The Rest Is History - 276: Netherlands: The Maid of Holland

Episode Date: December 8, 2022

Join Tom and Dominic as, for the first time ever, they dip their toes into the Dutch republic. They discuss the Maid of Holland, who as both a warrior and a house maker, was emblematic of the golden age of the Dutch republic. Join The Rest Is History Club (www.restishistorypod.com) for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello and welcome to The Rest Is History with me, Dominic Sandbroek, and my friend Tom Holland. Hello. We've come to the subject of Holland, the Netherlands. Yeah, we're going to do the whole thing in Dutch accents and everybody will find that enormously amusing.

So anyway, yes, Tom, you are very keen on the Netherlands, not merely because you're called Holland, I think, but because you genuinely... Yeah, that's part of it. You like the history, don't you, of the Dutch Republic? I do, I do. And actually, the book that got me interested in it, I'm sure like so many people,

is Simon Sharma's The Embarrassment of Riches, which was his first great book came out late 80s i think i read it at university yeah a brilliant portrait of the dutch republic in its golden age and i've read and reread it and i always remember there's a particular sequence about the the significance of housework to the dutch in their golden age such a glamorous subject tom it. It is a glamorous. Well, it's a very, very interesting subject, I think. I know that you disagree about this, don't you?

You're sceptical. But the subject of today's Dutch-themed episode is the Maid of Holland, the Hollandsche Macht. I hope that my translation there was right. And the Maid of Holland emerges in the late 16th century as basically the most potent symbol of the Dutch Republic. And so I thought it would be interesting to ask, you know, who is she? Why? What are the symbolic resonances? And I know you're skeptical, but I'm going to try and convince you that this is actually a fascinating topic. To start with, explain. So we are in what, the 17th century? No, we are a little bit earlier. We're in the late 16th century. This is the Dutch revolt against the Spanish.

Yeah. And this is the kind of the northern part of the lowlands. People remember that episode we did on Burgundy with Bart van Leeuw, that these cities, these kind of city-states, which today would embrace the Netherlands and Belgium, we did on Burgundy with Bart van Leeuw, that these cities, these kind of city-states, which today would embrace the Netherlands and Belgium, that they had their golden age under the Dukes of Burgundy. They then become part of the Habsburg inheritance. And so in the 1560s, the northern part of the Netherlands, what will become the Dutch Republic, is becoming ever more Protestant and specifically Calvinist.

And therefore, that gives a religious dimension to the resentment that they feel about their distant Spanish overlord, Philip II. And from the mid-1560s onward, you get this process of kind of revolt and rebellion until in 1588, the Dutch Republic is officially proclaimed. And English listeners, of course, 1588 is the year of the Spanish Armada. And people remember that the whole point of the Spanish Armada is that it's going to sail up to the lowlands and take on the Spanish armies that are there. And the reason that there are Spanish armies in the lowlands is because they are busy fighting the rebellious Dutch. And 15 years before the official proclamation of the Dutch Republic, the rebels had issued a medal that had the two words libertas, so freedom and patria, fatherland, motherland, stamped on it. And the emblem on this medal was a maiden wearing a hat, seated within a garden with a fence around it.

And this maiden is Hollandia. It was a figure from medieval allegory in the Middle Ages. Every city, every town, every region would be represented by an allegorical female figure. So that's where she's coming from. But on this medal, she's freighted with all kinds of extra symbolism and moral weight. So there are obviously, it won't surprise you to hear from me, Dominic, there are very strong Christian echoes here. And specifically of the Virgin Mary. So this is a Protestant revolt. So the kind of the Mariolatry of the Middle Ages is something that's been parked by the Dutch

rebels. But you don't suppress the memory of something as potent as the imagery of the Virgin overnight. So just as in England, Elizabeth I becomes Gloriana, she kind of takes on a lot of the allure and the glamour and the symbolic potency of the Virgin Mary, becomes a kind of Protestant equivalent of the Virgin Mary. So with this medal, this image of the maid of Holland, the idea of the garden that can't be broken into in the Middle Ages, this serves as an emblem of Mary's virginity. And so at a time when the Dutch rebels are trying to create a kind of impregnable border between them and the Spanish armies. And also, of course, because their towns and their fields have been redeemed from the North Sea by dykes.

The idea of a kind of unbreachable wall is very, uh in in the early years of the dutch revolt is that as they they you know it's kind of iconoclastic approach to um churches and cathedrals and stained glass window will be destroyed when they repair them often the maid of holland replaces the virgin in the iconography of these stained glass windows that's interesting yeah thank you dominic thank you so it is interesting that's i'm chalking that up as a victory so there's there's that kind of christian That's interesting. Yeah. Fridgen hats. The hat that the maid is wearing is a more typical hat, but it's still serving as an image of liberty. And in due course, actually, the rebels will start minting medals that just show the hat. So the hat becomes a kind of, you know, a totem of Dutch liberty. But of course, the other very, very very celebrated symbolically freighted uh virgin

female virgin is minerva athena the goddess of wisdom who is also a warrior yeah famous for her helmet famous for her helmet yeah yes absolutely um and the idea of the maid of holland as a kind of athena figure a minerva figure enables the the uh the people who are kind of Athena figure, a Minerva figure, enables the people who are kind of manufacturing this image to allude to real life examples of women who display their heroism and their virtue by defying the Spanish. And there's one person in particular who is a kind of absolute totem of Dutch heroism, who's a woman in Harlem. She's a wood merchant by the name of Kenau Simons Dochter Hasseler. Very good.

If I've pronounced that right. Superb. And in 1573, the Spanish have put Harlem under siege. They've destroyed the walls. And again, you know, again and again, the significance of walls, of dikes, of barriers, so important to the Dutch rebels. And so the people of Harlem,

they work tirelessly night and day to try and repair the breaches. And Kenau is the woman who becomes the emblem of this repair work. She never stops. She's absolutely indefatigable. And over the course of the years and then the decades that follow, stories told about her become ever kind of more implausible. So it's said that she basically she develops the necklace. You remember the necklace in South Africa? It's kind of burning rubber tires that get thrown over neck. So this is what she's doing. She's throwing wreaths of tar over the necks of the Spanish soldiers.

This is her signature. Her signature way of killing them. By the 17th century, you're getting prints showing her as a full-blown warrior. She's holding a pike. She has a sword. She has a pistol. So actually, the comparison is Joan of Arc, surely. I mean, that's the obvious antecedent, isn't it?

Kind of, except that Quenau is actually, she's not a maid. So she's a middle-agedaged woman she's kind of 40 and there's a there's a painting of her in the reichs museum where she's painted without any kind of hint of idealization she's the you know she's the kind of woman you would see you know in a in a shop or whatever but she's she's got all her weapons and i think it's the it's the contrast between the fact she she looks like an absolutely conventional, ordinary, middle-aged woman. And the fact that she's kind of bristling with pistols and all kinds of things. And it has this inscription, see here a woman called Quenao Brave is a man who in that time gallantly fought the Spanish tyrant.

So this is hurrah. And by the 19th century the stories are being told that she's leading a band of 300 female warriors so again a kind of classical echo perhaps of the spartans at thermopylae and there are other stories too of women defying the spaniards and basically the maid of holland is reminding the dutch of this tradition of heroic women and it's reflective of the fact that women as well as men are valorized, are seen as being heroic by the people who commemorate the glory days of the revolt against the Spanish. But I think there is something much more interesting going on as well.

Okay. So the idea that, you know, of warrior maidens i mean you mentioned joan of arc i mean this is a kind of tradition it's an unusual tradition but it's not an unheard of tradition yeah but i think there is something about the maid of holland that is absolutely distinctive completely distinctive and so interesting about the character of the dutch republic and of its civilization in the golden age and i think we should take a break here and then when i come back we will when you come back no when we come back i'm coming back too yeah sorry did i say did i say just say me i said when i come back okay well i'm i'm so in the zone dominic

that i'm afraid i blanked you out when we come back uh we will explore what it is that makes the figure of the maid of holl Holland so culturally distinctive. Totally good. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works.

We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. Contrary to predictions before the interval, I have returned. I am still here.

I am listening to Tom's wonderful discourse about the Maid of Holland. So Tom, there's been an interesting sort of contradiction in the first half, because you said you were going to be talking about housework, but actually you're talking about pistol work. Yes, I have been talking about pistols and guns. And you're absolutely right. Well spotted. So we are now going to start exploring the dimension of housework. So now we're getting to the really interesting bit so the problem with podcasts of course is that you if you want to talk about visual things there has to be very detailed descriptions but you defy that so i'm going to defy that so i want to talk about um it's an allegory on the deceitfulness of spain and the

liberty and prosperity of the dutch republic which was an image on a pamphlet that was issued in 1615 i'm looking it up live this is very exciting. So what you get... I see it, yeah. You get the Maid of Holland. There she is. She's sat in her walled and fertile and prosperous garden. Over her are the arms of the various provinces of the Dutch Republic and of the House of Orange, which will give in due course a king in the form of William III to Britain. There are two Dutch men who are busy tending the garden, making all the tulips and so on grow. And at the gate, you have a Dutch lion, the emblem of Holland, guarding the gate. And outside it,

you have the Spanish army and you have a hostile leopard. Yes. And the inscription, see the leopard's nature that is not to be trusted. So the leopard is emblematic. Spain. Spain and potpourri and everything bad. But there's also another note, which is, note the wisdom of renowned Dutch housekeeping. Oh, yes. And so that is the two men. I don't know how to pronounce that. Huishoven or something like that, is it?

What a splendid image that is. So the garden is incredibly neat and sort of domesticated, isn't it? And if you think of Amsterdam or Leiden or any of the kind of the great cities of the Dutch Republic, it's that kind of, it's that order. It's that neatness. Yeah. And that is what is being symbolically represented interestingly um well you can't go wrong with a pyramid so note the wisdom of renowned dutch

housekeeping what does housekeeping mean well there are various levels so there is the literal the making of of houses of gardens of cities because you know the netherlands is redeemed from mud it was all kind of mud and bog and water yeah and so you know the walls of the gardens are the basically the dikes that keep the sea at bay but there's also of course the sense of housekeeping that stereotypically women do and again it's it's about mud. It's about keeping the filth at bay. And it's the way in which, for the Dutch, the house and the cleanliness of the house becomes emblematic of what their republic is all about. So Simon Sharma, in The Embarrassment of Riches, he quotes from a household manual that's called the Experienced and Knowledgeable Dutch Householder. And it overtly compares the weekly kind of routine

of housekeeping to the rituals that you might get in a church. So it has a sacral quality, Dominic. So to quote Sharma, the steps in front of the house, the path leading to the house, if any, and the front hall were all to be washed every weekday early in the morning. On Wednesdays, the entire house was to be gone over. Monday and Tuesday afternoons were devoted to dusting and polishing reception rooms and bedrooms. Thursdays were scrubbing and scouring days, and Fridays were assigned to the unenviable job of cleaning the kitchen and cellar. Obviously, you also have to do the laundry. You have to keep the dishes washed. You have to sweep the cobwebs, you have to scrub the steps, but not just the steps, you also have to scrub the paving stones that extend beyond the

steps and beyond the house. So that's also kind of part of the remit. That's your sort of civic duty, right? It's your civic participation. Absolutely your civic duty. And people therefore can tell if you have a slatternly household. Yeah. If, you know, the housewife of the household is sluttish, if she is failing to keep the paving stones in front of the house clean, then the house inside must be dirty. Tom, you said that with the relish of a UKIP MEP. Not at all. It's the relish of a good Dutch 17th century Calvinist. Because the thing is that to us, this actually seems quite normal. The idea of cleanliness, we talked about this in the context of the Royal Navy in the late 18th and 19th century, that they obsessively clean because they have come to realise that this is what keeps germs at bay. But in the 17th century, the idea that you keep not just your house clean, but you keep the streets

clean seems to visitors to the Dutch Republic, the absolute height of, I mean, kind of insane. I mean, they find it weird. And so English visitors say who go there, they find it very, very peculiar that you can't spit. You know, if you go into a house and you don't take your shoes off, the maid will come and basically kind of rough you up and pull your shoes off by force and put your feet into a pair of slippers. So one English traveler describes the Dutch as perfect slaves to cleanliness. You know, they see it as being very, very peculiar. And for the Dutch, this is a totem of what makes them distinctive. So when they portray the maid of Holland, they may sometimes show her with a spear, but they will also just as probably show her with a mop. a house and the wall around the Dutch Republic. And that idea of keeping something intact, keeping it clean, keeping it ordered, that is, it operates right the way from the individual household, right the way to the whole fabric of laziness. And therefore, the cleanliness of a

house becomes emblematic of the way that the Dutch have been chosen by God for a kind of providential role in his plan. So it's a very kind of Calvinist take. You know, the Calvinism has at its idea that there is an elect, that God chooses who will be redeemed and who won't. And so a house becomes, the clean house becomes the emblem of redemption, basically. And so what's amazing is that the whole Dutch revolt, this whole incredible heroic story, which does, as you pointed out, feature women with cutlasses and pistols and all that kind of stuff. But it's also cast as a great project of housekeeping, of cleaning and sweeping and polishing and scrubbing. And this is operating on all kinds of different dimensions. So it's obviously very, very patriotic. And Dominic, I know that you love a Dutch admiral, don't you?

You're obsessed with sea battles in the 1650s and 1660s. When we were doing the Battle of Trafalgar, I couldn't keep you off it. So you will remember, you will remember Admiral Martin Tromp. Do you remember him? Big fan of him? Crazy name, crazy guy. Yeah. So he was a famous Dutch Admiral who was very successful at fighting the English.

And he fixed a broom to the bowsprit of his flagship. And the idea was that he would sweep the English off the channel. We know how that worked out. But it's amazing. It's incredible. This is the emblem of- Housework. Martial housework.

Martial housework. Yeah. Nautical housework. I mean, you can't imagine Nelson doing that. No, definitely not. And of course, it'swork. Yeah, nautical housework. I mean, you can't imagine Nelson doing that. No, definitely not. And of course, it's Protestant. Yeah. Because you are sweeping away all the flummery and the ornamentation of Catholic churches

and replacing it with the whitewashed sobriety of a Calvinist church. Yes, I was thinking about the churches. I mean, that's what strikes you when you go into a Calvinist church, right? It's spacious. It's light. It's very clean. It's rigorously, meticulously maintained. There are no sort of dusty cobwebby corners with gilt kind of effigies or something. No. So therefore, clenueless and housework is seen as very Protestant.

And further way in which that is the case is that for Calvinists, to know that you are redeemed, to know that you are one of the elect, you have to look into your soul and kind of cleanse it of every speck of dirt. Right. Yeah. Because if that, if the, if those specks of dirt are starting to accumulate,

then you have to fear for the future of your immortal soul. And so basically the, you know, the responsible housewife is being cast as the archetype of the good Calvinist. Her scrubbing of a step, her polishing of a candlestick is to be equated to the cleansing of a soul. And so there's a lot of misogyny in Dutch culture in the 17th century, as you know, as there is in all cultures at this time. But cleaning women are invariably portrayed in positive light. Right. of everything that is good. And I think that, so Schama's, you know, the brilliant case that he makes in The Embarrassment of Riches, he says, the struggle between worldliness and homeliness

was but another variation on the classic Dutch counterpoint between materialism and morality. So it's this idea that on the one hand, Dutch culture in the 17th century is precociously materialist. This is where capitalism is being stress tested for the first time. You have merchants who are kind of going out beyond the enclosing wall of the Dutch Republic, out into the world, off to the Indies, whatever, bringing back spices and enabling individual households in say Amsterdam or Leiden or whatever to become rich in a way that individual households had never been rich before. This is the first great bourgeois state, if you want to put it like that. But this obviously spells danger because wealth can be corrupting. But if you clean it,

if you scrub it, then you are keeping that risk at bay. So the idea that you can simultaneously be rich and virtuous requires this idealization of housework. And that's why in Dutch art in this period, famously, it's so domestic. You know, there's a lot of emphasis on domesticity. Still lifes, all that sort of stuff. All that kind of stuff. So you see a lot of paintings of women doing housework, of maids around the laundry chest, lots of pictures of women checking their children's hair for knits. And this is kind of material for art of everything that modernity will be. It's patriotic, domesticated. It's all about privacy, individualism.

Yeah, because if you think about it, you know, the English are coming over and they're kind of dirty and smelly and spitting, and they've got their dirty boots. But basically, what the Dutch are doing in the 17th century is what the British will do in the 19th century with their idealization of the home. Very similar ways that the British Empire will be profiting from the riches that are being brought in from the outside world, just as the Dutch do in the 17th century. And likewise, a way of kind of domesticating this is to make a fetish of housework of house cleaning of the feminine character of the house so i think i think it is i hope i've convinced you that that's it you have convinced me i mean the idea that dutch made is still so i googled dutch made um earlier and um so this is like with when you when you had your laptop on the uh when i was watching adam kern's program about r Russia in the 1990s.

Yeah. So what comes up with Dutch made? I haven't actually... So Dutch made, you'll be pleased to hear, is not a kind of erotic niche. It's a sort of the brand, particularly in America, actually, Tom, images of Dutch made are pretty,

they recur again and again. So there are Dutch made cigars. There's a company in, where is it? Tennessee. That makes, that makes pies, Dutch made pies.

I mean, I'm giving them free advertising. They make all kinds of, all kinds of fried pies. They say, I don't know. I don't know. I'm not sure about that.

You're not sure the Dutch would approve of that. But this idea, the Dutch made is always very primly turned out, the little kind of bonnet. Yeah. Little apron. Clean apron. Yeah, with tulips on it.

Wearing clogs. And I suppose it does, even now, it captures a kind of, there's a kind of innocence. A neatness. An earnestness to it. Yeah. Which I suppose you could you would say

absolutely captures that spirit of and a healthiness I think yeah healthiness and when would you say the heyday

of the Dutch maid ends then or does it never end well I think I think it endures as an emblem of the Dutch Republic and then

yeah the various iterations of what becomes the Netherlands I think it's still as you say it still has a certain potency. But the Dutch golden age peters out when?

Late 17th century? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And I suppose that's- It's Louis XIV. Right. And that's the point at which the art,

you know, when we think about Dutch art, we think of early 17th century, don't we, I suppose. Yeah. So it becomes increasingly kind of under the shadow of French militarism and British naval power. But, you know, it blazes a path.

And that is absolutely part of what makes the Dutch Republic fascinating. But it's also the fact, you know, I mean, it's so distinctive and brilliant a culture in its own right. And we will definitely come back to the Dutch Republic. I know we've been saying that a lot, but this the first well this dipping of the toe into the subject exactly and if i was to go now tom to amsterdam and to ask for a dutch maid well well we hopefully we may end up going to amsterdam perhaps that would be a brilliant place for a rest is history walking tour wouldn't it yeah we could we could try that out couldn't we yes you can try that out i'll no you you suggested it you suggested it but for now for now uh i think that's enough so that was thanks very much for listening splendid

yes that's inspired me to go and hoover my house for some such uh so on that to do it for you i proper proper dutch behavior we'll see you next time bye-bye bye-bye thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes early access ad-free listening and access to our chat community please sign up at rest is history pod dot com that's rest is history pod dot com To get access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. biz gossip and on our q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early