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Preface
In spring 2013, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam – home to unimaginable
treasures from the Dutch Golden Age – reopened after a ten-year
closure for refurbishment. Strolling through opulent rooms displaying
towering blue-and-white pyramidal delftware tulip vases, gorgeous
jewel-like paintings by Vermeer and Rembrandt, and ornately inlaid
baroque furniture a week after the reopening, I came upon an object
which for me went to the heart of the seventeenth-century cultural
relationship between England and the Netherlands. If only I had known
of it a few years earlier, when I was writing my book-length study of
Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century, Going Dutch. I would
certainly have reproduced it there.
In a quite large glass display case all of its own sat a small
rectangular block of mottled grey stone, in a modest-sized, purposemade
wooden box. Two original hand-written labels, in a rather
unconfident cursive hand, in fading brown ink, are affixed – one inside
the box’s lid, the other pasted on to the stone itself. ‘A piece of the Rock
on which William Prince of Orange first set foot on landing at Brixham
in Torbay Nov[embe]r 4th 1688’, the latter reads. 1
The fragment of stone in its contemporary setting reminded me
powerfully of a similar fragment of stone on my own bookshelf – a
piece of the Berlin Wall, given to me by a friend who had raced from
London to Berlin in November 1989, to witness the ‘people power’
1 The inscription inside the lid reads: ‘The Stone on which King William III first placed his
foot on landing in England was long preserved in Old Market House of Brixham, and
when placed in the Obelisk now on the Pier a piece of it was kept by the Harbour Master &
afterwards given to me & now placed in this box of heart of English Oak for Her Majesty
the Queen of Holland. R. Fenwick Elrington Vicar of Lower Brixham Nov 4. 1868.’
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