One index of Huygens’ continued concern with the literary life of England throughout the mid seventeenth century is the posthumous sale catalogue (made in 1688) of volumes from his library, discarded by his sons and heirs. It contains about three thousand volumes and eighty-six books of music. A surprising number of these were English literature. His English books included a first-folio Shakespeare, Donne's Satyrs and Poems (and his Sermons), Chaucer's Works, the collections of Cartwright, Randolph, Crashaw, Cowley, Carew and Waller, what the Dutch printer calls ‘Rumph Songs’ (an anonymous book of pro-Stuart popular poetry more generally known as Rump, or the Rump Ballads), John Owen's (Latin) Epigrams, Samuel Butler's Hudibras, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Ben Jonson's masque The Gypsies Metamorphos’d (in manuscript), his Epigrams, a manuscript entitled English Poems of Divers Autors, and what must be nearly the entire published output of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (fourteen volumes, folio). Although Huygens made several visits to England in the course of his life, the spread of English texts which he owned would suggest that he must have kept up his English connections, and that he continued to buy English books as they came out (it is noteworthy that his library also included a Catalogue of the Most Vendible Books in England, printed in London in 1658). Otherwise, his library reflects a wide range of interests. He owned a number of books about the House of Stuart: a reflection of a personal loyalty which stemmed from the kindness shown him by King James. Although this loyalty was strained by unhappy diplomatic dealings with the Stuarts in his middle years, his very last poems include English doggerel verses made for the amusement of Mary, wife of the King-Stadhouder William iii. In connection with Hofwijk, it is also worth noting that he owned copies of Vitruvius's De Architectura and that garden-obsessed dream-vision of the Venetian Renaissance, Poliphilo's Hypnerotomachia.

The library catalogue gives a picture of the reading of a savant and poet whose interests extended across the linguistic frontiers of early modern Europe. But Huygens also maintained personal and literary contacts with many of the authors. The most important of Huygens’ contacts with English writers will be examined individually.