Hugh Dunthorne

A Cambro-Belgian in the Great War: Frank Brangwyn as Artist and Activist

This chapter illustrates the versatility which set Frank Brangwyn apart from many of his contemporaries. His realism made his work especially effective for posters and publications encouraging recruitment and promoting war charities. Brangwyn’s refusal to idealize the fighting forces and to ignore the horrors of war underpinned his activism during the First World War, one of his chief achievements being the practical and financial support of Belgian refugee artists.

Memory wars in the Low Countries, 1566–1700

How did the people of the Low Countries in the later sixteenth and the seventeenth century recall the Revolt of the Netherlands? Which of its decisive moments and leading figures caught their atten...

The Royalist Republic: Literature, Politics, and Religion in the Anglo-Dutch Public Sphere, 1639–1660

What attitudes towards Britain were expressed publicly in the United Provinces of the Netherlands during the British civil wars of 1639-48 and their aftermath? Should the Dutch state intervene in the domestic conflicts of its oldest ally and, if so, on which side? And what stance should it take towards the Commonwealth and Protectorate regimes which supplanted the Stuart monarchy after 1649? These are the questions – much debated in the Netherlands during these years yet relatively neglected in Anglo-Dutch historiography – which Helmer Helmers considers in this valuable and accomplished new study. He draws on an impressively wide range of Dutch and English sources – contemporary histories and correspondence, printed pamphlets and engravings, poems, plays and even popular songs – and in making sense of this mass of material he brings to bear the skills both of an informed historian and a perceptive literary critic. Whatever their field of interest in the early modern past, readers will find much to learn from and to enjoy in this book. A brief glance at Anglo-Dutch diplomacy in the 1640s might suggest that the Republic stood aloof from the English Civil War. Declaring its neutrality in the conflict in November 1642, the States General subsequently intervened only once, in 1645, when an embassy sent to London tried and failed to mediate between the warring parties. Yet when we turn to the ‘public sphere’ of Dutch towns, which Helmers describes in the first part of his book, an entirely different picture emerges, one of widespread public concern and argument over what was called ‘the English question’. Far from being spontaneous, this interest was deliberately encouraged by parliamentarian and royalist agents, deploying teams of writers, translators and printers (Scots and English as well as Dutch) to boost their own cause and blast their opponents. Thus the United Provinces ‘became the scene of a paper battle between British parties’ (p. 59) as they fought each other for international support. At first, down to 1644, the Scots-English ‘puritan’ party had the better of the fight. Wellorganized and accustomed to collaborating with their Dutch co-religionists, they also had the more appealing case to make, arguing that their cause, like the Revolt of the Netherlands against Spain, ‘was about safeguarding the true, Protestant religion and opposing royal tyranny’ (p. 63). Yet their very success provoked a royalist reaction. Under the direction of Sir William Boswell, Charles I’s resident at The Hague, and later of Edward Hyde, the future earl of Clarendon, royalist propaganda grew in coherence and effectiveness while that of the parliamentarians fragmented. By 1648 Parliament had won the war of arms in England but was losing the paper battle in the Netherlands, allowing the Dutch Republic, at least in its public discourse, to become increasingly royalist. The irony of the once rebellious Dutch provinces now posing as upholders of divine right monarchy was not lost on John Milton, the Commonwealth’s ‘secretary for foreign tongues’. Defending the execution of Charles I in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, he quoted the Dutch ‘abjuration’ of the tyrant Philip II in 1581 and appealed to the States General ‘not to look with an evil or prejudicial eye upon their neighbours walking by the same rule’. Yet his words went largely unheeded in the Netherlands. There, as Helmers shows in the five thematic case-studies which form Part II of his book, sympathy for the Stuart cause and hostility to England’s

History, Theology and Tolerance: Grotius and his English Contemporaries*

Drawing on letters of Grotius and his English hosts as well as on work of modern scholars, the first part of this article considers the origins, conduct and outcome of Grotius’s mission to England in April and May 1613. Ostensibly part of a trade delegation, his real purpose was to win the support of King James I and senior English churchmen for the policy of Oldenbarnevelt and the States of Holland in the worsening religious and political conflict of the United Provinces; and his failure to achieve this purpose was one factor which led to the writing of the treatise Ordinum Pietas soon after his return to the Netherlands. In the short term, Grotius’s treatise was no more successful in winning English support than his diplomacy had been. But in the longer term, as the second part of this article seeks to show, its impact was more positive. The arguments for tolerance put forward in Ordinum Pietas were reinforced in later works of Grotius: in his Verantwoordingh (1622) and in De veritate religionis Christianae (1627), the most accessible, popular and widely-translated of all his writings. And these works, together with the emergence of a more tolerant policy in the Netherlands from the years around 1630, left their mark on Britain. They resonated in English writings on toleration, from the pamphlets of Henry Robinson and Richard Overton in the 1640s to Locke’s Letter on Toleration of 1689. In doing so, they contributed not only to the growth of more liberal religious attitudes in Britain but also to the measures which enshrined those attitudes in law, the toleration acts of 1650, 1689 and 1695.

Migration to and from the Low Countries as a Factor in the Religious History of Early Modern Britain

Abstract During the two centuries which followed the Reformation, religious persecution and war caused large-scale migration in Europe, not least between Britain and the Low Countries. From the time of Elizabeth Is accession English, Welsh and Irish Catholics sought refuge in the Spanish Netherlands, while persecuted Flemish Protestants fled across the North Sea to towns in south-eastern England Soon a third wave of migration was gathering pace, as ‘Puritan’ dissenters were driven out of England to havens in the emerging Dutch Republic This three-way migration was most intense in Elizabethan and early Stuart times; but its effect on religious life in the British Isles was felt over a longer period, extending into the eighteenth century. The most obvious impact was on the dissenting communities themselves. For Catholics who remained in Britain, the émigré institutions in Flanders were not only a source of missionary priests and devotional literature but a link with the stricter discipline of the continental Counter-Reformation. For Puritans, similarly, the Dutch/Walloon churches in England and the English/Scots ones in Holland were a link with the more radical and thorough going Protestantism of the continent Seen as models of what a godly reformed community should be, these churches were the foundations on which Englands emerging traditions of Presbyterianism and Congregationalism were built But the Dutch Republic was a model in another way, too By providing a haven not just for Protestant dissent but for other faiths as well, it showed that religious pluralism was not incompatible with political stability or commercial prosperity. Thus it fuelled the arguments of those urging a similarly liberal religious settlement in England. If after 1689 religious toleration became a principle of the English (and later British) constitution, it did so largely because the principle had already proved its worth among Englands neighbours in the United Provinces.

Singing The News: The Dutch Revolt and English Street Ballads, c. 1560–1660

Among the three thousand or so English street ballads published between 1557 and the end of the seventeenth century there is a small but intriguing minority of songs that deal with international wa...