Lisa Jardine - Going Dutch: How England Plundered Hollands 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 faence, lace and tableware, permeated the European sensibility and beyond it, the sensibilities of those settling new lands across the ocean (faence 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 fathers family arrived in London from Poland via Germany in 1920 economic migrants in search of a new life. My mothers 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 mothers 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?