamour and revelry staged for Charles II and his court in February 1658, shortly after the death of Oliver Cromwell, when Europe was buzzing with rumours of the possibility of the English King’s return to the throne. In the event, it was to be another two years before the continuing Commonwealth failed under Cromwell’s son Richard, and Charles II was restored to power, but the premature celebration reminds us that those who eventually returned had developed their own characteristic, lavish forms of recreation in exile, whose fashions were closely linked to Dutch ‘royal’ circles in The Hague, and whose influence persisted when the participants returned to London.
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The occasion for the entertainment at the Cavendishes’ Antwerp home was the installing of General Marchin as a Knight of the Order of the Garter, followed by a ball in his honour. A verse panegyric ‘of the highest hyperbole’ written by Cavendish was delivered by a former actor, ‘Major Mohun’, who wore ‘a black satin robe and garland of bays’. There was dancing, and a performance by sixteen of the King’s gentlemen. The high point of the evening was a song by ‘Lady Moore, dressed in feathers’, who sang one of Cavendish’s songs set to music by Nicholas Lanier.

Here, yet again, we have the threads of English and Dutch cultural activity becoming wound together in intricately complicated ways. As we saw in the
previous chapter
, the English musician Nicholas Lanier was an old friend of Sir Constantijn Huygens, whom he had met in London at the home of Sir Robert Killigrew in 1622, when Huygens was a young diplomat, dazzled by the cultural and social life of James I’s court in England, and Lanier was a rising court star as musician and instrumentalist, destined to become the Keeper of the King’s Music when Charles I ascended the throne.

In addition to taking charge of Charles I’s music and instruments, Lanier become one of his key art procurers, brokering international deals to build up his fabulous collection of Italianate paintings and statuary – a lynchpin in the courtly web of patronage and acquisitions which shaped seventeenth-century European art connoisseurship, shuttling around Europe in search of costly treasures to enhance the courtly magnificence of his royal employer.
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In the 1650s, the exiled Lanier frequented the émigré community in Antwerp, helping to provide cultural continuity between those fallen on hard times from the élites of the houses of Orange and Stuart together. The guest list on this occasion was impressive. ‘Along with the King and his entourage were his sister Mary (the Princess Royal), the Duke of York (later James II) and the youngest royal brother, Henry, Duke of Gloucester. In addition to the Stuarts, Béatrice de Cusance and her two children attended, a Danish nobleman, Hannibal Sehested and his wife (a Danish Princess), and members of the Duarte family.’
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The context for the entertainment, its conception and execution, were strictly Dutch, and closely related to comparable documented performances at The Hague, at the court of Elizabeth of Bohemia, Charles I’s widowed sister, of the kind we saw earlier. The occasion itself was resolutely ‘English’.

Not all the Cavendishes’ entertaining was musical. During his frequent visits to the Rubens House in the 1650s, Sir Constantijn Huygens and Margaret Cavendish developed an intense intellectual friendship, spending hours absorbed in conversation on scientific and philosophical matters.

In 1653, Huygens was one of those to whom Margaret and William sent the poems she had published in London. ‘A wonderful book, whose extravagant atoms kept me from sleeping a great part of last night in this my little solitude,’ he wrote to Utricia Swann from his country house at Hofwijk.
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On his visits to Antwerp, Huygens often stayed at the Duarte family’s house and kept the company of the Duchess of Lorraine. When he called at the Rubens House, conversation turned to learning, and in particular philosophy. He questioned Margaret closely about her own theory of natural philosophy, and joined her in her chemistry laboratory, where, he later recalled, her enthusiastic experiments led to her each week dirtying several of the white petticoats she wore there to protect her fine clothes:

I could not forbeare to shew your Grace by these lines how verily mindfull I am of the many favours she hath been pleased to bestow upon me in former times, especially of those favours [in your laboratory], Madam, which I remember did cost you many a white petticoat a week.
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In the spring of 1657, following a visit to the Rubens House and an enjoyable session together discussing natural philosophy, Huygens sent Margaret some specimens of ‘Prince Rupert’s drops’ – small teardrop- shaped glass vessels, with extraordinary physical properties. The drops could withstand the pressure of considerable weights placed on them, and were unbreakable even when struck squarely with a hammer. Yet if even the smallest tip of their tails was snapped off with a finger, the whole thing exploded into powder with a loud report. Huygens requested Margaret to study the properties of these curious glass baubles and to offer him a scientific explanation:

I had the honour to heare so good solutions given by your Excellencie upon divers questions moved in a whole afternoone, she was pleased to bestowe upon my unworthie conversation, that I am turning to schoole with all speede, humbly beseeching your Exellencie may be so bountifull towards my ignorance, as to instruct me about the natural reason of these wonderfull glasses, which, as I told you, Madam, will fly into powder, if one breakes but the least top of their tailes, whereas without that way they are hardly to be broken by any waight or strength. The King of France is as yet unresolved in the question, notwithstanding he hath been curious to move it to an assembly of the best philosophers of Paris, the microcosme of his kingdome.

With his customary exquisite decorum, Huygens explained in his letter how Margaret should handle the drops if her feminine sensibility made her nervous of the explosions caused when their tails were snapped off:

Your Exellencie hath no cause to apprehend the cracking blow of these innoxious gunnes. If you did, Madam, a servant may hold them close in his fists, and yourselfe can break the little end of their taile without the least danger. But, as I was bold to tell your Exellencie, I should bee loth to beleeve, any female feare should reigne amongst so much over- masculine wisdom as the world doth admire in her. I pray God to blesse your Exellencie with a dayly increase of it, and your worthie selfe to graunt that amongst those admirers I may strive to deserve by way of my humble service the honour to be accounted.
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Margaret replied a week later. She thanked Huygens for his letter and accompanying poems in Dutch, and gave at length her views on the causes of the violent reactions when the drops were broken. In her view there was a tiny quantity of volatile material trapped inside each drop, which exploded on contact with the air:

To myne outward sense these glasses doe appeare to have on the head, body or belly a liquid and oyly substance, which may be the oyly spirrits or essences of sulpher; alsoe the glasses doe appeare to my senses like the nature or arte of gunns and the spirrit of sulpher as the powder; where although they are charged, yet untill they bee discharged, give no report or sound; the discharging of these glasses is by the breakeinge of a piece or part or end of the tailes, where the discharging of guns are by much [match?] firelockes, scrues or the like, which setts fire or gives vent to the powder, but these sulpherousse spirrits, having as it seemes a more force- able nature, it doth viollently thrust itselfe out, where itt findes vent, like as wind, but rather like fire, being of a firy nature, and may have the effects of bright shining fire, which, when it has noe vent, lyes as dead, but as soone as it can ease out a passage, or findes a vent, it breakes forth in a violent crack or thundering noisse.

She suggested that the liquid was inserted into the drops using the same skill as that employed to make fashionable glass earrings:

Weomen weares at there eares for pendents as great wounders, although they make not soe great report, which are glasse bobbes with narrowe neckes as these glasses have tailes, and yet is filled with severall coullers silkes and coursse black cottonwooll, which to my senses is more difficult to putt into these glasse pendants, then liquer into these glasse gunnes.
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The explanation did not satisfy Huygens, who responded a week later. He did not detect any liquid inside the drops.
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A week later again, Margaret reiterated her belief that there was some kind of combustible material inside the drops, but conceded that it might simply be compressed air.
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This exchange of letters is fascinating in itself, both for what it tells us about the involvement of women in seventeenth-century science, and for the additional light it sheds on Sir Constantijn Huygens’s varied and wide- ranging intellectual and artistic interests. It is particularly interesting to note that Prince Rupert’s drops were one of the earliest curious phenomena explored at length experimentally at the Royal Society after the return of the English exiles. On 4 March 1661 ‘glass bubbles’ were produced to a meeting of the Society: ‘The King sent by Sir Paul Neile five little glass bubbles, two with liquor in them, and the other three solid, in order to have the judgement of the society concerning them.’
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Anxious to impress the King (whose active support for the Society was being sought), the members responded immediately. More drops were produced and experimented on two days later, and a full report of the experiments performed was given to the Society at its weekly meeting on 14 August by the President, Sir Robert Moray.
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Two years later Henry Oldenburg, secretary to the Society, lent Moray’s account to the French traveller Balthasar de Monconys, who made his own translation into French of the method described for making the drops.

It was the Society’s curator of experiments Robert Hooke who produced a plausible (and largely correct) explanation for the phenomenon of the glass drops, based on the compression of the glass itself, and drawing an analogy with the way the locked stones in brick arches collapse instantaneously and violently once the keystone is removed.
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Historians of science are generally agreed that it was Prince Rupert (Elizabeth of Bohemia’s son, and a prominent figure at the Restoration court) who brought the drops from mainland Europe, but are undecided as to where they originated. But a common name for the drops was ‘Holland tears’ –
lacrymae Batavicae
– and although the first known discussions of them come from the early scientific academies in France, it is suggested that they were brought to France from Holland in the 1650s.

The exchange of letters between Margaret Cavendish and Constantijn Huygens shows that the drops were indeed known in the Dutch Republic in the 1650s, and were also being discussed in France. But I hope that the story indicates how overdetermined the connections are between the Dutch and the English in the history of ‘Prince Rupert’s drops’, and how many strands there are to the development of a plausible explanation of the causes of the drops’ spectacular properties. In particular, when we find Christiaan Huygens trying to manufacture drops with the help of local craftsmen (they were largely unsuccessful), and investigating their properties in The Hague in 1665, and corresponding about them with Adrien Auzout in Paris, we need to factor into our account his father’s enthusiasm for the same drops almost ten years earlier.

During the 1650s, the elegant, restrained neoclassical style of building cherished by Sir Constantijn Huygens in The Hague, and admired by him in the Rubenshuis in Antwerp, became the familiar backdrop to the complicated lives of exiled Englishmen and women. The Cavendishes’ appreciation of their sumptuous rented home inspired them to remodel their own estate when they returned to England, replacing the late-Elizabethan of Robert Smythson’s designs with more Continental classical influences, and doubtless influenced the architectural views of the many English courtiers and hangers-on who visited the Rubenshuis while they were living there.

The returning English exiles carried their memories of ten years in the stylish material surroundings of Antwerp and the northern Netherlands home with them in 1660. In 1658–59, the exiled Charles II stayed for some time at Frederik Hendrik’s favourite country palace, at Honselaarsdijk, just outside The Hague, while he helped his widowed sister Mary, the Princess Royal, to organise suitable educational arrangements for her eight-year- old son, William III. Following the announcement of his reinstatement as King of England in March 1660, Charles spent four hectic weeks lodged at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, whose design and construction by van Campen Huygens had supervised just before the building of his own elegantly neoclassical house next door – the one he discussed by correspondence with Rubens in Antwerp. It was these buildings which helped shape the architectural aspirations of Charles II’s court in the second half of the seventeenth century.

In this area of culture as in so many others, the Huygens influence permeated the experience of those returning to rebuild lives interrupted by the Civil War and its aftermath. Accustomed to the Dutch architectural aesthetic, it is hardly surprising that in so many of the post-Restoration houses William III visited after his arrival in 1688 the new King should have felt perfectly at home.