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Holland [beaver] hat’. Would Huygens please send the hat as soon as
the viols reached him, and he had judged them to be to his satisfaction? 7
The six fragile musical instruments had, Snouckaert wrote, already
been dispatched to Huygens, in a custom-made packing-case, and were
en route to The Hague, under the watchful eye of a ship’s captain from
Middelburg. The total shipping price was 8 shillings, which included a
trusted carrier to deliver the precious cargo safely to Huygens’s door.
Maarten would be grateful for speedy settlement of his bills, as he was
unlikely to return to the Netherlands himself in the near future, and
would have to negotiate transfer of the funds by bill of exchange. 8
Here is an elegantly documented example of Constantijn Huygens’s
day-to-day involvement in what we might call ‘material cultural transactions’
between London and The Hague. His network of international
connections allows him to seek out excellent examples of the most
sought-after and fashionable musical instruments – instruments of
recognised quality and workmanship – and to transfer them from one
national context to another (thereby, we might argue, contributing
to a web of musical influences from one milieu to another). On this
occasion, it is a newly married cousin of Huygens’s who executes the
complicated commission to Huygens’s instructions.
I have chosen this example deliberately because it introduces us
to the part played by the expert judgement of one of Huygens’s oldest
London friends, named here as ‘Lady Stafford’, in transactions of this
sort. It is her assessment of the viols (together with that of another
old friend-at-a-distance of Constantijn’s, an artist and musician first
encountered in convivial gatherings at Lady Stafford’s family home
in London, Nicholas Lanier) which is critical for the completion of the
deal. Together they provide the necessary expert confirmation that the
deal Huygens is transacting across the Narrow Sea, as the North Sea
was sometimes called, is a good one. In the case of Lady Stafford, the
deal, one feels, could not have been concluded successfully without her.
‘Lady Stafford’ is Lady Mary Killigrew – remarried to Sir Thomas
Stafford, gentleman-usher to Queen Henrietta Maria, following the death
of her first husband Sir Robert Killigrew in 1633. On his second stay in
England many years earlier in 1622 (the viols transaction, remember,
takes place in 1638), Constantijn Huygens had struck up a lasting
7 For an interesting discussion of Dutch beaver hats in the period, see T. Brook, Vermeer’s Hat:
The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (New York: Bloomsbury Press,
2008), pp. 42–4.
8 University Library Leiden, Worp, nr. 2035, Cod. Hug. 37, transcribed by Rasch,
pp. 299–300; Appendix IV.
48 TEMPTATION IN THE ARCHIVES