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Part 1
Claiming spaces
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1 Propagating the Orange
Gender, material culture and the early modern trajectory of the House of Orange-Nassau
This chapter charts a history of how women and men associated with the House of Orange-Nassau helped this dynastic family confront the challenges and changes of the early modern period. The House of Orange-Nassau emerged from among other leading families of the region during the sixteenth century, saw a remarkable rise to power, and concluded the period as the appointed monarchs of a new country. Here we analyse the changing strategies of the House – in materials, behaviours, and acts – to increase and maintain their power and status, and the people who were instrumental to this creation and exercise.
Scholarship to date has predominantly focused on the role of male interlocutors in the creation of Orange-Nassau power.1 However, as we have argued elsewhere, a wide variety of men and women, from family members and those from other Nassau dynastic branches, to paid retainers, courtiers, and artists, were involved in advancing the interests of the House of Orange-Nassau when they intersected in a beneficial way with their own objectives. We follow J. P. J. Duindam, who has argued that dynastic power is ‘based on the transmission of power from generation to generation; spouses, mothers, heirs and siblings are the building blocks of dynasticism’.2 Gender shaped the nature of the engagement that different women and men undertook, but critical too were their positions within the dynastic hierarchy, age, faith, reproductive and familial status, professional capacities, and experiences with state institutions and military endeavours, for example. In a recent study we argue that letters were a particularly important mechanism for negotiating individuals’ alignments to the House, and certainly one that allows historians to see these dynamic processes in action.3 In this study, we focus on presentations of Orange-Nassau identity and power in other forms, particularly through material culture in sites of interpretation that could range from physical spaces to textual forms. These also played a key role in negotiating one’s affiliation to the House of Orange-Nassau, for the consumption of varied audiences and viewers.
In this chapter, we examine the trajectory of the relationship of the House of Orange-Nassau over the early modern period in three different yet overlapping phases, each with particular characteristics of interaction with material culture. In each phase, we argue that different strategies were applied to achieve distinct objectives by varied individuals, thus creating distinctive phases in the employment of objects, their materials, and their use in specific spatial sites. These engagements with materiality are explored in more depth throughout this study. Our aim here is to articulate an over-arching narrative of the House for the early modern period, which will provide context for the more thematic focus and detailed examination of activities, materials and spaces in the chapters to follow. In the first section, we explore how individual actions in times of conflict in the sixteenth century became materialised sources of power and identity for the House of Orange-Nassau.
Conflict and sacrifice
The political and military leadership provided by the Nassau dynasty was critical to the capacity of the northern provinces to break away from the control of the Spanish Habsburg monarchs in the later sixteenth century. Although the branch of the Orange-Nassau led by Willem van Nassau, Prince of Orange (1533–84) (Figure 1.1), would come to dominate the elite political world of the United Provinces over the early modern period, a far broader group of men from the Nassau dynasty were centrally engaged in the pursuit of these political, and confessional, objectives.4 Willem might have emerged as the ‘Father of the Fatherland’ but his brothers – Johann (1536–1606), Ludwig (1538–74), Adolf (1540–68) and Heinrich (1550–74) – provided key political, military, financial, and familial support to his actions (Figure 1.2). Ludwig drafted some of the early political documentation explaining the position of those who disapproved of the rule of Margaret of Parma (1522–86) in 1566, while it was Johann who authored the Union of Utrecht (1579) that formally brought together the northern states in a shared purpose. Adolf and Ludwig fought in military engagements, including the Battle of Heiligerlee (1568), in which Adolf died, and the Battle of Mookerheyde (1574), in which both Ludwig and Heinrich perished. Ludwig’s military support to French Huguenots fighting under the Admiral Gaspard II de Coligny (1519–72) not only integrated the Nassau with wider Protestant movements, but also established a bond that would enable Willem’s fourth marriage to Coligny’s daughter, Louise (1555–1620). Meanwhile, Johann VI and his successive wives, Elisabeth von Leuchtenberg (1537–79), Kunigonde Jakobäa von Simmern (1556–86) and Johannetta von Sayn-Wittgenstein (1561–1622), took care of many of Willem’s growing brood of children, leaving Willem free to focus on political matters. The brothers were also adept users of print media to justify their actions and advance their causes.5
In the following generation, Willem’s Calvinist sons – Justinus (1559–1631), Maurits (1567–1625), and Frederik Hendrik (1584–1647) – all maintained positions of martial leadership in the northern Low Countries. Willem’s eldest son Filips Willem (1554–1618), whose mother was Willem’s first wife Anna von Egmont (1533–58) and who was raised as a Catholic at the Spanish court, later enjoying his father’s inheritance in the Spanish-controlled southern Netherlands, remained militarily neutral in the conflict between the provinces, although he did take part in the negotiations for the Spanish in 1608 for the Twelve Years’ Truce. By contrast, Maurits, son of Willem’s second wife Anna von Sachsen (1544–77), applied the strategic innovations of theorists such as Simon Stevin (1548–1620) to siege warfare and training, which initially produced great results for the northern provinces’ campaign.6 By the age of twenty, Maurits was captain-general and admiral-general of the Union. These appointments gave him control over both the sea and land forces of the northern provinces. Likewise, Justinus, Willem’s illegitimate son by Eva Elinckx (c. 1535–c. 1590), was first appointed lieutenant-colonel, then lieutenant-admiral, of Zeeland in 1585 and later was the governor of Breda between 1601 and 1625. These military actions helped to assert the (legitimate) brothers’ claim to political positions. Maurits became the stadtholder of Holland and Zeeland in his father’s footsteps in 1585, conveniently sidestepping any suggestion that these were to be considered hereditary claims. His success in reclaiming Breda in 1590 was matched by political gains as the stadtholder of Guelders, Overijssel, and Utrecht in the same year. After the execution of the statesman Jan van Oldenbarnevelt (1547–1619) in 1619, Maurits was unrivalled in political power.7 The stadtholderates of Groningen and Drenthe followed in 1620. The ascendant status of the Orange-Nassau brothers was assured when youngest brother Frederik Hendrik, son of Willem and his fourth wife Louise de Coligny, was appointed to five of these stadtholderates, as well as becoming captain and admiral-general of the Union in 1625, at Maurits’s death.
Visualisations of Willem’s sons in martial garb reinforced their political ascenda...
