each province a veritable order of battle, army list and table of organisation.
Following these heads of expenditure, come miscellaneous expenses in no set
order but including the costs of the defence of the frontier fortresses, costs of
secret service, spies and messengers, entertainment of foreign envoys and of Dutch
envoys sent abroad, monthly interest owing on loans raised by the provinces for
the States-General, monthly payment of reparations to Sweden for damage caused
in the 1690s and pensions for French refugee officers. The 'extraordinary' volume
for 1705 deals with the same heads of expenditure in the same way and presumably
represents the estimates and budget in connection with an additional special levy.
Of Flenry s position as Captain of the Royal Bodyguard, little survives beyond
a small bundle of accounts and lists of members of the Bodyguard with some
details of their pay and livery, 1688-1692. Since most of the members of the
Bodyguard were clearly Dutch and since at least one muster list clearly distin
guishes between those serving in England and those in the Netherlands, even this
small survival may be of interest.
An incomplete series of household accounts in Dutch beginning in 1691 and
ending in 1720, kept in great detail on a daily basis, survive to show something
of the domestic life of the Nassau D'Auverquerque family in England both during
Henry's own lifetime and beyond when his widow remained behind in England to
manage the affairs and finances both of her late husband and her grandson, the
young William Henry, 3rd Earl of Bath. Frances D'Aersen must have been a
woman of competence and character. During her grandson's lifetime, she was
his legal guardian and several large bundles of letters from the local bailiffs and
agents of the Granville estates in Devon, Somerset and Cornwall, together with
volumes of their detailed accounts of their administration of the young Earl's
estates from 1701 until his death in 1711 survive to show that she took her respon
sibilities seriously. A flashback to her youth is provided by the survival of a formal
deed of partition of her father's estates in 1683 after his death between her brother
and her other sisters. Her character and capabilities are likewise mirrored in the
few surviving personal accounts of her own expenditure in the later years of her
life, which ended in 1720, when her son, by now virtually completely Anglicised
and a member of the English peerage, Henry, Earl of Grantham, secured her
burial in Westminster Abbey at a cost of 99, as testified to by a small surviving
volume of his own personal expenditure in that year.
Grantham, as he became, has his part in English history as Chamberlain to the
household of Caroline of Brandenburg-Anspach, unhappy princess and consort of
George II, in the intrigues, jealousies and pettinesses of the early Hanoverian court.
Such of his archives as survive amongst the Panshanger MSS cast little light on
Dutch history. He kept in touch with his brother, William Maurice, though never
seems to have visited him in Holland, rather the reverse since in William Maurice's
papers there are some formal requests by him to the Prince of Orange, at different
dates, to have leave to visit England to see his brother and to attend to his affairs
there. Henry and William Maurice as executors of their mother's will were respon
sible for the handling of a trust created by their mother for the benefit of their
sisters, Frances, wife of the Earl of Bellamont and her daughter, in the form of
a small annuity of 100 a year. An account book, 1720-1735, kept by William
Sasse, the bailiff or agent of Grantham, records these transactions of money recei
ved from Holland for the payment of this annuity (or at least William Maurice's
part of it) and of money spent in Holland for Grantham. One or two bundles of
receipts and bills and vouchers fill out the picture of this active link between the
two brothers.
The bulk of the Nassau D'Auverquerque Papers now surviving in the County
Record Office at Hertford concern William Maurice Nassau D'Auverquerque and
these are primarily of Dutch relevance and importance. William Maurice, like
his father before him, served his native land faithfully and well as a soldier and
administrator and only the day before his death on 25th May 1753, he had been
reviewing the troops on horseback in his capacity as Field Marshal.
It is impossible to analyse these papers in the detail which I feel they deserve at
this present stage. More work needs to be done on them yet and the help of
someone knowledgeable in Dutch history and administration of the first half of
the 18th century would be a welcome visitor to Hertford for a short time to tidy
up, clarify and amplify what has already been but imperfectly done. Some brief
analysis of the papers can, however, be given to show what they do contain and
to indicate their relevance to various aspects of the history of the period they
cover, from the early 18th century until 1753.
William Maurice was first of all a soldier, rising from the lowest to the highest
commissioned rank in the army of the States-General and held general officers'
rank in the British Army, and papers of primarily a military nature take first
place in his archives. He was, secondly and no doubt because of his military
ability and rank, governor of Sluys and Dutch Flanders so that some aspects of
the administration and history of these places are reflected here. And, lastly, he
was a private individual intent on making enough money on which to live com
fortably a highly successful one too if his obituary in The Gentleman's Magazine
for June 1753, is true when it credits him with leaving his brother, the Earl of
Grantham a fortune of more than 300,000. This side of his life is illustrated too.
To what extent the papers at Hertford represent the whole surviving archive of
William Maurice is something to which someone here may be able to give an
answer, which would be welcome. Certainly, I would suspect it must at least be
the major surviving part.
Despite their extensive migrations from Holland to England and thence almost
certainly to Florence and back to Hertingfordbury again, the whole Nassau
D'Auverquerque archive and William Maurice's papers in particular have suffered
little damage and disarrangement. William himself, I suspect had a tidy mind,
bundling his papers away methodically, giving each bundle a number reference
and an indication of the writer of each letter and its date, often with an indication
of subject matter (this being in French more often than not in William's own hand
has been of the greatest help to me in getting some idea of the scope and content
of these papers). With William Maurice's occasional notes 'Useless Letters', 'Papers
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