Christiaan Huygens – A family affair - Proeven van Vroeger

Orange – which itself in turn showed the prince’s gratefulness and greatness to those, most
loyal to him.
The second reason (as shortly mentioned) why the prince would want to satisfy
Huygens with substantial gifts lay in the latter’s socio-professional ambitions. Though
Constantijn Sr. would always feign polite and modest surprise when receiving princely gifts,
he had good reasons to long for these rewards and the related social enhancement. The prince
and his wife Amalia – center points in aristocratic The Hague, where status was measured by
wealth, “genealogies and family connections” 123 – knew this and used growing rewards to
secure his loyalty.
As second-generation immigrants from the Catholic Southern Netherlands, the
Huygens were not acknowledged as “complete” Dutchmen. This “hereditary malfunction”
gave rise to an inherent limitation to Constantijn Sr.’s possibilities in Dutch civilian public
service, where the higher regions knew a “void” of Southern Netherlanders. 124 A possible route
to both social and professional success was obtaining a noble status, a characteristic that the
family Huygens lacked too, as the lines of Huygens’s parents only consisted of rather wealthy
Belgian merchants on the one hand and civilian servants affiliated to the House of Orange. 125
The settlement of Christaan Huygens Sr. in The Hague, a center of diplomacy and a wealthy
upper class made the need for distinction and acceptation in the true aristocracy even more
urgent.
Huygens was one of the first of the Dutch upper-bourgeois 126 to put everything to
work to cross the intractable yet existent line between bourgeoisie and nobility – and an early
example of the newly rising European elite in the seventeenth century, the noblesse de robe. As
Francisco de los Cobos (1477 – 1547) had already done in the sixteenth-century Spain, these
new nobles acquired landownership, lordships, and titles, thus increasing their wealth and
status. Typified by their service for the state, they worked under the direct patronage of
123 ZIJLMANS, J. (1997) Life at the Hague Court. IN KEBLUSEK, M., ZIJLMANS, J. &
MUSEUM, H. H. (Eds.) Princely display : the court of Frederik Hendrik of Orange and Amalia van Solms. The
Hague; Zwolle, Historical Museum; Waanders., p30
124 HOFMAN, H. A. (1983) Constantine Huygens (1596-1687) : a christian-humanist bourgeois-gentilhomme in
service of the House of Orange, Utrecht, HES Uitgevers., p163-4; PRICE, J. L. (1994) Holland and the Dutch
Republic in the seventeenth century : the politics of particularism, Oxford; New York, Clarendon Press; Oxford
University Press, PRICE, J. L. (1974) Culture and Society in the Dutch Republic During the 17th Century
London, B. T. Batsford Ltd., Parival/Temple? HUYGENS, C. & BLOM, F. R. E. (2003) Mijn leven
verteld aan mijn kinderen in twee boeken (De vita propria sermonum inter liberos), Amsterdam, Prometheus.,
125 HUYGENS, C. & HEESAKKERS, C. L. (1987) Mijn jeugd, Amsterdam, Querido., p1-15
126 Later the regents would “follow his example:” PRICE, J. L. (1994) Holland and the Dutch Republic in the
seventeenth century : the politics of particularism, Oxford; New York, Clarendon Press; Oxford University
Press., p51-2
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