I picked this up recently, The Diary of Constantijn Huygens Jr, Secretary to Stadholder-King William of Orange, edited by Rudolf Dekker, and is available to buy online here.
The Huygens were the hereditary secretaries to the Dutch House of Orange for three successive generations. 2013 was proclaimed as the 'Huygens Year' in Holland. Constantijn Huygens Jr was a brilliant scientist, and his diary was written in multiple volumes from 1649–1696. The 2000 pages of manuscripts were found in 1823, and published about 50 years later, but "with two passages omitted because of their obscene nature". In a way the Huygens diaries can be compared with the more famous 1660s diaries by Samuel Pepys.
(Painting above: Departure of William III from Hellevoetsluis, 19 October 1688 from the Royal Museums Greenwich collection.)
As a day-by-day "livestreamed" eyewitness account of the Williamite Revolution, this 270 page paperback edition starts with the preparations in Holland in October 1688 and ends on 1 September 1696. It's a tremendous source – but mundane in places and yet salacious in others! Among those are references to William's reputed mistress, Betty Villiers.
I bought it as further research into the slogan which I mentioned here recently, but there's no reference to it here. What did stand out was Huygens' description of their arrival in Belfast, dated 26 June 1690 –
"We decided to leave the yacht and go to Belfast, whither the King had ridden on horseback the evening before. The King lodged at a rather great house, built in a very disorderly and old-fashioned way, which had very bad paintings. There were some gardens that were not so bad, but totally neglected and in disarray.
It took me a long time to find my lodging, which were in an alehouse. In Belfast I saw large numbers of poor, miserable people - men, women and children - wearing hardly any clothes and looking very ugly and unhealthy, more so that I have ever seen before in any country. The houses are also very poor and dirty.
The people living there do not want to admit to being Irish, and say they are Scots who came over."
So, these folk either were Scots migrants to Ulster, or regarded themselves as culturally & ancestrally Scots, or both. Ireland is an island of cultural variety.
The very first entry in this edition, on 21 October 1688, is a quote from William's close ally the Prince Georg Friedrich of Waldeck, (Wikipedia here, portrait below), saying to Huygens –
"We are about to embark on a great and glorious enterprise"
0 comments:
Post a Comment