Dutch Society in the Seventeenth Century

It is a cliché to describe any individual as a child of his time. Yet Constantijn Huygens demonstrates continually in his writing an overwhelming sense of being the product of a particular place at a specific historical moment. He is conscious of being the remarkable product of a remarkable nation: the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century. Holland had invented itself at the end of the sixteenth century when the Low Countries, a group of loosely federated provinces and dukedoms with no history of political independence, individually or collectively, coalesced into nationhood under the leadership of William of Orange. If William was the father of the new Republic, then it could reasonably be said that Constantijn's father, William's secretary, was one of its godparents. The political life of his country was, for Constantijn Huygens, neither an accomplished fact nor a distant, recessive background to his personal concerns. He was a child in a household that lived and breathed the politics of a new nation which was labouring in the process of self-fashioning. His father's aspirations as both patriot and parent were profoundly interrelated; and thus Constantijn was deliberately moulded and shaped as the ideal son of the new Republic.

Such a sense of effective centrality to national concerns would be, for anyone, a heady atmosphere in which to come to maturity. In Huygens’ case it was all the more so because the new nation was realising spectacular success by flouting every political rule of early modern Europe. The achievements of the new Dutch Republic were dizzying, unprecedented, colossal; yet the whole trend of medieval and Renaissance thinking about the operations of fortune meant that so remarkable an exercise in creating prosperity and liberty out of beleaguered adversity could not be considered secure: … the joys which fortune grants us / Are raised up unto their highest / When they’re nearest to their fall. Especially in the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic, Holland's educated population can be imagined at various moments in their lives to be counting under their breaths, as it were, awaiting the crash.

What were the peculiar features of this Dutch civilization which formed Huygens and shaped his immense poetic oeuvre? Only a few relevant features can be suggested, one of the most noteworthy being an assimilation towards the middle.