Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory

by Lisa Jardine

  As a recent scholarly assessment of Downing’s career perceptively suggests, ‘he did not live a national life’, but rather straddled England and Holland, Europe and America. He was born in Dublin, and educated in Massachusetts. His professional career began in Scotland, where he was Scoutmaster General of the English army – all-purpose intelligence and information gatherer. He was English Resident Ambassador at The Hague under Cromwell’s Commonwealth from 1657 to its demise, and again from the Restoration on and off until the declaration of the third Anglo–Dutch war in 1672, as representative of Charles II. By the 1660s he was a baronet, and by his death in 1683 he was the wealthiest landowner in Cambridgeshire.32

  Downing was clearly not a nice man. Samuel Pepys, who worked for him in the Exchequer office, has left us a colourful picture of an ambitious, avaricious man, who summoned Pepys on the day he was made a baronet to make sure that henceforth he was always addressed by his title. As a former supporter of the Commonwealth, he has gone down in history as the ultimate turncoat, for his kidnapping of two of the regicides in The Hague in 1661 and shipping them back to London, where they were hanged, drawn and quartered for treason. During his two periods of residency as ambassador to The Hague he took his duties as collector of intelligence extremely seriously, employing a network of local spies. He later boasted to Pepys that he had ‘had so good spies, that he hath had the keys taken out of De Witts [the republican head of the Dutch government] pocket when he was a-bed, and his closet opened and papers brought to him and left in his hands for an hour, and carried back and laid in the place again and the keys put in his pocket again’.33

  His intensive surveillance of Dutch affairs, coupled with his early upbringing cheek by jowl with the Dutch settlers in North America, gave Downing an unparalleled insight into the operations of the Dutch republican state – a state he regarded as significantly more efficient and financially buoyant than its English monarchical counterpart. What is of particular interest to us here is the way Downing’s close contact with the Dutch Republic, coupled with his experience as an administrator during the Commonwealth period, led him to advocate explicitly Dutch-derived fiscal measures for the consistently financially embarrassed government of Charles I, in particular a system of taxation which would support an adequate military force to protect the state. ‘Two things coloured and shaped Downing’s approach. The first was his experience of this in the Dutch context. The second was his understanding that this was driven by a Dutch commitment to finance its military endeavours as a matter of priority.’34

  From The Hague, Downing explained to his English correspondents time and again that a precondition for the success of the Dutch VOC and WIC was the States General’s willingness and ability to protect it with military convoys, paid for by the state. The profit and prosperity this produced led in turn to the Dutch being prepared to put up with heavy taxes. ‘It is strange to see,’ Downing reported, ‘with what readiness this people doe consent to extraordinary taxes, although their ordinary taxes be yet great.’ He noted with approval that Dutch finance relied upon excise duties (exacted pro rata on all goods imported through Dutch ports), while keeping customs duties (charged to individuals carrying goods into the Republic and based on discretionary valuation) low. And he encouraged the English administration to adopt a similar strategy.

  Downing’s most important contribution to English fiscal policy, however, was the importation of the underlying principles of state banking that led ultimately to the formation of the Bank of England. The details of this are beyond the scope of this book, but recent academic studies agree that his influence laid important groundwork for reforms introduced after 1688. ‘Downing’s scheme used parliamentary legislation to underwrite loan repayments with the authority of the state (rather than simply of the monarch personally)’. The Earl of Clarendon, historian of this period, and passionate opponent of Downing’s fiscal policies, has left us a clear account of the innovative nature of his new measures:

  Downing […] told them [that] by making the Payment with Interest so certain and fixed, that […] it should be out of any Man’s Power to cause any Money that should be lent Tomorrow to be paid before that which was lent Yesterday […] he would make [the] Exchequer (which was not Bankrupt and without any Credit) the greatest Bank in Europe.35

  ‘All Nations would sooner send their Money into [it],’ Clarendon continued, ‘than into Amsterdam or Genoa or Venice.’ Such an English bank, in other words, would be as powerful and profitable as those of the three most prosperous European republics. The tone of Clarendon’s remarks makes it clear how opposed to such strategies the old Royalists were after the Restoration. But it was Clarendon who fell from office, and Downing who continued to rise, carrying with him his enthusiasm for fiscal reform on a Dutch model.

  Throughout his career – whatever the form of government in England, and whichever political party was in power – Downing worked tirelessly to reform English financial institutions so as to bring them in line with those he regarded as so supremely successful in the United Provinces. He did so in spite of the fact that England was a monarchy, while the United Provinces was a long-established republic. In so doing, he put in place the machinery for the ‘constitutional monarchy’ which would follow the arrival of William III in England in 1688.

  There is, surely, no small irony in the fact that the foundations for modern English banking, to whose rise has been attributed the eventual eclipse of the Dutch in what had once been their area of greatest power and influence in the world, were laid by a man who has gone down in history for his hatred of the Dutch. I use this story to close, as a reminder of the many curious and varied ways of ‘going Dutch’ there were in the course of the seventeenth century – adoptions and assimilations of Dutch ideas and mores, which shaped the fortunes and futures of both the English and Dutch nations.

  Conclusion

  Ibegan my story with an invasion, a violent interruption of the historical narrative of a nation, theatrical, unexpected and disruptive. Yet it was an invasion whose political and cultural consequences were accommodated and smoothed over with extraordinary rapidity, melding the life-worlds of invader and invaded into an unbeatable blend of tough political realism and commercial acumen – with a dose of tolerance thrown in – which within little more than a generation would turn the conquered nation into a great power.

  Because by 1688 England and Holland were already so closely intertwined, culturally, intellectually, dynastically and politically, that the invasion was more like a merger. It had after all been attempted by treaty before, in the 1650s, when the United Provinces took the initiative, and tried to persuade Cromwell that the shared interests of the two nations made a political union obvious. Although that attempt failed – England had all too recently freed itself from the dominion of the Stuarts to be prepared to give up its independence – the idea was revived more than once over the following decades. The two East India Companies (Dutch and English) made several attempts prior to 1688 to bring about a political union which might rationalise their seaborne activities and commercial operations, making them one company under one flag. It was one of the many ironies of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ that William III chose to keep his lucrative English and Dutch maritime enterprises separate and in competition.

  So deep ran the connections between England and Holland in the runup to the invasion that the subsequent merger of dynasties and cultures was almost seamless. Constantijn Huygens junior’s delight, as he recorded Prince William’s enthusiastic welcome from the ‘ordinary folk’ of England, was the delight of recognition:

  Alongside the roads the people had gathered, as on the previous day, women, men, and children alike, all shouting: ‘God bless you’ and waving to us a hundred good wishes. They gave the Prince and his entourage apples, and an old lady was waiting with a bottle of mead and wanted to pour his Highness a glass.

  That, at least, is what I have argued here. I am also of the opinion that in excavating the subterrane
an ties that bound the English and the Dutch in the seventeenth century, I have barely scratched the surface of my subject. Once we discard history’s customary petty nationalism, and survey fields like art, music, science and medicine more broadly, we find ourselves returning again and again to close collaborations between individuals and groups separated (but only sometimes) by the Narrow Sea.

  So I bring this story to a close with a couple of decidedly odd examples of Anglo–Dutch collaboration (as usual, involving that assiduous facilitator Sir Constantijn Huygens, father of the diarist who witnessed the 1688 invasion from start to finish from the Dutch side). They may stand here for all the other unexpected connections I am confident readers will begin to find all around, once they begin to look.

  Between early November 1670 and mid-September 1671, Sir Constantijn Huygens, at the age of seventy-two, was in London with his twenty-year- old charge, Prince William of Orange, attempting to retrieve monies owed to William by his uncle Charles II.1 It was William’s first visit to his mother Mary Stuart’s country of birth. Strictly speaking he travelled as a commoner. He had not yet regained the position of Stadholder of the Low Countries, of which he had been stripped as an infant, following his father’s death in 1650, but now that he had declared himself ‘of age’, complex political manoeuvring by the Orange faction seemed likely to achieve that end.2 As far as Charles II was concerned, his young Dutch relative was a potential bit-part player in his complicated power-brokering negotiations with France and the Dutch Republic: ‘According to the Sommier Verhael [“Summary Relation”] of William’s journey, Charles II had repeatedly kissed his nephew when he arrived in England in early November 1670.’3 The King was particularly insistent that William be treated with all ceremony.

  When the Prince of Orange was to dine with the lord mayor [of London] in [January] 1671, there was much consideration of the seating arrangements; the King was consulted and he gave his ruling on the matter – that the Prince should rank before the mayor. A fifteenth-century precedent was then unearthed which, showing Henry V’s brothers had ceded place to the lord mayor, apparently contradicted Charles’s decision on the matter, but ‘notwithstanding the King kept his first opinion; alledg-ing that forms of Ceremonies were changed in the world since that time; & that those Dukes were the Kings own brothers; yet they were his subjects; which the Prince of Orange was not’.4

  When the City of London refused to give way on the matter, the King simply declined to attend and the dinner was cancelled.

  Still an ‘ordinary’ visitor, though a nephew of the King, William was fortunate to have with him the elder statesman who had served both his father and his grandfather as secretary, and who was as thoroughly conversant with English court ways as Huygens.

  The debts owing to the House of Orange which Huygens undertook to recover included the dowry Charles I had contracted to pay William’s grandfather when William’s father and mother were married (hastily, on the eve of the first English Civil War, in 1642), and substantial sums later advanced to Queen Henrietta Maria for ships and weapons to assist the Royalist cause: ‘The English King owed [William] 2,797,859 guilders, a debt which included the unpaid dowry of his mother, worth 900,000 guilders … From the financial viewpoint William’s journey had little result. The King and his nephew agreed to reduce the debt to 1,800,000 guilders, but the English King again proved to be a bad payer.’5

  Among the Huygens letters in the Royal Collection at The Hague is a copy of the final letter from Charles II to William, who had returned to the Low Countries ahead of his old retainer, written during that residency. It displays real affection for the elderly diplomat, whom the English King has known from boyhood, which is presumably why Huygens carefully kept a copy among his papers:

  I am not a little ashamed that I have delayd Monsieur de Zulichem from time to time with promise of a speedy dispatch, and according to what I haue written to you in my former letters. The funds giuen me by the Parliament haue fallen infinitely short of their first computations which hath disturbed and made almost ineffectuall all my orders; so that it were to abuse you to giue you any of them.

  In spite of Huygens’s best efforts, Charles is evasive about the repayment. But he lets Prince William know that Huygens has been tireless in pursuit of the debt:

  I cannot finish this letter, which I meane to communicate to the bearer before I seal it up, before I lett you know how troublesome a sollicitor he hath been to me, though a most zealous one for you and consequently how worthy he is of the continuance of your esteem and good will.

  Charles writes to William in English, which Huygens spoke and wrote with almost native fluency. In his archive, Huygens heads it in French, the language of the Dutch élite. The exchange is clear evidence of Stuart– Orange understanding at a ‘family’ or domestic level, and of Huygens’s pivotal role in crafting that relationship, vital to William’s national and international political future.

  The money, as I said, was never forthcoming (Charles II rarely settled his debts, and the 1670s were a particularly parlous time for his exchequer), but the sentiments expressed by the Stuart King towards Huygens may be taken to be sincere. Since the long-term result of this visit was the marriage alliance between James, Duke of York’s daughter Mary (Charles’s niece) and William, the anglophile Huygens’s negotiations and bridge-building between the House of Orange and the Stuarts may be judged to have been a success overall. Indeed, I want to argue that Huygens’s activities on either side of the Narrow Sea represent a version of Anglo–Dutch intellectual, cultural and political accord in the seventeenth century which, whilst unfamiliar, actually sums up the age.

  Recently, I came across another piece of epistolary evidence for the way the unexpected closeness of Anglo–Dutch accord – the almost cosy personal relations between William’s circle and the Stuart court – had (or in this case, almost had) remarkable historical consequences, leeching away the national protocols separating English affairs from Dutch.

  While in London, in December 1670, and presumably following an unrecorded face-to-face encounter, Huygens wrote (in English) to Sir Christopher Wren, the Royal Surveyor, responsible for the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire, as follows:

  The King hath been pleased to keepe a copie of this poor project, and would doe me this morning the honour to commend it with the character of ‘a very good paper’. If it doe but chance to pass for half so good in your liking, Sir, I will hold my paines happily bestowed. I pray you to peruse it, that we may have occasion to conferre about [it], while I am here.6

  No further mention of this ‘project’ is to be found in the Huygens archives around this date, but in February 1678 there is a further, clarifying reference, this time in a letter in French to Monsieur Oudart:

  It matters little whether my inscriptions have been used for the Column or not. I remain extremely well satisfied that so distinguished a person as Monsieur the Surveyor [Wren] found them to be to his taste, to the point that he produced them to the City officials, and thereby demonstrated to them my good will towards their great and most noble City. I beg you to assure that most excellent personage of my boundless esteem for his great talent and my most ardent affection in his service.7

  So, remarkably, the ‘poor project’ which both Wren and Charles II, according to Huygens, found so much to their taste was a set of proposed inscriptions for the plinth of the Monument to the Great Fire.

  Sure enough, if we trawl through Constantijn Huygens’s literary works for this period (he was a prolific writer of poetry in four or five languages), there we find two draft Latin inscriptions composed by Huygens in 1670 for this purpose. The second of these concludes: ‘Lignea consumpta es, surgis de marmore: tanti,/O bona, Phoenicem te perijsse fuit./Urbis an exustae clades. dubitabitur olim,/An restauratae gloria maior erat’ (In wooden form you have been consumed [by fire], you are resurrected in marble… etc.).8

  The Prince of Orange’s arrival in London in late 1670 followed awkwardly on the he
els of Charles II’s signing of the secret Treaty of Dover with Louis XIV against the Dutch, in June of that year. Strictly speaking, England and Holland were on the brink of war (the third Anglo–Dutch war was eventually declared following France’s invasion of Holland two years later). Yet here is William’s most senior adviser, closely involved in discussions with the English King and his Royal Surveyor concerning Dutch involvement in the memorial to England’s most recent national calamity.

  Neither Huygens’s commemorative inscription, nor remarkably similar ones which Wren himself proposed, were in the end used.9 On 4 October 1677 the Court of Aldermen of the City of London minuted their final decision as to the inscriptions:

  This Court doth desire Dr Gale Master of the Schoole of St Paul to consider and devise a fitting inscription to be set on the new Pillar at Fishstreet Hill, and to consult therein with Sr Christopher Wren Knt his Matie’s Surveyor Generall and Mr Hooke And then to present the same unto this court.10

  ‘Within three weeks of the first meeting of the inscription committee, the Court of Aldermen, having heard from the lord mayor that Charles II had “very well approved” the inscriptions’ drafts, decreed that the inscriptions be carved “forthwith”. On October 25, the Court rewarded Gale with “a handsome peice [sic] of plate”.’11

  In addition to his reputation as a cultivated diplomat, a man of good taste and a considerable musician, Huygens was renowned, particularly in his native Holland, as an accomplished poet in Latin, Dutch, French, English and Italian. The lines he had suggested and crafted for the as yet unbuilt Monument, the construction of which was indeed being widely discussed during the period of his 1670 stay in London,12 were not the first he had been encouraged to propose for an internationally famous memorial. Indeed, in all likelihood it was his poetic involvement in an earlier memorial project which had led to the subject of the Monument inscription becoming a topic of conversation at the English court.