English National Identity and the Image of the Dutch: From the Armada to the Glorious Revolution 3031429109, 9783031429101

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EARLY MODERN LITERATURE IN HISTORY

English National Identity and the Image of the Dutch From the Armada to the Glorious Revolution Andrew Fleck

Early Modern Literature in History

Series Editors Andrew Hadfield, School of English, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK Michelle O’Callaghan, University of Reading, Oxford, UK

Within the period 1520–1740, this large, very well-established series with notable international representation discusses many kinds of writing, both within and outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different theoretical perspectives, but they share an historical awareness and an interest in seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive cultures. This series is approaching a hundred titles on a variety of subjects including early modern women’s writing; domestic politics; drama, performance and playhouses; rhetoric; religious conversion; translation; travel and colonial writing; popular culture; the law; authorship; diplomacy; the court; material culture; childhood; piracy; and the environment.

Andrew Fleck

English National Identity and the Image of the Dutch From the Armada to the Glorious Revolution

Andrew Fleck The University of Texas El Paso, TX, USA

ISSN 2634-5919 ISSN 2634-5927 (electronic) Early Modern Literature in History ISBN 978-3-031-42909-5 ISBN 978-3-031-42910-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42910-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Historic Images/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgments

It is a great pleasure to thank the family, friends, colleagues, and institutions that made it possible for me to complete this book. Time and financial support make sustained thinking and writing possible and I am grateful for the Folger Shakespeare Library’s fellowship support at a critical juncture, to the Fulbright Program for a fellowship making it possible for me to work in Dutch archives, to the National Endowment for the Humanities for summer seminars and institutes in which I found time to write, and to San José State University and the University of Texas at El Paso for sabbatical and research leaves. I have used the collections of too many university libraries to count and I am grateful for the academic community that opens its doors to researchers. That generous spirit is alive and well in the dozens of archives I visited across the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and the United States; I particularly want to thank the Huntington Library for providing a friendly haven ever since I was a graduate student. I have been very fortunate to have the guidance of Claire McEachern, Lori Anne Ferrell, and Constance Jordan at the early stages of this work and I hope they will approve of this version. Three other teachers I want to thank include Debora Shuger, Phil Soergel, and Jeff Coray. Old grad school friends Ambereen Dadabhoy, Kathryn DeZur, Atsuhiko Hirota, and Michael Winkelman have always asked tactfully about my project. Ton Broos taught me to read and speak Dutch and I learned a great deal about translation from my old friend John Eyck; I take responsibility for any mistakes v

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here. I am grateful to the many colleagues who have become friends with an interest in this project over the years. I worry that in naming them I may leave someone out, but I especially want to thank Nigel Smith, Ton Hoenselaars, Susannah Brietz Monta, Tim Harris, Helmer Helmers, Katrina Vandenberg, Kent Cartwright, Paul E. J. Hammer, John Garrison, Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen, Jerry Passannante, Zachary Lesser, Rebecca Lemon, Sjoerd Levelt, Peter Herman, Paul Sellin, Kristen Bennett, Owen Williams, Vimala Pasupathi, Martine van Elk, Aaron Pratt, Kristine Steenbergh, John Gallagher, Marjorie Rubright, Curtis Perry, Kevin Sharpe, Lloyd Kermode, Liz L’Estrange, Liesbeth Corens, David Cressy, and Douglas Brooks for encouragement, advice, and helpful criticism of my work. At the press, Eileen Srebernik and Supraja Yegnaraman have been unfailingly helpful and efficient and I appreciate their assistance. I also appreciate the curiosity of my friends, especially Matt McDonough, John Carlson, and Jim Sparaco, about this project. My parents, Raymond and Dorothy, have been careful readers of my work from the start, and my brother Casey and his family, Grace and Holden, have been generous and supportive all along the way. My clever and kind children, Aidan and Julian, have been very patient when I needed to work and impatient when I needed a break. I dedicate this book to Barbara. I have written and deleted enough words in her praise to fill volumes, but in this dedication I retreat to a dialogue of one. I thank the publishers who granted permission to use material that has previously appeared. Parts of chapter 5 appeared in my essay “Vulgar Fingers of the Multitude: Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Transformation of News from the Low Countries,” Shakespeare Yearbook 15 (2005): 89– 112. A section of chapter 3 includes material from my essay “Marking Difference and National Identity in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” Copyright © 2006 William Marsh Rice University. This article first appeared in SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, Volume 46, Number 2 (Spring 2006): 349–370. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Contents

1

Introduction: Dutch Industry and English Identity

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Rescuing the Widow Belge: Chivalry in the Construction of Elizabethan Englishness Justifying the Dutch Revolt: Theories of Contract and Resistance “Of Puissant Nations”: The English Nation in Spenser’s Legend of Justice “Widowes ayd:” Divine Justice for Defenseless Women “Euerlasting Praise”: Arthur’s Glorious Intervention “To Sustaine So Great a Burden:” When Equity Enables Rebellion

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1 27 30 42 48 55 60 67

Wooing in English: Staging the Dutch in English Comedy “Look Upon the Nations, Sects, and Factions”: Negotiating Difference Negating and Negotiating the Dutch: Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday Separation Anxiety: English Obligations to the Dutch Family Dutch Sects and English Sex Coda: The Alchemist

83 98 117 128

These Factions and Schisms: Countering Absolutist Thought in Church and State A Decade of Troubles: Fissures in the United Provinces

133 138

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CONTENTS

England’s Arminian Problem and the Synod of Dort Freedom of the Will: Arminian Difficulties in Barnavelt Jacobean Conflict and the English Polity “Government New Setled”: Barnavelt’s Politics Fathers of the Republic or Father of the Empire Metadrama, Censorship, and the Marginal Castigations 5

6

7

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England’s Thirst for News: Dutch News and the English Public Sphere Making and Marring News in Early Modern England Translated Out of the Netherlands: Dutch Periodical News and the English Public Sphere Debating and Dividing Trade: Understanding Dutch Violence in the English Public Sphere News of a Massacre: Manipulating the English and Dutch Publics Plays on Amboyna and the Public Rome and Carthage: Figuring the Anglo-Dutch Wars Rome and Carthage: Two Republics Alike in Dignity The Painter and the Poet Dare: Compliment and Satire in the Second Anglo-Dutch War Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Third Anglo-Dutch War

144 149 154 159 166 177 185 190 196 204 208 217 227 232 247 270

The New Black Legend: England’s Violent Colonial Competition with the Dutch Fond Credulity: Dryden’s Edenic Amboyna Historiography and Nostalgia Surinamese Sugar in Oroonoko The Colonial Facts of Life in Oroonoko Dutch Colonial Violence and English Trauma

279 285 294 298 305 315

Conclusion: Willem the English Hero

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Index

325

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2

Fig. 6.1

Hans Collaert, Belgicae Delaceratae Lamentatio (1577). Image courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Image of the reverse side of the Dutch Arch in Conraet Jansen’s Beschryvinghe vande heerlijcke arcus triumphal ofte eere-poorte vande Nederlandsche natie, opgherecht in Londen. Image used by permission of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België Claes Jansz. Visscher’s engraving, Ivstitie aen Ian van Oldenbarnevelt geschiet, 1619. Image courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Title page of Abraham Verhoeven’s coranto, Verhael hoe ende in wat manieren den heere M. Johan Van Olden-Barneveldt advocaet van Hollandt ende West-Vrieslant is Onthalst gheworden (Antwerpen, 1619). Used by permission of Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp—UNESCO, World Heritage (call number R 47.25) Woodcut from A Trve Relation of the Vnivst, Crvell, and Barbarovs Proceedings against the English at Amboyna. Image used by permission of the Newberry Library, Chicago Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, The Continence of Scipio (1659). Philadelphia Museum of Art: Purchased with the George W. Elkins Fund, 1981, E1981-1-1

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 6.2

Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 7.1

Peter Lely, Flagmen of Lowestoft: Admiral Sir John Harman (1666). (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London) Willem van de Velde the Elder, Episode uit de Vierdaagse Zeeslag (1668). Image courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Abraham Storck, The Four Days’ Battle (© The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) Charles de Rochefort, “La Figure des Moulins á Sucre,” Histoire naturelle et morale des iles Antilles de l’Amerique (Rotterdam, 1665) plate between pp. 332–333. Call #: F2001. R6 1665 Cage. Digital Image File Name: 8020. Folger Shakespeare Library

260 261 261

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Dutch Industry and English Identity

At two key moments in its history, as England stood on the verge of fundamental transformations, John Milton called on his fellow Englishmen to seize the opportunity before them, to secure their civil and ecclesiastical liberties, and to create a new English nation. In the winter of 1649, England executed its hereditary monarch; in the winter of 1660, England contemplated inviting that monarch’s son to take up his father’s crown. Justifying the regicide, Milton praises the vigorous exercise of the “liberty and right of freeborn Men” of England to act decisively against threats to their nation, even the despotic attempt of a “King of England to govern us tyrannically.”1 Eleven years later, Milton exhorts the English once again to exercise their “active vertue and industrie” in order to make this idealized nation into a reality.2 He trumpets England’s initial success in “turning regal-bondage into a free Commonwealth,” exemplifying the heroism of a freeborn people “to the admiration and terror of our neighbors” (7:356). At these turning points, as he imagines an exemplary English nation that others will imitate, Milton pursues an opportunistic strategy that modulates between claims of priority and 1 All references are to Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953). “Tenure of Kings and Magistrates,” 3: 206, 214. 2 “Readie & Easie Way,” 7: 362.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Fleck, English National Identity and the Image of the Dutch, Early Modern Literature in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42910-1_1

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deference to precedent. He celebrates England’s unique greatness even as he needs to measure his nation against others. And at both points of inflection, Milton turns to the Dutch as a foil. Milton, like many Englishmen, had encountered the Dutch in diverse contexts. He met Hugo Grotius, one of the leading Dutch intellectuals of the early seventeenth century, and felt the influence of other Dutch writers, notably Daniel Heinsius. Although he never took up arms in the cause of the Dutch Revolt, as had Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and scores of Elizabethan and Jacobean poets and playwrights, Milton did interact with the Dutch Republic’s veteran diplomats—Adrian Pauw, Jan van Vliet, and others—during the First Anglo-Dutch War and he knew about the complex political structures of the United Provinces. Milton did not study medicine or theology at Dutch universities in Leiden or Franeker, as many other Englishmen had, nor did he exchange scientific speculations with Dutch mathematicians, natural philosophers, or inventors, as had some of his English acquaintances, but he did learn some Dutch from Roger Williams, who spoke the language with Dutch colonists in North America.3 Milton did not deal directly with Dutch merchants, but skilled Dutch weavers and artisans resided in several English urban centers and Milton knew the importance of Dutch markets for English textiles and other goods. And while his theology remains notoriously idiosyncratic, Milton did grapple with the views associated with the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, as had many of his English peers. In early modern England, the fabric of everyday life included many threads spun in the Low Countries. Milton’s interest in the Dutch as a complementary example to his ideal of Englishness permeates his revolutionary prose. The Dutch are there in Milton’s history of Reformation. The English had been granted “this grace and honour from God to bee the first that should set up a Standard” in the cause of reform, but they had regrettably failed to pursue that course to its conclusion.4 Suffering under a corrupt episcopacy, the English spurn natural allies, like the Protestant Dutch Republic, 3 Esther van Reemsdonk shows that Milton could have learned some Dutch, though no evidence shows that he spoke the language. Milton, Marvell, and the Dutch Republic (London: Routledge, 2021), 27. 4 “Of Reformation,” 1: 525. For David Loewenstein, Milton’s prose reflects “enormous expectations for national renewal and reform” in the 1640s. “Milton’s Nationalism and the English Revolution: Strains and Contradictions,” in Early Modern Nationalism

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“whom we ought to love” but who have been “often dismist with distastfull answers, and somtimes unfriendly actions” (1:586–7). The Dutch are there again when Milton expects Parliament to embrace the nation’s historical role as God’s chosen people. He boasts that England has “this honour vouchsaft from Heav’n, to give out reformation to the World,” as it had done in the case of “the Northumbrian Willibrode,” the English missionary saint who converted the Low Countries in the eighth century.5 In the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates , Milton uses the Dutch Republic—which had secured its independence a year before, after decades of warfare against the Habsburgs—as a powerful historical precedent for the English decision to rouse their own “fortitude and Heroick vertue” and to “remove, not only the calamities and thraldoms of a People, but the roots and causes whence they spring” by bringing their monarch to justice (3:191). When the pioneering Dutch “abjured all obedience and subjection” to the Spanish king and declared “that by his tyrannous government against faith so many times giv’n & brok’n he had lost his right to all the Belgic Provinces,” they had reaped many blessings, among them that “no State or Kingdom in the world hath equally prosperd” in the previous eighty years (3:226–7). Throughout his efforts to encourage his fellow English readers to gird their loins, to grasp the opportunity for transformation that presented itself, and to make an England that would exemplify the ideal nation, Milton turns to the example of the United Provinces of the Netherlands—a prosperous, Protestant republic that had broken the religious and political shackles of Rome and Madrid—as worthy of consideration, if not emulation. Although the Dutch Republic provided a ready example of a nation striving for greatness, Milton did not embrace it unequivocally. The Dutch had rid themselves of their king, but in the 1640s, they remained under the sway of the house of Orange-Nassau. The ambitious Orange stadholders—especially after a dynastic marriage with the Stuarts—had

and Milton’s England, ed. David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 25. 5 “Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce,” 2: 231.

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violated the official neutrality of the United Provinces to assist Royalists against Parliament.6 Milton thus hedged his praise of Dutch political virtue when he turned from his English audience to caution the Dutch to mind their own business: “let them remember not to look with an evil and prejudicial eye upon their Neighbours walking by the same rule” in abjuring the Stuart tyrant (3:227).7 This ambivalent treatment of the Dutch embodies the quintessential double move of those who promote national fervor, the “coordinate, mutually constituted negative and positive maneuvers” that Elizabeth Sauer identifies in some of Milton’s later meditations on the English nation.8 As he gestures to the example of the United Provinces to make his case against the capricious Presbyterians, Milton simultaneously warns the hypocritical Dutch not to prevent England from embarking on the same course of action they had pursued only a generation earlier. Eleven years later, as the English decided to take the retrograde step of embracing their its “once abjur’d and detested thraldom of kingship,” a “degenerate corruption” of their national ideal, Milton again ambivalently invokes the Dutch as a model that England could eclipse (7:356–7). Conscious that turning back from the work of completing the reformation of the nation’s political and religious orders would make England the object of “the common laughter of Europ,” Milton claims that a comparison with the Dutch Republic would make England’s

6 Simon Adams, “The House of Orange and the House of Stuart, 1639–1650: A Revision,” Historical Journal 34 (1991), 967. Lisa Jardine highlights the Oranges’ pretentions to royalty through this marriage into the Stuart line. Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory (London: HarperCollins, 2008), 67. 7 Helmer Helmers demonstrates the United Provinces’ overwhelming sympathy for the Stuart cause. The Royalist Republic: Literature, Politics, and Religion in the Anglo-Dutch Public Sphere, 1639–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 2. 8 Elizabeth Sauer, “Milton’s Of True Religion, Protestant Nationhood, and the Nego-

tiation of Liberty,” Milton Quarterly 40 (2006), 11. Although he focuses on the early Interregnum context and tilts toward the Scots point of the “triangular matrix,” John Kerrigan dissects some of the complex ways that the Dutch figured in Milton’s nationalist writing. Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 222.

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abortive experiment even more risible.9 The restoration of the old religious and secular authorities “must needs redound the more to our shame,” Milton laments, “if we but look on our neighbours the United Provinces, to us inferior in all outward advantages: who notwithstanding, in the midst of greater difficulties, couragiously, wisely, constantly went through the same work, and are settl’d in all the happie injoiments of a potent and flourishing Republick to this day” (7:357). Milton recalls the early modern commonplace that the Dutch, endowed with fewer resources than England, had achieved much more than the nascent English republic. He casts the Dutch Republic as simultaneously exemplary and imperfect, urging the English to model themselves on the prosperous, reformed Dutch Republic even as he spurs them to perfect the Dutch example. The English stand at an important crossroads in their history, Milton continues, and must pursue the arduous path of strenuous liberty and self-reliance, renewing the English national ideal. Ultimately, Milton’s warnings went unheeded, the moment passed, and England remade itself again, turning away from its republican interlude. Three decades later, however, England would turn to the Dutch once again as it refashioned itself in the Glorious Revolution. English National Identity and the Image of the Dutch shows that many in early modern England understood their nation by thinking about the Dutch. Milton’s shaping of these two moments of inflection, as the English nation changed course and simultaneously changed the meaning of “Englishness,” points to the artifice and contingency of national identity. Nations do not enjoy an objective, fixed essence and the early modern period witnessed a renegotiation of the dynamic, mercurial meaning of “England.”10 Some English writers fashioned their national identity by

9 Paul Stevens, who rightly considers Milton’s nationalism beyond doubt, argues that

these sentiments become more pronounced, depending on the extent to which the polemicist felt a danger for his nation. “Nationalism’s Double-Bind: Individualism and the Global Implications of Milton’s Nationalism,” Milton Studies 63.1 (2021), 53. 10 Ernest Gellner usefully reminds us that unlike the pernicious ideology of nationalism, “Nations, as a natural, God-given way of classifying men... are a myth,” an imagined form of collective identification. Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 48–9. Throughout this book, I use Benedict Anderson’s influential definition of the “nation” as “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 6. Eric Hobsbawm argues that national identity “can change and shift in time.” Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme,

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celebrating supposedly native traits.11 Other English writers expressed their sense of their nation by marginalizing the Welsh, the Irish, and the Scots.12 Still others articulated a national identity in explicating the stark differences between the English and foreigners: the Spanish, the French, or people in the distant lands of the Middle East, the Americas, and Asia.13 They did not always resort to xenophobia in articulating their difference from others.14 A sharper picture of Englishness comes into Myth, Reality, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Canto, 1992), 11. Gellner, Anderson, and Hobsbawm locate the birth of nations in the nineteenth century, after nationalism became a widespread ideology, but each sees in England an early exception. In Andrew Hadfield’s view, early modern England’s refusal of the papacy’s international authority put “greater pressure than there had been immediately before on the importance of defining identity as national.” Literature, Politics, and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 9. Claire McEachern expands on this idea and argues that the Church of England and its dedication to England’s political independence helped to shape early modern English identity. “Literature and National Identity,” New Cambridge History of Early Modern Literature, ed. David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 327–8. 11 The most influential treatment of this phenomenon remains Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 5. 12 Many critics have responded to John Pocock’s call for more nuance in the study of the Atlantic Archipelago. “British Identity: A Plea for a New Subject,” Journal of Modern History 47 (1995): 601–21. Philip Schwyzer argues that a “British nationalism” occluded and appropriated the aspirations of others, particularly the Welsh. Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 7. Colin Kidd argues that the different populations of the archipelago traced their close kinship, even as they occasionally drew fine distinctions, especially as they disagreed over whether to anchor political institutions in ethnic or territorial claims. British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 62, 87. Kerrigan argues that English identity emerged in contrast with others on the islands. Archipelagic English, 41. 13 In Linda Colley’s memorable phrase, “men and women decide who they are by

reference to who or what they are not.” Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707 –1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 6. 14 Lloyd Kermode argues that Elizabethans imagined Englishness “not by resistance and antithesis alone, but by absorption and similitude” as well. Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 9. Scott Oldberg finds a kind of multiculturalism that “accommodate[s] the presence of immigrants” in contested visions of England’s national identity, but concedes that the xenophobic English “maintained a fairly narrow view of social and economic relations” that subordinated aliens to English interests. Alien Albion: Literature and Immigration in Early Modern England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 5, 12. In her analysis of “proximate relations” in early modern English theater’s semiotics of Dutchness, Marjorie Rubright

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focus when we examine how English writers like Milton imagined their nation by writing about their liberal, Protestant neighbors, the Dutch. The English could find much to admire and emulate, much to fear and to shun, and much in common in the Republic of the United Provinces of the Netherlands. The Dutch Republic had itself emerged as a nation in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.15 Frustrated by Philip II’s reign from distant Madrid, uneasily taking common cause with the Protestant currents that swept through Europe in the sixteenth century, and responding to the changing economic situation of displaced capital, especially from the southern Low Countries, and new opportunities for global trade, the Dutch Republic had gradually acquired independence, a tolerant Protestant public sphere, great commercial prosperity, and a national identity to encompass these successes.16 The image on the cover of English National Identity and the Image of the Dutch, a version of the Leo Belgicus or Nederlantschen Leeuw, embodies some of the ambiguities of Dutch pride in their emergent nation. The zoomorphic representation of the seventeen provinces of the Low Countries as a rampant lion grew in popularity during the Revolt. The cover image dates from the 1650 state of Joannes van Doetecum’s engraving of this theme, modified by Claes Jansz Visscher to celebrate the independence the Dutch Republic achieved in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. In its optimistic 1598 original, the engraving imagines the seventeen provinces united in resistance to the Habsburgs. Visscher’s version idealizes a glorious national history papering over a present reality in which only seven rebellious provinces gained their independence. And, as I argue throughout this book, the image uses one country to frame the other. Here, the Dutch lion’s tail points to England’s eastern coast and van Doetecum includes the English

focuses on “the movement between differentiation and similitude in the construction of English ethnicity.” Doppelgänger Dilemmas: Anglo-Dutch Relations in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 25. 15 Philip S. Gorski treats the paradoxes of the emergent Dutch nation in The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Jonathan Israel provides the most thorough modern history of the Revolt. The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). 16 For Judith Pollmann, the temporary respite created by the Dutch truce with the Habsburgs in 1609 ultimately strengthened the national identity of the Dutch as different from their brethren who remained loyal to Madrid. Catholic Identity and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1520–1635 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 185.

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towns of Norwich, Ipswich, and Colchester where many Dutch weavers migrated during the Revolt. The image also depicts Robert Dudley, briefly an English Governor-General of the United Provinces, on its margins. Similarly, through the “device” of representing the Dutch, the English created a mirror in which they sometimes caught distorted glimpses of themselves.17 The English sometimes defined themselves in contrast to the Dutch, sometimes recalled their common interests, and sometimes envied and simultaneously eschewed traits they associated with the Dutch. The century between the Spanish Armada and the Glorious Revolution delimits a crucial period of self-definition in England. After the miraculous victory of 1588, the English imagined themselves as the great champions of Reformed Christianity, supporting their dependent Dutch co-religionists against Spanish, Catholic tyranny. A hundred years later, the English would imagine themselves as depending on the Dutch for deliverance from another exotic, Catholic tyranny.18 As they engaged in an emulative rivalry, a desire simultaneously to follow and surpass their friendly competitors, the Dutch helped set in motion the emergence of England’s national identity over the course of the century. Within this period, England responded to the Dutch in complex, dynamic ways. The Dutch were usually England’s surest allies, and yet England fought three mid-century wars with the United Provinces. The Dutch were one of England’s closest trading partners—in addition to their interdependence in textile manufacture and rivalry in North Sea fishing, both had an interest in contesting Iberian control over commerce in Asia and in the Americas—yet competition between English and Dutch merchants erupted into violent conflicts both in the Narrow Seas separating the two nations and in Amboyna and Surinam, distant outposts in an expanding global marketplace. Religious refugees from each nation found safe havens with the other—the Dutch Protestant community at Austin Friars was the largest foreign church in England; Marian exiles, 17 Marchamont Nedham uses the phrase “Dutch device” to characterize hypocrisy in A Short History of the English Rebellion (London, 1661), 2. 18 A few weeks before William of Orange landed in Torbay, John Evelyn would record that the people “long for & desire the landing of that Prince, whom they looked on as their deliverer from popish Tyrannie.” The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), 600 (7 October 1688). Steve Pincus argues that James II intended to remake England with the model of Catholic absolutism in mind, while the vast majority in England resisted that model in favor of the modernizing example of the Dutch. 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 7.

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disaffected Elizabethan Catholics, Brownists, and the pilgrims destined for Plymouth Rock weathered the storms of domestic persecution by fleeing to the Low Countries—yet Dutch religious toleration caused friction, jealousy, and resentment among many in England.19 And the political systems in each nation posed challenges for the other. The English had an interest in promoting the expulsion of Spanish tyrants on the northwest coast of Europe and keeping hostile interests from dominating the opposite side of the Channel, yet many in England felt uneasy about replacing a monarchy with the Dutch republican system. In English National Identity and the Image of the Dutch, I show that these erratic trajectories of convergence and separation heated the crucible that refined English identity as a liberal, Protestant, commercial nation. At the beginning of the period, the English might seem to have shared with the Dutch a broader Protestant interest transcending national interests. The subsequent decline of the external threat of Spain, however, revealed their superficial common cause to be simply Hispanophobia and exposed the national interests of England at odds with those of their Dutch neighbors. Focusing on the emulative rivalry of the English and the Dutch, I argue, reveals the processes of creating national identity in early modern England. In the last few years, scholars have revised two key, related concepts of social formation necessary for understanding early modern national identity: theories of the nation and of the public sphere. In the first case, the accepted history of “the nation”—that the development of nationalisms and nations follows the revolutions in America and France, linked with developments in print capitalism—has come under sustained pressure.20 While many historians once focused on the national movements in conflict with the large polities in central and eastern Europe, Liah Greenfeld locates the origin of national formations in the sixteenth-century England. She argues that “[b]efore nationalism was a cause of certain 19 Ole Peter Grell surveys the migrations of Dutch Protestants in exile: from the Low Countries, to London, to Emden under Mary, then back to London. Calvinist Exiles in Tudor and Stuart England (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), 1. Christopher Highley argues that the critical voice of English Catholics in exile in the Low Countries added to the formation of Elizabethan England’s national identity. Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 25. 20 Kidd succinctly summarizes the views and conflicts of Gellner, Hobsbawm, and other proponents of the “modern” genesis of nations after nationalism. British Identities, 1–4. For Kidd, early modern “national consciousness” precedes the nineteenth-century “doctrinaire nationalism” Gellner and others studied (6).

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social processes, it was an effect of others,” specifically of an inchoate national identity that precedes the political structures of nations and modern nationalist ideologies.21 Although her bold assertion remains controversial, Greenfeld points to the literary and political language of early modern England and concludes that “by 1600, the existence in England of a national consciousness and identity, and as a result, of a new geo-political entity, a nation, was a fact” (30).22 Most historians of the “modern” school of nations even acknowledge the special case of early modern England—often pointing to Milton as an example—before turning their attention to other parts of modern Europe.23 The other related and important category of social formation, the “public sphere,” has also recently received important scrutiny and elaboration. The great theorist of the public sphere, Jürgen Habermas, located its emergence “in Great Britain at the turn of the eighteenth

21 Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-

sity Press, 1992), 18–21. The contest between an older school of thinking about the nation and more recent historians—not just Greenfeld, but also Adrian Hastings in The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 35, and Anthony D. Smith in Chosen Peoples (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 119—ultimately derives from the question of whether a concept of “nation” follows (in the older view) or precedes (in the newer view) the ideology of nationalism. Anthony D. Smith offers a very fine overview of the stakes in this debate in “Nationalism in Early Modern Europe,” History and Theory 44 (2005), 407. Krishan Kumar criticizes Greenfeld’s thesis in The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 95. 22 Rubright eschews the concept of the early modern nation, preferring instead to focus on “ethnicity in the making.” Doppelgänger Dilemmas, 19. She argues that scholars have paid too much attention to the “construction of differences” (30), and that “the process whereby those differences and likenesses are vested with cultural authenticity” would “rattle[] those notions of Englishness that existed eccentric to concepts of national selfdefinition” (32). However, as I will be arguing throughout English National Identity and the Image of the Dutch, the English and the Dutch acknowledged some shared interests even as they recognized and reinforced a variety of differences that helped to distinguish their national identities. 23 Thus, Hobsbawm recognizes an Elizabethan “proto-nationalism” preceding the key

date of 1780, admitting that it “would be pedantic to refuse this label to Shakespeare’s propagandistic plays about English history,” (75), while Anderson must admit that the execution of a sacred monarch in 1649 was an important jolt to the previous pre-national system (21) and Gellner acknowledges that the Reformation was “a harbinger of social features and attitudes which . . . produce the nationalist age” (41).

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century.”24 This public sphere developed to replace feudal social formations, substituting “the sphere of private people come together as a public” in order to engage authorities “in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor” (27). As with historians of nationalism, however, Habermas acknowledges an ambiguous prehistory of this concept and scholars now comfortably locate the genesis of the public sphere in the early modern period. Joseph Loewenstein and Paul Stevens argue that a “cumulative” pressure stretching back into the early seventeenth century creates the public sphere.25 Peter Lake argues that in Elizabethan England confessional groups appealed to these “adjudicating publics” to accept one or another view of religious doctrine and political formations to support them.26 Steve Pincus joins Lake to boldly revise the Habermasian chronology. They posit the emergence of a series of public spheres, creating “spaces for or modes of communication or pitch making in which appeals to a general audience were made through a variety of media, appealing to a notion of the public good (or religious truth),” only to dissipate when a crisis had passed.27 Such ephemeral public spheres laid the groundwork for a more permanent public sphere as events of the 1640s “took the form that they did, in part, because the recurrently episodic instantiations of the post-Reformation public sphere helped to change the nature of politics and expand the political nation” (9). Since the emergence of the public sphere—focused as it was on “new commercial relationships: the traffic in commodities and news created by early capitalist long-distance trade” (Habermas 15)—coincided with the emergence of “what has since been called the ‘nation’” (Habermas 17), these recent revisions profoundly affect the understanding of both the development of the public sphere and the emergence of the nation. We 24 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1989), 57. 25 Joseph Loewenstein and Paul Stevens, “Introduction: Charting Habermas’s ‘Literary’ or ‘Precursor’ Public Sphere,” Criticism 46 (2004), 202. 26 Peter Lake, “The Theatre and the ‘Post-Reformation Public Sphere’,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare, ed. R. Malcolm Smuts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 186. 27 Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, “Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England,” in The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 6.

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can speak confidently now about early modern England’s construction of a national identity. Milton was not the only Englishman to ponder the nation barely visible across the Narrow Seas, a nation that had emerged just as the English were coming into their own. In this period, many English writers treat the Dutch simplistically: the persistence of crude, xenophobic jokes made at Dutch expense attests to a popular preoccupation with England’s neighbors.28 English caricatures of the Dutch as “drunkards” and “butterboxes” had wide circulation. In a xenophobic catalogue of foreigners’ vices in Thomas Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveler, for instance, the Dutch appear as a people who “doe nothing but fill bottomeles tubs, & will be drunke & snort in the midst of dinner.”29 As we shall see in Chapter 3, the stereotypical figure of the drunken Dutchman retained broad appeal in Shakespeare’s theater. In addition to the satire on the Dutch propensity for drunkenness, bawdy English jokes about the “Low” Countries— combining erotic euphemisms and Dutch topography—abound as well. Dromio of Syracuse’s comical cartography in The Comedy of Errors locates Ireland, France, and America in different regions of Nell’s globular body, but when his master Antipholus asks “Where stood Belgia, the Netherlands?” Dromio replies, “O, sir, I did not look so low.”30 Similarly, the English associated certain desirable textiles with the Dutch, calling holland cloth after Holland, enabling numerous bawdy jokes, including Hal’s jest about Poins’s linens, “the rest of the low countries have made a shift to eat up thy holland,” in Henry IV, Part 2.31 Holland, at the heart of a nation reclaimed from the sea, also inspired puns on its “hollow land.” In Chapter 6, we shall see that Andrew Marvell participated in his proud insular nation’s dismissive humor when he starts his satire on the Dutch Republic with a joke that Holland “scarce deserves the name of

28 Simon Schama argues that court cultures wanted to dismiss the republican Dutch as coarse and avaricious to compensate for unease with emerging commercial realities. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Knopf, 1987), 259. Raamsdonck surveys these stereotypes. Milton, Marvell, 22–24. 29 Thomas Nashe, “The Unfortunate Traveler,” in Works, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, vol. 2 (London, 1905; reprinted Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 301. 30 All references to William Shakespeare are to Norton Shakespeare ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 2016). “Comedy of Errors,” 3.2.142–3. 31 “King Henry IV, Part 2,” 2.2.21–22. Rubright discusses the significance of similar puns. Doppelgänger Dilemmas, 2.

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land.”32 The stock forms in which the English abused the Dutch typically begin in one or the other of these registers: appetitive excess or topographical lack. But the English did think about the Dutch in more sophisticated ways as well.33 By focusing on these other registers, beyond the simplistic stereotypes, we can observe English writers creating a new identity for their nation. The English ascribed a handful of admirable traits to the Dutch, but they located the font of Dutch virtue in their industriousness. In his survey of national types, for instance, John Barclay mentions the Dutch love of imbibing and then considers the paradox that drinking makes the Dutch more “industrious in all the artes of merchandise, beyond the diligence of other Nations.”34 When Michael Drayton enumerated the forms of England’s bounty and turned to the area around Norwich, he pauses to praise “the Industrious Dutch, / Whose skill in making Stuffes, and workmanship is such / … as they our ayd deserve.”35 Many English writers, even those who criticized the Dutch, recognized that their industriousness—the determination and effort that promoted commercial prosperity, enabled independence from Spain, and fostered civic virtues—allowed the Dutch to forge a nation. A wide spectrum of early modern English writers ascribed the success of their neighbors to this assiduousness. Lewes Roberts, drawing on his commercial experience, claims that although the Dutch originally patterned their success “in imitation of their neighbors, the English Nation,” their lack of resources and their naturally frugal dispositions have allowed them, “by industry and Marchandizing,” to dominate global trade.36 Although the Elizabethan traveler, Fynes Moryson, indulges in some stereotypical jibes about the Dutch, he similarly marvels that by “their singular industry” the Dutch not only “enjoy all commodities of all Nations for their owne use, but by transporting 32 References to Marvell’s verse are to Poems, ed. Nigel Smith, Rev. Ed. (New York: Longman, 2007). “The Character of Holland,” line 1. 33 Hugh Dunthorne shows that the Dutch Revolt excited English interest in the Low Countires, not only among elites but also among common English people. Britain and the Dutch Revolt, 1560–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 46. 34 The Mirrovr of Mindes, or Barclay’s Icon animorum, trans. Thomas May (London, 1631), 180. 35 “Poly-Olbion,” in Works, ed. J. William Hebel, vol. 4 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1933), 20.35–7. 36 The Marchants Mapp of Commerce (London, 1638), 2.119–20.

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them from place to place with their owne ships (whereof they haue an vnspeakable number), make very great gaine.”37 As a byproduct of the Dutch dedication to trade, they have “growne so bold sea-men, as they will scarcely yeeld in this Art, to the English for many former yeeres excelling therein” (3.4.6.287). Although his Itinerary issues no call to arms, Moryson does register in passing the rivalry that would emerge at various points in this period when he chides his complacent fellow Englishmen for ceding preeminence to the Dutch. Across the political spectrum, English writers could not deny the blessings the industrious Dutch enjoyed. Thomas Scott, a radical Protestant exile ministering to the English garrisons stationed in the United Provinces, penned a dozen tracts urging his readers to support their fellow Protestants against Spain. At the other end of the political continuum, the royalist Owen Felltham satirized the Dutch in a text that circulated widely in manuscript at about the same time as Scott’s pamphlets.38 Both authors turned to the text of Proverbs 6:6, “Go to the pismire, o sluggard: beholde her waies, and be wise,” in representing the Dutch.39 Unlike the humming beehive, a figure for the monarchy, the busy anthill, and its apparently republican organization seemed a particularly apt analog for the Dutch.40 After a long, mocking treatment of the Dutch, Felltham acknowledges that they might be considered “the Pismires of the World... making by their industry all the fruits of the vast Earth their own.”41 Even as this royalist merchant sneers that the ungrateful Dutch republicans resemble ants so perfectly that “you shall not find they want so much as the sting” (65), he elsewhere begrudgingly admits that they “shame us with their industry” (71). This ambivalence, even in one of 37 Fynes Moryson, Itinerary (1617), (New York: Da Capo, 1971). 3.4.6.287. 38 For the most thorough treatment of the manuscript circulation of Felltham’s text,

first composed at the end of James’s reign but printed only in 1648, see Kees van Strien, “Owen Felltham’s A Brief Character of the Low-Countries: A Survey of the Texts,” English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 6 (1997), 141. 39 The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). 40 Proverbs makes the association of ants and republics in the next verses, “For she hauing no guide, gouernour, nor ruler,/Prepareth her meat in the sommer & gathereth her fode in haruest” (6: 7–8). 41 [Owen Felltham], A Brief Character of the Low-Countries, (London: Henry Seile, 1652), 61–2. Further references will be to this edition, rather than to the abridged quarto, Three Moneths Observations of the Low Countreyes (London: William Ley, 1652).

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the Dutch Republic’s harshest critics, points to the way the Dutch served as a foil for English identity. Scott has fewer difficulties celebrating Dutch virtues. In his Belgicke Pismire, an extended meditation on all that the English might gain from rousing themselves and adopting the sedulous ways of “the Pismire of the vnited Prouinces,” Scott praises temperate Dutch manners, diet, and clothing, as well as the contributions of Dutch exiles to the English economy.42 Like Felltham, his appreciation for the seemingly inconsequential Dutch ants returns frequently to their industry. The “incredible... paines they take” to preserve their nation from both the sea’s encroachments and Spanish tyranny earn Scott’s unqualified admiration: “it is a miracle that they should haue so much courage as to vndertake it” (68). For Scott, the Dutch pismire provides England with a model, one “to which Salomon sends us for imitation” (69). Scott and Felltham would have disagreed on most topics, but both English writers acknowledge that their nation might learn something from the remarkable Dutch. The most unbiased Jacobean appraisal of the United Provinces also emphasizes the benefits the Dutch enjoy due to their industrious dedication to the common good. Sir Thomas Overbury penned a balanced, influential overview of the Dutch national character in his Observations in 1609. Writing as Spain and the Dutch Republic entered into the Twelve-Year Truce, Overbury seems genuinely curious about the effect a temporary peace may have on the Dutch after forty years of fighting for independence. Although he mixes criticism with compliment, Overbury’s inquiry into “the disposition of the people,” reveals his optimism that the Dutch will emerge into an admirable liberty and prosperity.43 England should take note, Overbury implies, since it has a stake in the outcome. He uses England as the basis for evaluating the new republic of the United Provinces. Thus in trade, he compares the Dutch to “France and England, both fearing the Spanish greatnesse” (223), boasts that in the military support of the Republic “most part of the great exploits have been done by the English” (224–5), and draws a rough analogy between the Dutch “assembly of the generall States, [and] our Parliament, being composed of those which are sent from every province upon summons” 42 Thomas Scott, The Belgicke Pismire (London, 1622), 47. 43 Thomas Overbury, “Observations in his Travailes vpon the State of the XVII

Provinces as they stood, Anno Dom. 1609,” in Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse of Sir Thomas Overbury, ed. Edward F. Rimbault (London, 1856), 223.

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(225). Commending this liberal republic, Overbury admires a national culture in which “every one hath an immediate interest in the State” and the sense of common purpose by which “they still retaine that signe of a common-wealth yet uncorrupted, Private povertie and publicke weale” (226). Overbury’s appraisal of the Dutch concludes with an epitome of the Dutch character. The people, he concludes, “are neither much devout, nor much wicked, given all to drinke, and eminently to no other vice; hard in bargaining, but just, surly, and respectlesse, as in all democracies, thirstie, industrious... inventive in manufactures, cunning in traffique” (230). This mostly sober commitment to productivity serves as a hallmark of English evaluations of the Dutch. It may occasionally sink to the level of mockery: for some, Dutch plodding simply signals their boorishness. But in many cases, Dutch industry and dedication become traits the English could emulate. Curiosity about the secret of Dutch prosperity excited some of the great minds of the Restoration as well. After the humiliating conclusion of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, English authors tried to understand how their naturally superior nation could have faltered against a Dutch nation with so few material advantages.44 They returned to the analyses of Scott and Overbury, who had explored the paradox of Dutch success: that the nation’s industry and dedication to the public good compensated for its limited natural resources. The Whig merchant Slingsby Bethel, for instance, would articulate the advantages England would gain if it adopted Dutch models in the pursuit of trade. Denying that Dutch prosperity can “be a good or honest foundation of a quarrel,” Bethel refutes the arguments for renewed warfare and advocates emulation instead, since hindering Dutch commerce would not earn England “the increase of Trade to other Countries.”45 The Royalist William Aglionby, while skeptical of Dutch republicanism, concedes the power of their example, “infinitely transcending all the ancient Republicks of Greece, but not much inferior in some respects even to the greatest Monarchies of these later Ages.”46 Sir William Temple drew on his experience as England’s 44 The argument that the republican Dutch could better exploit global markets returns to English analyses of the United Provinces throughout this period. Blair Hoxby surveys that argument in Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 75. 45 The Present Interest of England Stated (London, 1671), 31. 46 The Present State of the United Provinces, 2nd ed. (London, 1671), A4r-A4v.

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ambassador to the United Provinces to provide the most perceptive Restoration analysis of the Dutch. Aware of the paradox that “more Shipping belongs to them, than there does to all the rest of Europe, yet they have no Native Commodities towards the building or rigging of the smallest Vessel,” Temple explains the reasons for their prosperity, including their frugal dispositions, the benefits of population density, and the government’s legislation to stimulate commerce.47 Although the Dutch nation, like many of the great mercantile empires of history, adopts a republican government, Temple argues that any form of government, with the exception of one that exercises “Arbitrary and Tyrannical Power,” can promote trade (110). Both serious theorists and crude xenophobes thought the industrious Dutch might serve as a model as England refashioned itself after the disasters of the 1660s. In his texts framing the Interregnum, Milton too draws on the example of Dutch industry as he cautions his English readers that returning to monarchy would have a catastrophic effect on the nation. Hoping to forestall the Restoration, Milton ventured into unaccustomed arguments, appealing to his readers’ commercial interests as he argued that republics enjoyed greater prosperity than monarchies. In both the Tenure and the Readie and Easie Way, Solomon’s proverb about the industrious ant, so often associated with English analyses of the lessons to learn from the Dutch, figures as well. When Milton first invokes the nation of pismires in 1649, he does so in the same paradoxical way that others had done in their evocation of the mighty strength of the lowly Dutch. As we have seen, Milton pursues several conflicting arguments for national greatness in his prose.48 In one of these threads, he summarizes the precedents for England to remove a tyrant and then argues that the nation’s unprecedented action will inspire future generations of proud English citizens, who will “aspire toward these exemplary, and matchless deeds

47 Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands, ed. Sir George Clark (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 108. 48 Homi K. Bhabha argues that articulations of national identity often depend on “archaic ambivalence” and temporal contradictions. “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 294. Paul Stevens explores Milton’s crafting of an English national identity by “simultaneously rejecting and re-inventing common roots.” “Milton’s Janus-Faced Nationalism: Soliloquy, Subject, and the Modern Nation State,” JEGP 100 (2001), 268.

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of thir Ancestors, as to the highest top of thir civil glory and emulation” (3:237–8). He expects that decisive English actions will admonish even good kings, so that no monarch “may presume such high and irresponsible licence over mankinde, to havock and turn upside-down whole Kingdomes of men, as though they were no more in respect of his perverse will then a Nation of Pismires” (3:238). A tyrant may assume that the people are insignificant ants, but the sovereign English people will prove that assumption false. Milton warns those who would trust their hypocritical monarch that they should learn from the skeptical Dutch. Just as “the main visible cause which to this day hath sav’d the Netherlands from utter ruin, was thir final not believing the perfidious cruelty which, as a constant maxim of State, hath bin us’d by the Spanish Kings on thir Subjects that have tak’n Armes and after trusted them,” so the craven Presbyterians ought to know that the assurances of their former monarch are just so many empty promises (3:240). The lessons of the pismire and the lessons to be derived from the Dutch go hand in hand in Milton’s assessment of the English nation’s future in 1649. At a second critical juncture, Milton again combines the Solomonic wisdom about sedulous ants and the example of the prosperous Dutch. Arguing desperately that the English must not restore the Stuarts, Milton recalls the Dutch nation of pismires throughout the Readie and Easie Way. He urges his readers to reject the temptation to submit to monarchy, proposing a Grand Council as an alternative way to create political stability. He contrasts the profligacy of monarchies, dependent on the “softest, basest, vitiousest, servilest, easiest to be kept under” people, and the frugal prosperity of republics, as exemplified by the fact that “trade flourishes no where more, then in the free Commonwealths of Italie, Germanie, and the Low Countreys” (7:384, 386).49 If a monarch is no more than a man, Milton argues, it would be foolish to return to the bondage that a heroic generation of Englishmen had paid a bloody price to eliminate. If Englishmen want to show themselves to be something other than “sluggards and babies, we need depend on none but 49 Thomas Corns shows that Milton embellishes the theme of Stuart profligacy in the revisions to the Readie and Easie Way. Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 288. A few years later, Pieter de la Court makes a similar point in his celebration of the United Provinces’ delivery from the “ydelen en dwasen Koningliken ofte Princeliken praal [vain and foolish royal or princely pomp]” of monarchs. Aanwysing der heilsame politike Gronden en Maximen van de Republike van Holland and West-Vriesland (Leiden, 1669), 9.

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God and our own counsels, our own active vertue and industrie” to take the paradoxically easy way of claiming the liberty that comes from the hard work of civic engagement (7:362).50 And then Milton, like both Scott and Felltham before him, quotes from Proverbs: “Go to the Ant, thou sluggard, saith Solomon, consider her waies and be wise; which having no prince, ruler, or lord, provides her meat in the summer, and gathers her food in the harvest” (7:362). As Milton warms to the subject, professing disbelief that a “nation should be so valorous and courageous to winne thir libertie in the field” and then, “after ten or twelve years prosperous war and contestation with tyrannie, basely and besottedly to run thir necks again into the yoke which they have broken,” he uses Solomon’s paradox about the admirable ant to shame those Englishmen who would return to the ignominious slavery of having a king (7:363). Solomon’s proverb “evidently shews us, that they who think the nation undon without a king… have not so much true spirit and understanding in them as a Pismire” (7:362). Once again, the seemingly insignificant ant shames the English sluggard. If the English will rouse themselves to action and reject the slothful grant of sovereignty to a king, they may even surpass the Dutch who hobble themselves by remaining under the influence of a “potent family... the house of Nassaw” (7:375). Exercising their own industry, the English will become “the cleerest and absolutist free nation in the world” (7:375). Liberty and prosperity remain within England’s reach if the nation will avoid the temptation of restoring the monarchy. Milton elaborates on the lessons England should learn from the Dutch Republic and from the sluggard and the ant in his revisions to The Readie and Easie Way. As the elections constituting the Convention Parliament proceeded, Milton anticipated that its members would invite Charles to take his father’s throne.51 Now Milton urges Englishmen to see that nature presents humanity with the pattern for the best polity. 50 Elizabeth Sauer argues that Milton cajoles his English readers to embrace the work of ensuring their nation’s liberty, pinning his hopes on the zealous, better minority. Milton, Toleration, and Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 94. Loewenstein calls Milton an “anguished nationalist,” who must ultimately claim to speak for the abstract national good, even in the face of a majority longing for the return of stability with the Stuarts. “Milton’s Nationalism,” 43. 51 Blair Worden traces Milton’s desperate pleas in the two editions of Readie and Easie Way. Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and Marchamont Nedham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 354.

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In his wisdom, Solomon selects the republic of the anthill rather than the monarchy of the beehive as the model for human society. Republican ants, Milton argues, “are set the examples to imprudent and ungoverned men, of a frugal and self-governing democratie or Commonwealth; safer and more thriving in the joint providence and counsel of many industrious equals, then under the single domination of one imperious Lord” (7:427). Rather than leave the lesson of Proverbs 6:6 implicit as he had a few weeks earlier, Milton now explicitly applies the value of the industrious ant for his English audience. Throughout the text, the Dutch remain an example upon which England can improve.52 His proposals will secure the blessings of active and educated citizens, with “the whole nation more industrious, more ingenuous at home, more potent, more honorable abroad” (7:460). As he had in the first edition, Milton claims that if the English adopt his proposal “we shall also far exceed the United Provinces,” but he now adds that his proposal will correct a flaw in the Dutch Republic, where the confused claims of sovereignty among the provinces of the confederation, “to the retarding and distracting ofte times of thir counsels on urgentest occasions,” results in paralysis (7:461). The England Milton envisions will have a vigor unmatched by even the excellent Dutch. Once again, for Milton, the Dutch offer a model that England can eclipse. This ambivalence, so characteristic of England’s wider engagement with the Dutch in the early modern period, demonstrates the significant role the Dutch played in the process of fashioning Englishness. In English National Identity and the Image of the Dutch, I draw on a broad range of English and Dutch texts to argue that when the English and the Dutch wrote about each other they gave shape to their own identities as liberal, mercantile, Protestant nations. In the second chapter, I show how Edmund Spenser’s gendered allegory of succoring Belge in The Faerie Queene’s Legend of Justice imagines these nations as it transforms an English encounter with the Dutch of the sort that Filips van Marnix had begged for in texts like his Ernstighe Vermaninghe. Spenser represents the seventeen provinces of the Low Countries in the overdetermined figure of the Widow Belge and her seventeen children. Belge suffers the 52 Kerrigan notes that royalists criticized Milton for admiring the Dutch too much. Archipelagic English, 242. Hoxby focuses on Milton’s attempt to move beyond the Dutch in advancing an original proposal to treat individuals as “economic agents” rather than resources. Mammon’s Music, 81, 86.

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abuse of a terrifying monster that undermines commerce and requires her to worship a false idol. Most unjustly, Geryoneo demands that she submit to his false authority. As Arthur relieves the disconsolate widow from Spanish tyranny, the poet justifies this intervention both as a chivalric knight’s duty to a powerless woman and as a court of equity’s recognition of a widow’s de facto legal standing. Spenser employs the theories of political resistance that justified the Dutch Revolt and England’s assistance: the language of equitable relief from broken contracts found in texts such as Politicq Onderwijs , which had explained the Dutch rationale for abjuring Spanish authority. Moreover, as Arthur rescues the Widow Belge from the injustice of a Spanish tyrant, Spenser imagines the Dutch in a position of dependence, grateful to the English for defending the cause of political liberty. Glossing over England’s dilatory intervention in the conflict and Leicester’s failure to expel the Spanish and place the Dutch on secure footing, Spenser idealizes his nation’s role in liberating the desperate United Provinces. He shapes the Anglo-Dutch relationship toward a particular end, creating a fantasy of liberal Englishness that would be deployed throughout the seventeenth century in English representations of the Dutch. Early modern England’s theatrical treatments of the Dutch further weave together the threads of commercial, religious, and sovereign national identity. In Chapter 3, I move beyond the facile English stereotypes of the Dutch love of beer and butter to consider the complex role Dutch characters play in London comedy. William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money and Thomas Dekker’s Shoemakers’ Holiday point to English anxieties about harboring Dutch economic rivals in England. A few years later, while James attempted to settle England’s affairs abroad and its national church at home with the 1604 Treaty of London and the Hampton Court Conference, the Dutch community in London joined a celebration of the new monarch but sounded an unwelcome note of caution as they lectured the king about his religious and commercial duties. The Dutch refugees and the Dutch affinities of heterodox English merchants in Lording Barry’s Family of Love and John Marston’s Dutch Courtesan throw into relief the tensions between mercantile competition and religious cooperation that animated both nations’ view of themselves and their rivals. The shadowy figure of the hypocritical Dutchman exploiting English toleration hovers at the edge of the fraternal figures of the merchant and the puritan that

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these plays help create. Jonson’s Alchemist vividly stages this interdependence of English mercantile identity and popular images of the heterodox Dutch. As Chapter 3 focuses on the competition of piety and commerce, Chapter 4 explores the knotted threads of popular sovereignty and religion in the fabric of England’s identity. In The Tragedie of Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt , John Fletcher and Philip Massinger dramatize a conflict that threatened to tear the United Provinces asunder. Appearing in a twice-censored version during a tense period in King James’s relationship with England’s Parliament, the play sympathetically stages a heterodox republican statesman heroically resisting the machinations of an autocratic Dutch prince who enjoyed the English crown’s support. Barnavelt highlights English writers’ use of Dutch matters to comment on England’s own national formation. In Chapter 5, I show that the emergent public sphere in early modern England, as it weaves together the threads of trade, religion, and politics, depended on the Dutch. The earliest printed news sheets in England came from the United Provinces; this news focused on international affairs, a topic in which the Dutch figured prominently. In these respects, the Dutch provided both the form and the content of early modern England’s news culture. While Jonson satirized the popular attractions of commodified news—especially as it originated in the Low Countries—in The Staple of News , he attests to a nascent public sphere that subsequent Caroline dramatists could exploit, particularly at the time of the massacre on the island of Ambon in the East Indies, an event that served as an English rallying cry whenever Anglo-Dutch tensions increased. Eventually, despite English hopes that the Dutch would gratefully defer to England for saving them from Spanish tyranny, the two nations fought three wars shortly after mid-century. Trade rivalry contributed to tensions between the two nations, but larger ideological concerns shaped these wars. Both Dutch and English writers saw wars between their two nations through the lens of the Punic Wars, when Rome and Carthage fought each other three times across a narrow body of water. After the regicide in 1649, English writers appropriated the language of republican Rome to create an identity for their Commonwealth. When war erupted in 1652, Milton, Marvell, and other English writers used the historical victory of Rome over Carthage to express their certainty that republican England would vanquish their rivals. In the midst of the conflict, Dutch poets such as Jan Vos and Joost van den Vondel promoted an alternative vision in which a Dutch Rome would defeat a Carthaginian England. After the

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Restoration, the trappings of republican Rome fit England’s return to monarchy less easily, as the truncated republication of Marvell’s Character of Holland for the Second Anglo-Dutch War illustrates. John Dryden and other English writers strained to represent their nation’s inevitable victory over Dutch Carthage, even though Restoration England no longer resembled Scipio’s Roman republic. Especially after the powerful Dutch commercial republic triumphed on the Medway, the English desire to continue using the trappings of republican Rome points to a crisis in the development of English identity. The Dutch, whose poets again cast their nation as Rome triumphing over English Carthage in 1667, continued to provide occasions for the renegotiation of Englishness in the last quarter of the century. In the final chapter of English National Identity and the Image of the Dutch, I contend that English authors used the ruthless Dutch pursuit of colonial commerce to idealize English principles of harmonious trade and religion. Beneath their nostalgic veneer, John Dryden’s Tragedy of Amboyna and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko return to historic English defeats at the hands of the Dutch and use these traumatic events to demonize England’s former dependents. These texts cast the republican Dutch as rapacious criminals whose plundering of distant colonies aligns them more closely with the Spanish of old than with the scrupulous merchants of Protestant England. Dryden and Behn decry episodes of English failure—the violent incident on Ambon, the ceding of Surinam—even as they mourn the loss of such profitable colonies to their rivals in the imperial arena. These texts create a fantasy of Englishness that partially obscures the violent practices of the English themselves and displaces the responsibility for these bloody outcomes onto the Dutch. In the case of Behn’s Oroonoko, this nostalgia for a land that both English and Dutch writers figured as another Eden glances at contemporary political events in England as James’s absolutism provoked English writers to declare that transferring sovereignty to the Dutch stadholder William III would save natural English liberty from an ambivalently exotic slavery. Throughout the early modern period, then, the Dutch Republic served as a kind of carnival mirror in which the English could see reflected a dynamic and unstable vision of themselves. As Thomas Scott, the exiled English firebrand writing from Utrecht, would ask his Dutch readers as he exhorted his English countrymen to come again to their aid, “what Nation is there, or what State; nay, what man that in all friendship lookes not inward and homeward with one eye?” (Pismire, aa v). Scott was not

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alone in trying to encompass the United Provinces and England in one distorted perspective. As we have seen, Milton’s agonistic representations of the exemplary Dutch prompted him and his fellow English writers to articulate their understanding of the English nation as well. Writing in defense of the regicide, as his nation seemed to be fulfilling its destiny and would soon enjoy the fruits of liberty, Milton marshals the classical precedent of “the Roman republic... after the expulsion of the kings” and an example closer to hand in “the Dutch, whose republic, after they had driven out the Spanish king in long wars successfully waged, by glorious courage won her freedom.”53 At the same time, even though the Dutch may offer an example of a commercially flourishing, post-monarchical republic, Milton puts their example behind him, “for the English see no need for them to justify their own deeds by the example of any foreigners whatever... They have as models their own forefathers, indomitable men, who never yielded to the unbridled sway of kings” (4:533). While the English do have historical and contemporary precedents for their actions, Milton simultaneously wants his nation to be sui generis with native paternity. The experience of the First Anglo-Dutch War only exacerbated this need to put more distance between Milton’s formerly admired example and the England that strove to reach its full potential. Having humiliated the Protestant republic that he had recently treated as a model for his fellow Englishmen to imitate, Milton now refuses comparison with the Dutch, insisting that “he is mistaken who supposes that we depend on anyone’s example. We have very often helped and encouraged the Dutch in their struggles for liberty, but never have we considered it necessary to emulate them. If any brave deed must be done on behalf of liberty, we are our own exemplars, accustomed to lead, not to follow, others.”54 Effacing the long relationship between England and its Dutch neighbor, Milton would seem to deny the need for the present study. But as English National Identity and the Image of the Dutch makes clear, Milton, Scott, and many other English writers thought they could see the glories of 53 “A Defense of the People of England,” 4:429. 54 “A Second Defense of the English People,” 4:656. Stevens argues that Milton’s

positive nationalism appears discontinuous at times, reflecting periods of optimism and despair about the nation he loved, but that his hope for his nation was always there “if only in potentia.” “How Milton’s Nationalism Works,” 286. One could say the same about Milton’s view of England’s rivals across the Narrow Seas, that his constant engagement with an idea of the Dutch as he considers his own nation reflects Milton’s respect for them, even if he must sometimes deny any admiration for them.

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their prosperous, free, and Protestant English nation more clearly if they included the Dutch in their perspective.

CHAPTER 2

Rescuing the Widow Belge: Chivalry in the Construction of Elizabethan Englishness

The Lord kepeth the strangers: he relieveth the fatherles and widowe: but he overthroweth the way of the wicked. —Psalm 146:9

In 1582, in the second decade of the Dutch Revolt, an anonymous author published a pamphlet justifying the Act of Abjuration. Cataloguing the abuses that had prompted the States General to dissolve Philip II’s authority, the author argues that God instituted monarchs to ensure that there would be “gherechticheyt onder den borgheren [justice among the people].”1 The Spanish tyrant had failed to abide by his sacred oath. Comparing him to Nero, Caligula, “ende diergelijcke Tyrannen [and similar tyrants],” the author claims that Philip ruthlessly pursued “sijne eyghen bate... en[de] sijne onghetoomde begheerlijcheden [his own advantage... and his unrestrained desires]” (B4r). Among the king’s oppressive actions, the author lists those that “weduwen ende weesen benaut ende beanct [oppress and terrorize widows and orphans]” (B4r). Two years later, when an English pamphleteer introduced news of William 1 Politicq Onderwijs , (Mechelen, 1582), B4r.

Inhoudende

diuersche

ende

seer

ghewichtighe

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Fleck, English National Identity and the Image of the Dutch, Early Modern Literature in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42910-1_2

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the Silent’s assassination, he lamented that “the widdowe, the sucking Babe, and the fatherlesse childe shall haue cause to bewayle his death.”2 Bereft of the figurative father of the country, the Dutch Republic had been “widowed” that day in Delft. Recalling biblical texts in which the widow stands for the abject person whose abuse by the mighty should inspire pity in the righteous and shame in the tyrant, the widow occupies a symbolic place in English and Dutch rhetoric of the Revolt. Of course, the Dutch Revolt also created actual widows and these women had important parts to play as well. William’s widow, Louise de Coligny, coordinated the upbringing of his orphans and the complex relationships among his adult children.3 Across the Narrow Sea, England would soon grieve with and celebrate another widow created in the Dutch Revolt. Frances Walsingham had passed initially from the household of her father, Queen Elizabeth’s “forward” principal secretary, into the household of her first husband, Sir Philip Sidney—a chivalric proponent of English national pride and military strength—then experienced a brief moment of independence as a widow before passing into the household of another vocal champion of English power, Robert Devereaux. Memorializing Sir Philip Sidney’s bravery at Zutphen, when the hero charged down on the “brutish nation” to his death, Edmund Spenser would dedicate his belated elegy to Sidney’s widow, now the “most beautiful and vertuous Ladie, the Countesse of Essex.”4 This dedication of a poem about Sidney to the wife of the Earl of Essex testifies to the importance of early modern widows in securing political exchanges between men. Essex appropriated the symbolic capital of Sidney’s role as champion of England’s martial glory when he entered the 1590 Accession Day tilt carrying the sword Sidney bequeathed to him at Zutphen and gesturing to the fallen hero’s widow.5 Frances Walsingham’s movement

2 G. P., The Trve Report of the Lamentable Death, of VVilliam of Nassawe (Middelburg, 1584), 2. 3 Susan Broomhall and Jennifer Spinks, Early Modern Women in the Low Countries: Feminizing Sources and Interpretations of the Past (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 83. 4 “Astrophel,” in The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, vol. 7 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932–57), 92, 98. 5 Richard C. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 78. David Norbrook treats Essex’s public securing of forward leadership in marrying Frances Walsingham. Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1984), 129.

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from the protection of one heroic English husband to another illustrates the equivocal role of widows in early modern England. No longer protected by male authority as a married feme covert , an early modern widow acquired a measure of autonomy as a feme sole. For a poor widow, such freedom without financial means might prove disastrous, forcing her to rely on the charity of her parish.6 The widow of a tradesman, on the other hand, would need to settle her husband’s estate and could support herself by operating his business until his heirs were adults. Widows could even find themselves responsible for administering significant property matters in managing their own interests and the inheritances of their orphaned children. At the same time, a prosperous widow created different anxieties for her husband’s heirs: if she remarried, her new family might waste her older children’s patrimony. Many widows found themselves caught up in litigation over inheritance, but without husbands or fathers to speak for them these women had no formal voice in courts of law. Because situations arose in which widows needed legal standing, they acquired a de facto ability to “wage law” in early modern courts of equity.7 Simultaneously powerless and yet more sovereign than most other women, widows occupied an unusual and destabilizing position in Elizabethan England, a nation ruled by another unusual single woman. In 1596, this sovereign, unmarried woman received the dedication of the second part of The Faerie Queene. Near the end of the Legend of Justice, Spenser’s romance includes another figure for Elizabeth— Mercilla—as well as a particularly important widow. As Spenser weaves lightly-allegorized, contemporary events into his poem, he takes up the cause of the beleaguered Dutch under the figure of the Widow Belge. In this episode—in which Arthur, the romance’s heroic epitome of the nation’s chivalry, undertakes a quest to succor Belge, the personification of the imperiled Dutch nation—Spenser indulges national fantasies

6 Natasha Korda discusses the burden poor widows placed on their community. Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 187. 7 Timothy Stretton thoroughly analyzes the legal status widows assumed. Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 112–113.

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of English valor in service of a noble cause against its hated enemy.8 He exploits the unusual status of widows in Elizabethan England to justify English intervention in the Low Countries, simultaneously mystifying the inconsistencies of English intervention elsewhere. Spenser’s vision of Arthur’s resounding victory on Belge’s behalf—a victory England had not yet, and would in fact never achieve—participates in an imaginative projection of England’s identity as a proud and powerful nation supporting the oppressed, dispensing justice and equity in the cause of liberty, and vanquishing foreign tyranny.

Justifying the Dutch Revolt: Theories of Contract and Resistance The allegorical episode in which Arthur rescues Belge from the tyrant Geryoneo and his associates allows Spenser to embellish England’s intervention in the Dutch Revolt. Given the details the poet incorporates into the “brutal, topical allegories” Ayesha Ramachandran locates in the romance’s final books, many see the Belge episode as a simple version of events leading to the 1585 Treaty of Nonsuch, in which Elizabeth formally agreed to support the United Provinces against Habsburg tyranny.9 Tobias Gregory, at least, recognizes a “disjunction between the Belge episode and the events it evokes.”10 Belge, resembling the seventeen provinces of the Low Countries, is “mother of a frutefull heritage,/ Euen seuenteene goodly sonnes” (V.x.7.3–4). By 1585, only five provinces continued their conflict with the Catholic forces of Philip II, just as Geryoneo “had left [Belge] but fiue of all that brood” (V.x.8.2). Following “her Noble husbands late decesse,” a reference to the assassination of William the Silent in 1584, Belge sends “two, her eldest sonnes …/ To seeke for succour of this Ladies gieft” (V.x.14.6–7), just as

8 Tobias Gregory considers the romance conditions of the Belge episode. “Shadowing

Intervention: On the Politics of The Faerie Queene Book 5 Cantos 10–12,” ELH 67 (2000), 366. As a form, romance is especially suited for such fantasies. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 110. My understanding of ideological fantasies draws on the analysis of Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989). 9 The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 143. 10 “Shadowing Intervention,” 370.

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Holland and Zeeland had sent emissaries to Elizabeth to implore her for assistance in 1585. Despite the apparent correspondence of the romance and the history behind it, Spenser’s handling of England’s involvement in the conflict emphasizes some details while obscuring others. In particular, Spenser makes several revelatory choices in his figuration of Belge as a widow and her relationship with Geryoneo as a contract. Although hostilities in the Low Countries erupted in the late 1560s, it took several years before Dutch leaders seriously considered dissolving the king of Spain’s authority. Philip had taken the traditional oaths of a lord of the Low Countries in 1555. He accepted the traditional oath of the “Blijde Inkomst,” or Joyous Entry of Brabant, as well as the Grand Privilege of 1477 and similar local privileges, and in return, he received limited sovereignty—a dominium politicum et regale—in the Low Countries.11 These traditional remnants of the medieval relationship between the powerful civic and provincial interests of the Low Countries and their rulers established a contractual relationship that limited the sovereignty of a lord and allowed him to be removed if he violated local prerogatives.12 When Philip departed for Spain after the death of his English consort, Mary Tudor, he entrusted the government in Brussels to deputies who would ruthlessly enforce his resolution to suppress Protestantism. These policies appeared to trample on the local privileges he had sworn to uphold. Eventually, some in the Low Countries took up arms against these abuses, directing their anger initially at the king’s deputies before eventually rejecting Philip’s authority.13 The Dutch Revolt began as a result of conflicting interpretations of Philip’s contractual obligations. The 11 H. G. Koenigsberger explains the evolution of this form of rule and its implications for Philip. Monarchies, States General, and Parliaments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 172. 12 The extension of these local privileges across the Low Countries is an important part

of the history of “urban constitutionalism” in the Netherlands. Peter Arnade Beggars, Iconoclasts, and Civic Patriots: The Political Culture of the Dutch Revolt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 32–3. 13 It did not take long for resistance directed at the king’s deputies to change into resistance to the king himself. Compare the reluctance to take up arms in Sendbrief in Forme van Supplicatie aen die Conincklicke Maiesteyt van Spaengien: Van wegen des Princen van Orangien (Dordrecht, 1573), C2v with the fatalism of Wachtgheschrey. Allen liefhebbers der eeren Gods des Vaderlants en[de] der Priuilegien ende Vryheden des selue[n] tot waer schouwinghe ghestelt (n.p., 1578), with its call for immediate sacrifices in order “te commen tot sijn oude vryheyt, maer ooc om veel lieuer duysentmael te steruen dan wederom te com[m]en in die die[n]stbaerheyt des Spaingaerden” [to come to their old

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rebels claimed that Philip had violated and thus invalidated his oath, while the king and his advisors denied that the rebels could terminate their obedience to their ruler. After the horrors of the Duke of Alva and his Council of Blood and following the bloody 1576 sacking of Antwerp— the “Spanish Fury”—many in the Low Countries no longer sought to reconcile with the king. Several contenders emerged as possible replacements for Philip. William of Orange selflessly declined the offers made to him and urged his fellows to support Archduke Matthias of Austria (the candidate of the Malcontents, who intended him as a counterweight to Orange’s popularity), or Henry III of France. Later, support for the French king’s brother, François the Duke of Alençon, intensified. Many in the Low Countries wanted to make the Protestant queen of England their head. In order to justify their rebellion against Philip, the Dutch adopted theories of resistance similar to those articulated in the influential Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (1579). This Latin treatise distilled arguments that the Huguenots and others employed in the conflicts of the late sixteenth century.14 That text argues that kings exist to serve their people that “innumerable peoples live without a king, but you cannot conceive of a king without a people.”15 Its author advances the argument that all governments originate in a double contract: the first binding both the people and their ruler to be faithful to God and the second binding “the king and people, that while he commanded well he would be obeyed well” (21). In his analysis of this second contract, the author concludes that the monarch has an absolute obligation to his people, while the people observe a conditional obligation that they can revoke if the monarch abuses his authority. This conditional relationship does not risk anarchy, the author asserts, since the decision to revoke or resist a king’s authority must be made by the people’s sober magistrates, who are collectively the monarch’s “superiors” (47). The magistrates and the people may not have enough strength to resist a powerful tyrant, however.

freedom, but also much preferring to perish a thousand times than to come again under that servitude of Spain] (B2r). 14 Quentin Skinner, “The Origins of the Calvinist Theory of Revolution,” in After the Reformation, ed. Barbara C. Malament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 325. 15 [Philippe du Plessis-Mornay], Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos , ed. George Garnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 75.

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In that case, the nation may appeal to a foreign prince for justice. That neighboring prince can rightly bring an army across the borders of a troubled nation, “not in order to invade another’s, but to command [the tyrant] to be content with his own” (183–4). These arguments—that the king must serve his people, that the people under their magistrates may resist an unjust king, and that neighboring nations have an obligation to intervene against powerful tyrants to restore justice—would appear in scores of Dutch tracts justifying the Revolt. The States General’s delegates to the peace negotiations in Cologne in 1579, for instance, raised the possibility of abjuring the king of Spain’s authority on the basis of arguments similar to those in the Vindiciae. Philip and the papal delegation insisted that any settlement must reaffirm royal supremacy and return the Low Countries to religious conformity with Rome. The Revolt had proceeded far enough, however, that the States General could not accept a return to the status quo ante.16 The most radical of the provinces, Holland and Zeeland, had already expressed a willingness to abjure Philip’s authority in favor of William of Orange or Queen Elizabeth. With the Cologne negotiations at an impasse, the other representatives of the States General wrote to the Holland and Zeeland radicals with their own proposal to revoke Philip’s authority and invite the Duke of Alençon to defend the liberty of the Low Countries. The Spanish king, and especially his representative Alva, had “getyanniseert met Inquisitien ende rigoreuse placcaten, die innegebracht zijn gheweest jeghen den wille ende Previlegien van den Lande [tyrannized with Inquisitions and harsh decrees, which have been brought in against the desire and ancient privileges of the country],” and these actions violated the local authority and privileges of the individual provinces, including the religious toleration recently promulgated in the Pacification of Gent.17 Having delegitimized his own rule in the Low Countries, the king of Spain could now be replaced, with the choice of a new leader resting in the hands of the Dutch magistrates of the States General rather than in some foreign court. They explained to their allies in Holland and Zeeland that if the negotiations in Cologne did not guarantee the old privileges 16 Koenigsberger, Monarchies, 288. 17 Pieter Bor Christiaensz, Vervolgh der Nederlandtsche Oorloghen, Second Part

(Amsterdam, 1621), book 13, fol 132v. In order to undertake his history of the Revolt, on a scale similar to Holinshed’s and expanded several times from its first printing in 1595, Bor gained access to numerous contemporary documents and letters of this sort.

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and religious peace, “de Provincien zijn geoorsaekt den voorsz Konink van Spangien te verlaten, daer af declaratie te doen [the Provinces are forced to abandon the aforementioned King of Spain, and to make a declaration]” publicizing their decision since it is “geheel apparent dat de landen sullen moeten een hooft kiesen [entirely clear that the country must needs elect a new head]” (13:132v). The States General reluctantly followed through on this threat as the various parties in the Low Countries refused to negotiate further. The Vindiciae’s justification for a nation to repudiate its bonds to a monarch provided a framework for Dutch efforts to replace Philip with Alençon. William of Orange expected that the elevation of the French king’s brother, a suitor of the English queen, might give the rebels powerful friends who could help them withstand resurgent Spanish forces. Although Holland and Zeeland had remained skeptical of the ambitious Alençon, who had revealed his lack of principles when he abandoned the Huguenots after the Edict of Beaulieu, the States General negotiated to choose him as their new lord.18 They then took the step of repudiating the authority of the king of Spain, publishing the Act of Abjuration in the summer of 1581. In addition to removing the signs of Philip’s authority on coins, documents, and seals, the Act required Dutch officials to take a new oath revoking their previous bonds with the king of Spain and giving their loyalty to the state, the “ghevnierde Nederlanden [united Netherlands],” rather than to any individual.19 One influential pamphlet, Politicq Onderwijs , published when Alençon took the oaths of the Joyous Entry in 1582, provided a lengthy defense of the Act of Abjuration in terms taken from the Vindiciae. Arguing from the principles of “recht redene ende equiteyt [justice, reason, and equity],” its author claims that anyone empowered to make the laws must “oock den wetten onderworpen sy [also be subjected to the laws]” (B4rv). Philip, however, has “misbruyct [abused]” his “Coninclijcke digniteyt [royal dignity]” and can no longer be regarded as a ruler “in aenschou van dese Nederlanden maer een volcomen ende wel ghemact Tyran [in 18 Israel, Dutch Republic, 209. Mark Holt examines the cynical pragmatism of Alençon. The Duke of Anjou and the Politique Struggle during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 92. 19 Israel, Dutch Republic, 209. Arnade notes that the pragmatic Dutch did not declare Philip an enemy of the state so that they could continue to trade with Castile and Portugal. Beggars, 308.

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view of these Netherlands, but as a complete and fully formed tyrant]” (C1v). Therefore, the author concludes that the Dutch have agreed to be “niet voorder verplicht noch verbonden [no longer obliged nor bound]” to him and are “vermogen hem met crijch te wederstae[n] en[de] by eede te versaken [permitted to resist with force and by oath to forsake him]” (C1v). As an additional “claer ghetuyghenis [ready proof]” of this argument, the author cites a statute in which “de Keysers Theodos. ende Valentinia[n] schrijuen [the emperors Theodosius and Valentinian write]” that “Adeo de authoritate juris nostra authoritas,” or that a prince must “aende wetten verbonden te sijne soo seer hanght onse authoriteyt [be bound to the laws, so much does our authority depend on it]” (B4v). Here the author of Politicq Onderwijs gestures to a key text cited in the Vindiciae, but unlike the humanistic Latin of the Huguenot treatise, this author writes in the vernacular, appealing to and helping to popularize the Vindiciae’s theories for a Dutch audience. With the administration of the new oath, Philip’s sovereignty ceased to exist in the lands of the Dutch Republic. The mighty king of Spain now became their inveterate enemy in a struggle that would continue for another half-century. The Dutch continued to seek out foreign support against the king of Spain and the Duke of Parma and called on their neighbors to heed the call of the Vindiciae to support a nation seeking to be released from a conditional contract with an unjust tyrant. After the so-called “French Fury” of January 1583, when Alençon betrayed the Dutch cause by attempting a coup in Antwerp, the Dutch again found themselves without a political head. Filips van Marnix, the great spokesman for William and the rebels, penned a desperate appeal to foreign heads of state, urging them to support the faltering Dutch cause or face unchecked Spanish ambition. His Ernstighe Vermaninghe warns that the king of Spain aspired to claim for himself “den naem van alghemeyne of Catholijck Conick … dat is te seggen die generale heerschappye ende tyrannie ouer alle[n] [the name of universal or catholic king… that is to say that general dominion and tyranny over all].”20 Calling on potential allies in France, Germany, and England to act, Marnix argues that the Spanish intend to conquer and pacify the Low Counties so that “de Nederlanders eens onder hun subiectie ghebrocht hebbende [having once brought the Dutch under their control]” they would have a base “om d’oorloghe te voeren van waer 20 [Filips van Marnix] Ernstighe Vermaninghe vande standt ende gheleghentheyt der Christenheyt ([Antwerp], 1583), C4r.

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sy met luttel moeyte souden vallen soo wel op Duytschlant als Enghelandt ende Vrankrijck [from where they should conduct the wars and with little difficulty attack Germany, as well as England and France]” (A4v). He pleads with them to check Spanish tyranny in the Low Countries before Spain turns its attention to the atomized German princes, the divided French, or the Protestants of England. While appeals to the altruistic defense of religious and political liberty pepper Marnix’s tract, he also appeals to the self-interest of each of the potential allies. In England’s case, he emphasizes the need to prevent Spain from launching dangerous schemes from across the Channel. The plots surrounding Mary Stuart, Marnix claims, originate in Spanish plans by which Elizabeth has been “ghebrocht in perijckel haers leuens deur boose conspiratien int midden vanden Conincrijcke aenghericht, ende het Coninckrijck ten besten ghegheuen den genen die dat souden connent innemen ende willen besitten [brought in danger of her life through wicked conspiracies brought about in the midst of the realm, and the realm given as a prize to anyone who cared to take it up and possess it]” (B4r). Moreover, the king of Spain planned for his half-brother, the Governor-General of the Low Countries, Don John of Austria, “als de saken in Nederlandt souden gheslist ende ghedaen sijn [as the matters in the Netherlands should be quieted and concluded],” to marry the Queen of Scots and claim the throne of England for himself (B4r). Dutch attacks on Spanish forces had saved England from that scheme, but the Spanish now planned to assemble an army under the papal banner to land at Smerwick and invade Ireland, “dwelck sy meynden tot haerwaerts getrouwe te vinden [the which they hoped to find loyal to their cause]” (B4v) and create a base from which to “met ghewelt in Enghelant vallen ende alsoo tgheheel Coninckrijcke onder haer heerschappe brengen [attack England with force and thus bring the entire realm under their dominion]” (B4v). Marnix asserts that the Dutch wars distracted Spain from preparing an invasion of England. If it were not for Dutch resistance, which would collapse without foreign assistance, “den gantschen last vander oorloghe soude ouer la[n]t op Enghelant ghewallen hebben geweest [the entire weight of war would have been transferred and fallen on England]” (B4v). England had benefitted from the Dutch Republic’s resistance to Spanish tyranny. If the English did not support the Dutch as a buffer, then they would soon have to face Spanish aggression alone. Marnix pleads that the future of the Dutch Revolt, and with it the safety of the Low Countries’ neighbors, remains precarious. Decisive

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action now may save the embattled Dutch cause and prevent the Spanish from achieving a universal monarchy. Appealing directly to the powerful princes who warily oppose the Spanish, he declares that a universal Spanish tyranny can only be prevented if “de seer deurluchtighe Coninginghe van Enghelant … met ander Princen van Christenrijck ernstelijck ende in tijtsraet houdet van te doen blijven binnen haere palen dese seer groote macht vande Spaeignaerden [the most illustrious queen of England … with other princes of Christendom do earnestly and in a timely way please to act to hold the great power of Spain within bounds]” (D2r). This issue of the justice of intervening in a neighbor’s affairs, an important consideration in the Vindiciae, surfaces throughout Marnix’s appeal. He claims that every polity has a deep interest in making sure that “syne naebueren regerende met gherechticheyt ende maticheyt binnen haere palen [their neighbors are governed with justice and moderation within their borders],” lest the chaos of interior troubles—in a metaphor dear to a man from the Low Countries—overflow their dykes and “versincken [drown]” other nations “in eenen afgrondt van alderley ongheluck ende cattyuitheyt [in an abyss of both misfortune and misery]” (A2v). To give greater urgency to his appeal, he shames the Low Countries’ neighbors for their “traecheyt [inaction]” and for not recognizing that the “aengaende vier der Spaenscher eerghiericheyt [consuming fire of Spanish ambition]” would burn so fiercely that it “haer eyghe[n] huysen, iae alle de Landen heerschappijen ende Rijcken van Christenrijck corts sullen bronden [would shortly burn their own houses, yea all the countries, dominions, and realms of Christendom]” (A4v). Marnix urged England’s queen and her fellow princes to extinguish the unquenchable tyranny of the ambitious king of Spain, both from a sense of justice and from self-interest, before it was too late. Elizabeth ultimately agreed to take the Low Countries under her protection following William of Orange’s assassination, with the Dutch cause at its nadir. The Duke of Parma had advanced across the rivers protecting the Dutch heartland and besieged Antwerp, the mart of Europe and the key to England’s exports to the Continent.21 The Dutch had exhausted their appeals for foreign assistance in the other courts of Europe, and the specter of hostile Spanish forces encamped across the Channel meant that England would finally have to take up the

21 Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 215.

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defense of the Low Countries. Dutch commissioners arrived in London and offered Elizabeth the “principalitie, sovereigntie, and just government” of the Low Countries if Elizabeth would accept certain conditions, “chieflie concerning the preservation of the exercise of the reformed religion, and of the ancient privileges, liberties, franchises, and customs, and next the administration of affaires, policie, and justice of the warres in the said countrie.”22 They claimed that such a union would ensure England’s “absolute gouernment of the great ocean sea,” providing security from Spanish invasion that would follow should the last Dutch provinces fall, and would add the felicity of “diuerse good seruices, fruits, and commodities” of trade (4: 619). Hesitant to condone the dissolution of subjects’ allegiance to a sitting monarch, Elizabeth declined the offer of sovereignty, but, in accord with the principles of the Vindiciae, “incline[d] hir hart … to the ease and releefe of the said oppressed people” (4: 619). In the Treaty of Nonsuch, Elizabeth accepted the title of “Protector” of the United Provinces.23 England would loan money and provide troops and supplies to the States General for the defense of Dutch sovereignty, freedom of trade, and liberty of religion. In exchange, England would occupy seats on the Raad van Staat , the council overseeing the defenses of the new nation, and would nominate governors for three cautionary towns held as security for the loans.24 Elizabeth cast herself as a prudent sovereign restoring justice to a neighbor. Emphasizing the common bonds of neighbors and friends, the queen’s Declaration traces the history of England’s dealings with the Netherlands, recalling that “there hath beene in former ages many speciall alliances and confederations … betwixt the very naturall subjects of both Countries … for maintena[n]ce both of commerce and entercourse of Marchantes.”25 Given the bonds of amity and a historically profitable 22 Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, ed. Henry Ellis, 6 vols. (London, 1808; reprinted New York: AMS, 1965), 4: 619, 616. 23 Simon Adams discusses Elizabeth’s rejection of outright sovereignty and the ambiguity it created in the “protectorate” she did accept. “Elizabeth I and the Sovereignty of the Netherlands,” TRHS 14 (2004), 318. 24 Israel, Dutch Republic, 220. 25 A Declaration of the Cavses Mooving the Queene of England to give aide to the

Defense of the People afflicted and oppressed in the lowe Countries (London, 1585), 2–3. Dunthorne argues that this proclamation took some of its cues from the resistance theory developing in the Low Countries. Britain and the Dutch Revolt, 181. R. C. Strong and J. A. van Dorsten remark that Elizabeth’s justification appeared in England and in the

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relationship, England should naturally want to assist the Dutch against foreign oppression. The queen takes this temperate and considered relief from foreign tyranny as the Declaration’s main theme. Elizabeth worried that endorsing the dissolution of subjects’ bonds to their sovereign would justify the actions of Catholic rebels in England or Ireland to throw off their allegiance to their divinely appointed monarch.26 Now, Elizabeth claims, Spain’s actions in Ireland have forced her to support the Low Countries for defensive reasons: “we did... manifestly see in what danger our selfe, our countries and people might shortly bee, if in conuenient time wee did not speedily otherwise regard to preuent or stay” Spain’s adoption of a similarly aggressive stance so close to England’s shores (11). As the Ernstighe Vermaninghe had urged, Elizabeth’s interest lay in restoring the rule of law among her neighbors. Perhaps mindful of the Vindiciae’s justification of intervention in order to constrain tyrants, Elizabeth summarizes her rationale for taking the Low Countries under her protection. England sought a “restitution of their ancient liberties & gouernement by some christia[n] peace, & thereby a suertie for our selves & our realme to be free fro[m] invading neighbors, And our people to enjoie in those cou[n]tries their lawfull commerce and entercourse of friendship and marchandise, according to ancient vsage and treaties of entercourse” (19).27 England provides succor out of concern for justice and trade. Although some of her council might have preferred an apocalyptic crusade, Elizabeth carefully moderates her language on the thorny issue of religion. English and Dutch exuberance erupted after the ratification of the treaty. Elizabeth’s belated decision to support the desperate Dutch nation overtly, in addition to responding directly to Spain’s violent suppression of the reformed nations in northern Europe and creating the breach that led inexorably to the fearful days of the Armada crisis, also permitted her more zealous advisors in Leicester’s circle to claim that England would

Low Countries in five languages. Leicester’s Triumph (Leiden: Leiden University Press and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 26. 26 Wallace T. MacCaffrey, Queen Elizabeth and the Making of Policy, 1572–1588 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 237, 355. 27 In fact, a translation of the Vindiciae’s justification for this kind of intervention appeared in conjunction with England’s intervention. A Short Apologie for Christian Souldiers (London, 1588), A4r.

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finally take up the guerdon of Spain’s aggressive challenge.28 The frustrated chivalric affect of the Elizabethan court would now find an outlet in the battlefields of the Low Countries. Although the news that Antwerp had fallen to Parma tempered the excitement of belatedly entering the fray, enthusiasm in the Low Countries and in England intensified in the last months of 1585 as the Queen formulated her plans.29 When Leicester arrived in Dordrecht, the people staged an entertainment for their new English hero in which they represented “the state of the low countries” as a “widow countrie wailing her losse” but grateful that, at long last, after Catholic “France and Spain haue doone their woorst,” she can trust that her “helplesse yoong ones are by England nurst.”30 Such optimism might have inspired Leicester to accept the Dutch offer to make him Governor-General and sovereign—one contemporary account reported that his authority was as “absolute as ever any Governour had in these countryees & that aswell in cyvill polycy as in warres”—a sovereignty that Elizabeth had refused only six months before.31 The infuriated Queen excoriated her mere subject for “hav[ing] in so contemptible a sort broken our commandment in a cause that so greatly toucheth us in honor,” and complained that the Dutch had put her in an awkward situation by making this offer and thus embarrassing her with “the repugnancy to our protestation set out in print” that she had no designs on another monarch’s sovereignty.32 Her blistering condemnation of the Earl and his

28 Although some viewed the approaching war in an apocalyptic light, the decision to oppose Spain resulted from a mixture of other English interests. As Penry Williams observes, rather than resorting to apocalyptic language, “arguments about English policy came to be formulated less and less in religious terms, increasingly in the language of national security against Spain and of material profit to be won from the war.” The Later Tudors: England, 1547 –1603 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 329. 29 Antwerp fell to Parma just as the first English troops arrived in Middleburg. MacCaffrey, Making, 312. Leicester grimly assessed the desperate fortunes of the Low Countries for Walsingham, claiming that they had ebbed “for lack of tymely harkening to the relyfe of them.” SP 12/182/1. 30 Holinshed’s Chronicles, 4: 642. 31 The letter is from a gentleman in the English entourage to an English gentleman at

home, Folger MS V.b.142. On Leicester’s mistake in accepting authority that his queen had declined, see R. B. Wernham, The Making of Elizabethan Foreign Policy, 1558–1603 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 73. 32 Elizabeth I, Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 273, 270. On the Dutch hopes

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consequent humiliation exemplify English missteps in the initial stages of England’s awkward intervention in the Low Countries. Although English troops and funds buoyed the United Provinces, it took time for the English and their Dutch dependents to develop a successful working relationship. Thomas Digges, one of Leicester’s clients, would send back a brief report on the Earl’s campaign, assembling a catalogue of modest gains and declaring optimistically that since the English had not lost too much, it demonstrated “all Gods blessings in these militarie seruices.”33 In the end, Leicester achieved very little. Unfamiliar with the levers of power in the United Provinces, he made a number of blunders. He aligned himself with aristocratic Protestant exiles from the lost southern provinces and with the parties opposed to the dominance of the province of Holland.34 The provincial States of Holland reminded Leicester that he did not wield absolute authority in the Dutch Republic and, tactfully avoiding a direct comparison to the recent abjuration, recalled the Dutch defense of liberty against tyrants, whom they would “brenghen tot recht ende redelijckheydt, niet alleen met remonstrantien ende versoncken [bring to justice and reasonableness, not only with remonstrations and dismissing]” but with punishment.35 His departure from the United Provinces in 1587 helped restore amicable relations between the two nations.36 Eventually, England and the United Provinces had some success against the Habsburg armies. The relationship would remain somewhat tense, as the parsimonious and pragmatic queen continued to hope for a brokered peace, for the loan of her own troops for service in French campaigns, and for the minimization of costs. For instance, in the autumn of 1590, as Spenser published the first three books of The Faerie Queene, that offering sovereignty to Elizabeth’s favorite might force the Queen to abide by her obligations to them, see Williams, Later Tudors, 310. 33 A Briefe Report of Militarie Services Done in the Low Covntries, by the Erle of Leicester (London, 1587), E1r. 34 James Tracy discusses Leicester’s conflict with the province of Holland and its merchants’ interests. The Founding of the Dutch Republic: War, Finance, and Politics in Holland, 1572–1588 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 275. 35 Corte verthoninghe van he Recht byden Ridderschap Eedelen ende Steden van Hollandt ende Westvrieslant van allen ouden tijden in den voorschreuen Lande ghebruyckt (Rotterdam, 1587), A3r. 36 Martin van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt, 1555–1590 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 58.

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the English proposed an attack across the Dutch frontier into areas Parma left unguarded when he moved troops to northern France, but the States General refused to act because they “feared operations in Flanders would put the English in possession and they would not contribute to anything that brought honour to the English nation.”37 The English also continued to struggle to exercise authority in the Raad. The two nations could cooperate, but they never enjoyed a completely harmonious relationship. In 1596, as the final three books of Spenser’s romance reached the public, the Triple Alliance of France, England, and the United Provinces signaled greater Anglo-Dutch cooperation, even though English military attention now turned to Ireland.38

“Of Puissant Nations”: The English Nation in Spenser’s Legend of Justice Spenser fashions a glorious identity for the English nation in several ways in The Faerie Queene, particularly in its treatment of the Dutch in the Legend of Justice. Throughout the romance, Spenser celebrates the virtues and history of England under the transparent allegory of Faery Land. Its opening book, for instance, chronicles the adventures of two of the nation’s heroes, Redcrosse and Prince Arthur, who defend the pious Una, draped in a sober widow’s habit (I.xii.22.3). While the Legend of Holiness occasionally exhibits eschatological overtones, Spenser more commonly figures this virtue and the others of the romance as especially English.39 Each of the first three books of the romance contains

37 List and Analysis of State Papers, Foreign Series: Elizabeth I , ed. Richard Bruce Wernham (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1964), 2: 194. Dunthorne argues that English forces had a smaller impact than the English claimed. Britain and the Dutch Revolt, 90. 38 The Anglo-French Treaty of Greenwich grew to include the United Provinces, but Dutch successes meant that England’s need to prop them up had decreased. R. B. Wernham, The Return of the Armadas: The Last Years of the Elizabethan War Against Spain, 1595–1603 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 80. 39 For Claire McEachern, the Legend of Holiness demonstrates Spenser’s focus on

the exceptionalism of the English nation. The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 65. As Andrew Escobedo argues, Spenser defers the closure of apocalypse in order to celebrate the English nation’s achievements. Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 113. Although Ramachandran is not interested in the

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a prophetic canto in which the heroes encounter English history as if it lay in their future.40 Spenser’s use of insular history in these proleptic visions revealed to heroes who will eventually help to make England great contributes to the nostalgic processes of bringing a nation into existence.41 At the same time, the poem also has its outward-looking moments. Its allegorical villains sometimes represent generic vices such as infidelity or voluptuousness, and sometimes stand for specific foreign threats to a nearly English Faery Land. Acrasia, the object of Guyon’s “rigour pittilesse” (II.xii.83.2), may gesture toward wild Ireland, for instance.42 Duessa, “clad in scarlet red,/ Pursled with gold and pearle of rich assay,/ And like a Persian mitre on her hed” (I.ii.13.2–4), evokes the whore of Babylon, associated with the gaudy and menacing Church of Rome. Other characters, such as Archimago, may represent still other external enemies of the English nation. In the prophetic cantos of the romance’s first edition, Spenser sometimes positions his nation relative to others, such as the new Dutch Republic, in order to elevate and praise England and its queen. Spenser’s readers could optimistically imagine Elizabeth as shielding the Dutch under her protection; after all, she held the title of “Protector” of the United Provinces, and the Dutch Republic’s survival seemed to require England’s assistance. The first Anglo-Dutch military successes against Spain’s Army of Flanders could give some hope that perhaps one day “the great Castle” of Castile might be defeated. Merlin concludes his prophecies with the promise that in the future the United Provinces will depend upon England, whose “royall virgin [shall] raine” and “Stretch her white rod ouer the Belgicke shore,/ And the great Castle smite so sore with all,/ That it shall make him shake, and shortly learne to fall” apocalypse per se, her reading of Spenser’s romance as moving between the nationalist and the cosmic perspective, with England in “the center of the world as Spenser sees it,” offers a useful way of thinking about the co-existence of these supposedly incompatible threads in Spenser’s romance. Worldmakers, 135. 40 Bart van Es explores Spenser’s complex shuttling among kinds of history—prophetic, chronicle, euhemeristic—and his “prospective” and incomplete historical vision. Spenser’s Forms of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 149. 41 As Escobedo observes, nostalgia is an important element of the national project and one that Spenser exploits in his use of Arthur in the romance. Nationalism, 71. 42 As Richard McCabe argues, the episode may gesture simultaneously to Ireland and the Americas. Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 122.

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(III.iii.49.6–9).43 Merlin’s enigmatic description of the virgin queen’s relationship with the Low Countries figures Elizabeth as the benevolent protector of the Dutch, preparing to overthrow the power of Spain. Significantly, however, Merlin “stay[s]” his prophecy and keeps the rest of the vision to himself (III.iii.50.1).44 Since English forces continued to fight against Spain in the Low Countries, England’s victorious triumph remained chimerical. Merlin leaves Britomart and Elizabethan readers with only a hopeful promise that the “royall virgin” would someday triumph on the Belgicke shore. When Spenser published the Legend of Justice with Arthur’s valiant rescue of the Widow Belge as part of the 1596 expansion of The Faerie Queene, England’s intervention in the Low Countries had lost some of its luster. Decisive victory over Spain remained elusive and English commitments in France and Ireland diverted resources England could devote to the Low Countries.45 Whereas Spenser had characterized the first three books of the romance as “an historicall fiction” that would distance the poem from “suspition of present time” (1:167), the books of the second installment take on a greater immediacy. Recent history resides just beneath the surface of Book V’s allegory as Spenser explores the complexities of justice.46 That princely virtue and its attendant considerations of punishment, mercy, and equity contribute to the proper governing of a people. Queen Elizabeth sits “in th’Almighties place” and acts as the instrument of divine justice, dispensing “righteous doome” to her nation (V.Proem.11.2, 4). Elizabeth, however, makes decisions that

43 For Michael Ullyot the compliments to Elizabeth here also serve to lock her in to a course of action. The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 65. 44 Harry Berger, Jr. focuses on the structures of Merlin’s prophecy and this final indeterminacy in Revisionary Play: Essays in the Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 130. 45 Wallace T. MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I: War and Politics, 1588–1603 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 272. 46 Lowell Gallagher argues that the Legend of Justice has an ambivalent relationship to historical events and points to the contingency of historiography. Medusa’s Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 258. For Anne Lake Prescott, the example of Henri IV and Sir Burbon show that Spenser himself recognized history as itself a constructed and signifying narrative bearing an uneasy pseudo-allegorical relationship to events. “Foreign Policy in Fairyland: Henri IV and Spenser’s Burbon,” Spenser Studies 14 (2000), 191.

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affect not only her own people but also those of “furthest Nations,” who are “fille[d] with awfull dread” when confronted with her commitment to justice (V.Proem.11.5). The romance’s treatment of this virtue necessitates contact with other nations. In transforming England’s involvement in France, the Low Countries, and Ireland, Spenser creates an image of national valor in England’s support of distressed women: the ambivalent Flourdelis, the desolate Belge, and the ostensible object of the book’s quest, succor for the “distressed Dame” Irena (V.i.3).47 The completion of these quests in the Legend’s final cantos, particularly the succor of the Widow Belge, resolves the issues of justice and equity that arise throughout the first section of Book Five. The heroes of the Legend of Justice come to understand not only the nature of that virtue but also the proper operation of equity. Artegall, who learned “all the discipline of iustice” directly from Astraea (V.i.6.9), accepts the Faery Queen’s charge to redress the injustice Irena suffers at the hands of the tyrant Grantorto. Arthur, a just prince who “Gainst tortious powre and lawlesse regiment,/ In the behalfe of wronged weake did fight” (V.viii.30.7–8), later learns more about the virtue at Mercilla’s court and takes up the righteous cause of Belge. Both chivalric heroes epitomize a knight’s commitment to fight in the cause of justice, since, as Ramon Llull’s formulation of the chivalric code specifies, “withoute Justyce Chyualrye may not be.”48 As Artegall journeys toward his confrontation with Grantorto, his quest creates opportunities for him and his iron groom Talus to exhibit the crucial Aristotelian virtue of justice. Aristotle, whose Nicomachean Ethics Spenser used to frame his romance, considered justice “not a part of Virtue, but the whole of Virtue,” and humanist writers regarded it as the hallmark of the best rulers.49 When he and Talus encounter Sanglier, the Egalitarian Giant, Braggadochio, and the brothers Amidas and Bracidas, Artegall metes out the distributive and corrective justice into which Aristotle had divided this ideal.

47 Mary R. Bowman focuses on Spenser’s representation of English activities in Ireland, France, and the Low Countries in the figure of these three women. “Distressing Irena: Gender, Conquest, and Justice in Book V of The Faerie Queene,” Spenser Studies 17 (2003), 168. 48 [Ramon Llull], The Book of the ordre of chyvalry or Knyghthode (London, 1484), e6 verso. 49 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics , trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 261.

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In these encounters, Artegall also learns important lessons about the elusive function of equity. His resolution of the conflict between Amidas and Bracidas, for instance, explores the nature of equity.50 Britomart’s dream of “That part of Iustice, which is Equity” (V.vii.3.4) in the midst of her rescue of Arthur from Radigund further emphasizes its importance as a complement to the proper, public operations of justice.51 Equity, which Aristotle considers a separate, “special kind of Justice” (317), remedies cases that the statutory, positive law had not foreseen so that good laws do not become unjust. Equity is not quite the same as mercy. Whereas mercy spares a person convicted of violating a just law, equity sets aside an otherwise lawful statute or contract that has not operated justly. Equity’s malleability and imprecise application, opening a “Pandora’s box” in Lowell Gallagher’s view, contributed to the ambiguous understanding of its proper use.52 If equity is applied too liberally, the law loses its force; if it is withheld, the rigidity of statutory law may become unjust. As Aristotle had realized, “the law is always a general statement, yet there are cases which it is not possible to cover in a general statement” (315). Equity provides relief in such instances. Having temporarily joined forces with Arthur to protect Samient, Artegall journeys to Mercilla’s court and witnesses one more act of public justice before continuing his quest for Irena. The arrival of Artegall and Arthur occasions an extended meditation on Mercilla’s dispensation of justice locally and internationally, allowing Spenser to praise his own queen and her scepter, “The sacred pledge of peace and clemencie,/ With which high God had blest her happie land/ Maugre so many foes” (V.ix.30.3–5). Figures of mercy and equity surround Mercilla as she hears the pleas of “people meane and base” (V.ix.36.5) and then invites Artegall and Arthur to witness an important trial so that they can bear “witnesse forth aright in forrain land” of her commitment to justice, mercy, and equity (V.ix.37.5). In the trial of Duessa that follows, Zele accuses the

50 Maria Devlin McNair examines the difficulties and various theories that might resolve the brothers’ conflict at length, situating them within a discussion of the application of equity. “The Faerie Queene as an Aristotelian Inquiry into Ethics,” Spenser Studies 33 (2019), 117. 51 James Nohrnberg claims that Radigund’s unjust rule is meant to be overcome by equity. The Analogy of the Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 380. 52 Medusa’s Gaze, 149–153.

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“vntitled Queene” of the crimes for which Mary Queen of Scots had ultimately been executed.53 Although he tactfully passes over Duessa’s execution, the poet uses the episode to praise Mercilla’s divine justice as offering relief to all, “From th’vtmost brinke of the Armericke shore/ Vnto the margent of the Molucas” allowing both “Those Nations farre thy iustice [to] adore,” even as “thine owne people do thy mercy prayse much more” (V.x.3.6–9). Such praise for Mercilla implicitly obligates Spenser’s own queen to dispense justice both at home and abroad.54 This important decision sets the stage for Arthur’s reaction to the plight of the Widow Belge. When the “two Springals” arrive at Mercilla’s court to sue for Belge’s relief from a neighboring tyrant, a new sequence of interventionist justice begins. They explain that they have come “To seeke for succour of [Mercilla] and her Peares,/With humble prayers and intreatfull teares” (V.x.6.5). They inform her that they were Sent by their mother, who a widow was, Wrapt in great dolours and in deadly feares, By a strong Tyrant, who inuaded has Her land, and slaine her children ruefully alas. (V.x.6.6–9)

These orphans inform the queen and her court of their widowed mother’s devastation under Geryoneo and beg for “ayde, against that cruell Tyrants theft,/ Ere all her children he from her had reft” (V.x.14.4–5). Mercilla grants Arthur’s petition to respond to the widow’s plea. The prince intervenes on Belge’s behalf, in an episode often treated as a simple and direct allegory of England’s intervention in the Dutch Revolt.

53 John D. Staines sees in Spenser’s handling of Duessa’s trial a complex mixture of

“political rhetoric” in which the poet praises Mercilla as a way of influencing his own duplicitous and equivocal queen. The Tragic Histories of Mary Queen of Scots, 1560– 1690: Rhetoric, Passions, and Political Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 143. His reading rejects Jonathan Goldberg’s interest in the way power interpolates the subject. See Goldberg’s influential reading of this scene in James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 1–7. 54 As Louis Montrose observes, Spenser’s many figures for Elizabeth throughout his work, and particularly in the romance, are efforts to “frame the queen to her subjects’ fantasies,” performing a kind of “rhetorical bridling of the monarch.” “Spenser and the Elizabethan Political Imaginary,” ELH 69 (2002), 940.

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“Widowes ayd:” Divine Justice for Defenseless Women Significantly, Spenser chooses to make the Belge who appeals to Mercilla for relief a widow. Several consequences follow from Spenser’s emphasis on this widow’s suffering. First, it makes Belge an object of pity, rather than derision. Instead of a merry widow pursued by young gallants, Spenser presents this widow as a pitiable mother who suffers under a cruel oppressor. Arthur initially finds the wretched Belge cowering among the “moores and marshes” where she has sought to “hyde from [Geryoneo’s] hard tyranny” (V.x.18.4,9). As the widow of a “Noble husband” (V.x.11.8) and the “mother of a frutefull heritage/Euen seuenteen goodly sonnes” (V.x.7.3–4), Belge is the desperate widow and mother of her nation and its seventeen provinces. If Belge were a maiden she would need the protection of a father who could protect her virginity, but she could not be the mother of her country. If she were still a wife she would enjoy the protection of a husband, perhaps someone like the now-deceased William the Silent. Spenser’s Belge has no protective father or husband, however, and the poem’s references to her as a widow focus on her “sorrow and dismay” (V.x.19.1) and her need for succor from someone outside her family. In this way, Spenser associates Belge with biblical widows, the typical object of the divine injunction to relieve the lowly. David Norbrook and others have understood this widow in an apocalyptic context.55 This godly widow might easily serve as an inversion of the gaudy Duessa, dispatched immediately before Belge’s introduction, just as the brazen whore of Babylon had rejected the typical widow’s sobriety, declaring, “I sit being a quene, and am no widowe, and shal se no mourning” (Revelation 18:7). As John Bale had expounded on the implications of that

55 Although it is possible, as Norbrook suggests, to understand Arthur’s assistance in apocalyptic terms (Poetry and Politics 135), the episode involves greater complexity and more pragmatic motives—political and economic—than simply the eschatological. Even Kenneth Borris concedes that by the 1590s there were those who viewed England’s involvement in the Low Countries as a “defense of England against Habsburg ambitions” and who turned away from apocalyptic notions in favor of a “nationalistic reinterpretation of Protestant historiography.” Spenser’s Poetics of Prophecy in The Faerie Queene V (Victoria: University of Victoria Press, 1991), 27. Ramachandran shows that Spenser creates a tension between the nationalistic and the cosmological, sometimes emphasizing one or the other. Worldmakers, 110.

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sensual harlot, her words suggest “The myghty princes and pote[n]tates defendeth me with the death of innoce[n]t people. Neuer w[ere]... cruell tyrantes, more sure vpon my syde in defence of supersticio[n]s.”56 Revelation’s whore is bloodthirsty, while the widow is meek. But just as Bale’s King Johan could take a less urgently eschatological view of history, making Widow England into the mother of an oppressed nation, “yowr commynallte” the people, so the resonances of biblical widows need not necessarily make this episode apocalyptic.57 Widows more frequently appear in the scriptures simply as figures of pity and suffering. They are emblems of the powerless, lacking a male protector to shield them from the harsh world’s cruelties. The prophets, for instance, often speak of the Lord’s requirement that Israel secure justice for widows as part of a national reformation. Isaiah’s vision of heavenly displeasure with a sinful nation, having abandoned a desolate daughter of Zion, includes a rebuke of corrupt rulers who have neglected their duties, have ignored the fatherless, and have not let “the widowes cause come before them” (1:23). The Hebrew scriptures’ emphasis on providing for the widow adds to the impact of the widow’s “mite” (Mark 12:42) in the Gospels and lends force to the parable of the widow whose persistent demands for justice from a wicked judge who “feared not God, neither reuere[n]ced man” eventually cause him to do right in spite of himself (Luke 18:2–5). Biblical widows stand for those who need relief from injustice or oppression. Elsewhere in Spenser’s romance, Redcrosse learns the value of assisting widows from the seventh beadsman in the House of Holiness, who charges him to give “widowes ayd, least they should be vndone,” particularly in their times of “most necessitee” (I.x.43.3, 8). The biblical emphasis on succor to actual widows produces one of the chivalric obligations of the medieval knight. In his influential ceremony for a knight’s investiture, William Durand attached specific meanings to each aspect of the rite. During the ceremony, the bishop blesses the knight’s sword, so that he may take up his role as “defender of the church,

56 John Bale, The Image of Both Churches ([London, 1548]), Bb3 r. 57 John Bale, King Johan, ed. Barry B. Adams (San Marino: Huntington Library,

1969), line 1573.

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of widows, of orphans, and of all the servants of God.”58 Similarly, Llull made the defense of widows a centerpiece of the code and a symbol of the knight’s greater obligations to secure justice. “Thoffyce of a knyght,” Llull declares, “is to mayntene and deffende wymmen/wydowes and orphanes” and to perform “werkes of myserycorde and pyte... to helpe and ayd them that al wepynge require of the knyghtes ayde and mercye” (c3 r-v). The Elizabethan antiquarian, John Stowe, recorded a similar oath to take up the cause of widows in the rituals for creating “Knyghtes of the Bathe:” “Be ye stronge in the feith of Holy Cherche, and wydowes and maydones oppressed releve as right commaundeth.”59 Despite the “discord” Richard McCoy identifies later in the poem, chivalric conventions play an important part in Spenser’s romance, particularly in Artegall’s quests, alluded to in the first description of him to Britomart (III.ii.14.5– 6).60 The Legend of Justice’s second canto begins with a meditation on the honor that attends a knight’s duty to “defend the feeble in their right/ And wrong redresse in such as wend awry” (V.ii.1.3–4). Since widows traditionally represent the most destitute, Arthur’s succor of poor Belge embodies the essence of this virtue. Belge’s loss of a husband creates an ambiguous situation. On the one hand, early modern widows enjoyed a unique position before the law. Unlike an unwed maiden or a married matron, the widow released from male authority could exercise certain customary freedoms. She had specific responsibilities: preserving the inheritance of dependents and managing property left to her during her lifetime. In order to carry out those public duties, widows acquired a de facto legal standing in England and actively used it.61 Although some widows enjoyed prosperity and independence, the magistrates encouraged them not to flaunt their 58 William Durand, “De benedictione novi militis,” in Le Pontifical Romain au MoyenAge, vol. 3 (Vatican: Vatican Apostolic Library, 1940), 447. The original Latin reads “esse possit defensio ecclesiarum, viduarum, orphanorum, omniumque Deo servientium.” 59 Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles with Historical Memoranda by John Stowe, ed. James Gairdner (London: Camden Society, 1880; rprt New York: Johnson, 1965), 113. 60 Rites, 142. Michael Leslie treats the chivalric elements of Spenser’s knights, particularly Artegall, in depth. Spenser’s ‘Fierce Warres and Faithfull Loves”: Martial and Chivalric Symbolism in The Faerie Queene (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983), 26–32. 61 Stretton, Waging, 111–13. Maria Cioni traces the legal standing of women and widows’ comparative freedom in sixteenth-century England. Women and Law in Elizabethan England with Particular Reference to the Court of Chancery (New York: Garland, 1985), 111.

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freedom.62 On the other hand, they occupied a precarious position, one that mixed anxiety with their independence. A widow’s state could vacillate, causing further instability. Once a woman married, she could never again be a maiden. But a widow could remarry and might even become a widow again.63 This instability vexed theologians like Richard Bancroft who defended the Church of England against its radical critics.64 A widow might listen to those in the church who cautioned against remarriage,or she might connect families or members of a cause, as Sidney’s widow and Louise de Coligny had.65 The stereotypes that developed around widows—the wealthy, lascivious widow pursued by young fortune-seeking suitors or the melancholy, chaste widow with an orphan at the breast, bereft of material support or erotic desire—focus on the extremes and may have served to “fix” their ambiguous place in the social milieu. Literary treatments of widows explore this ambiguous place, often within the context of the three acceptable roles available to Elizabethan women. In Sir John Davies’s “Contention between a Wife, a Widowe and a Maide for Precedence,” for example, the widow negotiates this complex dynamic. She celebrates her freedom—“Moste maides are wardes, and every wife a slave,/ I have my liverie sued and I am free”—while encountering scorn from women in other roles—“Goe widowe, make some younger brother rich,/ And then take thought and dye, and all is well.”66 62 Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 71. Jennifer Panek, who explores the stereotype of widows on the Elizabethan stage, finds significant social pressure on widows to remarry. Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 34. 63 Amy M. Froide argues that marital status is a neglected element in understanding women’s experiences in early modern England. “Marital Status as a Category of Difference: Singlewomen and Widows in Early Modern England,” Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 258. 64 Richard Bancroft, A Svrvay of the Pretended Holy Discipline (London, 1593), 219. The paratext in this chapter “Of certaine widdowes” further registers this instability in its inconsistent headings, which vary between “Of Women” and “Of Widdowes.” 65 Broomhall and Spinks note that William’s widow wrote frequently to Leicester to remind him of her personal dependence, as well as her nation’s dependence, on England. Feminizing, 82. 66 Sir John Davies, “A Contention between a Wife, a Widowe and a Maide for Precedence at an Offering,” in The Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Robert Krueger (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), lines 31–2 and 111–2.

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In “An Old Woman’s Tale in her solitarie Cell,” Sir John Ogle, a young veteran of the Dutch wars, uses chivalric and pastoral romance conventions to imagine a destitute widow’s sufferings in a time of uncertainty and war. The poem includes the lament of a desperate widow dwelling in a cave. In the space of one page, she passes from merry maiden to contented wife to disconsolate widow, losing “My stay, my ioy, and my comfort merely.”67 Left with three orphaned boys, this widow watches helplessly as most of the family property passes to her eldest son, whose premature death sends the inheritance to his infant son’s maternal guardian, whose dislike for the old widow leaves her nearly penniless and without remedy. The knight who narrates the old widow’s tale tries unsuccessfully to comfort her, but she insists on living out her days alone, calling for death until Atropos “doe for her as she did/ To hir husband and sons when she cut their liues thred” (H4 v). The Faerie Queene’s treatment of Belge, while of a piece with Elizabethan literary treatments of desolate widows, places her in a much more complex fantasy, a fairy world populated by powerful single women: Gloriana, Belphoebe, Britomart, Duessa, Radigund, and others. The widow Belge, like the maiden Irena, and the betrothed Flourdelis, must appeal to the aging virgin queen Mercilla for succor. As an unmarried and yet powerful woman who dallied with marriage, claimed to be married to her realm, and took easy offense at her courtiers’ own marriages, Queen Elizabeth sometimes imbued single female figures with more power than they conventionally held. At the same time, powerful widows might be made to compliment the aging English queen. In 1578, for instance, when she made her progress through Norwich with its large community of Dutch exiles, an entertainment staged at her entry began with a female allegorical figure, Norwich, praying for the health and prosperity of Elizabeth, “my louing nurse and mother,” the traditional emblem of caritas, before introducing three strong, biblical matriarchs to further praise England’s most powerful woman.68 In addition to

67 I[ohn] O[gle], The Lamentation of Troy...Wherevnto is annexed an Olde Womans Tale in her solitarie Cell (London, 1594), G1 v. 68 The Ioyfvll Receyuing of the Queenes most excelent Maiestie into hir Highnesse Citie of Norvvich (London, [1578]), C1 v. Zillah Dovey includes an account of Elizabeth’s progress. An Elizabethan Progress: The Queen’s Journey into East Anglia, 1578 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 70. Natasha Korda argues that figures of nurture in the Norwich pageant acknowledge Dutch dependence on Elizabeth, as well as

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Debora and Hester, Judith addresses Elizabeth in this entertainment. This widow, famous for taking up the sword against Holofernes, recounts her triumph and then asks, “If widowes hand could vanquish such a foe:/.../ VVhat Tirant liues but thou mayest ouerthrow.” In the summer of 1578, as England again wavered in its confrontations with Spain, this strong widow’s praise of a powerful virago’s strength in the face of tyranny must have seemed an exhortation to action.69 The Dutch understood the value of representing their Habsburg enemies as rapacious, violent tyrants who had no regard for powerless women. Encouraging his fellows to refuse peace overtures from the enemy, for instance, the anonymous author of VVaerschowinghe aen alle goed Inghesetenen vanden Nederlanden recalled the many crimes of the Spanish and their armies, including numerous examples of towns “gheplondert vrouwen vercracht diuershe persoonen vermoort … roouinge fortsen violeringe van dochters ende vrouwen die sy inde vlecken ende plaetsen [plundered, women raped, many people killed … roving bands violating daughters and wives in rural regions and places].”70 With William of Orange murdered and Elizabeth coyly refusing to take his place, another Dutch pamphleteer warned his fellow patriots not to accept the tempting offers of peace with Spain. Urging them not to forget the barbarous treatment of cities that had come under Spanish control, the patriot warned, “Dat wy wel souden veruloecken de ueren/ Doen wy het Tractaet der Spaengiaerden saghen [That we would indeed curse the hours/ When we saw the Spanish Declaration” and reminds his readers of how often “De jonghe Dochters worden gheuioleert [Young daughters were raped].”71 The violence widows and other defenseless women suffered during the Spanish Fury had given rise to a tradition of woodcuts and engravings, such as Hans Collaert’s Belgicae Delaceratae Lamentatio, depicting “Belgia” ravished and despoiled by four Spanish soldiers (see

the benefits England receives from nurturing this desperate community of exiles. “Staging Alien Women’s Work in Civic Pageants,” in Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Michelle Dowd and Natasha Korda (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 64. 69 MacCaffrey, Making, 233. 70 VVaerschowinghe aen alle goed Inghesetenen vanden Nederlanden ([Antwerp], 1583),

B1r. 71 Dialogus, Oft t’samensprekinghe tusschen eenen Spaensch-ghesinden Peysmakere ende eenen goeden Patriot ofte Lief hebber des Vaderlants ([Antwerp], 1584), A3r.

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Fig 2.1). Heroic defenses of such powerless women thus became a rallying cry in the rhetoric and imagery inspiring Dutch patriots in the revolt. Because widows had developed ad hoc rather than statutory standing, their primary legal recourse came through the system of equity courts— especially Chancery and Exchequer—that had developed incrementally in early modern England. One of the most important of these was the Tudor Court of Requests. As Timothy Stretton explains, this forum for equity had “evolved, growing out of the willingness of English monarchs to entertain, in person or by proxy, the complaints of poor subjects.”72 Biblical characterizations of just rulers often mentioned the importance of equity, particularly in the ruler’s care for those without power or influence. In describing the leader who would arise from Jesse’s stock,

Fig. 2.1 Hans Collaert, Belgicae Delaceratae Lamentatio (1577). Image courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

72 Waging, 71.

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for instance, Isaiah promised that “with righteousness shal he iudge the poore, and with equitie shal he reproue for the meke” (11:4). Existing outside of any statutory framework, the Court of Requests offered equitable relief to those who could not find satisfaction through the regular courts of common law. Because it operated without the common law’s procedural burdens, the Court of Requests offered an expeditious avenue for matters that came to the crown’s attention. It took up the cases of impoverished litigants who could show that they could not afford to pursue remedies through other, more costly legal channels. For these reasons, this short-lived venue provided an especially important arena for widows who could not otherwise obtain relief. The formal scenes of requests for justice in courtly settings in the Legend of Justice—Irena’s appeal to the Faery Queen herself; the trial of Duessa; Belge’s request for relief by proxy—all involve a female monarch dispensing justice to women and recall the importance of the Court of Requests and other arenas of equity for those without regular legal standing. The quest that structures the entire narrative begins because the great queen at the heart of the romance takes pity on the lowly. Her “glorie” comes about both because she “aide[s] all suppliants pore” and fashions herself to be the “Patronesse” of “weake Princes” (V.i.4.6–7). Belge’s plea for Mercilla’s relief distills the matter of equity and justice in its treatment of a tyrant’s contract. The application of equity in her relief stands at the heart of the romance’s fashioning of England as a champion for the Dutch.

“Euerlasting Praise”: Arthur’s Glorious Intervention Spenser uses the episode of Arthur’s rescue of the Widow Belge to construct a fantasy of English greatness. For Belge, the “beginning to her woe and wretchednesse” (V.x.11.9) occurs when she becomes a widow. Lacking a husband’s protection, she needs a new male defender. In her desperate state, she encounters Geryoneo the giant who “of her widowhed/ Taking aduantage, and her yet fresh woes,/Himselfe and seruice to her offered” (V.x.12.1–3). Lulled into a false sense of security, the widow enters into a contract with the dissembling giant. Believing Geryoneo to be trustworthy, “she did at last commit/ All to his hands, and gaue him soueraine powre/ To doe, what euer he thought good or

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fit” (V.x.13.2–3).73 From Geryoneo’s perspective, Belge has fallen into his trap. With this contract in place, he proceeds to tyrannize Belge and her infants, establishing a false religion and sacrificing her children to it: he gan forth from that howre To stirre vp strife, and many a Tragicke stowre, Giuing her dearest children one by one Vnto a dreadfull Monster to deuoure And setting vp an Idole of his owne. (V.x.13.4–8)

In response, the beleaguered widow sends to Mercilla for relief from this unjust contract. Spenser’s vision of England’s glory in Belgium depends on this distressed woman’s status as a widow, one who can rely on the help of a chivalric knight and who can justly appeal to equity for relief from a tyrant’s contract. In this episode, Spenser recasts the history of Elizabeth’s response to Dutch pleas for assistance against the tyranny of Spain in Belge’s appeal. Just as the Dutch had initially done with Philip, Belge grants “soueraine powre” to Geryoneo in exchange for his offer of protection.74 And just as Philip had done in violating his oaths, Geryoneo abuses the sovereignty Belge gives him, destroying her fair city and “imposing the yoke of inquisition,” forcing it to turn its devotion from God to “his Idole most vntrew” (V.x.27.2–9). He slays most of her seventeen children just as Philip’s tyrannical government had ravaged the nation in recapturing most of the seventeen provinces. Following the loss of her sons, Belge seeks equitable remedy: help from a foreign monarch, Mercilla, against a tyrant’s abuse of a contract. In Belge’s plea and Mercilla’s immediate offer of succor, Spenser presents an ideal response informed by “tactical amnesia,” in Linda Gergerson’s view, that ignores the decade of empty promises preceding Elizabeth’s decision to assist the Dutch rebels overtly.75 Whereas the reality of English intervention resulted in tensions, resentment, and misunderstandings, Spenser’s 73 Melissa Sanchez correctly reads a “voluntary submission” in Belge’s initial relationship with Geryoneo and examines its eroticized, sadistic elements that may undermine some readers’ sympathy for her plight. Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 77. 74 Bowman argues that Spenser is “evasive” about sovereignty in this episode, but she misunderstands the contract Belge enters here. “Distressing” 169. 75 The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 101. Benedict Anderson argues that an

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tale of Belge’s woe and Arthur’s assistance refashions these events and elides the complexities and frustrations of those who had advocated such assistance. In imagining Arthur’s resounding victory and the widow’s deferential gratitude, Spenser transforms the Dutch appeal into a pretext for English national greatness in its conflict with a powerful enemy. When the “noble Briton Prince” hears of Belge’s distress and witnesses the reluctance of others, “for cowheard fear,” to rescue her, he boldly steps forward to beg that Mercilla “graunt him that aduenture” (V.x.15.2,5,9).76 The queen “gladly granted it” (V.x.16.1) and Arthur immediately prepares to undertake the quest. This scene may gesture toward specific details in the “forward” Protestants’ zealous, decade-long advocacy of intervention. It may erase the shame of the queen’s previous neglect or the initial failures of the expedition. It may even gesture specifically to elements of Leicester’s costly preparations for the expedition.77 It certainly represents this episode as an English triumph. Mercilla, one of Elizabeth’s avatars in the poem, does not hesitate to redress Belge’s plea, and a chivalric English hero, Arthur, valiantly comes to the assistance of a desperate Dutch figure. Throughout the episode, Spenser marks the milestones of his native hero’s victories—the defeat of the Seneschall (perhaps a figure for Parma); the capture of the fallen city of Belge (perhaps Antwerp); the defeat of the tyrant himself (perhaps a reference to Philip II); the destruction of the monster beneath his Idol (possibly the Church of Rome); and the restoration of Belge, “settled in her raine,/ With safe assurance and establishment,” (England’s ostensible objective)—but in each case, Arthur’s victories on Belge’s behalf represent Spenser’s dreams of glory accruing to England’s heroic prince; none of these events would come to pass outside of the romance.78 When the poetic victory is complete, Arthur

intentional amnesia characterizes the narratives of national history. Imagined Communities, 204. 76 Gregory suggests that the romance conventions requiring a lone hero to accept the dangerous quest allow Spenser to represent Arthur’s actions as simple valor, undiluted by considerations of realpolitik. “Shadowing Intervention,” 367. 77 Although there are a number of candidates for the “real” Arthur behind this episode—Leicester, Sidney, Essex, and Norris among them—the popular choice remains Leicester. See, for instance, Richard McCabe, Monstrous, 222. 78 In Homi K. Bhabha’s focus on the relationship between the narratives people tell themselves and the construction of nations he points to the ambivalence of national

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receives the adulation of a grateful Belge and her people, who lead him “through all their streetes along,/ Crowned with girlonds of immortal baies” (V.xi.34.5–6). Spenser’s vision of perpetual Dutch deference, the image of the “vulgar” coming to see their hero, “whose euerlasting praise/ They all were bound to all posterities to raise” (V.xi.34.8–9), completes his dream of a future victory that would elevate England to a place of honor for having saved a dependent, godly people and destroyed the vicious Spanish tyrant. A widow’s appeal to a valiant, chivalric knight enables Spenser to construct this glorious vision of his nation. In addition to creating another episode of an English hero’s triumph over a Spanish fiend, Spenser’s representation of Belge as a widow also signifies in a second, ideological way. Belge is a feme sole and has special legal standing in matters of contract. When Arthur discovers the exiled widow, she praises her new champion for taking up the just cause of a “wretched woman” as a godly labor that will earn him an “immortall guerdon” (V.x.21.3–4). The Dutch Revolt’s recourse to the figure of the “bloetdorstighe Tyrannen” [bloodthirsty tyrants] whose actions contrast with just princes doing God’s bidding by “weduwen en[de] weesen aen het here helpen” [coming to the aid of widows and orphans], finds expression in this episode.79 Bereft of a noble husband, “depriued” of her sovereignty by a “Tyrant” (V.x.18.3) who has taken advantage of her naivety and weakness, Belge inspires more than Mercilla’s and Arthur’s chivalric aid. She appeals to a righteous, foreign power for equity. As a figure of chivalry and justice, Arthur acts both to relieve an abject figure needing a knight’s assistance and to grant relief from an unjust contract to a distressed widow in her capacity as feme sole. Arthur saves the widow, restoring her sovereignty and returning possession of her city. He defeats the tyrant’s deputies and slays Geryoneo, sending him “Downe to the house of dole, his daies there to deplore” (V.xi.14.9).80 After toppling the idol and defeating its monstrous guardian, Arthur makes sure that

histories, particularly when powerful images are in the process of being created. “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 3. 79 Chronyc. Historie der Nederlandtscher Oorlogen Troublen en[de] oproeren oorspronck anuanck en[de] eynde ([Leeuwarden], 1579), A2 r-v. 80 Van Es reads this episode as euhemeristic history, presenting Geryoneo as simultaneously the particular tyranny of Spain in the Low Countries as well as ancient, cyclical struggles of justice with tyranny. Spenser’s Forms, 129.

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Belge regains her rightful, settled place. Rescuing Belge from Geryoneo and his agents, Arthur defeats tyranny and ensures the triumph of justice and equity. Spenser mystifies the reasons for English intervention on behalf of the Dutch, but unlike the diplomatic language of Elizabeth’s Declaration, he aggressively fashions the conflict as an occasion to celebrate English heroic greatness. Arthur comes to Belge’s aid not from a motive of conscience, but from a desire to save a helpless widow and to restore justice over tyranny. The poem consistently frames the “strife” (V.x.13.5) that Belge suffers as a matter of Geryoneo’s destructive “tyrannizing” (V.x.14.1). The widow bases her claim in Geryoneo’s abuse of sovereignty, the loss of liberty, and the damage that ensues. The pitiful sacking of Belge’s city results in numerous miseries including the imposition of “new lawes and orders” with “many hard conditions” on its citizens (V.x.27.6–7). The violence accompanying the fall of the city results in the cessation of commerce, a closed harbor that “mard her marchants trade” (V.x.25.6).81 After Arthur has liberated Belge from the tyrant, she requests one last boon, “Sith ye thus farre haue tendred my poore case” (V.xi.18.3). The removal of the tyrant’s idolatry comes as an afterthought. The difference in religion certainly forms part of Belge’s claim against Geryoneo, but throughout the episode Spenser subordinates religious oppression within a broader loss of liberty. In this overdetermined figuration of Arthur’s relief of Belge as the dissolution of a contract, Spenser approaches and then avoids an ideological contradiction in England’s foreign policy. The poet evokes the contractual language of resistance from the Vindiciae and its popular treatment in tracts like the Politicq Onderwijs . Arthur heeds the widow’s appeal for equitable relief from an unjust contract when he restores Belge to her ravaged city. In response, Geryoneo charges Arthur with usurping his place, claiming that the English knight has no right to intervene between him and the “Lady Belge” (V.xi.2.2), perhaps implicitly denying her right to appeal as a feme sole. Casting Arthur as an interloper, Geryoneo demands that the knight “Deliuer him his owne, ere yet too late,/To which they had no right, nor any wrongfull state” 81 Although he misunderstands these events, Aaron Kitch rightly notes Spenser’s embrace of “heroic commerce” as part of the poet’s treatment of Arthur’s assistance to Belge. Political Economy and the States of Literature in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 39–40.

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(V.xi.3.8–9). From Geryoneo’s perspective, Arthur has unjustly engrossed the Spaniard’s rightful possessions and must return them. Because Spenser overtly figures the relief of Belge as Arthur’s assistance to a poor widow, the conflict over possession subtly introduces the difficulty of competing claims to speak for justice, pointing to the complex subjectivity inherent in equity. In the abstract, justice should render an impartial judgment rooted in an “atemporal, objective reality,” but as Gallagher observes, in practice subjectivity enters into adjudications, pointing to equity’s unstable nature.82 As Elizabeth represented her decision to intervene on the side of the Dutch against Spain, she figured her actions as a manifest restoration of justice, regardless of Spain’s view of the matter. A contradiction emerges in this English intervention in the Low Countries, revealing the national exceptionalism that enters into late Elizabethan ideology. Understanding these contradictions reveals the ideological operations of the national identity at work in Spenser’s romance.

“To Sustaine So Great a Burden:” When Equity Enables Rebellion The poet’s praise for Arthur’s chivalric defense of Belge as the equitable restoration of justice against tyranny belies the contradictions in Elizabethan foreign policy, particularly in terms of England’s interventions in the Low Countries and in Ireland, and points to the masks of an ideology of national greatness in early modern England.83 Earlier in the Legend of Justice, Artegall had confronted a giant intent on achieving radical equality and overthrowing “Tyrants that make men subiect to their law” (V.ii.38.6–7). In that instance, he rejected the notion that hierarchy creates tyranny and insisted that God “maketh Kings to sit in souerainty” (V.ii.41.5).84 Artegall’s defense of “the powers that be... ordeined of God” (Romans 13:1) echoes the English crown’s ideology of patient suffering. Those who might reject the authority of a Protestant woman on the English throne would annually hear that they must “paciently suffre 82 Medusa’s Gaze, 147. 83 Slavoj Žižek argues that ideology requires a misrecognition and appears to make

contrary evidence support its claims. Sublime Object, 49. 84 James Holstun recognizes the ideological contradiction in Artegall’s juxtaposed responses to Pollente and the Egalitarian Giant in that canto. “The Giant’s Faction: Spenser, Heywood, and the Mid-Tudor Crisis,” JMEMS 37 (2007), 341, 347.

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al wronges & iniuries, referring the iudgeme[n]t of our cause onely to god.”85 Officially, a subject’s dissatisfaction with a ruler did not justify rebellion. Such a position created irreconcilable contradictions once Elizabeth agreed to accept the Dutch theory of their revolt against Spain. Semiofficial responses to such a contradiction ultimately asserted an unconvincing difference. For instance, William Cecil sought to justify the regime’s execution of Edmund Campion on the grounds that the Jesuit mission constituted a treasonous effort to displace a legitimate monarch. The bishop of Rome could not “depose any sovereign princess, being lawfully invested in their crowns by succession in blood or lawful election... [or] arm subjects against their natural lords to make wars.”86 Parsing the treatment of Campion in this way required a casuist’s nimble intellect. The crown’s official position that foreign powers could not intervene between the monarch and her people could be difficult to maintain. When Thomas Bilson responded to Cardinal Allen’s unremitting charges of Elizabeth’s tyranny, he confronted these ideological contradictions in a dispute that again turned on equity. Arguing that the Jesuits’ advocacy of rebellion against Elizabeth constitutes sedition, Bilson returns to the claim that “God is the ordainer of princes, and will be the reuenger of all that presume to displace them or resist them.”87 He simultaneously justifies the Dutch rebellion against Philip’s cruel regime in the Low Countries, now supported by Elizabeth, on the grounds that Philip has tried to “alter their state and euect their ancient lawes” (281). Just as Belge had initially welcomed Geryoneo, so the Dutch had at first accepted Philip, but “if he will needs become an oppressor, why should they not defend the freedome of their country?” (281). The difference between assisting legitimate rebels in the Low Countries and denying the legitimacy of resistance at home depends upon perspective. Bilson claims that

85 Certayne sermons appoynted by the Quenes Maiestie (London, 1560), T1r. 86 William Cecil, “The Execution of Justice in England” in The Execution of Justice in

England by William Cecil and A True, Sincere, and Modest Defense of English Catholics by William Allen, ed. Robert M. Kingdon (Ithaca: Folger Shakespeare Library/Cornell University Press, 1965), 21. The translation of this tract into Dutch suggests its relevance across the Channel as well. 87 Thomas Bilson, The True Difference Betweene Christian Subjection and Unchristian Rebellion (London, 1586), 263.

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England does not hunt Jesuits and rebels to Elizabeth’s crown “for religion;” from his perspective, it appears that Philip and his agents persecute the Dutch for just this reason (279). Therefore, as Marnix had similarly argued, foreign magistrates opposed to Philip’s tyranny may “interpose themselves for the safegard of equity and innocencie” (280). Bilson can only reconcile these contradictions by claiming that equity distinguishes them. The Dutch must not be called rebels because England has been forced to accept that they are not; the Jesuits and the Irish must be labeled rebels because they endanger Elizabeth’s regime. The case of Elizabeth’s rebellious Irish subjects offers further insight into the ideological contradictions of the late Elizabethan regime. Spenser’s solution to this contradiction points to these stresses and fractures and to the poet’s impulse to preserve a glorious English identity. Just as the Dutch had appealed to Elizabeth for assistance for years before she officially took up their almost hopeless cause, so the Irish had sought Spanish assistance in their conflict with the Elizabethan state.88 Irish rebels abjured their allegiance to Elizabeth, requesting Philip to make his nephew, the Archduke Albert, regent in Brussels, their king.89 In letters to the Spanish king, O’Neill and O’Donnell begged him to send an army and “appoint the Cardinal Archduke Albert to be their Prince.”90 Although neither the Archduke nor the Spanish king accepted the sovereignty offered by the Irish, they continued to provide support for Elizabeth’s rebellious subjects in a situation mirroring England’s relationship with the Dutch rebels: a people in a land separated from their nominal overlords by some distance, claiming to find the violent regulation of religious orthodoxy to be unjust, would abjure their allegiance to a supposed tyrant and offer the nation’s sovereignty to a different monarch, aligned more closely in religious outlook with the rebels. This was precisely the situation Elizabeth had long feared and one that 88 Norbrook notes that many in England recognized the contradiction, but he does not explore the ideological fantasy by which Spenser attempts a resolution. Poetry and Politics, 139. The Dutch kept close watch on events in Ireland. They perceived the papal landing at Smerwick as an attempt either to invade England “ofte incursien op Nederlandt te doene [or to make raids on the Netherlands].” Victorie In Ir-landt van de Coninghinne van Engel-landt teghen de Spaignarden ende Romanisten (London, 1584), A2r. 89 On this offer, see Hiram Morgan, Tyrone’s Rebellion: Outbreak of the Nine Years War in Tudor Ireland (Woodbridge: Boydell/RHS, 1993), 210. 90 Calendar of Letters and State Papers (Spain), ed. Martin Hume, vol. 4 (London, 1899; rprt. Nendeln: Kraus, 1971), 620. O’Ryan would make a similar request, 4: 623.

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her regime worked to prevent, even as Spenser’s romance was coming through the press.91 In his poem, Spenser aligns Artegall’s long-deferred rescue of Irena with Arthur’s aid to Belge. Only from the perspective of the readers of Spenser’s English nation can the relief of Irena at the expense of the Irish rebels be made to echo the rescue of Belge and the Dutch rebels. In a scene analogous to Arthur’s defeat of Geryoneo, another Spanish tyrant, the witnesses of Artegall’s defeat of the Iberian Grantorto, “Glad to be quit from that proud Tyrants awe,” celebrate the restoration of their rightful queen, “their true Liege and Princesse naturall” (V.xii.24.3,8). As in the Belge episode, this scene’s hero ensures that Irena is “therein establish[ed] peaceablie” (V.xii.25.3). Even the matter of religion comes as an afterthought, the “reforme” beginning once Artegall has worked diligently to establish “true Justice” in the commonweal (V.xii.26.2).92 Despite the romance’s figurative repetitions and parallels, Elizabeth’s actions in the United Provinces invert her actions in Ireland. To achieve this fantasy—of successfully completed quests for Belge and Irena, quests that represent Spenser’s hope for English victories that remained elusive and in doubt throughout his lifetime—the poem simply indulges in the sort of fantastic inversion of perspective that romance can accomplish with ease.93 Irena, who resembles another unwed queen with a claim to be Ireland’s natural sovereign, becomes the oppressed people who

91 Wernham discusses the frenzied efforts in England to prevent the further inflammation of Irish rebellion that would accompany a Catholic claim to sovereignty there. Return, 130–1. In addition to the ongoing commitment to the Low Countries, England had to respond to the opening phases of the Nine Years’ War. 92 Brian C. Lockey argues that Spenser sought an abstract, transnational framework

based in natural law with which to judge the “legitimacy of sovereigns and competing claimants” in Ireland without reference to a specifically English or national context, but as I show here, the inversion in Artegall’s deliverance of Irena shows that Spenser’s treatment of justice is certainly interested and English. “Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser on Transnational Governance and the Future of Christendom,” RQ 74 (2021), 400. 93 As Jameson observes, romance is uniquely suited to contain competing ideological

perspectives, creating a resolution that “can be projected in the form of a nostalgic (or less often, a Utopian) harmony.” Political Unconscious, 148. Gordon Teskey reads the later books of Spenser’s romance as enabling a strategic blocking of memory, one that enables Spenser to efface the ideological underpinnings of his romance. Allegory and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 181.

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ought to resist Grantorto’s alien tyranny.94 Spenser does not voice the feelings of the many who had lived on the other island subject to Elizabeth’s authority and who might have considered England’s queen to be an alien tyrant. The romance merely substitutes the minority view of Ireland’s ruling elites as that of the oppressed and imagines that even as Arthur justly succors Belge, so Artegall redresses Irena’s imprisonment under Grandtorto’s tyranny and restores another doleful woman to her rightful place. As Richard McCabe observes, Spenser’s “creation of Irena was a masterstroke” in separating the national avatar from the people.95 Spenser concludes Arthur’s assistance to the Widow Belge with one last fantasy: England acquires glory through the subordination of the Dutch. Reporting at the outset of England’s initial intervention, Digges had expressed optimism that the Dutch would acknowledge “the great grace and fauor of her Maiestie, in spending and sending to and for them, her money, forces, and most valiant, noble, louing and beloued subiects.”96 In the decade between England’s intervention in the Low Countries and Spenser’s representation of it, however, the English— engaged in Normandy and Brittany; in Ireland; and occasionally on the Iberian peninsula—had never completely committed to the cause in the United Provinces. At the same time, following their emergence from the crisis of William of Orange’s death, and having regained some stability after the contribution of English military and financial backing, the Dutch, under William’s son Maurits, began aggressive campaigns against the Habsburg Army of Flanders. Territory previously lost to Parma and fortified cities that English garrisons had betrayed to Spain came back under Dutch dominion as the United Provinces pushed the Habsburg forces further east and south. With Dutch successes, Elizabeth could feel confident about demanding repayment of her loans. She instructed her envoy Thomas Egerton to remind the Dutch of her generosity, which had allowed them “to defende their owne estate, to rectifie and settle the forme of their governem[en]t... to better their traffike & commerce abroade, to fortifie and enlarge their cities and townes, to fill them full of riche inhabitants of the enemies Prouinces, [and] to increase in every

94 For Žižek, the obvious illusion that goes unremarked signals the ideological fantasy. Sublime Object, 33. 95 McCabe, Monstrous, 229. 96 Briefe Report, E1v.

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quart[er] the generall meanes.”97 If all of this were so, if the effects Spenser imagined in describing the fall of Belge’s city had been reversed, then the Dutch should not begrudge English demands for repayment or deny the redeployment of English troops in France or Ireland. Spenser’s romance easily subordinates Belge, a position the Dutch might not have imagined for themselves in their dealings with England a decade after Nonsuch. Although the chivalric Arthur should perhaps not expect anything from an oppressed widow other than the reward of fulfilling his duty as a Christian knight, pragmatic England expected prompt repayment of the loans granted in the 1580s. Belge’s disclaimer that she can offer no “other meede” than the reward of allowing the knight to do God’s will may thus hint at Dutch ingratitude, a theme that would echo increasingly loudly in England through the seventeenth century. Even in the 1590s, there had been a perceptible growth in the Republic’s economic prosperity.98 English ministers and the Queen viewed the Dutch refusal to begin immediate repayment as a form of ingratitude. When the Dutch tried to defer their debts, the Queen instructed Egerton to describe for the States General “the daily complaints of her people at home, for the losse of so many, and so valiant english souldiers, in defense of forraine q[uar]rels.”99 The Dutch Revolt continued for another half-century, however, and English troops would continue to serve in the Low Countries for many years. The lengthy siege of Ostend, as we shall see in the next chapter, would soon serve as an important test of England’s resolve. Spenser’s poem, however, imagines a glorious and total victory, one that results from the decisive assistance of Mercilla and her English champion. Spenser’s fantasy includes a Dutch figure who would acknowledge England’s greatness. Belge does have hubristic flaws that hint at her ingratitude. In a “former age” before the appearance of the tyrant Geryoneo, she had enjoyed “great worth and wealth” and had been happier “Then famous Niobe” (V.x.7.1–2, 8). Invoking a figure whose excessive pride and impious boasting had brought about her destruction, the poet suggests that to some extent, Belge contributed to her own downfall. By subtly criticizing Belge, Spenser asserts a subordination that no

97 Huntington Library, MS EL 1611, fol. 3. 98 Israel, Dutch Republic, 241. 99 Huntington Library, MS EL 1611, fol. 2–3.

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longer obtained. The Dutch had survived their crisis and set a course for prosperity and success. England had contributed to that success but not as decisively as some English writers pretended. The poet fashions his nation into a champion of liberty, a fanciful image at odds with England’s modest successes in the Low Countries and its ruthless suppression of Ireland’s rebels. In “misremembering” the immediate history of England, Spenser does just what nationalists do, and what Eric Hobsbawm cautions good historians against: “Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so. As Renan said: ‘Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.’”100 The episode of the Widow Belge offers Spenser an opportunity to write about his nation’s greatness, urging the English actively to pursue their still-unfulfilled potential.

100 Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, 12.

CHAPTER 3

Wooing in English: Staging the Dutch in English Comedy

IAGO:

CASSIO: IAGO:

And let me the cannikin clink, clink, And let me the cannikin clink. A soldier’s a man, oh, man’s life’s but a span, Why then let a soldier drink! … Fore heaven, an excellent song! I learned it in England, where indeed they are most potent in potting. Your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander—drink, ho!—are nothing to your English. Othello 2.3.61–69

The sober widow whose pious connotations envelop the Widow Belge found her profane antithesis in the giddy widow Paul condemned in 1 Timothy. Some widows used their legal status to amass significant wealth. Younger brothers, decayed gentlemen, and other kinds of gallants hoping to make their fortunes sought out such widows in London’s lucrative remarriage market. The “paths that lead to widows’ beds” form the basis for many plots in the urban comedies that began to dominate the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Fleck, English National Identity and the Image of the Dutch, Early Modern Literature in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42910-1_3

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London stage at the end of Elizabeth’s reign.1 City comedies—plays depicting London residents of the middling sort engaged in commercial and libidinal schemes—adapted the plotlines of New Comedy to the specific conditions of early modern London, while developing many new variations on old themes.2 In addition to plots involving prodigal sons, disguised adulterers, cuckolds and wittols, greedy dupes, and scheming heirs hastening their parents’ demises, the plot to wed a rich widow structures many of these plays. The form was so popular—it played in all the theaters of London, before large and small audiences, of the common and the elite varieties—that it shaped new versions of social types in the public imagination for generations.3 The gallant, the roguish parasite, the prostitute, and the scolding wife would all emerge in countless iterations on the early modern stage. Three social types—the merchant, the puritan, and the foreigner—appearing on the late Elizabethan and Jacobean stage and engaging with traits figured as Dutch would contribute to the circulation of social energies reflecting, shaping, and redirecting the emerging understanding of an English national identity. The new tradesman appears regularly in this dramatic genre so insistently engaged in the commercial life of the city. In 1600, London was a city in transition.4 From a population of 50,000 at the end of the fifteenth century, it had quadrupled in size to over 200,000 people.5 Londoners came to grips with numerous changes including overcrowding, squalor and luxury within yards of each other, concentration of resources, and

1 References to Thomas Middleton are to Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John

Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007). “No Wit/Help Like a Woman’s,” 8.184. Panek argues that theatrical widows facilitated their remarriage by assuaging male anxieties. Widows and Suitors, 10. 2 Jean Howard, Theatre of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 22. 3 Theodore Leinwand argues that the “comic staging of social roles” in these comedies “permits audiences to question their adequacy.” The City Staged: Jacobean Comedy, 1603– 1613 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 13. Andrew Gurr discusses the heterogeneous audience for city comedies. Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 192. 4 Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 439. 5 For these figures, see David Harris Sacks, “London’s Dominion: The Metropolis, the Market Economy, and the State,” in Material London, ca. 1600, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 22.

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new strains on public works. This powerful commercial life presented the English with new challenges. The traditional trade guilds responded to some of these changes as London’s growth strained the traditional structures for governing the metropolis.6 The runaway growth of new sorts of international commerce deeply transformed early modern London. In the last half of the sixteenth century, the Merchant Adventurers—who moved their staple several times in response to the wars in the Low Countries, eventually abandoning Antwerp for Middelburg and Stade— found themselves defending their control of England’s traditional cloth exports against foreign competitors and new English companies trading to Russia, Turkey, Venice, the Levant, the Baltic and Eastlands, Virginia, New England, and the East Indies.7 These changes in economic life produced changes in the ways of doing business, a response to movements in the deep economic structures of English and European society. The commercial shadow that hangs over early modern city comedy— a literal shadow cast by the new Royal Exchange, combined with the metaphorical shadow of these plays’ anxious treatments of debts, usury, trade, dowries and jointures, bills, credit, bankruptcy, speculation, and fantastic but ephemeral wealth—testify to the intense fascination with all things mercantile at the heart of London life.8 In these plays, the contested treatment of tradesmen and their dealings contributes to the emerging understanding of Englishness, an identity with a trajectory from

6 Ceri Sullivan, “London’s Early Modern Creative Industrialists,” SP 103 (2006), 325. 7 T. H. Lloyd traces the Merchant Adventurers’ attempts to maintain their monopoly

and staple. England and the German Hanse, 1157 –1611: A Study of their Trade and Commercial Diplomacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 338. Derek Keene argues that London’s commerce with Antwerp still shaped London’s material conditions on the eve of James’s accession. “Material London in Time and Space,” in Material London ca. 1600, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 67. Robert Brenner shows that these new English companies, especially the East India and Levant Companies, accelerated the failure of the traditional Merchant Adventurers. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 53. 8 Several recent studies have put city comedy into productive dialogue with the complex changes in the economic life of early modern England. See, for instance, Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 89–90. Jean Howard treats Gresham’s Royal Exchange and its literal and symbolic shadow. Theater of a City, 34. As Marjorie Rubright notes, Gresham probably modeled the Exchange after the Antwerp Bourse. Doppelgänger Dilemmas, 164.

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the figures on stage or just down the road from the Rose Theater to Adam Smith’s nation of shopkeepers. Emerging beside the city comedy merchant, the puritan appears as a type on the early modern stage as well. “Puritan” is a notoriously vexed category in early modern England. The discipline of the Church of England fragmented as Henry VIII’s break from Rome receded into the past. The deferred resolution of doctrinal matters stirred up greater and greater resentment and repression over the course of Elizabeth’s long reign. The Hampton Court Conference of 1604 frustrated those hoping that a new regime might resolve the previous era’s ambiguities and articulate a clear statement of the national church’s doctrine. The most zealous, who disliked these results, fractured into additional groupings.9 Many English Protestants who expected the national church to take additional steps toward further reformation found themselves lumped together as “puritans,” radical critics of the Church of England. These puritans responded to the state of the church in a variety of ways: some grumbled but conformed; others supplemented their official observances with extra practices, such as hearing additional godly sermons; many offered written or oral critiques of the church; some refused to conform at all; and a few took the drastic step of separating from the church and emigrating to the Low Countries. Some discontented English Protestants, or puritans, developed their more radical beliefs in the Dutch Republic as preachers for English regiments, merchant outposts, or separatist churches.10 Playwrights brought the figure of the “precise,” or aggressively godly man or woman, to the early modern stage as a “puritan,” a figure of ridicule and scorn, frequently abused for hypocritical behavior.11 But while the various playwrights who brought “puritans” to the theater rarely had a specific set of theological doctrines in mind, their use of this comic figure had to be 9 David Como argues that the radical sects of the next generation emerged from conflicts between and among puritans of the early Jacobean church. From the perspective of the mainstream, these sects might all have existed under the confused category of “puritans.” Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil War England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 20–21. 10 Keith Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism: A History of the English and Scottish Churches of the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1982), 14. 11 Peter Lake and Michael Questier extend Patrick Collinson’s treatment of the influence of the theatrical puritan beyond the theater in The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 579.

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recognizable to the Londoners attending and reading these plays even as it shaped the perception of this social type. A final comic type, the “foreigner,” also emerges in early modern city comedy. In particular the figure of the “Dutchman” has a conspicuous presence in these plays concerned with England’s trade and religion. To mark a character as foreign, an early modern dramatist could employ a variety of techniques. Characters could identify themselves or other characters could recognize them as foreign. A character could wear clothing that marked him or her as foreign, as Luce Spurcock does when disguising herself as “a Dutch Frow” near the end of the fourth act of The London Prodigal .12 A character could gesture toward his foreignness through certain behaviors or actions. A taste for dairy products made the figure of the “butterbox” a convenient shorthand for the Dutch, as did the persistent stereotype of the Dutch weakness for alcohol, bequeathing the “drunken Dutchman” to the stage.13 The most obvious signals of difference on the early modern stage, however, are the linguistic inflections—such as “stage Dutch”—that the audience can hear and immediately recognize as foreign. As A. J. Hoenselaars shows, early modern dramatists brought dozens of foreign types to the stage and signaled their difference in a variety of spoken cues: characters spoke mangled versions of Spanish, French, Dutch, and Italian on London’s stage under Elizabeth and James.14 Visual and aural clues combine with stereotypical treatments to create the Dutchman as a recognizable type among foreigners in early modern city comedy. Marston, Dekker, and other playwrights marked characters as Dutch on the London stage for a variety of reasons. At the basest level, the dramatists’ use of negative stereotypes pandered to English xenophobia and participated in the satirical aesthetic of such plays. Shakespeare 12 “The London Prodigall,” in The Shakespeare Apocrypha, ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon, 2018), stage direction to Act 4, Scene 3. G. K. Hunter offers the classic study of sartorial identity markers. “Flatcaps and Bluecoats: Visual Signals on the Elizabethan Stage,” Essays and Studies 33 (1980), 28. 13 Near the end of John Marston’s The Malcontent , Malevole and Maquerelle enter the stage singing a song about national stereotypes, beginning with Malevole’s “The Dutchman for a drunkard.” The Malcontent , ed. George K. Hunter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 5.2.1. 14 Images of Englishmen and Foreigners in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: A Study of Stage Characters and National Identity in English Renaissance Drama, 1558–1642 (Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992). Kermode, Aliens, 5.

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could certainly sink to using his contemporaries’ stock jibes about the Dutch. His jokes about Poins’s “holland,” or linen, barely covering his “low countries,” or about Dromio’s refusal to find Nell’s “Netherlands,” or about an icicle on a Dutch sailor’s beard do not differ significantly from the lethargic, cold-blooded, drunken butterbox in Jonson, or Middleton.15 The Dutch and other foreign characters these English playwrights created sometimes allow English audiences to congratulate themselves for their nation’s importance on the metaphorical world stage. In this rehearsal of foreign cultures, English audiences could take pleasure in the display, commodification, and marginalization of the foreign.16 At the same time, some English playwrights juxtaposed flawed foreign characters with even more troubling English characters, complicating the humor of some scenes that cut close to home. In Merry Wives of Windsor, for instance, Shakespeare has Ford complain that he does not trust his wife with herself any more than a Fleming with butter (2.2.267–8) and then has the corpulent English knight describe himself stewing in butter. In Othello, he has Iago evoke the notorious Dutch love of alcohol, but only so that he can accuse the English of an alcoholic excess that puts the Dutch to shame.17 When English playwrights stage the exaggerated traits of the stereotypical Dutch, the supposed differences threaten to collapse and wound the English as well. The Dutch initiated complex situations in the city comedies at the turn of the century. Certainly, some of these comedies present a Dutch type in a way that merely echoes the xenophobic tastes of some playwrights and audiences. Webster and Dekker, for instance, collaborated on both

15 2 Henry IV (2.2.20); Comedy of Errors (3.2.140); Twelfth Night (3.2.23). In Volpone, Corvino imagines that Celia must consider him to be a phlegmatic Dutchman rather than a fiery Italian if she thinks he will patiently bear her flirtations (2.5.24), while Mosca compares the avarice of unkind fathers to the Dutch hunger for pills of butter (1.1.42–3). Works of Ben Jonson, ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). In Bartholomew Fair, Tom Quarlous compares intercourse with zaftig Ursula to falling into a “shire of butter,” and needing a crew of Dutchmen to be rescued (2.5.74–5). 16 Steven Mullaney explores “the pleasures of the strange” in drama’s rehearsal of cultures. The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 63. 17 Rebecca Lemon mentions the peculiar, ambivalent moment of “national pride” in Iago’s manipulation of Cassio here. Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 120.

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Westward Ho and Northward Ho, two plays that bring simple stereotypes of the Dutchman on stage. Similarly, a Dutch maid who speaks halting English inadvertently creates some difficulties at the conclusion of Middleton’s A Fair Quarrel ; his No Wit/Help Like a Woman’s has two Dutch figures who pass quickly out of the play. While they play minor roles in these comedies, Dutch characters and engagement with Dutch influences figure prominently in several of the period’s other city comedies. Significantly, as we shall see, some Dutch characters take on traits associated with other prominent English dramatic types, such as the merchant and the puritan. Such associations might be expected at the turn of the century. After all, Dutch traders emerged as England’s great trade rivals and would establish their own East India Company barely a year after England chartered its landmark company. At the same time, significant migrations of Dutch Protestants—even radical, iconoclastic Protestants—crossed the Narrow Seas back and forth in response to changes in the religious climates of England and their own nation.18 The Low Countries also harbored some of England’s religious refugees: radical Protestants under Mary Tudor, some Catholics under Elizabeth, and separatists near the end of her reign and at the outset of James’s. Moreover, throughout the period, each nation’s most radical religious figures added to a significant exile community on the margins of the other. Rather than making them simply the butt of xenophobic jokes, then, some English playwrights made complex and challenging use of Dutch characters or plots with Dutch concerns. Early modern dramatists do not always present foreigners as characters to be expelled in favor of superior Englishmen. Their Dutch characters illustrate that Englishness had partially come to depend on a meaningful Dutchness. Although Marjorie Rubright reads the Dutch and the English as “problematically proximate,” with “minor differences” that constantly threaten to collapse, these playwrights did ultimately assert a difference that allowed a distinct English identity to form.19 As the English struggled to articulate their own sense of religious identity and its relationship to their mercantile 18 Andrew Pettegree discusses the fortunes of Dutch radicals who fled to England under Henry VIII and Edward VI, only to flee to Emden under Mary, and then to return to England under Elizabeth, a migration that accelerated with the first stirrings of the Dutch Revolt. Emden and the Dutch Revolt: Exile and the Development of Reformed Protestantism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 88. 19 Doppelgänger Dilemmas, 40.

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aspirations, Dutch theatrical characters reflect the concerns of English audiences and playwrights. Specifically, the Dutch served as a foil as five English playwrights negotiate, delineate, and differentiate English national identity at the turn of the century. In William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money (1598) and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599), the playwrights resolve the material strains of the Anglo-Dutch relationship to England’s benefit. They celebrate unadulterated Englishness, even as hints that English prosperity depends on Dutch fortunes return in their comedies. At the same time, English puritans staged in city comedies begin with particular Dutch inflections, as imagined Familists and Anabaptists, associated with radical sects from the United Provinces. Treatments of the Family of Love in John Marston’s Dutch Courtesan (1604) and Lording Barry’s The Family of Love (1605) point to the impossibility of exorcizing the Dutch presence from the religious element in English national identity. And finally, in a dizzying alloy of economic and doctrinal matter, Ben Jonson’s Alchemist (1610) displays the extent to which Protestant England’s commercial identity cannot fully eliminate a Dutch residue. As these comedies assert an English difference from the Dutch, they point to the centrality of the Dutch contribution to England’s dynamic national identity.

“Look Upon the Nations, Sects, and Factions”: Negotiating Difference From its title page to its final lines, William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money (1598), the first city comedy, works to celebrate English superiority. Its witty English protagonists may endure temporary disappointments, but they ultimately prosper. Onto the traditional frame of a comedic plot in which three young suitors overcome a disapproving father and three flawed rivals in pursuit of three vibrant beauties, Haughton stretches two overdetermined sets of conflicts. At its center, the three lively suitors, Harvey, Ned Walgrave, and Ferdinand Heigham, have mortgaged their lands, the source of traditional wealth, to a merchant who prefers three dull merchants for his daughters. This conflict between traditional landed and new commercial wealth, which would have a long life in the theater and beyond the stage’s edge, manifests the changing economic situation in early modern England. Haughton loads this conflict with an additional complication: the daughters prefer three English suitors while their father, the Portuguese Pisaro, wants them to marry three

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foreign merchants, the Italian Alvaro, the French Delion, and the Dutch Vandal. Pisaro’s claim in his opening soliloquy, “every soil to me is natural,” thus signifies in several registers.20 As a merchant with interests in ports throughout Europe, Pisaro feels no special affinity for any particular nation. As an immigrant, perhaps a wandering Jew, he exhibits an even stronger sense of alienation.21 In contrast to his daughters’ English suitors, Pisaro has no ties to any land; he has portable wealth, bound up in profits, commodities, and credit while Walgrave, Harvey, and Heigham have a specific soil, their English estates, that anchors them. As Pisaro says, “gold is sweet” (1.1.26), but more importantly in London’s dynamic economy, it temporarily grants him the upper hand over the cash-starved English gentlemen. Ignorant of the ways to operate in the developing commercial marketplace, they need access to ready money, while Pisaro hopes not only to maintain his liquid wealth but also, through “usury,/ Letting for interest, and … mortgages” (1.1.17–18), to gain the traditional markers of success, the pawned lands of the three English gallants. The triumph of the English suitors over their foreign rivals, among them a Dutch merchant, reduces English anxiety about understanding the new mercantile realities into a simple competition in which the clever suitors outwit their rivals, especially the dull Dutchman Vandal. Englishmen for My Money celebrates England’s mercantile heart. Haughton anchors his comedy in the audience’s everyday experience, even as he stages the wild swings of speculative activity in the Exchange for their edification. As English audiences enjoy its comedic twists, they hear their local landmarks named, transformed from abstract places into meaningful spaces in Certeau’s terms, and start to recognize a new urban type, the international merchant.22 In this first comedy to take 20 William Haughton, “Englishmen for My Money,” in Three Renaissance Usury Plays, ed. Lloyd Edward Kermode (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 1.1.12. Alan Stewart notes that this initial speech sets the tone for Pisaro, often described through horticultural tropes that mark him as a denizen, never fully grafted into England. “‘Euery Soyle to Mee is Naturall’: Figuring Denization in William Haughton’s English-men for My Money,” Renaissance Drama 35 (2006), 60. 21 Kermode argues that it serves Haughton’s interest in usury to hint that Pisaro is Jewish without explicitly making the connection. Aliens, 122–3. 22 Michel de Certeau analyzes both the transformation from place to space, especially in early modern urban environments (92, 117), and the habituation to a “style of use, a way of being and a way of operating.” The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 100.

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a detailed version of contemporary London as its setting, two locations figure prominently. Pisaro lives in Crutched Friars, a specific street on the eastern edge of the City. As the English suitors and the women they desire gull the disoriented foreign suitors, they refer to particular streets and landmarks familiar to the audience at the Rose. These Englishmen share an expertise with the English audience that the Dutch merchant Vandal and his fellows lack.23 Crutched Friars plays an especially important part in celebrating Englishness in this comedy, since the English suitors woo Laurentia and the other young women who stand at their father’s balcony in a relocation of Romeo’s courting of Juliet into an insistently English setting. From Crutched Friars, characters set out for Paul’s Walk, Fenchurch Street, and Leadenhall, to name only a few of the landmarks familiar to the audience. The play insists on its familiar, English setting and aligns the audience’s sympathies with the English suitors’ interests. Despite the habituation of Heigham and his friends to England’s capital city, they remain ignorant of some of the new operations enabling the accumulation of economic capital there. Early in the comedy, they leave Crutched Friars in search of Pisaro, whom they find conducting business at the relatively new Royal Exchange. That scene opens with a jovially successful Pisaro planning to match Laurentia to Vandal when “our business [is] done here at the Burse” (1.3.11). Pisaro’s exuberance vanishes when the English merchant Towerson unexpectedly presents a bill of exchange. The arrival of the English gallants to negotiate new loans allows Pisaro to defer his business with this English creditor. When another English merchant arrives at the Exchange, Pisaro postpones concluding the previous transactions as he negotiates with Browne for textiles he plans to ship “straight away to Stoade” (1.3.83), until very recently the site of the Merchant Adventurers’ staple.24 Frustrated by Browne’s refusal to bargain, Pisaro returns to negotiating usurious loans with Heigham, only to postpone the business again when the Post

23 Crystal Bartolovich sees the English suitors and the audience as having the “shared unifying cultural knowledge of insiders.” “London’s the Thing: Alienation, the Market, and Englishmen for My Money,” HLQ 71 (2008), 153. 24 Having been “driven from Stade,” the Merchant Adventurers sought “some place as residency,” and unified their staple in Middleburg. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth 1598–1601, Preserved in Her Majesty’s Public Record Office, vol. 5 (London: 1869; rprt. Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1967), 72.

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arrives with letters for the Exchange’s merchants. One letter describes luxury commodities—“sack, Seville oils, pepper, [and] Barbary sugar” (1.3.101)—Pisaro’s factors purchased on credit with a bill of exchange made out to Towerson, as well as the even more damaging news that pirates have captured some of Pisaro’s ships (1.3.109). A frustrated Towerson dismisses Pisaro’s frantic description of his losses, demanding immediate payment on the bill and threatening Pisaro’s credit, since his hysterical deferral “fits not one of your account” (1.3.132). The news depresses both Pisaro and the business of the Exchange. His failures threaten not only his credit but also, as the English merchant Moore reveals, the twenty English traders that are “partners in his loss” (1.3.201). These doldrums disappear, however, when Alvaro arrives with news that Pisaro’s ships escaped the pirates and arrived safely in Crete. As the ringing Exchange bell signals the end of the trading day, Pisaro happily clears his debt to Towerson, handsomely tips the Post, and departs for a celebratory feast in Crutched Friars with his daughters’ many suitors. Although the English gallants and some of the English audience may find the Exchange’s business much more bewildering than the crooked streets of London, the scene helps familiarize them with an increasingly important economic reality in England. The figure of the international merchant at this stage does important work in the emergence of a proud, commercial England. In the space of just a few lines, Haughton dramatizes numerous forms of old and new commerce at the Exchange. Merchants have struck deals. The older markets of the Merchant Adventurers, the traditional wholesalers of English cloth exports to places like Stade, have faltered next to the roller-coaster of speculation in luxury commodities whose loss nearly bankrupts Pisaro. Men have arranged financial instruments, mortgages, and usurious agreements and have begun negotiations for dowries. In this frenetic scene at the Exchange, Haughton introduces his English audience to a style of use in London emerging as a significant commercial space.25 Pisaro and the English merchants enact that mastery. As Towerson presses him to pay his debts, Pisaro puts on a bold face as he confronts the threat of bankruptcy. In the new economic circumstances, credit-worthiness and credibility required

25 Janette Dillon observes that the physical spaces of Gresham’s Exchange and the Elizabethan public theaters had much in common. Theatre, Court, and City, 1595–1610 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 40–41.

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the ability to act a role, to exude confidence even in the face of catastrophic events, lest creditors come calling and create a rush on one’s debts.26 Pisaro brazens out the situation until he learns that he has prospered and can ask almost incredulously, “What is this world, or what this state of man?/How in a moment cursed, in a trice blessed?” (1.3.260–1). The rapid swings of gain and loss in this brief scene gesture toward the possibilities of modern speculation and commerce in luxuries. The operations of this business mystify the English gallants, however.27 The Post, for instance, carries letters with news of trade, the sort of commercial information found in the famous Fugger newsletters (as we shall see in Chapter 5) and critical to the marketplace, but these English suitors have no experience with such letters. As the merchants swarm about the Post hoping for momentary advantages, Harvey asks his friends “What’s he, sweet youths, that they so flock about?” and Walgrave fears that “yonder fellow will be torn in pieces” in the merchants’ frenzy. Heigham explains both to his friends and to the audience at the theater, “tis some body brings news” (1.3.92–5). The concerns of actual trade and commerce initially confuse the gallants, pushed to the side during the speculative excitement and rise and fall of the market that follows. With this mercantile context as its background, the play returns to the domestic space of Pisaro’s house. Here the traditional plot of a father blocking some suitors in favor of others takes on a starkly national coloring. As Harvey declares, gathering his comrades for the feast at Pisaro’s house, they will get a good laugh when the Portuguese merchant remembers his distracted invitation to attend him at supper and “look[s]/Upon the nations, sects, and factions” that have gathered around his table (1.3.314–5). The comedy that dominates the rest of the play pits the mortgaged English property-owners, hoping to erase their debts by marrying their creditor’s daughters, against prosperous foreign merchants who speak mangled English and offend the vivacious young women. Haughton exaggerates the difference between these merchants, contributing to the theatrical type of the foreigner. The French merchant boasts of erotic conquests. Alvaro hints at his proficiency with poison, a practice conventionally associated with Italian treachery. Vandal, the obese

26 Laura Kolb argues that performance played a critical role in the credit relations shaping early modern London. Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 15. 27 Bartolovich reads the Exchange scene as one that habituates the audience to the operation of the emerging forces of the market. “London’s the Thing,” 147.

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and phlegmatic Dutch merchant, can speak only in terms of his merchandise. Each of the young women mocks their suitors’ linguistic failures, but Laurentia displays the sharpest disgust in her dealings with the Dutchman: “Shall I stay till he belch into mine ears/Those rustic phrases, and those Dutch French terms,/Stammering half sentences, dogbolt eloquence?” (2.3.2–4). She reports that Vandal adds to his offensive behavior by framing his courtship in commercial terms: And when he hath no love, forsooth, why then He tells me cloth is dear at Antwerp, and the men Of Amsterdam have lately made a law That not but Dutch as he, may traffic there. Then stands he still and studies what to say. (2.3.5–9)

While comedies often mix the language of commerce with the language of courtship for figurative effect, the dull-witted foreigner Vandal appears incapable of wooing Laurentia and instead tries to impress her with the trade advantages he enjoys as a Dutchman. The mercantile advantages he enjoys in trade to Amsterdam by virtue of his nationality may mirror Pisaro’s intention to interdict Heigham’s English commerce with Laurentia, but in a play that insists so vehemently that “Women and maids must always have their will” (1.2.129), the father’s protectionism ignites a metaphoric trade war of speculative English suitors against their foreign rivals. When Mathea later declares that “I have so much English by the mother/That no base, slavering French shall make me stoop” (4.1.45–6), she merely inverts the chauvinistic judgments of her father.28 The young women define themselves as English—they were born in England to an English mother—and they object to their foreign suitors because they cannot speak English, the girls’ native language. Haughton represents the competition between the suitors through the English linguistic facility. The native suitors speak the mellifluous mother tongue they share with Pisaro’s daughters; the merchant-suitors speak halting stage dialects and occasionally slide into incomprehensibility. As Laurentia says at one point, venting her frustration with the linguistic gallimaufry of her Dutch suitor, “If needs you marry with an English 28 Kermode sees the women, with an English mother and a foreign father, as possessing an initially hybrid identity that will be domesticated by marriage to their English suitors. Aliens, 129. Scott Oldenburg sees the daughters of Pisaro, the foreign blocking figure whom he casts as the admirable humanist ideal in the comedy, as seeking legitimizing marriages to native English gentlemen. Alien Albion, 132.

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lass,/Woo her in English, or she’ll call you ass” (2.3.159–60). The foreign traits of the distasteful merchant-suitors manifest themselves most obviously in their hybrid language; the English suitors’ facility grants them easier access to these willful young women. Envious of the English suitors’ success, the Dutch suitor laments that he will fail to marry into Pisaro’s household and wealth “if dat ik can neit deze Englese spreek vel” [if I can not speak this English well] (2.3.187–8). Commercial alliances motivate Pisaro’s plans for his daughters. As Pisaro exuberantly declares when he learns of the fantastic profits from his most recent venture, “Master Vandal,/Here’s somewhat toward for my daughter’s dowry./ Here’s somewhat more than we did yet expect” (1.3.37–9). The case of the Dutchman, the only suitor who enumerates his trading ventures, most explicitly transforms a daughter into a token to be exchanged between men. Pisaro’s daughters reject his attempts to marry them to these foreigners, but perhaps because Pisaro presents the monetary transaction so plainly in Vandal’s case, the Dutch merchant suffers the worst of the daughters’ symbolic punishments. His broken English undoes him. Disguised as Heigham in an effort to trick Laurentia, he makes a linguistic slip that reveals his identity to the daughters—“How, Master Heigham, my ‘grote vriend’? … we know the ass by his ears: it is the Dutchman” (3.4.11, 18, emphasis added)—and they trick the Dutchman into a basket, leaving him suspended above the stage instead of smuggling him indoors. The women scorn Vandal’s linguistic failures and humiliate him. Haughton links the English facility with other forms of success throughout the play. In the opening scene, Pisaro dismisses Anthony, his daughters’ academic tutor, and plans to replace him with a teacher who will give his daughters something more practical: language lessons. In a scene mocking foreign tongues, Pisaro explains to his servant how to hire a good tutor for his daughters. Told that he would recognize the French competence of a tutor who says “Awee, awee” [i.e. “Ah, oui! Ah, oui!”], Frisco recalls a relative who told him “that pigs and Frenchmen speak one language, ‘awee awee’” (1.1.173–4). The tutor should also speak Italian, but the page interrupts the joke to focus instead on Italianate apparel and manners. Most significantly, the teacher must also speak Dutch. Pisaro says Frisco will recognize such a man if he can say something like “Haunce butterkin slowpin” to which the page replies that he too “can speak perfect Dutch” if he can “have my mouth full of meat first, and then you shall hear me grumble it forth full mouth, as Haunce butterkin slowpin frokin” (1.1.178–9, 181–83). Frisco’s joke about spoken Dutch draws

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on the audience’s association of the Dutch with boorish gluttony and a fondness for dairy products. The play’s frequent recourse to jokes at the expense of the foreign merchants and their broken English take on connotations of economy, trade protection, and the market. Searching for a language tutor, Frisco really needs “a clipper of the King’s English … an eternal enemy to all good language” (1.2.79–81). This concatenation of language and monetary adulteration points to Frisco’s fears about debasing language and the English nation. Of course, language and coins must circulate if they are to retain their currency, though in every transaction, both linguistic and commercial, the sign of value inevitably fluctuates.29 Mocking the linguistic markers of the foreigners, especially of the Dutchman, this scene prepares the audience for a series of jokes about broken English that will lead to broken engagements over the course of the play. The comic abuse of these foreigners persists until the play’s resolution and the victory of the English suitors over their foreign rivals. The stereotypes come to life in the space of the Exchange, where Pisaro’s favorites speak mangled English not far removed from that which Frisco has mocked a few scenes earlier. Vandal, for instance, cannot requite Pisaro for his generous offer of a prized daughter, nor can he offer his thanks in plain English, “you maak mee so sure of de wench, dat ik can niet dank you genough” (1.3.18–9). The daughters’ first meeting with their father’s marriage candidates reinforces these jokes at the foreigners’ expense: Vandal lapses into nearly incoherent Dutch, and Alvaro’s stage Italian prompts Marina to ask “what is all this in English” (2.1.37). They refuse suitors who cannot speak their mother tongue. Although the mocking of inept speakers of English momentarily fractures to mock the mockers, Haughton directs the thrust of the comic treatment of broken English primarily at Vandal and his companions.30 Scenes with stage dialects provide more than just an opportunity to laugh at foreigners.

29 Marc Shell’s consideration of classical Greek notions of numismatics as the nexus of linguistic and monetary values informs my thinking here. The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 85. 30 As Elizabeth Schafer observes, the satire on linguistic confusion here cuts in multiple ways. “William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money: A Critical Note,” RES 41 (1990), 537. For Bartolovich, a pure English language is itself a fantasy. “London’s the Thing,” 152.

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The linguistic incompetence of Vandal and the others remains an insurmountable barrier and leads to the English suitors’ success. When Vandal, Alvaro, and Delion impersonate their English rivals, their broken English reveals their foreign identities. The English gallants recognize Alvaro and Delion by their accents and convince them that they have come to the wrong house. With imperfect knowledge both of the English language and local geography, Alvaro and Delion end up hopelessly lost while their English rivals woo Pisaro’s daughters. Meanwhile, the Dutch merchant hangs above the stage cursing his luck while Laurentia assures him, “London maids scorn still/A Dutchman should be seen to curb their will” (3.4.83–4). Pisaro barely escapes losing his daughters in the English suitors’ first plot. During their second attempt, his decision to close his doors to them ensures his failure, as their disguised friend Anthony, plots to “help my countrymen” (4.2.58) to obtain their desires. The play’s resolution, in which the English suitors outwit Pisaro, expels and marginalizes the foreign in order to preserve and celebrate notions of English purity. From the outset, the members of Pisaro’s household favor the English suitors. Frisco opens the doors to them as he heads to Paul’s Walk in search of a new tutor, hoping that Heigham and his friends will “not suffer a litter of languages to spring up amongst us” (1.2.105). Although Pisaro’s daughters chide their English suitors for trying to recover their property through marriage, they quickly ally with them to get as much of their father’s money as possible. Laurentia encourages the young men to get as much gold from their father for their lands as possible, since “We here, you there [at the Exchange] ask gold, and gold you shall [have]/We’ll pay the int’rest, and the principal” by bringing about the marriage (1.2.144–5). In moving toward a marriage of the English daughters of the wealthy foreign merchant to the indigent gentlemen, the play indulges a dream of English prosperity that will allow the English youths to have their cake and eat it too. It reaches this fantastic conclusion by uniting the vivacious daughters and their attractive English suitors while allowing them to profit from their triumph over the alien merchants. The play ends happily for the English suitors and their English brides. Pisaro gnashes his teeth, but Moore, the English merchant, advises him to accommodate himself to a situation beyond his control: “These gentlemen have, with your daughters’ help,/Outstripped you in your subtle enterprises” (5.1.291–2). Acknowledging that they have outsmarted him, Pisaro makes his peace and sends the foreign suitors

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packing. Turning his back on them, he accepts his new sons-in-law: “gentlemen, I do entreat tomorrow/That you will feast with me” (5.1.304–5). Traditional forms are restored and the play’s emphasis in the final speeches on the status of the English suitors, nominated “Gentlemen” repeatedly by the merchants, fantasizes the restoration of propertied English gentry, free from the usurer’s bonds, and not sullied by the muck of tradesmen, who have been scorned by three headstrong young English women. The English suitors eventually outwit old Pisaro and his foreign friends. The Dutch merchant’s gamble fails and his fellows leave empty-handed. The English on the other hand enjoy their brides and erase their debts. Acknowledging that nothing can be done about these events, Pisaro stoically remarks, “Do what we can, women will have their will” (5.1.296). Englishmen who speak plain English marry English brides and promote English prosperity. The emphasis in the play on its English setting allows Haughton to stage a London populated by new dramatic merchants and clever young English men and women who learn about speculative commerce. In this first of the English city comedies, clear spoken English paves the way for English lovers’ success.

Negating and Negotiating the Dutch: Dekker’s Shoemaker ’s Holiday In addition to Dutch merchants who passed through England while conducting business, a substantial population of Dutch immigrants and denizens made their home in London and other English urban centers. Some Dutch people had lived among the English and had established a Protestant church at Austin Friars under Edward VI, but the outbreak of the Dutch Revolt accelerated the movement of Dutch refugees to England. Either out of sympathy for the plight of fellow Protestants or from the more practical motive of learning from Dutch expertise with textiles, the English initially made room for these Dutch exiles.31 For example, John Payne, an English preacher resident in Haarlem, would praise Dutch merchants “of a sownd profession, repayringe fyrst to our contrey from the rage of the enemie.”32 By the 1590s, London had 31 Siobhán Higgins finds a desire to bring skilled Dutch laborers into England at the highest levels. “‘Let us Not Grieve the Soul of the Stranger’: Images and Imaginings of the Dutch and Flemish in Late Elizabethan London,” Dutch Crossing 37 (2013), 21. 32 Royall Exchange (Haarlem, 1597), 16.

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a substantial immigrant population—a census in 1593 had found 5545 “straingers” living in London, 1089 of whom were from Dutch territories—with significant neighborhoods of foreign denizens in the center of London.33 After several decades of harboring religious refugees, English concerns over the economic threat posed by this source of labor began to fray the mantle of toleration that accompanied the first influx of oppressed Protestants. Payne, for instance, would recognize the biblical injunction to tolerate refugees but would hope that “the Lord [would] purge the churche of suche hypocrites” as those enriching themselves without “the zeale of Gods honor” (16). These tensions arose in part as a response to changes in labor markets in England’s urban centers, causing friction as native English craftsmen competed with aliens for work. The perception that these immigrants used the pretense of religious persecution to cover an ulterior motive—the search for wider economic opportunities at the expense of English artisans—further exacerbated these tensions.34 Because statutory regulation of foreign laborers accumulated haphazardly and had inconsistent application, English frustrations intensified and anti-alien uprisings occurred with greater frequency.35 These frustrations over economic competition from Dutchmen dependent on England’s good will continued into the new century. Writing in 33 For these statistics, which also showed that 7113 foreigners lived in London, Middlesex, and Surrey, 1376 of whom were Dutch, see Huntington Library MS EL 2514. According to Laura Hunt Yungblut, in May 1593 there were significant alien populations in the wards of Bishopsgate, Aldgate, and Langborne, all within a few hundred yards of London Bridge. Strangers Settled Here Amongst Us: Policies, Perceptions and the Presence of Aliens in Elizabethan England (London: Routledge, 1996), 27. As John Michael Archer points out, immigrants made up a small fraction of the population, but real anxieties about that population developed anyway. “Citizens and Aliens as Working Subjects in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” in Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Michelle M Dowd and Natasha Korda (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 40. 34 The ministers of the Dutch church forwarded a census of their Austin Friars congregation in January 1593. It includes far fewer members than the general census of aliens and may have contributed to the feeling that persecuted Dutch Christians finding refuge in England were not necessarily seeking to practice their religion. Folger MS V.b.142, folio 87r. See also Andrew Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 287. 35 Jacob Selwood discusses the gaps and inconsistencies in English practices of naturalization and other efforts to exclude or accommodate its immigrants. “‘English-Born Reputed Strangers’: Birth and Descent in Seventeenth-Century London,” JBS 44 (2005), 729. Yungblut finds that “actual or planned attacks occurred in almost every decade of Elizabeth’s reign. Strangers, 40.

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1601, John Wheeler accuses the people of the Low Countries of pressing their advantage in the safe harbor England provided. He complains that in just a few decades a handful of Dutch traders grew to “at least one hundred Netherlandish Merchantes” trading in a wide variety of commodities.36 While English monarchs, including eventually Elizabeth, traditionally aided their Dutch neighbors, allowing a thriving merchant community to develop in London at the expense of the English, the ungrateful Dutch had never assisted the English, Wheeler claimed. In fact, he goes on, “since the troubles in the Low Countries, in all which the Kings & Queenes of England have shewed themselves faithfull and friendly Princes, and good Neighbours and Allies to the said low Countries... we cannot reade, that those of the house of Burgundy ever made warres against Scotland, or France, in helpe of the Kings of England directly” (32). In this view, the ungrateful Dutch sought English assistance against Spain’s tyranny but demonstrated no willingness to return the favor. And, a few years later, when some in the Low Countries sought to establish peace with Spain, the fundamental commercial interests of the Dutch would be found in its merchant community’s desire for continued war. One evaluation of the potential for peace complained that “De navigatie op Frankrijk en Engeland zijn weinig profijtich [The trade with France and England offers little profit]” and that therefore “Oorloghe oock is gheruster dan een twijfelachtighe ende twistighe Vrede [War is preferable to a dubious and discordant peace].”37 Englishmen like Wheeler complained that Dutch immigrants not only took advantage of England’s religious protection but also hypocritically cloaked their profit motive in the guise of religion, calling their loyalties into doubt. On popular stages and in elite circles, the English began to express doubts both about the Dutch Republic and even about Protestant Dutch denizens in England. The impression that the Dutch abused the religious haven England provided as the protector of the Protestant faithful increasingly found its voice at the turn of the century. The incident surrounding the so-called “Dutch Church Libel,” for instance, illustrates English frustrations with Dutch religious refugees who posed a threat to native English workers. Some of the frustration reflects English dissatisfaction with sending their sons to die abroad. Just as Elizabeth would instruct Egerton to remind 36 John Wheeler, A Treatise of Commerce (London, 1601), 38. 37 Consideratien vande Vrede in Nederlandt gheconcipieert (n.p. 1608), A2r, A1r.

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the Dutch of the English blood spilled in their defense, the Libel’s author complains to the Dutch communicants at Austin Friars that honest Englishmen go to the Dutch wars to “dy like dogges as sacrifice for you.”38 The Libel complains primarily about the hypocritical Dutch in England who take bread out of the mouths of English families. From the start, the libeler lashes out at the rootless Dutch who threaten Englishmen’s livelihood: Your Machiavellian Marchant spoyles the state, Your usery doth leave us all for deade Your Artifex, & craftesman works our fate, And like the Jewes, you eate us up as bread. (5–8)

Cruel Dutch merchants and hungry Dutch workers threaten the welfare of English citizens; linking the Dutch to the shadowy figure of the Jewish usurer further emphasizes the threat to England’s well-being. The complaint takes particular aim at the economic effects of harboring Dutch immigrants in England, causing “Our pore artificers [to] starve & dye/ For [tha]t they cannot now be sett on worke” (25–6, my emphasis). To make matters worse, England’s participation in Dutch wars and toleration of Dutch immigration may not be worth the cost. The English have little cause to trust the Dutch hypocrites, the libeler claims, since “in your hartes [you] doe wish an alteracion,” a sign of immigrants’ potential treachery (16). Among the preparations undertaken when fears of a new Armada developed in 1596 was the requirement that “Recusants [should be] restrained... and the Mynisters of the French and Dutch churches to be wrytten unto, to knowe what Strangers be within and about London, that be not of theire Churches, or repaire to theire p[ar]ishe churches.”39 English suspicions about the Dutch continued to intensify in the 1590s. Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday engages many of these worries about the economic effects of foreigners living, working, and trading in London in its portrayal of two “Dutch” figures: a Dutch merchant captain and an English aristocrat disguised as a Dutch shoemaker. The play presents numerous plot lines that take up concerns of 38 Arthur Freeman includes a transcription in “Marlowe, Kyd, and the Dutch Church Libel” ELR 3.1 (1973): 44–52 (line 34). Although the libel has populist aspects to it, Higgins connects it to court factions divided on the need to support Dutch immigrants. “Let us Not,” 26. 39 SP 12/260/101, fol. 2.

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class antagonism (Lincoln and Oatley’s mutual distrust), fantasies of social mobility (Simon Eyre’s advancement to Lord Mayor), marriage and the marriage market (Lacy and Rose’s courtship, Hammon’s pursuit of Rose and then Jane), beset fidelity (Jane’s loyalty to Ralph), and England’s honor and interests (the King’s war with France). The play also explores the place of the Dutch in Eyre’s rise, but Dekker closely links it to many of these plot lines. The “Dutch” figures in The Shoemaker’s Holiday create anxieties about Dutch immigrants and underwrite the national prejudices of its conclusion. Dekker, an English dramatist whose recent ancestors came from the Low Countries and who thus had more personal experience of immigrant Dutch customs and particularly their language, shapes the Dutch matter of his London to create English unity and identity. The treatment of Hans, the supposedly Dutch shoemaker in Dekker’s play, reflects and shapes English anxieties about the theatrical “foreigner,” particularly the foreign artisan who threatens to displace native English workers. The impoverished gentleman Roland Lacy loves Rose, the daughter of London’s wealthy mayor. In order to circumvent his uncle’s commands and the objections of Rose’s father, Lacy disguises himself as a Dutch shoemaker. Unlike Vandal, whose linguistic confusion dashes his hopes, Lacy negotiates seamlessly between English and Dutch, a linguistic facility with important consequences for Dekker’s comedy. Disguised as Hans, Lacy—singing a Dutch drinking song—approaches Simon Eyre’s shop in search of employment. In this early scene, a strange conflict arises. One of Eyre’s journeymen, Firk, sees a competent shoemaker whose comical foreign language will entertain him, allowing him to “learn some gibble-gabble” from the Dutchman.40 Simon Eyre, on the other hand, warily reminds Firk of the economic realities: it is a “hard world” and “We have journeymen enough” (4.53–4). The play thus stages the unusual situation of the laborers, Firk and Hodge, demanding that Hans be taken into service to replace their absent English comrade, Ralph, pressed into military service, and the owner of the shop, Simon Eyre, reluctantly agreeing to take on an additional, if unnecessary, laborer. On its surface, the comedy presents an idealized world in which craft solidarity overcomes English distrust of Dutch immigrant laborers.41 It 40 Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, ed. R. L. Smallwood and Stanley Wells (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 4.51. 41 David Bevington, “Theatre as Holiday,” in The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre, and Politics in London, 1576–1649, ed. David L. Smith, Richard Strier and David Bevington

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seems counterintuitive that Dekker would create such a scene when just beyond the edge of the stage, an audience consisting of Englishmen, some perhaps underemployed, frequently complained that foreign, Dutch laborers threatened their livelihood. Firk may initiate the request that Eyre hire Hans, but he keeps the Dutch shoemaker at a distance. He immediately tests this Dutch worker’s knowledge of the craft, demanding, “have you all your tools [?]” (4.83). Hans’s reply, that he is a skilled “skomawker,” not an indigent foreigner or an idle beggar, satisfies Eyre that he has “skill in the mystery of cordwainers” and he grudgingly takes the Dutch artisan into service (92–3). Although Hodge earlier declared his solidarity with the Dutchman, he now warns Hans to “Use thyself friendly... if not thou shalt be fought with” (109–110), indicating the English laborers’ wariness of their Dutch coworker. Some members of Dekker’s audience, facing limited employment prospects that they blamed on the influx of Dutch and French laborers hiding their economic motives under the cloak of religion, might have applauded the artisans’ reluctance to embrace Hans.42 Elizabethan England certainly experienced periods of dissatisfaction directed at the economic competition posed by the growing community of Dutch refugees. English workers protested against Dutchmen practicing their trades, complaining that foreigners, both “1. marchants [and] 2. handycraftesmen,” injure the “better sort of our nacion contrary to the statutes” that protected the economic interests of Englishmen.43 A later memorandum sought to ensure that Englishmen who “have passed their youthes in service as apprentices should[,] be in a certeyne securitye when

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 110. David Scott Kastan argues that the play offers a “reassuring vision of coherence and community,” despite the late Elizabethan distrust of English artisans for Dutch immigrants. “Workshop and/as Playhouse,” in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (New York: Routledge, 1991), 152. 42 In his reading of Dekker’s comedy as an intervention in debates about laborers’ freedom, Tom Rutter focuses on an audience enjoying the play during their own holiday. Work and Play on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 95. 43 “Complaynt of the Cytizens of London against the great number of strangers in and about this cytty (1571),” in Tudor Economic Documents, ed. R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, 1924), 308–9.

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thei came to aige.”44 This concern for native English laborers, who have followed the expected course in learning a trade, prompted the 1571 Complaynt. It cites the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers that required completion of an apprenticeship in England and claims that “none or very few [foreign laborers] have beene” brought up as apprentices, requesting “that after a fitt tyme of warninge [the laws] may bee put in execution” (310).45 Frustrations with Dutch workers and others violating the statutes led to riots just beyond the stage’s edge. As Dekker contributes to the theatrical figure of the English merchant, some of his audience would have recognized that they were watching a medieval history play. Simon Eyre, whose fantastic ascent Dekker dramatizes, transformed Leadenhall, a medieval predecessor of the Exchange, and established the disorderly apprentices’ feast of Shrove Tuesday almost two centuries before The Shoemaker’s Holiday appeared at the Rose.46 Audience members wary of the Dutch worker hired into the English master’s shop might also have understood their dissatisfaction with the situation as anachronistic. The 1571 Complaynt cites laws prohibiting foreigners from practicing trades that would put native Englishmen out of work, but the earliest of these laws dates from the reign of Edward IV. During the reigns of Henry V and Henry VI, when Eyre lived and made his fortune, the master could legally hire a Dutch-speaking shoemaker with foreign training as a journeyman, without regard for displacing good English laborers. This dual awareness—the “temporal bricolage” Brian Walsh locates in comedy in which a once-acceptable practice had become one that a London audience might have balked at in 1599—may account for the English shoemakers’ ambivalent response to the Dutch

44 “Memorandum on the Statute of Artificers, 1573,” in Tudor Economic Documents, ed. R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, 1924), 358. 45 Ian Archer shows how economic cycles affected the complex regulations of labor in London at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 133. Kastan notes that resentments toward foreign workers led to violence a few years before Dekker’s comedy. “Workshop,” 152. 46 Crystal Bartolovich reads Shoemaker’s Holiday’s shift in the focus of history plays from the king to the history made by a medieval citizen as raising the status of merchants. “Mythos of Labor: The Shoemaker’s Holiday and the Origin of Citizen History,” in Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Michelle M Dowd and Natasha Korda (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 21.

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employee.47 Watching the humorous antics of a historical London mayor, Dekker’s audience could make careful distinctions between the actions of the stage and contemporary events. They could distinguish between the play’s distressed medieval Dutch merchant, who must surreptitiously sell a cargo of luxury goods because he “dares not show his head” (7.18), and the recent edict that forbade the Hanseatic merchants at the Steelyard, across the Thames from the Rose theater, from “us[ing] any manner of traffick in way of marchandize” and required them to “departe oute of oure dominions” in retaliation for the 1597 expulsion of the Merchant Adventurers from Stade.48 After all, the English tradesman profiting from the Dutch merchant’s expulsion lived in the fifteenth century. Dekker’s treatment of Eyre’s medieval ascent to wealth and status somewhat mitigates the play’s gestures to Elizabethan economic conditions. On the one hand, Dekker’s audience could keep these two situations separate. On the other, contemporary suspicion of foreign artisans may explain Firk’s aggressive interrogation of this fellow of the gentle craft. For an audience uneasy with an English shopkeeper employing a Dutch laborer, Dekker stages a more complex treatment than the easy division of English and foreign Haughton had recently produced for the same theater. Rather than a simply cohesive vision of Eyre’s shop as a metonym for a city and nation, the disguise plot and Lacy’s ability to pass as foreign complicates the play’s efforts to contain national differences. Proficiency in spoken English serves as a way to maintain that difference, establishing the community of Eyre’s native laborers at the expense of their new, least senior, Dutch employee. While Firk, the lowest-ranking worker in Eyre’s shop, appears hospitable in his overtures toward Hans, throughout the scene, he aggressively asserts his priority over the Dutchman. Firk delights in mocking the sound of the Dutch language. Hans’s greeting, “Goeden dach, meester, end you fro, auch [Good day, sir, and you also, madam]” (4.77), prompts Firk to mock the sound of Dutch: “Nails, if I should speak after him without drinking, I should choke!” (4.78–9). Firk’s laughter—not merely at Hans’s linguistic difference but specifically at the guttural sound of his spoken “Dutch”—recalls Frisco’s mocking of 47 “Performing Historicity in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” SEL 46 (2006), 339. Jonathan Gil Harris argues that a new, capitalist temporality threatens the continuity and repetition of the play’s monumental time. “Ludgate Time: Simon Eyre’s Oath and the Temporal Economies of The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” HLQ 71 (2008), 29. 48 BL Additional MS 48,128, fol. 28v.

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Dutch and a tradition that stands behind such mocking. Significantly, in this scene and throughout the play, only the lowly Firk mocks the Dutchman’s language. With Hans working in the shop, where he will “make me laugh so” (4.90), Firk attempts to secure superiority for himself by marginalizing the Dutchman. A few moments later, he again declares that Hans’s “Yaw, yaw” makes him sound “like a jackdaw, that gapes to be fed with cheese curds. O, he’ll give a villainous pull at a can of double beer” (4.98–100), playing on English stereotypes of the drunken Dutchman, fond of dairy products. While these lines mock Hans for being Dutch, Firk, in the next breath, asserts the new Dutch laborer’s inferior status within the shop as well: “But Hodge and I have the vantage; we must drink first, because we are the eldest journeymen” (4.100–2). The play introduces Dutchness and immediately subordinates it. The English shoemakers use the Dutch presence in their shop to establish their community at Hans’s expense. By pushing Eyre to take on an apparently Dutch artisan who speaks broken English, Firk reduces the distance between himself and his countrymen—Hodge and Eyre—by emphasizing his superiority to the new laborer. Whereas David Bevington sees in Firk an anxiety about the foreign threat to his status, Firk actually uses xenophobia to establish his status.49 When Eyre allows his journeymen to follow him to breakfast, calling first to Hodge, then to Hans, and finally to Firk, Firk warns Hans: “Soft, yaw, yaw, good Hans. Though my master have no more wit but to call you afore me, I am not so foolish to go behind you, I being the elder journeyman” (4.132–4). Mimicking Hans’s language, Firk again insists on his own importance and precedence, partly to maintain his newfound rank, but also because this seniority ensures that he receives better food at the breakfast table, rather than allowing the stereotypically gluttonous Dutchman to eat first. Firk’s assertions appear to affect Eyre’s attitude. A few scenes later Eyre asks his men what sort of work they are doing, and on hearing that Firk is preparing shoes for Rose’s maid, Eyre declares with newfound respect for his English employees, “Fie, defile not thy fine workmanly fingers with the feet of kitchen-stuff…Put gross work to Hans” (7.91–2, 94). The master trusts the dull Dutch shoemaker with simple, enervating tasks. He gives

49 “Theater as Holiday,” 110–11.

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the delicate work to his trusty English fellows.50 Thus, while this scene may demonstrate some social cohesion, it is a community that emphasizes the common superiority of English shoemakers at the expense of their new Dutch hand. The play similarly abuses the other important Dutchman in this comedy, the captain who sells luxuries to Simon Eyre. The Dutch captain must deal secretly because “the merchant owner of the ship dares not show his head” (7.17–18). This policy forced the merchant to sell his goods quickly, enabling Eyre to take advantage of the desperate Dutch skipper. As an Englishman without time constraints, he can buy luxury commodities cheaply and sell them for astounding profits at his leisure. Eyre conducts his business unethically if not illegally. He impersonates an alderman and uses this feigned authority to further pressure the foreign captain. Dressed in a prosperous civic official’s gown, robes, and ring, Eyre looks as though he deserves the alderman’s honorific, “Right Worshipful” (7.120). In this role, he takes advantage of the captain, promising him “my countenance in the City” (7.146). Pretending to have authority—the power of his “countenance” that will protect the skipper and legitimate their deal—Eyre dupes the captain and secures a fortune for himself.51 Moreover, the metatheatrical performance of this transaction—an actor plays Eyre who performs the role of an alderman in borrowed robes—helps habituate Dekker’s audience to the new roles England’s merchants must occasionally play.52 Participating in the process of establishing the new English mercantile type, Dekker stages an Englishman getting the better of a Dutchman in a cargo of luxury items, a significant triumph in the early days of Anglo-Dutch competition for the new trades. Just as English writers regretted English guidance to ungrateful and ambitious Dutch merchants, “instructed by the diligent search and trauell [travail/travel] of the English Nation,” and now 50 John Michael Archer argues that Dekker uses the foreign figures in the play to distract from the reality of English class tensions between a rising English merchant class and poor English laborers. “Citizens and Aliens,” 47. 51 Henry S. Turner sees Eyre as pursing status in this ambitious scheme. “Corporate Life in Thomas Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday,” in Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater, ed. Ronda Arab, Michelle Dowd, and Adam Zucker (New York: Routledge, 2015), 187. Bartolovich argues that the Dutch skipper becomes a sort of scapegoat for Eyre’s dubious dealings. “Mythos,” 30. 52 Audiences learned and questioned the roles of social types by attending plays. Leinwand, City Staged, 13.

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prospering in the luxury spice trades while hoping that accounts of fabulous Dutch wealth would “work in our English Nation further desire of Honour” by surpassing their rivals, so Eyre’s astonishing triumph over a Dutch merchant indulges a fantasy of Dutch failure at English hands.53 While waiting for Eyre to make the deal, the captain, prone to the stereotypical vices of the Dutch, has “veale gedrunck,” [drunk much] (7.144), further easing Eyre’s ability to take advantage of him. Firk finds the skipper’s spoken Dutch hilarious, mocking his description of the commodities and laughing as he nudges Hodge, “‘Yaw heb veale gedrunck’, quotha! They may well be called butterboxes when they drink fat veal, and thick beer too” (7.147–9).54 Once again, a jovial son of England links the Dutchman’s language to other stereotypical behavior—gluttonous eating and heavy drinking—while signaling the foreigner’s inferiority: he is about to be fleeced by Simon Eyre, the good English shoemaker. While Eyre’s success in taking advantage of the Dutch merchant might have disturbed traditional English moralists, others would have found his actions acceptable in the new circumstances of emerging capitalism. New economic forces had begun to supersede the festival world of Simon Eyre.55 In this new context, the national interest included trade interests and English merchants worked for the good of their nation. Analyzing the situation of English merchants abroad, for example, John Wheeler claims that England needs the Merchant Adventurers since in their absence “the ancient rights of the Realme are either lessened, or infringed, & that, which ought not to be suffered, unwonted tallages, taxes, and impositions, are levied upon subjects to his great grievance, and empoverishing, 53 John Wolfe, trans. Jan Huygen van Linschoten, Discourse of Voyages unto ye East and West Indies (London, [1598]), A3v–A4r. Dekker transforms his source material so that Eyre purchases a cargo of luxury goods, rather than expensive textiles, allowing him to make an even more astonishing fortune. Ann C. Christensen, “Being Mistress Eyre in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Deloney’s The Gentle Craft,” Comparative Drama 42 (2008), 457. 54 Bartolovich smartly observes that the stage Dutch in the negotiations for the skipper’s cargo further mystify the unethical, material source of Eyre’s sudden wealth. “Mythos,” 29. It seems unlikely that Eyre’s success represents, as Oldenburg claims, a critique of the queen’s actions against Hanseatic merchants. Alien Albion, 108. 55 Jean Howard reads The Shoemaker’s Holiday as participating in an effort to negotiate “the ideological disparities between old and new sources of wealth.” “Competing Ideologies of Commerce in Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part II ,” in The Culture of Capital: Properties, Cities and Knowledge in Early Modern England, ed. Henry S. Turner (New York: Routledge, 2002), 173.

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and to the bringing of the Trade into strangers hands only” (35–6). He argues that England’s national interests included protecting its merchants’ commerce, particularly given the series of decrees from Madrid, the Empire, and Brussels that had hindered English trade. Wheeler adopts the English nation’s interests in his interpretation of recent events affecting England’s trade in textiles through the Low Countries. Wheeler shows that in decrees at the outset of the Dutch Revolt “wee may perceive the sleightes, practices, & industrie of the Antwerpians, and Netherlanders, to drawe the trades of all nations into their owne hands…in hatred of the Religion professed in England” (43). The disastrous attacks on English commerce had continued. In 1592, for example, the King of Spain interdicted the sale of certain goods, including “all commodities of wollen, worsted and linnen, wrought and made in England, Holland, Zealand and like provinces,” throughout the Low Countries.56 Protecting a nation’s traders became a matter of national interest. Dutch merchants recognized this, arguing that acquiring new markets at the expense of national rivals served their new nation’s interests. Willem Usselincx, for instance, would passionately argue that Dutch trade to the Indies made it more difficult for their Spanish enemies to pay for continued warfare in the Low Countries. If a Dutch West India Company could intrude into the arenas of Spain’s foreign wealth, it would “t’vyer in hare eyghens huysen te brengen [bring the fire into their own house]” and give “onse vyanden gheenen middel ofte stoutheyt [our enemies no means or strength]” to fight in the United Provinces.57 He would later argue that “het principaelste proffijt vant Lant bestaet in de overgroote schade die den Vyant in Oost-Indien ende onderweghen heeft voore ende naer gheleden ende noch lijdet [the main profit of the nation consists in the enormous damage that the enemy has suffered and continues to suffer in the East Indies].”58 Wheeler treats international commerce in a similar fashion, arguing that the profitable trade of England’s merchants promotes the good of the whole nation. Since so many in England depended on the textile trade for their livelihood, their 56 A Proclamation set out by the K. of Spaine. Wherein order is taken for the use and trafficke of merchandise (London, 1592), A3r. 57 Naerder Bedenckingen, Over de zee-vaerdt Coop-handel ende Neeringhe (n.p., 1608),

A2r. 58 Missive. Daer in Kortelijck ende grondigh werdt vertoont hoe veel de Vereenighde Nederlanden gheleghen is aen de Oost ende West Indische Navigatie (Arnhem, 1621), A4r.

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enemies intended to keep English goods out of the Low Countries in order “to stirre up some notable commotion, trouble or disorder in the State of England” (45). England’s rivals used trade policies to wage war against England, hoping to stir up anarchy in England so that eventually they could “set strangers over us and … reestablish poperie, and so lastly bring the whole English people and subjects of her Majestie into miserable slaverie of bodie and conscience, under an ungodly and superstitious nation” (45). Wheeler slides quickly from the security of the monarch, through the protection of the true church, to the very existence of the English nation. In this context, England should protect fellow Protestants on the Continent, but not at the expense of England’s economic and national safety. Trade and economic prosperity come before religious affiliation, and Wheeler concludes his tract with a warning. English trade interests must precede any consideration of cooperation with the United Provinces: “Trade & Amitie betweene the two most noble Dutch, & English nations might be made firme & stable... yet so, that strangers be not preferred before the Naturall borne subject, who at all times is and must be ready to serve his Prince & country with his person and goods at home, and abroad, when strangers, and strange help wilbe far off” (115). When the basis of relationships and alliances no longer requires higher moral purposes and instead takes on the pragmatic terms of exchange and use value, few would object to a sharp English citizen taking advantage of a Dutch skipper. Even a moralist like John Payne, who feared the hypocrisy and greed of the new merchant class, conceded that scripture provided many examples to show that “they fowlie err in denyenge marchandise to be Gods ordinans, seing buyenge and sellinge is one of the leggs wherevpon every common welthe dothe stand” (15). This new view of the world runs through Dekker’s play and into English views of the Dutch in the decades that followed. Although the Dutch skipper and the Dutch laborer suffer the English shoemakers’ scorn in The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Dekker treats the idea of the Dutch with greater complexity than simply mocking their language or employing the common stereotypes of the drunken Dutch butterbox. In addition to serving Firk’s various purposes, the Dutch shoemaker proves useful to Simon Eyre as well, enabling him to make a fortune. Hans alerts Eyre that a foreign merchant with a load of luxury goods needs to make a quick, surreptitious sale. He engineers the entire exchange, telling Firk, “bringt Meester Eyre tot den signe van swannekin. Daer sal you find dis skipper end me [bring Master Eyre to the sign of the little swan.

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There you will find this skipper and me]” (7.9–11). When Eyre dawdles, Hans brings the drunken skipper to his master. He informs Eyre that “De commodity ben good. Nempt it, meester; nempt it [The merchandise is good. Take it master; take it]” (7.131–2). And when Eyre prepares to complete the deal, he asks Hans if he has “made [the skipper] drink” (7.143). With the skipper in his cups, Eyre can take advantage of him to make an even better bargain. In fact, as Hodge notices, “for the love he bears to Hans” his countryman, the skipper offers Eyre even better terms, making him “a huge gainer” (7.19–22). This bargain creates the great wealth that puts Eyre on the road to civic office, the mayoralty, and eventually underwrites the philanthropy that makes him the popular hero of London’s artisans and apprentices.59 Even the capital with which Eyre makes this purchase, moreover, comes from Hans’s generosity. Eyre uses the “twenty porpentines” Lacy received from his uncle “as an earnest penny” with the Dutch captain. Thus the “Dutch” employee enables each aspect of the deal, from finding the foreign mark with distressed merchandise, through negotiating the deal, to underwriting his master’s purchase. As Eyre remarks near the play’s end, “Simon Eyre had never walked in a red petticoat, nor wore a chain of gold, but for my fine journeyman’s portagues” (17.19–21). Eyre acknowledges his indebtedness to a worker he once thought was Dutch, modeling a gratitude that many in England, including the author of the Libel, thought the Dutch did not reciprocate. Of course, the generosity underwriting Eyre’s rise ultimately reveals itself to have been English all along. The English master fleeces a stereotypically drunken Dutchman, while the Dutch shoemaker gradually reverts to his English identity. A ghostly Dutch presence persists, only to be exorcised in the final scene. Eyre continues to call Lacy “Hans” and the young aristocrat wears his Dutch costume for a few additional scenes, reminding the audience of his double identity as Hans the Dutch shoemaker and as Lacy the nephew of an English lord. And as Eyre prepares to intercede with the king for Lacy, he calls “follow me, Hans” and tells his apprentices to enjoy the feast, declaring “about your business, my frolic freebooters” (20.62–3), perhaps inadvertently employing a new English nautical word that had come into use only a few decades before from the Dutch word

59 As Kermode points out, this English feast created by an English patron relies on profits secured by the “Dutch” shoemaker. Aliens, 138.

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“vrijbuiter.”60 These Dutch remnants disappear before the final scene, as the king comes to Eyre’s feast and celebrates Lacy’s union with Rose. As in Haughton’s comedy, an impoverished English aristocrat, once he sheds his Dutch appearance, weds the English daughter of a wealthy tradesman. The play’s final scene suspends the class tensions apparent in Lacy and Rose’s match, preparing the way for a united England to face a foreign enemy. Now, with foreign characters banished from the action, the class divisions at work in the play begin to dissolve. The king encourages Eyre’s merriment, and the new Lord Mayor replies with his tag line, “Prince I am none, yet I am princely born!” (21.17), a line that imagines the erasure of class lines evident throughout the play. Lincoln and Oatley, suspicious of each other throughout the comedy, now enter and demand that the king invalidate the marriage of Lacy and Rose. The aristocrat’s disdain for Rose, a citizen’s daughter, and the former mayor’s distrust of Lacy, the prodigal aristocrat, threatens the egalitarian community of Englishmen gathered at Eyre’s feast. The king feigns a divorce to placate his haughty nobleman and his greedy former mayor, but he suddenly reverses himself again and rejoins the lovers’ hands, telling them to “Be what you would be” (21.96). The blocking figures eventually accede to the king’s wishes. Hodge, Firk, and their fellows return, filling the stage with good English folk. The king guarantees the trading privileges of his new Lord Mayor, then in the play’s final lines agrees to join Eyre’s feast and “revel it at home” with his fellow Englishmen before returning to the wars with France: “When all our sports and banquetings are done,/Wars must right the wrongs which Frenchmen have begun” (21.193–4).61 The play ends in a fantasy of unified classlessness, akin to the “horizontal brotherhood” of Anderson’s imagined community as king, lords, citizens, and laborers come together in a celebration of England’s greatness before taking up the business of fighting a foreign enemy. The play definitively banishes the Dutch presence from the stage as an English man has enabled Eyre to make his fortune; English apprentices benefit from the

60 The OED gives 1570 as the earliest usage in English and notes its Dutch etymology. “freebooter,” n. 61 Jean Howard argues that London comedies “defined Englishness differently” than the previous decade’s history plays with their emphasis on a nation coterminous with the monarch. “Women, Foreigners, and the Regulation of Urban Space in Westward Ho” in Material London, ca. 1600, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 153.

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generosity of a former London artisan turned Mayor, and England’s class lines temporarily disappear in a feast for prentices and princes. English unity has been asserted and can be turned outward against a foreign foe. With national trade interests undermining the assumptions of a common Protestant cause, Dutch figures occupy an ambiguous position in English city comedy. Whether they focus on new commercial institutions like the Exchange or the traditional sites of production like a shoemaker’s shop, city comedies limn the changing economic reality and offer audiences the figure of the merchant who plays an important role in England’s emerging identity. As these plays present English characters triumphing over their rivals, including the theatrical Dutchman, they offer their English audiences new values. English merchants skillfully navigate the new commercial opportunities and challenges available to them. They take risks and succeed in making a fortune or preserving their wealth. The Dutch represent a special case, different from their Continental counterparts because they embody competing elements of England’s national identity. Where Spenser can imagine the English as defenders of their desperate Protestant neighbors, the rebounding Dutch economy and commercial enterprises made it clear that the Dutch no longer depended on the English for their survival. They had become rivals, but the English would triumph if they could make use of the Dutch and then surpass them. When these plays include foreign characters who speak stage Dutch and broken English, they provide an opportunity for an English audience to laugh at the failures of Dutch characters. In some cases, as with Haughton and Dekker, English audiences encounter something more complex than simple stereotypes. As they watch these plays, the English audiences learn a new sort of linguistic competence. In addition to taking pride in their mother tongue, they experience some of the language of the new emporium of England. After the turn of the century, however, English playwrights would use Dutch characters in their city comedies to explore trade in tension with England’s religious identity.

Separation Anxiety: English Obligations to the Dutch Family In his manuscript chronicle of the Dutch community in London, Symeon Ruytinck juxtaposes three events within a few pages at the start of 1604. He notes with disappointment that King James has sided with his conservative bishops against the puritans at Hampton Court. Then he describes

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at length the Dutch community’s contribution to the new king’s ceremonial progress through London. Finally, he mentions the arrival of Habsburg diplomats negotiating England’s withdrawal from the Republic’s war of independence. Just as the Dutch arch serves as a hinge for this chapter and as a hinge for events in Ruytinck’s account of events in 1604, so it holds “providence” and “prudence,” the themes of its two faces, in tension. As James and his royal entourage approached the arch, they observed a figurative program devoted to Providence, represented atop the arch by “een beeldt op een Radt vol ooghen [a statue on a Wheel full of eyes].”62 Confronting a large painting of himself beneath this statue and above a gallery of seventeen young women bearing the individual escutcheons of the provinces of the Low Countries, the king “stille stont voor de poorte [stood quietly in front of the gate]” with his family and prominent members of the Dutch community nearby as they listened to young Samuel Beerens, dressed in white silk, deliver “in eenighe 30 Latijnsche verskens de meyninghe vande Eeren-poorte verclaerde [the meaning of the Arch explained in some thirty Latin verses]” that Raphael Thorius had composed for the occasion.63 The king passed through the arch’s central gate, adorned with complementary emblems of Solomon’s wisdom both in handling the “ordeel t’kint van twee lichte vrouwen [verdict of the child of two easy women]” and in participating in international exchange, “het besoeck vande Coninghinne van Saba [the visit of

62 London Metropolitan Archives, MS CLC/180/MS09621, page 135. Although a number of English accounts of King James’s progress appeared, this version, produced by one of the men who designed the Dutch contribution, offers unique insights into its iconography. For instance, the wheel on which Providence stands, with its many eyes, receives no comment in English sources, though it is visible in Harrison’s engravings. J. J. van Toorenenbergen offers a helpful, but often abridged and inaccurate transcript of Ruytinck’s chronicle. Gheshiedenissen ende handelingen die voornemelick aengaen de Nederduytsche natie ende gemeynten: wonende in Engelant ende in bysonder tot Londen (Utrecht, 1873). Further references are to the Dutch Church manuscripts in the London Metropolitan Archives unless otherwise noted. 63 Emanuel van Meteren, Commentarien ofte Memorien van-den Nederlandschen Staet, Handel, Oorloghen ende Gheschiedenissen van onsen tyden ([Amsterdam], 1608), Book 25, Fol. 96r. Thorius’s poem, “Sermo ad Regem Angliae habitus nomine Belgicae nationis,” appears in BL Sloane MS 1768, fol 39, with a number of variants from other printed and manuscript accounts of the speech.

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the Queen of Sheba],” before exiting under the figure of Prudentia, allegorically represented atop the arch’s rear.64 The two sides of the Dutch arch yoke together divine providence and human prosperity, emphasizing that heavenly intentions create the conditions for worldly peace and trade. Although David M. Bergeron rightly suggests that the 1604 entry generally refers to religion less frequently than in Queen Elizabeth’s royal entry, and though English observers focused on depictions of mutual commerce on this arch’s reverse side, the Dutch seem to have expected the pious message of the arch’s obverse to form the foundation of their figurative address to the new monarch.65 As English playwrights and other writers worked to create the stereotypical image of the “puritan” in the early years of the king’s reign, this pointedly religious message of the Dutch arch might have gained relevance. The creators of London’s pageant celebrating the new king offered a complex program of seven triumphal arches and brief, possibly impromptu skits. Dugdale, for instance, refers to several dramatic moments that Dekker’s otherwise comprehensive account leaves out. He cannot say for certain whether a “prentise in a blacke coate” was “appointed, or of his owne accord” spontaneously professed his “forward loue” when he called out to the king passing between the Dutch arch and the Soper Lane arch that the city “on their knees, prayes for thy happy state” (B3v–B4r).66 For the five arches of London’s scripted program, Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker reluctantly worked together, with small contributions from Thomas Middleton and perhaps John Webster.67 The Italian and the Dutch communities of London each provided additional arches. Jonson quickly published His Part of King James his Royall and Magnificent Entertainement and Dekker produced an account encompassing Jonson’s two arches and his pageant on the Strand within the

64 Conraet Jansen, Beschryvinghe vande Herlycke Arcvs Trivmphal ofte Eere Poorte vande Nederlantshe Natie opgherect in Londen (Middelburg, 1605), A3v. Only Jansen, who oversaw the construction of this arch, includes specific details of the Solomonic tribute of the central passage in the arch. 65 English Civic Pageantry 1558–1642 (London: Edward Arnold, 1971), 89. 66 The Time Triumphant (London, 1604), B3v–B4r. 67 Henry S. Turner focuses on the transformation of “urban elements into icons” along the lines Certeau uses in discussing the making of space out of place. The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 149.

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larger program.68 As the king and his entourage progressed from the Tower of London into Westminster, they passed under seven arches displaying complex iconographic themes employing allegorical figures, classical allusions, and a few biblical characters. To a greater extent than in the past, the pageant’s classical architecture, under Stephen Harrison’s management, drew on the latest continental trends, gesturing to Roman triumphal arches as models.69 Christopher de Steur, Assuerus Regemorter, Jacob Cool, Thorius, and Ruytinck provided the conceits of the Dutch arch; Conraet Jansen incorporated these ideas in his design for the portal with sixty-two artisans, including Dutch painters residing in London, like Marten Droeshout, as well as artists invited from Antwerp.70 The Dutch erected their arch “on Cornhill by the Exchange.”71 As Rubright observes, the Dutch arch combined familiarity and novelty.72 England’s monarch traditionally passed along Cornhill during ceremonial entries, but neither a Dutch community, based at their church in Austin Friars a few blocks away, nor the monumental Royal Exchange, erected in 1568, had figured in civic pageants before 1604 (Fig. 3.1). The Dutch designed their arch to convey two related themes in the hopes of persuading the king to continue England’s support for

68 A dispute arose over the printing of Dekker’s and Jonson’s texts, the result of which was Dekker’s expanded Whole Magnificent Entertainment. For that text, see the Bowers edition. For a summary of the dispute and Jonson’s contribution, see “The King’s Entertainment” 2: 422. Although Heather C. Easterling’s description of the entry as an event captured in print overlooks Jansen’s Beschryvinghe, printed in Middelburg but advertised on its engraved 1604 title page as sold from Jansen’s house in Southwark, she offers a useful discussion of competition for authority in representing the pageant. “Reading the Royal Entry (1604) in/as Print,” Early Theatre 20.1 (2017), 52. 69 Bergeron discusses the advance in architectural design. English Civic Pageantry,

71–2. Gervase Hood analyzes the Dutch arch’s combination of classical Roman and contemporary Flemish monumental architectural features. “The Netherlandic Community in London and Patronage of Painters and Architects in Early Stuart London,” in Dutch and Flemish Artists in Britain, 1550–1800, ed. Juliette Roding and Eric Jan Sluijter (Leiden: Primavera, 2003), 47. 70 Grell provides an overview of the Dutch collaborators on the arch. Calvinist Exiles,

165–7. Gervase Hood attributes the arch’s classical inscriptions to Cool, who studied and produced two treatises on Roman numismatic mottos. “A Netherlandic Triumphal Arch for James I,” in Across the Narrow Seas: Studies in the History and Bibliography of Britain and the Low Countries (London: British Library, 1991), 74. 71 The Annales of England (London, 1605), 1429. 72 Doppelgänger Dilemmas, 177.

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Fig. 3.1 Image of the reverse side of the Dutch Arch in Conraet Jansen’s Beschryvinghe vande heerlijcke arcus triumphal ofte eere-poorte vande Nederlandsche natie, opgherecht in Londen. Image used by permission of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België

the United Provinces against the Habsburgs. On its front, under the allegorical figure of Providence, the Dutch assembled paintings, inscriptions, and mottos designed to compliment James as the culmination of a divine plan even as they reminded him of his obligation to maintain the Reformed cause. Between the king’s portrait “sittende in Conincklicken Staet [sitting in royal state],” (Beschryvinghe B1r) and the statue of Providence, Jansen placed a crown with two scepters and the motto “Sceptra haec concredidit vni,” which Ruytinck translates as “Des Heeren raedt alleen/Geeft dees Scepters aen een [The Lord’s Counsel alone gives these scepters to one person]” (“Gheschiedenissen” 135). Other elements on this side of the arch emphasized the providential forces of history and Christian virtue in the king’s ascent to the English throne:

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statues depicting faith, hope, charity, and peace sit atop the columns enclosing the three gates at the bottom of the arch, while images of pious biblical kings, David and Josiah, and devout English kings, Lucius and Edward VI, appear above the outer gates. Directly above the phoenix adorning the central gate, Cool’s classical inscription recalls Elizabeth’s succor of the desperate Dutch and hopes for the king’s long reign and continued assistance. Having described the front of the arch in detail, Ruytinck distills its message as “dees Conincrycken door Gods Providentie t’samenghevoeght waeren ende gegheven Jacobo, eenen Prince v[er]ciert met Pieteyt en[de] Religie [through God’s providence, these kingdoms were united and given to James, a prince adorned with Piety and Faith]” (“Gheschiedenissen” 137). The Latin oration Beerens delivered as James prepared to pass under the arch exhorted the king to obey God’s plans for him. In Dekker’s translation of the speech, God “holds the Raynes of thy Kingdome in his owne hand: It is hee, whose beames lend a light to thine: It is hee, that teaches thee the Art of Ruling; because none but hee, made thee a King.”73 Perhaps given the memory of the plague epidemic that had delayed the event, this emphasis on divine providence carries through both sides of the Dutch arch, if not through the joyful English celebrations elsewhere on the king’s route. The back of the arch, under the figure of Prudentia, uses emblems of commerce and industry to illustrate the worldly cooperation and respect that England and the Dutch enjoy. If the king extends England’s support for the Dutch, the iconography implies, that mutual prosperity will continue. The arch displays a series of interconnected allegorical figures. At the edges of the arch, statues of Sincerity and Time look toward the central square of the arch’s upper level, in which Diligence poses with Industry to her right and Labor to her left. Across the middle of this side, three large paintings appear, showing the shared interests of the English and the Dutch. In the central image, the Dutch artists depict in the background “de Zeecuste van Engelendt, van Dover af, tot voor den mont vande Riviere Tamesis [England’s coast from Dover up to the Thames River’s mouth]” and in the foreground the sea “vol varende Scheppen, van alle soorten ende Natien [full of ships of all kinds and nations sailing]” and smaller fishing vessels hauling in the sea’s bounty 73 With the exception of Shoemaker’s Holiday, all references are to The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955). “The Magnificent Entertainment Given to King James,” 2: 675–7.

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(Beschryvinghe B2r). To the left and right of this panel, two smaller paintings illustrate English and Dutch customs-houses bringing wealth into the national coffers. On the left, “eenighe Kaye der stadt van Middelburgh [a quay in the City of Middelburg]” and on the right “het Tol huys ofte Costume-Kaye van Londen [the Toll house or Custom-Key of London]” with “Cooplieden oock vriendelick met elck anderen handelen [Merchants as well, trading amicably with each other]” (Beschryvinghe B2r-v). Directly above the outer gates, two paintings depict stages of textile work, one of which renders the labor in a particularly “Neerlandtsche wyse [Dutch manner]” (Beschryvinghe B2v).74 Above each gate, Cool appended three more classical inscriptions, each emphasizing the interchange of goods and goodwill that would enter and leave through the good king’s harbors.75 This side of the arch displayed the profits the Dutch and the English could enjoy together. The Dutch designers treated this message of prosperity as deriving from divine providence’s hand in positioning the king to preserve England’s bonds with the Dutch. In summarizing this side’s iconography, the godly Ruytinck expresses less interest in the specific details of the king’s worldly prudence, skipping over sections with “etc.” as he describes how Industry, Diligence, and Labor bring to fruition the benefits of Prudence and “daer toe dat Tempus en[de] Sinceritas oock grootelycx van noode is etc. datmen in dit rycke daer van d’ overvloedighe ervarentheit heeft. Etc. [to that end there is need of Time and Sincerity etc. that

74 Natasha Korda emphasizes the women performing much of the work in these lower images. “Staging Alien Women’s Work in Civic Pageants,” in Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Michelle M. Dowd and Natasha Korda (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 66. 75 Rubright, who does not refer to Dutch sources, incorrectly contends that the iconography, filtered through Dekker’s English account, shows the Dutch “willfully embrac[ing]…the double vision that rendered Dutchness an uncanny likeness with Englishness.” Doppelgänger Dilemmas, 183. Even if Dekker does not recognize the locations depicted on this part of the arch, he recognizes Dutch difference, often commenting on their peculiar national costume, and understands that their theme focuses on shared interest rather than interchangeability. Dekker, in fact, assumes that Cool’s inscription beginning “Qvod mvtvis comerciis,” and concluding “mvtvaqve amicitia conservetvr,” the inscription that comes closest to anything like an “uncanny likeness,” pertains to the Dutch “Froe” and “Burger” conducting business on the wharf, “the praise of whose industrie (being worthy of it) stands publisht in gold, thus:” (588–90). He reads the Dutch gesture of mutuality as a praise only of themselves.

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they in this realm have abundant experience of it. Etc.]” (“Gheschiedenissen” 138). Jansen, though succinct, more enthusiastically summarizes the program of this side of the arch. It shows “hoe de societeyt ende onderlinghe vrientschap onder de menschen onderhouden wort [how society and mutual friendship among the people may be maintained]” (Beschryvinghe B1v). For Jansen, this theme relies on the meaning on the arch’s obverse. “Ghelijk de voorste zyde aenwijst de gaven, die de Providentie Gods, aen zyne Maiesteyt besttet heeft [Just as the first side shows the gifts that God’s Providence bestowed on his Majesty],” Jansen explains, “Soo verthoonde d’achterste zyde, de nutticheyt die t’Ghemeyne daer van heeft [So the rear side shows the necessity the Commonwealth has thereof]” (Beschryvinghe B2v). The Dutch minister might have glossed over the worldly benefits accruing to those who followed a prudent monarch, even if the Dutch architect thought godliness and prosperity went hand in hand, but the Dutch arch struck English witnesses as an advertisement of the Dutch community’s diligence and wealth. The proximity of the Dutch arch to the Exchange, the heart of England’s new mercantile aspirations, created resonances beyond its explicit iconography. The Dutch merchants, who spent about twenty-five percent more on their ornately decorated arch than the average cost of the other arches in the pageant—van Meteren records that they spent “boven de 10 duysent gulden [more than ten thousand guilders]” (25:96v)— might have been disappointed that the audience did not fully appreciate its complex iconography. Dugdale records that the king “admired” it and that in his view, beyond the painting of ships, which he seems to have misunderstood, “the glorie of this show” appeared “as a dreame, pleasing to the affection, gorgeous and full of ioy... full of show and variety” (B3v). He does, however, record that the king noticed the location of the Dutch arch near England’s Exchange as creating added significance. According to Dugdale, the king visited the Exchange incognito on the eve of the pageants to observe their final preparations. Witnessing the merchants there engaged in business, he declared that “he was neuer more delighted then seeing so many of diverse and sundry Nations so well ordered and so ciuill one with the other” (B2r). He records that on the next day, when the king reached the Dutch arch at the Exchange, he “smilde looking toward it, belike remembring his last being there, the grace of the Marchants” (B3v). In his account of the king’s progress, Dekker also praises the Dutch contribution for something more than its

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explicit themes.76 Perhaps indirectly influenced by the Dutch emphasis on providence, Dekker notes that they erected their arch “(as it were by Fate)…neere vnto a royall place; for it was a royall and magnificent labour” (448–9). The Exchange’s association with royalty, established when Queen Elizabeth visited it and renamed it, allows Dekker to compliment the magnificence of the Dutch arch, though the compliment fits the republican Dutch nation awkwardly. A shared interest in international trade provides the most likely set of associations between the Dutch community’s arch and the commerce conducted within the walls of the adjacent building. When Dekker describes its obverse side he makes the connection as well. Implicitly, Dekker’s comment on the arch’s location “as it were by fate” next to the Exchange recognizes that symbols of Dutch trade would invite comparison with a critical site of English commerce made familiar in plays like Haughton’s. He reinforces that comparison when he describes the rich paintings of maritime trade. Although he recognizes the scenes of Dutch textile workers, he assumes that the three scenes across the center of the arch depict Dutch locations, rather than one scene of Dover and the Thames, one of London’s Custom House near the Tower with St. Paul’s in the far distance, and one of Middelburg. The specificity in Jansen’s description escaped English observers. Harrison, for instance, thought that here the arch depicted “the people of the Seuenteene Prouinces at their Husbandry; their Exchange; their Mart” and did not bother to include an image of the rear.77 When Dekker describes these scenes, he focuses on the artful craftsmanship, such that a viewer might “walke into the Mart, where as well the Froe, as the Burger, are buying and selling” (588–9), without commenting that the scene depicts a quay in Middelburg. When he, like Harrison, describes the painting on the other edge of the arch as depicting “their Exchange; the countenances of the Marchants there being so liuely, that bargaines seeme to come from their lippes” (575–7), he has less of an excuse for not recognizing London’s CustomKey, which Stow describes as one of the most notable landmarks in Tower 76 Katherine Blankenau argues that Dekker paradoxically praises the Dutch and Italian communities in London for their contribution to the new king’s welcome even as he erases and subordinates the unique approach of the two migrant communities. “‘As Well by the English as by the Strangers’: Performing a Multicultural London in The Magnificent Entertainment,” London Journal 77.1 (2022), 52. 77 Stephen Harrison, The Arch’s of Trivmph (London, 1604), E1r.

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Street Ward, on the Wool Wharf “which now of late is most beautifully enlarged and built.”78 For Rubright, Dekker’s naming of the scene as “their Exchange” here indicates an anxiety about the Dutch associations of Gresham’s Burse, now known as the Royal Exchange.79 It likely indicates the more common experience, however, of describing something foreign with reference to something familiar. Addressing Dutch readers, for instance, Van Meteren describes the location of the Dutch arch as “byde plaetse ofte Borse daer te Coopliede[n] vergadere[n] [at the location or Burse where the merchants gather]” (25: 96r) and other Dutch accounts similarly use their familiar term, Burse, to describe London’s commercial heart.80 They refer to a local English edifice with a word more familiar to their readers. The Dutch, in fact, understood the entire pageant through the lens of a familiar ceremony, the “Blyde Incomst” or Joyous Entry, by which sovereigns in the Low Countries historically bound themselves to their people. Jansen describes the speed with which London initially prepared for the king’s “Coronation ende Blyde Incomste, met de solemnele Door-rijdinghe, nae ouder gewoonte, [Coronation and Joyous Entry, with the ceremonial passage, according to old precedent]” (Bescrhyvinghe, A2r). And Van Meteren, who incorporates the pageant within the opening maneuvers of England’s “vrede met Spaenigien [peace with Spain],” also sees it as “zijn blyde in-comste [his joyous entry]” (25:96r). In the end, the Dutch may have hoped that their arch, with its enumeration, in Dekker’s translation of Thorius, of “the giftes of Heauen” (691) poured out according to the king’s providential descent from “so many Grand-fathers” (700), would persuade him to allow the Dutch to “be sheltered under your wings” (691, 700, 698), but the king dashed these hopes a few months later when he signed the Treaty of London. 78 A Svrvay of London (London, 1598), 37. 79 Doppelgänger Dilemmas, 183. Dekker does not particularly focus on this painting in

his description of the arch, mentioning it briefly in the context of the other images on its obverse, and he certainly does not “emphasiz[e] the Dutch Beurs,” since he uses the term “Exchange” and may not have even had the specific building in Antwerp in mind. Doppelgänger Dilemmas, 291, footnote 61. 80 Jansen, for instance, says he built the arch “beneden de Borse (diemen die Royal Exchange noemt) ontrent 160. voeten [below the Burse (that is called the Royal Exchange) about 160 feet].” Beschryvinghe, A2v. Ruytinck, in his abridged annals of the Dutch Church, notes that the Dutch arch “stont byde Borse [stood near the Burse].” London Metropolitan Archives, MS CLC/180/MS10055, fol. 27r.

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James sacrificed English prestige in order to end the nation’s formal support of the Dutch Revolt. As the Venetian ambassador reported, James pursued “peace with everybody” even if it led to “the ruine not only of England but of all the world.”81 With Tyrone’s rebellion in Ireland concluded, the king now signed the Treaty of London with Spain and ended English military support for the Dutch. England still possessed the cautionary towns as security for Dutch debts and the States General still paid for English mercenaries, but the strategic port of Ostend, which had resisted a siege from the Army of Flanders since 1601, fell to the Spanish shortly after the peace.82 The English had once taken pride in their nation’s joint defense of Ostend, “the most memorable occurrant of our age,” with their Dutch partners.83 In their comedy Love’s Cure, for instance, Beaumont and Fletcher remember the siege as a “stage of war/Wherein the flower of many Nations acted,/And the whole Christian world spectators were.”84 Where the Dutch wars might once have necessitated impressing men like The Shoemaker’s Holiday’s Ralph into the army, the peace left many without employment, as in Middleton’s The Puritan Widow, whose Peter Skirmish finds himself “put to silence like a sectary.”85 The Dutch knew how to respect their soldiers who preserved England’s domestic tranquility by standing “as a bulwarke … between the enemy and us for the defence of our lives, wives, children, goods, and country.”86 Initially supported by Elizabeth’s troops, Ostend’s valiant resistance made it the subject of intense interest in England. Inexpensive pamphlets regularly reported on the progress of the siege. These forerunners of the newspaper, discussed below in the fifth chapter, lionized

81 Calendar of State Papers... Venice, ed. Horatio F. Brown, vol. 10 (London, 1900),

49. 82 See Parker, Dutch Revolt, 235–6. 83 A True Historie of the Memorable Siege of Ostend, trans. Edward Grimeston (London,

1604), A2v. 84 References are to The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). “Love’s Cure or, The Martial Maid,” 1.1.39–41. 85 “Puritan Widow,” 1.2.4. 86 Further Newes of Ostend Wherein is declared such accidents as have happened since the

former Edition (London, 1601), B1r.

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Sir Francis Vere, the English commander.87 The Dutch community in London took pride in their fellows’ resistance as well, with James Godskall pointing to “that admirable besieging of Ostende, admired of all the nations of the worlde,” when encouraging English readers disheartened by the plague.88 After a lengthy siege, Ostend fell to the Army of Flanders. When Truewit advises Dauphine on seduction in Epicene, he takes the familiar trope of besieging a woman and connects it to “Ostend,” which, “you saw was taken at last” (4.1.55). The fall of Ostend and the entrenching of Spanish forces in a harbor just across the Channel from Dover endangered English shipping, security, and prestige. As Venice’s ambassador in England reported, “[t]here is a general disaffection toward this peace, for no one can bear to see the Dutch abandoned.”89 Many in England still took pride in their nation’s support for the Dutch and regretted the peace. England’s uncertain relationship with the Dutch colors several early Jacobean city comedies. In a moment of casual gossip in The Family of Love, two gallants exchange news of the court and from farther afield. Gregory Gudgeon asks “How stands the state of things at Brussels?” to which Lawrence Lipsalve replies, “nothing but pride and doubledealing,” a comment on the designs of the Habsburg Archdukes.90 A few years later in Westward Ho, Justiniano refers to the exaggerated heroics of Ostend as he mocks his wife’s melodramatic account of the Earl’s advances: “the booke of the siedge of Ostend, writ by one that dropt in the action, will never sell so well, as a report of the siedge between … this wicked elder and thy selfe.”91 In the immediate aftermath of their abandonment of the Dutch, however, English ambivalence intrudes in an ambiguous comment like Freevill’s in John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan. Written shortly after the Treaty of London and the fall of Ostend, 87 Further Newes of Ostend, for instance, promised updates on the status of the siege, including Vere’s heroic leadership “despite all the ennemies force” (A4r). Another author focuses on Vere’s preservation of the town in desperate circumstances. Extremities Urging the Lord General Sir Fra Veare to offer the late Anti-parle with the Arch-duke (London, 1602), 13. 88 The Kings Medicine for This Present Yeere 1604 (London, [1604]), A4r. 89 CSPV , 185 (for 6 October 1604). 90 Lording Barry, The Family of Love, ed. Sophie Tomlinson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), 2.3.26–8. 91 “Westward Ho,” 2: 4.2.186–9.

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Marston’s comic plot involves Freevill introducing his friend Malheureux to his spurned Dutch courtesan Franceschina. Malheureux hesitates to visit a brothel, but Freevill admonishes him that men should love brothels “as Englishmen love the Low Countries, wish war would be maintained there, lest it should come home to their own doors.”92 This humorous remark points to ambivalence about England’s failure to support the Dutch. In its bawdiness, the comment points to a common pun on low “cunt-ries” and genitalia. Freevill treats brothels as a way to preserve a wife’s fidelity, since—like gallant soldiers expending their martial energies abroad—libidinous gallants can spend their sexual energies there rather than in seducing other men’s wives. This particular brothel takes on added layers of significance, however. The courtesan to be found there is a Dutch courtesan, making the connection to the Low Countries more apposite. The fact that the English had used the Low Countries as a diversion allowing them to avoid fighting Habsburg forces on English soil stands behind Freevill’s remark as well.93 As Marnix had argued in the Ernstighe Vermaninghe, England’s interest lay in keeping Habsburg forces occupied on the other side of the Channel. The fear that Spain would have access to good ports on the Narrow Seas had ultimately prompted England to prop up the faltering Dutch rebellion. If the English abandoned the Dutch bulwark and the Dutch Republic, England might suffer disastrous consequences. Just as James frustrated Dutch hopes for England’s continued military support, his actions at the Hampton Court conference early in 1604 frustrated English Protestants identified as “puritans.” Across the religious spectrum, many of his English subjects hoped that their godly king would resolve the Church of England’s doctrinal ambiguities in their favor. James, however, left many of these points of adiaphora in place. The conference did not lead the English church to undertake additional reformation in ceremonial matters, kept the Book of Common Prayer in place, and left the more divisive points of doctrine unexamined. It did succeed in broadening support for the Church of England and in incorporating some of the established church’s less radical critics, who conformed and

92 John Marston, The Dutch Courtesan, ed. Karen Britland (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 1.1.76–79. 93 Jean E. Howard points to the manipulative transformation of the Dutch in this remark. Theater of a City, 151.

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returned to the fold.94 The centrists labeled those who remained dissatisfied as “puritans,” an umbrella term for groups that included conformists who chafed at the Church of England’s ceremonies, those with Presbyterian sympathies, Brownists and separatists who went into exile in the Dutch Republic, and other radical English Protestants. Conservative divines and controversialists, celebrating the successful defense of English episcopacy, moved to identify these puritans as seditious, disloyal, treacherous, or otherwise dangerous. James had already defined puritans as a danger to the state a few years before his succession, calling them “rashheadie Preachers, that thinke it their honour to contend with Kings, and perturbe whole kingdomes.”95 At Hampton Court, the king reiterated his distaste for the Presbyterian puritans he had encountered in Scotland, declaring that “howsoeuer he liued among Puritans, and was kept for the most part, as a Ward vnder them … he euer disliked their opinions.”96 The Dutch, as Ruytinck’s chronicles attest, took an interest in the king’s handling of the radicals’ dissatisfaction. A Dutch translation of William Barlow’s account, De Summe ende Substantie, appeared a few years later, when conflicts between Dutch secular and spiritual authority, as we shall see in the next chapter, threatened to turn into civil war. As the meaning of the national church in Protestant England took shape in the early seventeenth century, the threat of the unruly “puritan,” especially one under Dutch influence, contributed to English attacks on this scandalous group. Moving to capitalize on the king’s distaste for the dangers of radical religion and its threats to the mutually reinforcing structures of church discipline and state hierarchy, English writers created the exaggerated figure of the “puritan” in the English imagination. They placed a heterogeneous group of malcontents under this label and worked to ostracize

94 Charles Prior examines the Hampton Court settlement and the speed with which it was contested. Defining the English Church: The Politics of Religious Controversy, 1603–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 111. On the apparently “consensual” middle ground of the conference, see Patrick Collinson, “The Jacobean Religious Settlement,” in Before the English Civil War, ed. Howard Tomlinson (London: Macmillan, 1983), 50. 95 References are to Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). “Basilicon Doron,” 5. 96 William Barlow, The Summe and Substance of the Conference (London, 1604), 20.

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them.97 Oliver Ormerod, for instance, represented them in The Pictvre of a Puritane as English schismatics infected with dangerous foreign doctrines. This prose dialogue dramatizes a conversation between a low “Germaine” and an Englishman who find puritans to be a “Schismaticall and vndiscreet companie, that resemble the Anabaptists in Germanie.”98 Ormerod claims that “our Puritanes” have such dangerous, foreign views that they have caused “the disturbance and perril both of the Church & comonwealth” (D3v). Two points emerge in Ormerod’s character of a puritan. First, puritans, who claim to want stricter church discipline, appear extremely disorderly themselves, resonating with the charge of hypocrisy throughout the text and throughout Jacobean antipuritan invective generally. Second, Ormerod laments foreign influences on England’s puritans, linking them to the anarchy of foreign sects. Echoing the king’s complaint about the sensitive consciences of puritans who take offense at inconsequential matters of practice in the Church of England, Ormerod scorns those puritan ministers who object to the “adiaphora, that is, thinges in their own nature indifferent” and foolishly give up their ministries in response to Archbishop Bancroft’s demands for conformity (F2r). Such radical English preachers sometimes fled to the United Provinces, reinforcing the feeling that English puritans embraced foreign, and especially Dutch, influences. This rejection of the English church could raise doubts about the puritans’ loyalty to their nation. Significantly, the Dutch authorities sometimes disapproved of unruly English puritans arriving on their shores. By 1610, English exiles had five distinct churches in Amsterdam. The Dutch Reformed Church supported one of these churches, a sort of analog to Austin Friars; English separatists, often in conflict with each other and with their national church and with their Dutch hosts, had established the other four.99 Some puritans in England admired their separating brethren who escaped English episcopal discipline for the liberty of the United Provinces. The hedonistic puritan Mistress Underman in Middleton’s Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613), who gets as drunk as any dramatic Dutch character, praises the Allwits for baptizing their daughter “After 97 David Loewenstein argues that the definition of the heretical requires an articulation of orthodoxy. Treacherous Faith: The Specter of Heresy in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 176. 98 Oliver Ormerod, The Pictvre of a Puritane (London, 1605), C1r. 99 Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, 66–7.

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the pure manner of Amsterdam.”100 From Amsterdam, these puritans lamented “that any of the Englysh nation should for the truth of the Gospell be forced to forsake their native country.”101 Such public criticism, as well as their own internecine conflicts, brought scandal onto their ministries. At the head of one congregation, Francis Johnson quarreled with his brother George and their church splintered. In the recriminations that followed, various English ministers attacked each other, their native church, and the church of their Dutch hosts. In quarreling with another godly minister, Johnson felt compelled to explain “the particulars … wherein we differ from the Dutch and French Churches of this city” and had lamented that the reformed Dutch “worship God in the Idol-temples of Antichrist.”102 In a subsequent controversy over ordination, John Paget would accuse Henry Ainsworth of “injuriously pervert[ing] and falsify[ing]” his description of the practices of the Dutch among whom he lived.103 At one point, the Amsterdam consistory, which wanted to maintain good relations with England and its national church, learned that the Bishop of London complained to English agents in the United Provinces about puritan access to the press. He blamed Dutch permissiveness, complaining “dat alhier Brounistische boecken worden gedruckt, die daerwaerts worden overgesonden, ende aldaer te Lande worden gestroyt, tot nadeel van Gods Kercke [that Brownist books are printed here, which are sent over to England, and distributed throughout that country, to the detriment of God’s Church].”104 The consistory regretted that these unruly English puritans abused their Dutch hosts’ toleration, bringing scandal and English disapproval onto the reformed church of the United Provinces. James also associated puritans with dangerous foreign influences, particularly in their affinity with disorderly Dutch sects like the Anabaptists and Familists. In the king’s view, puritans posed a danger to the

100 “A Chaste Maid in Cheapside,” 3.2.5. 101 Henry Ainsworth, The Confession of faith of certayn English people, living in exile,

in the Low Countreyes ([Amsterdam], 1607), 5. 102 An Inquirie and Ansvver of Thomas White his Discoverie of Brownisme ([Amsterdam], 1606), 78–9. 103 An Arrow Against the Separation of the Brownists (Amsterdam, 1618), 117. 104 Epistulae et Tractatus Ecclesiae Londino-Batavae Historiam, ed. J. H. Hessels, vol.

3 (Cambridge, 1897), 1180.

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discipline and hierarchy of church and state. Their tendency to withdraw their communities from the Church of England aroused the king’s suspicions. He accused them of embracing the anarchy of the heretical Anabaptists and “wear[ing] … their liuerie” (Basilicon Doron 7). In associating puritans with the foreign influence of the Anabaptists, James evokes a particularly troublesome Dutch sect. The name “puritan,” James concedes, had once “properly belong[ed] onely to that vile sect amongst the Anabaptists, called the Family of loue” (6), though now it encompasses many groups. Puritans in the Family of Love, a sect maintaining a secret separation within the church combined with an arrogant precision, think “themselues onely pure, and in a maner without sinne, the onely trew Church... and all the rest of the world to be but abomination in the sight of God” (6). As Anthony Maxey, one of the king’s chaplains, would remark, such arrogant separatists have historically troubled the peace of the church. In the past, “the Katharites” in France, and in a previous generation, “the family of loue” from the Low Countries, and now “the Puritanes of our times” proudly embrace a “selfe conceited and head-strong opinion” that “now, in this life by a godlye reformation, we may attaine vnto perfection.”105 Although the king and his ministers did not often comment on this Dutch sect’s doctrines, they found it easy to conflate puritans and Familists as stubborn radicals and self-described saints who justified their separation from and criticism of the Church of England and its discipline with a hollow pride. The mystical teachings of the Family of Love and their Dutch leader, Hendrik Niclaes, first took root in England in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Originally brought into England by a Dutch textile merchant, Christopher Vittels, linked to prominent Dutch figures in London, and increasing in the 1570s as Dutch refugees arrived in larger numbers, the Family of Love found fruitful soil among English Protestants in regions where the Lollards had once thrived.106 A period of persecution followed.107 English divines determined to root out this 105 A Copie of the Sermon Preached before the King (London, 1605), G1r. 106 J. W. Martin, “Elizabethan Familists and English Separatism,” JBS 20 (1980), 56.

On Vittels’s travels, see Christopher Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550– 1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 78–9. 107 In 1579, fearing the Familists’ “absurd and fanatical” teachings “first begun and practiced in other countries to be now brought into this her realm,” the state initially ordered the suppression of the sect. “Ordering the Prosecution of the Family of Love,” in

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dangerous Dutch influence found the Familists’ allusive mysticism and embrace of outward conformity to the established church especially frustrating. Niclaes deployed literal and metaphorical understandings of the Christian emphasis on God’s “Love” to suggest human perfectibility in this life and to hint at millenarian beliefs.108 The sect’s use of unstable linguistic registers prompted one Jacobean critic to despair of their “od interpretations of God’s word” that wrench the sense of scripture to make “sound religion” into the mere “fancies of men.”109 In Ainsworth’s critique of the lascivious and “heretical doctrines” of the Family, he finds it “hard to comprehend any good vnderstanding in anything which H. N. doth write, he is so ledd with the spirit of error.”110 Familists claimed that the original Dutch language of their leader contained more meaning than any English translation could express. Stung by this slander of his native language, John Rogers asserts that Niclaes’s “rude stile beeing written in the Dutch tongue, is rather beautified by translation, then impayred.”111 While Dekker, Haughton, and others might have associated the Dutch language with commercial success, then, others found the language’s traffic in radical religious notions dangerous and frustrating.

Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. 2, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 474–5. Once it became apparent that the group posed no threat, those who had been imprisoned were released. See for instance, Folger MS X.d.30, which ordered the release of the last Familists in Cambridge but required that they be kept under surveillance. 108 For instance, Niclaes claimed that God had “determined to erect and establish upon the Earth, for evermore, now in the last time; the Peace and Blessing of all the Generations of the Earth, under the Obedience of his Love.” A Publishing of Peace upon the Earth (Cologne, 1574), A3r-A3v. Janet E. Halley offers a sophisticated reading of the sect’s slippery textuality, arguing that Familism and the Established Church create a sort of mutually constitutive understanding of each other. “Heresy, Orthodoxy, and the Politics of Religious Discourse: The Case of the English Family of Love,” Representations 15 (1986), 105–6. For Kristen Poole, H. N.’s emphasis on perfectibility incited orthodox invective, since it inspired antinomianism. Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 76. 109 A Supplication of the Family of Loue… Examined (Cambridge, 1606), 25. This text presents a version of the lost Supplication with extensive commentary on the Family’s heterodoxy. 110 An Epistle Sent vnto Two daughters of Warwick (Amsterdam, 1608), 55, 51. 111 The Displaying of an horrible secte of grosse and wicked heretiques (London, 1579),

B3r.

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The Familists’ English adversaries adopted two strategies for attacking this unorthodox Dutch sect. Because they could not mount a direct refutation of the sect—Rogers would declare in exasperation “there is no matter in the Author that may bee drawen into an argument” (B2v)— English divines sought to associate the Familists with known heresies.112 Rogers and others focused on the supposed allegiance of Familists with the much more dangerous Anabaptists, who originally “were Hollanders, and schollers of David George, whose disciple your author H. N. was at that time” (A6r).113 Ainsworth similarly attacked Niclaes’s “Anabaptistical error” (53). The king himself would repeat this move in his expanded preface to Basilikon Doron, associating puritans with pernicious Dutch sects. English critics’ second strategy for attacking the Family of Love focused on the hypocritical disconnect between their outward appearance of conformity and a suspected interior dissent. When English Familists petitioned the king to accept their loyal conformity, for instance, one defender of the English church’s orthodoxy quoted H. N.’s earlier teachings to show that “the bodies of Familistes may be in our Churches…but their harts doe loath whatsoeuer they doe either see, or heare” unless a Familist elder speaks it.114 This charge of hypocrisy joined a larger antipuritanical discourse on hypocrisy—their claims to live a precise life when such precision seemed impossible and arrogant—to imagine these supposedly ascetic figures as prone to indulgence and excess. Henoch Clapham, once a preacher in the United Provinces, would discredit the separatists in a series of dialogues between “Flyer,” an English man searching for the true church, and representatives of various sects. Meeting “Familist,” Flyer hears his explanation of “Louely-beeing” and deems him a clanging symbol of nonsense: “This soundeth somewhat which you speake: but I

112 Christopher Carter suggests that English divines who attacked the Dutch Familists as a “crypto-Catholic force within England” deflected the English hierarchy’s attention from their own desire for further reformation. “The Family of Love and Its Enemies,” SCJ 37 (2006), 662–3. 113 Similar worries about Dutch pollution permeate the texts of other English critics of the Family of Love. In A Confutation of monstrous and horrible heresies, taught by H. N. (London, 1579), John Knewstub includes a letter from a divine complaining of “the heresie, or rather the heape of heresies, which some yeeres past comming out of Dutchland arrived in England” (**7r). 114 Supplication … Examined, 17.

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understand it not.”115 As Familist continues in his discussion of naked meetings without shame and his sinless ability to bed the lovely Dutch hostess serving them tankards of ale, Flyer rejects the Familist to return home to England’s Mediocritie: “Keepe your Loues & your Lusts to your selfe; & God giue me to see mine owne home againe. There is money for the Beere, and adue lewd leacherous Familist” (55).116 From the highest levels to lowly itinerant preachers, the charge that English Familists, infected with dangerous Dutch heterodoxy, indulged in hypocritical excess under the guise of proving their “precise” lifestyles helped in the theatrical construction of the “puritan.”

Dutch Sects and English Sex Jacobean playwrights popularized the supposed lechery of the Dutch Family of Love. Since so many city comedies turn on adultery and other transgressive erotic liaisons, the purported licentiousness of this sect of puritans offered an easy device for bringing amorous characters into illicit contact. The Family of Love supposedly taught that when a person slept, because he or she was no longer alive to the (conscious) world, his or her spouse had no obligations of marital fidelity. In The Malcontent , for example, a bawd recalls rumors of a “sect that maintained, when the husband was asleep the wife might entertain another man” (5.3.7–9). The Dutch sect appears in Anything for a Quiet Life, as well. When Knavesbe wants to convince his wife to sleep with Beaufort, he tells her to “think I am gone to th’Indies, or lie with him when I am asleep—for some familists of Amsterdam will tell you it may be done with a safe conscience.”117 Such connections might have been more easily made because the name of the Familist prophet, H. N. or Hendrik Niclaes, recalled a licentious sect condemned by the early church, when an angelic messenger had warned the church in Pergamum against harboring heretics, including “the doctrine of the Nicolaitans,” recently expelled from Ephesus (Revelation 2:15). According to the Geneva Bible’s gloss, that sect included “heretikes w[hi]c[h] helde that 115 Henoch Clapham, Errovr on the right hand through a preposterous zeale (London, 1608), 54. 116 Halley argues that the charge of sexual promiscuity derives in part from simplifications and distortions of the published works of Niclaes (105). 117 John Webster and Thomas Middleton, “Anything for a Quiet Life,” 2.1.99–102.

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wiues shulde be commune, & as some thinke were named of one called Nicolas.” The popular connection of this wickedly loose sect condemned in Revelation with contemporary Familists and other puritans allowed Thomas Lodge to lump them together in his character of the hypocrite, who comes “to the Nicolaits, who held ye axiome of Aristotle in a sinister sence, Bonum quo communius eo melius. A good faire wench the commoner she were, the better she were.”118 Every church has its share of licentious hypocrites, but the popular image of the hypocritical puritan attaches itself to the morally loose indulgence of the Familist in a number of city comedies. Barry’s Family of Love capitalizes on popular interest in Familists. In the comedy, the Glisters prevent a pair of young lovers, Gerardine and Maria, from marrying. The philandering Doctor Glister objects to the gallant’s attention. The hypocritical doctor beds Mistress Purge, a member of the Family of Love, whose husband accepts his role as a wittol. At the same time, Gerardine’s rakish companions, Gudgeon and Lipsalve, attempt to seduce as many of the play’s women as possible, mocking Gerardine’s professions of true love for Maria, whom they both desire. Gerardine, pretending to go into exile for love, returns to Maria in disguise. Mistress Purge, in addition to her liaison with Glister, teases Lipsalve and Gudgeon, and cozies up to the outwardly godly merchant, Dryfat. When the randy Gudgeon learns that he can attend a feast Purge will host, he declares, “Oh, his wife is of the Family of Love. I’ll thither: perhaps I may prove of the fraternity in time” (1.2.162–3). Pitting the monogamous but forbidden love of Maria against the polyamorous desires surrounding Mistress Purge, the comedy then complicates these values. After all, Gerardine consummates his love with Maria when he finds he can visit her secretly; and Mistress Purge faces a charge of adultery, but Gerardine releases her once he can trick Glister into giving a pregnant Maria a hefty dowry to avoid being charged with the paternity. The contrast between Mistress Purge’s sexual insouciance and her sartorial fastidiousness typifies the hypocrisy of puritans on the Jacobean stage. Her first entrance links her concern for superficial appearance with her membership in the Family as she orders her husband’s apprentice, Club, to polish her shoes so she can look her best when she attends the meeting (1.3.55). Like the godly figures of a Frans Hals portrait, she

118 Thomas Lodge, VVits Miserie or the VVolrds Madnesse (London, 1596), 11.

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takes pride in her puritanical apparel. References to her neat, if unfashionable dress occur at several points in the comedy, and on her first visit to the Family she berates Club for carelessly dirtying the surface of her clothes and making her an “unclean member i’ the congregation” (3.2.2– 3). Although she uses a judgmental spiritual phrase of the godly, she applies it to literal stains in her clothes rather than to the moral stains of her sexual promiscuity. In addition to this concern with her superficial appearance, Mistress Purge’s pharisaical language further marks her as puritanical, if not hypocritical. She takes offense at the profane oaths of courtiers (1.3.50) and when accused of giving her wedding ring to a lover, she claims “by my sisterhood, I gave it to the relief of the distressed Geneva” (5.3.267–8), a metonym for radical puritanism. Engaged in a conversation with Dryfat that she does not fully understand, for instance, she mistakes the merchant’s remarks about asceticism and disciplining the body’s organs, lamenting that they make “a most abominable squeaking sound in mine ears; they edify not a whit, I detest ‘em” (3.3.26–8). Her casuistical defense of sensual indulgence—that senses are part of the understanding, that better understanding (literally) “lifteth up the mind from earth; if the mind be lift up, you know the body goes with it” and that therefore indulging or “mak[ing] singular use of feeling” edifies the soul (3.3.39–41, 43)—adds to the linguistic signals of her precise hypocrisy. A similar condemnation of the theater—“This playing is not lawful, for I cannot find that either plays or players were allowed in the prime church at Ephesus” (1.3.110–12)—while aligning her with puritanical antitheatrical critics, appears even more ironic coming from the mouth of a transvestite actor on the Whitefriars stage. Mistress Purge’s ambiguous diction creates the greatest sense of her hypocrisy. Like the cunning Dutch and English Familists who alternated between the allegorically spiritual and carnally physical meanings in a capacious word like “love,” Mistress Purge’s speech adds double entendres to double entendres. When the puritanical Dryfat expresses his “desire” to “be of your society” and his admiration for the Family’s zeal—often a marker of the stage puritan, since moderate Protestants associated zeal with pride, suggesting the hypocrisy of the precise—Mistress Purge asks an ambiguous question in reply: “Are you upright in your dealings?” (3.2.56–9). Dryfat responds with his testament of faith and receives Mistress Purge’s approval. Her husband, however, assumes that the discussion of Dryfat’s “upright” or erect dealings and their conversation about the use of the senses in a Familist gathering, “when we

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crowd and thrust a man and a woman together” (3.2.50–1), signal his wife’s infidelity. Mistress Purge’s speech—if an auditor assumed the usual bawdy meanings associated with her phrases—would mark her as a loose woman. One indication that her words may evoke the quibbles associated with Hendrick Niclaes’s figurative wrenching of the scriptural language of “love,” occurs earlier, as the gallants compete to seduce Mistress Purge. Lipsalve, for instance, cannot understand why this Familist continues to frustrate his hopes of erotic fulfillment and confesses to Gudgeon that when he “discourse[s] of love to her, she tells me I am wide from the right scope. She says she has another object, and aims at a better love than mine.” He replies to Gudgeon’s conviction that she must mean her husband’s love with the explanation, “No, no, she speaks pure devotion” (2.3.64–9). Surprisingly, this Familist does not easily grant sexual favors, causing the two gallants to search for a philter that will overcome her reservations. Mistress Purge does eventually commit adultery, but not in the expected promiscuous way. Some of the misunderstandings in the play come from the men who assume that she trades sexual favors, either in Purge’s shop or at meetings of the Family. Purge, for instance, accepts his wife’s infidelity since her beauty brings customers to his shop: “Here they come in term time, hire chambers, and perhaps kiss our wives—well, what lose I by that?... [T]hey that will thrive must utter their wares … and wink at small faults” (2.1.15–16, 21–3).119 He willingly tolerates his wife’s regular travel to the Family’s meetings (2.1.7) but his permissiveness contributes to a misogynist anxiety about women and their supposedly enthusiastic tendencies in religion. In his humorous “character” of a puritan, for instance, Sir Thomas Overbury would claim that women were prone to unconventional beliefs because a woman, “next [to] fruit, longs for forbidden Doctrine,” while John Earle had made a similar point about the “she-precise hypocrite” who “will goe in Pilgrimage fiue mile to a silenc’d Minister, when there is a better Sermon in her owne Parish.”120 119 Leslie Thomson, “‘As proper a woman as any in Cheap’: Women in Shops on the Early Modern Stage,” MaRDiE 16 (2003), 148–9. 120 Sir Thomas Overbury, Sir Thomas Ouerburie His Wife, with New Elegies (London,

1616), F1v; John Earle, Micro-cosmographie (London, 1628), H8v. Sophie Tomlinson suggests that outsiders might have misread the sect’s emphasis on sociable community and turned it into the exaggerated licentiousness of the stage. “Sensuality, Spirit, and Society in The Dutch Courtesan and Lording Barry’s The Family of Love (1608),” Early Theatre 23 (2020), 73.

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Richard Verstegan, a bilingual English Catholic exile in Antwerp, would perpetuate the stereotype of the unruly sectarian woman in his character of the “Hollandtsche Bijbel-suster or Schriftuer-vrouwe,” whose husband laments that because she hankers after heterodox preachers’ words, he “dickmaels een sermoon t’huys moet hooren als andere zijn sermoon in de kercke hebben gehoort [must often hear a sermon at home as well as having heard his sermon in the church].”121 Earle would even suggest that the puritanical wife of a tradesman “helps him to customers” by attending conventicles, implying her lasciviousness (H10 r).The anxiety that women attending disorderly services might indulge in other promiscuity returns when Purge is mocked for his wife’s “notes out of her quotations” (5.3.103) at Familist gatherings, a joke about quotations of puritanical sermon notes and the coitus practiced at such meetings. Concerns about puritanical women running riot return in the play’s mock trial when Dryfat demands that Mistress Purge and other loose women be brought to heel. “[I]f they be not punished,” he worries in curtailing the supposed Familist doctrine of Bonum quo communis eo melius, “each man’s copyhold will become freehold, specialities will turn to generalities … [t]heir wives, the only ornaments of their houses and of all their wares, goods, and chattels the chief movables, will be made common” (5.3.188– 95). Barry stages the concern that the Familists’ lack of discipline, and in particular its female adherents’ disorderliness, will unravel the hierarchies woven into the English social fabric. Wives, wares, and goods will lose the value they have based on scarcity and possession should they become common property. If the “charter” is not to be “infringed” (5.3.198), then they must uphold the principle of scarcity and possession. Similar worries about unruly puritans haunt John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan. This comedy combines two plot lines in which Familists figure prominently. In the popular subplot, the English Mulligrubs, a Familist pair of dishonest vintners, suffer the pranks of a protean trickster, Cocledemoy. In the main plot, an English gallant, Freevill, ends his affair with a Familist Dutch prostitute in order to wed a virtuous English bride. The scorned woman manipulates Malheureux, a young man of “professed abstinence” (1.2.124) now under her sway, into a plot

121 Scherp-sinnighe Characteren (Antwerp, 1622), 64.

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to murder Freevill.122 That plot fails and leads to the courtesan’s humiliation. Malheureux nearly goes to the gallows. The plots intersect through a cluster of women in the Family of Love: the jealously competitive Mistress Mulligrub, the coarse bawd, Mary Faugh, and the Dutch prostitute, Franceschina. Satirical mortification of the ambitious, puritanical Mulligrubs and the punishment of the scheming Dutch courtesan—who again links anarchic female sexuality with a dangerous foreign sect—bring the puritanical Family to the stage. Marston relies on city comedy’s social types, including the hypocritical religious radical, the tradesman, and the foreigner, using his harsh treatment of the Family of Love to enhance these figures. The subplot links the Mulligrubs with the Familists specifically and with hypocritical puritans more generally. Mulligrub embodies one comic type, the dull shopkeeper. His frustrations at being “shav’d” by the prankster Cocledemoy (who disguises himself as a barber at one point) increase his frenzy until he willingly goes to the gallows to escape his bad luck.123 His wife represents a different type: the female puritan who speaks with an affected, Hebraic zeal and maintains membership in the licentious Family of Love. As Mulligrub rails impotently at his fate, his wife takes a more philosophical approach to their loss of gold plate to Cocledemoy. She worries that “heaven is not pleas’d with our vocation. We do wink at the sins of our people, our wines are Protestants, and—I speak it to my grief and to the burden of my conscience—we fry our fish with salt butter” (2.3.8–12). Her anxieties pull in multiple directions.124 Engaged in the sale of beverage and food, often a marker of group distinctions, her parsing of their practices points to the unstable identity of the Mulligrubs and their establishment. When she worries that they have practiced an immoral profession, she adopts an extremely ascetic position, one that might seem to align her with the dour moralizing of

122 Sarah K. Scott shows how Marston might create sympathy for Franceschina, a victim of her environment, though she does not account for the courtesan’s attempt to have Freevill’s murdered. “Discovering the Sins of the Cellar in The Dutch Courtesan: Turpe est difficiles habere nugas,” MaRDiE 26 (2013), 63. 123 Philip J. Finkelpearl sees Cocledemoy’s torturing of Mulligrub as an exorcism of the vintner’s puritanical extremism. John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in His Social Setting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 214. 124 For Rubright, Mistress Mulligrub’s anxieties reflect the misalignment of her foreign religious practices and her English profession. Doppelgänger Dilemmas, 52–3.

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the puritans. Their winking at “the sins of our people,” their indifference to others’ salvation, which taken to the extreme leads to the perfectionism of Familists and puritans, further pushes her in this direction. At the same time, her anxiety that using animal fat to fry her Friday fish constitutes a sin marks her as Catholic.125 The practice also ambiguously associates the greasy Mulligrubs with the Dutch, the great consumers of butter. Mistress Mulligrub’s shocked realization that their “wines are Protestant” further marks this Familist as dangerously hypocritical. Members of the Church of England might have hoped to draw clear distinctions between Protestant and Catholic, but puritans and other religious radicals made it difficult to sustain such classifications. Some puritans insisted that the English Church’s dietary recommendations smacked of papist superstition. To make their point, they ostentatiously ate meat when others abstained. In Ormerod’s Pictvre of a Puritane, the Englishman complains that some puritans ate meat specifically “to crosse the authoritie of that power which inioyneth vs to abstaine from Flesh-meate” (E2r). He concludes that these schismatics perversely violate the Church of England’s discipline to show their freedom from superstition. Like the requirement that Familist converts turn from the “sin” of “eating fish on Fridays” in Barry’s comedy (4.1.85), the Familist Mary Faugh’s rejection of “the wicked that eat fish o’Fridays” (1.2.20) marks her as outside of the English Church’s orthodoxy. Similar traits mark Dryfat as a puritan; at one point, he catalogues his charity only to those of his sect, his easy conscience that permits sharp business practices and usurious lending, his indulgence on Sundays, his policy to “keep no holydays nor fasts, but eat most flesh o’ Fridays of all days i’ the week,” his artificially lengthy graces before meals, and his insistence on naming his godsons by Hebraic names such as “Aminadab and Abraham” (3.3.72–4). Dryfat and Mulligrub, who “use to fast at nights” in their sleep (5.3.87) after a day of indulgence, would find themselves at home with Verstegan’s giddy “Hollantschen Sect-looper,” “Bijbel-suster,” or “Hippocrijt,” the last of whom “stoffeert hy hem seluen beter met goede spijse en dranck … gemeynlijck snoenens op eenen vastendach om dat hy t’sauonts wel vasten mach [stuffs himself better with good food 125 Christopher Kissane notes that in northern Europe, where Lenten restrictions on consuming dairy particularly chafed, Reformers criticized Rome’s manipulation of local dietary practices for pecuniary gain. Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 66.

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and drink … generally at noon on a fasting day in order that he may actually fast in the evenings]” (65). Their rejection of church discipline made it easy for mainstream English Protestants to conflate puritans and Familists. At the same time, because Familists did not explicitly reject the Church of Rome and found it possible to be both a Familist and a Catholic, the sect’s critics often accused its members of being simply Catholics.126 One Jacobean tract considered this Dutch sect’s toleration especially damning since “they accuse nor blame any folke for their religion, whether the Ministers of the Popish Church or any other.”127 Despite considering them “the most odious Puritanes vnder the coape of Heauen” (60), this critic also associated the Family of Love with “the Church of Rome” since H. N. “commendeth” that church on many occasions (32). Some English writers lumped Familists, puritans, and Catholics together. David Owen took offense, on behalf of “the godly Protestants” of the Church of England, against “the Papists and Puritans [who] doe damnably abuse… the Ecclesiasticall and Civill authority of Kings.”128 The heterodox Mistress Mulligrub’s complaint that their “wines are Protestant” thus puts her on the outside of the moderate mainstream and reflects the view that puritanical Familists are not really English Protestants. The play presents the Familists as an unruly group. Mulligrub and his wife speak the Hebraic terms associated with the outwardly precise puritans.129 Despairing of his faith after another of Cocledemoy’s pranks, Mulligrub declares that he will “go no more to the synagogue,” by which he means “church” (3.4.126). Mistress Mulligrub—in addition to her meditation on wines, butter, and fish—takes offense at those who smoke “profane tobacco.” She regrets that her customers indulge in this morally suspect practice and has zealously objected to “ungodly tobacco since one of our elders assured me, upon his knowledge, tobacco was not used in the congregation of the family of love” (3.4.4–7). As she prepares a feast, she proudly muses on her rising social status, declaring “methodically” 126 Peter Lake. The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy,’ ‘Heterodoxy’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 114. 127 Supplication … Examined, 14. 128 Herod and Pilate Reconciled: Or, the Concord of Papist and Puritan (Cambridge,

1610), 54. 129 On Jacobean playwrights’ tendency to mock the “Old Testament mode,” see also Lake, Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, 604.

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that she has gentlewomen kin. This unusual word diverts her attention as she repeats it and tries to remember where she learned it. Eventually, she recalls that a puritanical elder of her sect with a Hebrew name, “Sir Aminadub Ruth bade me kiss him methodically” (3.4.11–12). This memory of profitable intercourse and the double entendre of her occasionally accepting gentlemen customers’ “piece of flesh” (3.3.26) signal her participation in the lewd rituals of the Family. Her godly language, pride, and sexual license mark her as one of the disorderly puritans of the popular imagination. Although Mistress Mulligrub displays less sexual appetite than other stage members of the Family of Love, the Familist characters in the comedy’s main plot—the bawd and her Dutch prostitute—make the sexual indulgence of the sect plain. In the play’s logic, since they work in a brothel, a site of sexual excess, they should profess membership in this disorderly, supposedly licentious, sect. Moreover, given the sect’s Dutch origins, the “Froe of Flanders” at the heart of the play, despite her Venetian sophistication, should speak with a Dutch accent.130 Both Barry’s and Marston’s comedies link the licentiousness of the female Familists to the commodification of sexual desire. Just as Purge profits from the sale of the fashionable wares his wife’s suitors purchase, contenting himself “with horns of abundance” (2.1.6) in return, so Mistress Mulligrub wishes she could trade places with a goldsmith’s wife, “a worthy ornament to a tradesman’s shop” (3.3.12–13), who dresses in fine style because her husband profits from the men who come to her.131 Cocledemoy and the loose Dutch Familists, of course, drive this point home most clearly. Meeting up with the Familist Mary Faugh, who disapproves of speaking “ungodly terms” despite her profession’s requirements (2.2.80), the trickster delivers an encomium in defense of bawds, the “most worshipful of all the twelve companies” of London (1.2.32–3). Dilating on the commodities she sells, Cocledemoy praises her purveyance not of “cloth, satins, and jewels” but “virginity, modesty and such rare 130 Howard notes the curious combination of Venetian traits under a Dutch surface. Theater of a City, 152. John Stow associated Southwark’s stews with the “Froes of Flaunders.” Svrvay, 333. 131 Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. argues that in early modern London, the market comes to pervade all aspects of life, and that women haunting their husbands’ commercial ventures can never be fully removed from the market. “‘All Thinges Come into Commerce’: Women, Household Labor, and the Spaces of Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan,” Renaissance Drama 27 (1996), 38.

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gems” (1.2.40). Most significantly, the sale of pleasure supersedes an economy of scarcity, as Cocledemoy looks implicitly to the phrase dramatists associated with Familists, “bonum quo communis eo melius,” sharing something good increases its value. Other trades can only thrive “by the loss and displeasure of another” but the madam “lives by others’ pleasure, and only grows rich by others’ rising” (1.2.46–7, 51–2).132 The distance between buying and selling goods, arranging the transfer of property in marriage, and the sale of sex nearly disappears in Marston’s play. Mary Faugh sells a Dutch luxury. Not simply a prostitute, Franceschina entertains an international clientele and has her pick of wealthy English citizens and gentlemen. The Dutch courtesan’s desirable commodity commands a premium price. She accompanies herself on a lute as she sings melodious airs filled with double entendres. She perfumes her sheets and prepares her chamber to appeal to all of the senses. When Malheureux bluntly asks about heading toward her boudoir, she labors to extend his ecstasy: “No, no, I’ll make you chew your pleasures vit love:/ De more degrees and steps, de more delight” (5.1.31–33). She provides a carnal, deluxe commodity certain to have incurred far greater ire from a moralist like Stephen Gosson or a mercantilist like Malynes than silks or other frivolous imports. At the same time, as in her halting entreaty to Malheureux to take his time, her sensual appeal sits uneasily with the harsh sounds of her stage Dutch. As Freevill prepares for monogamous austerity, he links Franceschina’s availability to the stage’s Familist tag, “how can the love of woman’s beauty be bad? And bonum, quo communis, eo melius ” (1.1.158–3). Commending her to Malheureux, he wistfully praises this sexually loose Dutch Familist as “a pretty, nimbleey’d Dutch Tanakin; an honest, soft-hearted impropriation; a soft, plump round cheek’d froe that has beauty enough for her virtue” (1.1.158–61). His sympathy for this Dutch woman dissipates once she reveals herself as an avenging Fury, determined to kill her beloved, who now rejects this foreign luxury for homespun English virtue. Scott Oldenburg concedes that this foreign figure represents a threat to be contained.133 Counting himself lucky for having escaped her violent plot, Freevill learns “what difference is in women and their life!” (5.1.71). In the end, Marston 132 For William M. Hamlin, Cocledemoy sketches a mercantilist fantasy of abundance “exempt from the rule of profit and loss.” “Common Customers in Marston’s Dutch Courtesan and Florio’s Montaigne,” SEL 52 (2012), 411. 133 Alien Albion, 127.

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heaps the unsettling elements of the play onto the Dutch courtesan, relegated to “severest prison” and refusing to speak anymore (5.3.58). As Haughton and Dekker had done with their Dutch merchants, Marston quarantines the corrosive danger of this commodified Dutch heretic. Marston stages the possibility of containing the pernicious influence of the Dutch sect, but the action of the subplot continues and, as in Barry’s comedy, uncertainty finally muddles the superficial distinction between the English and the Dutch. In Barry’s comedy, the gallants gain admission to a meeting of the Family when they adopt the “demure habit,” or sober dark clothes of the puritan, and “speak pitifully” in godly phrases, promising to stop “speaking reverently of the clergy” (4.1.11, 73, 85– 6). If Englishmen can pass as Dutch Familists simply by speaking an affected dialect, the difference must be located elsewhere. In Marston’s Dutch Courtesan, a disguised Cocledemoy torments Mulligrub long after Franceschina’s stage Dutch ceases. Having made his final confession at the gallows, Mulligrub hears Cocledemoy complain that the vintner’s “Popish wines” have perverted his customers’ taste for “true ancient British and Trojan drinks” (5.3.116–18). Cocledemoy indicts both Mulligrub’s foreign commodities and the weakness of English consumers. An English vintner practicing a Dutch religion satisfies English drinkers rather than a stereotypically drunken Dutchman. In fact, as Jean Howard notes, Mistress Mulligrub, the maudlin English precisian devoted to a mysticism developed in the Low Countries, indulges her “burgher sensuality” and gets tipsy at one point, further blurring the distinction between Dutch and English drunkenness.134 As in Iago’s comment about northern European tipplers, the English suffer in Cocledemoy’s wrenching of the Familist vintner’s conscience. Finally, in Barry’s Family of Love, Mistress Purge’s unruly refusal to abjure the Family of Love—she insists that “my love must be free still to God’s creatures... I will do as the spirit shall enable me”—combined with Gerardine’s final appeal for the audience’s approval, “join with me/ For approbation of our Family” (5.3.425–8, 454–5), suggests that the English can never fully limit religious practices they might prefer to stigmatize as Dutch.

134 Theater of a City, 154.

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Coda: The Alchemist On the day England made peace with Spain, the Venetian ambassador reported that “They say that though it is true that the English hate the Spanish and like the Dutch, yet gold works miracles everywhere, and nowhere greater than in England.”135 As material concerns overtook higher ideals such as the unified front of the Protestant nations against Spain’s Catholic tyranny, gold’s miracle-working power appeared in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610).136 The play’s focus on schemes for great wealth—both the gulls’ fantasies of miraculous wealth and the hucksters’ more modest goal of siphoning off their investments—enmeshes the mercantile values prevalent in this genre with its treatment of puritanism and the Low Countries. As in other playwrights’ city comedies, Jonson uses The Alchemist to challenge and outline the social types of seedy, commercial London. He directs his satire at “your whore,/ Bawd, squire, impostor,” but these dramatic types shade into the “many persons more” who sit in his audience (Prologue, 7–8). While Jonson brings no Dutch characters into The Alchemist , he substitutes a pair of English separatists— Tribulation Wholesome and Ananias the deacon, working on behalf of their brethren in Amsterdam—whose speech and manners mark them as Dutch, whose loyalties lie contemptuously outside of mother England, and whose expulsion invites the audience’s rejection of such hypocrisy. In them, the playwright imports a spectral Dutch presence that he cannot easily exorcize. The comedy certainly engages with the material concerns of Jacobean London. Jonson populates his play with figures drawn from the heart of metropolitan economic life. He brings together Abel Drugger, a gullible apothecary associated with “Harry Nicholas,” Dapper, a greedy clerk, and Sir Epicure Mammon, an even more avaricious gallant, with the hypocritical puritans, all hoping to make a profit from Face, Subtle, and Doll Common, the “venter tripartite,” in the absent Lovewit’s house (1.1.27).137 These characters participate in the amoral commercial life of

135 CSPV , 18 August 1604. 136 David Norbrook suggests that Jonson saw the Dutch in such pragmatic terms.

Poetry and Politics, 176. 137 Bernard Krumm sees the play’s resolution as reflecting the contingencies of the market rather than more principled ideals. “Mammon in the Market; or, How Ben Jonson Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Capitalism,” Ben Jonson Journal 28 (2021), 53.

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Jacobean London. The charlatans have experienced the harsh realities of the capital and represent those on the underside of London’s new prosperity, determined to make a profit from others like them. These three offer the dupes a fantasy of wealth without labor, the fulfillment of their dreams.138 With the charm Subtle and Face offer to sell, Dapper the gambler aspires to take on “a new business” of success in all ventures to allow him to retire from his vocation (1.2.86). Like Simon Eyre and his windfall prosperity, Epicure Mammon similarly hopes to make a quick bargain and avoid the necessary labor required to find a second version of “Great Solomon’s Ophir” (2.1.4). The puritans of the play have similar aspirations: they hope to purchase the miraculous philosopher’s stone “for the holy brethren/ Of Amsterdam, the exiled Saints, that hope/To raise their discipline by it” (2.4.29–31). In each case, the schemers take advantage of their marks’ fantasies of escaping the requirements of hard work to make a speedy profit. The hypocritical English puritans from the Dutch Republic use a godly dialect to obscure their wicked greed. They chop logic to ensure that they profit. Ananias initially shuts his ears to Subtle’s profane cant: “All’s heathen but the Hebrew” (2.5.17). Ananias does not sing a Dutch drinking song when he enters the house of transmutation, but Subtle nevertheless dismisses his pious dialect as sounding like a Dutch Anabaptist’s (2.5.13). Subtle appeals to the separatists’ wildest hopes of profit, however, threatening the failure of their projections of “rooting out the bishops,/ Or th’antichristian hierarchy” if they do not invest more money (2.5.82–3). Later, Tribulation Wholesome speaks in the puritan manner when he hopes that Subtle may one day “stand up for the beauteous discipline” (3.1.32). Such superficial piety disappears when Subtle paints a picture of all that the English separatists in Amsterdam can achieve, if they invest more in the venture. With their profits, the separatists can “hir[e] forces/ Abroad” to fight against the papacy and subsidize “the Hollanders, your friends” so that they can give up their lucrative trade to the Indies and return to war with Spain, which they had temporarily halted in 1609 (3.2.22–3). After a lengthy, ironic catalogue of the puritans’ false virtues, Subtle promises Ananias and Tribulation an enormous sum in the 138 As Theodore Leinwand observes, Jonson presents alchemy as enabling the fantasy that labor can be transmuted into greater profit than has been supplied. Theater, Finance and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 134.

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future and a way to make pewter into “as good Dutch dollars/ As any are in Holland” (3.2.144–5). Ananias, whose scruples do not extend to affairs governed by secular magistrates, believes that the “brethren shall approve it lawful, doubt not” (3.2.158). Fraudulently passing dross as currency among their Dutch allies does not weigh on the consciences of the English brethren. The veil of moral superiority vanishes as these puritans reveal a greed and ambition that rivals the projections of the gallants, merchants, and other social types who crowd the alchemist’s chambers. Radical English Protestants who left England for the United Provinces angered their king, their English countrymen, and even their Dutch hosts. In the same year as The Alchemist , John Etherington wrote contemptuously of the puritans in the United Provinces who criticized their conforming English brethren. Most English Protestants found solace in the church of “Mother England,” Etherington wrote. The puritans who criticized these good Englishmen must be very un-English indeed: “Is this a kind sonne to vse his mother thus: not onely to rune away from her, like his fellowe brethren... but to raile against her so?”139 Rather than working for the good of their nation, the tender consciences of men like Ananias— who cannot bear to hear the word “traditions” spoken (3.2.106)—drive them to turn their backs on England to pursue their selfish version of Christianity. Dutch ministers expressed similar concerns about the English who set up their own churches beyond the scrutiny of the Church of England, in Amsterdam and elsewhere. These unruly English communities created scandals throughout the 1590s and early 1600s. For instance, the Merchant Adventurers’ radical church closed temporarily in 1592 when two rival English ministers came into conflict, prompting the Middelburg consistory to request a new minister “in de Kerckenregieringhe met ons ouereen comme [in Church discipline in accord with us].”140 A few years later, one English minister complained about the Amsterdam consistory’s decision to side with a competing English congregation. He composed ten points demonstrating the wickedness of the Dutch Reformed Church.141 The Amsterdam consistory refuted each

139 I[ohn] H[etherington], A Description of the Chvrch of Christ (London, 1610), 108. As Lake observes, Etherington distinguished his Familism from the more dangerous separatists. Boxmaker’s Revenge, 113. 140 Epistulae et Tractatus Ecclesiae Londino-Batavae, 3: 937. 141 Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, 54.

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of the English minister’s attacks, concluding “dat de sodanige voor schismatices ofte schuermakers [sic] behooren ghehouden te worden [that such should be held and esteemed schismatics or splitters].”142 When the Amsterdam authorities sought to establish an English church “in Leere ende Kerckenordeninge mette Gereformeerden Gemeynten deser Landen ouereencommende [in unity with the law and church discipline of the Reformed Community of this Nation],” they explained that they sought to establish some order and discipline among the English puritans after hearing of the Bishop of London’s complaints about their disorderly behavior.143 Offended that the English puritans’ behavior reflected poorly on the Dutch church, the writer promised his colleagues in Austin Friars that “[v]ele vroome Christenen bedroeven haer grootelix, dat de ondersaten van soodanig een Godsalig Coninck, ende beschermer des Waeren geloofs ons (ten dienste vande Roomschen Antichrist, ende andere geswooren vyanden van Gods Kercke) comen bekrygen ende verdrucken [it greatly grieves many pious Christians that the subjects of such a Devout King, and protector of the True faith are coming (in service of the Roman Antichrist and other sworn enemies of God’s Church) to attack and oppress us]” (3:1180). Puritans’ refusal to abide by the practices of the Church of England offended Protestants living on both sides of the Channel. At the end of Jonson’s play, as Truewit settles accounts with the comedy’s fools, he threatens to beat Ananias and Tribulation, urging them to leave England and return to Amsterdam (5.5.112). They stand awkwardly between two worlds—not exactly Dutch, but also not whole-heartedly English. If separatists want to be separate, perhaps good English folk should help them. In the second decade of the seventeenth century, the social types created in English city comedies had taken on a kind of solidity. Numerous figures from the new commercial life of England stepped onto London’s stages. Plenty of puritans appeared in English theaters. And dozens of Dutch characters would be mocked off those same stages. The competition of material motives in this life with the desire to live according to spiritual principles made the world dramatized in the period’s city comedies compelling. These character types, speaking in 142 Acta der Provinciale en Particuliere Synoden Gehouden in de Noordelijke Nederlanden Gedurende de Jaren 1572–1620, ed. Johannes Reitsma and Sietse Douwes Van Veen, vol. 1 (Groningen, 1892), 307. 143 Epistulae et Tractatus Ecclesiae Londino-Batavae, 3: 1179.

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specialized discourses and languages, pointed to the merchants and radicals, and Dutchmen who walked the streets of London and other English cities and contributed to the popular understanding of these figures. Watching these plays, English audiences learned to speak new languages themselves. They may not have learned very much Dutch, but they did learn some of the language of modern commerce and the terms of a godly minority’s hypocritical dissatisfaction with the state of the English church. Hugh Broughton, himself a master of languages and an English minister in the United Provinces, made the relationship between commerce and Protestantism clear in one of his final pamphlets. Dedicating his account of disputes with learned Continental rabbis to the English Merchant Adventurers, Broughton would praise the modern development of trade, singling out England, whose “Merchandes haue bene a great help to hold the Gospel.”144 Given the prominence of the Dutch Republic in both England’s new commercial life and in its efforts to bring separating puritans back into the fold, perhaps it is not surprising that Jonson did not include a Dutch figure in The Alchemist . His English audiences already knew something about the Dutch gap in English identity. The realization that Dutch acquisitiveness and English acquisitiveness do not significantly differ returns and points to the place of the United Provinces in the national identity of early modern English city comedy.

144 A Require of Agreement (Middelburg, 1611), A3v.

CHAPTER 4

These Factions and Schisms: Countering Absolutist Thought in Church and State

On 27 October 1618 George Carleton addressed the States General in the Hague. As the highest-ranking dignitary of the English delegation to the Synod of Dordrecht, Carleton received the respectful gratitude of the Dutch assembly. The States General convened the Synod in the aftermath of a conflict that had erupted between two Dutch parties of divergent religious and political convictions. The Synod brought together theologians from across the United Provinces, as well as delegations from other Calvinist churches, to debate the claims of the defeated Remonstrant party and establish the Counter-Remonstrants’ orthodoxy. The Dutch viewed the Synod as a key moment in their new nation’s history. Pamphlets emphasized that the States General had called a “National Synod.” The presence of an English bishop among the foreign dignitaries enhanced its legitimacy. One “good patriot” described the Synod’s opening, at which so many “wtheemsche ende inlandtsche Hoochgeleerde, wijse, eere, ende achtbaere persoonen zijn gecomen… van alle de wareGereformeerde Kercken respectivelijcken uyt Engelandt, Paltz, Hessen, Switserlandt [foreign and native learned, wise, honored, and respectable persons have arrived … from all truly-Reformed churches,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Fleck, English National Identity and the Image of the Dutch, Early Modern Literature in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42910-1_4

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respectively from England, the Palatinate, Hessen, Switzerland].”1 For decades after Dort, the Dutch and the English would refer to its canons as they articulated the orthodoxy of their respective national churches. Justifying an English presence at a synod devoted to anathematizing a set of troubling Dutch theological positions, Bishop Carleton spoke of the need to advance the peace of the universal church. England’s king, who had intervened publicly at the start of this controversy in the United Provinces, sent British delegates to help restore peace after a period of troubles. The international context of the Synod provided an opportunity to restore the “vrede ende eendracht der Christelicke Princen door de geheele Weerelt [peace and concord of Christian Princes through the whole world],” particularly in the “bevoorderinge des Vredes ende gerusticheyt van uwen Staet ende Republijcke [promotion of peace and tranquility of your State and Republic].”2 England had an interest in seeing peace and quiet return to the Dutch Republic. The English still bore some responsibility for the success of the Dutch Revolt. They shared a common Protestant cause against the resurgent forces of the CounterReformation. They had a common interest in exploiting the relative weakness of the Iberians in the trade of the East Indies. At King James’s behest, Carleton represented England as having common goals with the Dutch Republic, “met welcke hy verstaet dat sijn Rijck door den bandt soo des oudens als des vasters Verbondts te samen is cohererende [with which he understands that his Kingdom is joined together in covenants through a bond as old as it is firm]” (A2r). Carleton and his king hoped that this Synod would settle affairs that had roiled England’s neighbors for a decade. Specifically, it would address the bitter conflict that had arisen between a faction of Dutch Protestants, the Arminian Remonstrants, and the orthodox Calvinists of the Counter-Remonstrant party. That conflict

1 Copie van sekeren Brief uyt Dordrecht van een Goet Patriot (n.p., 1618), A1v. Fred van Lieburg has discovered that one of these “learned” contributors was London’s Dutch Church’s Simeon Ruytinck, who published a history of Dutch synods in 1618. “Dordrecht’s own Decretum Horribile: The Acta Synodi Behind the Scenes or the Role of Emotions in the History of Theology,” in The Doctrine of Election in Reformed Perspective: Historical and Theological Investigations of the Synod of Dordt 1618-1619, ed. Frank van der Pol (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019), 99. 2 Des Eerw: Bischops van Landavien Oratie (The Hague: 1618), A2r. The English version appeared early the next year. An Oration Made at the Hage, Before the Prince of Orenge, and the Assembly of the High and Mighty Lords, the States Generall of the Vnited Prouinces (London, 1619).

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had highlighted the unresolved questions of Dutch sovereignty that erupted after the Dutch had signed a truce with the Habsburgs. The chief political figure in the United Provinces, the Advocaat of the most prosperous province of Holland, Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, promoted the sovereignty of individual provinces in the Union and argued that Holland could unilaterally grant toleration to the Remonstrants. Opposing him, the stadholder Maurits of Nassau, who inherited William the Silent’s title Prince of Orange in 1618, stood at the head of the Dutch military as captain general. Because Oldenbarnevelt blocked the call for a national Synod, his downfall at Maurits’s hands contributed indirectly to Carleton’s presence. Parallel to the Synod’s proceedings, an exceptional trial against Oldenbarnevelt led to his execution in May 1619. Many English Protestants, concerned with the parameters of their own nation’s church discipline and political hierarchy, paid close attention to these events in the Dutch Republic. Even though most English readers had no access to the Dutch texts defending the sovereignty of individual provinces or calling for a National Synod, many wanted to follow this sensational news. In the final year of Oldenbarnevelt’s life several Counter-Remonstrant texts appeared in English translation. John Fletcher and Philip Massinger capitalized on this dramatic event. In The Tragedy of Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt , they fashioned this conflict over sovereignty and religious issues in the Dutch Republic as an occasion to consider their significance for the English nation. They worked quickly, staging their tragedy just three months after Oldenbarnevelt’s death.3 Two English censors objected to the playwrights’ handling of political and ecclesiastical matters. The Master of the Revels, Sir George Buc, carefully scrutinized the play, leaving some ambiguous markings in its margins, rewriting some lines to soften their charged language, cutting a few inflammatory speeches, and noting explicitly his unease with their characterization of the Prince of Orange.4 Once the Master of the Revels permitted the tragedy to go

3 They wrote the play sometime between 8 May 1619, when John Chamberlain wrote to Dudley Carleton in the Hague that news of Oldenbarnevelt’s execution had reached England (SP 14/109/18) and 14 August 1619 when Thomas Locke wrote to Dudley Carleton to informs him that “The Players heere were bringing of Barnavelt vpon the stage … but at th’instant were prohibited by my Lo[rd] of London” (SP 14/110/18). 4 Richard Dutton discusses Buc’s censorship. Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991),

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forward, the ecclesiastical authorities temporarily “prohibited” the King’s Men from performing it.5 As a strict Calvinist, the Bishop of London, John King, may have objected to Barnavelt’s forthright declaration, “I am of your belief /... And openly I will profess myself / Of the Arminian sect.”6 A new scene, mocking Arminian Dutch women, may have satisfied the bishop that the play did not sympathize with that group. After these revisions, the King’s Men finally performed Barnavelt for appreciative crowds near the end of August 1619.7 The controversial play did not appear in print until the nineteenth century. Buc’s objections point to the dangerous relevance to England of political and religious controversy in the Dutch Republic. The playwrights, their scribe Ralph Crane (likely responsible for minor revisions), the King’s Men (responsible for other changes in staging the play), and the two censors who shaped the remaining material took risks in bringing the subject of an aborted Dutch civil war to the English stage. Their tragedy explored the conflict between two real people, one of whom had brought about the execution of the other only a few months before. Maurits, “that braue Scipio of our age,” a man of action who represented the military strength of the young Republic, emerged triumphant from that conflict; his rival, Oldenbarnevelt, deliberative and “potent in this Counsell,” had wielded the levers of political and diplomatic power of the new nation

208. Janet Clare argues that Bartnavelt demonstrates Buc’s oppressive censorship. “Art made tongue-tied by authority”: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1999), 197. T. H. Howard-Hill argues that Buc added personal interests to official distaste for Oldenbarnevelt. “Buc and the Censorship of Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt in 1619,” RES 39 (1988), 56. 5 See Locke’s letter, SP 14/110/18. The bishop may have objected because he staunchly opposed Arminian ideas. Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 21. Andrew Gurr considers the possibility that Bishop King bowed to popular demand in permitting the play to go forward. The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 135–6. 6 John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, “The Tragedy of Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt,” 1.2.3, 5–6. I distinguish between the historical “Advocaat,” “Oldenbarnevelt,” and the dramatic “Barnavelt” or “Advocate.” Similarly, I differentiate between the historical “Maurits” and the play’s “Prince,” or “Orange.” 7 On 27 August 1619, Locke wrote to Dudley Carleton to say that “Our players have found the meanes to goe through w[i]th the play of Barnevelt & it hath had many spectators & receaued applause.” SP 14/110/37.

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for thirty years before his fall.8 Barnavelt skirts dramatic convention, which would have kept playwrights from dramatizing a living head of state, because the Dutch technically had no monarch, even though both the stadholder and the Advocaat exercised considerable military and political power.9 Fletcher and Massinger adopt a pose of treating the political and religious issues of a foreign country, rather than touching on English matters, but the censors’ uneasiness about Barnavelt indicates that an English audience might have found much of this Dutch conflict relevant to their own concerns. The play pits its two leading figures against each other not only over the important issue of whether the state should enforce religious orthodoxy, especially in exploring the truth of Orange’s charge that Barnavelt had committed “Treason maintaind with heresie” (2.6.27), but also more significantly over the basis of sovereignty and Barnavelt’s exhortation to “Rise up against this Tirant” Orange (2.1.155). In rehearsing such charged material, especially with the question of the Dutch “head of state” unresolved, the playwrights raised dangerously topical themes. England’s king espoused theories of rule that anchored sovereignty and absolute authority in his own person; some in England disputed that view, arguing that the king needed to work through Parliament to exercise his authority. Some of these critics had even begun to think about their nation in almost republican terms in the second decade of James’s reign.10 When Massinger and Fletcher staged Barnavelt in 1619, they did not write the play for a Dutch audience. They used Dutch events that would attract an English audience interested in questions of political sovereignty and religious orthodoxy. Their tragedy holds up a mirror that distorts contemporary events in the Dutch Republic, using

8 Henry Peacham praised Maurits for leading an Anglo-Dutch force in the contested Jülich-Cleves succession. A Most Trve Relation of the Affaires of Cleve and Gvlick (London, 1615), B2 r. Though Overbury praised Oldenbarnevelt’s diplomatic wisdom, the Advocaat miscalculated in the 1614 maneuvers, resulting in the loss of Wesel and the treaty of Xanten. 9 Andrew Gurr discusses this early Jacobean practice of keeping contemporary statesmen out of plays. The Shakespeare Company, 1594–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 172. 10 Markku Peltonen locates republicant threads in early modern England. Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 12. See David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 40.

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them to stir up an English audience concerned about the role of religious orthodoxy and political sovereignty in their own national identity.

A Decade of Troubles: Fissures in the United Provinces Bishop Carleton’s hope for the return of concord and stability to the United Provinces responds to troubles that had accelerated in the decade since the Treaty of Antwerp and the Twelve Years Truce of 1609. After England made peace with Spain and after the fall of Ostend, the Dutch continued to resist the Habsburg Army of Flanders. The costs to both the Dutch and their enemies continued to escalate. Eventually the Spanish made peace overtures and Oldenbarnevelt outmaneuvered the stadholder’s bellicose war party to negotiate an advantageous truce that acknowledged the Republic’s sovereignty.11 The remarkable Truce caught many observers’ attention. Sir Thomas Overbury predicted that the lack of an external enemy might now unleash tensions within the Republic that the Dutch had previously ignored. Writing on the eve of the Truce, he wondered “whether this, being a free State, will as well subsist in peace, as it hath done hitherto in warre, peace leaving every one to attend his particular wealth, when feare, while the warre lasts, makes them concurre for their common safety” (226). Overbury would prove prescient, but despite conflicting attitudes toward the Truce, the Dutch celebrated their nation and its independence during this brief cessation of conflict. Hugo Grotius, Oldenbarnevelt’s brilliant young protégé, celebrates the national myth of ancient Batavian liberty, praising the people of Holland for persevering through a period of foreign tyranny. He predicts that the Truce will reveal that the Batavian love of republican liberty “die te vooren was nu claerder schijnt [that previously existed now shines more readily].”12 Tracing the legendary origins of Dutch republican sovereignty to the ancient nation that resisted Julius Caesar and narrating its survival through to the recognition of Dutch independence in the Truce, Grotius concludes that “ghedurende meer als duysent seven hondert jaeren de Bataviers nu Hollanders ghenaemt ghebruyckt hebben 11 Israel describes the advantageous terms of the Twelve Years Truce. Dutch Republic,

404. 12 Tractaet vande Ovdtheyt vande Batavische nv Hollandsche Republique (The Hague, 1610), ¶3r.

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de selve regieringhe waer van de hoochste macht gheweest zy by de Staten [during more than a thousand seven hundred years, the Batavians—now called Hollanders—have employed the self-government in which they locate the highest power in the States]” (46–7). For Grotius, the Truce provided an opportunity to celebrate restored Dutch sovereignty. The Dutch now confronted issues they had not resolved in the emergency circumstances of the Revolt’s first phase. Although disputes over church discipline provided the spark that would ignite the controversy, the conflict ultimately turned on matters of sovereignty. The parties to these conflicts espoused different interpretations of the Union of Utrecht, the 1579 document that established a confederation among the individual Dutch provinces in revolt against the Habsburgs.13 The dispute over the extent of the civil authorities’ ability to manage church discipline within an individual province would combine issues of local and national sovereignty with questions of religious toleration. As with so many matters in the Dutch Republic, the wealthy, populous, influential province of Holland and its provincial government, the States, shaped this conflict. Objections to the teachings of Jakob Hermanszoon (Latinized as Jacobus Arminius), a professor of theology at the University of Leiden, set the conflict in motion.14 His defense of conditional election against the strict predestination of the Calvinists brought him into conflict with another professor of theology in Leiden, Franciscus Gomarus. The Arminian and Gomarist disputes reached a wide Dutch audience and inspired controversy even after the death of Arminius.15 Grotius wrote a sympathetic elegy of that “Scrutator alta veritatis [Searcher into deepest truth],” who temperately displayed “charitate temperata libertas [charity tempered with freedom],” when confronted with zealous rivals.16 Although most Dutch Protestants objected to the teachings of Arminius, his ideas appealed to

13 As Jan den Tex argues, the problem derived from an ambiguous “conflict of two rights, not of right and wrong.” Oldenbarnevelt, trans. R. B. Powell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 2:511. 14 Carl Bangs, Arminius: A Study in the Dutch Reformation (New York: Abingdon,

1971), 138. 15 Freya Sierhuis surveys the period’s dynamic Dutch “literary culture of religious controversy.” The Literature of the Arminian Controversy: Religion, Politics, and the Stage in the Dutch Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 16. 16 Hugo Grotius, “In Mortem Iacobi Arminii,” in Poemata Collecta (Leiden, 1617), 304, 306.

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an influential Dutch minority, including many merchants of the province of Holland. Attempts to silence and suppress this heterodox theology created a conflict among the local, provincial, and national magistrates over their authority to regulate ecclesiastical affairs. When the Arminian minority submitted their Erastian Remonstrance to Holland’s provincial States, they appealed to the traditions of Dutch toleration, described five limitations in Calvinist teachings, and called for minor revisions of the Confessio Belgica to tolerate teachings that would resolve these problems.17 Johannes Uyttenbogaert, the author of the Remonstrance, simultaneously published the Tractaet van t’Ampt, arguing that unlike the false Roman church with its supreme pontiff, or even a state in which the civil and ecclesiastical authorities shared sovereignty in “collateraliteyt” or equality, the examples of the Old and New Testament, as well as of the early church and the original Christian emperors offered examples “by de welcke den Hoogen Christelicken Overheyden toegestaen wort de hoochste opsicht, authoriteyt, macht, ende ghebiedt int Kerckelicke nae des Heeren woordt [by the which the supreme Christian magistrates are permitted the greatest respect, authority, power, and command in the church according to the word of the Lord].”18 Because “de Christelicke Overheydt de hoochste macht heeft in Kerckelicke saecken (altijt verstaende onder Godt), soo moet oock die de Kerckelijcke Wetten stellen [the Christian magistrate has the greatest power in church affairs (always understood under God), so it must also set ecclesiastical laws]” (98).19 The Gomarist Counter-Remonstrants, however, insisted that the regents must not meddle in church affairs. Although the CounterRemonstrants dominated the majority of the weaker provinces of the Dutch Republic, the Remonstrants’ submission to the authority of civil magistrates appealed to Oldenbarnevelt, whose leadership of the powerful provincial States of Holland also gave him the greatest influence over

17 Den Tex describes the circumstances of the Remonstrance, Oldenbarnevelt, 457. 18 Tractaet van t’Ampt (The Hague, 1610), 87. 19 Grotius would echo these views in his unpublished Tractatus de iure magistratuum circa ecclesiastica and further elaborate the arguments in his posthumous De imperio. For the circumstances of these two tracts see the thorough introduction to De Imperio Summarum Potestatum Circa Sacra, trans. Harm-Jan van Dam (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 15–16.

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the States General of the United Provinces. Maurits, perhaps because he opposed Oldenbarnevelt’s Truce, encouraged the Counter-Remonstrants. The Remonstrants enlisted England’s example in their defense of the state’s authority in ecclesiastical matters. James despised unruly puritans and Uttyenbogaert’s 1612 translation of David Owen’s treatment of the puritan danger, Herod and Pilate Reconciled, discussed in the previous chapter, dates from this period.20 After the king accepted the CounterRemonstrants’ objections to the appointment of Conradus Vorstsius to replace Arminius at the University of Leiden, Grotius persuaded the antipuritan king that he had taken the Dutch puritans’ side.21 Grotius, who met with James during Anglo-Dutch conferences about the spice trade, characterized the Counter-Remonstrants as unruly Dutch puritans, eliciting the king’s condemnation of their approach and disseminating his words as if they endorsed the Remonstrants. When Grotius returned to the United Provinces, he made extensive use of King James’s writings to defend the toleration of the Remonstrants’ views.22 Emboldened by his understanding of James’s commitment to the magistrates’ primacy expressed in his letters, Grotius penned Ordinum Hollandiae ac Westfrisiae Pietas .23 Written in Latin to make it accessible to an international audience, especially powerful allies in England, and translated into the vernacular for the benefit of lay Dutch readers, Grotius attacks Sibrandus Lubbertus, the doctrinaire Calvinist professor of theology at the University of Franeker, for troubling the nation and rejecting civil authority. He fulsomely praises King James for his “devot[ion] to ecclesiastical peace” and his commitment to “the safety of our Republic” and accuses Lubbertus of insulting James by quoting him selectively and discounting the king’s interest in the Republic’s liberty.24 Drawing on the king’s distaste, Grotius brands Lubbertus a Dutch puritan. That “naem Puritan 20 Herodes ende Pilatus Vereenight (n.p., 1660). 21 Den Tex, Oldenbarnevelt, 547. 22 W. B. Patterson argues that despite initial concord, James turned against Grotius for twisting his words. King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 145. 23 Henk Nellen traces Grotius’ devious manipulations in this decade and sees Ordinum pietas as an effort to co-opt the English to the Remonstrant cause. Hugo Grotius: A Lifelong Struggle for Peace in Church and State, 1583-1645 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 172. 24 Ordinum Hollandiae ac Westfrisiae Pietas , trans. Edwin Rabbie (Leiden: Brill, 1995),

123.

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wt Enghelandt comt [that name Puritan comes from England]” and refers to “seeckere hartneckighe menschen” [certain stiff-necked people].25 Puritans reject patristic examples and the episcopal hierarchy and, even worse, “loochenen sy met woorden oft immers metter daet dat de Coninghe het hooft is vaende wterlicke Engelsche Kercke [they deny with words or surely in deeds that the King is the head of the visible English Church]” (66). Linking the Gomarists to English radicals, some resident in the United Provinces, might simultaneously discredit them in England and closer to home. After a slight majority in the States of Holland promulgated a decree of toleration, “Tot den Vrede der Kercken [For the Peace of the Church],” which forbade public discussion of predestination, Grotius helped write a justification for the edict. The authors quoted Scripture, Church Fathers, early councils, and even England’s Thirty Nine Articles and King James’s letters to support the decree.26 Dutch writers on both sides of the conflict aligned themselves with England, whose monarch aspired to demonstrate his wisdom in a variety of international theological disputes. English writers would similarly make use of the Dutch dispute for their own purposes. Ultimately the majority of the Dutch provinces, aligned with the Counter-Remonstrants and supported by Maurits, forcefully over-ruled Oldenbarnevelt, Grotius, Uttyenbogaert, and the Holland Remonstrants. They would now convene a National Synod, with the “well prepared” delegates selecting the typically “seasoned” Johannes Bogerman as its president, and condemn the Remonstrants’ doctrines.27 England’s ambassador assured the States General that although James recognized that “de saecken van eere ende Souverainiteyt seer ketelachtich sijn ende teeder [matters of honor and sovereignty are very sensitive and delicate],” he favored this step as a way to resolve almost a decade of disorder.28 Although a majority of the provinces pressed for the Synod in the States

25 De Heeren Stateen van Hollandt ende West-Frieslandt Godts-Diensteicheyt (Hague: 1613), 66. 26 Resolvtie vande Doorluchtighe Moghende Heeren Staten van Hollant ende West-

Vrieslandt tot Den Vrede Der Kercken (The Hague, 1614). 27 Van Lieburg shows the careful preparation that went into this Synod, drawing on delegates with experience in lower councils and choosing sober leaders. “Dordrecht’s own Decretum Horribile,” 105. 28 Oratie Ghedaen door den Doorluchtighen Eerentvesten Welgebornen Heere Dudley Carleton (n.p., 1617), A4r.

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General, Oldenbarnevelt and his followers insisted that the States General could not violate the sovereignty of the province of Holland, whose provincial States would not consent to such a meeting. At the same time, popular agitation against the Remonstrants in individual towns in Holland like Oudewater sometimes led to violence; Maurits also used the threat of military force against garrisons in towns with Remonstrant magistrates. In response, some cities raised waardgelders , or local mercenary forces, imposing oaths to the local vroedschap on them. Although Maurits objected to the calling of these local militias who had no loyalty to the Republic’s commander, the States of Holland passed the “Scherpe Resolutie,” preserving the right of cities to hire these armies and refuse to allow local court matters to appeal to the Hof, or supreme court, of Holland.29 Grotius again wrote in defense of the provincial sovereignty of Holland. The province of Holland had issued more declarations of toleration and would not accept the other provinces’ demand in the States General for a national synod. Moreover, the right of Holland’s cities “uyt vreese van tumulte ofte ander inconvenienten [from fear of tumult or other disturbances]” seeing “meerder ende stercker wacht van node [a need for more and stronger guards]” had historically “gebruyckt eenige Soldaten die sy namen in haren particulieren dienst [used some soldiers that they swear into their local service].”30 On the advice of Gilles van Ledenberg, their provincial secretary, the States of Utrecht, traditionally one of the most anti-Calvinist in the Republic, took the occasion to raise six hundred waardgelders of their own.31 Force finally resolved this ideological impasse. Maurits, who publicly declared his preference for the Counter-Remonstrant party in July 1617, took matters into his own hands. With elite soldiers, he marched through the night to force the Remonstrant vroedschap of Brill to reject waardgelders . As the Counter-Remonstrant provinces voted to convene a National Synod, over the objections of Holland, Utrecht, and Overijssel, Maurits took the States Army to Nijmegen to ensure the selection of a Counter-Remonstrant vroedschap. The final threat of force occurred at the end of July 1618 when part of the States General declared that the

29 Den Tex, Oldenbarnevelt, 590. 30 Ivstificatie vande Resolutie Der H. M. Heeren de Staten van Hollandt ende West-

Vrieslandt ghenomen den 4. Augusti 1617 (n.p., 1618), 15. 31 Den Tex, Oldenbarnevelt, 595.

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waardgelders posed a threat “tegens d’ordre, dienst ende welvaren vant lant, ende strecken tot onrustinge, ende diffidentie vande gemoederen der ingesetenen [against the order, service, and welfare of the country, and led to the agitation and alienation of the inhabitants’ affections],” and ordered the stadholder to disband them.32 Maurits led a delegation of uncertain legality to Utrecht; in response, Oldenbarnevelt himself participated in a dubious vote of a small portion of the States of Holland to support Utrecht’s sovereign use of a provincial military. The stadholder disbanded Utrecht’s waardgelders and deposed its Remonstrant regents. The veteran commander of the English garrison, Sir John Ogle, failed to fulfill his promises to Grotius and resigned in disgrace.33 Within four weeks, despite one author’s hope that now “bitterheyt ende partydicheydt werde afgheleyt [bitterness and partisanship can be diverted],” Maurits engineered Oldenbarnevelt’s arrest.34 No one doubted that the trial of Oldenbarnevelt, despite its lengthy proceedings, would result in a guilty verdict (Fig. 4.1). With the Advocaat removed from office and Maurits touring the rest of Holland to purge the vroedschappen of their Remonstrant members, no one could object to the calling of the National Synod, a triumph for the Dutch nation over the objections of a lone Dutch province.35

England’s Arminian Problem and the Synod of Dort After marginalized, separatist puritans ensconced in exile communities in the Low Countries blurred the boundaries of “English” and “Dutch,” and after imported Dutch Familist practices threatened to infect English

32 Den Tex includes the resolution in his Dutch edition. Oldenbarnevelt (Haarlem: Tjenk Willink, 1970), 4:594. 33 Carleton complained to his predecessor that Ogle, who commanded a crucial garrison, was the “most affected to the [Arminians],” of any Englishman in the Low Countries. Letters from and to Sir Dudley Carleton (London, 1775), 190. 34 Oranges Cloeck Beleydt (n.p., 1618), A2v. 35 Historians have treated the Synod as a triumph for strict Calvinism, which became

the orthodoxy of the public church, but as Christine Kooi notes, a significant portion of the “multiconfessional” Dutch Republic participated in other churches even after the Synod. “The Synod of Dordrecht after Four Hundred Years,” Archive for Reformation History 111 (2020), 293.

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Fig. 4.1 Claes Jansz. Visscher’s engraving, Ivstitie aen Ian van Oldenbarnevelt geschiet, 1619. Image courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

orthodoxy with sexual license, a new wave of destabilizing Dutch influences—labeled “Arminian”—nearly overwhelmed the Church of England in the final decade of James’s reign.36 Arminius’s reaction against Calvin’s strict teachings found favor among Holland’s merchant elites just as a similar reaction fleetingly emerged at England’s universities. In England, the triumph of orthodox Calvinism at the Hampton Court Conference pushed anti-Calvinist teachings out of the mainstream for a time; some of King James’s later favorites began to espouse anti-Calvinist or Arminian ideas more than a decade later, bringing these ideas to greater prominence at the end of his reign.37 As anti-Calvinist teachings on universal grace or the limitations of the elect—teachings called Arminian by their critics in order to taint the ideas as foreign—gained a hearing in mid-Jacobean 36 As Patrick Collinson argues, some in England feared that the manifestation of Arminian thought in England represented the beginning of a return to Catholicism. From Cranmer to Sancroft (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006), 96. 37 Tyacke argues that despite the official Calvinism espoused at Hampton Court, a tradition of English “anti-Calvinist” practices survived and would later be labeled “Arminian.” Anti-Calvinists, 5.

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England, James, who considered himself an able theologian, entered into these controversial discussions.38 Throughout the 1610s, James mapped out a broad middle ground for the English church. He and his ministers pushed the most radical critics of the Church of England—Catholics, puritans and separatists, and Arminians—to the margins. When Edward Simpson, a Cambridge divine, preached a sermon at the end of 1617 on “a point of Arminius doctrine touching vniuersalitie of grace” before the king, for instance, it “much displeased” James. He asked the university to examine the sermon for doctrinal error; their refusal to condemn Simpson so enraged the king that he required the preacher to appear before him in person where “the question was so narrowly discussed that [Simpson] was inioyned to retract what he had saide.”39 A few days later, the king recommended this method “as he had done here, not long since” to the Dutch as a means of combating the Arminians’ audacity, describing how he called such preachers into his royal presence to “mayntayne few of the opinions” before him, where they could be “examined and disgraced.”40 When the Synod, which he had supported, convened a year later, the king instructed his delegates to marginalize the Remonstrant position and establish the broadest consensus and unity among those churches adhering to Calvin, advising the Dutch to “conforme themselves to the publick Confessions of the Neighbour reformed Churches, with whom to hold good correspondence, shall bee no dishonour to them.”41 He instructed them to do everything in their power to put an end to the divisive teachings of Arminians.42 In the United Provinces, those opposed to the Arminians expressed their admiration and gratitude to James, “his Sacred Maiestie 38 Lori Anne Ferrell explores James’s self-image as England’s “Constantine,” a learned Christian monarch who could settle theological disputes both at home and abroad. Government by Polemic: James I, the King’s Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity, 1603-1625 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 115–16. 39 SP 14/94/74. December 20 1617. 40 SP 14/94/76. December 22, 1617. Edward Harwood to Dudley Carleton. 41 Anthony Milton includes James’s instructions in his anthology The British Delegation

and the Synod of Dort (1618–1619) (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), 94. 42 Peter Lake, “Calvinism and the English Church, 1570-1635,” Past and Present 114 (1987), 52. Margo Todd shows that the British delegates tried unsuccessfully to reincorporate the Remonstrants into the outcome of the Synod. “Justifying God: The Calvinisms of the British Delegation to the Synod of Dort,” Archive for Reformation History 96 (2005), 288–89.

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of Great Brittaine, who by his owne Writings... hath wrought much in the furthering of this great Business.”43 King James, like Saint James at the Council of Jerusalem, would ensure the success of the Synod. In addition to the more altruistic motive of wanting to preserve the Dutch Reformed Church from divisive Arminian innovations, James declared that these doctrines posed a danger to the English Church as well. The Dutch Arminian, Petrus Bertius, for instance, had defended the Arminian view of free will, sending his tract—“the title whereof onely” James declared, “were enough to make it worthy the fire”—to the Archbishop of Canterbury and audaciously claiming “that the doctrine conteined in his Booke, was agreeable with the doctrine of the Church of England.”44 Taking offense at the insinuation that the English Church could countenance Bertius’s position that the elect could ever fall away from salvation, James resorts to a metaphor that permeates his handling of Dutch Arminianism: “this gangrene had not only taken hold amongst our neerest neighbours... but did also begin to creep into the bowels of Our owne Kingdom” (16). The king represents Arminian teachings as a disease threatening to infect the English orthodoxy that he had expended so much effort to preserve. As England’s king, James declares that he has a special obligation to correct this failing in “the said States Our neighbors and Confederates,” warning the Dutch “to eschew and preuent in time so dangerous a contagion, which dispersing it selfe, might infect, not onely the bodie of their State, but all Christendome also” (7). This danger of the Arminian plague spreading beyond the Dutch body politic or its destructive fires spreading to nearby homes especially threatened the English nation “by how much the Prouinces of the said States are neerer vnto Vs in their situation” (7). James finally worries that accepting Arminian teachings constitutes the first step toward a liberty of conscience under the guise of toleration, “a dangerous and pernitious libertie, or rather licentiousnesse, opening a gap to all rupture, Schisme, and confusion in the Church” (86). If the Dutch tolerate this heretical sect, they endanger the “good amitie & correspondencie which is betwixt Vs, and the Vnited Prouinces” (84). Although James cannot dictate policy to the States General, he makes clear his view that the growth of Arminianism 43 A Catalogve of the Depvties (London, 1618), A3 r. 44 His Maiesties Declaration concerning His Proceedings with the States generall of the

Vnited Prouinces of the Low Countreys, In the Cause of D. Conradus Vorstius (London, 1612), 15.

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in the United Provinces threatens to undermine the Dutch Republic’s relationship with England. Anxiety that the teachings of a heterodox Dutch theologian might also have begun to resonate with the thoughts of mature English divines appears to have worried other English observers. Shortly after arriving in the Hague, Dudley Carleton would write to his friend John Chamberlain to commend his cousin George Carleton’s criticisms “concerning Arminius’ doctrine, which hath gotten oversea and infected our universities.”45 A few months later, the ambassador took note of an impassioned disagreement he had with Oldenbarnevelt when the Advocaat had expressed his hope that during the Twelve Years Truce, the Dutch might clarify the relationship between religious and civic authorities, along the lines established in England, but both he and Carleton recognized that it would be a “hard thing to introduce a new forme of goverment” into the Dutch Reformed Church.46 Carleton took the opportunity to remind Oldenbarnevelt that the real source of instability in the Dutch Church came from those who followed Arminius and that order should be imposed not on those “who persisted in the old opinion but such as introduced new” (6). The Advocaat’s testy reply, that “Arminius was not first but many before him were of that opinion, and that we had of them in England” prompted the ambassador to remark that if any in England did agree with Arminian teachings, they at least had the decency to keep their thoughts to themselves “without bringing it at any time into the pulpett or writing of that subject” (6).47 Arminians had defended a moderating of Calvinist theology and a party of Dutch Remonstrants advocated toleration of these views, but the possibility that this strain of Dutch heterodoxy could infect England disturbed the English king, English divines, and English politicians. Although these teachings initially influenced only a small number of Englishmen, Dutch Arminianism posed a new challenge to the fundamental understanding of English Protestantism.

45 Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 1603–1624: Jacobean Letters, ed. Maurice Lee

(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1972), 226 (26 November 1616). 46 Milton, British Delegation, 5. 47 In the autumn of 1617, Carleton related that the Advocate had told him he was “of

the opinion of the Contraremonstrants though he holds for the Remonstrants, in that he thinks and maintains there may be a toleration of both, which the Contraremonstrants cannot admit.” Jacobean Letters, 243 (12 September 1617).

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Freedom of the Will: Arminian Difficulties in Barnavelt Massinger and Fletcher dramatize exactly this concern when they make the religious conflict that brought the Dutch Republic to the brink of war one of the axes of the conflict between Barnavelt and Orange. While no character rehearses the details of the theological points in controversy— perhaps because, as James suggested, such fine points might be lost on the common person, perhaps because the details of theology do not make for good drama, or perhaps because Bishop King objected to them—several characters label one party and its adherents as “Arminian,” a label that functions as a term of abuse.48 When Leidenberch reports to Barnavelt the preparations underway in Utrecht to resist Orange’s plans to disarm the “new raisd Companies” of waardgelders , he boasts that the “Preachers play their parts too, / And thunder in their Pulpitts, hell and damnation / To such as hold against us” (2.1.24, 26–8). Subsequently, Ralph Crane revised these lines, perhaps under pressure from Buc or Bishop King, changing “Preachers” to “Arminians” and “Pulpitts” to “meetings,” a change that explicitly links the questionable local militias and the nebulous, unorthodox “meetings” of the Arminians. These revisions make the Dutch religious division even more relevant to the play’s English audience. Now explicitly “Arminian,” the magistrates of Utrecht meet with the English forces garrisoned there. The English captain defends his fellows’ commitment to the greater good of the United Provinces rather than to any faction. The English have come to “guard this Cuntrie, not to ruyn it, / To beat of forreigne Enemies, not to cherish / Domestique Factions” (2.1.60–62). The revisions’ emphasis on the Arminian loyalties of the faction tempting the English soldiers intensifies the significance of this conflict for the English audience. The word “Arminian” itself occurs only a few other times in the play. Just as Oldenbarnevelt had informed Carleton in their February 1617 interview that he would support the right of the Remonstrants to publicly express their beliefs, since “the Governours of the State had Judged both opinions to be tolerated” (6), so the character in

48 Patrick Timmis argues that the tragedy does take up theological issues, particularly on the issue of the saints’ assurance of salvation, to condemn the Arminian view. “John Donne in the Hague and the Hague at the Globe: Performing Reformation England’s Religio-Political Doctrine of Perseverance,” JMEMS 53.2 (2023), 422.

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Barnavelt had announced his support for the minority party. Once Orange defeats him, Barnavelt’s alignment with the Arminians adds to the charges against him. At the trial, a Dutch officer reads the charges of disloyalty against Barnavelt: “that the Arminian Faction (of which Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt, late Advocate... was without contradiction the head) had resolved, and agreed to renounce, and break, the generality, and unitie of the State... [and] had raysed up and dispeirsed 3000. Arminian Soldiers” (4.5.29–36). Again, the tragedy includes no sophisticated treatment of the Arminian position on the nature of grace, the freedom of the will, or predestination, perhaps because the Synod had condemned the Arminian position just a few months before and English translations of Dutch decrees against secret “meetings” or conventicles and depriving Arminian preachers had circulated in England just weeks before the premier of Barnavelt .49 Within the tragedy, “Arminian” serves primarily as a slanderous term of abuse, functioning as “puritan” did in other contexts. Nevertheless, the threat heterodox Dutch teachings posed to England does interest the playwrights. Fletcher and Massinger draw on English translations of several Dutch pamphlets hostile to Oldenbarnevelt and celebrating his demise, but the playwrights create two emblematic scenes that have no specific source. These two scenes first present Dutch Arminian women taunting an English gentlewoman, followed by a scene in which the terrified Arminians flee from Orange’s victorious troops while the English gentlewoman exults. Revising a bawdy, deleted scene between an Arminian divine and a Dutch widow, the replacement scenes—possibly added to placate Bishop King—transform the licentiousness of the scene from wholly Dutch into a scene of Dutch attempts to corrupt a virtuous English figure. At the start of the scene, the Second Dutch Woman explains to the unnamed English gentlewoman: “here you may behold the generall freedom / We live and traffique in, the joy of women” (2.2.4–5). She and her friends proceed to outline the attractions of this general freedom, especially in comparison to the limitations women face in England. While “Your owne Cuntry breedes ye hansom, maintaines ye brave,” the Third Dutch Woman admits, “And though ye have some libertie, ‘tis lymitted” by a husband’s will (2.2.10, 13). In 49 Ivo Kamps’s thoughtful reading of the play’s competing historiographies points to the unstable “providential” narrative at work in the tragedy. Historiography and Ideology in Stuart Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 148.

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the United Provinces, however, women have the upper hand with their husbands. In matters of policy, “We know, and give allowaunces,” while in matters of religion, embodied in the timid Arminian minister accompanying the women, “We can make him thinck what we list, preach what we list, / Print what we list, and whom we list, abuse in’t” (2.2.34– 5). These Dutch women thus offer several temptations to the English gentlewoman, activating popular literary treatments of sectarian women in general and Dutch women in particular. Given the stereotypical dominance of Dutch wives over their husbands—the character sketch of “A Drunken Dutch-man resident in England,” for instance, had scoffed that he “Is but Quarter Master with his Wife”—this scene appeals to anxieties about unruly, heterodox Dutch women and their threats to the natural gender hierarchies in England.50 Richard Verstegan’s satirical stereotype of the “Hollantsche Bijbel-suster oft Shriftuer-vrouwe”—a proud woman censuring a preacher as a “valsschen Leeraer [false Scholar]” if “hy misten het recht ghetal van een capitel oft verse te noemen [he missed naming the correct number of a chapter or verse]”—had currency in the Low Countries, just as it had in England.51 The good English gentlewoman, however, resists the Dutch women’s offers. Recognizing that this ambiguous Arminian liberty—of church membership, of conscience, of the will—and its inversion of a stable hierarchy threatens to become the licentiousness that King James warned of elsewhere, this English gentlewoman rejects their final offer. They insist, “Come you must be as we are... / You do not know the sweet on ‘t,” but she responds definitively, “Indeed nor will not” (2.2.41–2). Instead, she praises the benefits of hierarchy and order. “Our Cuntry brings us up to faire obedience,” she explains, “To know our husbands for our Governors, / So to obey, and serve’em: two heads make monsters” (2.2.43–5). In dramatizing this imagined episode, the play presents an infectious set of Dutch teachings that threatens to corrode the social fabric, aimed at an English woman who might have considered the liberating possibilities of those beliefs appealing. Then it stages her steadfastly rejecting 50 Ouerburie His Wife, I8 r. 51 Scherp-sinnighe Characteren (Antwerp, 1622), 64. Martine van Elk compares English

and Dutch treatments of women in public, showing that some Dutch treatises on female roles, such as Jacob Cats’s Houwelick, imagined slightly greater freedom for Dutch women. Early Modern Women’s Writing: Domesticity, Privacy, and the Public Sphere in England and the Dutch Republic (New York: Palgrave, 2017), 43.

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these appeals. In fact, she triumphs, not only scorning her companions when word arrives that Orange stands at the gates of Utrecht, preparing to confront the waardgelders —“can theis holly woemen / That you have arm’d against obedience, / And made contempners of the Fooles, their husbands, / Examiners of the State, can they doe any thing?” (2.2.57–60)—but also mocking them once the Prince succeeds.52 She laughs at the powerlessness of the Arminian divine’s words—“out with thy two edgd tongue, / And lay about thee”—and concludes with a sarcastic assessment of their “strong faithes and notable valours,” evidently enjoying their defeat (2.6.7–8, 11). The scene celebrates the convictions of this English woman, a fidelity lacking in those English men beyond the stage’s edge who had accepted the appealing liberty taught by Arminius and had the audacity to propose such ideas to their king. Ultimately, the heterodox religious views of Barnavelt’s defeated party, as Fletcher and Massinger represent them in the tragedy, do not pose a threat in themselves. Rather, as with any unorthodox religious view in England, the danger arises when its followers link doctrinal differences to radical action. As Orange and his followers reiterate throughout the play, Barnavelt’s threat to the fragile Dutch nation comes from an ambitious use of religion for partisan ends. Confronting Barnavelt over the issue of “theis new religious forces” before the climactic showdown at Utrecht, Orange demands, “who blew new fires, / Even fires of fowle rebellion? I must tell ye, / The bellowes to it, Religion, you nere lov’d yet / But for your ends” (1.3.163, 165–8). He makes a similar point after disarming Utrecht. Even Barnavelt’s erstwhile supporter Modesbargen warns his friend that making religious practice a reason for opposing Orange could have dangerous consequences. His insight that “where Religion / Is made a cloke to our bad purposes / They seldom have success” (1.2.31–3), like his earlier warning that in contending with Orange over a matter of prestige “You move to your destruction” (1.1.106), fails to persuade the Advocate. Modesbargen’s evaluation of the conflict is perhaps the clearest in the play. The charge that his religious allegiances threatened to divide the Dutch Republic intensified the charges against Oldenbarnevelt in the Hague

52 Hoenselaars argues that the gentlewoman’s praise of obedience resonates with the English garrison’s obedience to the Dutch state. Images of Englishmen and Foreigners, 154.

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and contributed to Barnavelt’s downfall in the tragedy. The English playwrights shape the charge to give it an especially English valence for their audience, however. As Barnavelt stands on the scaffold facing death, he enumerates his many services to his state, bitterly complaining that the Dutch should “bethinck ye of theis things / And then turn back, and blush, blush for my ruyne” (5.3.114–5). The noblemen who accompany Barnavelt to the scaffold contest his boasts. One lord reminds the Advocate of his responsibility for the bitter struggle that has just ended, marring the benefits he claims to have brought to his nation. The other, in a speech added in the final stages of the play’s censorship, makes explicit the relevance of Barnavelt’s demise for an English audience: Examine all men Branded with such fowle syns as you now dye for, And you shall find their first stepp still, Religion: Gowrie in Scotland, ‘twas his main pretention: Was not he honest too? his Cuntries Father? Those fyery Speritts next, that hatchd in England That bloody Powder-Plot; and thought like meteors To have flashd their Cuntryes peace out in a Moment Were not they pious, just, and zealous Subjects? (5.3.134-42).

Rather than select a more relevant example of a treacherous religious conspiracy from Dutch history—the King of Spain’s bounty against the Protestant William the Silent, leading to his assassination, for instance— the English playwrights insert references to two plots against their own king into the mouths of these Dutch characters. Both conspiracies—the Presbyterian Gowries and the Catholic Gunpowder plotters—had deeply affected the king and contributed to his suspicion of religious zealots on either extreme.53 The king’s actions at Hampton Court and in his first Parliament, many of which had contributed to his unpopularity, advanced his policy of establishing a broad consensus that would marginalize only the most radical of his subjects. The Dutch Second Lord’s analogies, and 53 The two plots—coming from opposite ends of the religious spectrum—and his mirac-

ulous deliverance from them had become closely linked in the king’s mind. Ferrell, Government by Polemic, 72. Kamps sees this speech as making “explicit” the popular link between Arminianism and Catholicism. Historiography, 160. As I suggest here, the speech’s significance comes in linking Barnavelt not to Catholicism but to religious extremism, making the play relevant to an English audience.

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in particular his reference to the trauma of the Gunpowder Plot, suggest that the playwrights expected their audience to see the danger this radical, Dutch sect posed by linking it to recent English history. Significantly, in the Second Lord’s analogy, if Barnavelt stands in the same position as the Gowries or the Gunpowder Plotters, then King James and Orange take on other important resemblances.

Jacobean Conflict and the English Polity Although Massinger and Fletcher evoke Barnavelt’s dangerous use of a Dutch sect that threatened to infect the English church with antiCalvinist theology, their choice of dramatic subject carried with it a more challenging set of questions about political sovereignty. The Bishop of London objected to the playwrights’ ambivalent treatment of Arminians, but George Buc’s strenuous objections to the play’s political content suggest that the conflict between Barnavelt and Orange over Dutch sovereignty appeared to comment on English politics in 1619. Oldenbarnevelt and Maurits opposed each other in the conflict between Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants. The Advocaat supported the Remonstrants in the view that the state should tolerate a variety of Protestant beliefs. Maurits, on the other hand, had the support of the Counter-Remonstrants who believed that Calvinist practice should be imposed on the Arminian minority with a National Synod as an organ for enforcing the only orthodox theology. The dispute over church practices mapped onto a more fundamental and unresolved question at the heart of the United Provinces. Oldenbarnevelt favored a decentralized view of their union, with sovereignty resting locally in the individual provinces. As the scion of a Protestant dynasty and head of the military, Maurits aspired to a more centralized authority.54 He claimed to serve the organs of the United Provinces, such as the States General, but

54 As Dudley Carleton reported, the critics of Maurits accused him of “affect[ing] the

sovereignty of the country to himself and his house.” Letters from and to Sir Dudley Carleton, 182. Marco Barducci shows that Grotius wrote at length in this period in order to curb the “monarchical pretentions of the stadholder.” Hugo Grotius and the Centry of Revolution, 1613–1718: Transnational Reception in English Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 73.

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he acted to purge these bodies of his rival’s adherents when he considered such an action necessary.55 His elevation to his beloved father’s title, Prince of Orange, on the eve of his final conflict with Oldenbarnevelt only heightened the sense of his regal aspirations. Oldenbarnevelt would go to his death defending “his duty to prevent” Maurits’ “aspir[ation] to the sovereignty of these provinces.”56 In staging Barnavelt ’s conflict between two powerful Dutch figures, Fletcher and Massinger tread onto questions of sovereignty that had important implications for England in the tensions between their king’s absolutist outlook and Parliament’s resistance to unfettered royal authority. As Fletcher and Massinger stage the conflict between Barnavelt and Orange, they arrange these figures across a classic divide. They figure Barnavelt as a man of policy who guides the state through his wise counsel. Orange appears as an aristocratic man of action whose exploits on the battlefield complement his pedigree in granting him influence over the state. Both characters aspire to lead their nation and both move the levers of power to their own advantage: Barnavelt seeks to prevent his dishonor in the elevation of the Prince, while Orange dissembles his own greater ambitions and secures his rival’s defeat. In two key scenes Orange and Barnavelt direct a meeting of the States General. Both characters claim to be acting in the best interests of the nation, but each manipulates the body. Barnavelt praises the hard-fought liberty the Dutch enjoy and warns of the threat Orange’s autocratic aspirations pose to their sovereignty. Orange, on the other hand, engineers the demise of the Advocate, managing the body’s access to information to ensure Barnavelt’s defeat. Neither Barnavelt nor Orange escapes the taint of self-interest and ambition, but the play’s ambiguities—Barnavelt’s rehearsal of republican indictments of tyranny, and the thinly veiled ambitions of Orange—cast this conflict in terms that carried a potentially explosive charge in Jacobean England. While Barnavelt’s explicit but superficial declaration of Arminian sympathies prompted Bishop King to delay the tragedy’s premiere, Barnavelt ’s staging of tyranny and imperiled 55 As Herbert H. Rowen argues, Maurits stepped into an area without legal precedent, that “stage in a revolution where new law is created.” The Princes of Orange: Stadholders in the Dutch Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 50. 56 Carleton reports to Naunton that Oldenbarnevelt had written to Maurits on the night before the execution to ask why he so determinedly sought the Advocaat’s death. Letters from and to Sir Dudley Carleton, 363.

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sovereignty offered more opportunities for critical reflection, prompting George Buc to sift the play’s words carefully so as to minimize their dangerous content. By the time Barnavelt ’s staging of a conflict between absolutism and resistance came to the Globe in the summer of 1619, England’s king had alienated many of his people in a series of crises over the nature of sovereignty in England.57 His published theories of monarchy—Basilicon Doron and the Trew Law of Free Monarchies —presented an absolutist view of kingship that placed Parliament in a subordinate role.58 The more fully articulated theory of absolute monarchy in his Trew Law draws on a number of justifications for the primacy of kings. In James’s view, the king precedes and dictates the nation’s laws. He only agrees to be “bound thereto but of his good will, for good example-giuing to his subiects.”59 Turning from scriptural example and legal theory, James concludes his explanation of the absolute power of kings through an analogy from natural law. A king is “rightly compared to a father of children,” or “Pater patriae” (76), and just as the members of a body would not turn against its head, so children would never “make any resistance but by flight” no matter how vicious or tyrannical the father or king (77). The tract concludes with his rejection of any resistance—as justified in a Vindiciae or a Politicq Onderwijs —to a king, even a tyrant, since even if a king hypothetically enters into a contract with his people, “God is the onely Iudge” and, as the Elizabethan Homily on Obedience had admonished, a people must wait patiently for God to remove an unjust king (81).60

57 At key moments in James’s reign—such as at the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, in which James failed to provide support for his Protestant daughter and son-in-law, occurring just as Barnavelt was coming to the stage—his unpopular decisions caused tension between the king and his people. Kevin Sharpe examines the impact that James’s accession had in “rationaliz[ing] the political culture, making debate about government, even monarchy, acceptable.” Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth Century Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 21. 58 Moreover, as Charles Prior argues, James and his apologists emphasized the relationship between the king’s absolute sovereignty and his ability to direct the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Defining the Jacobean Church, 75. 59 “Trew Law of Free Monarchies,” 75. 60 Mary Nyquist argues that James inverts theories of contractual rule to argue that

dissatisfied subjects must patiently bear even the yoke of a tyrant. Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 136.

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James would appeal to these warrants for his authority throughout his reign. The 1617 printing of his Works publicized his theories. Writing nominally about a Dutch conflict, Massinger and Fletcher would contest some of these views in their tragedy. The theory of rule James articulated put him at odds with some of his subjects, who cherished their understanding of mixed monarchy. James could sometimes find common cause with Parliament, as when they responded in unison to the danger of the Gunpowder Plot, but a series of missteps in his dealings with his first Parliaments created tension between a monarch inclined to absolute sovereignty and a body that increasingly sought to preserve its freedoms from erosion.61 James’s handling of the disputed election in his first Parliament set him at odds with its members from the outset. Their “Apology,” written to correct the king’s “misinformation,” reiterated that Parliament’s “privileges and liberties... cannot be withheld from us, denied or impaired, but with apparent wrong to the whole state of the realm,” a lecture that earned the king’s testy response, “The best apology-maker of you all, for all his eloquence, cannot make all good... I wish you would use your liberty with more modesty in time to come.”62 The good will James initially enjoyed quickly took on a sense of competition and distrust that could only occasionally be put aside. Throughout the reign, James tirelessly recurred to his favored theories of the king’s powers. Addressing Parliament in 1610, he would marshal his theories of the analogy between kings and the divine and between kings and fathers to bolster his claim that “MONARCHIE is the supremest thing vpon earth” and that he would not suffer “that my power be disputed vpon.”63 Yet, in each case James confronted Parliaments in which some members disputed upon just these questions of arcana imperii, the mysteries of state. For instance, Sir Edwin Sandys—a stolid religious moderate who sat in each of James’s Parliaments—warned 61 Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 58. 62 “The Form of Apology and Satisfaction, 20 June 1604” and “James I: speech at the prorogation of parliament, 7 July 1604,” in The Stuart Constitution, 1603-1688: Documents and Commentary, ed. J. P. Kenyon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 31, 37. 63 “Speach to the Lords and Commons of Parliament” (21 March 1610), 181, 184. In James’s 1616 speech to the Star Chamber he compared the “presumption and high contempt in a Subiect, to dispute what a King can doe” to the blasphemy of disputing “what God can doe” (214).

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the “Addled” Parliament of 1614 that their inability to prevent James’s recourse to impositions to raise funds for his policies meant that they were allowing English liberties to slip through their fingers. He refused to accept the example of French absolutism as justification for King James’s exercise of the prerogative. And he rashly introduced an allusion to tyranny into a debate over King James’s finances.64 James’s frustrations in 1614 and his own indiscreet words left open the possibility that the King would avoid calling future Parliaments. In the summer of 1619, Parliament had not met for five years. English political “parties” did not yet exist as Fletcher and Massinger wrote Barnavelt , but tensions between Englishmen supporting the king’s view of prerogative and Englishmen fearing that James did not respect the liberties of the subject did occasionally erupt. On the one hand, James had many apologists who found much to celebrate in their monarch’s strength.65 Thus in June 1619, an Oxford fellow, William Dickinson, preached a sermon, The King’s Right , at the Reading Assizes, parroting most of the king’s favored theories of sovereignty. Taking Psalm 75: 7, “But God is the Iudge,” as its scripture, the sermon traces the sources of the king’s power to judge, “to haue the right of supremacy ouer all persons and causes, and to gouerne and moderate them and their actions according to that proportion of Law and reason which hee pleaseth to set downe to be obserued.”66 It goes on to refer to some of James’s preferred scriptural touchstones, Romans 13 and Psalm 82. Dickinson notices that some repine against monarchical authority since some kings “are Vsurpers, others Tyrants, many are prophane and wicked persons,” but he cuts off such arguments since “notwithstanding, the person and power of the King is alwaies sacred and inuiolable” and thus beyond the right of mere subjects to investigate (C2r). Thus even as a minor cleric addressed the presumably sympathetic audience of judges appointed by the king, the sense that some people, perhaps even some country judges, had their doubts about their king’s absolute authority creeps into the discourse. In his second decade on the throne, James’s continued efforts to increase his revenues without Parliament—the expanded impositions, 64 Theodore K. Rabb, Jacobean Gentleman: Sir Edwin Sandys, 1561-1629 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998), 193, 202–5. 65 Goldberg discusses the absolutist aesthetic inspired by arcana imperii in James I ,

68. 66 Kings Right (London, 1619), B3v.

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his sudden decision to allow the United Provinces to redeem Brill and Vlissingen in exchange for a discounted lump sum, the sale to the highest Catholic bidder of his son’s marriage—continued to make his subjects uneasy.67 Such unease frames Fletcher and Massinger’s decision to stage their tragedy that summer.

“Government New Setled”: Barnavelt ’s Politics The playwrights certainly do not present Barnavelt as a saint. The tragedy opens with the Advocate, in a fit of pique, complaining against “this ingratefull Cuntry” (1.1.42) whose awe for the dashing military hero obscures the victories achieved by the diplomat in the “labourinthes of pollicie” (1.1.25). Encouraged by his followers, Barnavelt nurses his injured pride that “in the sun-set of my daie of honour, / When I should passe with glory to my rest, / And raise my Monument from my Cuntries praises” he finds “the peoples thancks, and praires / Which should make faire way for me to my grave / To have an other object” (1.1.33–5, 38–40). One of his colleagues, Modesbargen, cautions him that this intemperate desire for fame does not befit an old man. He reminds Barnavelt of all the good he has done for his nation in guiding it through decades of uncertainty. He laments that the Advocate has fallen away from his selfless dedication to the public good.68 And he assures the Advocate that the Dutch will extol his virtues in retirement because even Orange would have to acknowledge the importance of Barnavelt’s counsel. He concludes with a warning—outlining the play’s tragic arc—that uncontrolled ambition will lead inevitably to his destruction. Barnavelt stubbornly refuses to heed his friend’s advice. Motivated by this determination to preserve his fame, Barnavelt opposes Orange, encourages the citizens of Utrecht to resist the Prince, and does his best to save himself after being arrested. He goes on to betray his friend Leidenberch, whose testimony would destroy him, encouraging him to take his own life “and mock their preparations, / Their envyes, and their 67 Andrew Thrush discusses James’s efforts to find the revenues that would allow him to rule without Parliament. “The Personal Rule of James I, 1611-1620,” in Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain, ed. Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 93. 68 Timmis notes that Modesbargen frames this falling away in theological terms. “John Donne,” 422.

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Justice” (3.4.83–4). This pursuit of personal glory and self-preservation taints Barnavelt in the opening scenes of the tragedy, but proud characters stand on the other side as well.69 Orange proudly defends his own fame and schemes to bring about Barnavelt’s demise. The playwrights do not ascribe ambition to Barnavelt alone. Despite the flaws they attribute to Barnavelt, Massinger and Fletcher ultimately valorize the defeated statesman, who goes to his death warning the Dutch of absolutism’s threat to their liberty. As they represent him, the playwrights create a character determined to prevent Orange’s aggrandizement and the potential for such an elevation to degenerate into tyranny. When an arrogant English commander scoffs at the authority of the States General, lowly “Merchants, / Lawyers, Appothecaries, and Phisitians,” Barnavelt pledges to make him learn the proper reverence he owes to these Dutch burgers, the nation’s true “Potentates, and Princes / From whom you take pay” (1.1.143–4, 146–7). Barnavelt’s impassioned rebuke of the sycophantic English soldier’s preference for the aristocratic Prince and his generals functions on two levels. It explicitly defends the sovereignty of the States General, the paymasters of the English soldier. Moreover, as the Dutch statesman speaks to an English soldier in front of an English audience about the assembly’s power of the purse, his defense of the people’s sovereignty evokes England’s own difficulties reconciling a monarch’s demands with Parliament’s defense of its power over taxation. That conflict contributed to James’s frustrated dissolution of Parliament in 1614. Although Barnavelt never articulates an explicitly republican theory of rule, he does warn of the dangers of a prince’s ambitious encroachments on the nation’s sovereignty. Alone with the Council, he urges them to remember that they embody the political power of a Dutch nation that no longer serves monarchs. They must secure their authority and remind Orange that he “Is but as Barnavelt, a Servant to / Your Lordships, and the State,” or they will encourage the Prince to believe “You have no absolute powre” (1.2.62–3, 67). When he returns to confront Orange, both men wrangle over who best serves the state. In a subsequent interview, Barnavelt again warns the wavering States General that their deferrence to Orange only emboldens the Prince. In language that 69 As Kimberly Hackett argues, the tragedy treats neither Orange nor Barnavelt as simply “good and bad or right and wrong.” “The English Reception of Oldenbarnevelt’s Fall,” HLQ 77.2 (2014), 172.

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rejects one of the favored tropes of England’s king, Barnavelt sarcastically demands of the Council, “What is this man, this Prince, this god ye make now, / But what our hands have molded, wrought to fashion, / And by our constant labours, given a life to?” (3.1.148–50). Rejecting the idea circulating among Jacobean apologists that princes enjoy divine sanction, Barnavelt declares that Orange exercises an authority delegated to him from the true source of sovereignty. For the States General to defer to their own creation, to “fall before him, now, adoare him,” would amount to idolatry (3.1.151). For all of his flaws, Barnavelt’s public persona as censor, reminding the Dutch that they hold their sovereignty in their own hands unless they let it slip between their fingers, remains constant. His pride reflects his own determination not to submit to an arrogant aristocrat’s aspirations to rule and demonstrates his commitment to preserve the liberties of a “slavish people” who fearfully accept the “griping yoak” of a prince, despite a generation of struggle against monarchy (3.1.146–7). In fact, the actions of the Prince of Orange in the tragedy do not embody principled actions. He vanquishes Barnavelt through careful manipulation of the States General and he exhibits the same pride as Barnavelt. He triumphs because he has an army behind him rather than due to the inherent virtue of his cause.70 Moreover, his hypocrisy occasionally exceeds his rival’s and his political ambitions validate Barnavelt’s concerns.71 In a scene mirroring his rival’s first appearance, Orange comes to the stage praising his nation’s successes, enumerating his own accomplishments, and expressing his desire to retire, to “sitt downe, though old and bruizd, yet happie” (1.3.20). Surrounded by sycophants, Orange hears their complaints that the people listen to slanderous rumors about him. Although the Prince professes to be unaffected by such detraction, the wounded pride he displays when guards bar the council chamber’s doors easily matches Barnavelt’s previous laments: “are my services / 70 G. K. Hunter considers the tragedy “daring” for its representation of Orange as a calculating politician. English Drama, 1586–1642: The Age of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 490. 71 Meg Powers Livingston argues the playwrights, who wrote a lost play (The Jeweller of

Amsterdam) about corruption surrounding Maurits, knew of some of Maurits’s vices. “The Tragedy of Sir John van Olden Barnavelt : A Re-examination of Fletcher and Massinger’s Sources,” Shakespeare Yearbook 15 (2005), 72. Dudley Carleton reported the scandal of “one of Count Maurice’s chamber” participating in the crime. Jacobean Letters, 199 (1 May 1616).

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Growne to so poore regards, my worth so banckrupt, / Or am I tainted with dishonest actions / That I am held unfitt my Cuntries business?” (1.3.59–62). He spars with Barnavelt over this affront to his honor, warning the departing Advocate that the “cure” for crossing the Prince “would make ye shrinck and shake too, / Shake of your head” (1.3.161– 2). He then addresses the Council, disparaging Barnavelt and playing on their jealousies. Deferring to the Prince, the Council empowers him to disarm the waardgelders and “proceed, as likes your Excellence” (1.3.190). Emboldened by the States General’s permission to act against his rival, Orange wins the contest of wills before the gates of Utrecht and then manipulates the use of witnesses and damaging information to turn the Council finally against the Advocate. In these proceedings, his public displays of modesty serve to cover a private ambition, infringing on the States General’s sovereignty, as Barnavelt had warned. Barnavelt’s confederates in the tragedy lament Orange’s elevation, not only because it comes at their expense but also because it threatens the liberty of the Dutch people. The play’s Grotius, echoing the historical Grotius’s language of Dutch liberty, reassures another of Barnavelt’s followers that the Advocate, who has “without dread, ever maintaind / The freedome I was borne to,” will resist Orange’s manipulation of the States General, even if he must “quench it in their blood” (3.5.13–14, 21). In articulating his frustrations with the States General’s acquiescence, Grotius rails against Orange, declaring that he will “not feare / What this old Grave, or this new Prince of Orange / Dare undertake” (3.5.15–17). Deriding the Dutch stadholder, Grotius alludes to his recent acquisition of an elevated noble title. Maurits did not inherit his father’s title as Prince of Orange when the assassin struck in 1584; his older half-brother held the title until 1618, while Maurits held the title of Graaf, or “Grave,” of Nassau. Under Oldenbarnevelt’s guidance, several Dutch provinces selected Maurits as stadholder. While some provinces sought to bestow a princely title on their military leader, Oldenbarnevelt had scuttled such offers.72 The action of the tragedy begins soon after Orange takes up his title. Modesbargen alludes to “this Grave Maurice, this now Prince of Orange” (1.1.95), a title that the Arminian women of Utrecht and their

72 Den Tex discusses Zeeland’s plan to make Maurits a Count and Oldenbarnevelt’s intervention to prevent that action. Oldenbarnevelt, 311. Lisa Jardine highlights the House of Orange’s efforts to acquire a regal title. Going Dutch, 67.

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divine pointedly do not use (2.2.26, 47). The tragedy presents Orange as an ambitious prince. The Dutch Republic fought for decades to release themselves from one king’s claims to sovereignty there, but many Dutch people supported the concept of monarchy and wanted Maurits as their ruler. The possibility that Maurits could satisfy that desire intensified after the Truce.73 In fact, just three months before Oldenbarnevelt’s arrest, Amsterdam arranged an elaborate triumphal entry for Maurits to celebrate his elevation to his father’s title. The festivities praised Maurits as a protomonarch. In a scene whose symbolism would have appealed to England’s monarch, the Amsterdam chambers of rhetoric touted Maurits’s new title in a program of classical might and divine right. Under an “Arche Triumphael,” one pageant took as its theme “de oude Romeynen die voortijdts oneenich waren door misverstandt doch eyndelijck hun weder op’t nieuwe verbindende ende to accoordt ghecomen waer [the ancient Romans who were once disunited through a misunderstanding until they were again unified in a new compact and brought to accord].”74 In addition to Roman political symbolism, Amsterdam’s pageant included Jupiter bestowing crowns on the new prince, suggestive of the divine source of his authority. Elsewhere, “Jupiter sittendt op den Arent zijn Princelicke Excellentie gegunt heeft ende toghelaten het Princschap van Orangien [Jupiter sitting on his eagle welcomed his Princely Majesty and acknowledged his ‘prince-ship’ of Orange]” (A3r). A similar display, incorporating Jupiter on an eagle with a crown and the seven maidens of the United Provinces, appeared on pageant wagons lining Maurits’s way out of town the next day. In celebrating Maurits’s elevation to a princely title with reference to mighty Roman unity and divine approval, these displays

73 Dudley Carleton reported that the Remonstrants spread rumors “that Count Maurice

doth aim at the sovereignty of the country.” Jacobean Letters, 243 (12 September 1617). Glimpses of Maurits’ authoritarian leanings appear in accounts of his purges of the vroedschappen. See, for instance, the account of Maurits ejecting Remonstrants from the municipal government of Rotterdam after Grotius’s arrest: Maurits sent the army to occupy city hall, then swept in and “de oude Vroedt-schappen ontboden ende … haren Eedt ontslaghen [summoned the old Municipal Council and…dissolved their oaths].” Verkiesinghe des Magistraets tot Rotterdam (Rotterdam, 1618), A2v. Sierhuis highlights the view of a vocal minority that accused Maurits of tyrannical dealings in engineering Oldenbarnevelt’s execution. Arminian Controversy, 163. 74 Triumphe tot Amsterdam Over het Incomen van den Hooch-gheboren Vorst Mauritius Prince van Orangien (Leiden, 1618), A3.

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bestow the appearance of sovereignty to the newest prince residing in the United Provinces. Some element of an adoring Dutch public wanted to imagine him as their Caesar or divinely appointed monarch. While the foreign title did not grant Maurits Dutch sovereignty, he served as stadholder of the majority of the provinces and accepted membership in the English Order of the Garter.75 When Barnavelt ruefully acknowledges in the opening scene, “His stile of Excellencie, was my guift” (1.1.29), it serves both to articulate the Advocate’s jealousy over his rival’s prominence and to acknowledge reluctantly the trappings of authority the Republic had granted to the Prince. The playwrights intensify the danger that the Republic will collapse into absolutism, even after Orange publicly disclaims any desire to seize Dutch sovereignty for himself. In public settings, Orange protests that he serves the state. After disarming Utrecht, he returns to the Hague with his armed guard and informs the States General about the leadership of the Arminian faction. Once Vandort, Bredero, and the other representatives of the States General agree to cooperate in indicting Barnavelt, Orange dismisses his guard (3.2.26). Claiming to bear no grudge against the Advocate, Orange allows the States General to appear to direct the investigation against the very man who brought about the peace “in a Goverment / New setled” (3.2.65–66).76 Orange claims not to want to outline the Advocate’s flaws even as he enumerates them. “Something I know / That I could wish, I nere had understood,” he says coyly, and then proceeds paralipsically to say those things he claims he would rather not say (3.2.44–5). Enticing the States General’s representatives to ask for the information he has withheld, Orange reluctantly agrees to “obey you,” lists the crimes of Barnavelt’s associates, and then stops short, pretending that he “would end here / And leave out Barnavelt” (3.2.87, 96–7). Bredero knows his cue and declares “Yf he be guiltie / He’s to be name’d, and punishd with the rest” (3.2.97–8). Although Vandort 75 Den Tex discusses Oldenbarnevelt’s efforts to prevent Maurits from accepting this English honor. Oldenbarnevelt, 490. The French viewed Oldenbarnevelt as their best ally in the Dutch Republic; after his arrest, Louis XIII’s ambassador warned the Dutch to be wary of Maurits, “lest one day he take away their liberties.” Calendar of State Papers … Venice, ed. Alan B. Hinds, vol. 15 (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1909), 327 [30 September 1618]. 76 Kamps smartly points to Orange’s cynical recourse to such language as he takes matters into his own hands in a play that contests the notion of providential history. Historiography, 148.

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belatedly recalls that they must conduct a trial before they can punish Barnavelt, Orange quickly mobilizes his guard to arrest Modesbargen. They have no doubt that a trial will find Barnavelt and his associates guilty. Orange’s actions in this scene explicitly gesture toward his service to the state, but he carefully manipulates the States General to serve his own political ambitions. The armed guard that accompanies him into the council chamber and waits just beyond the door assures the Council’s compliance. This scene presents Orange’s ascent to a position of power and shows the Council’s weakness. The obsequious Bredero’s opening line, “Will your Excellence please to sitt?” and his participation in the charade of pleading with Orange to outline Barnavelt’s crimes, “we doe intreat your Highnes / (For willingly we would not say, commaund you) /... to make knowne / All such as are suspected,” make the outcome of this scene as much a formality as the trial Vandort reminds them they must have before they can punish Barnavelt (3.2.1, 82–3, 86–7). By the end of the scene, the States General has lost its independent authority as its members seek to anticipate and endorse the Prince’s desires. Orange’s success in turning the Council against Barnavelt mirrors and surpasses the earlier scene in which Barnavelt had sought to limit Orange’s authority, a scene in which the Prince’s own hypocrisy first reveals itself. Frustrated that someone has spread rumors about Orange, a Dutch officer hints that “you are yourself Sir, / And master of more mindes, that love and honour ye,” while the Prince’s kinsman asserts that Orange has enough support, “Yf you would see it,” to succeed if he consented to a coup (1.3.40– 2). Although the Prince at first rejects such talk, “I pray ye, no more” (1.3.44), it becomes clear that he does not disagree, merely that he does not want such plans to be broached in public: “Stupid I never was, nor so secure yet / To lend my patience to mine owne betraying: / I shall find time and riper cause” (1.3.45–7). In his later handling of the States General, it appears that his time has come. The danger that the Republic will fall into absolutism, perhaps even tyranny, becomes even more acute in the tragedy’s final half as Barnavelt goes to his doom.

Fathers of the Republic or Father of the Empire In warning that Orange’s elevation threatens the sovereignty of the United Provinces, Barnavelt does not articulate a thoroughly republican critique of absolute monarchy. Instead, he signals his struggle against the ambitious Prince in two registers, one contesting the concept of a lone

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founding father or pater patriae and the other representing the conflict in terms of the Roman Republic’s demise. Both of these threads appealed to those in the English audience at the Globe who thought that their king’s unfettered exercise of prerogative posed a danger to the liberties of the subject. No coherent republican party opposed the king and his supporters in late Jacobean England, but as we have seen, some English subjects doubted James’s intentions and wanted to protect the nation’s unique political formation, a mixed monarchy that would guarantee their liberties. Barnavelt’s opposition to Orange’s usurpation of authority in language that contests some of the English king’s preferred theories of monarchy thus makes the contest between Barnavelt and Orange evoke the strains in England’s own conflicted political identity. From its first lines, the tragedy figures the contest between Barnavelt and Orange as a contest over the claim to have fathered the nation. Barnavelt’s first impassioned words bespeak his frustration that his swordwielding rival had displaced him in the people’s hearts. Offstage, Leidenberch has apparently repeated the popular view of the Prince, prompting Barnavelt peevishly to exclaim “The Prince of Orange, now, all names are lost els / That hee’s alone the Father of his Cuntrie? / Said you not soe?” (1.1.1–3). In the ensuing exchanges, his followers praise Barnavelt’s claims to the nation’s paternity while recounting and minimizing the popular view of Orange’s ability to make such a claim. Barnavelt may excel in diplomacy, but the ungrateful Dutch people believe that “the Provinces owe / Their flourishing peace” to Orange’s “Arme, and Sword... That hee’s the Armyes soule / By which it moves to victorie” (1.1.4–6). The Prince promotes this flattery, Leidenberch continues, and has overvalued his “lightest meritts: and who add to the scale / Seldom offend” (1.1.16– 17). Grotius adds that the weighty words of their diplomatic efforts have been dismissed as mere insubstantial wind next to the great actions of the Prince, and that Orange’s swelling pride has made him ambitious, rewarding his soldiers and “arrogat[ing] / All prosperous proceedings to himself, / Detract[ing] from you, and all men” (1.1.20–22). The contest to claim the role of the father of the nation depends on the proper valuation of the counselor’s gown and the soldier’s sword. Evoking a monstrous notion of multiple fathers, Barnavelt will not abide Orange’s claim to be “alone” the country’s father. In the Dutch Republic, national paternity must be shared.

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Barnavelt’s determination that his nation will have other fathers besides those who wield a phallic sword resonates with other monstrous perversions of the figure of a nation’s paternity. When James positioned himself to advise the fledgling Republic on its appointment of a new professor of theology in Leiden, he and his ambassadors had perverted the tropes to figure his demands as paternal care. England’s ambassador during the Vorstius Affair, Sir Ralph Winwood, represented James as a doting sire, expressing “the fatherly care which he hath euer had to procure the establishment of your State” (40). Winwood’s recourse to one of his king’s favored tropes—pater patriae—may have prompted James’s own retrospective characterization of his justification for attempting to influence the States General’s choice through a perverse deployment of the trope of paternity. Rehearsing the rights and obligations that “doe rightly belong vnto euery Emperour, King, and Christian Monarch,” James finds the title “Nutritius Ecclesiae, Nursing Father of the Church” (1). This peculiar, striking figuration of paternal caritas calls attention to itself in its monstrous amalgamation of gendered categories. Asserting a hermaphroditically parental duty to intervene in the international defense of the church in the Dutch Republic, James draws especially on the language of the stern but caring sire he used to justify his absolute authority over the English nation, those who are natio, born, of him. English readers knew their king’s fondness for representing his actions as fatherly care. This language of paternal sovereignty and the subject’s filial duty runs throughout James’s speeches and political writings. The hierarchy of father over family and its justification of the king’s natural paternity of his subjects so central to the Trew Law—“the King becomes a naturall Father to all his Lieges at his Coronation”—persists well into the reign, as when he instructs his 1610 Parliament that “a King is trewly Parens patriae, the politique father of his people.”77 The father rules over the family, a microcosmic unit repeated many times over to make up the fabric of the nation over which James exerted his sovereign will. In Barnavelt , both the Advocate and the Prince make competing claims to this language of national paternity. Barnavelt refuses to disavow his paternity of the nation, while Orange uses the discourse as an implicit ratification of his own aspirations to sovereignty. Just as Barnavelt’s first words reject the Prince’s claims, so Orange’s first words in the tragedy 77 “Trew Law,” 65. “Speech” (21 March 1610), 181. For James’s use of this paternal image and its significance in justifying his absolute dominion, see Goldberg, James I , 87.

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evoke another father of the country, his own father, William the Silent. “[N]ow, methincks, I feele the happynes / Of being sproong from such a noble Father / That sacrifizd his honour, life, and fortune / For his lov’d Cuntry,” he declares as he comes to the stage (1.3.1–4). Orange claims his right as son and heir of the fledgling nation’s originary, martyred father.78 Literally his father’s offspring, he can also figuratively represent himself as the filial subject of the paternal founder of the nation. The scene collapses the intervening thirty-four years, during which his status as younger son had put the family title into Catholic hands, however, and instead posits a continuity from heroic father to heroic son, a continuity troubled by Grotius’s later recollection of the Prince’s very new recasting as Prince of Orange. Engaged in a metaphorically filial struggle with Barnavelt, the Prince may speak as his nation’s father, but his adversaries dispute his claim of sole paternity in the fledgling Republic. Barnavelt, for instance, casts his own service to the state as paternal care while simultaneously denying Orange’s own paternity. Using an image that evokes the symbolic Dutch virgin of the desperate United Provinces of the 1580s raped by the vicious Spaniards, Barnavelt describes the Dutch Republic as a despoiled maiden, “naked / Floong out a dore’s and starvd” until he came along and cared for her, only to be rejected now by a fickle people entranced by a more exciting lover (3.1.125–6). When he first found her, he reminds his audience, she was “An orphan State, that no eye smild upon” (3.1.128). She had no father, other than the adopted father Barnavelt has been to her. Significantly, only Barnavelt and his compatriot Leidenberch appear on stage as actual fathers. Leidenberch enjoys several tender scenes with his innocent son. And although Barnavelt expresses frustration when his own son urges him to ask for Orange’s mercy—“Art thou my Son?.../ ... this unthanckfull / Forgetful Cuntry, when I sleepe in ashes, / Shall feele, and then confes I was a Father” (3.1.178, 188–90)—the biological father soon reconciles with his son, though the prodigal nation remains estranged. The playwrights subsequently make Barnavelt a truly caring father, appearing in a touching scene with his daughter, wife, son, and servants, fretting how they will survive “When I am gon, when [Orange’s 78 Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline van Gent argue that as William’s eldest Protestant son, Maurits assumed the role of pater familias as part of his public role in the Low Countries. “In the Name of the Father: Conceptualizing Pater Familia in the Letters of William the Silent’s Children,” RQ 62 (2009), 1161.

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party] have gorgd their envies” (4.3.84). On the other hand, the playwrights sterilize Orange—historically an elderly bachelor with several illegitimate children—making him a poor father indeed. In the tragedy’s climactic moment, Barnavelt’s literal paternity strengthens his claim to having sired the nation. As two lords lead him to the scaffold, Barnavelt again enumerates his service to the state. He reminds them of the nation’s prosperity under his stewardship and asks them to remember “who / Unbard the Havens, that the floating Merchant” can ply the “waves to bring you proffit? / Thinck through whose care, you are a Nation” (5.3.108–9, 111–12). Although he does not name himself the nation’s father here, he does remind the spectators that it is through his paternal care that the Dutch “have a name yet left, a fruitfull Nation” (5.3.113). The Second Lord tries to shame the fallen statesman by linking him to the violent radicals who had attacked King James. Such men, the Second Lord sarcastically notes, claimed to be their “Cuntries Father” (5.3.138), an added insult to King James who, like Orange, wanted to be the lone father of his nation. On the scaffold itself, the biological and the national paternity merge in Barnavelt. Conforming to the scaffold convention of forgiving those who participate in the execution—though significantly, Barnavelt does not pray for a monarch’s health, since the Republic has no king—he prays for the health of the commonwealth, finally explicitly laying claim to a share in its paternity: “peace to this Cuntry: / And to you all that I have bredd like children / Not a more faithfull father, but a more fortunate” (5.3.159– 61). Then, concerned that his judicial murder will prejudice his biological progeny’s inheritance—itself a contested issue, since the judges did not include the charge of treason in their sentence—Barnavelt pleads with his executioners that his family will “partake not with their Fathers ruyns” (5.3.167). A caring father to his own family and to the national family of the infant Republic, Barnavelt makes a strong claim to have diverted paternity from the tyrant who has engineered his downfall. The honor and respect due to the father of a country contributes to the rivalry in the tragedy, but Barnavelt intensifies the conflict by figuring Orange as a tyrant threatening the Republic’s liberty. Barnavelt frequently evokes the final days of the Roman Republic, casting Orange’s ascent as an urgent danger to the state. Although Jacobean England did not yet have a coherent republican ideology with which to contest the king’s absolutist theories of rule, Massinger and Fletcher’s Dutch tragedy provides

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its English audience with ways of thinking about sovereignty. Specifically, the playwrights make their Barnavelt into a revived Cato Uticensis, the outspoken critic of the Roman Senate’s gradual acquiescence to the demands first of Pompey and then more tragically of Caesar. Cato’s stoic resistance to tyranny and his determination to take his own life in the final moments of the Republic rather than live at the pleasure of a tyrant had transformed the younger Cato into a heroic martyr, praised on a par with and occasionally surpassing Lucius Junius Brutus and other mythical figures from the dawn of the Roman Republic. In associating Barnavelt and his comrades with the tragically doomed heroes of the Republic, Massinger and Fletcher generate an alternative genealogy for national paternity and create a powerful tool for criticizing the absolutism and potential tyranny of their Prince of Orange, simultaneously gesturing toward a similar danger gathering force at home. Cato’s stoic constancy, combined with his inflexible resistance to tyranny, earned him the approbation of classical historians. Plutarch, for instance, records Cato’s determination to resist the encroachments of tyranny “or otherwise die honourably in defence of our libertie.”79 Despite his distaste for Pompey, Cato grew even more alarmed at Caesar’s rise and at the people’s willingness to grant him extraordinary powers, warning Rome’s citizens “that they themselues with their owne voyces did set vp a tyrant, that one day would cut their throats” (782). As Caesar’s popularity grew, Cato—who made use of the theater for political ends—finally conceded that Pompey represented the lesser of two evils. He joined Pompey in resisting Caesar’s tyranny, ultimately finding himself encircled in Utica. Advised to bargain with Caesar to preserve his life, Cato instead declared that he would never “be bound to a tyrant for iniustice” (796). Contemplating the paradoxes of the Stoics, “that only the good man is free, & all the euil be slaues” (796), Cato stabbed himself, declaring “now am I where I would be” (797). To ensure that neither his friends nor his foes could revive him, he pulled his viscera out through the wound. When they learned of his death, Cato’s followers declared that “he only was a freeman, and had an inuincible mind” (798). Cato fashioned his end to appear in control of his destiny, making him a martyr as tyranny emerged from the Republic’s demise.

79 The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. Thomas North (London, 1612),

776.

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Cato’s contemporaries immortalized him as a heroic figure of resistance to absolutism. His friend Cicero celebrated Cato’s constancy. Using the civil wars as the subject of Pharsalia, his unfinished epic, Lucan valorizes the defeated Cato, declaring that he finds it difficult to assess the justice of Caesar’s triumphant cause and of Pompey’s defeated one, since “Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni [if the victor had the gods on his side, the vanquished had Cato].”80 Early modern editors produced numerous editions and translations of Lucan, often in the context of their nations’ own struggles to preserve liberty against tyranny; Grotius produced an edition in the midst of the crisis consuming the Dutch Republic.81 Sir Arthur Gorges’s translation of the Civil Wars appeared just as a frustrated king dissolved the contentious “Addled” Parliament of 1614. As Gorges translates Lucan, Cato chooses to support Pompey because “He is of a minde too just and meeke / Supreme command alone to seek / But doth such tyranny dislike. / To make him victor I’le be one: / He shall not claime the baies alone.”82 While Lucan’s unfinished Pharsalia does not arrive at Cato’s heroic suicide, Gorges makes the stoic’s willingness to give anything to save the Republic even more explicitly self-sacrificing as he declares, “O let this throat be carved in twaine, / If peace by it we may obtaine, / And giue an end vnto those broyles” (59). Jacobean versions of Cato focus on his heroic self-sacrifice and his resolve to fight the encroachments of absolutism and the emergence of tyranny.83 They present Cato as a republican hero and offer his example to an English audience concerned about their own ruler’s tendencies. Massinger and Fletcher stage Barnavelt and his Dutch associates as the party of Cato, offering a critique of tyranny to their English audience. In the tragedy’s first scene, Modesbargen praises Barnavelt’s long dedication to the republic revealing a stoic character in which “Reason had onely

80 Lucan, The Civil War (Pharsalia), ed. J. D. Duff (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 1.128. 81 Edward Paleit argues that early modern translators and editors approached Lucan from a variety of ideological perspectives. War, Liberty, and Caesar: Responses to Lucan’s Bellum Civile, ca. 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 95. 82 Lucans Pharsalia: Containing the Ciuill Warres betweene Caesar and Pompey, trans. Arthur Gorges (London, 1614), p 59. 83 Norbrook argues that for Gorges and others the Pharsalia presented a point of entry into a “universal struggle between absolutist and republican values.” Writing the English Republic, 34.

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wrought: passion no hand in’t” (1.1.53). His criticism surprises his friend, but Modesbargen continues, warning that if Barnavelt acted on his frustrations, he would ruin the nation that should be his monument, mar his reputation, and hasten his own destruction at the hands of the popular Prince.84 Recalling the stoic constancy of classical exemplars of republican virtue, Modesbargen reminds the aging Barnavelt that it would be better to “studie how to die” than to act so rashly (1.1.62). Barnavelt counters Modesbargen’s recommendations of passive stoicism with other precedents and will stoke “The fire of honour” that burns within him as he opposes Orange’s tyrannical ambition (1.1.110). Barnavelt treats the popular affection for the Prince as the cowardly and weak embrace of the very tyranny the Advocate helped the republic escape.85 Boasting of his successful leadership and his negotiation of Dutch independence, “That Spaine with feare hath felt in both hir Indies,” Barnavelt laments that the complacent Dutch have now “from Freemen growne / Slaves to the pride of one we have raisd up / Unto this giant height” (2.1.141–44). He complains that Orange has taken too much power into his own hands and laments that “the Spanish yoak / Is soft, and easie, if compard with … his owne ambitious ends” (144–5, 148). Fletcher and Massinger may not make Barnavelt an ardent republican, but they do supply him with a classically charged political language for resisting a tyrant’s ambition to enslave a nation. The playwrights’ affecting embellishment of the historical Ledenberg’s suicide further evokes the heroic determination of Cato, generating sympathy for the defeated cause of Barnavelt and his colleagues. Massinger and Fletcher create a scene in which Barnavelt visits the imprisoned Leidenberch, praising Cato’s republican suicide. When Barnavelt learns that Leidenberch has provided incriminating details of the events at Utrecht, the Advocate chides his friend for inconstancy. Distraught, Leidenberch pleads with Barnavelt, “What have I don? how am I foold and cozend? / What shall redeeme me from this Ignorance?” (3.4.72– 3). Barnavelt chillingly replies that they should both “Dye uncompelld,” by their own hands (3.4.83). Suicide exemplifies stoic self-determination, 84 Taken in by the period’s propaganda, Margot Heinemann emphasizes Barnavelt’s Hispanophilia. Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama Under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 203. 85 Paleit argues that Massinger and Fletcher criticizing courtly corruption rather than articulating a clearly republican ideology. War, Liberty, and Caesar, 150.

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a way to “scape the hands of Infamy, and tirrany” (3.4.97). Barnavelt’s defense of this means of dying as a free man—especially his representation of it as their stoic constancy to each other and their just cause—persuades Leidenberch, who professes that death at his own hands will “Redeeme what I have lost, and so nobely / The world shall yet confes, at least I loved ye” (3.4.116–17). Leidenberch accepts Barnavelt’s suggestion, fashioning himself as stoically resisting tyranny in choosing a famous death over an infamous life under Orange. The playwrights stage the scene of Leidenberch’s suicide as a modern analogue to Cato’s heroic end. As in Plutarch, where others carefully watch Cato late into the night, guards watch Leidenberch in his chamber. Like Cato, Leidenberch spends his last night in the company of his son. Putting the boy to bed, Leidenberch contemplates the paternal bonds that cloud his determination to die. “To dye were nothing,” he says, but the thought of leaving his son as a hostage to Fortune could make him “play Niobe, weeping ore hir Children” (3.6.29, 36). Fletcher and Massinger depart from their sources—English translations of Dutch texts written to denigrate Ledenberg and Oldenbarnevelt—and make this final touching scene into Leidenberch’s triumph. In a final rousing speech, Leidenberch gathers his resolve and invokes Cato as his heroic precedent: Thou soule of Cato, And you brave Romaine speritts, famous more For your true resolutions on your selves, Then Conquest of the world: behold, and see me An old man, and a gowne man, with as much hast And gladnes entertaine this steele, that meetes me, As ever longing lover, did his Mistris. (3.6.44–50)

Both English accounts of Ledenberg’s suicide report that he stabbed himself several times after the first blow. While Massinger and Fletcher may simply follow their sources, the multiple wounds of Leidenberch’s “So, so: yet further: soe” (3.6.51), given the precedent of Cato that Leidenberch has in mind with this final heroic action, may also signal his stoic resolve to choose death, as the other “brave Romaine speritts” had done, rather than be killed.86 In staging an emotionally powerful suicide 86 A Proclamation Given by the Discreet Lords and States against the slanders laid vpon the Euangelicall and Reformed Religion by the Arminians and Separatists (London, 1618)

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that explicitly invokes the great martyr to the advent of Roman tyranny, the playwrights turn the last half of their play into a stinging indictment of absolutism. The aura of Cato surrounds Barnavelt in his denunciations of the ambitious Prince. Since the fallen Advocaat died publicly on the scaffold rather than by his own hand, the playwrights could not stage his suicide. Fortunately, they could associate him with his colleague’s suicide and give it the appeal of Cato’s stoic self-determination. Beyond this connection, Barnavelt himself gestures toward the heroic resistance of Cato in his own speeches condemning the cowardice of the States General and the growth of Orange’s strength. After Utrecht opens its gates to Orange and Barnavelt’s cause seems lost, the Advocate refuses to beg for his life under the tyranny he believes will accompany Orange’s victory. Bredero and Vandort advise Barnavelt that he should go to the Prince and humble himself. Barnavelt refuses, declaring, “If this poore life, were forfeyt to his mercy, / At such a rate I hold a scornd subjection / I would not give a penney to redeeme it” (3.1.134–6). Such proud refusals accompany his speeches throughout this scene and throughout the rest of the tragedy. Because he has “liv’d ever free, onely depended / Upon the honestie of my faire Actions,” Barnavelt cannot abide the notion of depending on the whim of the Prince (3.1.137–8). Recalling Plutarch’s account of Cato’s demise, Barnavelt alludes to the stoic paradox Cato contemplated on the eve of his suicide, “that only the good man is free, and all the evill be slaves” (175). The playwrights’ Advocate may not have the option of emulating Cato in choosing suicide, but he can use Cato’s language of resisting tyranny and does so to the end. In the final scenes, the playwrights insistently allude to Lucan and Plutarch as Barnavelt defies Orange. The Advocate describes his own service to the Dutch Republic in the wars, then recalls positive moments in Anglo-Dutch relations that create further sympathy in the audience. As a diplomat, he has met not only with Henry IV and King James, but also with “Our Patronesse of happie memory / Elizabeth of England” (4.5.95–6) on several occasions. He exhaustively catalogs the troops he mustered, the funds he secured to fight Spain, and the benefits of

concludes with Ledenberg’s suicide (18). Another account appears in A Trve Discovery of Those Treasons of which Geilis Van Ledenberch was a Practicer (London, 1619), D4 v. Dudley Carleton offered details to Chamberlain. Jacobean Letters, 260 (28 September 1618).

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regaining the cautionary towns. Then he concludes his defense, asking “after all / Theis meritorious, prosperous travells / T’unyte theis States, can Barnavelt be suspected / To be the author, to undooe that knot / Which with such toyle he fastend?” (4.5.111–15). As he and Orange spar over their deserts, the Prince calls in a new witness, Modesbargen, whose testimony Barnavelt disputes. Barnavelt eventually realizes that Orange will defeat him regardless of his denials. Declaring that “this elaborate forme / Of Justice” may “delude the world” and provide “a cover / For future practices” (4.5.178–80), Barnavelt recognizes that he cannot prevent the sham trial’s guilty verdict, as Bredero had earlier intimated. Historically, Oldenbarnevelt’s trial lasted six months and Chamberlain informed Dudley Carleton that “this protracting makes men thincke that either they have very small proofes of so many imputations layde vpon him” or that the judges needed to justify their proceedings after the fact.87 As he moves toward his death, Barnavelt’s associations with Cato and the rise of Caesar’s tyranny reach a crescendo. His warning against Orange’s ambitions takes on its greatest republican charge as he ceases to challenge the basis for his extraordinary trial. Taking one last opportunity to remind members of the States General present at the trial that “my life / Was ever fertile of good councells for you,” Barnavelt hopes that his last advice to them will “not be in the last moment barren” (4.5.187–9). The impassioned speech that follows did not survive the censor’s efforts to mitigate its harsh critique, but the playwrights’ effort to place the words in Barnavelt’s mouth indicates the role they imagined for him as a spokesman for liberty against Dutch (and perhaps English) tyranny: Octavius, when he did affect the Empire, And strove to tread upon the neck of Rome, And all hir auncient freedoms, tooke that course That now is practisd on you: for the Cato’s And all free speritts slaine, or else proscribd That durst have stird against him, he then sceased The absolute rule of all: you can apply this: And here I prophecie, I that have lyvd And dye a free man, shall, when I am ashes Be sensible of your groanes, and wishes for me; And when too late you see this Goverment 87 SP 14/107/43. [19 March 1619].

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Chained to a Monarchie, you’ll howle in vaine And wish you had a Barnavelt againe. (4.5.190–202).

Barnavelt takes up the mantle of Cato and the vanquished critics who defended the “auncient freedoms” to the death before Caesar’s heir seized “the absolute rule of all.” He stridently condemns the ambitions of the victorious Orange. And while the playwrights might have hoped that setting their tragedy in the Dutch Republic, across the Narrow Seas, would provide a barrier across which they could comment on the loss of a nation’s sovereignty when it is “Chained to a Monarchie,” simultaneously shadowing the situation just beyond the edge of the Globe’s stage, they must also have expected the barrier to be permeable. Buc initially made some minor emendations in order to preserve the speech, but he could not make Barnavelt’s oration palatable.88 The fact that Buc found the speech too inflammatory demonstrates that the play’s commentary on absolutism and tyranny in the United Provinces might also apply to the tense situation in England in August 1619, where a king had governed without Parliament for more than five years and gave no indication he would ever call another. While the censor eliminated this most dangerously explicit reference to those final days before the tyranny of the Caesars, the scene of Barnavelt’s execution restores some of the republican language for criticizing Orange’s absolutist aspirations. Evoking a Crucifixion scene, three executioners play a dice game for the right to behead the fallen Advocate and take his fine garments as their customary reward. As the executioners brag about their skills and their tools, the successful candidate boasts of the sharpness and epic antiquity of his blade. Mocking his companions’ dull weapons, he displays some dazzling swordplay, exclaiming that “Heer’s the Sword that cutt of Pompeis head” (5.2.21). Indebted to Lucan, who portrayed Pompey’s assassination as a beheading, the playwrights allude to one of many important moments in which the Latin poet had condemned the tyranny of Caesar, responsible for the death of his kinsman Pompey. In a marginal note to his edition, Gorges called attention to Lucan’s “bitterness in taxing Caesar,” though his addition of “Caesar’s fact” to his translation of “Crede manum” itself makes Caesar’s villainy more explicit (344). Barnavelt’s conventional appearance on the

88 Dutton, Licensing, 11.

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scaffold, then, takes on stoic overtones as it evokes the killing of Pompey to clear the way for Caesar’s or Orange’s ascent. In his words from the scaffold, as Barnavelt prays that the nation he has worked so hard to preserve, who cannot find “a more faithfull father” than himself, will at least find a father “more fortunate,” the playwrights may make one final gesture toward Cato’s martyrdom, since Lucan had characterized Cato in the final days of the resistance to Caesar, as “parens verus patriae” [true father of the fatherland], or as Gorges had put it, “him that true father is / Vnto his Countries cause and blisse” (390). Massinger and Fletcher represent Barnavelt, father to his country, as Cato’s tragic heir in resisting the encroachments of Orange’s tyranny.

Metadrama, Censorship, and the Marginal Castigations A number of challenges creep into an assessment of the meaning of the idea of the historical Dutch statesman Oldenbarnevelt for an English nation fearful of political tyranny. Censorship and mediated texts hedged him in, permitting only partial views and particular facets of this Dutch figure to come to English audiences’ attention. Distrusted for arranging the temporary peace with Spain, Oldenbarnevelt laid the groundwork for the Dutch Republic’s independence, despite his detractors’ fears that such a peace signaled appeasement of a Catholic enemy. Despised for championing religious toleration, even though he professed to Dudley Carleton that his personal beliefs aligned more closely with the Calvinist CounterRemonstrants, Oldenbarnevelt’s principled stand helped make possible a facet of Dutch life that would be crucial to subsequent generations. Reviled by some for opposing the rise of Maurits, even though neither he nor Maurits sought to claim the Republic’s sovereignty for himself, Oldenbarnevelt stood his ground for essential principles of the young Republic’s independence. English audiences knew only fragments of his virtues. Massinger and Fletcher’s Barnavelt not only paced the labyrinths of policy to secure Dutch independence, but also negotiated a gauntlet of English obstacles, arriving clipped and censored in the theater. Paradoxically, having maneuvered their version of Barnavelt through these obstacles, the playwrights brought a figure onto the Globe’s stage that carried the greatest immediacy. From the distorted Oldenbarnevelt available to them, the playwrights created an enigmatic Barnavelt. This very ambiguity suggests the potency of this spectacular figure and the power

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of Barnavelt to use Dutch material to speak to issues at the heart of England’s own evolving national identity. The translated Dutch texts Massinger and Fletcher used for their tragedy carried an almost universally negative Oldenbarnevelt to English shores. Perhaps the most concerted effort to tear down Oldenbarnevelt occurs in the margins of his Apology. Oldenbarnevelt wrote this appeal to the States of Holland in his capacity as Advocaat in April 1618 before the crisis reached a climax that summer. In the Apology, he defends himself against the Counter-Remonstrant charges that he was a crypto-Catholic bent on destroying the bonds that held the Republic together so that Spain could conquer a divided land. The text describes his extensive services to the Republic—providing details the playwrights incorporate wholesale into their tragedy—and concludes with his advice to the province’s States that they defend Holland’s sovereignty against the other provinces’ attempts to overrule them in the States General. As Oldenbarnevelt had explained in a somewhat conciliatory letter to Maurits, “I find myself compelled to publish a statement in defense of myself” in response to the “many slanderous, lying, seditious, and fraudulent libels” that deny the benefits the Republic received from his three decades of service.89 Despite Oldenbarnevelt’s efforts to clear his name, the Apology did not reach an audience without mediation. The polemical commentary of the Frankfurt Calvinist Robertus Holderus’s “Marginal Castigations” appeared in many editions. An English translation of this mediated text appeared in October 1618, after Oldenbarnevelt’s arrest. English readers who might have turned to Oldenbarnevelt’s Apology to understand his perspective on the troubles in the United Provinces had to maneuver through Holderus’ oppressive apparatus in which he contains the Apology, contesting and twisting nearly every claim in the text, from the most substantial to the most insignificant. When Oldenbarnevelt mentions his admiration for his great-grandfather’s tolerant reluctance to condemn anyone else’s belief, for instance, Holderus adds in the margin, “You are an Atheist;” when Oldenbarnevelt points out that his aggressive diplomacy forced the Habsburgs to sign a treaty that acknowledged the Republic “not now as their vassals, and subiects, but Gouernours of freedominions, to which they made no claime,” Holderus refuses to accept that the Advocaat had any part in bringing about this recognition, despite 89 The letter is one of the documents printed in The Low Countries in Early Modern Times, ed. Herbert Rowen (New York: Walker, 1972), 124.

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the fact that other critics used his success in the negotiations to characterize him as a secret ally of Spain.90 Even if Oldenbarnevelt did make Spain recognize the Republic’s independence, he should not get credit, according to Holderus, since the negotiations would have failed “if God had not helped in these extremities” (C4v). The avalanche of invective threatens to overwhelm the text. On several pages, a few of the Advocaat’s words face dense columns of response. Nothing escapes Holderus’s petty sniping; even the Advocaat’s name suffers the critic’s execrations: “Barnavelt” suggests alternatively burning, evil, and vile while “Mauritius” is an anagram of “Mars uiuit” (H1v). The Advocaat’s effort to clear himself created a hostage to fortune; in England, he came from the press stained with calumny. The playwrights’ efforts to bring Barnavelt to the stage required negotiating the additional gauntlet of the censors. George Buc also sought to restrain the Advocaat’s words, slashing through some of Fletcher and Massinger’s Barnavelt. Buc carefully scrutinized the play, penciling in small crosses next to passages that concerned him. He darkened some of these pencil marks with ink crosses while he neglected or partially erased others. Some of the lines that initially worried Buc did not bother the censor in his subsequent reading. The ink crosses suggest that several passages continued to trouble him—the mention of Louis XIII, a living monarch, for instance—but he required revisions of only a few of these lines, suggesting that then Buc would let some ambiguous material pass.91 Six remaining passages, however, each powerfully attacking Orange’s status, required revision or excision. In some cases, the revision merely removes the explicit reference to the Prince. Despite these efforts, Buc could not find a way to salvage two passages. In one case, after trying to soften Barnavelt’s comparison of Orange and Octavius, Buc gave up and drew a line through the passage. In the other—as Orange demands entrance into the council chamber—Buc expressed his displeasure in a marginal castigation of his own, “I like not this,” though he took no further action. Despite Bishop King’s intervention, requiring the rewriting of the Arminian bookends of the second act, a controversial Barnavelt survived. 90 Barnevels Apology: Or Holland Mysterie with Marginall Castigations (London, 1618), D2r, C4v. 91 Dutton argues that Buc may have tried to rewrite the most dangerous passages rather than ban the play. Mastering, 215.

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After negotiating these obstacles, Massinger and Fletcher finally brought their Barnavelt to the Globe. No longer dogged by Dutch libels passing through the English press, unhindered by the slanderous paratext of Holderus’ “Marginal Castigations,” and given the vivacity of performance that could transform the ambiguous lines that had passed through two censors, Fletcher and Massinger’s Barnavelt speaks directly to English audiences.92 The playwrights stage a play that explicitly treats the tragic demise of a proud critic of absolutism and tyranny. Their diminished Barnavelt still stages the contest between Orange and Barnavelt as one for the paternity of the nation. And even though the Advocate’s most powerful condemnation of tyranny probably disappeared when Buc crossed through it, the other explicit evocation of Cato in Leidenberch’s suicide, as well as Barnavelt’s refusal to redeem his life if he must sue for it to Orange and his speech from the scaffold as he awaits his death with the same sword that assassinated Pompey, all survived the censor’s hedging. In its performance, Barnavelt ’s metatheatrical effects make the application of events in the Dutch conflict to the situation in England in 1619 even more likely. The most overt of these metadramatic gestures troubled Buc: the censor certainly worried that Barnavelt’s words to Dutch witnesses, “you can apply this” (4.5.196), might have prompted an English audience to apply the analogy still further, from Octavian, to Orange, to James, a monarch closer to home whose prerogative threatened another set of ancient freedoms. Because he thought he could discern the playwrights’ intent, Buc immediately struck through the line and made no effort to recuperate it. The loss of this particular instance of metatheatricality, however, does not erase numerous other similar gestures in the final scenes of the tragedy. From his praise of suicide as a way to avoid being made a “Slave to stick their gawdy triumphes” (3.4.93)— evoking Shakespeare’s Cleopatra’s resolution to avoid a similar fate—to his own embrace of the death sentence read out to him, “I humbly thanck your honours, / I shall not play my last Act worst” (5.1.203– 4), Barnavelt dissolves the boundary between the action on stage and the English audience watching his performance. As the Provost prepares the scaffold where Barnavelt will enact the powerfully theatrical conventions of the last dying speech, giving a “notable Speech” before his death, the 92 As G. E. Bentley observes, the actors could make the tragedy’s ironies more pointed in performance. The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 179.

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Dutch guards understand the positioning of Leidenberch’s coffin on the scaffold as a “prologue should portend a fatall Tragedie” (5.3.40). As the play moves toward its dramatic finish, the playwrights pointedly call attention to the play as a piece of theater and invite the English audience to participate in this struggle over sovereignty. The playwrights achieve several effects by calling attention to the theatrical performance. The self-consciousness in these final scenes may gesture again to Cato. Barnavelt’s servant describes the Advocate’s powerful oratory, “the whole Court attending / When he was pleasd to speake, and with such murmors / As glad Spectators in a Theater / Grace their best Actors with, they ever heard him” (5.1.20–3), evoking Plutarch’s description of the political plays Cato sponsored. These metadramatic elements may also signal the playwrights’ efforts to contest the received narrative of Oldenbarnevelt. Shakespeare’s Roman tragedies and English histories overflow with metatheatricality, inviting the audience to participate in the collaborative historiography performed in the theater.93 As the assassins in Julius Caesar bathe in blood, Cassius breaches the conventional barrier between audience and spectacle to ponder how future ages will stage their deed. Since Fletcher and Massinger selected very current events for their tragedy—just over a year had passed between the massing of troops in Utrecht represented in the early scenes of the tragedy and the first performance of the play; the tragedy alludes to the posthumous removal of Oldenbarnevelt’s son, an event that occurred one month before the first attempt to stage the play—their play destabilizes the skewed narrative of Oldenbarnevelt’s fall available in print. They drew extensively on material from the Advocaat’s Apology for the trial scene, for instance, extricating Oldenbarnevelt from the negative textual frame of the “Marginal Castigations” so that he can speak persuasively in his own defense. The playwrights treat the trial itself as a dramatic spectacle, and Barnavelt’s characterization of the trial as a “cover / For future practices” (4.5.179–80) uses the language of theater to undermine the narrative’s authority. The loss of the most explicit demand that the audience “apply this” commentary on Dutch events to the situation in England did not prevent Fletcher and Massinger from creating other bridges across the stage’s edge to draw the English

93 Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 29.

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audience’s attention to Dutch events and invite them to recognize their relevance just outside the walls of the Globe. Two contemporary responses to Oldenbarnevelt’s tragic end suggest that Massinger and Fletcher succeeded in helping English audiences recognize the significance of these Dutch conflicts at a key moment in the development of English national identity. Significantly, both occur in letters to Dudley Carleton, who had intensely disliked the Advocaat. In one, his friend John Chamberlain reports that accounts of the execution quickly began circulating in England. He knows that the English initially doubted Oldenbarnevelt, “yet now he is gon, his protestations both by word and writing, together w[i]th his manner of dieng so constantly and religiouslie move much commiseration.”94 Elaborating on the opinion of “diuers of goode iudgement [who] thincke he had hard measure,” Chamberlain points to the faulty sentence of the tribunal and the lack of evidence of conspiracy. He then interprets these events through an English lens. He ponders whether “perhaps in England,” a settled nation, such strenuous opposition “might be found treasonable or w[i]thin that compasse.” A “new vpstart commonwealth,” he continues, that “stands so much vpon libertie,” should not have permitted such an injustice. Judging the frailty of the new Dutch Republic by the standard of the powerful English nation, Chamberlain wonders whether the Dutch can absorb such a loss. In the second letter, Thomas Locke describes the success of the King’s Men’s tragedy, including enough details of the plot and Barnavelt’s lines from the tragedy to suggest that he attended a performance. Describing the play’s popularity, Locke remarks that “some say that (according to the proverbe) the diuill is not so bad as he is painted.”95 Although he considers Barnavelt’s intemperate comment that suicide will leave the prosecutors to sift their actions “out of their ashes … to be a point strayned,” Locke’s letter reveals that the sympathetic English audience at Barnavelt sensed a gulf between the rhetoric that blackened the Advocaat’s reputation and his good intentions. When Fletcher, Massinger, Ralph Crane, and the King’s Men brought Johan van Oldenbarnevelt’s fall to the English stage, Dutch events did not quite map congruently onto the situation in England. The ideas of Arminius, which had taken root in the United Provinces, found only

94 SP 14/109/61. [31 May 1619]. 95 SP 14/110/37. [27 August 1619].

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a small group of important sympathizers in England. After the Synod of Dort suppressed the Remonstrants, the United Provinces temporarily accepted a strict Calvinist orthodoxy. In England, an Arminian party would soon exercise potent influence. Only a few years later, Bishop Carleton would engage in a heated debate with Bishop Montagu over the relationship between the Calvinist canons of Dort and the orthodox teachings of the Church of England that would nearly tear the fabric of the national church to shreds. Even more troubling, the eclipse of a critic of absolutism and tyranny and the triumph of a prince figured a conflict between the subject’s liberties and princely prerogative that had begun to unsettle the English nation as patriots and loyalists began to pull in different directions. No one could foresee the events of the 1640s in 1619, but the fundamental questions of English political identity had begun to take shape as the playwrights staged this Dutch struggle over sovereignty.

CHAPTER 5

England’s Thirst for News: Dutch News and the English Public Sphere

I neuer knew a more empty and barren time for newes then this vacation hath ben, so that they are faine almost euery weeke to coyne great battells in Bohemia, the reuolt of the vice-roy of Naples…w[i]th a number of such other vnlikelihoods. —John Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton 23 August 1619; SP 14/110/ 26

When John Chamberlain complained about the lack of credible news in the summer of 1619, he hinted that his reliable correspondent might have some that he could share. As the English ambassador in the Hague, Dudley Carleton stood at the center of an important news network. He had news about the Dutch—the consequences of the Remonstrants’ defeats and their implications for England, the successes and profits of the VOC (the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the Dutch East India Company) as it competed with England’s East India Company, the strength of the Dutch military as the United Provinces looked ahead to the end of the Truce and made preparations for other conflicts—as well as news about international affairs in which the Dutch and English would play a part. Carleton had previously served in Venice, another important node in Europe’s network of political and trade news, and he often included handwritten gazzette, or newsletters, as a postscript to his letters

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Fleck, English National Identity and the Image of the Dutch, Early Modern Literature in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42910-1_5

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to Chamberlain.1 Writing to Carleton, Chamberlain could expect that his friend would slake his thirst for news in this “barren time.” If Chamberlain had known Dutch, Carleton could have begun to send an innovative commodity along with his letters: the Dutch printed news periodical. That summer, as Chamberlain mentioned the dearth of reliable news, Abraham Verhoeven, an Antwerp printer, continued to print an irregular series of inexpensive, brief news booklets, the Cort Verhael , or “Brief Narrative.” Among other items in this precursor of Verhoeven’s more sophisticated Nieuwe Tijdinghen, Chamberlain could have traced the progress of Maurits’s purge of the Remonstrant vroedschappen as he, “in veele plaetsen ende steden van Hollant, is veranderende de Wetthen [in many locations and cities of Holland is changing the laws].”2 Chamberlain could also have read of Oldenbarnevelt’s stoic demeanor on the scaffold and Verhoeven’s report that “hy heeft hem seer goetwillich tot de Doodt begheuen [he approached death very compliantly] (Fig. 5.1).”3 In another issue, Verhoeven would report that the Dutch exacted justice on the corpse of Ledenberg after his suicide, placing “het doot Lichaem van Ledenberch d’welck gebalsemt oft gesouten was [Ledenberg’s dead body, which was embalmed or salted]” in a special coffin “expresselijck ghemaeckt wel dry vingeren dick van houdt [purpose-built of wood nearly three fingers thick].”4 Although this news would have interested him, in August 1619 Chamberlain complained that he could not get reliable news about the Bohemian conflict that would soon ignite the Thirty Years War. As summer turned to autumn, Chamberlain joined an English public desperate for news about Bohemia. Protestant rebels in Prague had dissolved their allegiance to Ferdinand, their Habsburg monarch, and offered the Bohemian crown to Frederick V, Elector Palatine.5 Frederick, son-in-law of England’s pacifist king and nephew of Maurits the 1 For instance, at the close of his 12 September 1617 letter Carleton adds: “I send you my freshest gazettas only.” Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 246. 2 Cort verhael va[n]t gene Nu in Noort-Hollant is gephassiert (Antwerp, [1618]), A2r. 3 Verhael hoe ende in wat manieren den Heere M. Johan van Olden-Barneveldt…is

Onthalst gheworden (Antwerp, 1619), 8. 4 Verhael vant doot Lichaem vanden Secretaris Ledenberch van VVtrecht, daer de Iustitie is ouer ghedaen (Antwerp, 1619), 6. 5 Brennan C. Pursell frames Frederick’s actions as a response to a constitutional crisis. The Winter King: Frederick V of the Palatinate and the Coming of the Thirty Years’ War (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 85.

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Fig. 5.1 Title page of Abraham Verhoeven’s coranto, Verhael hoe ende in wat manieren den heere M. Johan Van Olden-Barneveldt advocaet van Hollandt ende West-Vrieslant is Onthalst gheworden (Antwerpen, 1619). Used by permission of Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp—UNESCO, World Heritage (call number R 47.25)

triumphant Dutch stadholder, eventually accepted the Bohemian offer. The Dutch, who supported Frederick and the Empire’s Protestant Union, hoped to use proxy battles to weaken and distract the Habsburgs in the final months of the Twelve Years Truce. For England, the Bohemian crisis created difficulties, including a gap between royal policy and English public opinion. James, who abhorred subjects’ rebellion against their

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king, had cautioned Frederick not to accept the Bohemians’ invitation. Many in England, however, rejoiced when Frederick accepted the Bohemian crown, celebrating the progress of the Protestant cause against the Catholic, Habsburg Empire. James, on the other hand, preferred not to send English forces into the conflict, especially since paying for troops would require him to swallow his pride and summon Parliament.6 Instead, he pursued a diplomatic solution, accepting the insinuations of Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, that the marriage of James’s son and the Spanish king’s daughter might avert further conflict.7 In England, the United Provinces, and across Europe, readers looked for reliable news about the situation in Bohemia.8 In August 1619, the Bohemian crisis continued to unfold rapidly and Chamberlain hoped his correspondent in the United Provinces, at the heart of the network of European news, might have information about the current state of affairs. Chamberlain’s letter carries another kind of lament with it as well. In place of credible news about the events that would indeed ignite a war that would engulf Europe, Chamberlain only had access to rumor. He complains that an unspecified “they” have “coyne[d],” or counterfeited, a number of “vnlikelihoods,” to satisfy the English public’s appetite for news. Unfortunately, as Chamberlain realized, those who circulated this information used a veneer of truth to cover their more fantastic stories. The ancient, unstable distinction between rumor and news inspired renewed anxiety among early modern critics in the era of cheap print.9 People like Chamberlain, or Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft in the United Provinces, had to sift through superstitious news of omens,

6 As Thrush argues, James made every effort to rule without begging for funds from Parliament. “Personal Rule,” 101. 7 W. B. Patterson emphasizes James’s ecumenical efforts to prevent a confessional war. King James VI and I , 296. 8 Jayne E. E. Boys reiterates the view that Frederick V’s elevation to the Bohemian throne intensified this need across Europe. London’s News Press and the Thirty Years War (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), 28. 9 Jason Peacey argues that English anxieties about cheap print intensified in the first half of the seventeenth century. Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 6.

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unreliable rumors, and extraneous or mundane details to find the news— of state, of the church, of trade—that mattered to them.10 Soon Dutch and English readers would find it easier to satisfy their desire for regular reports of news. England’s culture of news changed dramatically in Chamberlain’s lifetime. When most English readers purchased news before 1620, they had access to accounts of single events. They could purchase a pamphlet about a battle, or a broadside about a monstrous birth, or a ballad about an execution. They might see a play like Barnavelt about a recent event.11 A few wealthy English readers could purchase more expensive manuscript accounts of a single event or subscribe to a handwritten newsletter service.12 In 1620, however, the Dutch introduced a new commodity into England that transformed the English public sphere. A few years earlier, Dutch printers made tentative experiments with inexpensive printed news periodicals in local markets. Dutch printers in Amsterdam began to translate their news corantos into English for sale to an English readership in 1620. English printers quickly imitated and transformed this Dutch innovation. This shift in England’s news culture—the introduction of a periodical press—helped the English public sphere to take root. The Dutch, who initially modeled the form this news would take and created anticipation among customers who looked forward to purchasing the next installment of news, provided the mechanism for this transformation of English news culture. Moreover, the Dutch initially provided the content of this periodical news. Very quickly the Dutch also became the subject of the news the English public read and discussed. As these developments in English news culture occurred, the Dutch inadvertently spurred a transformation of the public sphere of the English nation.

10 Michiel van Groesen discusses Hooft’s sifting of news. “(No) News from the Western Front: The Weekly Press of the Low Countries and the Making of Atlantic News,” SCJ 44 (2013), 757. 11 F. J. Levy suggests that English audiences could have seen Barnavelt as a kind of “staged newsbook.” “Staging the News,” in Print, Manuscript, & Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England, ed. Arthur Marotti and Michael Bristol (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 259. 12 Markku Peltonen links newsletter writing to humanist pedagogy. Rhetoric, Politics, and Popularity in Pre-Revolutionary England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 47.

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Making and Marring News in Early Modern England One common greeting in early modern England, “What news,” might elicit a variety of responses.13 One person might respond with news of battles. Another might mention trade news. Still another might describe the latest court scandal. A superstitious person might describe the ominous portent of a comet. A puritan might lament the state of the church. The respondent might have gathered news from a ballad, from a play, or from a sermon that they had heard or read.14 He or she might have read the news in a private letter or might have heard it from someone frequenting Paul’s Walk.15 Some of the news might have come from a printed book. Early modern English men and women expressed their interest in hearing and sharing news that they had acquired through a variety of media. The many kinds of early modern news could mingle together in the telling. One pamphlet from the turn of the century aptly illustrates this unstable category. In A brief relation of what is hapned since the last of August 1598, an anonymous author narrates two otherwise distinct events. The author first describes Admiral Francisco de Mendoza’s invasion of Cleves on the eastern edge of the United Provinces, including the slaughter in Wesel of “all those they knew to be of the reformed religion.”16 The pamphlet then describes how a whale “came on shore at Berckhey in Holland, the third of Februarie 1598 [i.e. 1599]” (19). Although a narrative of military violence and an account of a rare maritime occurrence have no obvious relationship to each other, this

13 Joad Raymond mentions this greeting and the heterogeneous news it might elicit

in Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 148. 14 Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 11. 15 Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 193. For Ian Atherton news functioned differently at different levels of the social hierarchy. “‘The Itch Grown to a Disease’: Manuscript Transmission of News in the Seventeenth Century,” in News, Newspapers, and Society in Early Modern Britain, ed. Joad Raymond (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 48. Richard Cust finds that the volume of news meant that its impact could be felt regardless of media. “News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present 112 (1986), 69. 16 A brief relation of what is hapned since the last of August 1598 (London, 1599), 5.

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writer easily pivots from the murder of Protestant civilians to the portentous quality of the stranded whale. He explicates the bloodshed on the eastern edge of the Dutch Republic by glossing the omens of the whale on the nation’s Western shore. Its huge tongue represents the general’s great lies, while the author hopes that the little pieces spectators carved out of the whale’s tail presage the gradual dissolution of the Spanish forces through famine, riot, and desertion so that “his hoast is lessened by one halfe” (24). An omen and a military disaster coexist under the category of news in this “brief relation,” the title shared by numerous other early modern news pamphlets. Early modern news sometimes amalgamated the mundane and the miraculous. Such peculiar mixtures left those who consumed this strange news open to ridicule and satire. A few years after English readers paid to learn about admirals and whales, Ben Jonson produced Volpone’s portrait of Sir Politic Would-Be. Meeting Peregrine, a fellow English traveler newly arrived in Venice, Sir Pol addresses him with an aspiring newsmonger’s greeting: “Pray you, what news, sir, vents our climate?”17 Peregrine persuades him that a whale had recently appeared in the Thames in order to interdict English shipping to Stade. Sir Pol readily agrees that the whale—“Spinola’s whale, upon my life, my credit” (2.1.51)—reveals a sinister plot originating with the Army of Flanders. He reveals that the jester, Stone, tricked him into believing that he had privileged access to state secrets smuggled “out of the Low Countries, / (For all parts of the world) in cabbages” (2.1.69–70). Peregrine uses Sir Pol’s determination to gather news to humiliate him at the comedy’s conclusion. In his satirical “The New Cry,” Jonson similarly mocks aspiring statesmen’s commentary on old news, such as “If the [Dutch] States make peace, how it will go / With England,” mocking these affected newsmongers who know “so much of state (wrong) as they do.”18 The minor courtiers’ fashionable interest in talking about news as a signal of their special access to privileged information intensified late in the Jacobean period, though as Chamberlain’s letter to Carleton indicates, some lamented that they could not acquire this desirable commodity. Jonson and John Donne, among others, criticize an early news book, Mercurius Gallobelgicus , by name. That Latin compendium of accounts

17 “Volpone,” 2.1.18. For Sir Pol’s gullibility, see Goldberg, James I , 72. 18 “Epigrams,” 30–1, 40.

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of the conflicts of northern Europe appeared semi-annually from 1594.19 Donne penned an epigram shortly after the first publication of Mercurius Gallobelgicus , mocking not only its failure to carry recent news but also its failure to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Given the commercial role of newsletters—the Fugger newsletters, as we saw in Chapter two, offering a prime example—the failure of Mercurius Gallobelgicus to sift the news earns the poet’s scorn: “Thy credit lost thy credit” (“Mercurius Gallo-Belgicus,” 5).20 The news compiler’s decision to name the tome after Mercury, associated ironically with speed but also the patron of nimble thieves, further heightens the witty satirist’s scorn. He equates the purchase of Mercurius Gallobelgicus , “like / Mercury in stealing,” with willingly consenting to theft. That association of unreliability would stick with printed news reporting throughout its early history. The earliest surviving English translation of Mercurius Gallobelgicus dates from 1614 and carries news about Dutch and Habsburg interventions in Cleves, though the publication appeared in print six months after the events it describes.21 Given its infrequent publication, it could hardly qualify as “news,” perhaps explaining the staleness of the information Jonson’s and Donne’s aspiring statesmen recite when they try “To say Gallo-Belgicus without book.”22 It took some time to print the news and in the Jacobean period printed news might be blamed for both delays and unreliability. Most English readers in search of something more current than the semi-annual Latin news of Mercurius Gallobelgicus could select from an abundance of quarto pamphlets treating recent events. Typically, over the course of a few sheets, these mass-produced quarto pamphlets treated

19 Joop Koopmans argues that Michael von Isselt, the Dutch exile responsible for Mercurius Gallobelgicus , published this book in Latin to reach an international audience. “Storehouses of News: The Meaning of Early Modern News Periodicals in Western Europe,” in Not Dead Things: The Dissemination of Popular Print in England and Wales, Italy, and the Low Countries, ed. Roeland Harms, Joad Raymond, and Jeroen Salman (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 258. 20 Steven J. Harris traces the growth of the Fuggers’ manuscript. “Networks of Travel, Correspondence, and Exchange,” in The Cambridge History of Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, vol. 3. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 348. 21 A Relation of All Matters Passed, Especially in France and the Low-Countries... Translated According to the Original of Mercurius Gallo-Belgicus (London, 1614), D3 r. 22 “Satire 4,” in The Complete Poems, ed. Robin Robbins (Harlow: Longman, 2008),

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a single event in more detail than a ballad might contain.23 Scores of pamphlets like the Brief relation of what is hapned, with its news of an army’s movements, appeared in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. A pamphlet relating news of a specific event—such as Henry Peacham’s A Most Trve Relation of the Affaires of Cleve and Gvlick, with its praise for Maurits’ heroism, or the anonymous The Trve Description of the Execvtion of Ivstice describing Oldenbarnevelt’s execution—allowed early modern readers quickly to learn something about a single, particularly noteworthy event. A printer might produce several related pamphlets as an event unfolded. As English readers demanded news of the progress of the siege of Ostend—a turning point in England’s assistance to the Dutch, as we saw in the third chapter—Thomas Pavier provided them with four pamphlets on this subject. Across Europe, people turned their attention to the protracted siege. For the correspondents of the wealthy Fugger family, the siege of this critical port had significant ramifications for trade and the political balance of power. One correspondent in Antwerp reported that “Good hopes are entertained of Ostend, because the Marquess Spinola with great assiduity is pushing … But this week as is reported by letters from Bruges, the north-east wind brought a further forty ships with soldiers, victuals and ammunition to Ostend” and its Protestant defenders.24 The popular English audience did not have easy access to private correspondence, but Pavier could lend his pamphlets veracity by advertising on the title page and reiterating at the start of the book that he had “diligently Collected” the news “out of sundry Letters and aduertisements, as haue beene from Zeland, Callice, and other places lately receiued.”25 Pavier also tried to generate some anticipation in his audience. Further Newes builds on his first printed pamphlet, Newes from Ostend of, The Oppugnation, and fierce siege, succinctly reminding his readers of what “hath been declared in the former Booke, Intitled The Oppugnation of Ostend” (A2r). Further generating credibility for the news in his irregular series of pamphlets, Pavier announced on the title page that he “Diligently translated” his accounts of these significant events “out of Dutch into English, according to the Dutch Copie, Printed 23 Raymond proposes a loose definition of “the pamphlet.” Pamphlets, 25. 24 The Fugger News-Letters, trans. Pauline de Chary (London: John Lane, 1924), 243–

4. 25 Further Newes of Ostend. Wherein is declared such accidents as haue happened since the former Edition (London, 1601), A2r.

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at Amsterdam.”26 Series like Pavier’s paved the way for a more regular, periodical reporting of news two decades later.27 Playwrights appropriated the common greeting, “What news,” for dramatic purposes on the early modern stage. In Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money, the Post “brings news” with implications for Pisaro’s trade and Shakespeare makes similar use of “news on the Rialto” in the commercial environment of Venice.28 Shakespeare’s most extensive exploration of the figure of the newsmonger, however, occurs in The Winter’s Tale. The ambiguous Autolycus, “littered under Mercury” the patron of newsmen and thieves (4.3.25), attends a Bohemian festival to profit from the simple shepherds’ desire for news. He hawks suspect luxury commodities as well as printed ballads that catch Mopsa’s fancy.29 Despite her confident declaration that she “love[s] a ballad in print, alife, for then we are sure they are true” (4.4.250–1), she enthusiastically purchases tales of a usurer’s wife who gave birth to money-bags and of a large, singing fish that beached itself on the dubious “Wednesday the fourscore of April” (266).30 Later, Autolycus misses the ineffable joy of Leontes’ reunion with Perdita and must gather the news from gentlemen eyewitnesses. They can provide some of the factual details of the reunion, but must admit that so much “wonder is broken out within this hour that balladmakers” like Autolycus “cannot be able to express it” (5.2.22–4).31 Even though the reported events take place, one dazed courtier reports “This news which is called true is so like an old tale that the verity of it is in strong suspicion” (26–7). After frequently returning to the problems of rumor and the veracity of reports, the play ends with a demonstration of the limitations of news.

26 Newes from Ostend of, The Oppugnation, and fierce siege (London, 1601). 27 Raymond describes John Wolfe’s similar irregular series of news pamphlets about the

progress of the French wars in 1592. Pamphlets, 107. 28 “Merchant of Venice,” 1.3.33. 29 Aaron Kitch, “Bastards and Broadsides in The “Winter’s Tale,” Renaissance Drama

30 (2001), 53. 30 Stephen Wittek places these absurd ballads within the context of the challenging problems of reliability in the early modern “developing idea of news.” The Media Players: Shakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, and the Idea of News (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 49. 31 Kitch contrasts the mediated wonder of this scene with the direct experience of Hermione’s return. “Bastards and Broadsides,” 63.

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As King James charted a course for peace in the midst of the Bohemian tempest, Jonson staged a masque satirizing the crosswinds of England’s emerging news culture. In News from the New World Discovered in the Moon, Jonson imagines the discovery of lunar gallants, the Volatees, and satirizes three professional writers’ attempts to report this news. The Chronicler, devoted to antiquity, fails first. The Printer of news trades barbs with his rival the Factor, who produces a thousand individualized weekly manuscript newsletters. The Printer produces an inexpensive, standardized commodity for a broad public. The Factor creates a more expensive, personalized product for a more elite audience. Knowing the recipients of his letters, the Factor tailors the news for his audience, since he has “my puritan news, my protestant news and my pontifical news” at his fingertips.32 These writers argue over the significance of printed news accounts, with the Factor claiming that “when they are printed they leave to be news” because the printing creates such a delay (50). The indignant Printer responds that “the printing of ’em makes ’em news to a great many” who want more than the inconsequential news gleaned from a letter (52–3). They argue as well over the veracity of their reports. Because they carry the personal touch, the Factors’ newsletters, even “though they be false,” retain the aura of “news still” (51). From the Factor’s perspective, the Printer has no personal reputation at stake in selling news to an anonymous public, allowing him to print fantastic “news, that when a man sends them down to the shires where they are said to be done, were never there to be found” (42–4). Jonson mocks both news retailers, banishing them in the masque proper in favor of the inspired poet and the wise king. Dismissing the frivolous newsmen, who “adventured to tell Your Majesty no news” in the truest sense, the herald announces that the arriving masquers pursue “that excellent likeness of yourself, the Truth” (243–4, 253). News can only ever describe partial, contingent facts of the present; the poet and his king disregard these for a greater truth. Just as the poet offers the public access to a higher truth, so England’s “knowing king,” acting on the arcana imperii, guides his people on the true and proper course of action. In January 1620, with the king’s daughter and son-in-law confronting the Habsburg emperor, James continued to hope that the crisis would not ignite a war. Jonson figures the poet and the king, with their access to a greater truth than the daily 32 “News from the New World Discovered in the Moon,” 36–7. Raymond sees this dispute as debating the best medium for news. Pamphlets, 129.

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news, as transcending the mundane and transitory.33 King James would probably have agreed with his favorite poet in doubting the virtue of a market for news. By December 1620, after Frederick’s defeat, the king would proclaim that “matters of State (which are no Theames, or subjects fit for vulgar persons, or common meetings)” must not be handled “by Penne, or Speech.”34 The king had his own reasons for distrusting the spread of news to the English public.

Translated Out of the Netherlands: Dutch Periodical News and the English Public Sphere The king’s declaration coincided with the introduction of a new Dutch commodity in English markets: the coranto of news. Andrew Pettegree documents the publication of the first printed, serial news in Strasbourg in 1605.35 Combining the credibility of political and trade information contained in the newsletters of someone like Jonson’s Factor, moving along the postal routes of Europe, with the inexpensive, speedy duplication of print like the masque’s Printer, these news sheets created an immediate sensation in Europe. In Amsterdam, the first printed corantos appeared in 1618. Joris Veseler printed the Courante uyt Italien, Duytslandt, &c., for Caspar van Hilten. Broer Jansz followed, or just possibly, as Arthur der Weduwen shows, preceded Veseler with his own coranto, Tijdinghen uyt verscheyde Quartieren in 1619.36 They initially printed Dutch corantos on a single folio sheet with two dense columns of blackletter news. Headings in italic indicated when and where each item in their newspaper originated. The first report would come from farthest away, 33 Jane Rickard notes that James himself rejected claims that monarchs accessed divine

truth in A Meditiation upon St. Matthew, a text he completed a few days before the staging of Jonson’s masque. Writing the Monarch in Jacobean England: Jonson, Donne, Shakespeare and the Works of King James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 105. Martin Butler argues that the masque compliments the king who transcends “the newsmongers’ triviality.” The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 249. 34 Stuart Royal Proclamations, ed. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 495–6. 35 The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know about Itself (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 182. 36 Dutch and Flemish Newspapers of the Seventeenth Century, 1618–1700 (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 260.

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Italy.37 Thus the first surviving coranto begins with the dateline, “VVt Venetien den 1. Iunij, Anno 1618 [From Venice, the first of June, 1618]” and reports trade news, followed by the dateline “VVt Prage, den 2. dito [From Prague, the 2nd, ditto]” and the news “Die Staten zijn eensdeels van hier vertrocken van weghen het Pincxterfeest … ondertusschen Gouverneren die Heeren defensoren alhier [The Estates {of Bohemia} have partially departed away from here at Pentecost … meanwhile the Lords govern and defend this place].38 As the crisis in Bohemia unfolded, the Dutch coranto publishers kept themselves busy. When the English did not immediately follow suit, enterprising Dutch printers created and then tried to satisfy an English audience for their new product. At first, one Dutch printer sought to satisfy both his Dutch market and the untapped market in England. As Joris Veseler printed Dutch corantos for sale in Amsterdam and elsewhere in the Dutch Republic, he began to print an English translation of his news for export to London. Veseler entered into a partnership with Pieter van den Keere—who had fled Antwerp for London in the 1580s before immigrating to Amsterdam at the turn of the century—for the production of English translations of his corantos.39 Their product for English readers, Corrant out of Italy, Germany, &c., closely resembled the Dutch original, with news printed in dense roman columns on both sides of a folio with italic datelines for each news report. The earliest surviving copy of this English coranto, hastily translated and “Imprinted at Amsterdam by George Vesler,” carries news from the beginning of November and lists its publication date as “The 2 of Decemember [sic].”40 Carrying news from Vienna, Prague and other Bohemian locations, the Upper Palatinate, and Cologne, the

37 Paul Arblaster identifies Antwerp, where Verhoeven produced his important newspapers, as the hinge for the postal routes of central and Western Europe. “Posts, Newsletters, Newspapers: England in a European System of Communications,” in News Networks in Seventeenth-Century Britain and Europe, ed. Joad Raymond (London: Routledge, 2006), 21. 38 I translate from the facsimile in Dahl, Dutch Corantos, 1618–1650: A Bibliography

(The Hague: Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 1946), 1r. 39 Goran Leth argues that van den Keere’s flight from the religious persecution of Antwerp to the safety of London may account for the Protestant bias of his corantos. “A Protestant Public Sphere: The Early European Newspaper Press,” Studies in Newspaper and Periodical History 1 (1993), 71–2. 40 The new tydings out of Italie are not yet com (Amsterdam, 1620), 1v.

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coranto includes the first confused reports of the Battle of White Mountain. Among rumors of preparation for the battle or uncertainty about its outcome, the Prague correspondent can confirm the battle but leaves out, or perhaps suppresses, Frederick’s defeat: “Heere is tydings, that between the King of Bohemia & the Emperours folke hath beene a great Battel about Prage, but because there is different writing & speaking thereuppon, so cannot for this time any certainety thereof be written but must wayte for the next Post” (1 r). Such inconclusive tidings, with the promise that the next issue will include additional news, characterize many of Veseler’s corantos and help to create anticipation among readers who might then purchase the next coranto. In the summer of 1621, Broer Jansz briefly offered a competing product for the English market.41 Displeased with the Dutch sale of English corantos, King James asked the States General to prohibit their export.42 Although they did not immediately appear with regularity, English corantos printed in the Dutch Republic for sale in England did appear with some frequency.43 Experienced English printers quickly followed the Dutch printers’ lead. One of these, Thomas Archer, fell afoul of the king’s Christmas Eve proclamation against “vulgar persons” meddling in arcana imperii.44 The king’s petition to the States General to prohibit the export of corantos may have had the unintended consequence of spurring on English printers. Despite a royal proclamation in July reiterating the king’s demand that the vulgar public refrain from “intermedl[ing] by pen or speech with causes of state, and secrets of government, either at home or abroad,” Nathaniel Butter, in partnership with Archer and Nicholas Bourne, began to print Corante, or, Newes from Italy, Germany,

41 Folke Dahl traces Janszoon’s eight exported English corantos. A Bibliography of English Corantos and Periodical News Books, 1620–1642 (London: Bibliographic Society, 1952), 42. 42 Boys points out that this proclamation did not succeed. London’s News, 68. 43 C. John Sommerville discusses some of the obstacles to maintaining periodicity. The

News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 23. 44 Joad Raymond posits that Archer produced embellished translations of Dutch originals. “News Writing,” in Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1500–1640, ed. Andrew Hadfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 408.

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Hungarie periodically from September 1621.45 Like their Dutch inspiration, the English coranto of Butter and his colleagues filled both sides of a folio with two columns of densely printed news with italic datelines. In order to print inexpensive news for the vulgar, Butter’s syndicate limited itself to foreign news.46 As with their Dutch forebears, the English corantos generally began with slightly older Italian reports, gleaned from the southern end of the European postal route, followed by increasingly more recent news from increasingly northern locales. The Dutch had an additional hand in the development of English news because a Dutch refugee, Mathew de Quester, held the office of English “Post-Master for forraine Seruice,” charged with overseeing the orderly administration of letters in and out of England.47 Because Butter’s syndicate could print their English coranto locally, it cost less than its Dutch rival and eventually Veseler stopped exporting his coranto to England.48 Although they initially modeled the appearance of their folio coranto on a Dutch progenitor, these English printers soon reverted to the quarto format familiar to their English readership. The Dutch provided the inspiration and impetus for the development of these English corantos, an important stage in the development of an English culture of periodical news. The Dutch provided England not only with its first coranto and the model for corantos printed in England but also with much of the news

45 Pettegree argues that the state sanctioned this monopoly as a way of maintaining control over this new product. Invention of News, 195. Raymond notes that the syndicate included Bartholomew Downes and William Sheffard and lasted until 1624. Pamphlets, 132–3. 46 Sabrina Baron argues that writers of news must have agreed informally to this convention, since no explicit prohibition kept the corantos or manuscript newsletter writers from publishing English news. “The Guises of Dissemination in Early Seventeenth-Century England: News in Manuscript and Print,” in The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe, ed. Brendan Dooley and Sabrina A. Baron (New York: Routledge, 2001), 46. As Joseph Frank argues, if no formal restraint existed, the printers of corantos may simply have feared retribution, since English news in the corantos “remained conspicuous by its absence.” The Beginnings of the English Newspaper, 1620–1660 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 9. Arblaster notes that Verhoeven and other newsmen of the Habsburg Netherlands pieced together information that allowed them to print news out of England. “Posts,” 25. 47 Howard Robinson discusses de Quester’s office and the post’s impact on news circulation. The British Post Office: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), 24. 48 Boys, London’s News, 69.

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content that the English public demanded. English printers had drawn on material “translated out of low Dutch” for decades. A brief relation of what is hapned, for instance, translates and reorganizes the material of a Dutch original, Walvisch van Berckhey. The English pamphlet translates the Dutch original, including reports of the admiral’s troops “ombrengen alle die sy achten van de gereformeerd Religie [murdering all that they considered to be of the reformed religion].”49 It recycles the same, detailed maps and image of the stranded whale found on the title page of Walvisch van Berckhey and includes translations of many of the marginal notes from the Dutch original. The English title page even advertises its dependence on the Dutch original, declaring that its English printers “Faithfully translated” it “out of the Dutch coppy Printed at Roterdam.” The Dutch took an interest in English news as well. One Dutch printer, for instance, produced a faithful translation of an English account of the Gunpowder conspirators’ executions. This Dutch pamphlet advertises itself as “Eerst ghedruckt in Engelsch [first printed in English],” and “nu ghetrouwelijck … overgheset in onse Nederduytsche sprake [now faithfully translated into our Dutch tongue].”50 It reproduces both the English author’s gleeful description of Guy Fawkes’ execution, “tot groote vreucht van de aensienders dat het Landt was ghesuyvert van soo boose eene schelmerye [to the great delight of the spectators that the country was purged of so wicked a villainy]” (B1r) as well as its lengthy, concluding moral.51 For the English public, however, the words “translated out of low Dutch” may have served as a kind of brand, a signal of quality. Pavier’s reporting on the progress of affairs at Ostend signaled its Dutch origins, as did news of Oldenbarnevelt and scores of other news pamphlets in the period. A few in England may have sneered at the Dutch origins of England’s incipient newspaper culture. Observing that England’s vulgar readers took no notice of the proclamations against printing arcana imperii, Chamberlain complained that they “print euery weeke (at least) corantas w[i]th all manner of newes and as strange stuffe as any we have from Amsterdam”52 Butter and his compatriots, however, 49 Walvisch van Berckhey ([Rotterdam], 1599), B3r. 50 Een cort Discours op het Vonnisse ende de Executie van de acht Verraders, (n.p. 1606),

t.p. 51 Compare this author’s Dutch to the English of A True Report of the Imprisonment, the Arraignment, and Execution of the late Traytors (London, 1606), C3v. 52 SP 14/122/60, 4 August 1621.

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proudly professed their debt to the Dutch Republic for the news they translated, usually signaling at the bottom of the folio or on the title page of the quarto that they gathered their news “Out of the Low Dutch Coppy.” The Dutch helped to create an English market for corantos, helped to supply that demand, and then temporarily ceded the marketplace to an English syndicate determined to stoke the fires of public demand for news. In 1621, as Dutch and English printers brought corantos to the marketplace, the English increasingly turned their attention to the Bohemian crisis. After a decade of searching for ways to rule without Parliament and seven years without consulting them at all, James met with Parliament to demand supply to pay for English forces.53 Concerned that the news from White Mountain and its aftermath might negatively influence Parliament and the wider public, the crown issued declarations to restrict public comment on matters of state. The king sought to interdict the importation of news in English, printed in the United Provinces. At this point, James’s government also considered a proposal from the entrepreneurial letter writer, John Pory, and his associate Thomas Locke—who had informed Dudley Carleton of Barnavelt ’s staging—to establish an official organ of news. Gesturing to the serial news publications appearing across Europe and lamenting that England had no similar service, Pory and Locke explain that an official monopoly would allow the king to make his will known to his people and would counteract critics “in matter of religio[n] or obedience (w[hi]ch comonly growes vp rumors amongst the vulgar) to draw them in by the same lynes that drewe the[m] out.”54 Although the crown occasionally provided printed explanations of its policy, it did not grant Pory’s request. In spite of the king’s refusal to acknowledge an increasing English interest in discussing the news of the day, an English public sphere did exist and placed the state of the nation on its agenda. Access to news contributes to the formation of the early modern public sphere. Jürgen Habermas posits a public sphere that requires its 53 Thrush traces the popular elation that erupted when the king called a Parliament in 1621. “Personal Rule,” 99. Pursell treats Frederick’s unrealistic hopes as the pacifist king and the belligerent Parliament pulled in competing directions. Winter King, 139. 54 SP 14/124/113. Michael Frearson places this 1621 proposal in his detailed timeline of the development of London newspapers. “London Corantos in the 1620s,” Studies in Newspaper and Periodical History 1 (1993), 13.

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bourgeois participants to have access to news and information. When “private people come together as public” in order to “engage [public authorities] in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor,” they participate in a public sphere.55 A revolution in the circulation of information, beginning with important networks of correspondence among merchants but eventually broadening to include the printed dissemination of news to anonymous purchasers of corantos and other news products so that “the regular supply of news became public,” made it possible for individuals to participate in the discursive arena of debate and contest (16).56 For Habermas, the public sphere reaches its fulfillment in the eighteenth-century coffeehouse in which men gathered to discuss and criticize the news of the day.57 The processes that create the public sphere moved gradually, so that no single incident marks its emergence, and Habermas concedes that the public sphere at its height depended upon developments in the previous century in England. The English hunger for corantos produced in Amsterdam and then London created a public sphere in early modern England. Steven Pincus locates its emergence in the Restoration, while David Norbrook argues for an even earlier date, following the dissolution of the censorship apparatus in the 1640s.58 For Cyndia Clegg, the public sphere emerges in the early 1620s as the demand for news overcomes the Jacobean regime’s occasional efforts to regulate the publication of such texts.59 Alexandra

55 Habermas, Structural Transformation, 27. 56 For Habermas, improvements in the post that more quickly linked people living far

apart had a significant impact on the popular conception of national identity. Structural Transformation, 17. Anderson makes an analogous argument. Imagined Communities, 34–5. 57 For Habermas, the concept of “criticism” in the coffee house is a hallmark of the public sphere. Structural Transformation, 32. Pory and Locke seem to acknowledge a public sphere when they claim that a news service would draw the phlegmatic English “by degrees to the right rules of reason.” SP 14/124/113. 58 Steven Pincus, “‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture,” Journal of Modern History 67 (1995), 811. David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 13, 118. 59 Press Censorship in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 162.

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Halasz finds hints of the public sphere even earlier, in pamphlet controversies of the late sixteenth century.60 Having found that in moments of crisis, elements at the political center, then their clients, and finally others not connected to the center would appeal to a public and try to marshal its opinion through a wide variety of discursive media, Peter Lake and Steve Pincus postulate that the public sphere would open temporarily and flourish intermittently in the century after the English Reformation.61 They argue that at times of crisis, official and unofficial parties appealed to “an adjudicating public or publics able to judge or determine the truth of the matter in hand on the basis of the argument placed before them” (6). Jason Peacey argues that strict deference to the Habermasian model of the public sphere neglects the ways the early modern public used a variety of media to participate in the discursive arena.62 The exchange of letters, both of the newsletters of the sort distributed by Pory, Chamberlain, and John Meade, and of those exchanged in the humanist Republic of Letters, further suggests that an early modern public sphere had emerged.63 Pory’s proposal for the crown to support a weekly news paper imagines a public sphere in which “the ploughma[n] and artisan can talk of thes matters and make both benefitt and recreate by knowing the[m].”64 King James might have preferred that his English subjects stop purchasing this popular Dutch commodity and talking about their nation’s interests, but Pory, Butter, and others could see that an English public demanded this news.

60 Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 163. 61 Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 6. 62 Print and Public Politics, 13. Peter Lake reads the sixteenth-century “outpouring of

polemical divinity” as appealing to a public sphere. “The Theatre,” 180. 63 David Randall, “Joseph Mead, Novellante: News, Sociability, and Credibility in Early Stuart England,” JBS 45 (2006), 311–2. Harris finds in the humanist “Republic of Letters” an analogue to the Habermasian public sphere. “Networks,” 348. 64 SP 14/124/113.

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Debating and Dividing Trade: Understanding Dutch Violence in the English Public Sphere Various interests and agendas intersected in this new public sphere as people sought to shape its attitudes and opinions. Although the corantos sometimes adopted a plain veneer of factual reporting, they tended to present the news to the best advantage of particular interests. In January 1620, for instance, Abraham Verhoeven secured a monopoly for his most successful news periodical, Antwerp’s Nieuwe Tijdinghen, by promising Antwerp’s authorities that he would promote the imperial cause in the coming conflict with Protestant forces.65 His Cort Verhael had already focused on circulating embarrassing news of the chaos in the United Provinces as Maurits and Oldenbarnevelt clashed. Similarly, the coranto publishers in Amsterdam promoted the victories of the Protestant cause and treated Frederick V sympathetically when the disgraced Winter King and his English wife took up residence in the Hague.66 Describing the pitiful flight of the pregnant Elizabeth from White Mountain, for instance, a relieved Veseler adds a report from Cologne that “Op den 16. Januarii die Coninginne van Bohemen tot Berlin van een Jonge Sone bevallen [On 16 January in Berlin, the Queen of Bohemia has given birth to a young son].”67 Because publishers of English corantos did not report domestic news, the English public lacked access to news available in the original Dutch corantos and omitted in English translations. Thus, Dutch readers could learn of Francis Bacon’s scandalous fall, “ghevangen ende inden Tour ghestelt [arrested and sent to the Tower],” or could hope that news “verhoort uyt Enghelandt [heard from England]” that “syne Majesteyt metten eersten groote hulpe senden sal tot assistentie van Coninck Fredericus om Spinola uytte Pfalts te helpen [his Majesty shall measure out the first relief to send to the assistance of King Frederick in order to help remove Spinola from the Palatinate],” would prove true.68 Newspapers appeared at the start of the seventeenth century in several European urban 65 Pettegree, Invention of News, 191. Arblaster observes this bias throughout the Habsburg Netherlands. “Posts,” 28. 66 Leth argues that these Dutch printers shaped reports to put the Protestant cause in the best light. “Protestant Public Sphere,” 75. 67 Translated from the facsimile in Dahl, Dutch Corantos, 15v. 68 Translated from facsimiles of Broer Jansz’s coranto in Dahl, Dutch Corantos, 77v,

68v.

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centers, but the papers and corantos rarely had competition that might keep their reporting honest. A skeptical public might balk at the biases evident in serial news, but they often had no access to other perspectives in printed news. Readers might use the nascent periodical press as one source among many to acquire and compare information and in doing so they took steps into the public sphere. As news related to the United Provinces circulated in this arena, growing fissures in the English public’s attitudes toward the Dutch, their fellow Protestants and trade rivals, offered various parties an opportunity to make appeals to influence that public. The English wanted news on many subjects, not just datelines from the Palatinate, and as different interests appealed to the English public, they brought to light the strains of aligning English national interests with the international Protestant cause. As the formal end to the Twelve Years Truce approached in 1621, the public began to speculate whether England would assist the Dutch in renewed hostilities with Spain. Even the most zealous English writers acknowledged that England and the Dutch Republic now had competing interests and had to argue that English support for the Dutch in a war against Spain served England’s national interest. Thomas Scott, who wrote one of the most controversial texts of the period, struck a balance between a national English interest and a more generally Protestant one.69 Appearing in eight editions in 1620, before King James finally called Parliament to address the Bohemian crisis, Scott’s Vox Populi, Or Newes from Spayne—appropriating the popular voice and gesturing in its subtitle to the familiar quarto news pamphlet—allows English readers to imagine overhearing Spain’s hated ambassador, Gondomar, on his return to Madrid. Gondomar’s report of “what good for the Catholike cause [he] had effected in England” occupies most of the pamphlet.70 Speculating on the king’s reluctance to call Parliament at this critical time, Scott places the blame at Gondomar’s feet. The self-aggrandizing ambassador claims that through his machinations “the King will never indure Parliament againe, but rather suffer absolute want then receive conditionall relief from his subjects” (B3r). Scott presents King James in a respectful light, blaming England’s foreign policy mistakes on Gondomar’s manipulation of the king. Recognizing

69 Clegg traces the larger campaign of Scott and others to taint English dealings with Spain. Press Censorship, 173. 70 Vox Populi Or Newes from Spayne ([London], 1620), A2r.

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an increasing rivalry with the Dutch in trade matters, Scott imagines Gondomar sowing economic discord and “lay[ing] all upon the Hollander” in order to divide England and their Dutch friends, “weaken their amities & beget suspition betwixt them” (C4r). Throughout this period, Scott and other newsmakers would urge the English public to look favorably on their strong Dutch neighbors, though they appealed to common Protestant cause with less frequency. The rise of the Dutch commercial empire made it increasingly difficult for Scott and others to use shared interest with the Dutch in appeals to the English public. Over the first decades of the seventeenth century, the Dutch successfully entered and dominated the trade to the East Indies.71 The Dutch VOC and England’s East India Company (EIC) competed to control the trade of spices in the Maluku Islands, particularly on Ternate and Tidore and among the Banda islands, the world’s exclusive source of mace and nutmeg.72 The English rejected Dutch claims to trade monopolies in the region, requiring a series of meetings in London and the Hague to negotiate these differences. Oldenbarnevelt sent Hugo Grotius, who had defended Dutch trade practices in Mare Liberum, to lead discussions on the East India trade while discussing the Remonstrants with King James. Where Grotius had once argued that “the liberty of trading is agreeable to the primary law of nations which hath a natural and perpetual cause and therefore cannot be taken away,” he now demanded that the EIC respect the VOC’s exclusive treaties with the Bandanese.73 In the summer of 1619, King James suppressed Mare Clausum, John Selden’s rebuttal to Mare Liberum, because it would undo the progress of the

71 Jonathan Israel describes the forces that created the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) and led to its initial success. Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 69–73. Anthony Milton sees the EIC as responding to an English crisis in confidence. “Marketing a Massacre: Amboyna, the East India Company, and the Public Sphere in Early Stuart England,” in The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 172. 72 Adam Clulow shows that initial weaknesses in the EIC compared to the VOC led the Dutch to assume superiority in this region and to resent English imitation. Amboina, 1623: Fear and Conspiracy on the Edge of Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 99. 73 I cite Hakluyt’s translation, the basis of The Free Sea, ed. David Armitage (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), 51.

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negotiations.74 Eventually, England and the Dutch Republic agreed to share the costs and profits of trade in the East Indies.75 The English public took notice of the progress of the meetings of the VOC and EIC. In his letter complaining about the dearth of Bohemian news, for instance, Chamberlain informed Ambassador Carleton that he had tried to shame Maurice Abbot, the EIC’s director, for not rewarding the English mediator for assistance in settling the dispute. Although the English remained interested in matters in Prague, they also paid careful attention to their Protestant rivals’ actions on Puloroon on the other side of the globe. The Dutch had provided the English with models for reading the news. Now the Dutch would become the news. Dutch aggression in the trade of the East Indies strained the sympathy of the English public for their allied rivals. The VOC demanded English payment for fortifications they never built and in retaliation the English seized Dutch cargos in English ports. Responding to these renewed tensions, the Dutch ambassador in England, Noel de Caron, urged the States General to moderate its demands because “werden de subjecten van den Coninck door desen Oostindischen handel alsoo gheirriteert ende vergramt dat sy onse partijen soo benyden [through this East Indies trade, the subjects of the king were so irritated and angered that they envy our party].”76 Caron expressed confidence that the king would never entirely abandon the United Provinces, despite the fact that Gondomar “hier soo veel credijts heeft [has so much credit here],” but he also regretted that instead of the “duysent benedictien toewenschent [thousand benedictions wished upon]” the Dutch in the past, “nu hoore ick dagelicx dat sy het contrarie door de Oost-indische Actien [now I daily hear that they wish the contrary through the East Indies actions]” (5–6). Shortly after the printing of Caron’s letter to the States General, news that the Dutch had shed English blood in the Banda Islands reached the English public in a series of specially printed corantos. Only a few months before, the English started purchasing Dutch corantos in English

74 Robert Batchelor discusses the inconvenient timing of Selden’s treatise. London: The Selden Map and the Making of a Global City, 1549–1689 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 105. 75 Clulow explores the context and terms of the 1619 Treaty of Defense. Amboina, 1623, 108. 76 Nievs uyt Engelandt gheschreven door den Heer Ambassadeur (n.p., 1621), 4.

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translations. Now, as they sought out Butter and Archer’s corantos translated “out of the Low Dutch” and printed in England, they found two new corantos for sale. Unlike the European news of those other corantos, these advertised A Courante of Newes from the East India. Imitating the new commodity, these pamphlets formed part of a subtle EIC campaign to influence the English public after aggressive Dutch actions on Run in the Banda Islands. Two years later, in different circumstances, the EIC would make a similar appeal after events on Ambon.

News of a Massacre: Manipulating the English and Dutch Publics The EIC’s narrative of Dutch actions on Ambon would so successfully shape the English public’s attitudes that for decades the word “Amboyna” would serve as shorthand for the ruthless Dutch pursuit of commercial dominance. In February 1623, on the small island of Ambon, Herman van Speult and an anxious group of Dutch merchants and soldiers accused a small group of English traders and Japanese mercenaries of plotting to overthrow the Dutch factory and its profitable trade in cloves. As Adam Clulow shows, Dutch resentment of their “feigned friends” from England created a suspicious “fear loop” that finally led to an overreaction.77 Using a form of water boarding, the Dutch tortured the English and coerced confessions from them, then executed ten of the English merchants.78 News of this event arrived in England in early June 1624, just as King James reluctantly accepted the urging of his belligerent Parliament to provide English troops to assist the Dutch against the Habsburgs. Writing to Carleton about the power of the “fabula vulgi and the talke of the towne,” Chamberlain worried that English excitement following news of the “new forces that are to be raised to assist the Low-countries,” would now quiet down after the arrival of “newes how barbarously the 77 Amboina, 1623, 113. Clulow offers important evidence of the many interests— Dutch, English, Japanese, Portuguese, and enslaved Asians—contributing to this incident (19). 78 Alison Games discusses the incident in detail. Inventing the English Massacre:

Amboyna in History and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 44–75. Batchelor suggests that these events accelerated the EIC’s retreat from its outposts in the islands. London, 121. Clulow shows that the form of the trial itself satisfied no one: it seemed a travesty to the English and to Dutch superiors it appeared disorderly and reached too harsh an outcome. Amboina, 1623, 121.

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Hollanders haue dealt w[i]th our men in the East Indies... vpon colour of a plot they had to surprise their fort of Amboyna.”79 The news temporarily delayed England’s entry into the Treaty of London with the Dutch.80 That summer, a new contest to shape English public opinion began. As Chamberlain advised his friend in the Hague, this news cost the Dutch some English good will. In July a Dutch pamphlet, responding to rumors of the VOC’s wicked actions in Amboyna, sought to describe the conspiracy of Gabriel Towerson, the English leader in Amboyna, who had persuaded his fellows and their Japanese friends “dat hy wech ende middel wiste om sijn seluen Meester te maecken van het Casteel van Amboyna [that he knew a way and had the means to make himself Master of the Castle of Amboyna].”81 The text takes the form of a letter from a Dutch merchant to an English friend, explaining that he has seen VOC accounts of those events and digests them for his friend for better understanding and in hopes that he will persuade his English countrymen of the propriety of the Dutch handling of events on the distant island. He explains, for instance, that the Dutch merchants could not leave the investigation up to English merchants on the island, since every one of them “waren selfs vande Coniuratie ende Complices vant faict [were themselves of the plot and accomplices in the deed]” (13). Responding to English complaints he has heard that according to the 1619 treaty, a panel jointly composed of English and Dutch judges in Jakarta should have tried the EIC’s merchants, the Dutch author says that he has “by der handt ghenomen het General Tractaet [taken the Treaty in hand]” and carefully studied it “om miin seluen daer van wel te onderrichten [in order better to apprise my self about it]” (15). He invites the public to read the treaties for themselves and concludes that “ick bekenne (gheliick ick meen, dat yeder verstandich ende niet twist-gierighe Man sal moeten bekennen) dat int selue Tractaet nochte Ampliatie by my niet en can ghesien worden eenich Artikel ofte Woort [I confess (as I believe that every sensible and not factious person will have to admit) that in the same Treaty, nor in its expansion, can be seen by me any article or word]” requiring such a court (15). Seizing the initiative, the Dutch aggressively responded to

79 SP 14/167/16, 5 June 1624. 80 Cogswell discusses the bad timing of the news. Blessed Revolution, 274. 81 Waerachtich Verhael Vande Tidinghen ghecomen wt de Oost-Indien (n.p., 1624), 9.

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public outcry with a justification of their handling of events. In response, the English East India Company appealed to the public to consider the absurdity of this Dutch version. The EIC wisely entered the public arena only after the Dutch had presented their explanation to the public. The EIC, which had faced criticism in the meetings of Parliament early in 1624, proceeded cautiously to ask for the king’s assistance in demanding redress from the Dutch.82 King James pressured the States General to suppress the VOC’s justification.83 A few weeks before Parliament would meet again in November, the EIC printed its rebuttal, an even more complex appeal to the public than they had made in 1622. Their pamphlet, A Trve Relation of the Vniust Crvell, and Barbarovs Proceedings against the English at Amboyna, combined three main texts, as well as an impassioned paratext, all designed to influence discussions of the Dutch in the English public sphere. The pamphlet’s title page makes clear how the EIC expected the public to read the three documents printed together. Following the Trve Relation readers would then find Also, the copie of a Pamphlet, set forth first in Dutch and then in English, by some Neatherlander; falsely entituled, A Trve Declaration of the Newes that came out of the East Indies . The title page then lists the third part of the document, Together with an Answer to the same Pamphlet. Perhaps taking a cue from Verhoeven’s popular news corantos, the EIC attached a sensational woodcut depicting the Dutch cruelties to its pamphlet (Fig. 5.2). Finally, the title page indicates that the EIC published its response “by Authoritie.” Responding to the Dutch attempt to sustain the English public’s sympathy for allied action against the Habsburgs, the English East India Company made its case to the public and asked whether the nation’s interests suffer in tolerating Dutch hostilities in the pursuit of this profitable trade. This complex text assumes the possibility of making a rational appeal in England’s public sphere. The Trve Relation assembles eyewitness accounts in order to present a plain narrative of the events on Amboyna. It sets the scene, tracing the history of English and Dutch actions in 82 Milton argues that the EIC had learned from their mistakes in the appeals following events on Run. “Marketing,” 175. 83 The Dutch Placcaet De Staten Generael der Vereenichde Nederlanden (The Hague, 1624) called in “seecker Boucxken geintituleert Waerachtich verhael tijdinghe aengaende de Conspiratie ontdeckt inde Eylanden van Amboynen [certain books entitled True Narrative of News concerning the Conspiracy Discovered in the Islands of Amboyna].”

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Fig. 5.2 Woodcut from A Trve Relation of the Vnivst, Crvell, and Barbarovs Proceedings against the English at Amboyna. Image used by permission of the Newberry Library, Chicago

the Indies up to 1619, familiarizing readers with the location of the island, and describing the situation on Amboyna before the ugly events. The small handful of unsuspecting English merchants there counted on their alliance with the Dutch for protection, “holding themselues safe, as well in respect of the ancient bonds of amity between both nations, as

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of the strict coniunction made by the late Treaty before mentioned.”84 The author then describes the series of events that led to the murder of ten English merchants, who “dyed not traytors, but so many Innocents, meerely murthered by the Hollanders” (27). Despite the gruesome tortures the author describes, he proceeds dispassionately through the narrative. He then appeals to the English public to use its reasoning powers. Having narrated the events, “the bare and naked narration of the progresse and passage of this action, as it is taken out of the depositions of six seueral English Factors” who survived the ordeal, he proceeds to summarize and evaluate the evidence that the Dutch acted unjustly (33). Pointing out that the Dutch version of events relies on confessions of men suffering heinous tortures, the English author notes a number of inconsistencies and asks his English readers “to recollect and recall vnto this place, as it were vnto one summe and totall, certain circumstances dispersed in seuerall parts of this narration: whereby as well the innocencie of the English, as the vnlawfull proceedings against them, may be manifested” (33–4). Then the author asks his English audience to conclude that the English merchants would not involve themselves in a pointless scheme. He asks that “it be considered, how impossible it was for the English to atchieue this pretended enterprise” when they had only a few weapons against hundreds of armed Dutch marines (34). If the English public will sift through this evidence, the EIC author asserts, it must conclude that the VOC has offered “a meere tale” in their narrative, intended to “make the world beleeue that the ground of this barbarous and tyrannous proceeding was a true crime, and not the vnsatiable couetousness of the Hollanders” (38). The Trve Relation appeals to the English public to use its reason to evaluate the evidence. The EIC’s decision to translate and publicize the Dutch narrative of events appears to run the risk of undermining the case presented in the first part of its pamphlet. The English translation of Waerachtich Verhael as A Trve Declaration of the News that came out of the East Indies includes the Dutch writer’s appeal that “all true well willers (of our Countrey,) may be no otherwise thought of than we deserue” and replicates the Dutch original’s invitations to consider, sift, and evaluate evidence such as

84 A Trve Relation of the Vnivst, Crvell, and Barbarovs Proceedings against the English at Amboyna (London, 1624), 3.

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the language of the 1619 treaty.85 The Dutch writer exhorts his English correspondent to take “this information” and “make such vse, as to you shall seeme good, in any place where you come, both for refutation of any thing already reported contrary thereunto, and for preuention of any further false rumors” (20). The EIC’s English translation of the original seems to publicize an alternate explanation of Dutch actions. At the same time, the Dutch pamphlet justifies the Dutch response by disparaging the English system of justice. The Dutch author devotes a significant portion of his text to comparing the relative justice of English “pressing” a criminal defendant who refuses to participate in a trial, “one of the most sharpe and seuere kindes of death” (16), with the judicial use of torture, permitted in the Dutch Republic and elsewhere in Europe. A reasonable person must conclude that the water torture, or the threat of torture, that elicited confessions from all of the English merchants “is to bee iudged farre lesse, than that of pressing” as it is used in England (17).86 Such arguments might have satisfied Dutch readers, but the EIC calculated that Dutch denigration of England’s unique national system of justice would further enflame the English public. The third part of the EIC pamphlet reveals the increasing sophistication of the Company’s appeal to the public. In the EIC’s translation of the VOC’s Trve Declaration, printed capital letters, beginning at “A” and running to “S,” appear sequentially in the margins. Sometimes these letters appear in clusters and sometimes several pages separate them. Opening the final document in the pamphlet, The Answer vnto the Dvtch Pamphlet, the author dismisses the red herrings introduced in the Trve Declaration, “vsed by the [VOC] Author to supply the want of probabilities in the process it selfe.”87 Because “it will not be amisse to examine the seuerall circumstances” alleged in the Dutch version of events, this EIC author will pursue the logical gaps in the Dutch pamphlet. The author then proceeds to address these weaknesses, beginning each of his answers with a marginal capital letter, from “A” through “S,” keyed to the set of printed marginalia in the Trve Declaration. These animadversions, with the English author confronting the assertions of the Dutch author and 85 A Trve Declaration of the News (London, 1624), F3v. 86 As Clulow notes, the Dutch considered this torture permissible, but the failure of

VOC legal officer Isaaq de Bruyn to confirm the resulting confessions undermined their validity. Amboina, 1623, 127. 87 The Answer vnto the Dvtch Pamphlet (London, 1624), 2.

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then showing the faulty conclusions the Dutch author draws, make visually clear that the authors of the EIC pamphlet expected their readers to turn pages back and forth and then make up their own minds. In one example, the Dutch author had asserted that the written English confessions made no mention of torture. In the Trve Declaration, a large “R” hovers in the margin next to the assertion. In the EIC’s Answer, next to a large “R” in the margin, the author addresses that portion of the Dutch justification for torture. The English author then asks, “But suppose the acts make no mention of them; is it any maruell that the Authors of this murtherous and tyrannous processe, being themselues the persons that also formed the acts, would omit those things that made against them?” (27). The EIC cannot personally lobby every Englishman, reading suspect passages to individuals and gauging reactions, so this strategy allows the author to make his argument carefully to the large, anonymous English public. In each instance, the English author asks the English public to employ its rational faculties to “consider” or “suppose” or otherwise evaluate and sift the competing narratives that the East India Company has conveniently assembled for public consideration. The EIC takes the risk of presenting the Dutch explanation of events in order to counter its appeals in the English public sphere. The English EIC articulates this strategy in a lengthy preface to English readers. Explaining the belated entry into a public debate, the EIC’s author admits that his audience may find it strange that the pamphlet “cometh now at last to the Presse and was not either sooner published, or altogether suppressed” (A1r). The rest of the prefatory material implies that the EIC had turned to the English public to make its case after the crown did not address its complaints. While maintaining the stance that the EIC had no interest in straining diplomatic relations between England and the United Provinces, the author assures his readers that the EIC appealed to the King and the Privy Council “priuately in writing, to the end that necessary relief and reparation might bee obtained without publishing any thing to the world in print” (A2r). The VOC had taken advantage of the EIC’s discretion, publishing the Dutch version of events and translating the text into English. The VOC’s appeal not only insulted the EIC’s merchants, but also, more significantly affronted “the English Nation, and the laws and justice of the same” (A2v). As a result, the EIC must reluctantly “haue recourse to the Presse” to clear its reputation and “acquaint the world with the naked truth of this cause” (A2v–A3r). Maintaining a distinction between the “Dutch East-India Company, or their

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seruants in the Indies” and the “Genius of their Nation,” the admirable and well-meaning people of the Dutch Republic, the author blames the greedy VOC villains responsible for the “incredible outrages against their neerest allies and best-deseruing friends” (A4v). With that, the author presents his audience with the three tracts, offering them the opportunity to read and decide for themselves. The English East India Company’s public relations campaign continued, pursuing many avenues in an effort to saturate the public sphere with a version of events that would gain English sympathy for the Company’s efforts in the East Indies. The EIC printed two thousand copies of A Trve Relation, emphasizing the need to appeal as broadly as possible, regardless of the cost of such an unusually large run.88 They translated the Trve Relation into Dutch and circulated it in the United Provinces, once again demonstrating that the English public sphere could take its cues from Dutch forms. This pamphlet translates the content and reproduces the form of the EIC’s pamphlet. On its final page, it takes note of subsequent efforts “te verexcuseren hare Officieren tot Amboyna [to make excuse for its officers on Amboyna],” points out that the Trve Relation anticipates and answers these new excuses, and promises further “perfecte ghetrouwe antwoorde [complete, trusty answers]” as necessary.89 Chamberlain records that the EIC succeeded in agitating the English, so that through their reluctance to act against Herman van Speult and the actors returned from Amboyna, the Dutch “haue almost lost the hearts of their best frends here.”90 The EIC succeeded in shaping English public opinion and sought to shame the VOC before the Dutch public as well. The EIC relentlessly pursued its cause before the English public. Employing one of the most traditional forms of reaching a broad public, it commissioned a ballad about the events, Nevves out of East India. Decorated with a woodcut depicting the Dutch torturing the innocent English merchants, it concludes with a call on the English public “to thinke vpon” the violence and encourages readers to “read more of this

88 Karen Chancey discusses the significance of the EIC’s decision to print such a large run. “The Amboyna Massacre in English Politics, 1624–1632,” Albion 30 (1999), 588. 89 Een waer Verhael vande onlanckse, ongerechte, wreede, end onmenschelycke procedure teghen de Enghelshe tot Amboyna (London, 1624), F1r. 90 SP 14/184/47, 26 February 1625.

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bloody Tragedy in a booke printed by author[it]y.”91 As in 1622, others took their cue from the EIC’s campaign and tried to shame the Dutch before the English public. Chamberlain notes the public’s growing resentment of the Dutch, whom the English had to provide with troops and money under the Treaty of London. He writes to Carleton that a sermon of Robert Wilkinson The Stripping of Ioseph, or The crueltie of Brethren to a Brother, had been published with a new, “bitter” preface.92 Thomas Myriall, who repurposed Wilkinson’s generic sermon, added the arms of the East India Company to the printing and prefaced the text with a “consolation” on their loss, condemning the “treacherous Crueltie, and cruell Treacherie” of the Dutch and encouraging the EIC to continue its pious pursuit of “Trade, to the glory of God, the honour of the English Nation, [and] the inriching of our Weale-publicke.”93 The EIC’s efforts to shape English opinion continued. Chamberlain informs Carleton that the Company had commissioned a painting “describing the whole action in manner and forme,” but the council “supprest” it.94 The many woodcuts depicting the water torture, its aftermath, and a beheading—recycled throughout the century in texts devoted to the Amboyna massacre— may testify to this lost painting’s subject.95 Additionally, Chamberlain writes, the Privy Council prevented a tragedy prepared by the EIC.96 By exporting corantos for English readers, the Dutch had helped to open the English public sphere. The scandal of Amboyna now helped to make the Dutch a subject for public debate.

91 Nevves out of East India (London, 1624), 2. 92 SP 14/184/47, 26 February 1625. 93 The Stripping of Ioseph, or The crueltie of Brethren to a Brother (London, 1625), 17,

19. 94 SP 14/184/47, 26 February 1625. Milton considers that the painter’s premature exhibition of the painting ruined its ability to influence the public. “Marketing,” 178. 95 In Engelsche-Duymdrayery (Amsterdam, 1652), a pamphlet published on the eve of the First Anglo-Dutch war, the author complains that the EIC had revived its old complaints about Amboyna, displaying “seker schildery [certain paintings]” depicting the “gruwelick [heinous]” torture they claimed “hadden de Hollanders aen haer Natien in Amboyna … gepleegt” [the Hollanders had committed against their nation in Amboyna” (A1 r). 96 SP 14/184/47, 26 February 1625.

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Plays on Amboyna and the Public The Privy Council may have “forbidden” the East India Company’s attempt to stage an Amboyna tragedy, but other playwrights quickly capitalized on the public’s interest. Run may not have entered the popular lexicon, but Amboyna did. Over the next several years, dramatists would profitably appeal to English sympathies, attesting to the EIC’s success in shaping the “event” on that small island into a memory that would remain in public discourse for decades.97 As we shall see in subsequent chapters, John Dryden would appeal to the public’s memory of Amboyna fifty years later. With the English proceeding cautiously in their alliance with the Dutch against the Habsburgs, charged references to Amboyna on the public stage in England reminded audiences of the potential for Dutch treachery. For instance, in John Fletcher’s tragicomedy, The Fair Maid of the Inn, the mountebank Forobosco threatens to make the Clown travel to Greenland for venison and then on “to Amboyna i’ th’ EastIndies, for pepper” (4.2.262–3). The Clown scoffs, “To Amboyna? so I might be peppered,” both subtly acknowledging the physical violence perpetrated by the Dutch and claiming to find such a threat harmless to himself (4.2.264). The play gestures to the stereotypical Dutch weakness for beer and butter, describes the new commodity of corantos, and alludes to Dutch violence in the East Indies. In the same year Fletcher derided the Dutch in this way, Ben Jonson returned to the public theater with The Staple of News , a satirical critique of news culture grafted onto an allegorical city comedy. Although Jonson’s satire laments England’s demand for this commodity, it bears witness to the strength of the public’s dependence on the Dutch for both the form and content of the news. Jonson’s critique of the English public’s appetite for Dutch news contributed to the comedy’s failure. In the paratexts framing the satire, Jonson mocks this popular demand—similar to the derisive one in his masque—as a misplaced preference for the ephemeral instead of a poet’s insights.98 The “Prologue for the Stage” embodies Jonson’s frustration

97 Gilles Deleuze argues that the work of memory permits the transformation of diffuse experience into an event. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone, 1994), 80. 98 Ton Hoenselaars argues that the Staple allows Jonson simultaneously to mock unreliable news and inattentive readers while offering an inverted version of the poet’s art.

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that he must negotiate the timely and the timeless, demands that ultimately wreck the play. He distinguishes between the commercial demands of “those / Who are our guests, here, in the way of shows” for the public theater and the popular “maker” who “can instruct your youth / And keep your acme in the state of truth,” but the demands for fresh news and gossip about Hyde Park coaches threaten to overwhelm the play’s aspirations to something greater (3–4, 25–6).99 After failing at the Blackfriars, the play traveled to the court, where a second prologue announces its aspiration to satisfy the refined tastes of Charles I’s new court as the playwright stages poetic truths “above the vulgar sort” contained in quotidian news (7).100 Jonson’s Staple includes some “news,” but not the kind found in corantos. Rather, Jonson encourages the court’s ridicule of the “common follies” of a public that chases such worthless ephemera (11). Distinguishing between popular news and poetic art, Jonson aligns himself with the discriminating elites against the public sphere and subtly proposes a poetic arcana analogous to the crown’s secret mysteries of state. The Dutch mechanism for commodifying and circulating news returns at several points in Jonson’s Staple. Jonson creates a series of self-reflexive intermeans in which conceited gossips commenting on the play further strain its ability to reconcile aspirations to poetic truth with the demands of currency. In the Induction, Mistress Mirth declares that she participates in the spectacle in order to “arraign both [the plays] and their poets,” anticipating the literary critique Habermas finds in the prototypes of the public sphere, while her friend Mistress Tattle demands topical relevance in the entertainment, that the play’s “news be new and fresh,” or she will hiss it off the stage (17–18, 21). As the play moves toward the

“Rumour, News, and Commerce in Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News ,” in Rumeurs et Nouvelles au Temps de la Renaissance, ed. M. T. Jones-Davies (Paris: Klincksieck, 1997), 149. 99 Jane Rickard argues that Jonson places a premium on true poets’ transcendent art and satirizes emergent news culture for confusing truthful details and higher truths. “A Divided Jonson? Art and Truth in The Staple of News,” ELR 42.2 (2012), 303. As Raymond observes, Jonson’s play participates in Caroline news culture even as it derides that culture. Pamphlets, 141. 100 Wittek reads the Staple in terms of early modern “news thinking” and sees these printed paratexts as critical in “apostrophiz[ing] a print public, a community of readers united by common attention to the playtext rather than the theatrical production.” Media Players, 103.

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key scene of the Staple at its height, the vulgar gossips display a feverish taste for news. When Mirth turns from criticizing the play for the audience and asks for Expectation’s opinion, the gossip expresses her longing to see the Staple in operation and learn “what it will be!” (2.Int.37– 8).101 As the other gossips speculate about how the poet will bring this fantasy into being, they make repeated allusions to Nathaniel Butter, who had spent nearly a decade transforming the Dutch production of corantos into an English commodity. The comedy gestures to this newsman early, when the Register scoffs at the Staple’s first customer “Oh, you are a butterwoman. Ask Nathaniel” to make a parcel of news (1.4.13). In the intermean before the grand opening of the Staple, Jonson churns together three overdetermined meanings in the gossips’ insistent evocation of butter. As most readers observe, Expectation’s longing—“Would Butter would come in and spread itself a little to us”—evokes the prolific news printer (2.Int.38–9). With Mirth’s willingness to accept a substitution, “Or the butter-box, Buzz, the emissary,” the Dutch foundation of the news emphatically returns. Sliding from Butter to the butter-box Hans Buzz, who may evoke the Dutchman overseeing England’s posts, Mirth points to the English printer and the doubly Dutch—both through the stereotypical epithet, “butter-box,” and his previously described heritage as “A Dutchman” (1.2.71)—emissary who gathers some of the news at the heart of the Staple scene. The scene’s butter quickly loses its particular attachment to Nathaniel Butter. In fact, the discussion of “butter” that ensues, metaphorically equating the news commodity of the Staple with a second commodity associated with the Dutch, quickly moves from a discussion of the freshness of the butter-news to the importing and sale of different kinds of butter. The Staple’s news, packaged and sold in discrete quantities and in several varieties, like the butter the gossips crave, has a Dutch flavor. In the play itself, Jonson satirizes the hypocritical and pernicious developments in the commodification of news in the era of Dutch corantos. As a shoemaker and a tailor outfit the new heir according to the day’s fashion—itself unstable, ever changing, and demanding

101 Michelle O’Callaghan reads the “symposiac” atmosphere of the gossips alongside the scene in the Apollo as exhibiting a kind of public sphere. The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 168. Dyani Johns Taff reads the gossips as modeling a way for women to respond to news. “Gendered Circulation and the Marital Ship of State,” Renaissance Drama 46 (2018), 208.

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recurrent expenditures—Pennyboy Junior greets his barber with the traditional greeting, “tell’s what news” (1.2.22). Reminiscent of Cocledemoy purveying fantastic stories as he shaves Mulligrub in The Dutch Courtesan or Dryfat’s access to city news from his barber Master Beardbush, Tom traffics in rumors and news and breathlessly describes a factory erected near the heir’s lodgings where “all the news of all sorts shall be brought,” sorted, and validated, “no other news be current” (1.2.33, 36). The Staple presents a fanciful collection of brief news stories that emulates and mocks the Dutch corantos translated for English consumption. Some consumers carry off “Six pennyworth” of news about puritans, others take exotic news from distant lands, “miracles / Done in Japan by the Jesuits” (3.2.125, 154).102 The cook Lickfinger purchases “news o’the stage” as an appetizer for a feast he is preparing in the Apollo Room at Dunstan’s, the sort of tavern John Earle would later describe as “a broacher of more newes than Hogs-heads.”103 Like Chamberlain gathering gossip, rumor, news, and “unlikelihoods,” the Staple’s customers accept and pass on the dubious commodity they have acquired. In its insatiable demand for news, the fearful English public consumed news of Spinola, Tilly, and the Duke of Bavaria, just as they might happily pay for patently false news of fanciful Dutch military inventions like “the Hollanders … invisible eel / To swim the haven at Dunkirk and sink all / The shipping there” (3.2.60–2). Jonson invents news that readers should recognize as parody, refusing to make use of anything as occasional and temporary as news found in an actual coranto. The poet stages the Staple and the lamentable news of an emergent public sphere so that “the age may see her own folly or hunger and thirst after published pamphlets of news” (8–9).104 Such news may contain verifiable information or not, but to Jonson’s mind, they certainly bear “no syllable of truth,” of poetic, transcendent Truth (10). News of

102 For Stephen Deng, the allegorical elements of the comedy suggest Jonson’s concern with national and domestic moderation in place of miserliness or prodigality. “Global OEconomy: Ben Jonson’s Staple of News and the Ethics of Mercantilism,” in Global Traffic: Discourses and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1550 to 1700, ed. Barbara Sebek and Stephen Deng (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 254. 103 Microcosmographie, D10v. 104 Richard Burt finds Jonson adopting an “extreme reactionary position” on news in

the play. Licensed by Authority: Ben Jonson and the Discourses of Censorship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 128.

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the moment does not interest the poet; if it interests the public, Jonson can only despair. Despite Jonson’s claim to avoid current news, his comedy does occasionally alight on news of the moment, and attests to the English appropriation of Dutch matter in sharpening the appetite for news. The Staple’s news reports frequently return to the Dutch. For instance, a Dutch figure, “froy Hans Buzz” (1.2.69), displaces a bankrupt English merchant for the position of the Staple’s emissary at the Exchange, just as Dutch merchants often got the better of English traders. The ingenious Dutch inventor Cornelis Dribble makes an appearance in Jonson’s fanciful news as does Spinola, threatening to invade England from the Habsburg Netherlands. In response to a request for news of Middleton’s “poor English play,” A Game at Chess , Thomas Barber elaborates on the fate of the play’s villain, Gondomar, who now resides in Brussels, “filing certain politic hinges / To hang the States on” (3.2. 209, 213– 4), as he seeks treatment for an anal fistula.105 The humor of imagining the former Spanish ambassador conjuring constipated plots to overthrow the Dutch Republic requires an English public aware of news about the Dutch. Perhaps the most relevant current event in Jonson’s satire, however, despite his claims to leave out the transitory in favor of the transcendent, occurs when he evokes Amboyna. The Dopper, named for the Dutch term for an Anabaptist, whose sympathies—like Tribulation’s and Ananias’s—lie with “the saints at Amsterdam,” evokes the increasingly common view of the United Provinces as the primary haven for religious schism (3.2.124). When she learns that the Ottoman sultan plans “to visit / The Church at Amsterdam this very summer, / And quit all marks o’ the beast,” she responds with fervent thankfulness: “Now joyful tidings!” (3.2.145–6). She gloats when she hears that this news arrived at the Staple courtesy of her “countryman” Hans Buz the Dutch emissary of the Exchange. The Register rebukes her for her unseemly praise of the Dutch newsman and reminds her sarcastically of “Amboyna, and the justice there!” (3.2.148, 150). On the one hand, the reference to Amboyna—the likely source of the nutmeg Pennyboy Junior promises to add to an ale (1.3.65)—reminds the next customer to inquire whether 105 Alan B. Farmer notes that these references played on the fear news printers profitably instilled in their readers. “Play-Reading, News-Reading, and Ben Jonson’s Staple of News,” in The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Marta Straznicky (Amherst: U of Massachusettes P, 2006), 137.

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“any news from the Indies” has recently arrived (3.2.153). More significantly, the Register’s bitter sarcasm recalls the passions the EIC inflamed in using Amboyna to turn public opinion against the Dutch. Jonson may lament that the English public would respond to the powerful influence of news, but his own play testifies to the power of the public sphere that emerged in response to Dutch stimuli. As subsequent plays make clear, to comment on this news culture often meant to comment on Dutch responsibility for the violent events on Amboyna. In the Fair Maid of the Inn, for instance, the antics of the Clown and Forobosco around the issue of Amboyna follow a scene in which the mountebank leads on foolish projectors with promises to use his conjuring to help a pedant raise “new sects of religion at Amsterdam” and a coxcomb to a “new office for writing pragmaticall Curranto’s” modeled on Mercurius Gallobelgicus (4.2.89, 87). A decade later, the Amboyna incident remained a charged topic. When Sir William Davenant produced his homage to Jonson, News from Plymouth—with its aggressive posture toward the Dutch, “the King’s enemies,” and its use of stereotypes of the Dutch as “butter-boxes” and drunkards—he included a satiric sketch of those who scanned “the general courants, gazettes, / Public and private letters... / Weigh’d and reduc’d ’em.”106 The comedy’s foolish newsmonger, Sir Solemn Trifle, uses his awareness that “man’s nature’s greedy of [news]” for his plots, even though these eventually return to haunt him (167). One subplot of the play threatens to break into violence as the braggart, Sir Furious Inland, demands satisfaction of the Dutch merchant, Hans van Bumble, kicking and beating him and his English captain, who agree to fight Sir Furious at sea, or better yet “in Amboyna. There you shall swing for’t” (187). Amboyna continued to signify Dutch treachery and frustrated English vengeance for decades. Although the Privy Council prevented their tragedy about Amboyna in 1625, the EIC ventured into the public arena again in 1633 with a controversial play critical of the Dutch government’s toleration of the VOC’s proceedings on Amboyna. Walter Mountfort, a disgraced EIC merchant, drafted The Launching of the Mary while sailing back to London. This heavily censored city comedy, set in 1626 in the aftermath of the Amboyna affair, combines three plot lines relying on contests in

106 The Dramatic Works of Sir William D’Avenant, ed. J. Maidment and W. H. Logan, vol. 4 (London: H. Sotheran, 1874), pages 139, 142, 168.

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the public sphere.107 In one, Dorotea Constance suffers loneliness and poverty, but refuses to prostitute herself, challenging the public “Report” that seamen’s wives “all doe burn in lustfull fire” with her own fidelity as proof that “one woman makes report a lyar.”108 The other two plot lines also explore questions of reputation and public opinion. In the most banal plot, the EIC’s Governor and other members instruct Admiral Hobab in the intricacies of trade and the Company’s contribution to the nation’s prosperity. Declaring that “some grumbling rumour flys abroade / that you do much impouerish the state,” the Admiral plays devil’s advocate in three lengthy scenes in which representatives of the EIC confront and explain away those economists’ objections that its trade, in particular its special dispensation to export English bullion, contributed to England’s economic woes. Turning Thomas Mun’s dry prose defense of the East India Company, A Discovrse of Trade, into awkward verse, Mountfort’s Governor and other agents reveal the limitations of conservative economic theories and advocate an ideology based on balance of trade. Because foreign trade improves the economy’s health, regardless of the amount of gold and silver within the nation’s borders, “wch is truly prouude / In the discourse of trade, a booke,” one member of the committee overcomes the Admiral’s objections (535–6).109 Admitting that the Company presents “a misterie / that’s past all vulgar apprehension” and “aenigmatique vnto Com[m]on sense,” the Admiral finds himself “satisfiede” by the EIC’s explanation (607–9, 613). Modeling the rational English citizen entering the public sphere to find the truth for himself, “maugre the scandall of the multitude,” Admiral Hobab probes the limits of the mystifying ideology of trade that he fears “ys a deepe

107 Sir Henry Herbert licensed the play in June 1633, after making alterations and demanding to see a “faire Copy” reflecting the changes. The Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels , 1623–1673, ed. Joseph Quincy Adams (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917), 35. 108 William Mountfort, The Launching of the Mary: Or, the Seaman’s Honest Wife, ed. John Henry Walter (Oxford: Malone Society, 1933), 1255–6. 109 At one point, Mountfort transports one of Mun’s charts into the “speech” of one of his characters. A Discovrse of Trade, From England vnto the East-Indies: Answering to diuerse Obiections Which Are Usually Made Against the Same (London, 1621), 24– 5. Bradley Ryner reads Mountfort’s efforts to simplify and translate Mun’s charts for a theatrical audience as educating the public, in the figure of Hobab, about a complex topic. Performing Economic Thought: English Drama and Mercantile Writing, 1600–1642 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013), 37.

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misterie / beyond a Courtiers reach” (29, 252–3). The admiral, meekly voicing some of the objections of the EIC’s critics, accepts an explanation he deems reasonable. In doing so, he assents to an ideological position comfortable to his interests and models assent for an English public.110 Mountfort runs afoul of Master of the Revels in his comedy’s third plot, in which his play enters into renewed public discussion of Dutch mistreatment of the English in the Amboyna affair. English resentment intensified as the Dutch Republic dragged out its investigation of the VOC’s actions against English allies on Amboyna. In making peace with Spain in the 1630 Treaty of Madrid, Charles I agreed to press the Dutch to accept Spanish overtures in exchange for Spanish promises to work for the restoration of the Palatinate.111 Freed from the diplomatic need to appease the English, the States General immediately cleared the VOC and Herman van Speult of any responsibility for the Amboyna events. The EIC responded with a new edition of A Trve Relation and a fresh round of recriminations, A Remonstrance of the Directors of the Netherlands East India Company.112 These texts, like the Launching of the Mary and the EIC’s previous appeals to the English public, not to mention the 1631 printing of Jonson’s Staple, make a show of reluctance to condemn the Dutch while claiming to have no choice, since such reticence threatens to leave the Dutch version of events uncontested. Compelled “to vindicate their owne reputation, and the fame of their innocent servants and Country-men, by acquainting the world with the true state of the businesse,” the EIC again offers the English public a response to each of the VOC’s justifications in order to vindicate England and its Company’s

110 In his analysis of the operation of ideology, Slavoj Žižek points to the comforts of accepting the outlines of a system since “if we come to ‘know too much,’ to pierce the true functioning of social reality, this reality would dissolve itself.” Sublime Object, 21. 111 Simon Adams sees five phases of Stuart foreign policy, moving gradually away from confessional alignment with the Dutch, despite popular English support for fellow Protestants. “Spain or the Netherlands? The Dilemmas of Early Stuart Foreign Policy,” in Before the English Civil War Essays on Early Stuart Politics and Government, ed. Howard Tomlinson (New York: St. Martin’s, 1984), 100. 112 Chancey, “Amboyna,” 597. The reprint of A Trve Relation of the Vnivst, Crvell, and Barbarovs Proceedings... The Third Impression (London, 1632), intensifies the famous image of the title page.

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reputation from the false reports of the Dutch.113 The VOC exemplifies Dutch perfidy and ingratitude to the English, a “Nation [that] most agreeth with themselues in Religion and to whom they are of all other Nations most beholden” (22–3). Mountfort’s source, Mun’s Discovrse of Trade, moreover, points to competition with the Dutch in the East Indies as the central challenge of the East India Company and ultimately to the prosperity and honor of the English nation. Mountfort’s own affiliation with the EIC and his service in Asia might have contributed to the strident Hollandophobia of the Launching of the Mary, but the play’s treatment of the complexities and challenges of publicly discussing the Dutch actions on Amboyna and the censor’s response to these scenes point to the ways in which English treatments of the Dutch helped to stamp the amorphous public sphere. The Master of the Revels intervened in the manuscript at the point where these vulgar English shipwrights bring up Amboyna. Their pleasant banter takes on a more sinister tone when Sheathing Nail warns his fellows that if “any dutchmen should heare you they would make a treason of this” (92–4). He and Okum proceed to rail against the vicious Dutch who “haue Chopt of a good many of our nation at Amboyna” (97–8). Concerned that Sheathing Nail’s passions will overwhelm him, Okum sends the men back to work, vowing “for this business of Amboyna, fayth weell haue a daye to discourse of yt, priuately by our selues, and drink” (111–13). He defers additional comment until they can retreat to a private space with trusted friends. They return to their labors and Hobab registers his sympathies with these workmen and their response to “the vnmatcht vile, miserable, torture, / Thos dutch inflicted on some English men, / at that Amboyna” (118–20). In a subsequent scene, Tarre gathers the crew before work with “Come letts Call euery man his full pott & Chatt a little” (1046–7). Over their cups, the English laborers again turn to the news and Tarre asks Sheathing Nail, who has the most knowledge of the event, “tell us a little of the story of Amboyna” (1076–7). They discuss the details of the event, with Tarre finding the Dutch charges ridiculous and Okum sputtering in impotent rage. Sheathing Nail laments that the public secret of Amboyna can only be discussed “vnder the rose,” and that danger attends those who “speake somethynges that are in print” (1111, 1131). Ironically, these scenes into 113 A Remonstrance of the Directors of the Netherlands East India Company (London, 1632), *r.

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which news of Amboyna intrudes embody that danger. Sir Henry Herbert required their removal and substituted generic comments in their place. Even Hobab’s explicit sympathy disappears, replaced with an acknowledgment that “these fellowes would, but dare not, saye” something (115). Listening to their muted rage he can only “suppose hard measure to be vsde / in places farre remote gaynst some of note” (122–3). Mountfort’s play imagines a public sphere, a space in which individuals can gather to discuss and evaluate the news, but as Herbert’s pen demonstrates, the public sphere enjoyed a precarious existence.114 Or at least, Herbert may have fantasized that the authorities could control its existence. Only a few years later, the breach between king and parliament would change the nature of printed news again with the publication of A Perfect Diurnall , the royalist Mercurius Aulicus , the parliamentary Mercurius Britanicus , and a host of competing newspapers. A news revolution had begun. Many in England attributed its genesis, and all that went with it, to the Dutch. At the start of this productive period, James Howell wrote to his brother from Amsterdam in 1619, recording his opinion that the sprawling Dutch port also served as the “great Staple of news.”115 Because Howell did not print this letter until 1645, its appearance before the public attests to more than a quarter century of the English imagining a close relationship between printed English news and Dutch means of circulation. At about the same time, John Cleveland derides the many competing newspapers available after the breach with Parliament. Mocking these “puny Chronicle[s]... English Iliads in a Nut-Shell,” Cleveland lays the blame for this cacophony of news in the public sphere squarely at the door step of the Dutch Republic: “the originall sinner in this kind was Dutch; Galliobelgicus the Protoplast; and the modern Mercuries but Hans-en-Kelders.”116 Offering a genesis of early modern English news, from the embryonic Dutch mercuries, back to the seminal Mercurius Gallobelgicus , and ultimately to a degenerate Dutch father, Cleveland’s jest brings English news culture full circle to its Dutch origins.

114 As Lake argues, despite royal efforts to curtail the emergent public sphere, public pitch-making remained a recurrent feature of the political and cultural scene.” “The Theatre,” 186. 115 James Howell, Epistolae HoElianae: Familiar Letters (London, 1645), 10. 116 John Cleveland, The Character of a London Diurnall (London, 1644), 1.

CHAPTER 6

Rome and Carthage: Figuring the Anglo-Dutch Wars

England went to war against the Dutch Republic for the first time in the summer of 1652. That spring, journalists on both sides of the Narrow Seas reported on the increasing tension between the two nations and carried accounts of hostilities. Marchamont Nedham, the chief journalist of the English Commonwealth, included a timely account of the first engagement between an English and a Dutch fleet in his weekly newsbook, Mercurius Politicus . His reporting narrates incidents leading up to Admiral Maarten van Tromp’s deceitful “signall” for the Dutch fleet to “g[i]ve our General a Broad side.”1 This report appeared within days of the battle at Goodwin Sands, in the Downs off the coast of Dover. Dutch newsbooks offered their own accounts. Pieter Casteleyn’s Hollandsche Mercurius , a new kind of Dutch periodical, appeared annually and provided a larger, more historical perspective on recent events.2 Under the dateline of May 1652, Casteleyn inserts Tromp’s account of his fateful decision to confront Blake’s English warships harassing Dutch merchant 1 Mercurius Politicus , no. 103 (20–27 May 1652), 1623. 2 Joop Koopmans explains the construction of Casteleyn’s often-reprinted periodical.

“Storehouses of News: The Meaning of Early Modern News Periodicals in Western Europe,” in Not Dead Things: The Dissemination of Popular Print in England and Wales, Italy, and the Low Countries, 1500–1820, ed. Roeland Harms, Joad Raymond, and Jeroen Salman (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 259–60.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Fleck, English National Identity and the Image of the Dutch, Early Modern Literature in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42910-1_6

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vessels “om hun in mijn protectie te nemen … volgens het 7 en 8 Articul mijner Instructie [in order to take them under my protection… according to the seventh and eighth articles of my orders].”3 Appealing to the public sphere emerging with the advent of periodical news, mercuries like Nedham’s reported on events and “le[ft] the world to judge” their significance and accuracy (1624). Casteleyn similarly expected his Dutch audience to compare credible narratives of recent occurrences. Only a few months before these gunpowder and paper broadsides announced the war’s outbreak, England and the United Provinces had explored a closer political union. Just as the Dutch succeeded in formalizing their liberation from monarchy in 1648, England in 1649 rid itself of its king and defeated the remaining Stuart army in September 1651.4 In the Netherlands, Willem II, Charles I’s nephew, led a coup against the Amsterdam regents—who demanded less military expenditure after the Dutch secured independence in 1648—only to succumb to smallpox in November 1650.5 John Milton congratulated the Dutch on escaping a “slavery [that] was prepared for you” and preserving “that liberty which had been won by so many years of toil and battle” against tyrants.6 At the beginning of 1651, two republics embracing Protestantism and pursuing global trade occupied opposing coasts of the Narrow Seas. England now dispatched ambassadors to the Hague in hopes of creating a political union.7 The Dutch, who had no interest in diluting their hard-won independence, declined this proposal, inspiring English recriminations. Distrustful of the Dutch, the English adopted an emulous, aggressive posture toward their rivals and set themselves on the path toward war. 3 Hollantsche Mercurius, Brengende Een generale Beschrijvingh der aenmerckelijckste Geschiedenissen in Europa, in ‘t Jaer 1652, Fourth Edition (Haarlem, 1660), 36. 4 Nigel Smith examines the horrified reaction to the regicide across Europe. “England, Europe, and the English Revolution,” in Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 31. 5 Israel describes the short-lived coup. The Dutch Republic, 607. 6 “A Defence of the People of England,” 4: 311. 7 Steven Pincus offers the best treatment of this proposed political union and the

multifaceted consequences of the failed effort. Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 26. Sean Kelsey argues that this embassy’s reception helped to establish the English Commonwealth’s legitimacy following the regicide. Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–1653 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 65.

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England’s bellicose response, including the imposition of the Navigation Act, surprised the Dutch. Dutch ambassadors sent to Westminster to avert a crisis could not satisfy English demands. Among these, the requirement that Dutch ships acknowledge England’s maritime sovereignty by striking their sails provided the occasion for the exchange of fire in the Downs. One Dutch observer of these tense negotiations lamented the “wisselbaerheyt vande voorby-lopende tijt [mutability of fleet-footed time],” when “Vrienden werden Vyanden, Vyanden Vrienden, Koninckrijcken veranderen tot Republijcken, Republijcken in Annargien [friends have become enemies, enemies friends, monarchies changing to republics, republics into anarchy].”8 He appeals to the common bonds of friendship, but sternly warns the Commonwealth, whose “staet is niet geset, maer jonck en teer [state is not yet settled, but young and tender],” that in the event of a war, “wy avantage souden hebben en dat zy geen erger Vyandt konnen hebben als ons, en wy als haer [we would have the advantage, and that they could have no worse enemy than us, or we them]” (B3r). Even writing after the breach, Casteleyn would capture the shock that two nations with so much in common would destroy the bonds of alliance and friendship, especially when England that “soo nieuwe Republijcke ende maer een Suygelingh in ‘t vast-stellen hares Staets was [was so new a republic and but an infant in the establishing of its state]” would reject the offer of “vrundelijcke middelen tot vreedsame Nabuurschap [friendly means of peaceful neighborliness]” from the Dutch Republic, an “oude, ende … ervarene Politijcke Regenten [old and … experienced political regime]” (34). The Dutch could hardly believe that the new English Commonwealth would choose to make its first enemy out of its old friends in the more senior Dutch Republic. Casual references to England’s tender, infant republic raise a contentious issue that could sting the English as they returned to the global stage. As the English Commonwealth sought to assert ancient privileges at sea, some doubted whether a new nation could claim those old rights. Pointing to the Commonwealth’s infancy might suggest that the young republic could not make such historic claims. Francis Osborne’s defensive rhetorical question about England’s historical assertion of primacy at sea, “why may not we assume to ourselves the Rights of Disposure, and Regulating that which is undoubtedly our owne,” 8 Consideratien Over de teghenwoordighe Vrede-handelinghe tusschen Engelandt en Neerlandt (Rotterdam, 1652), A2r.

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gestures to an English anxiety not only about rights over the sovereignty of the seas, but over the continuity of the Commonwealth with the proud successes of English history.9 In this instance, with war looming, the issue of England’s ability to assert its historic rights took on great urgency as the Commonwealth confronted enemies, friends, and rivals on the Continent. Paradoxically, writers fashioning their new national identity often insist on their nation’s antiquity.10 On one hand, the removal of a monarch created new opportunities for the English, who could flatter themselves as the vanguard of the progress of liberty. Their remarkable nation had taken an unprecedented action to secure English liberty and the Protestant cause. At the same time, the English prided themselves on their ancient liberties and primitive church, characterizing the actions of recent generations as a restoration of purity corrupted through centuries of deference to the papacy and monarchy.11 Adopting the trappings of the great republic of Rome, prior to its demise under the emperors, allowed English writers to give their nation a borrowed glory and gravity. The Roman Republic offered a powerful model that the English could emulate as they articulated an identity for themselves as a nation recovering ancient liberties. Drawing from his Case for the Commonwealth, Marchamont Nedham offered a series of essays in Mercurius Politicus in which he frequently used the ancient Republic as a persuasive example.12 In the newsbook’s first issues, he refers to Charles Stuart as “young Tarquin,” the son of the last tyrannical Roman king.13 When Willem II initiated his coup, Nedham incorporated the negative example of the House of Orange’s tyranny into his articulation of the republican values,

9 A Seasonable Expostulation with the Netherlands (Oxford, 1652), 9. 10 Bhabha argues that people construct narratives for their nations operating in tempo-

ralities that simultaneously celebrate their primordial traditionalism and their contemporary newness. “DissemiNation,” 300. Stevens argues that Milton exemplifies this contradictory impulse. “Milton’s Janus-faced Nationalism,” 257. 11 Sauer discusses Milton’s pride in England’s recovery of ancient sovereignty. Milton, Toleration, 83. 12 Blair Worden, God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 291. Kelsey traces the Commonwealth gestures to the Roman Republic. Inventing a Republic, 203. 13 Mercurius Politicus , no. 1 (6–13 June 1650), 12. See also Mercurius Politicus, no. 2 (13–20 June 1650), 22; Mercurius Politicus, no. 3 (20–27 June 1650), 40; and Mercurius Politicus , no. 26 (28 November–5 December 1650), 435.

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once espoused by Rome, that England should embrace.14 He recalls the oath of Brutus to prevent the return of kings and then describes the Roman Republic’s determination “not to suffer particular persons to grandise or greaten themselves more than ordinary,” mentioning the dangerous example of Manlius Capitolinus and then describing the providential escape of the United Provinces, where Willem II’s marriage into the house of Stuart “elevated him” and “put other thoughts and designes into his head, then beseem’d a member of a Free Republick.”15 Nedham and others inspired their English readers with analagous tales of the virtues of the Roman Republic and its heroic statesmen and generals who withstood the dangers of the former tyrants just as the Commonwealth worked to prevent the return of a tyrannical royal family. As they articulated their identity without a monarch and found themselves going to war with another Protestant, commercial republic, English writers considered Rome’s persistence in defeating Carthage during the three Punic Wars (264–241 BCE, 218–201 BCE, and 149–146 BCE) a particularly useful precedent for legitimizing their own unprecedented achievement and aspirations. Looking across the Narrow Seas to a rival nation making similar claims after 1648 to a simultaneously fresh and yet ancient pedigree, English writers again confronted a compelling example they could not embrace unequivocally. When they went to war with the United Provinces, English writers drew on the history and language of republican Rome to bolster their resolve and encourage their fellow readers. The first war, in which one maritime republic faced a similar nation across a small sea, reminded both English and Dutch authors of the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. That trope had a transnational appeal that could be tailored to the national aspirations of each young republic. In addition to giving their fight an epic character, both sides knew the outcome of those historical events and could encourage their publics with the virtuous sacrifices of their republican exemplars that led inevitability to victory. When England went to war with the Dutch again in 1664 and a third time in 1672, the analogy of the three Punic Wars seemed, in some respects, even more apt. England fought those later wars 14 Blair Worden argues that Milton and Nedham saw Dutch triumphs against tyranny as showing common cause between the two nations. “Milton and Marchamont Nedham,” in Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 173. 15 Mercurius Politicus , no. 101 (6–13 May 1652), 1585, 1588.

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after the return of the Stuarts, however, and the contortions of English writers trying to appropriate republican Rome’s victories for England in its modern Punic Wars with a Dutch Carthage illustrate the ambivalent place of the monarchy in England’s evolving national identity.

Rome and Carthage: Two Republics Alike in Dignity In the year before Tromp and Blake traded broadsides near Goodwin Sands, England and the Dutch Republic flirted with establishing a close political union, but when hopes of concord evaporated, English and Dutch writers mobilized tropes drawn from the history of Rome’s wars with Carthage for encouragement. English optimism about establishing this close union proceeded from the ascendency of Johan de Witt in the province of Holland. Willem II’s attempt to seize the reins of the United Provinces had encouraged exiled English Royalists, but when de Witt assumed power and guided Holland to leadership in the Republic without a stadholder, the English Parliament could hope to neutralize the cooperation of exiled Royalists and disgruntled Orangists. One account of Willem II’s siege of Amsterdam, noting that his tyrannical ambitions matched those of his Stuart wife and brother-in-law, concluded with the hope that “these Countries will make a faster union with England.”16 A different Dutch correspondent informed Nedham that when the Great Assembly met at the beginning of 1651, following the miraculous preservation of Dutch sovereignty, a “Union between this State and England, is much desired by the common people.”17 In this spirit of optimism, Richard Marriot published a new edition of Overbury’s Observations , with its praise of Dutch industry and republican virtue, in December 1650. In hopes of establishing close ties with another powerful republic, of preventing the resurgence of Orange or Stuart ambitions in the newly stabilized republics, and of resolving growing trade disputes, England’s Council of State sent Walter Strickland—who once had deep ties in the United Provinces—and Oliver St. John—a jurist and trusted friend of 16 The Treaty and Articles of Agreement between the Estates of Holland, the Prince of Orange, and the Magistrates of Amsterdam (London, 1650), 6. 17 Mercurius Politicus , no. 31 (2–9 January 1651), 512. The Great Assembly was a sort of enhanced meeting of the States General intended to deal with the constitutional crisis created by Willem II.

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Oliver Cromwell—to assess the Dutch Republic’s commitment to their shared, godly and republican ambitions.18 They urged the Dutch to accept “a more intimate alliance, and nearer union... whereby a more real and intrinsical interest of each other may be contracted for their mutual good.”19 The Dutch, divided internally between Holland’s republican leadership and other provinces’ resentment of Holland, rebuffed this overture. England responded with retaliatory trade measures: the Navigation Act.20 As Dutch ambassadors sought a diplomatic solution, Tromp, the Orangist admiral, fired on Blake, accelerating England’s Declaration. Unwilling to overlook “een kleyne Attaque van Tromp, die sy selver veroorsaeckt hebben [a small attack from Tromp, that they caused themselves],” the English complained that the Dutch had attacked their English friends, “even when their Ambassadors were treating with us.”21 England exacted a costly revenge on the weaker Dutch navy, but ultimately allowed the Dutch to secure peace in 1654 at the expense of Orangist ambitions. Crudely xenophobic representations designed to highlight national differences lined the road to war. Competing publishers produced multiple editions of Owen Felltham’s popular Brief Character of the Low Countries as English attitudes toward the Dutch soured.22 In its opening section the text mocks the topography of the very low United Provinces, 18 Pincus analyzes this “intimate” union at length. Protestantism and Patriotism, 24. According to Blair Worden, the crisis at the end of 1650 made it possible to imagine Holland breaking from the other United Provinces to follow England. Literature and Politics, 126. Simon Groenveld argues that the Rump’s doubts about Dutch constancy contributed to the move toward war. “The English Civil Wars as a Cause of the First Anglo-Dutch War, 1640–1652,” Historical Journal 30 (1987), 544. 19 Joyful Newes from Holland (London, 1651), 3. 20 Austin Woolrych sees the Navigation Act as serving a punitive, political purpose,

rather than a simply commercial one. Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 510. Robert Brenner argues that the Act’s restrictions responded to the sudden surge in Dutch profits, particularly in the carrying trades, after 1648. Merchants and Revolution, 626. Israel discusses the divisions evident in the Great Assembly and its inability to appease the English embassy. Dutch Republic, 714. 21 Protestatie vande vrygevochte Nederlanders (Middelburg, 1652), B1v. The English complaint appears in The Case Stated between England and the United Provinces (London, 1652), 1. 22 Vvan Strien traces the late Jacobean manuscript circulation of Felltham’s text and the popular stereotypes that influenced Felltham’s views of the Dutch. “Owen Felltham’s A Brief Character,” 141.

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the “great Bog of Europe,” threatened with inundation and drowning.23 Comments about the Dutch love of alcohol, their girth, their hunger for cheese, their stubbornness, and a variety of misogynist comments pepper this “character” of the Dutch people. An extensive critique of Dutch religious toleration concludes with the complaint that the Dutch prefer profits to piety: “’Tis the Fair of all the Sects, where all the Peddlers of Religion have leave to vent their toies, their Ribands, and phanatick Rattles” (45). When the war erupted, Felltham’s catalogue of stereotypes spawned dozens of English imitators. One satirist addresses the Dutch fleet, assuring them that “the butterbox of your trifling honour may perchance melt away in a hot day with the English,” while another balanced historic Dutch dependence on England’s valor against Spain, “when / They brought thee Succours and our Valiant men,” with an analysis of the Dutch dependence on alcohol and the violence, including events on Amboyna, that it breeds.24 English insults reach a nadir of scatological excess in a pamphlet tracing the slimy genesis of the Dutch nation to hippopotamus dung fermenting in a box lined with butter and tracing the etymology of Belgia to “Bel-regia,” the kingdom of Beelzebub.25 Although the Dutch did not make use of a similar abundance of insulting personal stereotypes of the English—they preferred to mock the English for having “tails” and to threaten to “Hak of de Start [Chop off the tail]” of English “Devils, Dogs, Serpent Tailes, KingMurtherers”—the Dutch made extensive use of images on broadsides to mock their rivals.26 The war inspired a variety of crude insults on both sides of the Narrow Seas. Some English and Dutch authors in this period adopted a more elevated register for representing the disputes roiling the two nations, however. The wars of Rome and Carthage offered a shorthand for 23 Brief Character, 1. Graeme Watson prepared a modern edition of Seile’s text. “A Brief Character of the Low-Countries under the States (1652),” Dutch Crossing 27 (2003), 111. William Ley produced pirated editions of Felltham’s text in 1648 and in two editions of 1652. 24 A Great Victory Obtained by the English Against the Dutch (London, 1652), 6;

Brandy-wine in the Hollanders Ingratitude (London, 1652), 7. 25 The Dutch-mens Pedigree (London, 1652). 26 Dogg en Leeuwen-dans (n.p., 1652), stanza N. The list of figures with tails occurs in

Mercurius Politicus , no. 111 (15–22 July 1652), 1784. Helmers examines the “tail-man” insult as a Dutch anxiety about the satanic threat of anarchy the English may spread. Royalist Republic, 203.

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complex issues at mid-century. Memorable Roman and Carthaginian leaders as well as the nature of a conflict between nations with so much in common allowed English writers from a variety of political persuasions to represent themselves and their party’s virtues. When Percy Herbert returned to face Parliament after the regicide, he wrote a popular series of essays, including one on the necessity of honoring a promise. He advised his son to consider the constancy of Regulus, a captured Roman general who gave his Carthaginian captors his word that he would carry their belligerent message to Rome and then return. Regulus cautioned his Roman friends to reject Carthage’s demands, then returned to captivity, torture, and death, exemplifying “a world of magnanimity in his person.”27 In his conflict with Alexander More, who enjoyed a measure of Dutch protection during the Anglo-Dutch war, Milton compared himself to Scipio, Rome’s heroic general, “superior to Hannibal” in the wars against Carthage.28 The Roman Republic’s commitment to fostering the public good helped its people to persevere and eventually triumph over its corrupt Carthaginian rivals. In the midst of the war with the Dutch, Milton’s old acquaintance Stephen Marshall preached to London’s Lord Mayor and Aldermen on the subject of schism and toleration, reminding his audience that “self-seeking ruined and overthrew Carthage, and the other, of seeking publick-weale, built up Rome, and so is it in our great, and spiritual Commonwealth.”29 Even aside from the approach of war with the Dutch, republican Rome’s virtues and dedication to the public good offered precedents for the English people and the image of the nation they wanted to claim for themselves and project to others. When England sought to negotiate a political union with a Dutch Republic freed from the House of Orange’s influence, Andrew Marvell praised one of England’s diplomats in terms drawn from republican Rome’s ascendency over Carthage. Like the coded diplomatic scytale recalled near its end, Marvell’s “In Legationem Domini Oliveri St. John ad Provincias Foederatas” makes the most of Latin syntax to weave together the opposing terms the poet locates in the ambassador’s name and in the message he carries to England’s potential ally, the United

27 Certain Conceptions (London, 1650), 150. 28 “Pro Se Defensio,” 4: 699. 29 A Sermon Preached to the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor, and Court of Aldermen

(London, 1653), 36.

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Provinces.30 In the poem’s central conceit, Marvell compliments the ambassador for providentially bearing one of the “Ingeniosa... Nomina,” or “apt names,” that mark an individual for greatness.31 Oliver St. John’s given name offers the olive branch of peace while his apocalyptic family name evokes “Jani ferrea claustra,” the iron locks of the Roman temple of Janus, opened when the Roman Republic went to war (10). Even if he said nothing as an ambassador, his very names—“hoc Martis, sed pacis nuntius illo” the last name carrying news of war, the other news of peace (9)—place a stark choice before the Dutch. As in Marvell’s poem, the other Latin poem printed on the occasion of England’s embassy to the United Provinces celebrated the English offer of “Vincula tantarum late certissma rerum [bonds of such great and most reliable things]” and concluded with a threat of war.32 Marvell, however, uses the personal details of the ambassador’s own name to emphasize the consequences of the Dutch response to England’s embassy. Marvell evokes two famous diplomatic episodes from the era of the Punic Wars to position the Dutch as the inevitably defeated Carthage. On the eve of the Second Punic War, the Roman Senate sent Quintus Fabius Maximus to the Carthaginian assembly. Hannibal, the Carthaginian general, had violated the treaty concluding the First Punic War when he captured the city of Saguntum. A Carthaginian senator scoffed at Rome’s demands, telling Fabius to come to the main issue. In Livy’s account, Fabius then folded his cloak into a pouch and held it forth for the Carthaginian senate, saying “we present and offer warre and peace unto you, take whether ye will.”33 Marvell’s pointed question for the Dutch, “Vultis Oliverum, Batavi, Sanctumve Johannem?” recalls the stark 30 Nigel Smith speculates that Marvell’s address to St. John, rather than to Strickland,

may indicate Marvell’s association with the embassy in some form. Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 94. Nicholas McDowell argues that the poem also serves as Marvell’s early attempt to align himself with the Commonwealth. Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 268. 31 “In Legationem Domini Oliveri St John ad Provincias Foederatas,” 1. Norbrook

argues that the poem’s ambiguity mirrors the ambiguity of diplomacy. Writing the English Republic, 281. Worden suggests that the apparent binaries themselves point in more than one direction, adding greater significance to St. John’s name. Literature and Politics, 120. 32 Magnificentiss Dominis, Dominis Oliverio St. John Gvaltero Stricland (London, 1651). 33 The Romane Historie Written by T. Livivs, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1600),

403. Holland’s influential translation would be printed again in 1659.

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choice Fabius gave to Carthage (15). The poem’s final line, “Antiochus gyro non breviore stetit,” recalls a second famous episode when Rome, having outlasted Carthage in the second war and consolidating its grip in the eastern Mediterranean before the decisive Third Punic War, used diplomacy to achieve foreign policy without resorting to force. After Antiochus IV subjugated Egypt, Rome quickly sent Gaius Popilius to demand that the Seleucids—who had harbored Hannibal after the Second Punic War—retreat. In Livy’s account, Antiochus greeted Rome’s ambassador with pleasantries, but Popilius gruffly refused to respond, drawing a circle in the sand around the Seleucid king and demanding that before exiting the circle the king must either give up Egypt or accept war. Rather than provoke Rome, Antiochus acquiesced. In Lodowick Lloyd’s epitome of this event, Popilius “presently enforced [Antiochus] to answer the Senate of Rome, and give satisfaction to the demands of the Embassador, before he might go out of a little round circle which Popilius made with this riding Rod.”34 Like the ambassador from the powerful republic of Rome between the second and third Punic Wars, St. John represents an ascendant English republic that has narrowed its rival nation’s options. St. John may carry an equivocal name, but he does not permit the same flexibility to the Dutch. Explicitly alluding to Popilius’ embassy and evoking Fabius’ peremptory offer, Marvell imagines England’s ambassador as surpassing the Roman Republic’s examples. Whereas in ancient republics a diplomatic message might require a coded “scytale,” a rod on which a message would be wound and deciphered, England has no need for this archaic staff since Oliver St. John carries the “publica verba,” or official words, in his own name (14). By figuring St. John’s embassy as a new version of Fabius at Carthage, the poem implies that if the Dutch reject peace, as the Carthaginians did after Saguntum, they embark on a conflict that will lead inevitably to their destruction. When the embassy failed, some royalists reportedly gloated that they had persuaded the Dutch to accept “that Rome and Carthage are too stout to allow either to be sole Mistress.”35 Marvell and his opponents’ figuration of the coming conflict as a Punic War does significant ideological work. As Jacob Cats and other Dutch ambassadors arrived in Westminster early in 1652, Payne Fisher and John Milton penned a new round of

34 The Marrow of History (London, 1653), 30. 35 Mercurius Politicus , no. 57 (3–10 July 1651), 913.

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epideictic poetry evoking the Punic Wars and linking England and the Roman Republic. Fisher celebrated Cromwell’s victories that had placed the English republic on stable footing. He boasts that “Not Italy to Fabius …/ Nor Carthage proud to her known Ha[nnib]all” can grant as much fame and glory “As we to our renowned Generall.”36 Glancing at Roman and Carthaginian heroes of the Punic Wars, Fisher imagines that England’s general will surpass ancient precedents. John Milton may not recall the Punic Wars in his own sonnet to Cromwell that spring, but his poem lionizing Sir Henry Vane, like Marvell’s to St. John, does evoke Rome’s triumph over Carthage as England declared war on the Dutch.37 In the sonnet, Milton praises the youth’s paradoxical sagacity, responding indirectly to the anxiety that the Commonwealth’s youth invalidates its ancient roots. He wrote the sonnet in the weeks leading up to England’s formal Declaration of its causes for war, which stated that the Dutch stubbornly challenged “not onely the Rights, Honor, and Traffique, but even the very Being of this Commonwealth,” a reminder of the English republic’s recent emergence from monarchy.38 Milton’s sonnet, which modulates between historical exemplars and this republican statesman’s unprecedented leadership, relies on the paradox of this naval administrator, “young in years” like his nation, who demonstrates the wise insight of one “in sage counsel old.”39 Vane can penetrate treacherous Dutch obfuscation, the “drift of hollow states,” perhaps a pun on the drifting, hollow land of Holland, with its many cities “hard to be spelled” (6).40 As Fisher did for Cromwell, Milton praises Vane’s superiority to the famous men of the Roman Republic and their skillful adversaries of the Punic Wars era. Although the Roman Republic’s leaders helped their nation to victory in the wars of the “fierce Epirot and the African bold,” 36 “A Gratulatory Ode of Peace,” in Veni; Vidi; Vici. The Triumphs of the Most Excellent and Illustrious Oliver Cromwell, trans. Thomas Manley (London, 1652), 10. 37 Norbrook notices that both Marvell and Milton praise English diplomats by drawing parallels between their republic and republican Rome. Writing the English Republic, 283. 38 A Declaration of the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England (London, 1652), 14. Leo Miller discusses Milton’s contributions to the papers of this crisis. John Milton’s Writings in the Anglo-Dutch Negotiations, 1651–1654 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1992), 45. 39 “To Sir Henry Vane the Younger,” in John Milton, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), line 1. 40 Although Milton’s pun on “hollow” participates in popular mockery of the Dutch, as Kerrigan notes, it resonates on a variety of levels. Archipelagic English, 239.

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no “better senator held / The helm of Rome” against Hannibal than this new heroic figure, England’s Erastian Vane (3–4).41 Standing at the “helm” of his nation’s navy, young Vane will use his mature wisdom to help England overcome the enemy’s Pyrrhic attacks and lead his nation to victory in this new Punic War. Even more than in some of his fellow Englishmen’s appropriation of the Roman Republic’s precedents, Milton creates a productive tension of youth and age, of historical authority and modern freedom, for his nation and his contemporary heroes. Recalling the precedents created through Rome’s naval victories over Carthage, John Selden had argued in Mare Clausum that a nation could assert sovereignty over the seas. The Commonwealth revived these arguments in constructing the Navigation Act and the Council of State paid Nedham to translate Selden’s text into English. Selden recalled that Carthage and Rome “imperium Orbis agitabant ante bellum Punicum primum [strove for the empire of the globe before the First Punic War],” and as a result, “exutis dominio huiusmodi Carthaginiensibus, acquirebant jure Belli ac Victoria Romani [after stripping Carthage of this sort of dominion, the Romans acquired it by the Law of Arms and Victory].”42 Elsewhere, Selden had argued that England had ancient rights to dominion over its adjacent seas; the Stuarts had used that argument to justify taxing the Dutch for their use of the profitable herring fisheries.43 Although the regicide had complicated England’s claims, some of which could be construed as hereditary, English captains continued to demand that other ships, particularly Dutch vessels in the Narrow Seas, acknowledge English sovereignty by lowering their topsail.44 In his dedication to Parliament, “The Supreme Autoritie of the Nation,” Nedham simultaneously asserts the nation’s ancient, glorious history and its recent, glorious reemergence. He presents Parliament with Selden’s rationale for 41 Gordon Teskey argues that Milton foregrounds the tension between military prowess and policy in this sonnet. The Poetry of John Milton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 243–4. 42 Mare Clavsvm, sev de Dominio Maris (London, 1636), 98–9. 43 David Armitage notes that the conflict between Grotius and Selden rehearsed the key

arguments for European imperial expansion. The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 110. 44 Pincus discusses Dutch skepticism about the Commonwealth’s heredity sovereignty. Protestantism and Patriotism, 70. Bernard Capp discusses the implications of the English Commonwealth’s claims to sovereignty of the seas in Cromwell’s Navy: The Fleet and the English Revolution 1648–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 75.

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England’s maritime sovereignty in its adjoining seas, dating from “both before the old Roman Invasion and since, under every Revolution, down to the present Age.”45 Referring to the case for war contained in the Commonwealth’s Declaration, including Tromp’s attack when Dutch diplomats in Westminster sought “a more strict League and Union” (c2r), Nedham asserts that Selden’s articulation of maritime sovereignty makes them “as absolute Invaders as if they had enter’d the Island itself” (d1r). Nedham recalls an episode from the Second Punic War, representing Tromp’s cannonade as an invasion, just “as if Hannibal were again in Italy.” He aligns the “late affront given near Dover” with Hannibal’s “braving it before the walls of Rome” at the Colline Gate (d1r). In the material he adds to the end of Selden’s book, Nedham evokes the glory of the Roman Republic and the English nation’s duty to emulate its great predecessor. Just as the Stuarts asserted that England possessed the seas, so the new English Commonwealth, “the greatest and most glorious Republick, that the Sun ever saw, except the Roman,” must defend its rights at sea (483). Recalling the expansive Roman Republic that triumphed in the Punic Wars, Nedham reaches back to Hannibal threatening the gates of Rome as a turning point, one in which Roman perseverance triumphed over Punic insolence just as the England of his present will eventually defeat its Dutch rivals. Nedham’s preface probably inspired one of the most extensive deployments of Rome’s victory over Carthage to encourage English readers. In the same issue of Mercurius Politicus in which he advertised his translation of Selden, Nedham included a letter from a correspondent who responded enthusiastically to the hints in Nedham’s dedication. Confident that England will eventually triumph, the author explains that he sees “the Old game betwixt Rome and Carthage (the two great Commonwealths of the elder Times) revived again.”46 Both in that Punic War and in this conflict, the rival republics asserted “Dominions parted by a narrow Sea, for the command whereof … they began the Quarrell” (2053), a claim at the heart of Selden’s Mare Clausum and in the histories he cited. Comparing the national character of Rome and Carthage, Nedham’s

45 Of the Dominion, Or Ownership of the Sea, trans. and intro. Marchamont Nedham (London, 1652), b2r. Blair Hoxby argues that Nedham’s English translation serves to bring the case for expansion to a broad national audience. Mammon’s Music, 66. 46 Mercurius Politicus no. 130 (25 November–2 December 1652), 2053.

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correspondent praises the Romans, on whom the English model themselves, as “the more gallant people, such as their Actions stood on points of Honor; the Carthaginians,” with their Dutch counterparts, he considers “base and sordid, such as steered all their Counsels by the Card of Profit” (2053). This theme, accusing the “Carthaginians of crafty over-reaching Wit, infamous for their Breaches of Faith” (2054), runs throughout this analysis, concluding with the accusation that the Dutch, like their Punic counterparts, “great Lovers of their money, did their work by Halves” and demonstrated that “though they were ambitious, there were covetous also” (2054). England resembles Rome, “formerly under a King expulsed by the people,” while the Carthaginians had a nominal ruler, “meerly Titular, and his power so circumscribed and limited by the Acts of the Senate, that he was little better then a Stadholder,” the executive office associated with the United Provinces (2053). Ultimately, the Oxford correspondent celebrates the youthful vigor of his nation and the glory that awaits it. He likens the Dutch, who revolted from monarchy several decades before England, to Carthage, the “elder” republic, and associates the Commonwealth with Rome, “the younger State” (2053). That greater age made Carthage decadent, while the youthful republic retained its vitality. The young Roman Republic flexed “the stronger Ligaments both of Power and Policy,” while the “members” of the dissolute Carthaginian state, like the factious provinces of the Dutch Republic, lacked “coherence” and strength (2053). In exploring these parallels, Nedham makes the Punic wars reassuringly familiar and makes that history serve the ends of the English Republic. The glory Rome found in defeating Carthage and the humiliation imposed on them points to the inevitability of England’s victory over the false Dutch. The English did not enjoy a monopoly on casting themselves as Rome to their rival’s Carthage. Celebrating Tromp’s victory at Dungeness, Jan Vos, the Orangist poet, praised the Dutch admiral and imagined Charles I’s ghost urging both his son and the United Provinces to cooperate and avenge his murder.47 Drawing on the epic tropes of the Roman deities intervening in human affairs, the poet envisages several

47 Helmers emphasizes the poem’s attempt to align the Orangist Dutch Republic’s interests with those of the Stuarts. Royalist Republic, 194. Paul Sellin argues that Vos had malleable, complex loyalties, often aligned with Orange and Stuart monarchy, though the 1650 coup appalled him. “Royalist Propaganda and Dutch Poets on the Execution of Charles I,” Dutch Crossing 24.2 (2000), 258.

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Olympian meetings to assist Tromp and the Dutch against their foes. After describing Cromwell’s greed and describing a sea “van Britsche roovers krielen [swarming with British pirates],” Vos turns to the Dutch Republic’s preparations for new battles.48 As “Vulkanus stookt zijn schouwen [Vulcan stokes his furnaces],” the Dutch work together assiduously “om scheepen van te bouwen [in order to build ships]” (14). In a demonstration of national commitment and almost industrial might, “D’aambeelden rammelen, door ‘t smeeden, in het oor [At the forges, the anvils ring in the ear]” (14). All of this preparation reminds the poet of Rome’s dedication when faced with the threat of their maritime rivals. Dutch determination inspires the proud poet to draw an analogy: “Zoo woelde Roome toen Kartaag door zee quam streeven [Thus would Rome when Carthage came striving through the sea]” (14). Over the next several pages, the poet describes these preparations and some of the preliminary engagements. The courageous Dutch, like their Roman inspiration, will keep English Carthage at bay. Then, before the culmination of these efforts, the poet imagines one more council of the gods, in which Neptune, Apollo, and Minerva throw their support “Naa Hollandt, om dat zy hier aangebeeden zijn [after Holland, because they are propitiated here],” while—neatly reversing the usual stereotypes to tar the English—Bacchus and Venus “Verkoozen ‘t Englesche rijk [Chose the English commonwealth],” because “de wijn / En geilheidt past den Brit [wine and lust suits the Brit]” (27). Although the English might prefer to imagine themselves as the virtuous successors of the Roman Republic, favored by Neptune—as Marvell would in The Character of Holland—the Dutch could just as easily figure themselves in that triumphant role. In fact, in The Character of Holland Marvell uses Carthage’s weakness to intensify his satirical portrait of the Dutch. Completed as part of Marvell’s bid for employment with the Commonwealth after England’s victory off Portland in 1653, the satire looks forward to his nation’s triumph in a modern Punic War.49 In describing “Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land,” the poem’s first hundred lines weave together threads English writers typically used for mocking the Dutch: a topography below sea-level, belligerent drunkenness, excessive appetites, a 48 Zeekrygh tusschen De Staaten Der Vrye Neederlanden En het Parlement van Engelandt (Amsterdam, 1653), 12. 49 Smith dates Marvell’s poem to the victory at Portland (also called the Three Days Fight). The Chameleon, 107.

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barely-Christian religious toleration and the subordination of religion to profit motives.50 The poem pivots when the speaker asks sarcastically “when such amity at home is showed; / What then are their confed’racies abroad” (101–2). He treats only one foreign confederacy, however: Holland’s reliance on England, “To whom their weather-beaten province owes / Itself” (109–10). Although he mentions one specific betrayal, recalling Tromp’s attack while Dutch diplomats claimed to be negotiating for peace, the poet gestures to the Dutch Republic’s shattering of “all ancient rights and leagues” (107) between the two nations and indirectly produces a character of his own nation in response. Rome’s engagement with Carthage figures significantly at the close of this outline of an England responding to Dutch perfidy. The stereotypical jibes of the satire’s first section occasionally threaten to redound onto England and erase the chimerical difference they assert. In the first thirty-six lines, the poet mocks the Dutch for territory that can scarcely claim to be firm, an “indigested vomit of the sea” (7). He recalls the very real danger that northern European waters might submerge Holland and the other provinces, with a personified ocean that intentionally “on Land had come /To show them what’s their Mare Liberum” (25–26). The speaker turns the title of Hugo Grotius’s provocative defense of unrestricted maritime trade into the punch line for a joke about the likelihood that the Low Countries might find themselves again overwhelmed by the liberated seas England claimed with Selden’s Mare Clausum’s help. Scoffing at a land rejected by the English, “th’offscouring of the British sand,” or dredged up when “English pilots… heaved the lead” (2, 4), the poet anticipates his reference to England’s role in preserving the weather-beaten province.51 Bringing his mockery of Dutch topography to a close with the image of sunken cities in which cod swim to burghers’ tables as guests rather than meals, the poet makes one explicit reversal that relies on an implicit one. Describing this watery scene, he imagines “For pickled herring, pickled Heeren changed,” with the dietary staple of fish pickled in brine sitting down to eat a dish of Dutch “heeren,” or “sirs,” figuratively pickled in alcohol. This reversal 50 “The Character of Holland,” 1. Van Raamsdonck examines Marvell’s use of these stereotypes at length. Milton, Marvell, 33. 51 Norbrook detects a “grudging admiration” in Marvell’s imagination of Dutch efforts to claim the land. Writing the English Republic, 296. Kerrigan considers Marvell’s treatment of the Dutch as occasionally sympathetic. Archipelagic English, 238.

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of expectations requires a second reversal, as English readers must have some familiarity with the Dutch word as well as the English for the pun to work.52 Given the frequency with which satires scoff at Dutch titles, many English readers had encountered this word and some others. The satire goes on to lampoon Dutch religion and politics under the shadow of anxieties about England’s own systems. It criticizes the heterodoxy and avaricious toleration of the Dutch, the “Staple of sects and mint of schism” (72). Steven Zwicker disapproves of a seeming contradiction here as Marvell paradoxically “own[s] and deride[s] the very same opinion” about toleration, though I would note that Marvell characterizes Dutch toleration as a debased form of an ideal he would elsewhere cherish.53 Of course, Salmasius charged the English Republic with similar flaws in Defensio Regia, claiming that an ambitious “colluviem omnium sectarum [mixture of all sects]” replaced English episcopacy and that the Independents’ efforts to secure toleration threatened the proliferation of the sects and schisms Marvell deplored among the Dutch.54 The poem’s complex criticism of Dutch political disorder allows the poet to denigrate the amorphous Dutch system as “Something like government” (38). He mocks the rebellious Dutch who cannot “bear strict service, nor pure liberty” (54), though that characterization might equally apply to regicidal England’s chaotic politics, especially as a frustrated Cromwell prepared to dissolve the Rump. In its final third, Marvell’s Character of Holland responds to Tromp’s treacherous attack on a new English republic by predicting an English victory as inevitable as Rome’s over Carthage. The opening salvo of this section decries Tromp’s attack on “Our sore new circumcised Commonwealth” (118). The godly English Commonwealth has reformed itself, been circumcised, and made itself new. Further making a virtue of the 52 Raamsdonck contextualizes the several Dutch words Marvell uses in the satire and the way English readers might have understood their humor. Milton, Marvell, 35. 53 “What’s the Problem with the Dutch? Andrew Marvell, the Trade Wars, Toleration, and the Dutch Republic,” Marvell Studies 3 (2018), 10. Thomas Corns reads the religious anarchy of the poem’s vision of Amsterdam as an inversion of Marvell’s ideal of order. Uncloistered Virtue, 241. Nigel Smith sees Marvell’s representation of the Dutch Republic’s toleration as drawing on popular English views of heterodoxy in the United Provinces. Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 315. 54 Defensio Regia, Pro Carolo I ad Serenissimum Magnae Britanniae Regem Carolum II ([Leiden], 1649), 21.

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Commonwealth’s youth, Marvell’s poem praises England as an “infant Hercules,” ready to strangle “their Hydra of sev’n provinces” (137– 8). This epic image of young England’s strength contrasts with the dubious strength of the “water-Hercules” of the belligerent Dutch (94). This paradox of anchoring youthful vitality in classical myth and history continues as the speaker turns to the Punic Wars. Sounding an injured note, the speaker asks rhetorically, “Was this Jus Belli et Pacis ?” (113). In addition to harping on Grotius, the author of De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625), the poet implies that the hypocritical Dutch do not even follow their great jurist’s views on the proper conduct of war and negotiation. Moreover, the allusion may recall Grotius’s own disapproval, via references to Rome and Carthage, of an attack during a diplomatic truce. Grotius had drawn on examples from the Punic Wars in his analysis of diplomatic stratagem and deception. He frowned on some types of deception and declared that Romans rejected “versutijs Punicis [the craftiness of the Carthaginians],” because their “maiores nunquam vt astu magis quam virtute gloriarentur bella gessisse [ancestors would never have reveled in their cunning but rather in their courage].”55 In the final few lines of the poem, this synthesis of authoritative precedent and liberty from precedent adheres in the evocation of the Punic Wars. England’s recent victories and the prizes and salvage the nation has recovered leave the Dutch with very little, and the Dutch must now decide what to do with “what is left” (141). If they sue for peace, “their Carthage overcome” should take the remnant and “render fain unto our better Rome” as reparations (141– 2). If they do not, “our Senate” may “refuse” their pleas for peace in order to train a new generation of vigorous English sailors in victory “lest their youth disuse / The war” (143–4). England stands on the threshold of greatness. It has vanquished its rival, just as Rome defeated Carthage. Fusing that past with the limitless future, “Provided they be what they have been,” the poet optimistically asserts that “now of nothing may our state despair” (145–7). The Punic Wars may frame England’s present, but a glorious English future remains to be written. The English and the Dutch continued to think of their war as a modern version of the great contest between the two ancient maritime republics. When the Dutch sued for peace, Mercurius Politicus reported that many in Holland hoped that the Dutch would win at least some additional 55 De Ivre Belli Ac Pacis (Paris, 1625), 572. I use Clement Barksdale’s English translation. Of the Law of Warre and Peace with Annotations (London, 1654), 505.

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victories before the conclusion of peace. The Dutch worried that in these negotiations they must take on the role of “either Carthage or Rome, in conclusion of the business” and hoped not to emerge from the war in the same abjection as Carthage had at the end of the Punic Wars.56 Eventually Cromwell pushed through a peace that punished the Dutch without impoverishing them.57 The Dutch acknowledged English sovereignty at sea, professed their guilt for the Amboyna massacre, expelled English royalists, and accepted the Navigation Act. In a secret clause, the province of Holland agreed to prevent the House of Orange from regaining its traditional offices and authority.58 Poets celebrated the peace, with one giving thanks that “Now lock’d are Janus Gates” as another praised Cromwell for surpassing Hannibal “That Punick Victor, that with valour clad / Charg’d through the Alpes.”59 Robert Vilvain may have expected that this peace would end the conflicts between Rome and Carthage, since “Carthage at last, the Romans Triumphs raised,” but he also recalled that “Carthage and Rome held three wars furiously / At several times, meerly for Soveraignty.”60 Some hoped that these English and Dutch versions of Rome and Carthage would not need to fight two additional wars. Writing in 1655, however, Joost van den Vondel might have agreed with Vilvain as he considered the ratified peace. London may have hoped that they had “vischt een net vol Amsterdammen [fished a net full of Amsterdammers],” with the peace, but now “Karthage en Rome zien elckandre grimmigh aen, / Als leeuw en tigerdier [Carthage and Rome grimly eye each other as a lion and a tiger]” with the embers of the fires of war continuing to glow.61 Those coals would in fact ignite two subsequent wars.

56 Mercurius Politicus , no. 160 (30 June–7 July 1653), 2560. 57 Pincus analyzes the negotiations. Protestantism and Patriotism, 169. 58 Herbert H. Rowen discusses Johan de Witt’s diplomatic and political skill in these

negotiations. John de Witt: Statesman of the “True Freedom” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 43. 59 Musarum Oxoniensium (Oxford, 1654), 96. 60 Enchiridium Epigrammatum Latino-Anglicum: An Epitome of Essais (London,

1654), epigram XLV. 61 “Inwydinge van het Stadthuis Amsterdam (1655),” in Poezy of Verscheide Gedichten (Franeker, 1682), 224. Additional references to Vondel’s verse are to this edition.

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The Painter and the Poet Dare: Compliment and Satire in the Second Anglo-Dutch War Just as Vos and Vondel’s poetry demonstrates that the Dutch could imagine themselves as Rome to English Carthage, so the United Provinces’ painters found the Punic Wars useful for visually representing themselves and their nation’s aspirations. By using a static image, these painters created potential ambiguities as audiences might respond to it in a variety of ways. Such ambiguities surround the Continence of Scipio, a popular subject for Dutch history paintings (Fig. 6.1).62 Before he

Fig. 6.1 Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, The Continence of Scipio (1659). Philadelphia Museum of Art: Purchased with the George W. Elkins Fund, 1981, E1981-1-1 62 David Kunzle explores this moral ambiguity in the Dutch Republic. From Criminal to Courtier: The Soldier in Netherlandish Art, 1550–1672 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 512. Kunzle lists dozens of paintings on the subject.

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acquired the cognomen Africanus, Scipio led Roman forces against the Carthaginians in Iberia. According to Livy, Roman soldiers brought a young woman to Scipio as a prize. When he learned that she was engaged to Allucius, an honorable young man, Scipio summoned her fiancée and made a magnanimous speech in praise of the couple’s “groote liefde die ghy tot malcanderen habt [great love that you have for each other].”63 He reunited Allucius and his betrothed, made her ransom into a dowry, and explained that “diense van rechts wegen toe behoort [duty to the state commanded me away]” (102r). This gesture so impressed Allucius that he gathered “veerthien hondert paerden tot hem ende begeerde hem te dienen [fourteen hundred horses to himself and begged to serve him]” (102v). Several ambiguities permeate this episode. Scipio’s victory secured significant new sources of wealth for the Roman Republic, but that wealth tempted the austere and frugal republic with luxury and decadence, just as profits from global commerce tempted the Dutch Republic. These paintings could also carry a political charge among the factions within the Dutch Republic. On one hand, many towns in the province of Holland commissioned paintings on this subject of selfless, temperate rule for civic buildings. On the other hand, paintings of Scipio’s continence celebrated the military leader of the Roman Republic and might suggest the patron’s Orangist sympathies.64 As the posthumous son of Willem II, young Willem of Orange—who would unexpectedly sit on England’s throne one day—remained an object of intrigue in the United Provinces. Although the province of Holland agreed in a separate 1654 codicil that it would never elect Willem to be its stadholder or captain general, some in the Dutch Republic agitated for the House of Orange’s restoration. Everyone in the Dutch Republic preferred to think of their nation as a new Rome rather than a Carthage, but even to align the nation with the Roman Republic created some uncomfortable tensions. Similar awkwardness accompanied the classical registers of English poets praising the return of the Stuarts to the English throne. In 1657, Thomas Ross translated Silius Italicus’s Punica for the exiled Charles Stuart. Ross hoped that this epic of Rome’s triumph over Carthage in 63 De Romeynsche Historien ende Geschiedenissen, beschreven door Titum Livium, trans. Paulus Merulam (Amsterdam, 1635), 102r. 64 Richard Helgerson traces this ambiguity. Adulterous Alliances: Home, State, and History in Early Modern European Drama and Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 107.

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the Second Punic War might inspire a contemporary poet “to build you such another Monument” since England’s future monarch “is endowed with all those Virtues, that rendred the Valiant Hannibal famous, or Scipio a Conquerour.”65 When Ross printed this translation after the Restoration and dedicated it to Charles II, he made the first payment on that promise, characterizing his patron as providing a peaceful example surpassing Scipio and Hannibal, who “would no more contend, who best might claim / Priority” and would accept that “Rome would her Gen’ral, Carthage Hers refuse” in favor of Charles II. Some English writers tried to anchor their praise of their monarch in the precedents of ancient Rome, especially when England and the Dutch Republic again went to war, but such figures fit uneasily onto England under a king. English authors’ efforts to make the Punic Wars serve English interests in new wars with the Carthaginian Dutch, particularly in the political crisis following England’s naval failures, show that English identity continued to evolve as it came into conflict with their Dutch rivals. The gap between the English nation and its restored king grew wider as a result of the second war. Traditionally characterized as a trade war, the Second Anglo-Dutch War reflected a set of ideological differences. On the eve of hostilities, an English monarchy, fearing the specter of the regicidal republicans and espousing religious conformity, faced a Dutch republic tolerating religious plurality and harboring English malcontents critical of the Stuart regime. Charles II’s efforts to create toleration for Catholics under the cover of supporting Dissenters had created a backlash in favor of Anglican unity and conformity embodied in the Clarendon Code, which drove some religious exiles to join the king’s harshest English critics in the United Provinces.66 As king he had taken advantage of the indulgent Cavalier Parliament but he remained financially dependent on them even as he and his advisors benefitted from participation in the profits of the East India Company and the new Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into

65 The Second Punick War between Hannibal and the Romanes Englished from the Latine of Silius Italicus (London, 1661), B2v. 66 Tim Harris summarizes its provisions. Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (London: Penguin, 2005), 53. Pincus discusses this growing exile community in the Dutch Republic. Protestantism and Patriotism, 227.

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Africa.67 Across the Narrow Seas, Johan de Witt and the Loevestein party worked diligently to articulate the benefits of the “True Freedom” of a Dutch Republic liberated from deference to a nearly monarchical stadholder.68 When the provinces beyond Holland lobbied for the return of the House of Orange’s influence, de Witt published his Deductie, a lengthy defense of the republican character of the United Provinces. Liberated from the corruption of an ambitious noble family, the Dutch Republic would now enjoy the “principaelste effecten ende voornaemste vruchten van een rechte vryheyt ende onbevleckte liberteyt [chief effects and principal fruits of a true freedom and unblemished liberty].”69 The Dutch could now entrust their most important offices to those with “vromicheyt capaciteyt ende meriten vande Persoonen selfs [piety, ability, and merits of persons]” rather than with regard for wealth, nobility, ancestry “often andere bywerpselen vande fortune [or other remnants of fortune]” (70). In 1660, some in the United Provinces had high hopes for cooperation with England and sympathy with its restored regime, but Charles II’s domineering behavior helped to burnish the republican ideals of Dutch writers like Pieter de la Court.70 His Interest van Holland, with its defense of the “commercial republic” against the flatterers and “bloedsuygers van den Staat [leeches of the state],” who manipulate monarchs and promote their “eygen profijt [own profit],” went through eight editions that year, as many in the United Provinces grew skeptical of restoring authority to the House of Orange.71 Dutch republicanism, 67 Annabel Patterson treats the initial cooperation of the Cavalier Parliament. The Long Parliament of Charles II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 5. Harris identifies royal finances as the regime’s main weakness. Restoration, 60. Batchelor traces the braided interests of monarch and merchants at the Restoration. London, 169. 68 Herbert H. Rowen discusses the “True Freedom” and Dutch republican theories

that developed in the two decades during which Holland kept the House of Orange out of power. “The Dutch Republic and the Idea of Freedom,” in Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776, ed. David Wootten (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 317. 69 Deductie, ofte Declaratie van de Staten van Hollandt ende West-Vriesland; Behelsende een waerachtich ende grondich bericht van de Fondamenten der Regieringe vande vrye Verenichde Nederlanden (Hague, 1654), 70. 70 Israel argues that Charles overplayed his hand in 1662. Dutch Republic, 757. 71 Interest van Holland, ofte Gronden van Hollands-Welvaren (Amsterdam, 1662), a5r.

De la Court’s comments echo Milton’s own critique of the expense of monarchs in Readie and Easie Way. Arthur Weststeijn finds that the de la Courts believed commercial interest would ensure the greatest liberty in a polity dedicated to national interests. Commercial

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English intolerance, and competition for trade finally pushed the two nations into war. Fighting a war to humble an ambitious, tolerant Dutch Republic, the English had to come to terms with their evolving identity as well. Some English poets revived the compelling figuration of their war with the Dutch as a Punic War. In the Second Punic War, Scipio Africanus led Rome to victory over Hannibal’s seemingly indefatigable Carthage. As they had done a decade before, the English could imagine their rivals across the sea as a modern Carthage. However, a monarch ruled England in the Second Anglo-Dutch War, and English writers who tried to represent their nation as a modern Roman Republic confronted numerous difficulties. England enjoyed success at Lowestoft, in the St. James’ Day Fight, and belatedly in the Caribbean and South America, but the embarrassment of the Four Days’ Fight—deemed a victory initially but subsequently recognized as a defeat—followed by the humiliation of the Dutch raid on Chatham forced England to accept the disappointing terms of the Peace of Breda.72 That Dutch victory on the Medway forced the English to reexamine its own national identity. England would struggle to reconcile the restored monarch’s arbitrary designs with the liberal political nation, again confront England’s imperfect religious settlement, and account for the place of commerce and trade in the national interest. Although some English writers used classical figures—including the Punic Wars, when it seemed possible that England might again defeat the Dutch—to represent these interests, in this new context they had to hedge and to manipulate such figures for them to work as English identity faced a crisis around its relationship to monarchy. Some writers easily revived xenophobic tropes during the wars. Another edition of Felltham’s Brief Character appeared and inspired numerous satirical pamphlets. The East India Company published a new edition of their Amboyna pamphlet while John Darrell’s True and Compendious Narration added new examples of Dutch treachery around the globe as part of the ambitious designs of these “Politique Universal

Republicanism in the Dutch Golden Age: The Political Thought of Johan & Pieter de la Court (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 276. 72 De Witt’s triumphant leadership and the advantageous Peace of Breda secured the republican Loevestein party’s hold on power, removing Orangist pressure that had developed after the costly campaigns late in 1666. Israel, Dutch Republic, 776.

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Enemies (especially of England).”73 The Dutch responded similarly, with more threats that the English “Steertman sal sijn steert verliesen met een zwenck [Tailman shall lose his tail at one blow]” and narratives of English injustice to match Amboyna.74 Dozens of English broadsides and short pamphlets derided the Dutch or praised English admirals and their successes. In one important example of the difficulty English poets found in adapting the Punic Wars trope to England under a monarch, Marvell’s Character of Holland, which appeared in print for the first time in 1665, preserves most of its stereotypical jibes about the Dutch but rewrites its republican conclusion. The satire softens its original critique of monarchy, changing the line “Necessity, that first made kings” (37) to “Need, which some say first made Kings.”75 More significantly, Marvell excises the poem’s final third, in which he had predicted that “their Carthage overcome” would sue for peace to “our better Rome,” and replaces that section with praise of “sober English valour” and the royal fleet’s new admirals. Rather than use the awkward figure of the English monarchy’s Roman Republic achieving a certain victory over Dutch Carthage that figurative strategy disappears from Marvell’s satire. Despite the awkwardness of praising monarchical England as a modern Roman Republic, the appeal of representing the Dutch as a doomed Carthage continued to inspire some English authors to use these classical figures. After England’s victory at Lowestoft, Alvise Sagredo reported that English diplomats offered the Dutch conditions that “differ little from those which Scipio imposed on the Carthaginians after he had conquered Hannibal in Africa.”76 In Bellum Belgicum Secundum, celebrating Lowestoft, as an anonymous poet prepares to list the Dutch transgressions that started the war, he reaches for the popular figure of 73 A True and Compendious Narration; or (Second Part of Amboyna) (London, 1665),

35. 74 Engelsman in Hollander ([Amsterdam], 1665), 14. 75 The Character of Holland (London, 1665), 7. Martin Dzelzainis concludes that

Marvell had the poem printed and composed its new conclusion. “Marvell and the Dutch in 1665,” in A Concise Companion to the Study of Manuscripts, Printed Books, an the Production of Early Modern Texts, ed. Edward Jones (Oxford: Wiley, 2015), 260. Stephen Bardle argues that Marvell published the poem to show that English Dissenters could contribute to their nation’s success. The Literary Underground in the 1660s: Andrew Marvell, George Wither, Ralph Wallis, and the World of Restoration Satire and Pamphleteering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 100. 76 CSPV , 10 July 1665 (page 154).

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the previous war, Rome’s domination of Carthage. The Dutch sought out this war just as “mutinous Carthage oftentimes rebell’d,” and England will certainly triumph, just as “Rome her insolence as often quell’d.”77 Later, William Smith would compose a panegyric for the launching of the Loyal London in which he would make familiar gibes about the Dutch. The English fleet exhibits “Roman courage, Roman constancy, / Intends to conquer, or intends to die,” while the Dutch cower and quake.78 The United Provinces’ antagonism, as when “Mistaken Carthage urg’d the Romane State,” brings the inevitable destruction of the Dutch Republic on itself (4). Of course, Smith must make certain adjustments to this figure of England’s certain victory to fit the circumstances of England under a monarch. The Roman “State” rather than the more appropriate “Senate” will destroy Carthage in this view. In the end, Smith imagines the next English victory as one in which “great Augustus” overpowered the “weaker Angel of Antonius,” at Actium. Smith tries to have it both ways. England will succeed against the United Provinces, just as Rome defeated Carthage in the republican era and as it triumphed at Actium in the imperial age. The Dutch found it easier to imagine their war with England as a Punic War. They could claim the role of the Roman Republic and its providential victory over their arrogant commercial rivals for themselves, however. Vondel, who celebrated the ascendance of the States party over the ambitious, intolerant supporters of the house of Orange, published poems to celebrate Dutch success against the Stuarts as well. His poem in honor of Dutch success in the Four Days’ Fight, “De Zeetriomf der Vrye Nederlanden,” gestures repeatedly to the glory of his nation, the free republic, particularly as it frustrates the ambitions of an unjust English monarch who, “Als een zeegodt [Like a sea god]” arrogantly “een zeewet … schrijven [writes a maritime law]” and believes his “gezag / Alle volken overmag [authority prevails over all nations]” (81). Gesturing to the popular Dutch stereotype of the English, Vondel scorns how “Alle waterhonden vlugh [All the seadogs quickly]” sound “schutgevaerten [retreat]” and flee “met ingekrompen staerten [with tails curled in]” across “een zee van Engelsch bloet [a sea of English

77 Bellum Belgicum Secundum, Or A Poem Attempting something on his Majesties Proceedings against the Dutch (Cambridge, 1665), 1. 78 A Poem on the Famous Ship Called The Loyal London (London, 1666), 5.

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blood]” (83). Among England’s disgraces, George Ayscue, the admiral of the white squadron, ran aground in the shallows and surrendered to the Dutch. Vondel depicts Ayscue, “nu lang verlaeten [now long abandoned]” by his fleeing comrades, as he carries “op’t hof der Vrye Staeten / Zelf de tijding uit den slagh: / En de witte koningsvlagh / Wort in’t hofgewelf gehangen [news from the battle to the court of the Free States himself; and the white standard is hung from the court rafters]” (83). The arrogant English celebrations that this Dutch victory has invalidated originated “uit nieu Karthage [from new Carthage]” (81). While the Dutch could easily imagine their republican nation as Rome triumphing over Carthage, the struggle to appropriate the figure of an English Rome defeating a Dutch Carthage surfaces again at the end of the ominous year, 1666. John Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis recasts England’s year of tribulations as a year of wonders. After suffering a serious outbreak of plague, London endured the devastating Great Fire. Some feared that Dutch or French agents ignited the blaze and xenophobia intensified as a result.79 Praising London’s “invincible Courage and unshaken Constancy” in response to these trials, Dryden dedicates his historical poem to a metropolis determined to survive, rebuild, and prosper.80 English readers might recognize themselves in the example of the constant Romans who endured hardships, including many disappointments in the Second Punic War, for the greater good. Describing English resilience at the start of the war, Sagredo had praised the English people for emulating the “model of the ancient Romans, of whom Hannibal confessed, after having won two signal victories over them that they could never distinguish when they were victorious or when they had lost.”81 After a year of disasters, Dryden offered his readers the consoling example of the Romans, who survived a string of calamities, just as England would. Conceding that in order to encompass these varied events he has written a “Historical, not Epick” poem, Dryden positions the episodic Annus Mirabilis between Lucan’s Pharsalia and 79 Samuel Pepys reports the crowds’ reaction to the “great alarme” created by rumors

that Dutch and French forces would invade under cover of the chaos caused by the Great Fire. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (Berkeley: U of California P, 1970), 7:277. 80 Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956). “Annus Mirabilis,” 1: 48. 81 CSPV , 14 August 1665 (page 176).

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Silius Italicus’ Punica in its aims (50). London had suffered the trials of plague, fire, and war, but at least in fighting the Dutch in “our second Punick War” (20) England had enjoyed some success. Dryden encourages his English countrymen with the glorious prospect of all that their nation will gain when they defeat the Dutch. Even as Dryden disparages the Dutch and denigrates their motives and behavior, the distinctions he erects threaten to collapse. The poet focuses particularly on Dutch avarice. Without a hint of irony, the poet claims that trade, “which like blood should circularly flow / Stop’d in their channels, found its freedom lost” due to the Dutch (5–6).82 The grasping Dutch provoke the altruistic English to restore the world’s trade routes. At the same time, the poem lingers over Dutch prosperity and the prospect of almost unimaginable wealth the English may acquire by defeating their rivals. Several episodes begin with catalogues of the rich cargos in Dutch vessels, describing VOC ships sheltering at Bergen on their return “from India, fraught / With all the riches of the rising Sun” in the East (93–4) and enumerating the luxurious cargoes of a Dutch merchant fleet near the Vlie, full of commodities destined for “Turkish Courts” (823), and ports around the world. This envy of Dutch success erodes the distinction the poet draws between the two nations. When the English fleet descends on the Dutch merchants at the Vlie, “greedy” English sailors “rummage every hold” (829), guilty, in David Parry’s estimation, “not only of greed but also of sacrilege,” and tempting “an unseen Fate to lay us low” (839) with the chastising Fire of London.83 And yet the poet paints a bright future for England and its renewed metropolis. If the English persevere and defeat the Dutch, they will enjoy a future in which “The East with Incense, and the West with Gold, / Will stand, like Suppliants, to receive” England’s commands (1187–8). Ideologically motivated to assert a difference between his own nation’s benevolent commercial practices and their

82 Armitage notes that England restated its claim to dominion over the seas when James Howell prepared a new edition of Selden’s Mare Clausum and reasserted hereditary sovereignty over the seas. Ideological Origins, 120. Hoxby reads Dryden’s poem as an “epic of trade.” Mammon’s Music, 138. For Robert Markley, the religious and political ideology of sacred kingship barely clothes the material interests at work in the poem. The Far East and the English Imagination: 1600-1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 158. 83 “Sacrilege and the Economics of Empire in Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis ,” SEL 54 (2014), 536.

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rivals’ ambitions, Dryden musters allusions to the Punic Wars to align his nation with virtuous Rome. Dryden turns to the Punic Wars to raise English spirits after a period of despair. Because success does not come easily, the English will earn greater glory in defeating the Dutch.84 Celebrating even equivocal victories, like the mixed results of the Four Days’ Fight, the poet calls on his nation to join their monarch in finding hopeful signs “of great success, / Which all-maturing time must bring to light” (558–9).85 Of its three wars with Carthage, Rome suffered the most in the Second Punic War— Hannibal nearly vanquished Rome after crossing the Alps and winning several devastating victories—but endured and achieved a costly victory. Just as Rome eventually defeated Carthage, so Stuart England will surely defeat the United Provinces, the poet assures his readers. Evoking the Punic Wars allows Dryden to give England’s war a commercial valence as well. In its opening gestures to monopolistic Dutch trade, the poem describes the “brim-full Vessels” of the VOC bringing spices from the East Indies “to the Belg’an shore” (16). The poet compares these brimming ships to those of Rome’s great trade rival: “Thus mighty in her Ships, stood Carthage long, / And swept the riches of the world from far” (17–18).86 The Dutch may enjoy astonishing prosperity, but their pride will eventually lead to their humiliation. Just as Carthage “stoop’d to Rome, less wealthy, but more strong” (19), so the Dutch Republic must one day succumb to a greater nation, England. Dryden peppers his poem with allusions to the Punic Wars, but as with his ambiguous critique of Dutch mercantile ambitions, the overdetermined representation of the Dutch as doomed Carthage collapses. At

84 David Haley argues that Dryden adopts an optimism that characterizes his political poetry throughout the Restoration. “Dryden’s Emergence as a Political Satirist,” in Enchanted Ground: Reimagining John Dryden, ed. Jayne Lewis and Maximillian E. Novak (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 117. 85 Paulina Kewes argues that Dryden initially expresses optimism about this cooperation at the Restoration, before giving in to skepticism about the rabble. “Dryden and the Staging of Popular Politics,” in John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 61. 86 Annabel Patterson considers Dryden’s association of the United Provinces with Carthage a generous gesture meant to elevate their worth. “‘Crouching at home, and cruel when abroad’: Restoration Constructions of National and International Character,” in The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture, ed. R. Malcolm Smuts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 214.

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first, the figure serves its purpose. Just before the Four Days’ Fight, Albemarle, who had led England to victory in its first war with the United Provinces, observes “like Scipio, with disdain / That Carthage, which he ruin’d, rise once more” (197–8). When the two fleets separate after the battle, the poet casts the Dutch as sneaking off under cover of darkness “Proud to have so got off with equal stakes, / Where ‘twas a triumph not to be o’r-come” (535–6). His marginal gloss refers to Horace, who describes Hannibal praising Roman indefatigability and its tendency to grow stronger after disappointment, a verse Sagredo had recalled.87 The poem does not sustain the distinction of the virtuous, Roman English and the craven Carthaginian Dutch, however. Perhaps most significantly, the poem gestures again to the Punic Wars as the English navy pursues the retreating Dutch after the St. James’ Day Fight. Holmes promises his men the spoils of a defenseless Dutch merchant fleet. For the poet, this promise recalls the start of the Third Punic War, when “old Cato in the Roman’s sight / The tempting fruits of Africk did unfold” (692). Although the allusion still figures England in the role of the victorious Romans, it makes greed the motive of the English, rather than the Dutch. The poet’s praise for the remarkable valor of de Ruyter, the Dutch admiral in the St. James’ Fight, further destabilizes the distinction between English Rome and Dutch Carthage. When he compares the Dutch admiral to defeated “Varro, timely flying” (775), the poet evokes a famous incident of retreat, even as he praises the Dutchman in the figure of a Roman general defeated by Hannibal. For a moment, this turns England into Carthage, rather than Rome. The poem’s occasional comparison of English heroes and the king’s brother to Caesar (352, 762), gesturing to the fact that the political England of Charles II no longer resembled the Roman Republic, further complicates Dryden’s ability to use figures from the Punic War to maintain the difference between England and the Carthaginian Dutch. Rome’s eventual triumph over Carthage in the Second Punic War exerted a strong appeal on an ambitious poet trying to encourage England and its distressed capital, but just as an underlying ambition to commercial dominance overwhelms the distinction the poet asserts between his nation and

87 Paul Hammond argues that when Dryden cites Horace representing Hannibal grudgingly acknowledging Roman tenacity, the uncertainty in the web of allusion threatens to unwind it. Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 99.

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their trade rivals, so the king’s restoration undermines the ability to think of the war in those terms. Just as Dryden could not sustain the image of Stuart England as reviving republican Rome, so Edmund Waller and many who responded to his Instructions to a Painter would steer clear of the Punic Wars and treat England’s naval power as analogous to the strength Rome displayed at Actium as it shed its republican character. Published first as a broadside commemorating England’s attack on the Dutch Smyrna fleet on the eve of the war, Instructions to a Painter takes as its main conceit a poet giving a painter advice, in the ut pictura poesis tradition, on the best way to depict the “first success in war” of the English fleet and its admiral, the Duke of York.88 The poem comes closest to evoking the Punic Wars as it draws to a close, describing the “Confusion” of the defeated fleet, to which “Europe and Africa from either Shoar / Spectators are.” When he embellishes his Instructions to celebrate England’s victory at Lowestoft, Waller incorporates the heroic trappings of epic and imperial Roman precedents. Imagining the Roman gods taking sides in mortal concerns, the poet assumes that the Duke’s beautiful wife “Charm’d” the gods, who “Resolv’d the aid of Neptune’s court to bring” to her nation’s ships at sea (85, 87).89 Waller’s mythologizing evolves into apotheosis, a compliment to a court that reveled in language of sacred monarchy. The navy—which a generous public subsidy paid to send against the Dutch— becomes Charles’s powerful accessory: “His club Alcides, Phoebus has his bow / Jove has his thunder, and your navy you” (315–6).90 This elevated mode fits the poet’s characterization of the battle itself. Instead of reaching for figures from the austere Roman Republic to imagine the English navy’s heroism, however, Waller describes this contest for empire as surpassing the battle of “The Roman fleets at Actium” (114), when Anthony and Octavian contended for the relatively small, old world of

88 Instructions to a Painter for the Drawing of a Picture of the State and Posture of the English Forces at Sea (London, 1665). Jane Partner treats the emulation and rivalry of Restoration poets and painters. Poetry and Vision in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave, 2018), 171. 89 “Instructions to a Painter.” in Poems on Affairs of State, ed. George deF Lord, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 85, 87. 90 Hoxby reads the envoy as an effort to align Charles with the interests of his merchants. Mammon’s Music, 96.

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the Mediterranean.91 The painter should depict Charles as a triumphant “young Augustus... / Triumphing for that victory at sea, / Where Egypt’s queen and eastern kings o’rethrown, / Made the possession of the world his own” (301–4). Waller’s use of material from the demise of the Roman Republic and the emergence of the Caesars incited subsequent critics to give the painter better instructions. Marvell, for instance, would parody Waller’s evocation of Actium by turning Waller’s pastoral vignette of the Duchess of York’s farewell to James into a harsh vision of “Roman Mark” sporting with the “fair Egyptian Crocodile” and considering the tyrant “Nero” a more apt analog than Augustus for Charles II.92 Waller’s choice of precedents from imperial Rome rather than the Roman Republic better suited England under a monarch, but in the crises that followed, voices of opposition to the Stuarts’ arbitrary tendencies transformed the way other poets made use of the Roman Republic to articulate English identity. Waller’s Instructions and the responses it provoked confront the limits of artistic forms. While painting presents the audience with its entire subject in an instant, it remains static and, lacking interpretive guidelines, it risks ambiguity and misinterpretation, as in the case of the Continence of Scipio. Poetry, on the other hand, offers its audience a dynamic, carefully detailed narrative, but readers experience verse sequentially and partially. Waller encounters these conventional limitations at the end of Instructions. Nearly destroying his conceit in his exuberant narration of English valor, a subject that more appropriately “does the Muses fit,” the poet acknowledges that the painter should “draw arm’d heroes as they sit” statically (289–90). The Duke of York commissioned his brother’s court painter, the Dutch immigrant Sir Pieter Lely, to do just that. After the battle Waller describes, Lely painted Lowestoft’s heroic admirals as they sat for a series of thirteen paintings evocative of Queen Elizabeth’s “Armada Portrait.” In the portrait of Sir John Harman, for instance, Lely displays the young captain—who commanded ships in all three AngloDutch wars—with his sword in his right hand, gesturing with left across a balustrade to a depiction of part of the action at Lowestoft in the distance (Fig. 6.2). This sort of imaginative portrait accomplishes something approaching the subject Waller had described, containing as it does 91 Noelle Gallagher sees this move as gesturing implicitly to that of the painter of historical subjects, condensing global import into an emblematic scene. “‘Partial to Some One Side’: The Advice-to-a-Painter Poem as Historical Writing,” ELH 78 (2011), 87. 92 “The Second Advice,” 71–2, 14.

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Fig. 6.2 Peter Lely, Flagmen of Lowestoft: Admiral Sir John Harman (1666). (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)

both the clear, confident image of the individual character in the foreground, with the action subsumed into the background. That action, best captured by Dutch painters like Abraham Storck and the van de Veldes, gave rise to a genre of maritime battle scenes (Figs. 6.3, 6.4).

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Fig. 6.3 Willem van de Velde the Elder, Episode uit de Vierdaagse Zeeslag (1668). Image courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Fig. 6.4 Abraham Storck, The Four Days’ Battle (© The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)

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William van de Velde and his son painted large canvases of naval engagements.93 These composite pictures telescope hours of action into key scenes. The elder William often sketched from a small boat present at the battle, using “pen painting” to produce energetic monochromatic images of great ships engaged in heroic action; his son painted vibrant images on an even grander scale, often relying on sketches and reports of the action to complete his compositions. Pieter Casteleyn, publisher of Hollandsche Mercurius , included detailed engravings of battle scenes in his annual, making images of naval engagements available to a broad audience. On the English side, Wenceslas Hollar produced a handful of etchings of engagements from the Second Anglo-Dutch War, including one of the St. James Day Fight, depicting in the foreground a long line of English ships following England’s advanced new naval tactic against the Dutch fleet. Paintings like the van de Veldes’ allow for the grand scope that Waller’s poem and Dryden’s critical preface to Annus Mirabilis anxiously defer. Waller cannot finally reconcile epic poetry and historical painting. Waller and other Restoration panegyrists flattered this English king as a Roman emperor, Augustus, leading England into glories to rival imperial Rome, but Charles II’s incompetent managing of the war prompted opposition poets to vilify him in terms of the Roman emperors’ tyrannical excesses. Such criticism points to a rift between the English nation and its king. At least six satirical poems explicitly addressing Waller’s imagined painter followed the Instructions, each puncturing that poem’s optimism and demanding that the painter truthfully depict the corruption of Charles II’s government.94 As in Lely’s paintings with battle scenes in the distance, the Dutch war occasions the imagined paintings these poets commission, but the naval battles fade into the metaphorical background. The satirists foreground English failures—attributed to an incompetent court and corrupt administration—so that the painter can depict them accurately. Perfunctorily asserting a distinction between 93 Lelia Packer discusses van de Velde’s valorizing of the Dutch nation and its navy. “Prints as Paintings: Willem van de Velde the Elder (1611–1693) and Dutch pen Painting circa 1650–65,” in Prints in Translation, 1450–1750: Image, Materiality, Space, ed. Suzanne Karr Schmidt and Edward H. Wouk (London: Routledge, 2017), 45. Lisa Jardine discusses the movement of Dutch art objects across the Narrow Seas in Going Dutch, 139. 94 Bardle discusses the timing of several of these poems, meant to coincide with the start of new sessions in Parliament and offer a correction to official reports. Literary Underground, 107.

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the virtuous English and the inferior Dutch, these satires focus on the distance between the English nation and its monarch. Although these poems represent some of the same events—some take Lowestoft as their starting point—they achieve this differentiation by reshaping these incidents and emphasizing those shameful details that panegyrics ignore.95 The causes of the war with the Dutch Republic, the ineffective prosecution of it, the deceptive opacity and corrupt diversion of its extraordinary financing, and finally its catastrophic outcome in 1667 all provide fodder for these satires as they characterize the arbitrary, self-interested rule of the English monarch and his court. The shame of the Dutch raid on the Medway heats the crucible in which these poets refine an English identity, hoping to purge the nation of corrupt and venal governors. Some poets might have found it difficult to shape Roman history to celebrate Restoration England. In Marvell’s satires, however, figures of Roman tyranny enter seamlessly into the discourse, while nostalgia for the selfless heroes of the Roman Republic functions in praise of opposition. Despite their opposition to the king, Clarendon, and other members of the court, these satires still patriotically celebrate the English nation and hope for its success. Marvell’s two anonymous wartime contributions, the Second Advice and the Third Advice, praise English valor and denigrate the Dutch, sometimes in the same crude terms as the panegyrists used.96 The Second Advice, for instance, mocks the explosion of the Eendracht , the flagship of Opdam who “flies up in his ship to catch the moon” (168), with the same sadistic glee found in both Waller and others. At the same time, they criticize Charles II’s suspect ministers, who profit from an ill-advised war with the Dutch. Reminding Waller’s painter of some of the unflattering details of the Lowestoft victory and linking them to Sandwich’s scandalous personal profits from Dutch merchant vessels taken after the mistakes at Bergen, the Second Advice questions the value of continuing the war. Observing the huge expenditures on a war “fought we know not why” (317), the poem pleads with the king to

95 Partner sees the responses to Waller, offering to correct the flawed vision of his painter, in the context of mid-century polemical pamphlets offering visual aids to better see the opposition’s corruption. Poetry and Vision, 192. Gallagher triangulates between Dryden’s claims to describe history and the biases of Waller’s panegyric and Marvell’s satire. “‘Partial to Some’,” 98. 96 Annabel Patterson argues persuasively for Marvell’s authorship of these two poems. “Lady State’s First Two Sittings,” SEL 40 (2000), 402.

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exercise a better divinity as a “go[d] in peace” than the thundering Jove of Waller’s envoy (368). The Third Advice raises similar concerns. While maintaining a patriotic contempt for the Dutch, the poem worries that England faces a greater enemy at home. When the Duchess of Albemarle speaks to her husband, who commanded the fleet in the final battle of the First Anglo-Dutch War, she hints that Clarendon manipulated popular sentiment against the Dutch in order to prevent domestic criticism and in order to finance his extravagance and the king’s. Clarendon thought “a Dutch war shall all these rumours still, / Bleed out these humours, and our purses spill.”97 Urging the Duke to continue to fight for English success, she predicts that he will eventually make both “the Dutch and them repent” (320), aligning the foreign enemy with a domestic enemy at court. In the anonymous Fourth Advice and Fifth Advice, written after the disaster on the Medway, the Dutch recede even further into the background. The Fifth Advice promises domestic recriminations as Parliament convenes to demand “accounts to see / How this disbursement with receipts agree.”98 The Fourth Advice, the least restrained of these satires, accumulates all of England’s woes in a single powerful couplet: “Plague, fire, and war have been the nation’s curse, / But to have these our rulers is a worse.”99 Disenchantment with a costly, possibly unnecessary war drives these satires. In the guise of helping Waller’s painter see the scandalous truth of England’s humiliation, Marvell’s Last Instructions to a Painter places the corruption of the king’s government in the foreground. The Second Anglo-Dutch War may have ended with England’s disgraceful failure at Chatham and the humiliating Peace of Breda, but it forces the English

97 “Third Advice to a Painter,” 265–6. Jack Avery examines the way this satire relies on official news accounts, sparing Monck some of the harsh criticism directed at others. “‘That lie of state’: Andrew Marvell, the Earl of Arlington, and Restoration News Writing,” Seventeenth Century 36 (2021), 94. Bardle argues that these satires point to Marvell’s frustration and disappointment with the nepotism and corruption of those who were damaging the nation’s powerful navy. Literary Underground, 108. 98 “The Fifth Advice to a Painter,” in Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660–1714, ed. George deF. Lord, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 87–8. 99 “The Fourth Advice to a Painter,” in Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660–1714, ed. George deF. Lord, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 17–18. Bardle notes popular agitation in response to the disgrace. Literary Underground, 112.

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to confront their own national character.100 When the poet comes to the events that might have contained some epic features—de Ruyter’s arrival in the Thames and the call for good Englishmen to defend the nation— the Last Instructions unexpectedly modulates into pastoral, describing the Dutch fleet cruising pleasantly along “our rivers undisturbed” while nymphs cavort in crystal streams and Roman deities ease de Ruyter’s approach to the mothballed English fleet.101 The poet registers the national shame of the English flagship, once the “fatal pledge of sea command,” despoiled in “the ravisher De Ruyter’s hand” (757–8).102 Although this hardly counts as a battle, since the English fleet does not sail out to meet the Dutch, who “want an enemy,” Marvell finds some heroic military actions to praise (540). He sympathizes with Albemarle, idled by the navy’s inactivity, who watches enraged and helpless like a “tigress fell” (623) as England’s fleet burns, while the heroic sacrifice of youthful Douglas, who “wondered much at those who run away” (662), gives Marvell a chance to reproach those who permitted such a disgrace to occur.103 If Waller’s painter wants to depict “our Lady State,” he must learn to “paint without colours,” perhaps like van de Velde, or search for England’s wasted nation “through the microscope” (1, 5, 16).104 The indignant poet can find no heroic military engagements for Waller’s painter to depict. 100 England’s inept handling of the war may have frustrated Marvell, but he does not quite make the Dutch into the heroes Patterson finds in this poem. “Crouching,” 224. Katherine Acheson reads Marvell’s figuration of the contest between poets and painters as elevating English verse at the expense of foreign, Dutch painting. Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 120. 101 “The Last Instructions to a Painter,” 524. 102 Timothy Raylor argues that in this incongruous episode Marvell points to Waller’s

subordination of epic and national interests an his elevation of amorous romance in the panegyrics. “Waller, Tasso, and Marvell’s Last Instructions to a Painter,” in Texts and Readers in the Age of Marvell, ed. Chrisopher D’Addario and Matthew Augustine (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 203. 103 For Patterson, Douglas’s tragic end suggests a lost idealism in Marvell. Marvell: The Writer in Public Life (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 103. 104 Keith McDonald concludes that Marvell ultimately reconciles the painter and the

poet through a recognition of their powerlessness, both in matters of representation and in generating enough shame to overcome political calamity. “‘Art is indeed long, but life is short’: Ekphrasis and Mortality in Andrew Marvell,” in Ekphrastic Encounters: New Interdisciplinary Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. David Kennedy and Richard Meek (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 86.

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The painting envisioned in Last Instructions does include a kind of battle, however, and although it may lack the glory of defeating the Dutch at Lowestoft, Marvell uses tropes of the Roman Republic to represent this conflict in Parliament as fundamental to English identity. Marvell endows this mock-heroic scene, a battle over crown finance between the patriotic country party and the corrupt minions of the court, with many epic accouterments.105 As he invokes the muses for assistance, the poet turns to the painter suggesting that he should “wanting other, draw this fight” (148). This war of parliamentary maneuver cuts to the heart of the relationship between the English and the monarch. On one side, Marvell arrays the schemes of Charles II and his ministers in Parliament, characterizing them as spendthrifts, using public funds to enrich themselves. This secretive group frightens the nation with a tale, ironically “too true / How strong the Dutch their equipage renew” (315–6). Heedless of the real danger, the Court faction deceives the Commons by requesting a sum to outfit a navy for another year’s warfare with the Dutch, even as it “secretly for peace decrees” (123) and plans to mothball the fleet. On the other side, Marvell praises those who stand for English liberties. An heroic figure from the Roman Republic’s triumphs helps to secure Marvell’s vision of this battle in Parliament. Charles II’s cronies, aligned with the “rude Dutch” (233), confront Giles Strangways, a lone figure of opposition, “Fighting it single till the rest might arm” (248). Marvell figures Strangeways, valiantly striding “before the foe, / The falling bridge behind, the stream below” as “Roman Cocles” (249–50). This allusion to ancient Rome recalls a hero of the early Republic who stood alone on the only bridge across the Tiber when Porsena, a neighboring king, attacked Rome to restore the exiled Tarquins. Just before his account of Popilius constraining Antiochus and just after his version of Fabius carrying an offer of war or peace to Carthage—the two figures in Marvell’s 1651 valediction to Oliver St. John—Lodowick Lloyd sums up the courage of Horatius Cocles by praising the example of “one poor Romane [who] gave the repulse to the whole Army of a king” (Marrow,

105 Patterson reads the poem as one of several voices testifying to the emergence of

Country and Court parties dividing Charles II’s Parliament. Long Parliament, 28. Edward Holberton traces the connections between Marvell’s activity on parliamentary committees investigating the corruption that led to the Medway and England’s defeat and his poetic concerns in Last Instructions . “Representing the Sea in Andrew Marvell’s ‘Advice to a Painter’ Satires,” RES 66 (2014), 81. See Raamsdonck as well. Milton, Marvell, 191.

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30). Strangeways may not need to jump into the Thames as he resists the king’s demands but his valiant actions evoke a Roman’s resistance to a king’s tyranny. Although Marvell does not evoke the worst Roman despots in this poem, he may not need to. Both lascivious Anthony and depraved Nero appear in his Second Advice, while the anonymous Fourth Advice pointedly equates a voluptuous Charles who “swiv’d” while the Dutch fleet arrived in the Medway to Nero with his harp surveying “His flaming Rome, and as that burn’d he play’d” (130). Instead, Marvell can evoke a heroic figure from republican Rome and praise the heroism of the English who would have fought de Ruyter if the king’s ministers had launched the promised navy. Such selfless acts, however, will not redeem a nation suffering from the “disease” (952) of corrupt advisors who would elevate the monarch’s personal desires above the nation’s interest, or “isle our monarch from his isle” (968). The poem’s envoy serves as a traditional request for purging the nation of evil councilors, though the series of analogies culminating in the assertion that “the country is the King” suggests where sovereignty ultimately resides.106 Marvell might have agreed with Dryden that a bright future beckoned to England, but they would have disagreed about the role of the monarch and his party in helping England to rebuild. In a nation ruled by a monarch and vanquished by the Dutch Republic, the precedent of the Punic Wars lost some of its luster, but the Dutch themselves still found it useful. De Ruyter’s raid on the Medway captured Vondel’s imagination in this way in “Zegevier der Vrije Nederlanden op den Teems,” the “Triumph of the Free Netherlands on the Thames.” The poem characterizes the previous two years as “Amsterdam en Britsch Karthage /Worstelen onderling om strijt [Amsterdam and British Carthage wrestling each other in battle]” (89). The Dutch poet treats de Ruyter’s raid as a necessary step to humble this proud English Carthage that shamelessly “Schent verbonden, eer en trou [Violates alliances, honor, and fidelity]” (91). When the States General sends de Ruyter on the raid, they do so because—like the epic poet, who

106 Warren Chernaik notes that Marvell does not explicitly condemn Charles II, hinting at the king’s deep complicity in the corruption the poet exposes. “Harsh Remedies: Satire and Politics in ‘Last Instructions to a Painter’,” in The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell, ed. Martin Dzelzainis and Edward Holberton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 448.

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must “Leere staetgeheimenissen [Learn state-secrets]”—they have seen through these “meineedigh [perjured]” English negotiators (89). The Dutch admiral’s arrival takes on some of the same anticipation of the Last Instructions , where “all our [English] hopes now on a frail chain depend” (586). Vondel describes the “uitgelaeten [exuberant]” Dutch fleet sailing down the Medway after “de keten breekt en barst [the chain breaks and bursts]” (90). Unlike Marvell, who faced the constraints of an arbitrary monarchy, Vondel can figure his nation’s raid on England as a modern republic’s emulation of republican Rome’s humiliation of Carthage. His poem describes the desperate measures of the unprepared English to prevent the inevitable Dutch success at the Medway. England may “sterkt de wacht, / Spant de ketens … Zinkt de Schepen [strengthen the guard, tighten the chains, scuttle the ships],” but this defensive posture comes too late and no one can “Ziet … aen wat helpen wil [See what will help]” (90). These are the actions of hapless “Nieu Karthago [New Carthage]” (90) and later, as the poet describes the flames that consume England’s fleet, he adds the insult that impotent, creaking “Nieu Karthago rijdt op stelten [New Carthage moves on stilts]” and must accept terms from “Vrij Nederlanden.” The Dutch Republic has brought English Carthage low. The Dutch rejoice in the proof that, like Rome, they could suffer some defeats and still emerge victorious. Dutch success prevented Orange’s return to power, at least for a time. When young Willem reached his majority, Pieter de la Court published his Aanwysing , a revised and expanded version of his Interest van Holland, arguing that commercial strength in combination with republican government propelled the Dutch Republic to victory in 1667.107 In addition to developing his critique of monarchy in general, with that form of government’s tendency to support corrupt courtiers who fleece the nation’s citizens “hopende ‘t selfden straffeloos te sullen doen, ende door de corruptie der Regeeringe sig verrijkende [hoping to do the same with impunity, and to enrich themselves through the government’s corruption],” de la Court ascribes England’s failures in the recent war to the corruption of Charles II and

107 Weststeijn aligns the Aanwysing with the Perpetual Edict by which Holland abolished the stadholderate and persuaded other provinces to make their provincial stadholderates incompatible with the office of Captain General. Commercial Republicanism, 61.

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his minions.108 He crows that in 1667 the republican Dutch “die zeesaaken in eenen anderen stand hadde gebragt [had placed those maritime affairs on another footing]” (222). The English monarchy failed to defeat the Dutch Republic, de la Court suggests, due to their “quistinge ende spaarsaamheid respective [profligacy and thrift respectively]” (297). The corrupt hypocrisy of England’s monarch gave de la Court ample evidence of the dangers of promoting the House of Orange. Dutch critics of the English regime thought the Medway showed England’s weakness. English critics of their monarch had similar ideas. Disgraced by their nation’s defeat, the English no longer saw themselves as destined to surpass their rivals across the Narrow Sea. After all, unlike England, Rome had not lost its second war with Carthage. England failed, in part, because its irresponsible monarch squandered victory, the treasury, and his people’s good will. When the exiled Algernon Sidney uses the Punic Wars as a means of diagnosing the ills facing his beloved nation, he isolates the aftermath of Rome’s wars with Carthage as the point at which the Roman Republic began to decline. Nostalgically recalling the English Commonwealth, Sidney praises the greatness of the Roman Republic when it “lived in the fullness of liberty” (136). At the height of that Republic’s power, the “world could not resist just and wise laws, exact discipline, and admirable virtue” and the “proudest kings had died under the weight of their chains” (136). The Roman Republic had “conquered their foreign enemies” and “[r]ival Carthage lay ignobly hid in its own ruin” following its destruction at the end of the Third Punic War. But rather than sustain this austere virtue, Rome, like complacent England, had allowed itself to be ground “under the feet of one of her wicked sons” (137). As this degeneration took hold, the government fell into the hands of Sejanus and other corrupt favorites while the Senate, which had once included only men of virtue with “Cato for their head and leader,” came under the sway of men dependent on “the will of a Caligula, Nero, Vitellius, or other such like monsters” (137). This extended analysis of Rome’s decline from a virtuous republic into a corrupt imperium posits Rome’s final victory over Carthage as the virtuous Republic’s apex on a trajectory that culminated in corrupt tyranny. The analogy to the opulent court of Charles and his self-serving dependents who would lead a once great republic into decline points to the only way an English republican 108 Aanwysing der heilsame politike Gronden en Maximen van de Republike van Holland en West-Vriesland (Leiden, 1669), 8.

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could imagine the continued relevance of the Punic Wars to the situation facing England in the first years of the restored monarchy.

Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Third Anglo-Dutch War As England moved toward its unpopular third war with the United Provinces, Hollandophobic royalists revived the Punic Wars trope. England under a hedonistic monarch with arbitrary prejudices hardly resembled the austere Roman Republic, but ancient Rome had finally destroyed its commercial rival in the Third Punic War and confident, bellicose English writers wanted to appropriate the certainty of that victory for their own nation, regardless of the precedent’s politically awkward fit. Thomas Ross dedicated the two books of his new poem, An Essay upon the Third Punique War, to the Duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s illegitimate son. Describing the Carthaginians’ cruelty and Rome’s weakness between the wars, the poem concludes with Carthage’s conflagration following Scipio Aemelianus’ victory. Ross commended the examplary Aemelianus to Monmouth because that general succeeded “not so much by his Birth” as by “his Worth.”109 At the same time, the Earl of Castlemaine wrote a vindication of England’s recent war with the Dutch. He argues that Dutch survival strengthens England and sharpens its determination, just as “Aemulus Carthage,” in its ongoing competition with its more powerful rival, kept Rome “waking.”110 When Charles II declared war against the Dutch in March 1672, reprints of both Ross’s translation of the Punica and Castlemaine’s augmented True Account appeared. The Punic Wars again served English writers encouraging their nation to pursue a war against the Dutch. Only a minority who wanted war with the Dutch found the Punic Wars cloak appealing, suggesting that its utility in fashioning an English identity in relation to the rival Dutch had worn thin. Charles II increased English distrust of the monarchy by launching this war against the Dutch. He deceived the English about the causes of the war, began it without consulting Parliament, and tried to wage it

109 T[homs] R[oss], An Essay Upon the Third Punique War (London, 1671), A2v. 110 [Roger Palmer], A Short and True Account of the Material Passages (London,

1671), 98.

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without adequate preparation. Looking back to this period a few years later, Marvell would warn his English readers that the court’s manipulation of the national interest in 1672 offered additional evidence of an attempt “to change the Lawful Government of England into an Absolute Tyranny, and to convert the established Protestant Religion into a downright Popery,” in the mode of France’s monarchy.111 Officially, England and the United Provinces, together with Sweden, formed a Triple Alliance to check French ambitions, particularly in the Spanish Netherlands.112 When he declared war, during a long recess of Parliament, the king did it to fulfill the terms of the secret Treaty of Dover. In exchange for generous subsidies from his cousin, Louis XIV, Charles had agreed to go to war against the Dutch and to promote the Church of Rome’s interests in England. In March 1672, Sir Robert Holmes led English ships against a Dutch merchant convoy from Smyrna, just as Charles II issued a Declaration of Indulgence designed to empower English Catholics, and just before—as K. H. D. Haley characterizes it, in a “rather ignominious failure”—England officially declared war on the United Provinces.113 Monmouth’s English regiment joined Louis XIV’s army and inflicted terrible losses on the Dutch, prompting the fall of de Witt’s Loevestein regime and the ascent of Willem III to the stadholderate.114 Two months after Holmes’ inconclusive raid, the Dutch sailed into Solebay and crippled the English fleet, forcing Charles to forego further action until the following year. Although Parliament granted additional supply for 1673, Charles had to withdraw his Declaration of Indulgence and accept the Test Act. Some of those supporting the war promoted it as a means to check Dutch ambitions to monopolize trade, particularly in the East Indies, but concern that Louis XIV sought to establish a “universal

111 “An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England,” in Prose Works, ed. Nicholas van Maltzahn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 225. Annabel Patterson argues that Marvell’s revelation of “secret history” derives from a republican antipathy to monarchs’ claims of “arcana.” Early Modern Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 186. 112 Israel, Dutch Republic, 781. 113 William of Orange and the English Opposition, 1672–4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953),

32. 114 Rowen traces the demise of de Witt following the events of June 1672. John De Witt, 195.

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monarchy” helped to bring about England’s withdrawal from the war.115 After Dutch victories at Schooneveld and the Texel, when revelations that the French king ordered his new navy not to engage in the heaviest fighting, Parliament voted not to grant additional supply.116 Without money or a coherent strategy, English resolve quickly wilted and hostilities ceased early in 1674. The king, at least, could take satisfaction in the ascent of his nephew to the House of Orange’s traditional offices, though Willem’s distaste for the Catholicism of the Stuarts might have marred even that pleasure. During the two years of the war, frustration with the Dutch found expression in a variety of popular forms. Batavia: Or the Hollander displayed, a new edition of Felltham’s Brief Character, appeared, while the disasters of 1672, the Dutch Republic’s “Rampjaar” or year of catastrophes, finally vindicated William Lilly’s astrological predictions of Dutch suffering.117 English writers reminded their readers that “from the time of the Romans” England has had “an exclusive Property in the Sovereignty of the British Seas,” including in the fishery there.118 With the outbreak of hostilities, the “Dutch cruelties at Amboyna” served as the subject for Anthony Devo’s “farces, drolls, &c.” in London’s streets.119 The East India Company published the Emblem of Ingratitude, a new edition of their True Relation of the events on Amboyna, updated with the most 115 Steven Pincus traces the initial appeal to public opinion against the Dutch and the later increase of suspicion about Louis XIV’s ambitions. “Republicanism, Absolutism and Universal Monarchy: English Popular Sentiment During the Third Dutch War,” in Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature, Drama, History, ed. Gerald MacLean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 243. 116 In a letter to the French Admiral at the start of the war, Charles II encouraged him to “faire toute la diligence possible [use all possible diligence]” in the fights to come. Harry Ransom Center, MS 77. Haley examines successful Dutch efforts, spearheaded by Peter du Moulin, to influence the English public sphere to create antipathy for the war, culminating in the Treaty of Westminster. William of Orange, 168. Pincus argues that English dissatisfaction with the war grew out of concern that Louis hoped for a war of attrition between England and the Dutch so that he could dominate whichever fleet survived. “Republicanism, absolutism,” 264. 117 Batavia: or the Hollander Displayed (London, 1672). Lilly had predicted the end of the Dutch Republic for twenty years and felt that French success in 1672 finally proved him right. The Dangerous Condition of the Vnited Prounices Prognosticated (London, 1672), 2. 118 The Dutch Usurpation (London, 1672), 28. 119 CSPD, 11 November 1672 (page 148).

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recent “Provocations and Indignities” in the East Indies.120 Other poems and pamphlets demanded vengeance for the ghosts of all “that did at Amboyna fall” or recalled Dutch avarice and the “bloody and inhumane butcheries committed by them against us at Amboyna, Polaroon, and other places in the East Indies.”121 At the same time, broadsides, including a new printing of Marvell’s Character of Holland and new advices to a painter, urged England to continue the war in order to “Have both the Indies brought to our Own Seas” and “Humble [the Dutch] to save their Souls.”122 Many in England imagined the Dutch aspiring to control the world’s trade without the hindrance of moral principles. Some who opposed the tide of Hollandophobia, however, argued that England’s commercial interest required cooperation with their tolerant Dutch neighbors and that “it is the true Interest of England to maintain a firm and perpetual friendship and union with them.”123 Still, Henry Stubbe accused the unprincipled Dutch of exhibiting “the Punic or Belgic Faith” in their mendacious detention of free Englishmen in England’s lost Surinam colony.124 Perhaps the analogy of the ruthless pursuit of trade in the Dutch Republic and in Carthage came easily to Stubbe, who had a reputation as one of the most learned men in England. A few other Englishmen made this connection as well. When the Earl of Shaftesbury urged Parliament to support the king’s war, he too made use of the precedent of the Third Punic War. Charles II summoned Parliament in February 1673 to request additional funds to repair the fleet and continue the war. Shaftesbury set the tone for Parliament’s debates on funding the war. He pointed out the desperate condition of the Dutch Republic and their hope that England might waver in its commitment to the war.125 If Parliament would pay for its 120 The Emblem of Ingratitude. A True Relation of the Unjust Cruel, and Barbarous

Proceedings against the English at Amboyna (London, 1672), 93. 121 On His Royal Highness His Expedition (London, 1672); Poor Robins Character of a Dutch-Man... Together with a Brief Epitomy of the Ingratitude of the Dutch, and Their Barbarous Cruelties Committed on the English at Amboyna (London, 1672), 2. 122 Defiance to the Dutch (London, 1672). 123 Present Interest, 28. 124 [Henry Stubbe], A Justification of the Present War Against the United Netherlands (London, 1672), 38. 125 In fact, as Haley shows, the Dutch waged “political warfare” to sway the English public and create distrust of the king in Parliament. William of Orange, 10.

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continuation, however, they would permanently leave the Dutch Republic “never more formidable to Kings, or dangerous to England.”126 Shaftesbury evokes the Third Punic War to motivate England to see the Third Anglo-Dutch War to a conclusion. Noting that the proud and stubborn Dutch refused to accept defeat, Shaftesbury called on Parliament to humble the Dutch Republic and prevent them from rising again. Recalling the initial enthusiasm for the previous war, he praised Parliament for its perspicacity in recognizing characteristic Dutch treachery and encouraged them to demonstrate their conviction that “Delenda est Carthago, That Government was to be brought down” (5). Evoking Cato the Elder’s famous mantra in the years preceding Rome’s final annihilation of Carthage in the Third Punic War—Ross recalled the phrase at the end of the first book of his poem, “This is my Opinion. And that Carthage should be destroyed” (24)—Shaftesbury stamps England’s new war with the tautological image of a glorious victory, one that would redeem the humiliation of the previous war and restore England to greatness at Dutch expense. Shaftesbury’s evocation of the final Punic War resonated across the Narrow Seas. One Dutch pamphleteer used his declaration to stiffen his Dutch readers’ resolve. Encouraging these “Manhaftige Batavieren [Manly Batavians],” Baltes Boeckholt urges them to show “een Leeuwen hart met goddelijcke couragie [a lion’s heart with godly courage]” in response to the “afgrijselijck besluyt der vyanden, van onse Staet tot de grontvesten, na ‘t voorbeelt van Carthago, te verwoesten [horrific decision of the enemies to raze our State to the foundations after the example of Carthage].”127 Proud of his nation’s virtue and prosperity, the author argues that if the English want to imagine the Dutch Republic as a new Carthage, they must envy the Dutch, just as Rome envied Carthage. Perhaps, he admits, “Carthago was gelijck Hollant, welck door haer dapperheyt en schrandre Oorlogskonst [Carthage resembled Holland, which through its courage and clever skill in war]” had spread its glory “op de gronden van naebuerige, en uytheemsche gewesten [in the land of its neighbors and foreign regions],” and could boast of its “uytsteeckende scheepsvaert, deftige gebouwen, bloeijende Rijckdom, pracht 126 His Majesties Most Gracious Speech, Together with the Lord Chancellors (Edinburgh, 1673), 6. 127 [Baltes Boeckholt], Delenda Carthago, ofte Carthago moet werden uytgetroeyt (Amsterdam, 1673), 3.

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en weelde [outstanding shipping, stately buildings, flourishing commonwealth, splendor and opulence]” (3). All of Carthage’s “glans en gloot de Romeynen tot jalousie verweckten [luster and glow awakened the Romans to jealousy],” just as Dutch prosperity enticed the greedy English to attack (3–4). He exhorts his Dutch readers not to give up, however, because they have survived the worst of the crisis. For those who “oyt liefde tot dit Vaderlandt heeft gehadt [ever have had love for the fatherland]” and want to learn the consequences if the Dutch accept defeat, as Carthage had, Boeckholt offers a digest of Roman histories that “de verwoestinghe der Carthagers vertoont en ons tot onderganck wordt afgebeeldt [exhibits the destruction of Carthage, and in which is shown to us its demise]” (4). The fate England promises to the Dutch, if that fate actually followed the Carthaginian example, should make the reader’s “hayren … te berge rijsen [hairs rise on end]” (4). On the title page of Boeckholt’s call to arms, one early owner added a poem that recasts Shaftesbury’s words. The Lord Chancellor’s words may describe an England “moedig op uw macht [brave in your strength]” determined “Carthago deerlijk te vernielen [to destroy pitiful Carthage],” but, recalling the slain de Witt brothers, the poet praises them as “In trouw & dienst, twee Schipioon [two Scipios in loyalty and service]” and casts Shaftesbury instead as “Cajaphas … Wanneer hij sprack van Christus doot [Caiaphas when he pronounced Christ’s death].”128 Shaftesbury’s frustrated declaration inspired some Dutch readers to resist the attempt to destroy their wounded Carthage. For John Dryden, the Lord Chancellor’s words resonated as well. Although Amboyna: A Tragedy has more polish than Devo’s farces and drolls on the subject, it shares the objective of these efforts to revive the memory of the 1623 events to create English support for the Third Anglo-Dutch War. Performed in the early summer of 1672, the tragedy— as we shall see in the next chapter—distinguishes between wicked Dutch

128 “Op de woorden van de Oratii van den Cancelier van England, Delenda est Carthago” (Knuttel 10944).

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merchants and principled English traders.129 Dryden’s paratext embellishes Shaftesbury’s speech demanding that Parliament destroy Dutch Carthage. After the epilogue’s critique of the savage Dutch, it imagines the scene of Cato the Elder arriving at the Roman Senate with “his Affrique Fruits” (19), the figs he used as a prop for his mantra. Just as Holmes had done in Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis , this figure entices the English audience with the symbolic fruits of the Dutch global trade, “their Indies,” available to England if they persist in fighting the Dutch (20). “All Loyal English,” the epilogue asserts, “will like him conclude, / Let Caesar Live, and Carthage be subdu’d” (21–22). That he would conclude his call to arms with this reference to the Third Punic War reveals that Dryden expected the figure to continue to exert an influence on the English imagination. England now faced its Dutch rivals for a third time, just as Rome had confronted its Carthaginian rivals three times in short succession. And just as Rome had utterly destroyed its enemy at the end of its third war, leveling the city and exiling its inhabitants, so the English could expect that they could destroy the teetering Dutch state in the coming year. However, Dryden’s addition to this familiar language, imagining a great hero of the Roman Republic speaking in favor of Caesar, demonstrates the difficulty of making a trope that had seemed especially apt two decades earlier function smoothly under an arbitrary monarch. The Roman England Dryden calls into being in these final lines cannot be the successful Roman Republic if it has Caesar at its leader. Neither would England’s ultimately inconclusive third war with the Dutch end in the promised destruction of its rival. The revelation of Charles II’s aspirations to follow the arbitrary example of his French cousin should have put an end to the political utility of thinking of England as a new Roman Republic confronting Carthaginian rivals in the Dutch Republic. And yet the Dutch ambassadors negotiating the peace of 1674 took offense at the publication of John Evelyn’s Navigation and Commerce, Their Original and Progress , a partial history of the Second Anglo-Dutch War that Charles II had

129 Markley discusses Dryden’s tendency to simplify complex issues of competition on Amboyna. Far East, 164. Shankar Raman argues that Dryden never fully overcomes the ideological contradiction in his condemnation of Dutch commercial interests while valorizing a heroic English merchant. Framing “India”: The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 228.

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commissioned, and called for its censorship.130 Once again, as an English author described his nation’s mercantile competition with the Dutch Republic, which lacks all natural resources and instead dominates trade so that “the whole World (vast as it appears to others) seems but a Farm, scarce another Province to them,” he turns to the trade wars between Rome and Carthage.131 Evelyn pursues his general argument, that maritime trade makes nations great, by briefly recalling the great naval empires of world history, including the “Carthaginians... of the earliest fame for Commerce, and so well appointed for the Sea as gave terrour to Rome her self” (31). Before describing the rise of the United Provinces as a commercial empire and predicting the culmination of navigation and trade in England, Evelyn pauses to describe the “Punick War, the most obstinate that History has recorded” (31). As England’s war with the Dutch, so often figured as modern Punic Wars, had just concluded, Evelyn’s extended discussion of the war that resulted in “the utter ruine, and subversion of that emulous Neighbour” and had made Rome a great power, “Conquerours of the World, when they had Conquer’d the Sea,” can hardly be coincidental (32–33). The image of the struggle between England and the United Provinces as modern Punic Wars had at least a little life in it yet.

130 Gillian Darley describes the circumstances of the writing and censoring of this text. John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 243. 131 John Evelyn, Navigation and Commerce, Their Original and Progress (London, 1674), 7.

CHAPTER 7

The New Black Legend: England’s Violent Colonial Competition with the Dutch

In the autumn of 1672, as the Dutch opened their dikes to slow the advance of troops in the Third Anglo-Dutch War, an English pamphleteer tried to revive a skeptical public’s interest in continuing the fight. Reverting to a familiar stock of taunts, this writer mocks the vices of the Dutch and scoffs at their low topography, now literally submerged beneath the North Sea. He contributes innovative material, however, in his timely account of the end of the regime of Holland’s Grand Pensionary, Johan de Witt, one of the architects of the Dutch Republic’s “true freedom.” In August 1672, a crowd assassinated Johan in the Hague when he came to the aid of his brother Cornelis, one of the Dutch commanders who humiliated England on the Medway. The pamphleteer treats their demise in excruciating detail, describing how an “unhumane” mob tortured the brothers, shot them, cut them to pieces, then took “their mangled bodies, and hanged them up by the heels on the Gallows naked.”1 In the United Provinces, where most accounts celebrated their deaths and the Prince of Orange’s return to power, Joachim Oudaen offered a melancholy treatment of the scene in his tragedy, Haagse Broeder-Moord, of Dolle Blydschap. In it, the Orangist 1 Strange Newes from Holland, Being a true Character of the Country and People (London, 1672), 7.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Fleck, English National Identity and the Image of the Dutch, Early Modern Literature in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42910-1_7

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Lord of Odyk boasts to the Lord of Zuylestein that he can incite a mob “Met eene macht van meer dan hondert duizent handen [With a strength of more than a hundred thousand hands]” against the De Witts and that they will “van lidt tot lidt ontleden [limb from limb dismember]” the republican leaders.2 One horrified character describes how the mob “dryft een Koopmanschap van wat d’omstanders willen [ran a trade of what the bystanders desired],” bidding for the “ooren, lippen, neus, en d’uitgesnede tong / Van Jan [ears, lips, nose, and cut-out tongue of Jan]” (96). For the English pamphleteer stirring up English disgust, the incident illustrates “what an insatiate and cruel people they are,” and adds to a litany of Dutch bloodshed, now culminating in violence directed against themselves (6). Having honed their cruelty on others, the malicious Dutch now manifest their violent character by turning on some of their own. This English author diagnoses the ferocious anarchy at the heart of the Dutch Republic as symptomatic of a particularly Dutch propensity for violence. Recalling Dutch rebellion against their Spanish kings, the English author regrets that the Habsburgs had not destroyed the United Provinces and “done the world a good turn” (6). He makes a special point of describing Dutch treachery toward the English, who had once been their benefactors. Moving from Dutch duplicity in their dealings with kings and princes in general, the author specifically recalls “their Murderous and Tyrannical dealings with our English in the West [sic] Indies, as Amboina, Polleron, and the Molloco Islands, and lately at Surinam” (4). He considers it a short step from the violence the Dutch inflicted on their English allies in the East and West Indies to the violence the Dutch now unleash on themselves. He reserves the greatest disgust, however, for reporting how the crowd dismembered the De Witts and sold their body parts in a frenzied auction, “an Ear for twenty five stuyvers, a piece of finger for twelve stuyvers... and so proportionably any piece of their Bodies” (7). In describing Dutch men and women purchasing their former leaders’ fingers and ears in a frenzy of

2 Joachim Oudaen, Haagse Broeder-Moord, of Dolle Blydschap (Frederikstad, [1673]), 7.

Nigel Smith argues that Oudaen idealistically hoped that “the aesthetic potential of the drama” might “counteract the bloodthirstiness” of the moment. “The Politics of Tragedy in the Dutch Republic: Joachim Oudaen’s Martyr Drama in Context,” in Dramatic Experience: The Poetics of Drama in the Early Modern Public Sphere(s), ed. Katja Gvozdeva, Tatiana Korneeva, and Kirill Ospovat (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 232.

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mob violence, this English author underscores cruelty as the newest entry in the lexicon of England’s slurs against the Dutch, supplementing the more boorish and bumbling stereotypes that Felltham and others had popularized. This appalling scene of Dutch citizens bidding for human flesh in the Hague’s town square may have horrified observers in 1672, but half a world away in Dutch Curaçao, English Bridgetown, and Spanish Caracas, the degrading traffic in human bodies had lost some of the power to shock. By the third quarter of the seventeenth century, Europeans had enslaved hundreds of thousands of Africans, transported them to these depots, and sold them to colonists in the Americas. They did not invent this practice specifically to support their projects across the Atlantic, but this commodification of humans and their alienated labor quickly became a key means of extracting value from their colonies.3 Although the Dutch Westindische Compagnie (WIC) did not initially traffic in slaves, its acquisition of territories in Africa and Brazil soon made the trade profitable.4 The Dutch challenged the Portuguese for control in the middle of the seventeenth century, occasionally transporting a larger quantity of slaves than their Iberian predecessors and eventually dominating the trade in the 1670s and 1680s.5 At the same time, England also pursued this profitable trade. Shortly after the Restoration, Prince Rupert helped to organize the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading to Africa, designed to contest Dutch WIC dominance and to supply slaves for English plantations in Surinam, the Caribbean, and North America. The company’s depredations under Sir Robert Holmes had precipitated

3 Robin Blackburn traces the speed with which the colonial system came to depend on African slavery. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997), 123. 4 Michiel van Groesen argues that profits overcame moral objections to Dutch participation in the slave trade. “Global Trade,” in The Cambridge Companion to The Dutch Golden Age, ed. Helmer J. Helmers and Geert H. Janssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 173. 5 David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 90. Cornelis Goslinga treats the rivalry between the reorganized WIC and its English rival the RAC in the 1680s. The Dutch in the Caribbean and in the Guianas, 1680–1791 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1985), 156. Jonathan Israel observes that a virtual Dutch monopoly of the slave trade peaked in 1688. Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 322.

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the Second Anglo-Dutch war, a disruption that hastened its own insolvency.6 England’s successful competition with the United Provinces in this trade contributed to feelings of national pride. Samuel Pepys recorded fears at the Exchange that Dutch successes in Africa would not only cause “the utter ruine of our Royall Company,” but would also serve as a “reproach and shame to the whole nation.”7 In 1672, the year that the disgusted English pamphleteer described a bloodthirsty Dutch mob’s sale of parts of the De Witts’ bodies in the Hague, England’s reorganized Royal African Company (RAC) took up its charter to enslave African bodies and sell them in Barbados and other English colonies. The English soon surpassed the Dutch.8 In the second half of the century, English ships carried 350,000 enslaved Africans to colonies across the Atlantic.9 As English merchants undertook commercial ventures in the Far East and in the Americas, they found themselves competing with prosperous Dutch merchants who had entrenched themselves in both the spice trade and the slave trade. In order to vilify their erstwhile allies and dependents, English authors who had formerly blamed the Spanish for the violent exploitation occurring in colonial arenas now turned the force of the Black Legend against a new enemy.10 The Dutch, who had once played the role of victims in the Black Legend, now performed the bloody and unscrupulous deeds. After mid-century, the Dutch posed a more significant danger in certain corners of the English imaginary than their former Spanish masters did. Many English merchants understood this danger as commercial competition and urged their fellow Englishmen to work harder in their trades and make better use of abundant English resources 6 K. G. Davies traces the company’s disastrous actions and its subsequent rechartering. The Royal African Company (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 58. 7 Diary, 5: 352–3. 8 Davis discusses the series of displacements in the slave trade at the end of the

seventeenth century, with England eventually coming to dominance. Inhuman Bondage, 91. 9 See Susan Dwyer Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 41. 10 Carla Giardina Pestana argues that demonizing the Dutch in the new image of

the “sadist” enabled English justifications for displacing their Dutch rivals resembling the operation of the Spanish Black Legend. “Cruelty and Religious Justifications for Conquest in the Mid-Seventeenth-Century English Atlantic,” in Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic, ed. Linda Gregerson and Susan Juster (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 47.

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to surpass their rivals. The Dutch themselves worried that “onse Natie voornemelijck die aen de Negotie vast zijn [our nation are primarily focused on trade],” but “de Lande vast te maecken en wel versekeren daer passense niet wel op [to make the country there secure and really safe does not well suit us].”11 Sir William Temple, England’s former ambassador in the Hague, reached the same conclusion. Urging his fellow Englishmen to make peace with the Dutch, he finds that among the causes of the catastrophe of 1672, “their vast trade, which was the occasion of their greatness, to have been one likewise of their fall.”12 Others, however, figured this commercial rivalry in menacing terms and urged the English to fear and loathe the Dutch. These writers imagined England as a nation of principled Protestant traders, threatened by the ambitions of the avaricious and wrathful Dutch determined to destroy it. Treating the Dutch as enjoying an advantage from their ruthless pursuit of commercial dominance subtly licensed the English to respond in kind. In the last quarter of the century English writers added new incidents in distant colonial outposts to the infamous events on Amboyna as they created a history of the barbarous Dutch. As John Darrel put it in the midst of the Second Anglo-Dutch war, the “Dutch Design” had allowed the VOC to make “an absolute Conquest of all the SouthEast Seas of Asia and Africa (half of the whole Universe)” and now the Dutch aspired to link the VOC and the WIC “to carry on and propagate the said old War and design into Europe and America (the other half of the whole Universe).”13 English authors represented the inimical Dutch Republic—which had once joined England in resisting Spanish ambitions for a universal monarchy—as aspiring to exercise and violently defend its own universal dominion. As much as the English preferred to think of themselves as fair and moderate traders, however, the Dutch could easily turn the charge of intemperate violence against their former friends. As Darrel complained to English readers of Dutch aggression and violence, Johan Valckenburgh approached the Dutch public with an account of the “tyrannighe ende barbarigh mishandelt [tyrannical and barbarous mistreatment]” committed by “twee Conincklicke Oorlogschepen onder 11 Adrian van der Donck, Bescrhyvinge van Nieuvv-Nederlant (Amsterdam, 1656), 93. Donck first voices the views of the WIC’s anxious critics and then argues that the Dutch should proceed with their plans. 12 Observations, 140. 13 A True and Compendious Narration, 34–35.

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‘t beleyt van eenen Major Robbert Holmes en ses kloecke Schepen en Fregats wegens de Engelsche Royale Compagnie [two royal warships under the command of one Major Robert Holmes and six stout ships and frigates of the English Royal Company].”14 Valckenburgh goes on to describe the Dutch traders’ suffering as the brutal English “met roustige bootsmans messen eerst neus, en ooren, en daer na soo levendich al langhsaem … als swijnen de keelen hebben afgesneden [with rusty boatswains’ knives first noses, and ears, and as acutely as languidly finally slit their throats like pigs]” (4). English efforts to vilify the Dutch as violent and ungrateful competed not only with Dutch accusations of English hypocrisy but also with ongoing analyses of admirable Dutch prosperity that would eventually lead England to embrace a Dutch Prince of Orange as King William III. Nevertheless, many in England focused on Dutch ruthlessness and replaced the notion of a Dutch nation grateful to and dependent on the English with the image of a menacing and voracious rival intent on destroying England. Such a break, Benedict Anderson might argue, allowed the English to imagine that they would now chart their own path, free of their former entanglements with the Dutch.15 Responding to the Dutch threat to England’s prestige and national aspirations, John Dryden and Aphra Behn took up violent historical episodes in which the Dutch expelled the English from Edenic colonies and helped to transfer the mantle of the Black Legend onto the Dutch. While English writers added recent confrontations in Surinam to a litany of Dutch atrocities and greed, Dryden’s Amboyna and Behn’s Oroonoko refreshed the memory of those older events. They nostalgically idealized English colonial practices and reopened the wounds that the Dutch had inflicted on English pride. Figuring the Dutch as cruelly betraying the English to enhance their profits, Dryden and Behn turned the vicious Dutch Republic into a foil against which they could imagine their own nation’s virtues. At the same time, using the strategic amnesia Anderson identifies as necessary to the development of national identity, they relegated England’s innocence to the past and cleared the way for their pragmatic nation to strive for success in the colonial arena.

14 Waerachtigh Verhael vande Grouwelicke en Barbarische Moordereye (Middelburgh, 1665), 2. 15 Imagined Communities, 204–205.

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Fond Credulity: Dryden’s Edenic Amboyna In the prologue to Amboyna, Or the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants , Dryden casts himself as a patriot who refuses to let his English audience forget the violent Dutch practices in distant lands. Demanding that English audiences acknowledge the dangerous Dutch, the playwright scoffs at the “doteage of some Englishmen” who “fawn on those who ruin them, the Dutch.”16 Although a number of popular pamphlets, as we saw in the previous chapter, celebrated the Dutch miseries of the “Rampjaar” and circulated familiar English stereotypes of drunken Dutch courage, many in England recoiled at their king’s decision to align with the arbitrary monarch of France to destroy the Dutch.17 Slingsby Bethel, a prosperous dissenting merchant, had worked to articulate England’s true national interest after the mistakes of the Second Anglo-Dutch War.18 As Marvell would later do in his Account , Bethel warned English readers of the French “design,” since given Louis XIV’s “present Naval strength, increased lately by an unhappy accident (the late Dutch war) he is accommodated for any design, his ambition shall prompt him to,” including “an Universal Monarchy.”19 Although Bethel acknowledges Dutch commercial primacy, he dissuades his readers from clamoring for the Dutch Republic’s destruction. Their fall would injure England and help France, he argues, while the Dutch example of “Industry and Ingenuity” ought to inspire the English in “emulation of their Trade” (31). William Temple similarly argued that if “the Trade of Holland should be ruin’d,” no one in England should assume that it “would of course fall to our share,” since the aggressive French would engross the difference (121). Examining the causes and likely outcome of the war, Robert McWard argues that continuing it ran counter to English interests. He concludes that even if the Dutch “have in a manner rendred themselves 16 “Amboyna,” Prologue, 5–6. 17 Steven Pincus argues that England’s tepid desire for war evaporated once the French

seemed poised to destroy the United Provinces and turn their attention to bringing England low. “From Butterboxes to Wooden Shoes: The Shift in English Popular Sentiment from Anti-Dutch to Anti-French in the 1670s,” Historical Journal 38 (1995), 357. 18 Gary De Krey traces Bethel’s prominent role in the group of dissenting merchants opposed to a ruinous war against the Dutch. London and the Restoration, 1659–1683 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 107. 19 Present Interest, A3v.

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Masters, of the whole trade of the World, to the prejudice of England, and all others,” the expense and risks of war make clear that England’s interest lies in taking advantage “of the Dutch their readinesse to accept of peace at our pleasure.”20 McWard attributes English bellicosity to a desire to avenge the disgrace of the Medway and argues that while the “resentment of the Chattam-Attacque, is at the root of all,” yet considering the circumstances and the fact that the Dutch did not press their advantage should provide “a most powerful mitigation” (18). Some Englishmen thought their nation could learn from the Dutch and wanted to put their differences behind them. Dryden, however, warned against such complacency and tried to keep the memory of Dutch violence fresh in the minds of his English audience. Dryden works to renew English outrage over events on Amboyna in order to generate support for the third war. Dozens of broadsides and pamphlets alluded to Amboyna, but Dryden reopens the scars and vividly stages the painful incident.21 As we saw in the fifth chapter, the “Amboyna Massacre” did not constitute a stable event in 1623; it took time for the details to coalesce into a conceptual, historiographical fact or event.22 At the time, apologists for the Dutch treated the incident as the crime of a few rogue merchants; half a century later, Dryden urges his audience to understand the massacre of innocent English merchants as part of a violent pattern typical of the Dutch nation.23 By the end of the tragedy, his English hero will have learned that the Dutch have always had a violent character, surpassing even that of the Black Legend’s great villain, the Duke of Alva, who “did ne’re the like” (5.1.311). Dryden redirects the Black Legend in order to blame its victims, since the Dutch,

20 The English Ballance ([London], 1672), 19. 21 For Dominick LaCapra, those who write about traumatic experiences often hope to

keep the experience fresh, to “keep faith with” the “fidelity” of trauma. Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 22. 22 As Hayden White argues, “what counts as an event, as a fact, and as an adequate explanation of a historical phenomenon must be adjudged to be ‘relative’ to the time, place, and cultural conditions of its formulation.” “Response to Arthur Marwick,” Journal of Contemporary History 30 (1995), 244. 23 Games notes that Dryden, writing in the midst of war against the Dutch, did not face the same constraints as the EIC had faced in 1624, though this does not explain the absence of an Amboyna play in 1652 or 1664. Inventing, 155.

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who were “well us’d to this” violence on Amboyna, bear equal responsibility for the bloodshed of the Dutch Revolt.24 His tragedy may dramatize the most shocking, if familiar instance of Dutch designs on colonial trade, but England’s brutal rivals have also pursued their treacherous schemes in “The Streights, the Guiney Trade, the Herrings too” and if the English do not take heed, “they shall pickle you” (Pr. 9–10). Dryden’s prologue establishes a trajectory, with the tragic events on Amboyna long in the past, the trade conflicts in the Mediterranean and in Western Africa of the 1660s occurring within living memory, and a dangerous future beginning in the audience’s present in which Dutch colonial ambitions abroad and the war closer to home will spill more English blood.25 In its proleptic reminder of the history of Dutch violence against English interests since Amboyna, the prologue directs the audience’s attention to the explanatory significance of the events they will see performed. This complex awareness of a fictional plot engrafted onto familiar historical events connected to the audience’s present gives new life to the otherwise inert trauma of Amboyna. The audience may think they are familiar with the old story, but Dryden’s dramatization refreshes it by undermining the audience’s complacency.26 The play’s opening scene, for instance, makes references whose power to shock derives not from anything the scheming Dutch characters have said in their first few lines, but rather from the audience’s prior knowledge of how the action will conclude. As the Dutch merchants discuss the latest news from home, the Fiscal arrives to say that the English have accepted a trade agreement that will advantageously settle the VOC’s previous affronts. He teases his countrymen with tantalizing hints of this information until Harman

24 Benjamin Schmidt argues that Dryden here redirects almost a century of Dutch and English rhetoric of Spain’s tyranny over the victimized Low Countries, simultaneously making the Dutch into hypocrites. Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 297. 25 In thinking about how Dryden presents the complex amalgam of ideological historiography and fictional narrative, I am indebted to Deleuze’s discussion of the traumatic caesura of historiography. Difference and Repetition, 89. 26 Joseph F. Stephenson finds that Dryden’s manipulation of the audience’s awareness of what has come before might extend to their awareness of theater history through numerous references to plays produced earlier in the century by the King’s Men. “Redefining the Dutch: Dryden’s Approach to National Images from Renaissance Drama in Amboyna,” Restoration 38.2 (2014), 67.

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Senior, the exasperated head of the outpost and the villain of the historical incident, demands, “Prithee do not torture us, but tell it” (1.1.17). Coming so quickly after the opening curtain, this casual reference to “torture” touches a nerve in the audience: they have come to the theater to see a play about Dutch torturers, but an uncanny, passing reference to metaphorical torture immediately jolts them to attention by drawing on their proleptic knowledge. Towerson’s naïve concern that English responses to Dutch insults may give the Dutch an excuse to “betray them to a Massacre” (2.1.118) maintains this tension by appealing to the audience’s familiarity with the historical resolution of the action that the tragedy has not yet staged. Playgoers may think they know how the play will end, but Dryden pricks their taut nerves along the way and frustrates their ability to accommodate and compartmentalize the action within a narrative of the merely familiar and expected. Dryden’s characters frequently remind the audience that they are watching a performance. This recourse to metadrama also contributes to the alienating effect that prevents the audience from passively consuming the events on Amboyna as if the play were simply another pamphlet. In the opening scene, Beamont confides to Collins that he does not trust “these fleering Dutchmen, they over act their kindness” (1.1.144– 45). The audience knows that these hypocritical Dutch merchants do “over act” their parts; prior to the English merchants’ arrival, the Fiscal cautions his colleagues to “put on a seeming kindness” when he launches his schemes (1.1.79). As Marjorie Rubright notes, the Fiscal confirms English suspicions that these merchants appear as “seeming friend[s]” despite their underlying identity as “menacing dissembler[s].”27 Several other instances of this sort occur, reaching out to encompass the spectators beyond the stage’s edge. The Fiscal, for example, desires Towerson’s death, but he would prefer to devise a way to bring this about in secret and avoid future infamy. He worries that “they’le say we are Ingrateful... in England, and barbarously cruel,” just as Dryden’s tragedy portrays them and as the English audience may have been saying as they took their seats (2.1.157–8). Dryden refuses the dramatic artifice of ignoring

27 Doppelgänger Dilemmas, 219. Although Ayanna Thompson argues that an awareness of Amboyna as a performance is critical to understanding the tragedy’s racial discourse, she does not comment on the metatheatricality of the play. Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (New York: Routledge, 2008), 102.

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the audience that will view his play, puncturing the conventional division between actors and audience at several points and fusing past and present. In its combination of estrangement and recognition, the tragedy calls attention to the relationship between spectacle and spectators in its final scene. There, Dryden partially satisfies the audience’s expectations with the long-deferred barbarities they have paid to see. Even this scene refuses easy accommodation, however, as Dryden has Harman Senior draw back a curtain to frighten Towerson with the “image of his pains in other men” (5.1.307–8). The stage direction, “The Scene opens, and discovers the English Tortur’d, and the Dutch tormenting them,” almost certainly describes a tableau vivant of the infamous woodcut illustration on the title page of the Amboyna tracts. The familiar woodcut depicts John Clarke chained to a door frame, undergoing simultaneously both the water torture and the torture with flames while gleeful Dutch figures inflict other tortures on English merchants in the foreground. The woodcut’s static, synchronic image comes suddenly to diachronic life on the stage, confounding the categories of past and present and producing a shock of recognition in the audience.28 They experience a double perspective on the scene, both as a past, historical event captured in an oft-reprinted woodcut and as the vivid present when Dryden brings this image to life with movement and the audible moans of once-silent suffering. In the space between a dramatic rendering of an atemporal simulation of the tortures inflicted fifty years before and the irrecoverable trauma of the events themselves, Dryden creates a painful nostalgia, a desire to commemorate an agonizing event residing in the collective memory of an audience, most of whom have no direct recollection of these events that have become less painful over time.29 Dryden widens the breach in the psychic partition that safely contained the historical trauma 28 The recourse to metadrama, particularly in this instance of a celebrated atrocity, participates in Deleuze’s second historical synthesis, destabilizing the pastness of the past in the space of “memory,” which reproduces a former present even as it reflects the current present. Difference and Repetition, 81. Slavoj Žižek argues that ideology functions as a comforting lens through which to make sense of the brutal Real. Sublime Object, 45. 29 Susan Stewart provides several useful models for understanding nostalgia. The differ-

ence between resemblance and identity constitutes one kind. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 145. Cathy Caruth reads Freud’s linking of trauma and history as demonstrating that fiction and representation distort traumatic experience but also make it available, even indirectly, in a way it could not otherwise be comprehended. Unclaimed

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apart from the audience’s present when he brings Towerson to the stage to bid farewell to his friends. As the wicked Dutch merchants gloat— the burning fat rendered from an Englishman imparts a distinctive taste to the tobacco in Van Herring’s pipe, perhaps a reference to the rumors of cannibalism by the mob that destroyed the De Witts—the suffering Towerson declares, “We have friends in England who wou’d weep to see this acted on a Theatre” (5.1.368–9).30 With some in Dryden’s audience likely drying their eyes, Towerson speaks to his fellow Englishmen across a distance of fifty years and thousands of miles. As Dryden commemorates and appropriates these gruesome deaths, his play mourns the passing of an idyllic age. Lost innocence structures both the diplomatic shift that explicitly governs the tragedy’s action as well as the personal tragedy Dryden invents of Towerson and Ysabinda at the hands of their Dutch tormentors.31 Towerson returns to Amboyna hoping that shared management of the spice trade in the 1619 trade agreement between the VOC and the EIC will benefit all parties.32 He toasts the chance to put aside “these endless jars of Trading Nations,” an especially ironic hope since Dryden wrote the tragedy to create support for England’s current war with the Dutch (1.1.220–1). Earnestly believing that the Dutch feel the same way, he congratulates them for agreeing with the English that “those who can be pleas’d with moderate gain, may have the ends of Nature, not to want” (1.1.221– 3). Dryden’s avaricious Dutch approach the spice trade as a competition that one nation should monopolize, however. The villain of Amboyna, Harman Senior, can hardly bear to think of the English trading in the East Indies. He worries that “while the English maintain their Factories among us in Amboyna, or in the neighboring Plantations,” the Dutch cannot Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 15–16. 30 Hoxby notes that this metadramatic moment has a further self-reflexivity in its recycling of stage props from Davenant’s Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru and an actor tortured in The Indian Emperour. Mammon’s Music, 187. For Thompson, the barbarity of Dutch torture marks their racial alterity. Performing, 118. 31 Bindu Malieckal finds fragments of Mariam Khan, the wife Towerson abandoned in India, in Dryden’s Ysabinda. “Mariam Khan and the Legacy of Mughal Women in Early Modern Literature of India,” in Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds, ed. Bernadette Andrea and Linda McJannet (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 115. 32 Markley observes that Dryden’s tragedy obscures the work of the spice trade. Far East, 169.

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sustain their artificially high profits from the trade (1.1.12–14). Only the tragedy’s bloody catastrophe finally disabuses the English of their idealistic aspiration of cooperating with another nominally Protestant nation in the trade. As Dutch guards prepare to torture him, Beamont articulates the final divergence of England’s interests from the United Provinces: “if we deserve our Tortures, ‘tis first for freeing such an infamous Nation, that ought to have been slaves, and then for trusting them as Partners, who had cast off the Yoke of their lawful Soveraign” (5.1.165–8). While Bethel and other figures of the loyal opposition argued that the Dutch example of dedication to national interest and trade should inspire the English and teach them that “the world affords matter enough to satisfy both nations” (32), Dryden inflames English passions by promoting a stereotype of the violent, greedy Dutch. On Dryden’s Amboyna, the Dutch merchants’ destruction of harmonious relations with their English counterparts echoes in one particular Dutch merchant’s violation of Towerson’s personal relationship with his beloved Ysabinda. The standards for evaluating ethical behavior in this distant market slip their anchors, creating an amoral relativism in which Dutch avarice displaces native innocence and English sincerity. As his friends recognize, Towerson naively expects both his commercial and erotic rivals to behave ethically. In Beamont’s assessment, Towerson foolishly “thinks all honest, ‘cause himself is so, and therefore none suspects” (1.1.133–4). Even after the rape and the confrontation that ends in his Dutch rival’s death, Towerson accepts the Fiscal’s pious vow to justify the English merchant’s actions as self-defense. Only after the Fiscal leaves Towerson in chains does he finally regret his “fond credulity, to think there cou’d be Faith and Honor in the Dutch” (4.5.235–6). Dryden represents the Dutch as acting without morals throughout the tragedy. The Fiscal’s advice to Harman Junior after the rape, that he should slit Ysabinda’s throat to prevent her from denouncing him to Towerson, evinces this Dutch depravity. Only the law can define rape, the Fiscal scoffs, and in the East Indies, where the Dutch rapist’s father makes and enforces the law, it seems superfluous to ask “What Law is there here against it?” (4.4.53). He ridicules Harman Junior’s scruples, since a different standard applies on Amboyna, arguing that “if there be a Hell, ‘tis but for those that sin in Europe, not for us in Asia; Heathens have

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no Hell” (4.4.56–7).33 The Fiscal posits a moral relativism in distant commercial arenas, but the tragedy presents the Dutch as morally responsible for spoiling the purity of the indigenous people and abusing English generosity and rectitude. The rape itself thus embodies a number of violations. It literally violates Ysabinda’s virginity on the eve of her marriage to her beloved Towerson, prompting her to beg the Dutchman for death. Also, Dryden turns the relationships between native women and their Dutch and English lovers into emblems of the commercial rivals in the East Indies. The native Julia laughs “If my English Lover Beamont, my Dutch Love the Fiscall, and my Spanish Husband, were Painted in a piece with me amongst ‘em, they wou’d make a Pretty Emblem of the two Nations, that Cuckold his Catholic Majesty in his Indies” (2.1.226–230). Harman Junior’s rape symbolically violates the benevolent relationship between English merchants and the indigenous population.34 Finally, the rape pollutes the innocence of the island paradise. When Towerson locates Ysabinda, she urges him to “fly this detested Isle, where horrid Ills so black and fatal dwell, as Indians cou’d not guess, till Europe taught” (4.5.15– 17). Inverting the conventional understanding of Christian Europeans instructing the heathen natives in moral behavior, Dryden represents the nefarious Dutch as perverting the innocence of the virtuous people of Amboyna.35 Ysabinda may feel that the Dutchman’s rape has tainted her, but she expects to “plead my self my own just cause” in Heaven, refuses to accept responsibility for “thy sin” when Harman Junior offers to marry her, and calls on “Heaven [to] assist my Love” as Towerson and the Dutchman duel (4.5.79, 114, 122). The playwright treats Amboyna as a kind of Eden and casts this rape, anticipating the bloody violence 33 Thompson argues that only the Dutch adopt racialized discourse in the tragedy, using difference to justify mercantile exploitation. Performing, 113. 34 Raman discusses this aspect of the rape. Framing “India,” 233. Amrita Sen reads Dryden’s metonymic connection of Ysabinda and the spice trade on her native island through the colonizer’s trope of feminizing the landscape. “Ysabinda and the Spice Race: Reading the Body and the Indian Ocean World in Dryden’s Amboyna,” Postcolonial Text 14 (2019), 8. 35 On the “savage critic,” see Anthony Pagden, “The Savage Critic: Some European Images of the Primitive,” Yearbook of English Studies 13 (1983), 35. Rubright reads Ysabinda’s lament as effacing any difference between the English and the Dutch. Doppelgänger Dilemmas, 230. Ysabinda does make distinctions, however, remaining steadfast in her love for her English husband, pitying the English, and execrating her Dutch attacker.

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with which the play ends, as a kind of original sin that costs England its beneficial and productive opportunities in this paradise. The tragedy concludes with a speech that again bridges the dramatized past and the audience’s present. Having witnessed the intemperate greed and violence of the Dutch, Towerson admonishes his captors with a vision of divine retribution. With an optimism that ignores the audience’s awareness of two other wars in which “Amboyna” inspired patriotic fervor, he foresees that “An Age is coming, when an English Monarch with Blood, shall pay that blood which you have shed” (5.1.453–4). Then, alluding to events of the “Rampjaar” that will come to pass fifty years in this character’s future, events that have occurred in the audience’s very recent past, Towerson predicts that the Dutch, “to save your Cities from victorious Arms” will “invite the Waves to hide your Earth,” leaving themselves at the mercy of a heaven that will turn a deaf ear to their prayers (5.1.455–6). His captors mock Towerson’s final words, boasting that they will bring “confusion” to any English efforts to avenge their wrongs in the East (5.1.474). Dryden follows their proud displays with an epilogue demanding that the English sons of these martyred English fathers prove the Dutch wrong. For the Hollandophobic Dryden, the Third Anglo-Dutch War provides an opportunity to humble the Dutch. Not everyone in his audience agreed with him. Amboyna incites English audiences with a mixture of optimistic exhortation and melancholy nostalgia. The English mission to Amboyna, as Dryden represents it, had sought to extract moderate profits from an abundant paradise by cooperating with the Dutch and by wedding one of their own to a prosperous native maiden. The English have lost this opportunity because the Dutch forcefully acquired more than they needed. The violation in Harman Junior’s rape of Ysabinda precedes the violent massacre and expulsion of the civilized English merchants from the island, with Towerson’s losses at the nexus of both plots. Regretting that the English had once helped the republican Dutch, Dryden scornfully recasts the vaunted Dutch liberty as anarchy and declares that “their new Common-wealth has set ‘em free, / Onely from Honour and Civility” (Epilogue 11–12). If the English would rather learn the proper attitude toward the Dutch, they should carefully observe the play and “View then their Falsehoods, Rapine, Cruelty; / And think what once they were, they still would be” (Pr. 29–30). Dryden’s tragedy thus picks open the scar of Amboyna, nostalgically making the memory of events that had faded into a dull ache painfully fresh again so that they will not be forgotten and

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can be used to renew English mistrust of the Dutch fifty years after the traumatic events on that distant island.

Historiography and Nostalgia In energizing material that had become inert, Dryden participates in an historiographical process both Gilles Deleuze and Michel de Certeau describe. He makes the past bleed into the present in service of that contemporary moment. Deleuze argues that memory creates a kind of synthesis which reifies an event, a “former present,” from the undifferentiated past. Only in retrospect can the chaos of unrelated past occurrences acquire a coherent meaning. Making the past available as an object of reflection, the operation of representation in memory simultaneously instantiates that former present in relationship to the present moment and establishes some homology between the two.36 For Dryden, the two presents—his tragedy’s representation of an historical present on Amboyna and the present in which he stages the play as his nation attempts retribution on the Dutch for those events—bear a mutually reinforcing resemblance. The theatrical form he uses, in which characters address the audience, helps to reinforce this relationship. As he represents them, the aggressive and greedy Dutch of the Third Anglo-Dutch War and the rapacious Dutch who perpetrated the Amboyna massacre do not differ. Dryden extrapolates from the violence of a small handful of unscrupulous merchants on a distant island in 1623 to figure all Dutch people as violently greedy, a generalization that echoes the judgment of the pamphleteer who recorded the horrific scene of violence against the De Witts. If the cruel Dutch merchants on Amboyna at one time in that former present sound like the violent Dutch citizens in the Hague of Dryden’s present, then it must appear that the Dutch are violent and cruel and must all have been as violent and cruel in the past. Dryden refreshes the traumatic events of one particular moment for his audience, bringing the bloody image before their eyes in an effort to generate support for the war in the present. As Certeau observes about the effort to write a history, the historian cannot begin from an absolute or impartial origin. Rather, in selecting an arbitrary past moment as an anchor for constructing an historical narrative, “Current events are their

36 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 80.

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real beginning.”37 Dryden dramatizes a situation that never existed, one in which temperate English merchants and simple natives of Amboyna sought to work together with Dutch partners in an unspoiled paradise for everyone’s benefit.38 Dutch guile, not merely the treachery of a few individuals but the inherent wickedness of the Dutch people, destroyed that harmony. At the same time, in memorializing that lost utopia, Dryden also assures himself and his audience that they cannot restore that loss, enabling and justifying England’s own exploitative colonial ambitions.39 The destruction of Amboyna’s Eden serves a more important purpose precisely because it remains tantalizingly out of reach and irrecoverable. Now that the Dutch have spoiled the possibility of cooperation and moderation, the English can aggressively confront their rivals without bearing responsibility for the consequences. Countering Temple, McWard, and others who urged the English to put aside their differences with the Dutch and learn from their pragmatic, tolerant example, Dryden marshals nostalgic melancholy over the passing of the imagined paradise on Amboyna and all its connotations to generate new Hollandophobia and a desire to take revenge for half a century’s frustrations in competing with the Dutch in colonial arenas around the globe. Aphra Behn similarly mixes nostalgia and Hollandophobic jingoism to frame the action of Oroonoko. Her romance shuttles between a former present and a current present in Surinam, another contested site in England’s emulative rivalry with the Dutch. The plantations there, expanding over the first half of the seventeenth century, had gradually developed a profitable sugar trade in the 1650s before the Dutch had forcefully taken them.40 Although the Dutch captured the colony for a few months during the Second Anglo-Dutch War—an episode 37 The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 11. 38 Raman suggests that the tragedy’s success in effacing its contradictions explains its low critical fortunes; its supposed transparency disguises the play as an uncomplicated history. Framing “India,” 236. 39 Stewart argues that for nostalgia to make use of the dead it “must first manage to kill them” by telling their story in interested ways that prevent other dissonant historical accounts from emerging. On Longing, 143. 40 Joyce Lorimer discusses English attempts to establish colonies on the Wild Coast, including a briefly profitable one in Surinam, and their inability to sustain those efforts. “The Failure of the English Guiana Ventures 1595–1667 and James I’s Foreign Policy,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 21 (1993), 5.

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mentioned in Oroonoko—an English squadron under Sir John Harman recaptured Surinam early in 1667. Unaware of this development across the Atlantic, English diplomats at the peace conference in Breda had already ceded Surinam to the Dutch in exchange for New York.41 The Dutch again took possession of the South American colony. Some English planters remained in Surinam, hoping that the Dutch administration would fail. Despite Dutch efforts to satisfy England’s “unreasonable demands” concerning “some few English families” remaining in Surinam, their plight contributed to the slender casus belli of the Third AngloDutch War.42 Although England’s attention shifted to its North American and Caribbean colonies, the English nursed a sense of injustice attached to the loss of Surinam and kept watch on Dutch difficulties there as late as 1688. The traumatic episodes at the end of Oroonoko, coinciding with England’s loss of Surinam to the Dutch, create dual temporal perspectives and contribute to the narrative’s tension. As the plot advances, the characters experience the height of England’s successful colonization of Surinam in the narrative present. Behn idealizes Surinam as a pristine and abundant colony while mystifying the brutal practices required to capitalize on this fecundity. At the same time, Behn’s jaded narrator writes from the other side of a traumatic history, two decades after the events she describes. This narrator frames her tale with the conflicts between the English and the Dutch, two nations that profited from African slave labor in their competition to profit from the plantations in Surinam. She thus encodes the romance’s innocence with a sense of loss and outrage as it moves toward a dual conclusion: the grisly spectacle of an enslaved prince’s execution that closely coincides with England’s loss of the colony to the Dutch. At the intersection of these two experiences, Behn creates a traumatic site of national loss and colors the romance with nostalgia for an irrecoverable paradise. The romance’s two arcs, as the jaded older narrator describes her optimistic younger self in a fantastic colonial landscape, create a powerful 41 Israel discusses the changed fortunes of the two nations in the Caribbean and South America. Dutch Primacy, 279. 42 Andrew Marvell, “An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government

in England,” in Prose Works ed. Nicholas van Maltzahn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 225. Haley discusses the flimsy Surinam pretext for war. William of Orange, 31. Peter Colleton wrote to Arlington with reports of the Dutch “condition at Surinam to be very weak.” Calendar of State Papers: Colonial Series America and West Indies, 1669–1674, ed. W. Noel Sainsbury, vol. 7 (London, 1889), 517. 14 August 1673.

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sense of regret over England’s squandered opportunities in this Western sphere of commercial competition. This nostalgic narrative bears a structural similarity to traditional historiography. The interests of the present moment influence any effort to impose a cohesive story onto the disparate occurrences of the past and to posit a causal relation among them. By selecting the moment at which a history appears to begin, a writer establishes a kind of “caesura” that will mark an asymmetrical rupture in an otherwise undifferentiated past. As a result, the “former present” emerges into significance and begins to form a trajectory toward the present moment in which the writer selects it.43 This creation of a past event from the perspective of the writer’s present then reconfigures that past within a history that points toward the present moment and makes that past relevant to present concerns.44 Nostalgia similarly manipulates the frames of narrative. The longing for an irrecoverable past, one that “has never existed except as narrative”— in other words the selection, suppression, and arrangement of particular details required to articulate a version of the longed-for past—confronts a paradox.45 On one hand, nostalgia manifests a desire for authenticity, the genuine and unmediated experience of a former time. On the other hand, in its use of words and story, narrative makes use of artifice and mediation to create a coherent episode out of diffuse experience and to give shape to the object of nostalgia. Narrative neglects or erases some details and foregrounds others, grants them significance, and articulates their relationship to each other and to the one who recalls them. Both historiography and romantic plots rely on these nostalgic strategies of narrative to endow the past with meaning.

43 Deleuze posits a traumatic break or “caesura” that establishes a “before and after” and “creates the possibility of a temporal series.” Difference and Repetition, 89. Caruth makes a similar point in her reading of Freud’s treatment of the relationship between trauma and history. Unclaimed Experience, 14. White argues that the operation of constructing historical events in language can become especially apparent with “those events in the lives of nations, social classes, ethnic groups, institutions, and individuals which are experienced as ‘traumatic’, and the nature of which is of special concern for the individual’s group identity.” “Response,” 241. 44 As Certeau suggests, the historian picks out certain events, “asking something else of them than what they meant to say... We postulate a coding which inverts that of the time we are studying.” Writing of History, 138. Bhabha argues that national narratives rely on a dual temporal consciousness. “DissemiNation,” 305. 45 Stewart, On Longing, 23.

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Behn’s romance participates in this process by creating its pristine vision of an English Surinam spoiled by the death of her narrative’s hero and the arrival of the Dutch. The harrowing account of Oroonoko’s gruesome death marks a traumatic rupture, before which the young narrator naively enjoys the timeless, unspoiled abundance of a colonial paradise and after which she departs the lost colony for England, bearing cynicism, resentment, and regret with her. Two decades later, as William of Orange, the Dutch nephew and son-in-law of Behn’s king, began to marshal his forces to invade England and depose the increasingly unpopular Catholic autocrat, the author purports to revive a monitory tale of an innocent time, spoiled at the moment of the Dutch conquest of an English territory.46 Of course, the narrator’s wistful recollection of her younger self’s carefree adventures with a dashing African prince filter through intervening events and takes on a conflicted nostalgia for simpler times that never actually existed and cannot be restored. Although Behn pushes the exploitation in colonial Surinam to the margins of Oroonoko, she allows England’s brutal slave system to return violently and traumatically, in conjunction with the return of the Dutch, to drive the romance to its conclusion.

Surinamese Sugar in Oroonoko In locating her romance in Surinam, Behn focuses on the popular image of the territory’s bounty rather than on the prosaic drudgery profitable sugar colonies required. English and Dutch writers had promoted Surinam’s wonderful abundance to their countrymen for decades by the time they fought a war over the colony. Just before the Second Anglo-Dutch War, Renatus Enys visited Surinam and reported to the Earl of Arlington that “these parts exceedingly abound with strange rarities, both of beasts, fish, reptiles, insects, and vegetables.”47 When the Dutch Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie made its first serious effort to establish colonies, Johannes de Laet published “one of the most authoritative … encyclopedic” tomes about the Western Hemisphere in the seventeenth 46 The events of the summer of 1688 profoundly affected Behn’s romance. Richard Kroll places Oroonoko in the context of James II’s tyrannical trial of the seven bishops. “‘Tales of Love and Gallantry’: The Politics of Oroonoko,” HLQ 67 (2004), 578. 47 Calendar of State Papers: Colonial Series America and West Indies, 1661–1668, ed. W. Noel Sainsbury, vol. 5 (London, 1880), 166. 1 November 1663.

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century.48 Explaining that he felt the duty of “alle ghetrouwe lief-hebbers des Vaderlandts … om te vervorderen de middelen die noodigh zijn tot uyt-voeringhe van zoo grooten ende ghewichtighen werck [all faithful lovers of the fatherland … to provide the necessary means for the pursuit of such great and serious work],” de Laet offers a compendium drawing on previous Spanish, Dutch, Italian, and English discussions of that part of the world, hoping “voorder ondersoeckinghe te verwecken [to inspire further exploration].”49 Turning his attention to the Wild Coast where the Surinam colony will begin if Dutchmen respond to the call to cultivate it, de Laet describes the region’s “ghetempert, ghesondt, vruchtbaer [temperate, healthy, fruitful]” climate (470). Otto Keye repeats the promise of Surinam’s abundance a generation later. He notes the many fruit trees, “welcke boomen het geheele Jaer door hare vruchten geven: so datmen van haer maer segghen datse drie hondert vijf-en-tsestigh mael des Jaers midelycken den menschen haere vruchten schencken [which trees give their fruit the whole year through: so that men even say of them that people harvest their fruit three hundred sixty five times a year].”50 When Behn’s narrator arrives in Surinam, she praises its “Eternal Spring,” and marvels at Surinam’s trees that “bear[] at once all degrees of Leaves and Fruit, from blooming Buds to ripe Autumn; Groves of Oranges, Limons, Citrons, Figs, Nutmegs, and noble Aromaticks, continually bearing their Fragrancies.”51 Her feelings of wonder echo this tradition of imagining Surinam as another Eden. The narrator twice emphasizes that her story occurs in an exotic paradise. Like Dryden imagining Amboyna, Behn describes the English colony on the eve of the Dutch conquest in prelapsarian terms, the indigenous population “represent[ing] to me an absolute Idea of the first State of Innocence, before Man knew how to sin” (10).52 These guileless

48 Michiel van Groesen, “The Anglo-Dutch Lake? Johannes de Laet and the Ideological Origins of the Dutch and English West Indies,” International Journal of Maritime History 34 (2022), 566. 49 Nieuvve Wereldt ofte Beschrijvinghe van Westindien (Leiden, 1625), *2r, *4r. 50 Beschryvinge Van het Heerlijcke ende Gezegende Landt Gujana (Hague, [1659]), 52. 51 Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, ed. Joanna Lipking (New York: Norton, 1997), 43. 52 Albert J. Rivero reads the romance as representing Surinam as a kind of Eden. “Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and the ‘Blank Spaces’ of Colonial Fictions,” SEL 39 (1999), 453.

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natives help the English colonists to survive and prosper in their new environment. Having begun her story in the middle, the narrator pauses to describe the adventures and misadventures of her African hero that led to his enslavement and transportation to Surinam.53 Although she presents her narration as an unembellished “History of this Royal Slave…without the Addition of Invention,” the artful exposition of Oroonoko’s life in Africa sets up the careful symmetries, doublings, and repetitions of the romance’s second half (8).54 With that exposition complete, the narrative begins again with the narrator praising England’s colony in Surinam and the “divers Wonderfull and Strange things that Country affords” (43). It resembles a second Eden, a bountiful garden producing its plenty without requiring fallen individuals to live by the sweat of their brows. Although Behn’s narrator treats Surinam as another Eden, she reiterates England’s claim on this paradise. She justifies her digression into the African part of the romance, for instance, because she feels the need to explain the way slaves are transported from Africa to “our world” (12).55 She concludes this exposition when her enslaved hero “at last arriv’d at the Mouth of the River of Surinam, a Colony belonging to the King of England” (34). Looking back from her present moment in the reign of James II to traumatic events about to occur in the life of her orphaned, younger self in a colony lost to the rapacious Dutch, the narrator declares bitterly, “I must say thus much of it, That certainly had his late Majesty, of sacred Memory [Charles II], but seen and known what a vast and charming World he had been Master of in that Continent, he would never have parted so Easily with it to the Dutch” (43).56

53 For Kate Chedgzoy, the section in Africa exudes a “fictive nostalgia for a place that never existed.” Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World: Memory, Place, and History, 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 190. 54 Emily Anderson traces the repetitions allowing the reader to accommodate the experience of novelty. “Novelty in Novels: A Look at What’s New in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” Studies in the Novel 39 (2007), 6. The doublings that occur throughout the romance might serve as a symptom of the narrator’s experience of trauma. Caruth discusses narrative repetition as a sign of trauma. Unclaimed Experience, 4. 55 Jonathan Elmer points out that Surinam is part of only one world and suffers from European efforts to impose their systems onto it. On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 45. 56 Enys expressed a similar sentiment in his letter to Arlington, worrying that the “greatest infelicity of this colony is that his Majesty is not rightly informed of the goodness thereof” (5: 167).

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The narrator juxtaposes this reminder of England’s underestimation of the colony’s significance with one of her rhapsodies about the cornucopia of Surinam’s abundance. The traumatic expulsion concluding the romance occurs not as a result of eating forbidden fruit, but as a result of the eruption of violence that destabilizes England’s possession of the colony and its resources. References to England’s lost opportunities—and the advantage the Dutch have gained as a result—occur with increasing frequency as the romance rushes toward the mature narrator’s present in the summer of 1688. The wistful, idealizing representation of an idyllic Surinam may mystify a more commercial concern at the heart of Oroonoko, but the material rationale for the colony never entirely disappears. The narrator may pretend that a journey full of “Wonder and Amazement” (48) to a remote village represents a kind of “first contact,” but a European who had already lived among the natives and spoke their language facilitates the meeting.57 The Surinamese may represent a simpler time before original sin, but they also wear clothing—“as Adam and Eve did the Fig-leaves” after the fall—and participate in postlapsarian trade for “Knives, Axes, Pins and Needles” with the English colonists (9). The narrator gestures nostalgically to the colony’s former sinlessness, but she simultaneously recognizes that Surinam is no longer Eden.58 England can extract profits from Surinam’s lost innocence. Surinam’s miraculous abundance offers England the opportunity to profit from New World commodities. Just as Enys had confided in his correspondence to Arlington or as George Warren would boast more publicly in his Impartial Description of Surinam—a likely source for Behn’s narrative—Surinam’s plenitude made it ripe for profitable exploitation. The Dutch similarly emphasized its resources. De Laet had described a territory “vol Mineralen ende mijnen van diversche Metalen [full of minerals and mines of various metals]” (470) and Keye had argued that the profits of tropical Surinam would surpass anything to be made in cold New Netherland (25). In Oroonoko Surinam offers an inexhaustible

57 Mary Helen McMurran reads this episode as a nostalgic fantasy. “Aphra Behn from Both Sides: Translation in the Atlantic World,” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 34 (2005), 16. 58 As Stewart notes, nostalgia also acknowledges that the past remains irrecoverable. On Longing, 143.

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supply of raw materials because its climate makes the trees simultaneously produce “Ripe Fruit and Blooming Young” (43). Since the “Wood of these Trees have an intrinsick Value above common Timber” and “bear a Price considerable, to inlay withal,” England could have profitably exploited Surinam’s commodities if the Dutch had not acquired the colony.59 Similar sentiments arise later when the narrator encounters some natives carrying bags of gold dust. They explain that the gold “came streaming in little small Channels down the high Mountains, when the Rains fell,” putting the fantasy object of so much of European desire— as exemplified in Ralegh’s claim to have found El Dorado in the vicinity of Surinam—within easy reach (51). But as with so much of Surinam’s economic potential, any hopes of England exploiting this abundance of mineral wealth “dy’d or the Dutch have the Advantage of it; And ‘tis to be bemoan’d what his Majesty lost by losing that part of America” (51). The loss of the colony to the Dutch, on the heels of the loss of the romance’s hero, deprives England simultaneously of an unspoiled wilderness yielding profitable abundance without labor and of a viable colony with the potential for even greater commercial profit. This double fantasy points to the central mystification in the romance. The real profitability of Surinam did not derive from its overabundance of trees dropping ripe fruit into outstretched hands. Europeans could extract wealth from Surinam through establishing plantations devoted to sugar production. As de Laet pointed out, if the WIC wanted to “daer grooten rijcken uyt trecken [extract great riches from there],” they would need to recognize that, even more than the mines he had just described, the “principaelste commoditeyt van dit Landt zijn de Suycker-rieden [the primary commodity of this country is the sugar canes]” (472). Like de Laet, Warren moves from an overview of the colony’s various commodities to a discussion of its primary source of wealth: sugar production. The plantations in Surinam have “sugar-works, yielding no small profit to the Owners, for a slight Disbursement” and producing a ratio of profits to

59 Laura Brown’s influential reading of the colonial background of Behn’s romance

calls attention to the narrator’s list of commodities here and elsewhere within the context of the “period’s fascination with imperialist accumulation.” “The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves,” in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987), 52.

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investment “far larger... than is usually produc’d from a greater foundation, and more Continu’d Industry in England.”60 Surinam’s “chiefest commodity,” sugar, would bring great wealth to England if properly exploited, Enys reported to the king’s secretary of state (5: 167). As Behn’s narrator recalls in her romance, the English estates she observed as a young woman had been “Plantations of Sugar” (11). Warren, Enys, and their Dutch competitors recognized that reaping profits from colonies across the Atlantic demanded strenuous effort (Fig. 7.1).

Fig. 7.1 Charles de Rochefort, “La Figure des Moulins á Sucre,” Histoire naturelle et morale des iles Antilles de l’Amerique (Rotterdam, 1665) plate between pp. 332–333. Call #: F2001. R6 1665 Cage. Digital Image File Name: 8020. Folger Shakespeare Library

60 An Impartial Description of Surinam upon the Continent of Guiana (London, 1667), 17–18.

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Whereas other writers’ evaluations of the Surinam colony’s potential included an honest assessment of the need for slave labor to extract these profits from the plantations, Behn omits any scenes of sugar production. Her tale of a young woman temporarily residing in Surinam typically involves story-telling in a parlor or thrilling adventures in search of tigers with her hero. Oroonoko’s claims to authenticity do not extend to scenes of quotidian drudgery on a sugar plantation, but Warren and other authors whose texts Behn might have known candidly describe the plantations’ demand for enslaved labor.61 Warren, for instance, describes the harsh conditions of African slaves, “sold like Dogs, and no better esteem’d but for their Work sake” (19). Enys offers a similarly blunt assessment. African slaves provide “the strength and sinews of this western world” and a secure supply of this form of labor “would advance [planters’] fortunes and his Majesty’s customs” (5: 167). Dutch authors also argued that these plantations needed slave labor, “[w]ant die Swarten of Slaven konnen … tweemaal soo veele lands ende meer tot de Culture van die lant-vruchten verveerdigen dan geheurde blancke knechten [because those blacks or slaves can bring to cultivation twice as much and more land than hired white servants],” and went to great lengths to justify the practice.62 In the tragic “True History” of Oroonoko: Or, The Royal Slave, however, slavery functions more ambivalently. As the narrator nostalgically mourns the simultaneously unspoiled and profitable colony England has lost, she passes lightly over the brutality of one of Surinam’s most salient features: small groups of English or Dutch planters exploiting the alienated labor of a large population of African slaves.

61 Behn may also have known Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London 1673), a text that treats the practical requirements for sugar production in Barbados, England’s chief colony for sugar production after the Dutch took Surinam (57). Larry Gragg describes the labor-intensive requirements. Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados, 1627–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 103. See also Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges, 41. 62 Keye, Beschryvinge, 102. Groesen notes that de Laet and the leaders of the Dutch WIC, the Heeren XIX, initially rejected the practice of enslaving Africans, only to recognize by the 1630s their need for slaves on sugar plantations. “Anglo-Dutch Lake,” 568–9.

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The Colonial Facts of Life in Oroonoko Although it laments the treatment of its enslaved royal protagonist, Oroonoko accepts the necessity of England’s competition with its Dutch rivals to control the trade in and use of slaves in the colonial enterprise. The English did not have a coherent rationale for the practice. They inherited a justification that combined the classical theory of war slavery that Hugo Grotius articulated—he argues that in “publick solemn War” victors may enslave captives as well as “their posterity for ever”— with an inchoate racial discourse to allow the enslaving of Africans.63 Usually, English treatments of slavery focused abstractly on the relationship of individuals to tyrants. The English abhorrence of slavery in works written in the 1640s and again prior to 1688 connects more directly to political tracts of the sort written in the 1570s during the Dutch Revolt than to the later racial discourse of the eighteenth century. Thomas Hobbes, for instance, imagines slavery as an accident of the battle of all against all in the state of nature. He describes a primordial scene in which a victor accepts the submission of the defeated, establishing a covenant of sovereignty. At the same time, Hobbes indirectly introduces the general concept of slavery. Those who refuse a covenant, “(commonly called Slaves,) have no obligation at all; but may break their bonds, or the prison; and kill, or carry away captive their Master, justly.”64 The master–slave relationship, then, represents merely a temporary suspension of the violent conflict between two brutal individuals.65 It is this political understanding of slavery to which Beamont refers in Dryden’s Amboyna, though England’s ongoing competition with the Dutch in Africa might have imported the other resonance. 63 Of the Law of Warre and Peace, 567. Nyquist argues that Grotius made a significant contribution to the theoretical justifications for transatlantic slavery. Arbitrary Rule, 226. Sujata Iyengar notes that the legal basis for enslaving Africans in England’s colonies remained inconsistent until the eighteenth century. Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 203. 64 Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 141. 65 Nyquist notes that Hobbes distinguishes between citizens as servants who acknowl-

edge a covenant with the victors and slaves who exist in an ambiguous, extralegal relationship to a master. Arbitrary Rule, 317. Elmer argues that the African prince’s abject situation in Surinam constitutes the “absolutist’s nightmare,” in which the Hobbesian dispersal of power and vulnerability results not in stability but instability. On Lingering, 41.

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In his opposition to Hobbes in the Two Treatises of Government , John Locke also obliquely addresses the practical question of chattel slavery. Although Locke—who had played an important role in the Royal African Company and other Restoration ventures in the Caribbean— argued against the political slavery of the absolutists, he accepted the colonial practice of enslaving Africans.66 Locke argues that a freeborn individual “cannot, by Compact, or his own Consent, enslave himself to any one,” but he acknowledges that submission to another on the battlefield may occur, creating a temporary enslavement.67 Such slavery does not permanently change an individual and the slave may later choose, “by resisting the Will of his Master, to draw on himself the Death he desires” and has deferred (2.23).68 With some reservations, then, both Hobbes and Locke accept the idea that the vanquished could choose to preserve their lives on the battlefield by becoming slaves.69 The fiction that the slaves purchased in Africa had chosen slavery over death in battle provided a comforting rationale for the Restoration pursuit of the trade. England’s increased sugar production focused attention on the need for the cheaper labor of African slaves. The chronic shortage of labor to run the “Ingenios” on sugar plantations elicited insistent demands from Jamaica, from Barbados, from Antigua, and, before the Dutch captured it,

66 David Armitage argues that Locke’s experience in the colonial sphere exerts a subtle influence on his political thought, including in his toleration of slavery. Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 112. James Farr explores Locke’s involvement in these ventures. “‘So Vile and Miserable an Estate’: The Problem of Slavery in Locke’s Political Thought,” in John Locke: Critical Assessments, ed. Richard Ashcraft, vol. 3 (London: Routledge, 1991), 669. Locke knew something of England’s history in Surinam; when he had been forced to turn over his papers to his successors, these included “papers related to Surinam, 1574–1674” including its most recent developments after the loss in 1667. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 1675–1676, ed. W. Noel Sainsbury, vol. 9 (London, 1893), 164. 2 January 1675. 67 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government , ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), part 2, paragraph 23. 68 Nyquist argues that Locke’s distinction between tyrants and despots allows him to justify transatlantic slavery. Arbitrary Rule, 333. 69 Urvashi Chakravarty traces the “collusion of early modern fictions of consent” with

“fictions of race.” Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), 7. As Warren Chernaik argues, these views outlined the theoretical “limits of political power,” without attending to the lived experience of Restoration slavery, “Captains and Slaves: Aphra Behn and the Rhetoric of Republicanism,” Seventeenth Century 17 (2002), 102.

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from Surinam for larger quantities of slaves. Thomas Lynch, the English governor of Jamaica, would report to his superiors that certain material conditions kept the colony from profitability, among which the “want of negroes is the grand obstruction; without them the Plantations will decline.”70 Almost two decades later, Lynch would again report on the persistent demand for slave labor. The RAC might want him to enforce its monopoly, but he administers vast territories and interlopers occasionally arrive with a cargo of slaves. He excuses his failures by appealing to the prosperity such contraband enables: “it will not harm the King’s customs or English trade, for every negro’s labour that produces cotton, sugar, or indigo is worth twenty pounds a year to the Customs... Moreover it is impossible to hinder the importation of negroes, for the Island is large and slaves as needful to a planter as money to a courtier, and as much coveted.”71 Dutch advocates for their colonies in the region looked enviously at the labor practices in English colonies, trying to determine how “aen de zijde der Engelschen doordat middel den arbeyt nerghen nae soo dier en is [on the English part, labor is by no means nearly so costly]” (Keye 25) and hoping that more WIC slave imports would increase the profits in the tropical colonies. The demand for slaves in the plantations grew throughout the period. Shortly after Behn published Oroonoko, for instance, another pamphlet described the colonists’ dependence on “Our Negroes, which cost us so dear,” and who fatally suffer “many Mischances” in the hard labor of the sugar works.72 To compete with the Dutch and make their colonies profitable, the English demanded a cheap and plentiful supply of slave labor. Some in England objected explicitly to their nation’s participation in the trade in and use of slaves. They objected on more material grounds to England’s monopolistic handling of the slave trade. In this case at least, the Whig, Slingsby Bethel, thought the English should not imitate their Dutch rivals. If they “driv[e] their East India Trade by a Joynt Stock” it “is no argument for England to do the same,” and as a result

70 Letter of Thomas Lynch to Henry Bennet, CSPC 5:278 (12 February 1665). 71 Lynch’s Report to Lords of Trade and Plantations, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial

Series, 1681-1685, ed. J. W. Fortescue (London, 1898), 286. 29 August 1682. 72 The Groans of the Plantations (London, 1689), 19.

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England should make “all Companies open.”73 In 1667 some in Parliament accused the Company of Royal Adventurers of taking advantage of colonists who needed slave labor to operate England’s plantations. The company replied that the trade required a monopoly, since private individuals did not have enough capital—particularly the fortifications and shipping necessary to operate in West Africa where the Dutch vigorously protected their interests—to preserve England’s national interests in the trade.74 Particularly galling to the Company must have been the accusation that the inferior slaves sold to English colonists (and the better quality and price obtained by selling to Spain) had contributed to “the too easie Surrender of St. Christophers and Syrinam” to the Dutch (12). Responding that the English governor there had instead claimed “That the Credit they had from this Company had brought that Place to that good condition they were in before the Dutch possessed it” (13), the Company’s author accuses these critics of unpatriotic collusion with the rival Dutch to break the hold of the English Company. As this writer and others would claim, the profitable trade in this human commodity contributed to England’s national prestige at Dutch expense. A few years before the publication of Oroonoko, the RAC would respond to another challenge by reiterating the national interest in maintaining a strong monopoly for the trade, especially as “Our Neighbours of Holland who so much Covet and Solicite Trade, will be glad to see this Inclosure broken down.”75 Given the prominence of the Company’s royal patronage, it should not surprise Behn’s readers that Oroonoko’s English slave captain commands a ship for “the King his Master, to whom his Vessel did belong” (32). An English captain legitimately operates a ship of the Royal Adventurers of England to outsmart England’s Dutch rivals and transport this human cargo to a profitable English colony.

73 The Interest of the Princes and States of Europe (London, 1681), 11. 74 An Answer of the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading into Africa to

the Petition and Paper of certain Heads (London, 1667), 17. Robert Batchelor argues that criticism of the exclusivity and even the validity of the EIC and RAC increased near the end of the first decade of the Restoration. London, 166. 75 Certain Considerations Relating to the Royal African Company of England (London, 1680), 9.

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Others objected to the hypocrisy of using English evangelization to justify imperial expansion while enslaving fellow men.76 Behn herself knew one prominent critic of England’s use of slave labor, Thomas Tryon. In his Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen Planters , Tryon describes some of the horrific aspects of England’s slaving practices, including one of the first printed accounts of the Middle Passage. Adopting the voice of an African who survived the Middle Passage, he laments that when a traumatized slave arrives on an English plantation, he enters into a violent environment, with nothing Edenic about it. There, the cruel English masters exercise their “tyranny” over their African slaves, who in return “neglect our Labour, run away, spoil our Business, & in the anguish of our souls continually curse our Masters,” all of which only prompts the men with the whips to “redouble their Cruel Usages.”77 Tryon’s critique of slavery and its cyclical violence would not stop the brutal practices associated with it, but unlike Behn, he put principle above expediency. Finally, some of those who resisted England’s use of slave labor in Surinam and the colonies were the slaves themselves. Sensational reports of slave revolts and their ruthless suppression permeated Restoration news culture. Warren’s account of Surinam diagnoses uprisings as a symptom of the slaves’ hopelessness, which often “drive[s] them to desperate attempts for the Recovery of their Liberty” (19). Those whom their masters recapture suffer horrific punishment “for a terrour and example to others” (19). Because such revolts threatened to undermine the profitability of English colonies, or worse, make them vulnerable to competitors such as the Dutch, their eruption inspired violent reprisals.78 A narrowly averted

76 Chernaik, for instance, discusses the objections of Richard Baxter and other Dissenters. “Captains and Slaves,” 102. Philippe Rosenberg finds that nascent anti-slavery views belonged to a broad denominational spectrum of English Protestants. “Thomas Tryon and the Seventeenth-Century Dimensions of Antislavery,” William and Mary Quarterly 61 (2004), 620. 77 Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen Planters of the East & West Indies (London, 1684), 109. Rosenberg argues that Tryon attempted to reconcile principle and expediency by showing that slavery was both abhorrent and counterproductive. “Thomas Tryon,” 640. 78 Reports of renegade African slaves in Jamaica, Barbados, and other English possessions pepper the Calendar of State Papers Colonial Series. Just before Behn published Oroonoko, for instance, the Governor of Jamaica read reports concerning “parties out against the rebellious negroes” into the minutes. “Minutes of the Council of Jamaica, 1 June, 1687,” CSP Colonial 12, 380.

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rebellion in Barbados in 1676 would echo through the circles of the colonial elite and spill over into the popular English media, where pamphlets recounted the slaves’ plan to rise up and “kill their Master and Mistresses with their Overseers.”79 Attempting to destroy not only their oppressors but also the tools of their oppression, these men planned “to fire the Sugar-Canes, and so run in and Cut their Masters the Planters Throats.”80 A loyal slave revealed the plans and the English executed “35 of them for example.”81 Echoing the tendency to treat the colonies in simultaneously sinless and violent terms, one author rejoices that “this flourishing and Fertile Island, or to say more properly Spatious and profitable Garden” had providentially “escaped from Eminent dangers.”82 When Oroonoko finally refuses the bonds of slavery, he meets a similar fate. Behn’s narrative of a royal slave’s ghastly death registers no objection to the regular use of other enslaved Africans in English colonies. The narrator accepts the necessity of slavery to the profitability of England’s colonial interests in Surinam and distinguishes between typical slavery and her princely hero’s special case. Ultimately, as Laura Brown persuasively argues, the narrator mounts only “an ambiguous attack on the institutions of slavery,” drawing an unstable distinction between the exceptional young nobleman enslaved in Surinam and his fellow Africans on England’s plantations.83 The narrator’s meaningless distinction reflects the ideological fantasies at work in Oroonoko.84 Most of the plantations’ slaves exist as part of the capital the English colonists own and use to exploit the abundance of England’s doomed colony. Oroonoko endures a different kind of slavery, distinct from the enslavement of the men he conquered in African wars and sold to English or Dutch slave

79 A Continuation of the State of New-England…Together with an Account of the intended Rebellion of the Negroes in the Barbadoes (London, 1676), 19. 80 Great Newes From the Barbadoes (London, 1676), 10. 81 Letter from Governor Sir John Atkins to Secretary Sir John Williamson, CSPC 9:294

(3 October 1675). 82 Great News, 13. 83 “Romance of Empire,” 55. 84 In Žižek’s view, Behn’s romance could be said to be “overlooking the illusion which

is structuring our real, effective relationship to reality,” the perceived need for slave labor. Sublime Object, 33.

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merchants.85 He apparently suffers only the loss of dignity, rather than the additional compulsion to labor for another’s profit. Behn ultimately mystifies the conditions of slavery in England’s Edenic colony before it passed to the Dutch. As Oroonoko travels from his native land to the English colony, the horrors of the Middle Passage—with the exception of chains—make no appearance. In the prince’s transition from royal command to bondage, the transaction does not occur, as it does in Tryon’s view of the violent trade, between the vicious brutes that “most of that sort of Men are” (30). Instead, a refined English captain “of a finer sort of Address and Conversation” commands the English slave ship that arrives in Coramantien (30). Fortunately, when Oroonoko arrives in Surinam, he becomes the slave of Trefry and not one of the colony’s more wicked planters. Freed from the expectation that he must labor in the cane fields and reunited with his beloved Imoinda, Oroonoko can participate in the romantic adventures that characterized his life in Africa. Trefry does not require Oroonoko to work, but then, no one actually works in Behn’s Surinam. In fact, the only effort described among the slaves on Trefry’s prosperous estate is the work of Oroonoko’s former countrymen, who “waited on him, some playing, others dancing before him all the time... and with all unwearied Industry, endeavouring to please and delight him” (37). The English may need slaves to work the sugar plantations Behn mentions at the outset of her romance, but no one seems to toil at the machinery of production. Elsewhere in the print market of Restoration England, readers might learn that their nation exploited the labor of Africans to succeed in their competition with the Dutch in colonial markets, but in Behn’s Surinam the life of a slave does not include the necessity of alienating labor. The narrator herself expresses ambivalence about the slave trade without directly criticizing it as others did. In the opening episode of the romance, she describes the English, African, and indigenous peoples that mingle in Surinam. In order to provide the background for her story, she starts to explain that the English bring slaves to Surinam, since

85 Elliott Visconsi makes the point that the innate, “somatic kingship” that cannot be

hidden or disguised becomes a trope in Royalist writing of the Restoration. Lines of Equity: Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 166. Catherine Gallagher focuses on the exceptional quality of Oroonoko’s difference from other Africans in the romance. “Oroonoko’s Blackness,” in Aphra Behn Studies, ed. Janet Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 240, 244.

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“those they make use of there, are not Natives” (8). After her digression on Surinam’s virtuous natives, the narrator returns to describing her story’s setting. As she starts again, she repeats herself with a slight variation: “Those then whom we make use of to work in our Plantations of Sugar, are Negro’s” (11). The slippage between outside and inside the system of extracting profit from the colony, whether it is “they” who make use of African slaves or “we” who do, permeates the romance and suggests the ambivalent narrator’s own uncertainty about whether she participates in or merely observes the events in her story of slavery in England’s lost colony.86 She does not criticize the practice of slavery itself. In the key moment of treachery, when the English captain enslaves Oroonoko and transports him to Surinam, the narrator refrains from explicitly condemning him, commenting that “Some have commended this Act, as brave, in the Captain; but I will spare my sense of it, and leave it to my Reader, to judge as he pleases” (31). She describes the genteel English captain’s actions and hints at their wickedness, but he serves England’s royal company and satisfies an English colony’s need for slaves. Behn treats this brutal practice as necessary to England’s national ambitions to surpass their Dutch rivals in this trade. In fact, at various moments the narrator complies with the demands of the dehumanizing system. Her panicked retreat from the plantation during the slave revolt and her dilatory return leave Oroonoko at Byam’s mercy, despite her supposition that she “had Authority and Interest enough there... to have prevented” his brutal punishment (57). Distrusting Oroonoko’s reiterated protestations that he would never injure the narrator or the other sympathetic English colonists of the Parham plantation, the narrator flees from him. Despite his declaration that he perfectly trusts his English owners who promise to end his slavery eventually, the narrator refuses to take his honorable word or “trust him much out of our View” (42). In fact, in an unguarded moment of frustration with Oroonoko’s suspicions, the young woman reverts to the underlying basis of their relationship. She warns him that his sullenness “would but give us a Fear of him, and possibly compel us to treat him so as I shou’d be very loath to behold: that is, it might occasion his Confinement” (41). She can hardly have been surprised that the African prince would take offense and find his own doubts confirmed. In the end, the 86 For Chedgzoy, the narrative’s ambivalence represents Behn’s embrace of the “polyphonic” quality of memory. Women’s Writing, 191.

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narrator retreats to her position of authority and compulsion. She may sentimentalize this particular slave, but for all of her uncertainty about his enslavement she remains part of England’s colonial ruling class and Oroonoko remains an African slave. Despite his later disillusionment, Oroonoko himself initially accepts and profits from the system of African slavery. When he falls in love with Imoinda, the romance hero does not begin his courtship with gifts of jewelry, billets-doux, or other baubles. Rather, for his first gift he “presented her an hundred fifty Slaves in Fetters, [and] told her with his Eyes, that he was not insensible to her Charms” (14–15). Here and elsewhere, the trite metaphor of amorous enslavement takes on a greater charge when combined with the literal practices of the colonial arena. Oroonoko accepts slavery as a necessary fact of life. Though some sentimental English planters may express occasional reservations about slavery, Oroonoko does not. Elsewhere in the romance, the narrator recalls that as an African prince, Oroonoko regularly traded in slaves. He had previously supplied the English slave merchant, who “was very well known to Oroonoko, with whom he had traffick’d for Slaves” (30). In the mode of Grotius or Hobbes, the African prince typically enslaved those who yielded to him on the battlefield. After subduing Jamoan, Oroonoko chooses not to enslave this honorable opponent, even though victors typically consign even some high-ranking captives, “as they us’d to do, without distinction, for the common Sale, or Market” in slaves (29). Befriending his former enemy, Oroonoko entertains Jamoan “in his own Court, where he retain’d nothing of the Prisoner, but the Name” (29). When Oroonoko becomes Trefry’s slave, he also crucially “endur’d no more of the Slave but the Name” (37). The narrator insists on this difference, suggesting that she drew a fine distinction between menial drudgery in the sugar works and the loss of freedom. Although he never participates in the hard labor on the English colony’s sugar plantations, Oroonoko eventually decides that he cannot bear even this nominal slavery. He acts on Locke’s idea of resisting his temporary masters to regain his liberty, even at the cost of death. Some slaves preferred death; there are Dutch reports of Africans jumping overboard into the Atlantic, rather than accept their enslavement.87 Early English accounts of the African slaves laboring on English plantations 87 Willie F. Page, The Dutch Triangle: The Netherlands and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1621–1664 (New York: Garland, 1997), 132.

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record the readiness with which they embrace death. Although Richard Ligon assumes that such suicides derive from the erroneous belief “that they shall go into their own Countrey again” at their death (51), George Warren concludes that African slaves seek out their deaths “not otherwise hoping to be freed from that indeed un-equall’d Slavery” (20). Some despondent slaves must have viewed suicide as their only form of resistance. When the English slave merchant first betrays Oroonoko, the African prince similarly contemplates suicide as an honorable rejection of enslavement.88 The English captain’s promise to restore his freedom persuades him to abandon his plan to starve himself.89 When the chains remain in place after his arrival in Surinam, Oroonoko resolves to accept bondage only temporarily. His reunion with Imoinda and Trefry’s benevolent hand briefly quench his thirst for freedom, but when his beloved conceives, Oroonoko reproaches himself for ignominiously “having suffer’d Slavery so long” (42). Fearing that his enslavement may have no end, he acts to regain his liberty. Oroonoko rebels against his enslavement twice. In the first attempt, he gathers the other slaves and makes “an Harangue to ‘em of the Miseries, and Ignominies of Slavery” (52). Using the philosophical language of Hobbes and Locke, he asks his fellow Africans whether the English have “Vanquish’d us Nobly in Fight? Have they Won us in Honourable Battel?” (52). Oroonoko accepts Byam’s pardon, only to suffer a betrayal and shameful public punishment. Later he regains his strength and makes a second attempt to win his freedom, then tries to commit suicide when he fails.90 The treacherous Byam then distracts Oroonoko’s allies and subjects him to a gruesome execution that rivals the fate of Johan de Witt at the hands of the bloodthirsty crowd in Oudaen’s tragedy. Some English colonists participate in a bloody murder, but the Dutch might 88 Mary Beth Rose argues that Oroonoko’s heroic endurance, his choice not to kill himself, reflects a refusal to accept his place as a slave. Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 103. 89 Richard Frohock concludes that a “colonial hero” like Trefry or Colonel Martin modulates between Oroonoko’s idealism and the mercantile calculations of the English captain. Heroes of Empire: The British Imperial Protagonist in America, 1596–1764 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 61. 90 Christopher Loar sees Oroonoko’s attempt to disembowel himself as an act of “radical self-sovereignty that accompanies a recognition that violence now supercedes romance ideals in the colonial arena. Political Magic: British Fictions of Savagery and Sovereignty, 1650–1750 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 140.

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have considered Byam’s actions typical. As Valckenburgh had lamented, the RAC had perpetrated “ongehoorde cruelliteyten, als de verslagene van hooft, armen en beenen te beroven; oock het hert uyt den lijve [outrageous cruelties, such as the chopping of heads and taking of arms and legs; also hearts from bodies]” (4). Oroonoko, who would now prefer to die than to remain a slave, stoically endures his death “without a Groan, or a Reproach” (64).91 His ignoble slavery comes to an end, and Oroonoko, like many of the slaves described in the period’s pamphlets, accepts death as an end to living with dishonor.

Dutch Colonial Violence and English Trauma In Behn’s Surinam, violence intrudes unexpectedly. The Surinamese occasionally grow agitated and threaten to raid England’s little colony. Since the native population far outnumbers the band of English planters, a palpable “fear they shou’d fall upon us” makes the narrator and her friends uneasy (47). The ongoing threat of a slave mutiny “which is Fatal sometimes in those Colonies, that abound so with Slaves, that they exceed the Whites in vast Numbers” eventually does come to pass (41). The actual, historical violence that haunts the margins of the narrative, however, comes from the Dutch, who deceitfully acquired the colony from the English shortly after Oroonoko’s death. As we have seen, the narrator recalls this other traumatic event several times in the romance. Some of these reminders have a relatively benign quality to them. She twice reiterates that if England’s king knew what he had allowed to slip through his fingers he would regret the loss of this colonial paradise to the Dutch. The English might effortlessly have acquired great mineral wealth with the assistance of natives from further inland, but they have lost that potential now that the Dutch possess the colony. Her other references to the Dutch acquisition of the colony, however, occur in conjunction with other violent actions in her memory as the romance draws to a close. Dutch cruelty in Surinam absolves the English of their own violent practices. Behn uses the cruel Dutch to create a traumatic rupture in

91 Elmer reads his quiet suffering as an attempt to secure a heroic death, even as his English sympathizers refuse to let him have this end. On Lingering, 41, 49. For Rose, Oroonoko’s stoicism represents a partially heroic resistance to the humiliating role of slave. Gender and Heroism, 106.

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her romance, marking the narrative and historiographical caesura that frustrates her ability to tell this tragic tale of loss. The stereotype of the violent Dutch allows Behn to make use of that character trait and to visit retribution on England’s rivals. The young woman who witnesses most of the events does not know that Byam’s struggle for power with Trefry and the death of Oroonoko will serve no purpose. For her, the tragic narrative in which Oroonoko finds himself remains in the foreground. For the mature narrator who recalls events from the other side of her own narrative caesura, however, the violent colonial struggles between England and the Dutch Republic represent a more painful and more recent set of events, one with greater significance in the summer of 1688. As she narrates the story of the royal slave and the Dutch triumph in Surinam, the prism of intervening events colors the romance. She cannot escape the disappointing certainty that the colony will be lost to England’s enemies. However, she can use that certainty to bring about some narrative satisfaction. When she scoffs at Byam’s council of rogues in Surinam who had terrified her younger self, the cynical narrator’s proleptic knowledge of the colony’s fate mitigates that horror with a promise of just retribution, recalling that “Some of ‘em were afterwards Hang’d, when the Dutch took possession of the place; others sent off in Chains” (59). Similarly, when Byam’s gang trespasses onto Trefry’s plantation to carry out their butchery on Oroonoko, the narrator—from her vantage point after these events—can gloat that they “paid dearly enough for their Insolence” when the Dutch took over (64). In the older woman’s tale, she makes the Dutch into useful agents of violence. At the same time, the sterility of Surinam under its subsequent Dutch managers allows the narrator to imagine the colony falling into anarchy without its rightful English masters. As Oroonoko made its way through the press, Edwyn Stede, the Lieutenant Governor of Barbados, hoped that this would occur, informing his superiors that rumors “from Surinam report a mutiny of the soldiers there, who had murdered the Governor and attempted to murder the Deputy Governor.”92 In a fantasy of retribution against the Dutch, Behn’s narrator displaces the potential for violence between the English and the natives of the colony into actual violence between the Dutch and the natives. She and her friends had once

92 CSPC 12: 585. 30 August 1688.

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feared that the Surinamese would attack the colony. Such confrontations did finally erupt “immediately after my coming away; and that it was in the possession of the Dutch, who us’d ‘em not so civilly as the English” (47). In Oroonoko, the greedy and ruthless Dutch did not have the civilized, English sense to cooperate with the larger population of natives.93 As a result, a massacre ensued in which “they cut in pieces all they cou’d take, getting into Houses, and hanging up the Mother, and all her Children about her” (47). The violent and abusive Dutch are themselves subject to violence in the distant colonial sphere. The narrator can use the violent Dutch to exact revenge on the English villains who murdered Oroonoko, and then makes them suffer and fulfill the English hope that the Dutch will fail in Surinam. This Dutch violence infuses the narrator’s complex engagement with history and nostalgia. When Oroonoko arrives in English Surinam, she humbly claims that her “Female Pen” cannot adequately recount her hero’s valiant deeds and wishes Oroonoko had met with his proper biographers, “Historians, that might have given him his due” (36).94 Even in distant Surinam, however, Oroonoko’s great deeds might have received the proper celebration “if the Dutch, who, immediately after his Time, took the Country, had not kill’d, banish’d and dispers’d all those that were capable of giving the World this great Man’s Life” (36). Dutch murder and violence in Surinam thus shape the historiographical and narrative choices of the one person remaining to tell Oroonoko’s story. The “new” worlds that English colonists and merchant companies belatedly exploited provided a fruitful canvas for the English national imaginary. Having survived the threats of the Spanish Armada and the designs of the Church of Rome, the English could exert themselves in these new imperial arenas around the globe. To their frustration, however, the English found their former Dutch dependents—who had

93 Schmidt points out that after the Restoration, English pamphleteers found it easy to invert the rhetoric of Dutch victimization from the previous century. Innocence Abroad, 300. 94 Caruth, who reads trauma through Lacan’s reconfiguration of Freud, concludes that

the survivor must cope with events through an ethical responsibility to the real. Unclaimed Experience, 102. The narrator’s anxious compulsion to relate her story with the royal slave’s might be seen as symptomatic of traumatic narrative. Rivero reads the narrator’s sense of obligation toward her hero’s tale as operating within a matrix of Freudian mourning and melancholy. “Blank Spaces,” 458.

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also weathered the storms of Spanish aggression and religious persecution—prospering in these markets, with rival Dutch trading companies extracting huge profits for the liberal Protestant nation that ought to have remained gratefully deferential to their English saviors. As competition in these spheres intensified, English writers created fantasies of retribution to compensate for the genuine failures the English had experienced. At the same time, fantasies of a more innocent time, corrupted by the advent of the Dutch as violent rivals, free the English to make a break not only from the Dutch they had once represented as dependents but also from the previous understanding of themselves and their way of acting in the world.95 Behn takes slavery for granted as the cost of doing business in the competitive markets of the lucrative Atlantic imperial system. She does not mourn the introduction of slavery; she mourns England’s lost opportunity to use slavery effectively to extract wealth from Surinam, profits now lost to the Dutch. Dryden too mourns English losses to the Dutch in the global colonial arena and urges his audience to take revenge on England’s unscrupulous competitors. Their fantasies of better days, when life was simpler and righteous English colonists could bring fair profits home from distant markets, may have temporarily salved wounded English pride following losses to the Dutch. But a crisis was brewing at home, and one more transformation of English identity loomed on the horizon. On Guy Fawkes Day at Brixham in 1688, when Dutch William arrived on English soil, the Dutch would again force the English to redefine themselves.

95 As Anderson argues, the emergence of a sense of national identity requires this break from the old ways. Imagined Communities, 193.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion: Willem the English Hero

One irony of Behn’s 1688 lament about territory that His Majesty should “never have parted so Easily with to the Dutch” (43) occurred only a few months after Oroonoko’s publication. In the winter of 1688, James II did part easily with territory—his kingdoms—to the Dutch when he fled England in December without resisting William of Orange’s invasion. Parliament declared in February 1689 that William had been a divine instrument of “Miraculous Deliverance from Popery and Arbitrary Power,” and asked him and his wife to take up England’s crown.1 As Tim Harris summarizes the work of Parliament that spring, they determined that James had “broken the original contract, endeavoured to subvert the constitution, and violated the fundamental laws of the kingdom.”2 Although the repercussions of the Glorious Revolution would unfold over several more years, Parliament’s actions in response to William III reflect one more dramatic transformation of English identity in contact with the Dutch. William did not make much of a claim to hereditary rights in justifying his invasion. He could have. One of William’s great-grandfathers 1 A Proclamation. Whereas It Hath Pleased Almighty God (London, 1689). 2 Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London:

Penguin, 2007), 329.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Fleck, English National Identity and the Image of the Dutch, Early Modern Literature in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42910-1_8

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had been assassinated in Delft in 1584: William the Silent. Another of his great-grandfathers, however, had marched under the Dutch Arch on Cornhill by the Exchange in 1604. William’s father died of smallpox after a coup in 1650, but his mother was the daughter of the English king executed in 1649. As a teen, William sat on the sidelines while his uncle Charles II’s navy futilely exchanged broadsides with the Dutch fleet in 1666. He had stepped into power in 1672, when his other English uncle allied with Louis XIV, but having survived that crisis, William married his English cousin Mary in 1677. When his English father-in-law, his avowedly Catholic uncle James II, succeeded Charles in 1685, William’s English ancestry made him third in line to the throne and his English wife was heir apparent. The arrival of James II’s son in June 1688 sparked the events of the Glorious Revolution in part because William and Mary no longer stood to inherit the crown directly, but also in part because infant James Francis would be raised Catholic and, according to the dictates of hereditary monarchy, England would be ruled by a line of Catholics. William’s English heritage did not figure explicitly in the events of 1688. The seven aristocrats who wrote to William at the end of June 1688 did not mention his English mother or his English wife. Instead, they appealed to the powerful Dutch stadholder declaring that under the arbitrary rule of their king, England was “every day in a worse condition then we are, and lesse able to defend our selves” from their oppressive tyrant.3 This violation of key components of their sense of self, of “the present conduct of the Gouvernment in relation to their Religion, liberty’s and Property’s (all which have been greatly invaded)” motivated these peers to appeal to William for “remedy before it bee too late for us to contribute to our owne deliverance.” Just as the Dutch had done in Politicq Onderwijs a century earlier, these desperate Englishmen invited a foreign magistrate to relieve them from a tyrant. Just as Elizabeth had done, William issued a declaration explaining his intervention in a foreign dispute. Despite the Test Act and laws preventing “the exercise of the Popish Religion,” James II’s “Evil Councellours” have promoted the “Exercise of that Religion.”4 These advisors have used the pretense of religious toleration to pervert the operation of justice in England and with the assistance of Catholics, “Strangers as well as

3 National Archives, https://tinyurl.com/yr77mxwz. 4 The Declaration of his Highnes William Henry (The Hague, 1688), A1v.

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Natives, and Irish as well as English,” this wicked party has “rendred themselves Masters both of the affairs of the Church, of the Government of the Nation, and of the course of Justice, and subjected them all to a Despotick and Arbitrary power…to enslave the Nation” (A1v). William and his readers understood the king’s potential to “enslave” England to mean making them subject to tyranny rather than selling them as labor for plantations, even though both England and the Dutch Republic used that other practice extensively.5 Disclaiming any interest in taking up sovereignty, he instead called for “a free and lawfull Parliament” to enact new laws “necessary for the Peace, Honour, and Safety of the Nation, so that there may be no more danger of the Nations falling at any time hereafter, under Arbitrary Government” (A2v).6 The pamphleteers and newsmen loyal to the Stuart regime capitalized on the contrary winds delaying the Dutch fleet to respond to the Declaration, necessitating William to append an “Additional Declaration” in which he stated no one should believe “wee have any other Designe in this Undertaking, then to procure a settlement of the Religion and the Liberties and Properties of the subjects.”7 William casts himself as a neutral magistrate intervening in a neighboring state to secure justice and peace. Certainly part of the reason William could intervene in this way was because he had standing as a close heir to the throne. When he had wed Mary a decade earlier, English poets celebrated.8 Despite the efforts of poets like Dryden, the Third Anglo-Dutch War had never captured the English imagination and many in England sympathized with William 5 John Marshall examines the hypocritical compartmentalization of whigs who refused the political slavery imposed under James II even as they owned and profited from the trade in African slaves. “Whig Thought and the Revolution of 1688–1691,” in The Final Crisis of the Stuart Monarchy: The Revolutions of 1688–1691 in their British, Atlantic, and European Contexts, ed. Tim Harris and Stephen Taylor (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013), 74. Nyquist takes up the “differential racialization” in the slavery of political discourse and the African slavery practiced by these proponents of liberty. Arbitrary Rule, 278. 6 Israel argues that William sought to neutralize James as an ally of Louis XIV in the shooting war that was sure to result from the trade war the French had begun. Dutch Republic, 844. 7 Tony Claydon examines the limitations of the Declaration. “William III’s Declaration of Reasons and the Glorious Revolution,” HJ 39 (1996), 94. 8 Jardine notes that Charles II’s wife Maria of Modena was pregnant when William wed James’s daughter, thus making a match to “the comparatively minor house of Orange” more tolerable. Going Dutch, 66. Jardine overlooks that William had a royal English mother.

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as he regained ground against Louis XIV leading up to the Peace of Nijmegen. When the Prince of Orange came to England to marry Charles II’s niece, Edmund Waller and a variety of other poets celebrated the match. Joshua Barnes contributed a poem to a volume of epithalamia for their wedding. Praising English and Dutch glory, “Europe’s noblest Parts, / England and Belgia,” and remarking on their prosperity in global trade, the poet characterizes their match as one of genuine feeling rather than political expedience.9 Although the poet claims to want to celebrate love rather than heroism, however, he sentimentally melds these ideas in his final section. Addressing William, he encourages the lover to “raign / In Mary’s Breast, new Kingdoms there obtain, / Kingdoms more Rich and vast than Natures Ball” (Q3v). These two trading nations might enjoy great wealth, but the poet finds something even more valuable in the couple’s love for each other. The poem concludes with the transformation of the hero. Having lodged himself in the princess’s breast, he will find that “Belgia can’t hold thy Greatness now. From hence/ Lo! Thou an English Hero dost commence.” In a kind of alchemy, this union makes William English. And perhaps that transformation helps to explain the relative ease of William’s ascent to the English throne. In his short reign, preceded by a decade of defiance of England’s liberal, Protestant character, James II alienated the English. When William landed in Brixham, on the symbolically anti-Catholic date of November 5, 1688, popular sentiment quickly turned in his favor.10 England had turned away from Catholicism under Elizabeth and, despite some public exceptions, continued to find it anathema. William’s religious credentials were beyond reproach. The English made use of their Parliament to check the power of the monarchy, going so far as to execute a king at mid-century, and the tyrannical encroachments of the Francophile king threatened their liberties. William came from a nation notorious for its reliance on consultation 9 “On the happy Marriage of Their Illustrious Highnesses,” in Epithalamium in Desideratissimis Nuptiis (Cambridge, 1677), Q3r. 10 Pincus shows that the Glorious Revolution was not simply an aristocratic coup but enjoyed broad, active popular support. 1688, 229. Blair Worden focuses on “Stoic detachment” as a response to the revolution, an indication of evolving republican thought in England at the end of the century. “The Revolution of 1688–1689 and the English Republican Tradition,” in The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and Its World Impact ed. Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 264.

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and its hostility to monarchy and professed to bring with him a reprieve from “Arbitrary Government and Slavery” and a return to a “free and lawful Parliament.” And thus Willem became William, a Dutch stadholder became an English king, and England drew on the Dutch to remake themselves again.

Index

Symbols 1604 Treaty of London, 21 1619 treaty, 209, 213

A Aanwysing (de la Court), 268 Abbot, Maurice, 207 absolute power/absolutism/ absolutist/absolute monarch, 155, 156, 158, 160, 164, 165, 170, 171, 174, 176, 180, 183 abundance, 298, 299, 301, 302, 310 access to information, 155 Account (Marvell), 285 Actium, 253, 258, 259 Act of Abjuration, 27, 34 “Addled” Parliament, 158, 171 A Declaration of the Cavses Mooving the Queene of England to give aide to the Defense of the People afflicted and oppressed in the lowe

Countries/Declaration, 38, 39, 59 A Declaration of the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England/ Declaration, 233, 238, 240 A Defense of the People of England (Milton), 24 adiaphora, 110, 112 A Discovrse of Trade (Mun), 223 admirable traits to the Dutch, 13 Admiral Francisco de Mendoza, 190 Advocaat , 135, 136, 144 A Fair Quarrel (Middleton), 73 Africa, 281–283, 287, 300, 305, 306, 308, 311 A Game at Chess (Middleton), 221 Aglionby, William, 16 Ainsworth, Henry, 113, 115, 116 Albemarle, 257, 265 Albert, Archduke, 62 Alchemist (Jonson), 22, 74, 128, 130, 132

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 A. Fleck, English National Identity and the Image of the Dutch, Early Modern Literature in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42910-1

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326

INDEX

allegory, 42, 44, 47 Allucius (Punic Wars), 248 Alps (Punic Wars), 256 ambassador, 142, 148, 164, 167 ambiguous diction, 119 ambition/ambitious, 152, 155, 156, 160–163, 165, 166, 172, 174–176 ambivalent treatment of the Dutch, 4 Ambon, 22, 23 Ambon/Amboyna, 8, 208–211, 215–217, 221, 222, 224–226 Amboyna Massacre, 286, 294 Amboyna, Or the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants (Dryden), 275, 285 Amsterdam, 189, 194, 196, 197, 200, 202, 204, 216, 221, 222, 226 Amsterdam chambers of rhetoric, 163 Amsterdam consistory, 113, 130 Anabaptists, 74, 112–114, 116, 129 anarchy, 280, 293, 316 Anderson, Benedict, 97, 284 Anglo-Dutch War, 235 Annus Mirabilis (Dryden), 254, 255, 262, 276 “An Old Woman’s Tale in her solitarie Cell” (Ogle), 52 ant/pismire, 14, 15, 17–20 anti-alien uprisings, 84 anti-Calvinist, 143, 145, 146, 154 anticipation, 189, 193, 198 Antiochus IV, 237 Antony, Mark, 253 Antwerp, 32, 35, 37, 40, 53, 57, 69, 79, 101, 107, 121, 186, 193, 197, 204 Anything for a Quiet Life (Webster and Middleton), 117 A Perfect Diurnall , 226

Apology (Oldenbarnevelt), 157, 178, 181 appeal to a foreign prince for justice, 33 appetitive excess, 13 Arbitrary Government, 321, 323 arbitrary monarchy, 268 arcana imperii, 158, 195, 198, 200 Archbishop Bancroft’s, 112 Archbishop of Canterbury, 147 Archduke Matthias of Austria, 32 Archer, Thomas, 198, 208 A Remonstrance of the Directors of the Netherlands East India Company, 224, 225 Aristotle, 45, 46 Arminian/Arminianism, 134, 136, 139, 140, 145–152, 154, 156, 163, 164, 180, 183 Arminius, Jacobus, 2, 139, 141, 145, 146, 148, 152, 183 Army of Flanders, 43, 64, 191 Arthur, 29, 30, 42–48, 50, 55, 57–60, 63–65 artisans, 2 A Second Defense of the English People (Milton), 24 A Trve Declaration of the News that came out of the East-Indies , 210, 212–214 A Trve Relation of the Vniust Crvell, and Barbarovs Proceedings against the English at Amboyna, 210, 212, 215, 224 Augustus/Octavius/Octavian and sometimes Caesar, 257, 258, 276 authentic/authenticity, 297, 304 Ayscue, George, 254

INDEX

B Bacon, Francis, 204 Bale, John, 48, 49 ballad, 189, 190, 193, 194, 215 Bancroft, Richard, 51 Banda islands, 206–208 Barbados, 282, 304, 306, 309, 310, 316 Barclay, John, 13 Barlow, William, 111 Barnavelt , 189, 201 Barry, Lording, 21 Basilicon Doron (King James), 111, 114, 156 Batavian liberty, 138 Battle of White Mountain, 198 Beaumont, Francis, 108 beer/alcohol/drunkenness/drunkard, 222 Beerens, Samuel, 99, 103 Behn, Aphra, 284, 295, 296, 298–304, 306–312, 315, 316, 318, 319 Belge, 20, 21, 29–31, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50, 52, 55–61, 63–66 Bellum Belgicum Secundum, 252, 253 Berckhey, 190 Bergen (Second Anglo-Dutch War), 255, 263 Bergeron, David M., 100, 101 Bertius, Petrus, 147 Bethel, Slingsby, 16, 285, 291, 307 biblical widows, 48, 49 Bilson, Thomas, 61, 62 Bishop of London, 113, 131 Blackfriars (Named Theater Venue), 218 Black Legend, 282, 284, 286 Blake, 227, 232, 233 “Blijde Inkomst,”/Joyous Entry, 31, 34 “Blyde Incomst”/Joyous Entry, 107

327

Boeckholt, Baltes, 274, 275 Bogerman, Johannes, 142 Bohemian conflict, 186 bound to the laws, 35 Bourne, Nicholas, 198 brand, 200 Brief Character of the Low Countries (Felltham), 233 Brill, 143, 159 Brittany, 64 Brixham, 322 broadside (of naval cannons), 232, 258 broadside (of news), 189, 228 Broughton, Hugh, 132 Brownists, 9 Brussels, 31, 62 Brutus, 231 Buc, George Sir, 135, 136, 149, 154, 156, 176, 179, 180 butter/“butter-box”/cheese/dairy, 219, 222 Butter, Nathaniel, 198–200, 203, 208, 219 C Caesar, Julius, 138, 164, 170, 171, 175–177 Caligula, 27 Calvinist, 133, 134, 136, 139–141, 149, 154, 177, 183 Campion, Edmund, 61 Carleton, Dudley/England’s ambassador/“Carleton”, 135, 136, 146, 148, 154, 161, 163, 174, 175, 177, 182, 185, 186, 191, 201, 207, 208, 216 Carleton, George/Carleton, Bishop, 133–135, 138, 148, 183 Carthage, 22, 23 Carthage, Carthaginian doomed to defeat, 252, 256

328

INDEX

Dutch Carthage, 232, 252, 254, 257, 276 English Carthage, 242, 247, 267, 268 Case for the Commonwealth (Nedham), 230 Casteleyn, Pieter, 227–229, 262 Catholic League, 188 Catholic rebels in England or Ireland, 39 Cato the Elder, 274, 276 Cato Uticensis/Cato the Younger, 170 Cats, Jacob, 237 cautionary towns, 108 Cavalier Parliament, 249, 250 Cecil, William, 61 censors, 135–137, 161, 175, 176, 179, 180, 225 Certayne sermons appoynted by the Quenes Maiestie/Homily on Obedience, 61 Certeau, 75, 100 Chamberlain, John, 185, 186, 188, 189, 191, 200, 203, 207–209, 215, 216, 220 Chapman, George, 2 Character of Holland (Marvell), 13, 23 Charles I, 218, 224 Charles II, 19, 21, 24, 230, 249, 250, 257, 259, 261, 263, 266, 267, 269–273, 276, 320–322 Chaste Maid in Cheapside (Middleton), 112, 113 Chatham/Medway (Second Anglo-Dutch War), 251, 263, 264, 266–269 chivalry/chivalric obligations, 29, 58 Cicero, 171 Clapham, Henoch, 116, 117 Clarendon, 263, 264

Clarendon Code, 249 Clarke, John, 289 classically charged political language, 172 Clegg, Cyndia, 202, 205 Cleveland, John, 226 Cleves, 190, 192 Collaert, Hans, 53, 54 Cologne, 33, 197, 204 comic figure/comic type/dramatic type/theatrical type, 70, 71, 73, 78, 122, 128 commerce, 69, 77–79, 83, 94, 100, 103, 106, 132 commercial competition, 282, 297 commodity, 186, 189, 191, 195, 196, 202, 203, 208, 217, 219, 220 commodity/commodities/luxury goods/luxury, 68, 75, 77, 85, 90, 92–95, 125–127 commodity (news as), 219 Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading to Africa, 281 Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa/Company of Royal Adventurers, 250 condone the dissolution of subjects’ allegiance/condoning dissolution of subjects’ allegiance, 38 Confessio Belgica, 140 conflate puritans and Familists/ “puritanical Family”, 114, 122, 124 Conradus Vorstsius, 141 constant Romans/Roman constancy, 253, 254 “Contention between a Wife, a Widowe and a Maide for Precedence,” (Davies, John Sir), 51 Continence of Scipio, 247, 259

INDEX

contract/contractual/contractual relationship/contractual obligation, 31, 32, 35, 46, 55, 56, 58, 59 contradictions in Elizabethan foreign policy, 60 contrast to the Dutch, 8 control the world’s trade, 273 Convention Parliament, 19 Cool, Jacob, 101, 103, 104 Corante, or, Newes from Italy, Germany, Hungarie, 199 coranto, 187, 189, 196–199, 201, 202, 204, 205, 207, 208, 210, 216–220 Cornelis Dribble, 221 Corrant out of Italy, Germany, &c, 197 Cort Verhael , 186, 204 Council of Blood, 32 Council of Jerusalem, 147 Court of Requests, 54, 55 Crane, Ralph, 136, 149, 182 credible news/reliable news, 185, 186, 188, 217 credit-worthiness, 77 Cromwell, Oliver, 233, 238, 242, 244, 246 Crucifixion, 176 Custom House, 106

D Darrell, John, 251 Davenant, William Sir, 222 de Caron, Noel, 207 de Certeau, Michel, 294 Declaration of Indulgence, 271 de Coligny, Louise, 28, 51 Deductie (de Witt), 250 Defensio Regia (Salmasius), 244

329

Dekker, Thomas, 21, 71, 72, 74, 84, 86–90, 92, 93, 95, 98, 100, 101, 103–107, 115, 127 de la Court, Pieter, 250, 268, 269 de Laet, Johannes, 298, 299, 301, 302, 304 delegated authority/authority delegated, 161 “Delenda est Carthago”, 274, 275 Deleuze, Gilles, 287, 289, 294, 297 demand/appetite (news and), 221 Dependence (Dutch), 21 de Quester, Mathew, 199 de Ruyter, Michel, 257, 265, 267 de Steur, Christopher, 101 Devereaux, Robert/Earl of Essex/ Essex, 28, 57 Devo, Anthony, 272, 275 de Witt, Cornelis, 279 de Witt, Johan, 232, 246, 250, 251, 271, 275, 279, 280, 282, 290, 314 “De Zeetriomf der Vrye Nederlanden” (Vondel), 253 Dickinson, William, 158 dietary recommendations, 123 Digges, Thomas, 41, 64 discipline of the Church of England/ church discipline/episcopacy/ hierarchy/orthodoxy, 70, 110–112, 114–116, 123, 124, 130, 131 discontented English Protestants, 70 distinction between rumor and news, 188 Divine monarchy/God instituted monarchs, 27 divine right/princes enjoy divine sanction/divinely appointed monarch, 161, 163, 164 Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (Milton), 3

330

INDEX

Don John of Austria, 36 Donne, John, 191, 192 Dordrecht/Dort, 31, 40 Douglas, 265 Drayton, Michael, 13 Droeshout, Marten, 101 drunken Dutchman/beer/alcohol/ alcoholic excess (stereotype), 71, 72, 91, 96, 127 Dryden, John, 23, 217, 254–258, 262, 263, 267, 275, 276, 284–295, 299, 305, 318, 321 Duchess of Albemarle, 264 Dugdale, 100, 105 Duke of Alva, 32, 286 Duke of Monmouth/Monmouth, 270, 271 Duke of Parma/Parma, 35, 37, 40, 42, 57, 64 Dungeness (First Anglo-Dutch War), 241 Dutch aggression, 207 Dutch arch, 99–103, 105–107, 320 Dutch avarice/Dutch covetousness/ Dutch greed/greedy Dutch, 255, 273 Dutch bloodshed/Dutch violence/ wrathful Dutch, barbarous Dutch, Dutch propensity for, 280, 283, 286, 287, 317 Dutch butterbox/butter/cheese/dairy (stereotype), 71, 72, 81, 91, 93, 95, 122–124 Dutch Church Libel, 85, 86 Dutch commercial empire, 206 Dutch cruelty, 315 Dutch dependents/dependent Dutch, 317 Dutch drunkards/drunkard/alcohol/ beer/drink/drinking (stereotype), 12, 13, 21 Dutch duplicity, 280

Dutch, endowed with fewer resources, 5 Dutch ingratitude/ungrateful Dutch/ ingratitude, 65, 284 Dutch merchants, 2, 8, 208, 209, 221, 222 Dutchness, 73, 91, 104 Dutch painters (United Provinces’ painters), 247, 256, 257, 260 Dutch political structures, 4 Dutch printed news periodical, 186 Dutch Revolt, 27, 28, 31, 36, 58, 65 Dutch torturer, 288 Dutch treachery, 280 Dutch weavers, 2, 8 Dutch West India Company (WIC), 94

E Earle, John, 120, 121, 220 Earl of Arlington/Arlington, 296, 298, 300, 301 Earl of Castlemaine, 270 Earl of Shaftesbury, 273 East India Company, 73 East Indies, 206, 207, 209, 215, 217, 225 Eden/Edenic/paradise, 23, 284, 292, 293, 295, 296, 298–301, 309, 311, 315 Edict of Beaulieu, 34 Edward IV, 89 Edward VI, 73, 83, 103 Eendracht , 263 Egerton, Thomas, 64, 65, 85 El Dorado, 302 elect could ever fall away from salvation, 147 Elizabethan Catholics, 9 Emblem of Ingratitude, 272 emulative rivalry, 295

INDEX

emulative rivalry/emulative rival/ emulative/emulating, 8, 9 England’s East India (EIC), 185, 206–210, 212–217, 222–225 England’s intervention in the Dutch Revolt, 30, 47 England’s religious refugees, 73 English audience, 137, 138, 149, 150, 153, 154, 160, 166, 170–172, 177, 180–182 English Commonwealth/ Commonwealth, 1, 18, 20, 22, 227–231, 235, 236, 238–242, 244, 269, 275 English garrisons, 14 English history, 154 English hypocrisy, 284 English liberties, 266 English linguistic facility/proficiency in spoken English/linguistic incompetence/mangled English/ “foreign suitors because they cannot speak English”, 78, 79, 81, 82, 90 Englishmen for My Money (Haughton), 21, 74, 75, 81, 194 English merchants/EIC’s merchants, 208, 209, 211–213, 215 Englishness, 2, 5, 6, 10, 20, 21, 23 English translation, 135, 150, 173, 178 engravings, 262 entrenching of Spanish forces in a harbor just across the Channel, 109 Enys, Renatus, 298, 300, 301, 303, 304 Epicene (Jonson), 109 equity, 29, 30, 34, 44–46, 54–56, 58, 60, 61 equity courts, 54

331

Ernstighe Vermaninghe (van Marnix, Filips), 20, 35, 39, 110 Etherington, John, 130 Evelyn, John, 276, 277 Exchange, 320 exercise of the reformed religion, 38 expectations, 289, 311 expels and marginalizes the foreign, 82 Eyre, Simon, 87–93, 95–97, 129

F fame, 159, 160 familiar landmarks/landmarks, 73, 75, 76, 106 familist/family of love/familism, 74, 113–127 Family of Love and Dutch, 114 famous death, 173 fascination with all things mercantile, 69 Fawkes, Guy, 200 Felltham, Owen, 14, 15, 19, 233, 234, 251, 272, 281 female autonomy, 29, 50–52, 121, 151 female puritan (social type), 122 feme covert , 29 feme sole, 29, 58, 59 Ferdinand, 186 Fifth Advice, 264 First Anglo-Dutch War (Anglo-Dutch War), 2, 24, 233 First Punic War (Punic Wars), 236, 239 Fisher, Payne, 237, 238 Fletcher, John, 22, 108, 135–137, 149, 150, 152, 154, 155, 157–161, 170, 172, 173, 177–182, 217 foil (national foil), 2, 15, 284

332

INDEX

founding father/father of the nation/ nation/paternity/father of a country/pater patriae, 156, 166–170 Four Days’ Fight (Second Anglo-Dutch War), 251, 253, 256, 257 Fourth Advice, 264, 267 François the duke of Alençon, 32–35 Franeker, 2 Frederick V, Elector Palatine, 186 freedom of the will, 149, 150 French campaigns, 41 “French Fury”, 35 Friars, Austin, 8, 83, 84, 86, 101, 112, 131 Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen Planters (Tryon), 309 Fugger, 78, 192, 193 future victory, 58

G Gallagher, Lowell, 44, 46, 60 Geryoneo, 30, 31, 47, 48, 55, 56, 58–61, 63, 65 Globe (Named Theater Venue), 156, 166, 176, 177, 180, 182 Glorious Revolution, 5, 8, 319–322 gluttony (stereotype), 81 God’s “Love, 115 godliness, 105 Godskall, James, 109 Gomarist, 139, 140, 142 Gomarus, Franciscus, 139 Gondomar, 188, 205–207, 221 Goodwin Sands (First Anglo-Dutch War), 227, 232 Gorges, Arthur Sir, 171, 176, 177 Gosson, Stephen, 126

Gowries, 153, 154 grace, 146, 150, 181 Grand Privilege, 31 gratitude, 96 Great Fire/Great Fire of London, 254 Greenfeld, Liah, 9, 10 Gregory, Tobias, 30, 57 Grotius, Hugo, 2, 138–145, 154, 162, 163, 166, 168, 171, 206, 305, 313 Gunpowder, 200 Gunpowder Plot, 154, 157

H Haagse Broeder-Moord, of Dolle Blydschap (Qudaen), 279, 280 Habermas, Jürgen, 10, 11, 201, 202, 218 habituate, 78, 92 Halasz, Alexandra, 203 Haley, K.H.D., 256, 271–273 Hals, Frans, 118 Hampton Court Conference, 21 Hampton Court Conference/ Hampton Court, 70, 98, 110, 111 handwritten newsletter, 189 Hannibal (Punic Wars), 235–237, 239, 240, 246, 249, 251, 252, 254, 256, 257 Harman, John Sir, 259 Harrison, Stephen, 99, 101, 106 Haughton, William, 21, 194 Hebraic (puritans), 122–124 Heinsius, Daniel, 2 Henry III, 32 Henry IV, 174 Henry IV, Part 2 (Shakespeare), 12 Henry VIII, 70, 73

INDEX

Herbert, Percy, 235 hereditary monarchy/hereditary rights, 319, 320 herring fisheries, 239 heterodox Dutch teachings, 150 Hispanophobia, 9 His Part of King James his Royall and Magnificent Entertainement (Jonson), 100 historical episodes/historical event, 284, 287, 289, 297 Hobbes, Thomas, 305, 306, 313, 314 Hobsbawm, Eric, 66 Hoenselaars, A.J., 71 Holderus, Robertus, 178–180 Holland, 31, 33, 34, 41 Hollandsche Mercurius , 227, 262 Hollar, Wenceslas, 262 Holmes, Robert Sir, 257, 271, 276 Homily on Obedience, 156 Hooft, Pieter Corneliszoon, 188 Horace, 257 Horatius Cocles, 266 house of Orange-Nassau/House of Orange/Orange/Nassau, 3, 4 Howard, Jean, 68, 69, 93, 97, 110, 111, 125, 127 Howell, James, 226 Huguenots, 32, 34 hypocritical/hypocrite, 70, 84, 86, 116–120, 122, 123, 128, 129, 132 I idealized/romanticized, 284 ideology of patient suffering, 60 idolatry, 161 imagined community, 97 immigrants/refugees/migrants, 83–88, 114 Impartial Description of Surinam (Warren), 301

333

industriousness/industry, 13–17, 19, 103 infant/young/immature/new republic/nation/youthful vigor, 227, 229–231, 234, 235, 237–243, 245, 247–249, 251, 253–258, 262–270, 274, 277 “In Legationem Domini Oliveri St. John ad Provincias Foederatas” (Marvell), 235, 236 inquisition, 33, 56 Instructions to a Painter (Waller), 258, 265, 266, 268 Interest van Holland (de la Court), 250, 268 international commerce/international trade/global trade/global commerce, 69, 94, 106 intervention in order to constrain tyrants, 39 Ireland, 36, 39, 42–45, 60, 62–66, 108 Irish rebels, 62, 63

J Jakarta, 209 Jamaica, 306, 307, 309 James, 186–188, 195, 196, 198, 201, 203, 205, 206, 208, 210 James II/the king, 298, 300 Jansen, Conraet, 100–102, 105–107 Jansz, Broer, 196, 198, 204 Johnson, Francis, 113 Johnson, George, 113 Jonson, Ben, 2, 22, 72, 74, 100, 101, 128, 129, 131, 132, 191, 192, 195, 196, 217–222, 224 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 181 Jupiter, 163, 164 justice, 27, 30, 33, 34, 37–39, 41, 42, 44–50, 55, 58–61, 63

334

INDEX

K Keye, Otto, 299, 301, 304, 307 King’s Men, 182 King James/James/the king/the pacifist/England’s king/English king, 134, 136, 137, 141, 142, 145–147, 149, 151, 153, 154, 156–159, 161, 166, 167, 169, 170, 174 King James II/James II, 8, 21–23, 319–322 King Johan (Bale), 49 King, John/Bishop of London, 136, 154 L lacks all natural resources, 277 Lake, Peter, 11, 203, 206, 226 language of “love”, 120 language of commerce with the language of courtship, 79 Last Instructions to a Painter (Marvell), 264, 265 Leadenhall, 76, 89 Ledenberg, 186 legal standing (widows), 29, 50, 55, 58 Legend of Justice (Spenser), 20 Leicester, 21, 39–41, 51, 57 Leicester to accept the Dutch offer to make him Governor General and sovereign, 40 Leiden, 2, 18 Lely, Pieter Sir, 259, 260, 262 lewd rituals of the Family/“lechery of the Dutch Family of Love”, 117, 125 liberties, 38, 39 liberties of the subject, 158, 166 Ligon, Richard, 304, 314 Lilly, William, 272 linguistic markers, 81

Livy, 236, 237, 248 Lloyd, Lodowick, 237, 266 Llull, Ramon, 45, 50 local authority and privileges, 33 local privileges, 31 Locke, John, 306, 313, 314 Locke, Thomas, 135, 136, 182, 201, 202 Lodge, Thomas, 118 Loewenstein, Joseph, 11 London, 67–69, 71, 75–78, 82–90, 96–101, 104, 106, 107, 109, 114, 125, 128, 129, 131, 132, 197, 201, 202, 206, 222 lost innocence/perverting the innocence, 290, 301 Louis XIII, 164, 179 Louis XIV, 271, 272, 320–322 Love’s Cure (Beaumont and Fletcher), 108 Lowestoft (Second Anglo-Dutch War), 251, 252, 258, 259, 263, 266 low topography (stereotype), 279 Loyal London, 253 Lubbertus, Sibrandus, 141 Lucan, 171, 174, 176, 177, 254 Lucius Junius Brutus, 170 Lynch, Thomas, 307 M Madrid, 3, 7 magistrates, 32, 33, 50, 62, 140, 141, 143, 149 Maluku Islands, 206 Malynes, 126 managing property (widows), 50 manuscript account, 189 Mare Liberum (Grotius), 206 Mare Liberum (Selden), 206 marginalizing, 6 Marian exiles, 8

INDEX

maritime sovereignty/“gouernment of the great ocean sea”, 38 Marshall, Stephen, 235 Marston, John, 21, 71, 74, 109, 110, 121, 122, 125–127 Marvell, Andrew, 12, 13, 22, 23, 235–238, 242–245, 252, 259, 263–268, 271, 273 Massinger, Philip, 22, 135–137, 149, 150, 152, 154, 155, 157–161, 170, 172, 173, 177, 178, 180–182 Master of the Revels (Herbert, Henry Sir), 223 Master of the Revels (office/officer), 224, 225 Maurits, 186, 193, 204 Maurits of Nassau/Maurits, 135–137, 141–144, 154, 155, 161–164, 168, 177, 178 Maxey, Anthony, 114 McCabe, Richard, 43, 57, 64 McCoy, Richard, 28, 50 McWard, Robert, 285, 286, 295 Meade, John, 203 Medway/Chatham (Second Anglo-Dutch War), 16, 23 memory/memorialize, 284, 286, 287, 289, 293, 294, 300, 312, 315 Merchant Adventurers, 69, 76, 77, 90, 93, 130, 132 Mercilla, 29, 45–48, 52, 55–58, 65 Mercurius Aulicus , 226 Mercurius Britanicus , 226 Mercurius Gallobelgicus , 191, 192, 222, 226 Mercurius Politicus , 227, 230–232, 234, 237, 240, 245, 246 Mercury, 192, 194 mercy, 44, 46, 47

335

Merry Wives of Windsor (Shakespeare), 72 metadrama, 288–290 metaphoric trade war, 79 metatheatrical/metatheater, 92, 180 Middelburg, 69, 101, 104, 106, 132 Middelburg consistory, 130 Middle Passage, 309, 311 Middleton, Thomas, 68, 72, 73, 100, 108, 112, 117 migrations of Dutch Protestants, 73 Milton, John, 1–5, 7, 10, 12, 17–20, 22, 24, 228, 230, 231, 235, 237–239, 250 misogynist anxiety about women and their supposedly enthusiastic tendencies in religion/“unruly sectarian woman”, 120, 121 mixed monarchy, 157, 166 moderate mainstream, 124 moral relativism, 292 More, Alexander, 235 Moryson, Fynes, 13, 14 Mountfort, Walter, 222–226 Mun, Thomas, 223, 225 Myriall, Thomas, 216

N Narrow Seas, 8, 12 Nashe, Thomas, 12 nation, 1, 3–13, 15–21, 23–25 national church, 70, 111–113 national exceptionalism, 60 national fantasies, 29 national loss, 296 National Synod, 135, 142–144, 154 native traits, 6 Navigation Act, 229, 233, 239, 246

336

INDEX

Navigation and Commerce, Their Original and Progress (Evelyn), 276, 277 Nedham, Marchamont, 227, 228, 230–232, 239–241 Nero, 27, 259, 267, 269 new mercantile reality/economic reality, 75, 77, 98 New Netherland, 301 news, 11, 22 news culture, 189, 195, 217, 218, 222, 226 News from Plymouth (Davenant), 222 News from the New World Discovered in the Moon (Jonson), 195 newspaper, 108 New York, 296 Niclaes, Hendrik/H.N., 114–117, 120 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 45 Nieuwe Tijdinghen, 186, 204 Nijmegen, 143 Niobe, 65 Norbrook, David, 28, 48, 62, 202 Normandy, 64 North Sea fishing/herring fishing/ herring fisheries/fisheries), 8 Northward Ho (Webster and Dekker), 73 nostalgia/nostalgically, 23, 284, 289, 293, 295–298, 300, 301, 304, 317 No Wit/Help Like a Woman’s (Middleton), 68, 73

O oath, 27, 31, 32, 34, 35, 50, 56 Observations in his Travailes vpon the State of the XVII Provinces / Observations , 15 Observations (Overbury), 232

Octavius/Octavian/Augustus, 179, 180 Of Reformation (Milton), 2 Ogle, John Sir, 52, 144 Oldenbarnevelt, 186, 193, 200, 204, 206 Oldenburg, Scott, 79, 93, 126 omens, 188, 191 Opdam, 263 Order of the Garter, 164 Ordinum Hollandiae ac Westfrisiae Pietas (Grotius), 141 Ormerod, Oliver, 112, 123 Oroonoko (Behn), 284, 295, 296, 298–301, 304, 305, 307–310, 316, 317 Osborne, Francis, 229 Ostend, 65, 193, 200 Othello (Shakespeare), 72 Oudaen, Joachim, 279, 280, 314 Oudewater, 143 “out of Dutch into English”/ “translated out of low Dutch”, 193, 200 Overbury, Thomas Sir, 15, 16, 232 Owen, David, 124 P Pacification of Gent, 33 Paget, John, 113 painting, 216 pamphlet, 108, 132, 189–194, 200, 203, 205, 208–210, 212–216, 220 Parliament, 137, 153, 155–160, 167, 176, 188, 201, 205, 208, 210, 226, 319, 321–323 Parry, David, 255 paternal care/fatherly care/caring father, 167–169 Paul’s Walk, 190 Pauw, Adrian, 2

INDEX

Pavier, Thomas, 193, 194, 200 Payne, John, 83, 84, 95 Peace of Breda (Second Anglo-Dutch War), 251, 264 Peacham, Henry, 193 Pepys, Samuel, 282 periodical, 189, 194, 199, 204, 205 permitted to resist with force, 35 perspective, 43, 56, 60–63 Pettegree, Andrew, 196, 199, 204 pharisaical language, 119 Pharsalia (Lucan), 171, 254 Philip II/Philip/Spanish King/King of Spain, 7, 27, 30–37, 56, 57, 61, 62 Pincus, Steven, 8, 11, 202, 203, 206 plague/bubonic plague, 254, 255 plague epidemic, 103 Plutarch, 170, 173, 174, 181 political union (Anglo-Dutch), 228, 232, 235 Politicq Onderwijs , 21, 27, 34, 35, 59 Pompey, 170, 171, 176, 177, 180 Popilius, Gaius, 237, 266 Portland (First Anglo-Dutch War), 242 Pory, John, 201–203 Post, 76–78 Prague, 186, 197, 198, 207 precedent, 2, 3, 17, 24 predestination, 139, 142, 150 prerogative, 158, 166, 180, 183 preserving the inheritance (widows), 50 pride, 159, 161, 162, 166, 172 printed dissemination of news to anonymous purchasers, 202 printed news, 22 Privy Council, 214, 216, 217, 222 profligacy of monarchies, 18 progress through Norwich, 52 propertied English gentry, 83

337

protecting a nation’s traders became a matter of national interest, 94 protectionism, 79 protector, 38, 43, 44, 49 Protestant Union, 187 Proverbs 6:6, 14, 20 providence, 99, 100, 102–106 Prudentia, 100, 103 public/public opinion, 186–189, 195, 196, 198, 200–210, 212–218, 220–226, 235, 258, 266, 272, 273 public relations, 215 public sphere, 7, 9–11, 22, 189, 196, 201–205, 210, 214–216, 218–220, 222, 223, 225, 226, 228, 272 Punica (Silius Italicus), 248, 255 Punic Wars, 22, 231, 232, 236–242, 245–247, 249, 251–253, 256–258, 267, 269, 270, 274, 277 puritans, 190, 195, 220 puritans with dangerous foreign influences, 113 Q queen’s previous neglect, 57 Queen Elizabeth/Elizabeth/the queen/English queen/queen of England, 28, 32–34, 36–41, 44, 47, 52, 57, 65 Queen Elizabeth’s “Armada Portrait.”, 259 Quintus Fabius Maximus/Fabius/ Fabian (Punic Wars), 236–238, 266 R Raad van Staat /Raad, 38, 42 racial discourse, 288, 305

338

INDEX

radical action, 152 Ralegh, Walter Sir/Ralegh, 302 Ramachandran, Ayesha, 30, 42, 48 Rampjaar, 272 Readie and Easie Way (Milton), 17–19 reason/reasonable person/rational faculties/rational, 196, 202, 210, 212–214, 223 reformation, 3, 4, 10, 11 Regemorter, Assuerus, 101 Regulus (Punic Wars), 235 relief, 46–49, 55, 56, 58–60, 63 relief from foreign tyranny, 39 relief from this unjust contract, 56 religion for partisan ends, 152 religious conformity/religious orthodoxy, 249 religious orthodoxy, 137, 138 religious schism (and Amsterdam), 221 religious toleration, 33 religious zealots, 153 removal of a monarch/regicide, 228, 230, 235, 239 representation, 289, 294, 301 republican theory, 160 Republic of the United Provinces of the Netherlands/Dutch Republic/United Provinces, 7 resistance to tyranny, 170 restoration, 5, 16, 17, 23 restoring justice to a neighbor, 38 Revelation, 49 Roberts, Lewes, 13 Rogers, John, 115, 116 Roman Empire/imperial Rome, 259, 262 Roman Republic/republic of Rome/ republican Rome, 230–232, 235–242, 248, 251–253, 257–259, 263, 266–270, 276

Rome (Roman Republic, republican Rome), 3, 22–24 Rose theater, 70, 90 Ross, Thomas, 248, 249, 270, 274 Royal African Company (RAC), 281, 282, 306–308, 315 Royal Exchange/Exchange, 69, 75–78, 81, 82, 89, 98, 101, 105–107, 221 Rubright, Marjorie, 69, 73, 101, 104, 107, 122, 288, 292 rumor, 188, 194, 198, 201, 209, 213, 220 Rump Parliament, 233, 244 Run, 207, 210, 217 Rupert, Prince, 281 rupture/break/caesura, 284, 287, 297, 298, 305, 308, 315, 316, 318 ruthless Dutch (stereotypes), 23 Ruytinck, Symeon, 98, 99, 101–104, 107, 111 S Sagredo, Alvise, 252, 254, 257 Saguntum (Punic Wars), 236, 237 Saint James, 147 Salmasius, 244 Sandys, Edwin Sir, 158 Sauer, Elizabeth, 4, 19 Scherpe Resolutie, 143 Schooneveld (Third Anglo-Dutch War), 272 Scipio Aemelianus, 270 Scipio (Punic Wars), 235, 248, 249, 251, 257 Scott, Thomas, 14–16, 19, 23, 24, 205, 206 Second Advice (Marvell), 263, 267 Second Anglo-Dutch War (Anglo-Dutch War), 16, 23, 247, 249, 251, 262, 264, 276

INDEX

Second Punic War (Punic Wars), 236, 237, 240, 249, 251, 254, 256, 257 Selden, John, 206, 207 serial news, 196, 201, 205 seven aristocrats, 320 seventeen provinces (of Low Countries or of Netherlands), 30, 48, 56 Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, 180 Shakespeare’s Roman tragedies, 181 Shakespeare, William, 10, 12, 71, 72, 194 Shoemakers’ Holiday (Dekker), 21 Shrove Tuesday, 89 Sidney, Algernon, 269 Sidney, Philip Sir, 2, 28 Silius Italicus, 248, 255 Simpson, Edward, 146 slanderous term, 150 slave/slavery/enslaved/slave labor, 281, 282, 291, 296, 298, 300, 302, 304–318 slave revolt/slave rebellion/slave mutiny, 309, 312 slavery, 321, 323 slave trade, 282, 307, 311 Smerwick, 36, 62 Smith, Adam, 70 Smith, William, 253 Smyrna, 258, 271 social types, 68, 71, 92, 122, 128, 130, 131 Solebay (Third Anglo-Dutch War), 271 Solomon/Solomonic/Salomon, 15, 17–20 sovereignty, 19, 20, 22, 23, 135, 137–140, 142, 154–158, 160, 162–164, 166–168, 170, 176–178, 181, 183

339

sovereignty/sovereigntie, 31, 35, 38, 40, 41, 56, 58, 59, 62, 63 sovereignty (maritime), 229, 240 Spanish Armada, 8, 317 Spanish forces encamped across the Channel, 37 “Spanish Fury”, 32, 53 Spanish tyranny, 15, 21, 22, 36, 37 speak as a puritan, 129 Spenser, Edmund, 20, 21 spices, 206, 208, 221 spice trade, 141, 282, 290, 292 Spinola, 191, 193, 204, 220, 221 spoken Dutch, 80, 93 Stade, 69, 76, 77, 90 stadholder, 3, 23 stark differences between the English and foreigners, 6 States General, 27, 33, 34, 38, 42, 65, 198, 207, 210, 224 States of Holland, 140, 142–144, 178 States of Utrecht, 143 Statute of Artificers, 89 Stede, Edwyn, 316 Steelyard, 90 stereotype/stereotypical, 12, 13, 21, 71, 73, 81, 91, 95, 98, 121, 233, 234, 242, 243, 252, 253, 281, 285, 291, 316 stereotype Dutch weakness for beer and butter, 217 Stevens, Paul, 3, 5, 11, 17, 24 stigmatize as Dutch, 127 St. James’ Day Fight (Second Anglo-Dutch War), 251, 257 St. John, Oliver, 232, 236, 237, 266 stoic, 170–174, 177 Storck, Abraham, 260, 261 Stowe, John, 50 Strangways, Giles, 266 Strasbourg, 196 Stretton, Timothy, 29, 54

340

INDEX

Strickland, Walter, 232, 236 striking sails (or topsail), 229 Stuart, James, 228, 231, 232, 241, 249, 258, 259 Stuart, Mary/Mary Queen of Scots, 36, 47, 321 Stubbe, Henry, 273 subjects’ rebellion, 187 sugar sugar colony, 298 sugar plantation, 304, 306, 311, 313 sugar production, 30, 304, 306 sugar trade, 295 suicide, 171–174, 180, 182, 314 Surinam, 8, 23, 273 symbolic Dutch virgin, 168 Synod of Dordrecht/Synod of Dort/ Dort/“the Synod”, 133, 144, 147, 183

T tail/tail-man (English stereotype), 234, 252, 253 Tarquin, 230, 266 Temple, William Sir, 16, 17, 283, 285, 295 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates , 1 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (Milton), 3 Ternate and Tidore, 206 Test Act, 271 Texel (Third Anglo-Dutch War), 272 textiles, 2, 8, 12 The Character of Holland (Marvell), 242, 243, 252 The Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare), 12 The Declaration of his Highnes William Henry, 320 the Downs, 227, 229

TheDutch Courtesan (Marston), 21, 74, 109, 110, 121, 125–127, 220 The Faerie Queene (Spenser), 20 The Fair Maid of the Inn (Fletcher), 217, 222 The Family of Love (Barry), 21, 74, 109, 120 the foreigner (social types), 68, 78, 81, 93, 122 the Hague, 185, 204, 206, 209 The King’s Right (Dickinson), 158 The Launching of the Mary (Mountfort), 222–225 The London Prodigal , 71 The Magnificent Entertainment Given to King James (Dekker), 103 The Malcontent (Marston), 71, 117 the merchant/foreign merchant/ tradesman (social types), 68, 73, 75, 78, 81–83, 90, 92, 95, 97, 98, 105, 107, 119, 121, 122, 125, 132 “The New Cry”, 191 Theodosius and Valentinian, 35 theology, 2 theories of political resistance, 21 theories of the nation, 9 The Pictvre of a Puritane (Ormerod), 112 the pilgrims, 9 the puritan (social types), 68, 70, 73, 98, 112, 123, 127, 129, 130 The Puritan Widow (Middleton), 108 The Shoemaker’s Holiday (Dekker), 74, 84, 86, 87, 89, 90, 93, 95 The Staple of News (Jonson), 22, 217, 218, 220, 224 The Tragedie of Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt (Fletcher and Massinger), 22, 135–137, 150, 155, 156, 158, 161, 168, 178, 180, 182

INDEX

the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), 185, 206, 207, 209, 210, 212–215, 222, 224, 225 The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare), 194 Third Advice (Marvell), 263, 264 Third Anglo-Dutch War (Anglo-Dutch War), 270, 274, 275, 321 Third Punic War (Punic Wars), 237, 257, 269, 270, 273, 274, 276 Thirty Years War, 186, 188 Thorius, Raphael, 99, 101, 107 title/princely title/noble title, 135, 155, 162–164, 167, 168 toleration, 135, 139–143, 148, 149, 177 topical themes, 137 topographical lack/topography (stereotype), 12, 13 torture, 279, 288–291 “To Sir Henry Vane the Younger” (Milton), 238 Tot den Vrede der Kercken, 142 Towerson, Gabriel, 209 trade, 38, 59 trade war, 244, 249, 277 Tragedy of Amboyna/Amboyna: A Tragedy/Amboyna/the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants , 23 translation, 192, 197, 198, 200, 204, 206, 208, 212, 213 trauma/traumatic, 23, 286, 287, 289, 294, 296–298, 300, 301, 315, 317 treason/treasonous, 61 Treaty of Dover, 271 Treaty of London, 107–109, 209, 216 Treaty of Madrid, 224

341

Treaty of Nonsuch, 30, 38 Trew Law of Free Monarchies/Trew Law (King James), 156, 167 trial of Duessa, 46, 55 Triple Alliance (England, Sweden, United Provinces), 271 Triple Alliance of France, England, and the United Provinces, 42 truth (transcendent/poetic), 218, 220 Tryon, Thomas, 309, 311 Tudor, Mary, 9, 31, 73 Twelve Years Truce Venice, 187, 205 Twelve-Year Truce, 15 Two Treatises of Government (Locke), 306 tyranny/tyrannical, 230–232, 262, 263, 267, 269, 271 tyrant, 4, 9, 17, 18, 21, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 35, 41, 45, 47, 49, 53, 55–60, 62–65, 305, 306 Tyrone, 108

U Unfortunate Traveler (Nashe), 12 ungrateful Dutch, 85 Union of Utrecht, 139 universal monarchy/universal dominion/universal king/catholic king, 35, 37, 272, 283, 285 University of Franeker, 141 University of Leiden, 139, 141 unprecedented action, 230 unruly puritan, 121 unstable linguistic registers, 115 use of Dutch matters to comment on England’s own national formation, 22 Usselincx, Willem, 94 ut pictura poesis , 258

342

INDEX

Uyttenbogaert, Johannes, 140 V Valckenburgh, Johan, 283, 284, 315 van den Keere, Pieter, 197 van den Vondel, Joost, 22, 246 van de Velde, William the Elder, 262 van de Velde, William the Younger, 262 Vane, Henry Sir, 238, 239 van Hilten, Caspar, 196 van Ledenberg, Gilles, 143 van Marnix, Filips, 20, 35–37, 62, 110 van Meteren, Emanuel, 99, 105, 107 van Oldenbarnevelt, Johan, 135, 182 van Speult, Herman, 208, 215, 224 van Tromp, Maarten, 227, 233 van Vliet, Jan, 2 Vere, Francis Sir, 109 Verhoeven, Abraham, 186, 187, 197, 199, 204, 210 Verstegan, Richard, 121, 123 Veseler, Joris, 196–199, 204 Vienna, 197 Vilvain, Robert, 246 Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (Philippe du Plessis-Mornay), 32 Vlie (Second Anglo-Dutch War), 255 Vlissingen, 159 Volpone (Jonson), 191 Vos, Jan, 22, 241, 242, 247 Vox Populi, Or Newes from Spayne (Scott), 205 W waardgelders , 143, 144, 149, 152, 162 Waller, Edmund, 258, 259, 262–265, 322 Walsh, Brian, 89

Walsingham, Frances, 28, 40, 51 Warren, George, 301–304, 309, 314 war slavery/battlefield, 305, 306, 313 Webster, John, 72, 100, 117 Wesel, 190 Westminster, 229, 237, 240, 272 Westward Ho (Webster and Dekker), 73, 97, 109 whale, 190, 191, 200 Wheeler, John, 85, 93–95 Whitefriars (Named Theater Venue), 119 WIC/Geoctroyeerde Westindische Compagnie/Westindische Compagnie (WIC), 281, 283, 302, 304, 307 wicked councilors/king’s deputies, 31 widow, 21, 27–31, 40, 42, 47–51, 53, 55–59, 65 widows (more frequently appear in the scriptures simply) as figures of pity and suffering, 49 widow symbolism/unusual widow/ equivocal/ambiguous/ destabilizing widow, 29, 47 Wild Coast, 295, 299 Wilkinson, Robert, 216 Willem II, 228, 230–232, 248 William III/Willem III, 23, 248, 268, 271, 272 William of Orange/Willem III/ William III, 319, 321 Williams, Roger, 2 William the Silent, 168 William the Silent/William of Orange, 28, 30, 32–34, 37, 48, 53, 64, 135, 153, 168, 320 Willibrode, 3 woodcut, 210, 211, 215, 216, 289 workers/laborers/artisans/ journeymen, 85–89, 91, 106

INDEX

X xenophobia/xenophobic jokes, 6, 12, 71, 91 xenophobic/xenophobia, 233, 251

343

Z Zeeland, 31, 33, 34 “Zegevier der Vrije Nederlanden op den Teems” (Vondel), 267 Zutphen, 28 Zwicker, Steven, 244