John Adamson
RULED BY AN ORANGE
Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory
By Lisa Jardine (HarperPress 406pp £25)

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Of all the ties which seventeenth-century England had with other nations, none involved so volatile a mix of amity and irritation, admiration and jealousy, religious kinship and deadly commercial rivalry as that with the Dutch. If much in this mix was muddled and paradoxical, at least the reasons for amity were generally clear. In an age when confessional allegiance, Catholic or Protestant, dominated Europe's alliance-system, it was in England's interests to see that this flat, damp, prosperous and strategically vital strip of Europe's north-western coast remained firmly in Protestant hands.

But the bonds with the Dutch Republic were secured by more than just strategic self-interest. They were reinforced by a common culture which, as Lisa Jardine reveals in Going Dutch, constituted a series of intimate connections and took an astonishingly diverse variety of forms. As with any relationship, of course, intimacy did not necessarily make for easeful or harmonious coexistence. With cultural emulation went emulation of a different kind: commercial rivalry and a struggle for dominance of global maritime trade. That, in turn, set England and the Dutch Republic on a naval arms race which, from the middle of the seventeenth century, led periodically to open war. The Dutch were embroiled in armed conflict with England in the 1650s, 1660s and 1670s. And in the 1680s (at least as viewed by the Dutch), they launched their most audacious and successful assault - a full-scale invasion involving an armada of 500 ships, an army of 20,000 men, and a further 20,000 mariners and ancillary staff - which succeeded in placing the Dutch Stadhouder, the Republic's elected chief magistrate, unresisted on the English throne.

Professor Jardine's impressive and at times provocative new book takes that Dutch invasion - more familiar to English readers as the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688 - as the starting-point for her investigations. She challenges the received assumption that this was an essentially English coup d'état, effected with just a little help from our cross-Channel friends. Instead, she places it squarely in a context of European diplomacy (an interpretation pioneered by Jonathan Israel, the current doyen of Anglo-Dutch historiography), pointing out that the success of William's invasion depended at least as much on the Protestant Elector of Brandenburg's offer to defend the Dutch borders against the French while William took his armies to England, as it did on the luck of that famous easterly wind - the providential 'Protestant wind' - that blew the Dutch fleet safely to its landfall in Torbay. At the time, no one was in any doubt that this was a foreign invasion of England. William occupied London with his army and, until the spring of 1690, English regiments were not allowed within twenty miles of the capital.

What needs to be explained, Jardine contends, is England's subsequent collective act of 'amnesia': how so great a foreign irruption into the political and cultural life of England came so quickly to be accepted as a cleverly English coup, in which Whig defenders of liberty got the Dutch to do their (and God's) bidding. The Dutchness of this 'revolution' - and certainly the extent to which it was backed by a foreign invasion force of massive size - has been all but erased from English historical recollection. How was this trick of memory effected?

The answer, she suggests, lies partly in the effectiveness (and, no less, the tactfulness) of William's propaganda machine. But far more importantly, it lies in the extensive 'back story' of cultural interactions between England and the Dutch Republic, or what she terms 'an ongoing to-and-fro exchange of ideas, influence and taste between the [Netherlands] and England throughout the seventeenth century'. This made the Dutch, pre-eminently among the European nations, our cultural kin. Those interactions also turned the Republic's first family - the parvenu and uppity House of Orange ('mere' princes, and non-royal princes at that) - into the Stuarts' real kin, as Charles I and James II each married daughters (with varying degrees of reluctance) to scions of this upwardly mobile princely clan.

As an explorer in these luxuriant groves of Anglo-Dutch culture, Jardine is in her element, and she recounts her findings with enthusiastic élan. Some, of course, are already well known. In the visual arts, for example, Dutch painters - among them Michiel van Mierevelt, Gerrit van Honthorst, Adriaen Hanneman, Pieter Lely - have long been recognised as a decisive influence in seventeenth-century England, particularly in the context of portraiture. In other hands, this might have been simply a parade of the usual suspects. The originality of Jardine's account lies in her ability to make connections between such familiar areas as the visual arts and areas that are rather less well known: among them, clock-making (a science with major naval and hence commercial applications), medicine, gem-dealing, and - most extensively in its treatment here - the matter of garden design, exemplified most spectacularly by the 'Dutch' garden created at Wilton by Isaac de Caus in the 1630s for the 4th Earl of Pembroke, Lord Chamberlain to Charles I. (In 1688, William III allowed himself a sight-seeing break in his march from Torbay to London so as to see its glories at first hand.)

To impose order on what might otherwise have become a shapeless tangle of ideas, Jardine illustrates these interconnections through the experiences of one of those industrious, well-educated and hyper-talented burgher families with which the Republic was so well endowed, the Huygens. From the 1620s through to the end of the century, they served their Stadhouders as secretaries and diplomats, dabbled in science and the arts, and, happily for the historian, left a mass of letters and private journals that document the extensiveness of their contacts with England.

This choice of the Huygens as the principal witnesses to the process of cultural exchange brings many benefits. And in exemplifying cultural change so concretely, in real lives and real people memorably delineated, Jardine's skills as a writer are prominently to the fore.

But this choice also incurs one or two significant costs. The first is one of chronological range and relevance. The bulk of the Huygens material dates from the mid to late seventeenth century, with the result that the 'back story' to 1688 offered here rarely takes us back much beyond the 1630s. Yet the histories of England and the Netherlands were entwined even more tightly, and arguably more amicably, in the half century before 1630, for much of which both nations were involved as allies in a prolonged, on-again-off-again war for the Dutch Republic's survival against its former territorial overlord, Habsburg Spain.

There is also the problem of the sheer multiplicity of points of interchange between the English and Dutch. Here, too, the concerns of the Huygens family broadly define (and, it must be said, make manageable) the agenda: hence the predominance of such 'high-cultural' concerns as garden design, science and painting. Missing from the list are a host of other, arguably more influential, modes of contact whereby Dutch ideas, practices and ways of viewing the world seeped into the consciousness and habits of the English. One thinks of military service, which brought tens of thousands of English officers and men to the Netherlands, between the 1580s and the 1640s, to defend the Republic against its 'papist' foes; of education, where the eminence and (in relative terms) intellectual freedom of universities such as Leiden brought hundreds of English gentlemen, either as a supplement or an alternative to the option of study in Oxford, Cambridge and the Inns of Court; and of religion, where Holland's intra-Calvinist disputes during the first two decades of the century prefigured, and profoundly influenced, England's theological controversies of the 1620s and 1630s. One thinks, too, of the realm of political thought, where - to cite but one example - the writings of the great Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius provoked and engaged some of England's finest legal minds in the 1630s (among them Selden's), and were cited in the 1640s in defence of the Parliamentarians' efforts to create a princely republic of their own. (In a revealing aside, the Venetian ambassador once remarked that the English were dangerously attracted to 'Holland's forms of government'.)

At one point, Lisa Jardine remarks that her book has merely 'scratched the surface' of her chosen subject. This is unduly modest: in fact, it digs far deeper and unearths far more - with Jardine's now familiar literary panache - than this recusatio would suggest. That there is more yet to be uncovered is not a criticism of this book, but testimony to the extraordinary breadth, richness and complexity of the terrain its author has mapped out and made her own.

John Adamson is a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. His new book, 'The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I', is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.