The Netherlands, 1600–1660

Land's Advocate of Holland since 1586, Johan van Oldenbarnevelt ran the Republic's business through Holland's towns and their taxes. In 1600 he pressed the States General to send the army down the Flemish coast against Dunkirk, the privateers' port. In 1602 he brokered the merger of the rival companies trading to Asia into one United East India Company.

Maurice, stadholder and captain-general, would rather have besieged Sluis than march deep into Flanders, but he went. On 2 July 1600 he beat Archduke Albert in the dunes at Nieuwpoort, then turned back without reaching Dunkirk. Four years later he took Sluis after all, in August 1604, a month before Ostend fell.

William Louis, stadholder of Friesland, Groningen and Drenthe, had read how the Romans fought in ranks. In a letter to Maurice of December 1594 he described musketeers firing rank by rank, each rank marching to the back to reload while the next fired. The cousins drilled the States army in it, paid it regularly, and demanded strict discipline in return.

Simon Stevin, a mathematician from Bruges, had taught Maurice mathematics since 1593 and served his army as an engineer; in 1604 he became its quartermaster. At Maurice's request he designed a course at Leiden to train engineers quickly, taught in Dutch rather than Latin: arithmetic, surveying and the building of fortresses.

Sir Francis Vere commanded some three thousand foot in the dunes at Nieuwpoort. In July 1601 he took command of Ostend, besieged by Albert. In December, short of men, he opened talks of surrender until reinforcements came in, then broke them off and threw back the great assault of 7 January 1602. He left in March.

Archduke Albert ruled the southern provinces with his wife under the Act of Cession of 1598. He led his army in person at Nieuwpoort and lost, and his reputation as a commander suffered badly. In July 1601 he laid siege to Ostend, which the Republic still held and could reinforce by sea.

Isabella, Philip II's eldest daughter, ruled beside Albert as co-sovereign. The Act of Cession carried a condition: if the couple had no children, the provinces would return to the Spanish crown, and secret clauses kept Spanish troops in the country. They never had children.

The siege swallowed men and money. Ambrogio Spinola, from a great Genoese family, had raised nine thousand men at his own expense; on 29 September 1603 he took command of it. He could not stop Maurice taking Sluis, but in September 1604 he took the ruins of Ostend. Albert left the field army to him.

Petrus Plancius, a Reformed minister who had fled Brussels for Amsterdam in 1585, drew sea charts from Portuguese sources and urged a passage to Asia north of Russia. From 1599 he taught pilots, and his charts probably guided the first Dutch voyage to the East. In 1602 the new company made him its cartographer.

The States General merged the rival companies into one, with a monopoly of Dutch trade to Asia for twenty-one years and the right to build forts, keep soldiers and make treaties there. Seventeen directors, the Heren XVII, ran it. Among the founding directors were merchants who had fled the south, such as Isaac Le Maire.

Jacob van Heemskerck had sailed in 1601 with ships of one of the older Amsterdam companies. In February 1603, in the strait off Singapore, he seized the Portuguese carrack Santa Catarina; her cargo sold in Amsterdam in 1604 for more than three million guilders. Some shareholders objected to plunder, and a quarrel over the voyage's accounts drove Isaac Le Maire off the board in 1605.

The company turned to Heemskerck's cousin Hugo Grotius, a lawyer of twenty-one. In 1604 and 1605 he wrote a long treatise, later called On the Law of Prize, grounding the seizure in natural justice and arguing more broadly about when war is lawful. It was never published in his lifetime, except one chapter.

After Ostend, Spinola carried the war into the Republic's east. In 1605 he took Oldenzaal and Lingen, in 1606 Groenlo and Rheinberg, and for the first time since 1594 a Spanish army stood north of the great rivers. He pledged his own fortune to the bankers to keep it paid, and was never repaid.

Philip III paid for the Army of Flanders and had to approve any settlement. In 1607 his treasury declared itself bankrupt. He was appalled that Albert would concede Dutch independence, and ratified the ceasefire of that April only because his finances left him no choice.

The Duke of Lerma held all of Philip's authority as his favourite. He had made peace with France in 1598 and with England in 1604, when Spain was exhausted, but he used his influence against recognising the independence of the Low Countries. Bankruptcy, not conviction, brought Spain to the truce of 1609.

Albert wanted peace sooner than Madrid. In March 1607 he sent Jan Neyen, an Antwerp-born Franciscan raised a Protestant, who had long had Maurice's ear, to find terms for talks. When they stuck on Dutch independence, Neyen went to Spain and won the king's consent to treat the Republic as if it were sovereign.

James VI of Scotland became King of England in 1603. In August 1604, by the Treaty of London, he made peace with Spain and the archdukes and ended England's military and financial support for the Dutch rebels. The Republic now faced Spain without its English ally.

Henry IV of France wanted the Republic alive as a check on the Habsburgs; between 1598 and 1610 he sent it more than twelve million livres. In 1607 he sent his counsellor Pierre Jeannin to The Hague as ambassador, to help make a settlement.

Jeannin led the French mediators at the talks that opened in February 1608, and with the English envoy Ralph Winwood he stayed to the end after the other princes' delegates had gone home. When peace proved impossible, the two steered both sides to a long truce that was silent on everything contentious.

Oldenbarnevelt led the Dutch side in the Binnenhof against Spinola and the archdukes' envoys. He refused Spain's demand that Dutch ships keep out of the Indies, and carried the truce against Maurice, Zeeland's privateers and towns such as Amsterdam that feared for their trade. It was signed at Antwerp on 9 April 1609.

Maurice declined to sit at the talks, and his cousin William Louis led the Republic's delegation in his place. Maurice wanted the war fought on and full independence won. He lost the argument to Oldenbarnevelt, and the partnership that had won at Nieuwpoort began to come apart.

Between 2 and 6 October 1608, with the delegations in town, Hans Lipperhey, a spectacle-maker from Middelburg, demonstrated at Maurice's headquarters in The Hague a tube for seeing things far away as if they were near. The States General refused him a patent, since others claimed the same, but paid him well for copies. A report of an embassy from Siam to Maurice spread the news across Europe.

Heemskerck, now an admiral, took a fleet to the coast of Spain. On 25 April 1607, in the bay of Gibraltar, it destroyed a Spanish fleet, and Heemskerck was killed in the battle. A ceasefire had been agreed in the Netherlands thirteen days before.

In 1609 Grotius published a chapter of his treatise separately as Mare Liberum, The Free Sea: the sea could not be anyone's territory and must stay open to navigation and trade. It defended the Dutch refusal at the talks to keep out of the Indies, and the truce said nothing about them.

Jacobus Arminius had taught theology at Leiden since 1603. He questioned the strict doctrine that God had chosen the saved and the damned regardless of their faith, and his critics called him a Pelagian. He died on 19 October 1609, six months after the truce was signed, with the quarrel unresolved.

Franciscus Gomarus, a refugee from Bruges, held the strict view and fought Arminius in public disputations. When the States of Holland, backed by Oldenbarnevelt and Wtenbogaert, appointed Conrad Vorstius to succeed Arminius, Gomarus took it badly, resigned his chair and went to Middelburg in 1611.

Johannes Wtenbogaert, preacher at The Hague, had come there in 1591 at Maurice's invitation and taught his young half-brother Frederick Henry. With Oldenbarnevelt he planned the Remonstrance of 14 January 1610: five articles of the Arminian view, put to the States of Holland with a plea for their protection. Its signers became the Remonstrants.

Simon Episcopius had studied under both Arminius and Gomarus. In 1612 he succeeded Gomarus as professor of theology at Leiden; the appointment won him the bitter enmity of the strict Calvinists. He became the Remonstrants' leading theologian.

Oldenbarnevelt held that the civil authorities, not church synods, should decide what the public church taught. Under his lead the States of Holland took the Remonstrant preachers under their protection and refused the national synod that the Counter-Remonstrants, Gomarus's party, demanded.

Grotius, pensionary of Rotterdam from 1613, argued the case in a pamphlet the States of Holland ordered. Late in 1613 or early in 1614 he drafted their edict for the peace of the churches, which imposed moderation on the preachers and asked them to keep to the few beliefs that civil order needed.

Maurice had sat under Wtenbogaert's sermons for years. In 1617 the Counter-Remonstrants of The Hague, kept out of the town's churches, took over the Kloosterkerk, and Maurice began going to their services there instead. The country read it as the captain-general choosing his side.

The truce let the archdukes rebuild the south. Albert planned canals to carry trade from Ostend and Bruges round the Dutch closure of the Scheldt, and his government set up pawnbanks for the poor. In September 1609 the couple made Peter Paul Rubens, home from eight years in Italy, their court painter.

Rubens was allowed to keep his studio in Antwerp rather than at court in Brussels, and to work for other clients. Altarpieces such as the Raising of the Cross of 1610 made him the leading painter of Flanders. He stayed close to Isabella until her death, as painter and later as envoy.

François d'Aguilon, a Jesuit born in Brussels, started a school of mathematics in Antwerp in 1611. His Six Books of Optics, printed in Antwerp in 1613, contained one of the first studies of seeing with two eyes, and Rubens drew its illustrations, among them the pictures that open each book.

The company needed a single command in Asia. In 1609 the directors made Pieter Both, once an admiral of one of the older companies, its first governor-general; he governed from December 1610, made treaties in the Moluccas and drove the Spaniards from Tidore. Sailing home in 1615, he drowned off Mauritius.

Gerard Reynst, an Amsterdam merchant, took over from Both in November 1614. He died at Jayakarta on Java in December 1615, after barely a year in office.

Laurens Reael, an Amsterdam lawyer who had lodged at Leiden with his brother-in-law Arminius, governed from June 1616. He would act against the English traders in the Spice Islands only as far as international law allowed, and quarrelled with the directors over them and the islanders. He resigned in October 1617; the directors named Coen in his place.

Isaac Le Maire, one of the company's founding directors, had been forced off its board in 1605 and bound not to compete in the East. The monopoly covered the routes by the Cape of Good Hope and the Strait of Magellan, so he founded an Australian Company to find a third way into the Pacific.

Jacob Le Maire sailed from Texel on 14 June 1615 with the Eendracht and the Hoorn. The Hoorn burned in Patagonia, but in January 1616 the Eendracht found a strait south of Magellan's and rounded a cape they named Hoorn after their home port: a route outside the monopoly.

Willem Schouten of Hoorn, captain of the Eendracht and an equal partner, took her across the Pacific to Java. At Jakarta, in November 1616, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, then the company's second man in Asia, would not believe in a new route and seized the ship for breaking the monopoly. Jacob died on the voyage home; Isaac won his case in 1622.

Willem Usselincx, an Antwerp merchant who had seen the wealth of the Iberian colonies, had written down a plan for a West India Company as early as 1600: Dutch colonies in the Americas, to beat Spain there. To get the truce, Oldenbarnevelt took the proposal off the table, and for a few years Dutch ships traded to South America under foreign flags.

Henry Hudson, an English captain, was hired by the East India Company in 1609 to find a passage to Asia north of Russia, and left Amsterdam in April on the Halve Maen with directions from Plancius. Ice blocked the way; against his orders he turned west, and in September sailed up the river that now bears his name. Dutch fur traders followed.

On 4 August 1617 Holland passed the Sharp Resolution, carried by Oldenbarnevelt: its towns could hire their own soldiers, waardgelders, to keep order, and troops paid by Holland owed their first loyalty to Holland. Maurice and every other province except Utrecht answered that the States General held sovereignty in matters of common defence.

Rombout Hogerbeets, pensionary of Leiden, met Grotius and the Utrecht regents around Gillis van Ledenberg on 5 July 1618 to plan resistance to the disbanding; the meeting was later construed as a conspiracy. On 29 August, after a secret vote of the States General, he was arrested at the Binnenhof with Oldenbarnevelt, Grotius and Ledenberg.

Gillis van Ledenberg, secretary of the States of Utrecht since 1588, had rallied his province to keep its waardgelders and tried to stop federal troops marching on the city. Threatened with torture, he killed himself in his cell on 28 September 1618 so that his property would not be forfeit. The court condemned him all the same, and his body was executed.

Anthonie Duyck, who had followed Maurice's campaigns for the Council of State, was named against his will one of the three prosecutors before a special court of twenty-four judges. Oldenbarnevelt was condemned and beheaded in the Binnenhof on 13 May 1619, aged seventy-one. Grotius and Hogerbeets got life imprisonment. In 1621 Duyck became Grand Pensionary of Holland.

Grotius was locked in Loevestein castle, and his wife, Maria van Reigersberch, kept him in books, sent in and out in a chest. On 22 March 1621 she and their maid Elsje van Houwening packed him into it; it was carried out to Gorinchem, and he escaped to Paris, where the French crown gave him a pension.

François van Aerssen owed his career to Oldenbarnevelt, who had sent him to France as the Republic's envoy in 1598. In 1613 he dealt with the Huguenots against the Advocate's wishes and was recalled. He turned on his patron and became Maurice's standing adviser; in 1619 Maurice seated him among Holland's nobles, giving the Advocate's enemies the majority that set up the court.

Sir Dudley Carleton, James I's ambassador at The Hague from 1616, was a strict Calvinist who saw the quarrel weakening an ally. He came down on Maurice's side, pressed for a national synod in line with his king's thinking, and helped choose the English delegates who went to it.

In 1618 Maurice inherited the title of Prince of Orange from his brother. On 31 July he marched into Utrecht and had its waardgelders lay down their arms. On 28 August the States General secretly authorised him to arrest the Remonstrant leaders, and the next day they were taken. He went from town to town replacing Remonstrant councils with Counter-Remonstrants.

The national synod met at Dordrecht in November 1618, with delegates from Reformed churches abroad; Gisbertus Voetius, aged twenty-nine, was among the youngest. Its president was Johannes Bogerman, preacher at Leeuwarden. After a month over procedure, the Remonstrants were ejected on 14 January 1619, and the synod's Canons condemned their teaching.

Episcopius spoke for the thirteen Remonstrants cited before the synod and was refused a hearing. After it ended he and the others were deprived of their offices and expelled from the country. He went to Antwerp and then France, and in 1621 wrote the Remonstrant Confession.

Wtenbogaert had fled to Antwerp after the arrests. On 24 May 1619 he was banished and his goods confiscated. That year the exiles founded a Remonstrant community at Antwerp, and from exile he went on directing the Remonstrants' affairs.

At Breda in 1618, away from the synod, Isaac Beeckman, the son of a Middelburg candle-maker, just back from taking a medical degree in France, fell in with a young French volunteer in Maurice's army. Beeckman kept an extensive journal of his studies, and their talks on mathematics, falling bodies and music went into it.

René Descartes, twenty-two, had joined Maurice's army at Breda to learn soldiering and military engineering of the kind Stevin taught. Beeckman encouraged him to turn mathematics on nature, and in 1618 Descartes wrote him a Compendium of Music. He came back to the Republic in 1628 and wrote almost all his major works there.

The directors named Jan Pieterszoon Coen governor-general in October 1617; he took office in 1618. In May 1619 he stormed Jayakarta, burned it, and built the company's Asian capital, Batavia, on the site. In 1621 he took the Banda Islands, then the only source of nutmeg: of some fifteen thousand Bandanese about a thousand were left, and the groves went to Dutch planters worked by slaves.

Philip III died on 31 March 1621 and his son became Philip IV; nine days later the truce expired and was not renewed. When Albert died on 13 July, childless, the southern provinces reverted to the new king, and Isabella governed them for him.

Gaspar de Guzmán, Count of Olivares, rose with the young king. With his uncle Baltasar de Zúñiga he committed Spain to a more aggressive policy alongside the Emperor, and in 1622 he succeeded Zúñiga at the head of the government. The Dutch war went well for Spain in the 1620s, at great expense.

Spinola reopened the war in the field: he took Jülich in 1622 and failed before Bergen op Zoom the same year. On 28 August 1624 he laid siege to Breda, a town of the Nassau family, and sealed it off.

In Bohemia the Protestant estates had rejected their Habsburg king, Ferdinand, and in 1619 offered the crown to the Elector Palatine. On 8 November 1620 Ferdinand, by then Emperor, crushed their army at the White Mountain outside Prague.

Frederick V, mocked as the Winter King, lost Bohemia and then his own Palatinate to imperial troops. He was Maurice's nephew, a son of William of Orange's daughter Louise Juliana, and he fled to his uncle; he lived the rest of his life in exile, mostly at The Hague. In 1623 an imperial edict took the Palatinate from him.

Elizabeth Stuart, James I's daughter and Frederick's queen, kept her exiled court at The Hague. Among her ladies was a young German countess, Amalia of Solms-Braunfels, who had fled Prague with her and helped deliver her baby on the road. In 1622 Maurice's half-brother Frederick Henry fell for Amalia; she would not be his mistress, only his wife.

Willem van Oldenbarnevelt, lord of Stoutenburg, lost his post as governor of Bergen op Zoom after his father's execution. With his brother Reinier and the Remonstrant preacher Slatius he plotted to kill Maurice on 7 February 1623; the plan leaked the day before. Reinier was beheaded. Willem escaped to Brussels and, his will later showed, became a Catholic and served in Spain's army.

Justinus of Nassau, William of Orange's son by his mistress, held Breda for the Republic. Spinola drove off Maurice's relief army, and Maurice died at The Hague on 23 April 1625 with the siege still on. In June, after nine months cut off, Justinus surrendered and marched out with his banners and arms.

Weeks after the truce ended, on 3 June 1621, the States General chartered the West India Company, with a monopoly of Dutch trade to West Africa and the Americas, run by nineteen directors, the Heren XIX. Usselincx was among its founders, but he had wanted colonies of Protestant settlers, and for that he got little support.

Johannes de Laet, an Antwerp-born merchant and scholar of Leiden, was one of the company's founding directors and stayed on its board until his death. In 1625 he published the New World, or Description of the West Indies, compiled from the writings and notes of many nations, describing the Americas coast by coast.

Jacob Willekens commanded the company's first great fleet: thirty-five ships and 6,500 men, which left Texel on 22 December 1623 and learned its target only at Cape Verde. In May 1624 it took Salvador da Bahia, the capital of Portuguese Brazil, whose king was Philip IV.

Piet Hein, a sea captain's son from Delfshaven who had once rowed as a captive in Spanish galleys, led the assault on Salvador's harbour fort. Then he and Willekens left a garrison in the town and sailed on to other missions, as their orders said.

Philip IV ordered a joint Spanish and Portuguese armada, the Journey of the Vassals: fifty-two ships and twelve thousand men under Fadrique de Toledo. It reached Salvador on 1 April 1625 and besieged it for weeks; the garrison surrendered on 1 May. A Dutch relief fleet arrived days later.

Coen handed Batavia to Pieter de Carpentier on 1 February 1623 and sailed home to a hero's welcome. De Carpentier governed the company in Asia until Coen came back in 1627.

On Ambon in February 1623 a Japanese soldier in the company's pay was caught spying on the fort's defences. Under torture he confessed to a plot that implicated the English traders. The governor, Herman van Speult, had the suspects questioned under torture, and twenty-one men, ten of them English, were executed. In England it was remembered as the Amboyna massacre.

Louis XIII was a boy when his father, Henry IV, was murdered in 1610, and his mother ruled as regent and kept her influence after his majority. In 1624 he brought Cardinal Richelieu into his council, and that August made him chief minister.

On 10 June 1624 France and the Republic signed the Treaty of Compiègne, with Richelieu among the negotiators: French subsidies for the Dutch war against Spain, in return for naval help and trading privileges. Catholic France was paying the Protestant Republic to fight the Habsburgs, and later used the treaty to demand Dutch ships against the Huguenots of La Rochelle.

Maurice's half-brother Frederick Henry, William of Orange's youngest son, inherited the title of Prince of Orange in April 1625, and the provinces voted him Maurice's offices of stadholder and captain-general. Under him the banished Remonstrants began to come home. In 1627 he took Groenlo, the first of the sieges that earned him the name of city forcer.

Maurice, dying, made his brother promise to marry, and on 4 April 1625 Frederick Henry married Amalia of Solms-Braunfels. Together they built up court life at The Hague, with new palaces such as Huis ten Bosch, and Amalia collected art and jewels.

Constantijn Huygens, son of the secretary of the Council of State, had gone to Venice in 1620 as secretary of Aerssen's embassy. In 1625 he published his collected poems, Otia, and became Frederick Henry's secretary, a post he held for the rest of the prince's life.

With the prince's army fixed round 's-Hertogenbosch and Van den Bergh's invaders in the Veluwe, Frederick Henry sent Colonel Otto van Gendt, commandant of Emmerich, with 2,500 men against Wesel, the invaders' supply base. On 19 August 1629 he took it by surprise, the garrison barely resisting, and the invaders had to retreat. He became Wesel's governor.

Spinola left Flanders in 1628 and never returned; command in the field passed to Count Hendrik van den Bergh, Frederick Henry's own cousin. In 1629 he could not break the prince's lines round 's-Hertogenbosch, so he invaded the Veluwe with imperial troops to draw the prince away; on 14 August his army took Amersfoort.

Anthonie Schetz, Baron of Grobbendonk, had governed 's-Hertogenbosch since 1589. From 30 April 1629 Frederick Henry ringed the marsh-bound city with twenty-eight thousand men, diverted its two rivers with a forty-kilometre dyke and drained the ground with horse mills. With Wesel lost, no relief came, and Schetz surrendered on 14 September 1629.

Peter Minuit, a Walloon born at Wesel, became director of New Netherland in 1626, succeeding Willem Verhulst. That year, according to a Dutch letter of November 1626, he bought the island of Manhattan from the Lenape for trade goods worth sixty guilders.

In September 1628 Piet Hein, now the company's general with Hendrick Lonck as his second, caught the Mexican half of Spain's treasure fleet off Cuba; it ran aground in the bay of Matanzas and surrendered without a fight. The haul came to 11.5 million guilders, and the company paid a 50 per cent dividend. Made lieutenant-admiral of Holland, Hein was killed fighting the Dunkirk privateers on 18 June 1629.

After four years in the Republic, Coen came back to Batavia as governor-general on 30 September 1627. The town he had built on the ruins of Jayakarta stood in the way of the strongest king on Java.

Sultan Agung of Mataram ruled most of central and eastern Java and meant to rule all of it. In August 1628 his fleet arrived before Batavia asking leave to land and trade, and his army attacked; Coen burned the suburbs to deny it cover. A second siege followed in 1629. Both failed, and Coen died in the town on 21 September 1629, during the second.

Joost van den Vondel, an Amsterdam poet born to Mennonite parents, published Palamedes, or Murdered Innocence, in October 1625: a Greek hero destroyed by false charges, with Oldenbarnevelt behind Palamedes, Maurice behind King Agamemnon and Aerssen behind Ulysses. The authorities fined him heavily, and the play went through edition after edition.

In Paris, living on a French royal pension, Grotius published On the Law of War and Peace in 1625, dedicated to Louis XIII: a system of natural law binding on all peoples, setting out when war is just and what is lawful in it.

Jacques Specx had founded the company's trading post at Hirado in Japan in 1609 and run it for years. He reached Batavia just as Coen died, and on 22 September 1629 the Council of the Indies made him acting governor-general; he held the post until April 1632.

Hendrick Lonck, Hein's second at Matanzas, replaced him in 1629 as the company's captain-general. In February 1630 his fleet appeared off Pernambuco, where most of Brazil's sugar was grown, and took Olinda on 16 February and Recife on 3 March.

Colonel Diederik van Waerdenburgh commanded the expedition's soldiers, about seven thousand men on sixty-seven ships by one count. Made governor of the conquest, he pushed out from Recife with new troops and Portuguese deserters, and by 1634 the company held the coast from Rio Grande do Norte to Cape Santo Agostinho.

Matias de Albuquerque, governor of Pernambuco, could not hold the towns. Before retreating he burned the sugar warehouses at Recife's port, then fortified a camp on high ground between Olinda and Recife, the Arraial do Bom Jesus. From there he kept the Dutch confined to the towns until 1635.

Isabella governed the southern provinces for her nephew Philip IV. She kept Rubens close, as her painter and as an envoy, and from 1627 he travelled between the courts of Spain and England in the cause of peace.

Rubens spent eight months in Madrid in 1628 and 1629, painting for Philip IV between negotiations, then crossed to London. Cambridge gave him an honorary degree in 1629, and Charles I knighted him in 1630.

Charles I, king since 1625, had been at war with Spain. By the Treaty of Madrid of 15 November 1630 he made peace, restored trade on the terms of 1604, and agreed to break off England's commerce with the Dutch Republic, still at war with Spain.

Frederick Henry had meant to strike at Antwerp in 1632, but secret talks with discontented southern nobles drew him up the Meuse instead. He took Venlo in June, then Roermond, and besieged Maastricht, which fell in August 1632. The commander in those parts, Van den Bergh, had made no attempt to defend Venlo or Roermond.

Blamed by his rivals for the loss of 's-Hertogenbosch, and with his wife's estates near it confiscated by the Dutch, Van den Bergh joined southern nobles plotting against Spanish rule. He let the Meuse towns go and in 1632 went over to the Republic, hoping the south would rise. It did not.

René de Renesse, Count of Warfusée, presided over the Council of Finance in Brussels. In April 1632 he and Van den Bergh organised the Conspiracy of Nobles, which would have divided the Spanish Netherlands between the Republic and France, and he tried to bring a French army in. Accused of abusing his office, he fled to Liège.

With Maastricht lost, the States General of the southern provinces met from 7 September 1632, and Isabella tried to open peace talks with the North on her own, outside the king. They failed. She died on 1 December 1633, and in July 1634 Philip IV dissolved the assembly.

Pieter Roose, a Brussels lawyer whom Philip IV had made a councillor of state in Madrid, came back in 1632 as president of the Privy Council, Olivares's man in the Netherlands. He became in effect the civilian head of the government in Brussels, and stayed in office until 1653. He was a close friend of the theologian Cornelius Jansen.

Adriaen Pauw, son of an Amsterdam burgomaster who had helped found the West India Company, became Grand Pensionary of Holland in 1631. Like Holland and Amsterdam's Andries Bicker, he wanted peace with Spain. Frederick Henry wanted an alliance with France, and he would send Pauw to Paris to make one.

Domingos Fernandes Calabar, a mixed-race smuggler and soldier from Porto Calvo, had fought for Albuquerque and been wounded twice. In April 1632, for reasons no one recorded, he went over to the Dutch. He knew every inland road, and he planned some of their attacks on Albuquerque's camp; captured at Porto Calvo in 1635, he was executed for treason.

Hendrik Brouwer had found the fast route to Java across the southern ocean in 1611, and by 1617 every company ship had to take it. On 18 April 1632 he was appointed governor-general in Specx's place, with Anthony van Diemen as his assistant throughout his term.

Hans Putmans, governor of Formosa since 1629, had helped the Ming admiral Zheng Zhilong hunt pirates, but won no guarantee of trade. In 1633 he turned on him to force open trade with China: in July, with hired pirate junks, he surprised and destroyed the fleet Zheng was building near Xiamen.

Zheng Zhilong, a pirate chief whom the Ming court had taken into its service in 1628, struck back. On 22 October 1633 at Liaoluo Bay, off Kinmen, his fireships destroyed three Dutch ships and captured another, and the rest fled. Afterwards Zheng, free of rivals at home, granted the company the trading privileges it had wanted.

After Isabella's death the Marquis of Aytona governed for a year. On 4 November 1634 Philip IV's brother Ferdinand, the Cardinal-Infante, took over, fresh from beating the Swedes at Nördlingen, with orders to restore Spain's reputation and win back cities so that a truce could be had on good terms.

In 1635 a French army joined Frederick Henry's and invaded Brabant; Tienen, Diest and Aarschot fell. Anthonie Schetz, who had lost 's-Hertogenbosch in 1629, held Leuven against them from 24 June to 4 July, until they gave up the siege, and the joint invasion came to nothing.

Cornelius Jansen, a Dutch-born professor at Leuven, had been suspected of wanting a free Catholic south. To appease Madrid he wrote Mars Gallicus in 1635, a violent attack on French ambitions and on Richelieu's indifference to Catholic interests. It worked: in 1636 he became bishop of Ypres. He died there in 1638.

Richelieu now brought France into the war. Early in 1635 France and the Republic made an alliance at Paris to invade the Spanish Netherlands together, and in May France declared war on Spain. The alliance had been negotiated in Paris by Holland's Grand Pensionary.

Pauw, who had wanted peace with Spain, accepted Frederick Henry's mission and signed the treaty of Paris with France. In 1636 he resigned as Grand Pensionary.

Jacob Cats, pensionary of Dordrecht and a much-read moralist poet, had held Holland's chief office for two years before Pauw. In 1636 he took it again and kept it until 1651, through the rest of the war, the peace and the prince's coup.

After years of neglect under Philips van Dorp, the fleet was in a bad state. When Van Dorp resigned in October 1637, the States of Holland asked Maarten Tromp, a captain Frederick Henry had promoted, to take command as lieutenant-admiral. Tromp accepted on condition he got more and better-manned ships, and the States promised them.

Witte de With, born in Brielle a year after Tromp, brave but brutal and ill-tempered, became his vice-admiral. Both had served as flag captains under Piet Hein, and De With would be Tromp's rival for the rest of his career.

In 1639 Antonio de Oquendo brought a great fleet up the Channel with troops for Flanders. Harried by Tromp, he took refuge in the Downs, off the English coast. On 21 October Tromp attacked with fireships and destroyed or captured much of the Spanish fleet, though most of the troops had already been ferried to Dunkirk in small, fast ships.

The joint invasion of 1635 stalled at Leuven. Frederick Henry turned back to the strongholds nearest home, and in October 1637 he won back Breda, the Nassau town Spinola had taken twelve years before.

Huygens used his place as the prince's secretary to bring artists to the court. In 1629 he had discovered a young Leiden painter, Rembrandt, and in the 1630s he was in touch with him, with the painter Jan Lievens and with Descartes.

Through Huygens, Rembrandt van Rijn got important commissions from the court at The Hague, and Frederick Henry went on buying his work. In a letter to Huygens he left the only surviving account of what he sought in his art: the greatest and most natural movement.

Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen, a grand-nephew of William of Orange, was appointed governor of the company's Brazil in 1636 on Frederick Henry's recommendation, and landed at Recife in January 1637. He pushed the colony along the coast, built a new town beside Recife with the architect Pieter Post, and sent ships across the Atlantic that took Elmina, Portugal's fort on the Gold Coast.

Willem Piso, a Leiden-born physician, entered the company's service in 1637 as doctor to Johan Maurits and sailed with a scientific and artistic team. He stayed until 1644, studying the diseases and remedies of Brazil.

Georg Marcgraf, a German naturalist, astronomer and cartographer, came with the same team and recorded Brazil's plants and animals, partly in a secret cipher. He died in Luanda in 1644. The company director Johannes de Laet decoded his notes and published them with Piso's in 1648 as the Natural History of Brazil.

Frans Post, a Haarlem painter, went out with Johan Maurits on the recommendation of his brother Pieter, the governor's architect. He painted the colony's landscapes, came home in 1644, and went on making pictures of Brazil from his sketches for years after.

Albert Eckhout, from Groningen, painted Brazil's inhabitants for Johan Maurits: eight life-size figures of its peoples, twelve still lifes and a large picture of an Indigenous dance. Johan Maurits later gave them to his cousin Frederick III of Denmark, and they are still in Copenhagen.

Anthony van Diemen, a bankrupt who had made good in the company's service and found favour with Coen, had been Brouwer's assistant throughout his term. Appointed in 1635, he took office as governor-general on 1 January 1636 and turned the company's fleets on the Portuguese.

Rajasinha II, king of Kandy in the hills of Ceylon, held perhaps a third of the island; the Portuguese held most of the rest, including the cinnamon lands. In 1638 he wrote to the company asking for help to drive them out, offering cinnamon in return.

Adam Westerwolt, a Leiden-born admiral and member of the Council of the Indies, came on from blockading Goa in 1638 and took the Portuguese fort of Batticaloa on Ceylon's east coast. On 23 May he and Rajasinha signed a treaty: they would expel the Portuguese together and share forts and spoils fairly, and the company would have the cinnamon. Each side read it differently.

On 1 December 1640 Portugal threw off Spain's king and acclaimed the Duke of Braganza as João IV. His envoys signed a ten-year truce with the Republic at The Hague on 12 June 1641, but it would bind the colonies only after ratification, and overseas the fighting went on.

Cornelis Jol, nicknamed Houtebeen, Wooden Leg, had sailed from Brazil for Africa on Johan Maurits's orders on 30 May 1641, before the truce was signed. In August he took Luanda, Angola's slaving port, and then the island of São Tomé, where he died of malaria on 31 October.

The company recalled Johan Maurits in 1644 to cut its costs. João Fernandes Vieira, a planter who had prospered under the Dutch and, like many planters, owed the company money, led a rising against it in June 1645.

Henrique Dias, a Brazilian-born soldier, led a regiment of enslaved and freed Black men that had been fighting the Dutch since the 1630s; by 1636 he was called Governor of the Blacks. His men joined the rising to win back Pernambuco.

Antônio Filipe Camarão, a Potiguara chief whose name Poti meant prawn, had fought the Dutch since 1630. On 4 October 1645 he wrote in Old Tupi to the Potiguara leaders on the Dutch side, among them his cousin Pedro Poti and Antônio Paraupaba, promising pardon if they changed sides and death if they did not.

In New Netherland the director, Willem Kieft, had demanded tribute from the Lenape and their neighbours against the settlers' advice. On 25 February 1643 he ordered strikes on refugee camps at Pavonia and Corlears Hook; at Pavonia soldiers killed some 120 people, women and children among them. The war that followed united the region's peoples against the colony. Recalled, he drowned in a shipwreck off Wales in 1647.

The Cardinal-Infante held the south through six years of war with France and the Republic, but he died in Brussels on 9 November 1641, aged thirty-two, and the government passed for a time to a Portuguese nobleman in Spain's service.

Francisco de Melo, a Portuguese noble who stayed loyal to Spain when Portugal rebelled, governed the south from 1641 to 1644. He beat the French at Honnecourt on 26 May 1642, then invaded France and laid siege to Rocroi.

On 19 May 1643, five days after Louis XIV became king, the Duke of Enghien, twenty-one, destroyed Melo's army at Rocroi. In 1646, the year he became Prince of Condé, he took Dunkirk for France.

Manuel de Moura Corte Real, Marquis of Castelo Rodrigo, another Portuguese in Spain's service, lost his family's lands in Portugal for his loyalty. He governed the south from 1644 to 1647, while Frederick Henry took Sas van Gent and Hulst from the north and the French took Dunkirk from the west.

In January 1641 Van Diemen's forces and their ally Johor took Malacca from the Portuguese after a five-month siege. He looked further still. Frans Visscher drew up three routes for voyages of discovery, and in August 1642 Van Diemen and the Council of the Indies sent Abel Tasman south.

Abel Tasman sailed from Batavia on 14 August 1642, by Mauritius and the far south, to a coast he named Van Diemen's Land after his patron, now Tasmania. He went on to New Zealand, where Māori killed four of his men, and passed Tonga and Fiji on the way home; in 1644 he mapped Australia's north coast.

Frans Visscher of Flushing, who had sailed with the Nassau fleet of 1623 to 1626, had drawn up the plan the voyage followed and went on it as pilot-major. In 1642 he wrote a memoir on the discovery of the South Land.

Van Diemen died on 19 April 1645. A week before, he had the Council of the Indies name Cornelis van der Lijn, a merchant from Alkmaar, to succeed him, against the directors' rule that the council choose a stand-in for them to confirm. The directors overturned it, then appointed him anyway in October 1646.

Descartes had lived in the Republic since 1628, moving from town to town. In 1637 he published his Discourse on the Method, with essays on optics, meteors and geometry, and in 1641 his Meditations.

Henricus Regius, professor at Utrecht, became the chief champion of Descartes's ideas in the Netherlands and corresponded with him from 1638. His teaching, which also defended Copernicus against Aristotle, brought him into conflict with the university and the town council.

Gisbertus Voetius had been a field preacher at the siege of 's-Hertogenbosch and had fought Jansen in print. In March 1642, as rector of Utrecht, he had the senate formally condemn the Cartesian philosophy and Regius. Descartes answered with a public attack on him, and the quarrel ran on for years.

Elisabeth, the eldest daughter of Frederick V and Elizabeth Stuart, grew up in her parents' exile at The Hague. In her letters to Descartes she questioned how an immaterial soul could move a body, and he dedicated his Principles of Philosophy to her in 1644.

Frederick Henry died at The Hague on 14 March 1647, and his son William II, twenty, received his offices. William had married Charles I's daughter Mary in 1641. He opposed a settlement with Spain.

Amalia had pushed Frederick Henry into the talks at Münster, and in 1649 Philip IV gave her the lordship of Turnhout in thanks. As a widow she commissioned the Oranjezaal, the painted hall of Huis ten Bosch in her husband's memory, built from 1648 to 1651 by Jacob van Campen under her direction and Huygens's.

Adriaen Pauw had led the Dutch delegation at Münster in practice since 1646, speaking for Holland and Amsterdam, which wanted peace and a smaller army. The envoys signed the peace on 30 January 1648.

Gaspar de Bracamonte, Count of Peñaranda, led Philip IV's delegation. By the treaty Spain recognised the States General as sovereign, the Scheldt stayed closed to ships bound for Antwerp, and the companies kept their conquests. The two sides swore to it on 15 May 1648.

Gerard ter Borch, a painter from Zwolle, was at Münster during the congress and painted the ratification of the treaty, the two delegations taking the oath together. It became one of his most celebrated works.

Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Emperor's brother, became governor of the Spanish Netherlands on 10 April 1647, just as the Dutch were leaving the war. He went on fighting France, with limited success; his real passion was collecting paintings.

Cardinal Mazarin, who had taken Richelieu's place in 1642, governed France for Anne of Austria, regent for the boy Louis XIV. Without its Dutch ally, France fought Spain on alone, through the civil wars of the Fronde, until 1659.

Peter Stuyvesant, a Calvinist minister's son, had lost a leg to a Spanish cannonball at Sint Maarten in 1644. In May 1645 the company chose him to replace Kieft; he arrived at New Amsterdam in 1647 as director-general and set about restoring the company's authority.

Salvador Correia de Sá, governor of Rio de Janeiro, had fought the Dutch at Bahia in 1625. In 1648 he sailed from Rio with a fleet and in August retook Luanda. The company lost its slaving port in Angola while its Brazilian colony was in revolt.

Andries Bicker, Amsterdam's leading burgomaster, with his brother Cornelis and their cousins the De Graeffs, had driven the peace. Now they wanted the army cut. Early in 1649 it still had 35,000 men and Amsterdam wanted 26,000; a compromise left 29,250, but in 1650 Holland ordered further cuts in the companies it paid for.

On 30 July 1650 William II had six leading members of the States of Holland arrested at The Hague and sent to Loevestein, the castle Grotius had escaped from. Among them was Jacob de Witt, burgomaster of Dordrecht, the father of Johan.

When the prince's troops failed to surprise Amsterdam, Cornelis de Graeff, the Bickers' cousin, passed on William's terms: the Bickers must leave the council. With Joan Huydecoper he negotiated the settlement. The Bickers went, Holland withdrew its cuts, and the prisoners were freed.

William II meant to keep his army and his authority. At the end of 1649 a forged pamphlet claimed that Amsterdam was in league with England; William is thought to have had it spread. On 30 July 1650 he struck at Holland's leaders and at its greatest city at once.

William Frederick, stadholder of Friesland, led the troops toward Amsterdam that night. They lost their way in the rain on the heath near Hilversum, and a postman from Hamburg who passed them warned the city, which shut its gates. Amsterdam gave way all the same. Later that year Groningen and Drenthe also made him their stadholder.

On 6 November 1650 William II died of smallpox, aged twenty-four. Eight days later his widow Mary, the daughter of the executed Charles I, gave birth to their son. She became his guardian, at odds with her mother-in-law Amalia and unpopular for backing her exiled brothers.

William III was born Prince of Orange and held no office. Holland and four other provinces left the stadholder's place empty, and Holland's regents governed without a prince; only the northern provinces kept William Frederick.

England's Parliament passed a Navigation Act in October 1651 aimed at Dutch shipping. On 29 May 1652 Tromp met Robert Blake's fleet off Dover; his salute came late, the English opened fire, and the first Anglo-Dutch war began. After a failed campaign that summer Tromp was removed and Witte de With took his place, until Tromp was restored.

Robert Blake, General at Sea of the English Commonwealth since 1649, led its main fleet through the war. In the summer of 1653 the English blockaded the Dutch coast, choking the Republic's trade.

Michiel de Ruyter, a Flushing merchant captain about to retire, took command of a squadron in 1652 and in August beat George Ayscue off Plymouth while guarding a convoy. When Tromp died he refused the supreme command, fearing a clash with more senior officers, and in March 1654 became vice-admiral of the Amsterdam admiralty.

Johan de Witt, Jacob's son, became pensionary of Dordrecht in December 1650. Cats retired in 1651 and Pauw held Holland's chief office again until his death in February 1653; on 30 July 1653 the States of Holland chose De Witt, twenty-seven. Days later Tromp was shot dead in the battle off Scheveningen, though the English lifted their blockade.

Jacob van Wassenaer Obdam, a cavalry colonel and nobleman of De Witt's party, became lieutenant-admiral and supreme commander of the fleet in Tromp's place, and De Witt persuaded De Ruyter to serve as his adviser.

Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector from December 1653, made peace with the Republic at Westminster in April 1654. His price was that the infant William III, Charles I's grandson, must never hold power. De Witt arranged that only Holland bound itself, and on 4 May 1654 its States passed the Act of Seclusion.

The Act of Seclusion barred the House of Orange from Holland's stadholdership. William III was three years old, in the care of his mother Mary, who was at odds with his grandmother Amalia.

Francisco Barreto de Meneses reached Brazil in 1647, was arrested and escaped, and took command of the rebels' army, with regiments under Vieira, André Vidal de Negreiros, Henrique Dias and Camarão. He beat the company's army at Guararapes on 19 April 1648 and 19 February 1649; Recife surrendered in January 1654.

Antônio Paraupaba, a Potiguara leader and interpreter who had been educated in the Republic and become a Calvinist, left Brazil with the Dutch in February 1654, with his wife and two children. In 1654 and 1656 he appealed to the States General to restore the alliance and save his people from the Portuguese; he died in the Republic in 1656, without success.

The directors let Van der Lijn go at his own request in 1650, and Carel Reyniersz succeeded him. He enforced their orders to stamp out private spice trading and overproduction so strictly that West Ceram rose against the company. In 1653 the directors meant to dismiss him; he asked to go first, and died at Batavia that May.

Joan Maetsuycker, a Catholic lawyer trained at Leuven, had governed Ceylon from 1646 to 1650 and calmed Rajasinha's fury at the company's truce with the Portuguese. In 1653 he became governor-general and held the post for twenty-five years, a record.

On 6 April 1652 Jan van Riebeeck landed in Table Bay with the directors' orders to build a fort and grow fresh food for the company's ships on the way to Batavia. He traded with the Khoikhoi for cattle and planted gardens; in February 1657 the company gave land along the Liesbeek River to nine free burghers.

Vondel had become a Catholic around 1640 and lost old friends by it. His Lucifer, on the fall of the rebel angels, opened at Amsterdam's theatre on 2 February 1654; after the second performance the burgomasters, pressed by the clergy, banned it. Six printings of the text appeared that year all the same.

New Sweden had been founded on the Delaware in 1638 by Peter Minuit, the former Dutch director, now in Swedish service. Johan Risingh, sent out from Sweden in 1654, at once seized Fort Casimir, the post Stuyvesant had built in 1651 just below the Swedes' Fort Christina.

Stuyvesant answered in 1655: he sailed from New Amsterdam with seven ships and forced Fort Christina to surrender. New Sweden became part of New Netherland, though Lenape allies of the Swedes raided Dutch villages in revenge.

Gerard Hulft reached Batavia in October 1654 with letters naming him to high office. In August 1655 Maetsuycker sent him to Ceylon with eleven ships and 1,120 soldiers to finish the Portuguese. He besieged Colombo from October; on 10 April 1656, two weeks after visiting Rajasinha's court, he was shot from the walls. Colombo surrendered a month later.

Rijcklof van Goens carried the campaign on. In 1658 he took Mannar and Jaffna, the last Portuguese strongholds on Ceylon, and Nagapattinam on the Indian coast. The year before, advising the Cape on its defences, he had taken its interpreter Doman with him to Java.

Rajasinha kept his hill kingdom, but the company kept the coasts it had taken from the Portuguese, and the king had been fighting it on and off since 1645. A Sinhala saying sums up the bargain: they had given ginger and got chili, a worse master for a bad one.

Frans van Schooten, who had met Descartes in 1632, succeeded his father in 1645 as professor at Leiden's engineering school, the course Stevin had designed. His Latin translation of Descartes's Geometry, with commentary, came out in 1649 and made it readable across Europe.

Christiaan Huygens, Constantijn's son, learned mathematics from Van Schooten. In 1655 he and his brother began grinding lenses for telescopes; on 25 March that year he found Saturn's moon Titan. He invented the pendulum clock and patented it in 1657, and explained Saturn's strange shape as a ring.

Salomon Coster, a clockmaker at The Hague, built the first pendulum clocks to Huygens's design and in 1657 received the right to make them, signing them with privilege. The oldest that survives, of 1657, is in the Boerhaave Museum at Leiden.

Menasseh ben Israel, an Amsterdam rabbi who had founded the city's first Hebrew press in 1626, went to London in 1655 to ask Cromwell to let Jews settle in England again. He published his Humble Addresses to the Lord Protector, and Cromwell called a conference at Whitehall that December. In 1657 Cromwell gave him a pension; he died that year at Middelburg.

Franciscus van den Enden, an Antwerp-born former Jesuit, kept a Latin school in Amsterdam whose pupils staged plays and read the new philosophy. Sometime between 1654 and 1657 a young merchant from the Portuguese Jewish community began studying Latin with him and boarding in his house.

He was Bento, or Baruch, Spinoza. On 27 July 1656 the leaders of Amsterdam's Portuguese Jewish congregation pronounced against him, at twenty-three, the harshest ban they had ever issued, for abominable heresies and monstrous deeds they did not specify. He went on to write philosophy among freethinkers and dissenting Christians.

David Teniers the Younger, an Antwerp painter, entered the archduke's service around 1650 as court painter and keeper of the gallery in his Brussels palace. He enlarged the collection, painted views of it and made a printed catalogue. When Leopold Wilhelm went home to Vienna in 1656, the paintings went with him.

Juan José of Austria, the only illegitimate son Philip IV acknowledged, succeeded Leopold Wilhelm on 11 May 1656. That year, with Condé, he beat the French at Valenciennes.

Condé had led the princes' Fronde against Mazarin's government and, beaten in France, gone over to Spain. The victor of Rocroi now fought for Spain in the Netherlands, against French armies.

In 1658 Turenne besieged Dunkirk for France, with English troops supplied under Cromwell's alliance with Mazarin. On 14 June, in the dunes outside the town, he routed the relief army of Juan José and Condé, which had English royalist exiles under James, Duke of York, in its ranks.

Sir William Lockhart, Cromwell's ambassador to France since 1656, commanded the English troops at the Dunes. By the alliance Dunkirk was to go to England, and when it fell Lockhart became its governor.

Luis de Haro, Olivares's nephew, had led Philip IV's government since his uncle's fall in 1643. He negotiated with Mazarin in person on Pheasant Island in the Bidasoa, and the Peace of the Pyrenees of 7 November 1659 ended the war: Spain gave up Artois, and Louis XIV would marry the king's daughter, Maria Theresa.

Luis de Benavides Carrillo, Marquis of Caracena, who had fought at the Dunes, became governor of the Spanish Netherlands on 13 November 1659, a week after the peace, and governed a south without Artois or Dunkirk.

Charles X Gustav of Sweden marched across the frozen Belts in early 1658 and forced Denmark to give up much of its territory at Roskilde in February. In July he attacked again and besieged Copenhagen. With both shores of the Sound, Sweden could control the entrance to the Baltic, where Dutch trade went.

Frederick III of Denmark stayed in his capital and held Copenhagen against the Swedish siege through the summer and autumn of 1658, long enough for a Dutch fleet to come to his relief.

De Witt's government sent the fleet under Obdam. On 8 November 1658 it fought its way through the Sound past the Swedish fleet under Wrangel and relieved Copenhagen, which then threw back a major Swedish assault.

Witte de With, Tromp's quarrelsome vice-admiral of 1637 and his stand-in of 1652, was killed in the battle in the Sound, aged fifty-nine, as was another Dutch flag officer, Pieter Floriszoon.

In 1659 De Ruyter brought Dutch ships to the Danish islands, and on 14 November 1659 they helped Danish, Brandenburg and Polish forces defeat the Swedes at Nyborg on Funen. Charles X died in February 1660, and the war ended that year with Denmark still standing.

The Cape station grew into a colony on land the Khoikhoi grazed. The free burghers' farms spread, Van Riebeeck built a line of forts and hedges to protect them, and in 1658 he took several Khoikhoi leaders hostage.

Doman, Nommoa in his own language, was one of the company's first interpreters. Taken to Java by Van Goens in April 1657, he saw how its people had been forced to submit and came back the company's enemy. In 1659 he led the Khoikhoi in their first war against it; they could not storm the fort, he was wounded, and the war ended in 1660.

Krotoa, a niece of the Khoikhoi trader Autshumao, had lived in Van Riebeeck's household since she was about twelve and learned Dutch and Portuguese. Baptised Eva, she interpreted and traded for the company. Doman accused her of currying favour with the Dutch and betraying her people.

Cromwell died in September 1658. George Monck, who had fought the Dutch at sea in 1653 and commanded the army in Scotland, backed the moderates in Parliament who wanted the king back, and his support proved decisive.

Charles II had spent his exile in France, the Republic and the Spanish Netherlands, and in 1656 allied with Spain. In April 1660 he issued the Declaration of Breda, and in May he sailed from Scheveningen to take his father's throne. He was William III's uncle.

The States of Holland, which had barred the boy to please Cromwell, now courted his uncle: in November their envoys presented Charles with the Dutch Gift of paintings and sculpture. They declared the Act of Seclusion void, but still gave William III, ten years old, no office.

Mary went to London for her brother's restoration, fell ill with smallpox and died there on 24 December 1660, aged twenty-nine. William III had lost both his parents.