historical and political thought in the seventeenth - RePub - Erasmus ...

Chapter 3. Biography
tanus’s help during his work on the Theatrum and Pontanus contributed to
Boxhorn’s work on Juvenal. 182
Constantijn Huygens was a poet and secretary to two princes of Orange,
first to Frederik Hendrik (1584-1647) and later to William II. His function as
secretary to the prince of Orange gave Huygens an important position within
the Dutch Republic of Letters. In all of his three attempts to obtain, respectively,
the office of historiographer of the prince of Orange, the States of Zeeland
and the States General, Boxhorn sought the help of Huygens. 183 He also
turned to Huygens to get his father-in-law Pieter Duvelaar elected as burgomaster
of Middelburg. While his own attempts did not have the desired
result, his father-in-law was more lucky; in 1641 Pieter Duvelaar was elected
burgomaster of Middelburg, an event for which Boxhorn thanked Huygens. 184
Among the recipients of Boxhorn’s letters are also people who lived in Bergen
op Zoom. The Epistolae et poemata contain letters of Boxhorn to his former
teacher Richard Lubbaeus, to his friend and biographer Jacobus Baselius, and
to Johannes Antonius de Rouck and Justus Turcq (1611-1680), two members
of Bergen op Zoom’s urban elite. 185 From his letter to Turcq we learn that Boxhorn
visited his native town at least once. 186 Thus, while Boxhorn spent most
of his adult life at Leiden, he did not loose contact with the town in which he
was born.
Boxhorn did not see much of the world. As far as this author can tell Boxhorn
never travelled to places that lay outside the jurisdiction of the Dutch
Press; Copenhagen, 2002), pp. 37-43. Pontanus was married to a cousin of Boxhorn. See Rijcklof Hofman,
“Marcus Zuerius Boxhorn (1612-1653)”, in Lauran Toorians (ed.), Orbis Linguarum, Vol. 1: Kelten en
de Nederlanden: van prehistorie tot heden (Peeters; Louvain/Paris, 1998), p. 158. For the friendship between
Pontanus and Scriverius, see Langereis, Geschiedenis als ambacht, p. 109, and Skovgaard-Petersen, Historiography
at the Court of Christian IV (1588-1648), p. 56, there footnote 61. For some remarks on Pontanus’s
history of Amsterdam, see E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier, “Descriptions of Towns in the Seventeenth-Century
Province of Holland”, in Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. and Adele Seeff (eds.), The Public and Private in Dutch
Culture of the Golden Age (University of Delaware Press; Newark, 2000), pp. 24-32.
182 Boxhorn, Epistolae et poemata, pp. 6, 8, 39, 67.
183 Ibidem, pp. 158-59, 225-26, 308-9. To obtain the office of historiographer of the States of Zeeland,
Boxhorn had also turned to his friend Adriaen Hoffer for help. Boxhorn to Adriaen Hoffer, May 5, 1644.
Ibidem, pp. 219-20.
184 Ibidem, pp. 178-79, 182-83. In 1643 and 1644 Boxhorn once more turned to Huygens to get his
father-in-law elected again as burgomaster of Middelburg. Ibidem, pp. 208, 226-27.
185 The Epistolae et poemata contain three letters to Lubbaeus, three letters to Baselius while Baselius
was at Bergen op Zoom, one letter to De Rouck, and one letter to Turcq. Ibidem, pp. 144-45, 160-62, 172-
73, 190-93, 228-229, 234, 277. The De Rouck family and the Turcq family were two of the more than ten
families who together formed the patriciate or urban elite of Bergen op Zoom. See De Mooij, Geloof kan
Bergen verzetten, p. 186.
186 Boxhorn to Turcq, April 1642. Boxhorn, Epistolae et poemata, p. 190. ‘Cum superiore anno, caniculae
aestu anniversarium nobis otium faciente ad te venissem, Vir amplissime, tum ut tui, amici veteris,
tum ut dulcissimae patriae, cujus regundae ornandaeq;, cura tibi inprimis est demandata, aspectu me
oblectarem, ea humanitate exceptus sum; ut nihil majoribus officiis aut benevolentia fieri posse judicarem.’
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