Christiaan Huygens – A family affair - Proeven van Vroeger

ecently set the most successful steps in a new direction – both taking inspiration from Norbert
Elias and Stephen Greenblatt. 113 Avoiding the pitfalls of literalism and essentialism, they both
make Huygens’s language explicit and argue that certain socio-economical circumstances and
ambitions need to be taken in full account in order to make (true) sense of the larger picture of
Constantijn Huygens’s life and work. Taking on this challenge, I would like to shift the
attention from Huygens’s courtly language to the “nitty-gritty” of his socio-professional
ambitions and the way in which the Stadholder offered exciting possibilities for him and his
offspring.
iii. The social and professional possibilities of gift-giving
The gifts she [Amalia] rewarded my long endeavor and loyal service with, were princely, the
great guardian worthy and very generous for a servant who perhaps had not been completely
without merit but, in all frankness surely did not expect such a thing. 114
In conformity with the best courtly standards Constantijn Sr. was “highly surprised”
by the voluntary gifts Amalia presented him with at the end of his career. As a secretary,
Huygens was thoroughly informed of the mechanics of gift giving – he had a complete scheme
for himself in which he categorized the formalities of different sorts of communication with the
prince’s correspondents. 115 It is plausible that Huygens’s astonishment was almost purely
“stylistic;” it was mainly by gifts of the House of Orange (and the prince in particular) that he
grew in social and professional position. As Hofman concludes after showing the unequal
growth in wealth for the higher social strata in seventeenth century Holland: “It is of course
completely clear that those earnings cannot be explained by the annual salary, but instead by
all the additional advantages connected to the fulfillment of the office.” 116 Huygens is no
exception, he rather is a case in point: the total value of his possessions grew from f 80.000 in
113 ELIAS, N. (1994) The civilizing process, Oxford [England] ; Cambridge, Mass., Blackwell.,
GREENBLATT, S. (2005) Renaissance self-fashioning : from More to Shakespeare, Chicago, University of
Chicago Press. First edition published in 1980.
114 HUYGENS, C. & BLOM, F. R. E. (2003) Mijn leven verteld aan mijn kinderen in twee boeken (De vita
propria sermonum inter liberos), Amsterdam, Prometheus., 177. My translation.
115 HUYGENS, C. & JORISSEN, T. (1873) Mémoires de Constantin Huygens : publiés pour la premiére fois,
d'apres̀ les minutes de l'auteur, preécédes d'une introduction, La Haye, Nijhoff., “Discours Imparfait”, p1-35
116 HOFMAN, H. A. (1983) Constantine Huygens (1596-1687) : a christian-humanist bourgeois-gentilhomme in
service of the House of Orange, Utrecht, HES Uitgevers., p222. My translation of: “Duidelijk is natuurlijk
zonder meer dat die inkomsten niet verklaard kunnen worden uit het vaste jaarinkomen, maar uit alle
bijkomende voordelen verbonden aan de vervulling van het ambt.”
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