The writer and TV essayist Jonathan Meades has observed that the various Dutch-referring epithets invented by the British — Dutch cap, going Dutch, double Dutch, Dutch courage — do not owe their existence to feelings of affection. Historically, we British have been fond of mocking our neighbours across the North Sea. We’ve chortled at their clogs and tulips, their quaint language, their pretty but monotonous landscapes. But the Dutch don’t seem to have taken this to heart. After 1953’s devastating North Sea flood they ditched the French word for “helicopter” in favour of the English, in tribute to the assistance rendered by Britain during the disaster. Nevertheless, British ribbing of the Dutch has continued, though in recent decades Amsterdam’s red-light district and cannabis-scented streets have largely replaced the earlier symbols as objects of gentle (or not) mockery.

Yet in some ways Britons and Netherlanders have long been similar, thanks in part to our overlapping histories. Our two nations owe more to each other than we realise.

We Britons rarely discuss the pivotal Glorious Revolution of 1688, no doubt largely because it was a foreign head of state, Prince William III of Orange, Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, who instigated it. If 1688 looms in the national consciousness, it does not, unlike the preceding Civil War, loom large. Yet the later upheaval was arguably no less far-reaching in its consequences. The Revolution gave us a constitutional monarchy and affirmed the supremacy of Parliament. It also liberalised our economic system along Dutch lines, bringing true capitalism to the British Isles.

But this intervention of the Netherlands into the tumultuous affairs of its island neighbour certainly did not come out of the blue. It was the culmination of over a century of cultural exchange between England and the newly ascendent Dutch civilisation, in those years enjoying its Golden Age. As the country’s great historian Johan Huizinga noted in the 1920s, the peak of Dutch greatness was all the more astonishing for arriving so soon after the creation of the Dutch Republic in 1588, during the revolt against Spanish rule. Only fifty years before Rembrandt’s birth, he pointed out, there had been no Dutch nation in the full sense. How had that extraordinary flowering come about? For Huizinga the causes were complex, the precise formula elusive.

It may be more fruitful to consider only the question of Dutch prosperity: the sources of their wealth are easier to pin down. It’s in the Netherlands that the Rhine opens out into a delta before emptying into the North Sea. Cities in this corner of Europe thus became rich because two great currents of trade, from the Baltic and the Mediterranean, met in the Low Countries. In the 15th century Antwerp was the mightiest city in the region, but by the 17th it was Amsterdam that had become, in the words of French historian Fernand Braudel, “the warehouse of the world”.

Whatever the complex sources of Dutch greatness there is no doubt England benefited from it

Of course, the Netherlands’ advantageous position would’ve counted for little had the Dutch not been so extraordinarily adept at flood defence and land reclamation. Then there is the influence of the Dutch religion, which from the mid-16th century was Calvinism. It may be that, as Max Weber argued, the economic individualism Calvinism preached was a key reason very able, and ambitious, merchants and capitalists were often found among its adherents.

Whatever the complex sources of Dutch greatness there is no doubt England benefited from it in the spheres of art, music, engineering and science. To that list we may add philosophy, since in 1683 John Locke, suspected (on little evidence) of involvement in a plot to assassinate Charles II, fled to the Netherlands, where he lived for five years under the pen-name of Dr. Van der Linden. During his stay he befriended other Protestant freethinkers, for whom the Dutch Republic was likewise a refuge. Some evidence suggests Locke became acquainted with Spinoza’s ideas, most significantly, perhaps, the Jewish rationalist’s arguments for religious and political tolerance. Whatever the case, the mature philosophy of Locke, “the father of liberalism”, likely owed more than a little to his period of immersion in the Dutch ferment.

But if England benefited from Dutch greatness she suffered from it too. For there were times in the 17th century when it wasn’t culture the two nations exchanged, but cannon balls. The Netherlands and England fought each other in three wars between 1652 and 1674. No doubt these conflicts, which mostly sprang from imperial rivalry and were predominantly fought at sea, played their part in the coining of those less-than-kind epithets.

One imagines these wars were a cause of unhappiness for Constantijn Huygens, a diplomat, poet and composer who was a great Anglophile. Secretary to two Princes of Orange, Huygens is a pivotal figure in the checkered history of the Anglo-Dutch relationship. Service in the entourage of the English ambassador to the Hague took the young Huygens to England. There his lute playing greatly impressed James I, who knighted him one year into his stay. The Dutchman was no less taken with his host country. While the later role of secretary to Princes Frederik and William took Huygens all over Europe, where he befriended many prominent people, including Descartes, he retained a special fondness for England. In her book on 17th-century Anglo-Dutch relations, Going Dutch, English historian Lisa Jardine emphasised Huygens’ role as 

… the éminence grise behind vital decision-making in political and diplomatic circles, polite society, art connoisseurship and music appreciation on both sides of the Narrow Sea.

If English and Dutch aesthetic sensibilities developed in parallel in the 17th century it was, Jardine argued, not thanks to any innate affinity between the two peoples, but rather due to Sir Constantijn’s outsized influence as a tastemaker. For instance, in painting the Dutchman successfully promoted a more realistic flavour of Baroque; in architecture, the restrained and classical Palladian style.

Another renowned Netherlander who shaped English history was the engineer Cornelius Vermuyden. Trained in water management and land reclamation, Vermuyden moved to southern England in the early 1620s and there worked on various projects, including draining land at Windsor. These brought him to the attention of Charles I, who commissioned him to drain Hatfield Chase, a low-lying area in South Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. As payment Vermuyden was to receive one third of the drained land, most of which was commons. The Dutchman sold shares in the land to finance the venture. The project met with legal challenges from angry locals, not least because the lord of the Manor of Epworth had formally agreed to give up his right of enclosure in the 14th century. Due to drainage schemes often involving enclosure, they were to remain controversial well into the 18th century.

Though only partially successful, his work at Hatfield Chase netted Vermuyden a knighthood. But it was his efforts to drain the Fens, an expanse of marshland spanning several counties in the east of England, he became most famous for. As the abbeys had maintained the Fens’ banks and drains these had, following the Dissolution of the Monasteries, fallen into disrepair through the neglect of the new, absentee landlords. Flooding had thus become a major problem. James I and various “adventurers” (venture capitalists) began attempts to remedy the situation in the 1600s, spurred on by the prospect of enclosing land and reaping bumper profits.

Vermuyden’s expertise was crucial to these efforts. Interrupted only by the Civil War, the Dutch engineer worked for decades, overseeing the redirection of rivers, the building and improvement of drains and the reclaiming of land from the sea. Vermuyden also introduced a measure not seen before in England: washes, embanked areas of land for catching flood overflow. At this time technology and technique were still being honed; the project ran into obstacles, suffered setbacks. Some unforeseen effects meant the threat of flooding remained, but nevertheless, by the 1670s much new arable land had been created. Vermuyden set the Fens on course to be the agricultural factory it is today. The surrealism of the drained Fens is also his legacy. Meades recalled being haunted as a child by the sight of towering black sails on the far side of a bank, the barge they belonged to being above him. Another odd sight in England were the windpumps, resembling windmills, that for centuries were the most striking reminders of Dutch involvement in Fen history. One of these can still be seen in Cambridgeshire at Wicken Fen, now a nature reserve.

Neither Huygens nor Vermuyden lived to see the Glorious Revolution, when Dutch influence reached its peak. What spurred William of Orange to military action was a threat to his wife Mary Stuart’s claim to the English throne: Catholic James II’s queen Mary had purportedly just given birth to a male heir. Due to Mary’s prior struggles carrying a pregnancy to term there was talk of a “warming-pan plot”, i.e. the boy was suspected not to be theirs. A secured Catholic succession might well lead to an English-French pact, seen as a grave threat to the Dutch Republic.

Exactly a century on from the Spanish Armada the Stadtholder assembled an army and fleet vastly bigger than the force Spain had mustered. Unlike the would-be conquest of 1588 the Dutch invasion was a resounding success, with William’s forces meeting almost no resistance. In London the Protestant “liberator” was greeted by crowds waving oranges on sticks. Although, with the Restoration, the English had largely rediscovered their respect for the Crown as an institution, James II’s absolutism and Catholicism had been widely detested. Thus the transfer of power was smooth. James II was taken under armed guard to Rochester and from there allowed to flee to France. After their coronation in April 1689 William and Mary reigned jointly as constitutional monarchs. To William’s displeasure, the new Bill of Rights constricted their power.

the Dutch Golden Age provided … extraordinary raw material to work with

William had little time for certain royal traditions. For instance, he discontinued the practice of “royal touch” — which had seen previous kings touching thousands of the sick who believed contact with the royal person had healing powers — calling it “a silly superstition”. In short, he and his queen reigned in the rational and (mostly) liberal spirit of the Dutch Golden Age. Controversially, the divine right of kings was repudiated and a measure of religious tolerance embraced — though less than William wished, for Catholics and non-Christians still had their liberty restricted. Parliament, now supreme, swept away the last legal vestiges of feudalism, completing the transition to capitalism. In this way, and also by tolerating freethinkers like Locke, the Revolution and its consequences would allow the Enlightenment to reach full flower in the British Isles. It also set the stage for the Industrial Revolution to come. Without Dutch influence, would these momentous developments have come so swiftly, or in quite the same way?

Englishmen, Defoe remarked, improved everything and invented nothing. It was to England’s, and later Britain’s, long-term benefit that the Dutch Golden Age provided such extraordinary raw material to work with.