Chapter 6 The Low Countries History Seminar

Beginnings under Pieter Geyl

The Seminar’s origins were associated with the early life of the University of London’s department of Dutch studies, co-hosted by Bedford College and University College and founded in 1919 with funds donated by members of the Nederlandsche Vereeniging te London, a London-based gentlemen’s club for Dutch expats whose membership included executives from Royal Dutch Shell and other Anglo-Dutch companies. The department was established with a library, a readership and a professorship, with the first incumbent of the latter being the former London correspondent of the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant newspaper Pieter Geyl (1887–1966).¹ One guiding motivation here was a desire to revive the reputation of the Netherlands, whose neutrality during the First World War was widely, if not necessarily correctly, seen as having been more favourable to Germany. Geyl’s inaugural lecture laid out a bold plan for developing Dutch studies pertaining to ‘the whole field of Dutch civilization’, which from Geyl’s ‘Greater Netherlands’ point of view also included the Flemish part of Belgium and the Cape Dutch (Afrikaans) speakers in South Africa. In 1920, Geyl was joined by the reader Pieter Harting (1892–1970), a philologist from Utrecht who had originally specialized in Sanskrit; however, the two men did not work well together for long. Apparently, Harting conspired with Gregory Foster, the powerful provost of University College, to replace Geyl as chair on the occasion of the scheme’s initial five-year review in 1924, but the attempt failed.² The resulting acrimony between Geyl and Harting led to the department being split into two: Harting took sole control of Dutch language and literature at Bedford College (before accepting a professorship at Groningen shortly thereafter), whilst Geyl’s remit was reduced to Dutch history and institutions at UCL.³ Stripped of the responsibility of running a full department, he turned his attention to the fledgling IHR. In his autobiography (written in 1942 in a Nazi hostage camp and posthumously published in 2009), Geyl recalled:

Pollard had at about this time achieved one of his great life goals and founded an institution to which the more advanced, postgraduate historical work of the entire university would be concentrated: the Institute for Historical Research, for the time being housed in a temporary building behind the British Museum. I was given a room there for my historical books from the Dutch library, which I could build up with a Dutch government grant and which until then had been somewhat hidden away in Bedford College. I have always enjoyed that little library; it helped me a lot for my own work, and it was admired by English colleagues: there were especially many source publications that they could use.⁴

This contingent arrangement furthered Pollard’s design of the IHR’s seminar library, wherein ‘points made, and queries raised in seminars could be instantly checked by pulling a book of documents off the surrounding shelves’.⁵

These developments facilitated the emergence of a postgraduate teaching seminar in Low Countries history. As Geyl himself noted:

I was also asked to take the lead, along with [Hugh Hale] Bellot, a seminar in European diplomatic history. Only a few students came there, but it immediately got a good name: it was found interesting. Generating and leading a discussion was something that went well for me. Bellot soon left it entirely to me, he himself went in a different direction, but I know that he spoke about me with the greatest appreciation. The next step – and this had to be approved in the board of studies – was that to the list of ‘special’ and ‘optional’ topics that made up the BA exam, two of mine were added … Optional: the Low Countries in European history 1648–1839; special: diplomatic history of the War of the Spanish Succession. Those subjects were now indeed chosen by a few students every year, so that I had a small group of my own, with whom I always got along excellently. And some of them went on after their BA for the MA or PhD and came to the Institute at my seminar, where I had some outside students, by the way, from Edinburgh, Oxford, Berlin, and then Renier [Geyl’s favourite student and protégé]! And under my leadership they produced a few not insignificant ‘theses’ … All of this was extremely satisfying and enjoyable.⁶

Organized on a regular basis throughout term time, Geyl’s seminar ran from 1924–5 to 1934–5. Whilst ostensibly focused on European diplomatic history, studies of the Low Countries figured prominently. From 1927–8 onwards, after Geyl had arranged for a major book donation from the Dutch government (1925), the room for diplomatic history was repurposed for studying the history of the Netherlands, making this national specialism somewhat distinct from those supported by the room for the rest of European history.⁷

Attendance at Geyl’s Seminar was modest (although not out of keeping with that of many other of the early seminars), at between three and six participants. Geyl made every effort to ensure that readings were ‘accessible to English students, and not so Dutch that they would scare everyone away’.⁸ To complement these activities, Harting’s successor, Jacob Haantjes (1864–1953), organized a reading group at the IHR on Dutch historical texts.⁹ This drew in students such as Mary Fischer, who was working on Dutch Guiana under the supervision of Arthur Percival Newton (1873–1942), Rhodes professor of imperial history at King’s College, and the New Zealand born E. S. de Beer (1895–1990) – later famed for editing the diary of John Evelyn and the correspondence of John Locke, but then an assistant in UCL’s department of history.¹⁰

Geyl’s students played a formative role in the early life of the Seminar. Gustaaf Renier (1892–1962), who would succeed Geyl as chair in 1935, attended right from the beginning from 1924–5 through to 1929–30. After completing a master’s degree at the University of Edinburgh, Isabel A. Montgomery, née Morison, started doctoral studies under Geyl’s supervision and participated in the Seminar in 1925–6 and 1927–8.¹¹ Mary Trevelyan (1905–94) joined in 1926–7 as she studied Anglo-Dutch relations during the ‘Glorious Revolution’, resulting in a monograph on William the Third and the Defence of Holland, 1672–74 (1930).¹² Margaret Olivia Campbell, née Noël-Paton, worked on the Triple Alliance of 1668 and attended the Seminar from 1927–8 to 1929–30. She would later assist the German émigré pedagogue Kurt Hahn in founding Gordonstoun School in Scotland.¹³ The number of female seminarists at this time is striking, probably in part a consequence of the University’s Dutch programme being based at the female-only Bedford College (although students of Dutch from UCL and other London colleges attended the classes there as well).

In the early 1930s, another of Geyl’s protégés, Stanley Thomas Bindoff (1908–80), not only worked on the Scheldt controversy between the Treaty of Paris of 1814 and the Treaty of London of 1839, but also translated the second and third volumes of Geyl’s magnum opus Geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche Stam into English and became an assistant librarian of the IHR; in later years, Bindoff switched to Tudor history and became the first professor of history at Queen Mary College in 1951.¹⁴ Margaret Cobb addressed the breakdown of the Anglo-Austrian alliance (1748–56); R. R. Goodison focused on England and the Orangist party (1665–72), a work to which Geyl acknowledged he owed a lot for his own preparations of Oranje en Stuart (1939); and Alice Carter, née Le Mesurier (1909–86), studied Anglo-Dutch diplomatic relations from 1756 to 1763, before developing an academic career at the London School of Economics.¹⁵ As she put in the preface to her The Dutch Republic in Europe in the Seven Years War (1971):

I was one of the many English students Professor Geyl taught to love his mother country, and to want to learn about relations between the Netherlands and England, which Geyl had come to regard as his second fatherland. Professor Boogman, also a student of Geyl’s, has written recently of the freedom with which we were allowed to choose our own area of research, and make our own discoveries therein in our own way and at our own time. We could draw our own conclusions, to which Geyl would listen courteously before kindly revealing to us the fallacies apt to beset the young student who starts working on his own. We were not submitted to unsought direction, though it was always to be had on request. Nor were we intimidated by obiter dicta, though we would not, I think, have been permitted to harbour doubts about the Greater Netherlands theory. With that one exception his seminars were meetings of free minds.¹⁶

The dynamism of the Seminar also owed much to Geyl’s formidable reputation within and beyond the University of London. As one of the most senior historians from the Low Countries to be publishing regularly in English, Geyl was instrumental in shaping both the perception of the history of this European region in Britain and the wider Anglophone world (Henri Pirenne’s magnum opus Histoire de Belgique had not been translated into English, and still has not been fully to this day).¹⁷ During the interwar period, he also used and abused his position for political purposes, in particular for advancing the cause of Groot-Nederland and supporting the Flemish-nationalist movement, oscillating between moderate federalist and radical anti-Belgian positions, to the point that in 1929 he was declared persona non grata by the Belgian authorities.

After he left London to take up a chair in Utrecht (1935) and after the Second World War, which he largely spent in Buchenwald and German hostage camps in the Netherlands (1940–44), Geyl renewed his position in Anglophone intellectual culture in the post-war period by sparring with Arnold Toynbee and other British scholars on matters of historiographical controversy, including two highly influential BBC radio broadcasts in 1948.¹⁸ He continued to be regarded as ‘well acquainted with – indeed a part of – the English historical scene’, in spite of being located elsewhere.¹⁹

Continuation under Gustaaf Renier

Geyl was succeeded in 1935 by the ‘licensed eccentric’ Gustaaf Renier (1892–1962).²⁰ Born in Flushing to Belgian parents, Renier considered himself a Francophone Zeeuw. He started his historical studies in Ghent under the noted medievalist Henri Pirenne (1862–1935), but fled Belgium at the outbreak of the First World War, first to his parents in Zeeland, then on to England. After initially working as a journalist, he took up postgraduate studies under Geyl’s supervision at the University of London. In 1930 his thesis was published as Great Britain and the Establishment of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, 1813–1815.²¹ This marked the beginning of an extraordinary period of writing which included the irreverent The English: Are They Human? (1931), in which Renier, who struggled to fully integrate into British society, gave ‘a satirical description of the English among whom he had lived for many years without ever losing his sense of wonder at their social and mental habits’,²² short biographies of William of Orange [the Silent] (1932) and Oscar Wilde (1933), as well as serving as the translator for P. J. Blok’s The Life of Admiral de Ruyter (1933) and other works.²³

In 1934 Renier was appointed part-time lecturer in modern history as well as tutor to the Evening School of UCL’s history department, which had effectively subsumed Geyl’s nominal department for Dutch history and institutions.²⁴ After Geyl’s departure for Utrecht, Renier was not the department’s first choice to replace Geyl, despite there being a mutual understanding between them to that effect, but after a protracted process he was appointed as reader (elevated to the chair of Dutch history in 1945).²⁵ Having been a member of the Seminar since 1924, he took over its convenorship in 1936, with Stanley Thomas Bindoff as his first seminar assistant.²⁶

One seminar member and former student of Renier’s, Ragnhild Hatton, remembered upon the occasion of his retirement in 1957: ‘In the twenty-one years of [Renier’s] guidance, the Seminar has grown tremendously: in scope, as the amendment of its title to “International History of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries” indicates, and in size.’ The Seminar’s enlargement was partly ‘due to the post-war expansion of postgraduate studies and the influx of scholars from Europe and America to London’, which was reflected by the move from the small pipe-smoked room in the old IHR-barrack before the war to the stately Senate House in 1948, but also due to Renier’s growing reputation as a seminar convenor. While initially clearly orientated around postgraduate learning, in later years the emphasis shifted more to professional academic discussions. As Hatton further noted: ‘one of the distinguishing features of the Seminar in recent years has been the number of university teachers who have become regular members of it’.²⁷ Throughout, the defining rule of Renier’s colloquium doctum was, as Hatton expanded, that:

no written paper is ever read at the seminar (we have had some fine displays of temper when anyone has as much as suggested this), Renier insisting that scholars meet in a seminar to talk about their work and that to talk well about one’s work means a command of one’s material so disciplined that a learned conversation can take place. The speaker therefore (aided, if necessary in the case of a beginner, by some pencilled brief notes) must be able to get the results of his work, or problems relating to it, across to the rest of the seminar without too much detail and he must be willing to be interrupted – without losing the thread of his own thought – by the others for comments and questions at any moment.²⁸

In contrast to this detail on the format of the Seminar, little is known about its subject content under Renier’s convenorship; however, the titles of the theses his students produced are indicative. Master’s dissertations included P. J. Welch’s The Maritime Powers and the Evolution of the War Aims of the Grand Alliance, 1701–4 (1939–40) and E. N. La Brooy’s The Dutch East Indies (1939–40). From 1945–6 to 1946–7, William Gerald Beasley worked on Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century. He had intended to follow this up with doctoral research on Anglo-Dutch rivalry in South-east Asia but, having learned Japanese whilst serving in the Royal Navy and been a part of the British Liaison Mission in Tokyo, Beasley was hired as lecturer in far eastern history at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 1947 and settled on Great Britain and the opening of Japan, 1834–58, as a topic, encouraged by Renier.²⁹ Incidentally, Renier’s own wartime service included time with the BBC’s European Monitoring Unit in Evesham and then work as an adviser to the Dutch Press and Information Service for the Dutch Government-in-Exile, for which he received two Dutch decorations.³⁰ Beasley would later become professor of the history of the Far East at SOAS until his retirement and offer an IHR seminar on the history of the Far East from 1955–6.³¹

Occasionally, the Seminar was also the subject of external inquiries. In one documented instance from 1948, it was asked for its expert opinion on a contested seventeenth-century royal grant of William III of large parts of Labrador, Canada, to the Dutch merchant of Portuguese descent Joseph de la Penha (1697). Signed by William as King of England but filed in a Dutch archive without official seal in either capacity, descendants of de la Penha repeatedly used the document to claim ownership of the territory in Canadian courts. The Seminar was able to establish the credibility of the deed by proving that William had indeed been at Het Loo palace, where the document had been drawn up, at the time in question, but also commented that the grant could only have been made in William’s role as sovereign of the principality of Orange and not as stadholder of the Dutch Republic.³²

By the early 1950s the Seminar was flourishing, and the number of participants regularly reached double figures. This success hid a more painful sense of failure for Renier, however. For his book History: Its Purpose and Its Method (1950), which he regarded as his masterpiece, not only received a generally indifferent reception but was savaged in the Times Literary Supplement (26 January 1951) by an anonymous reviewer – widely known to be none other than Lewis Namier (1888–1960), who would soon move to the IHR to embark upon the re-launched History of Parliament project. So hurt was Renier that ‘not only would he never publish anything about history again, but not a word in English anymore’.³³ Looking back at his achievements on the occasion of his retirement, Renier wrote:

Comparisons are bound to be made. Geyl will come out of them better than I. He gave the chair scholarly distinction and that aura of controversy that is the lifeblood of the humanities. But he will also be remembered as the man who dined as Toynbee’s guest, before slaughtering him at the microphone. A man who neither looked to the right nor to the left and yet a kindly colleague and a gentleman. I shall be recalled, during the brief period that is covered by academic memory, as a touchy provincial looking down upon Hollander, Fleming and Englishman alike, the man who quarrelled with all but his students, who sent to Coventry [i.e. ostracized] the Dutch Ministry of Education, Long-skirt College [i.e. Bedford College] the Board of Studies in History, and all those who refused to live up to his theory that there is no evil in the world, but only folly and craziness.³⁴

Transition under Ragnhild Hatton

According to the IHR records, Ragnhild Hatton also was co-convenor of the Seminar for the years 1954–5 to 1956–7. Hatton, née Hanssen, (1913–95) – a native of Norway who married an Englishman in 1936 – had her studies interrupted by the Second World War, but after turning down a research fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge, she undertook doctoral studies in London, producing a dissertation which was published as Diplomatic Relations between Great Britain and the Dutch Republic, 1714–1721 (1950).³⁵ Maintaining a presence at the Seminar, Hatton then started teaching at the London School of Economics (where she rose through the ranks to become professor of international history in 1968). Informally she appears to have taken over the de facto leadership of the Seminar from Renier, as Andrew Lossky noted that she ‘directed two graduate seminars in the Institute of Historical Research, one of which she had inherited from G. J. Renier’.³⁶ This would tally with Renier’s general retreat from academe after the Namier incident and probably also extend further back than 1954–5, as Renier in a letter to the IHR director from May 1954 argued that ‘[i]n listing this seminar as a joint undertaking by Dr Hatton and myself we shall do no more than recognize an existing situation’.³⁷ In later reflections (1957) Hatton acknowledged that the Seminar

helped young research students to take an objective view of their subjects and to express their aims and their results with clarity and precision. It must also have helped to combat that isolation from which young research workers following the unsociable disciplines seem to suffer to a marked extent in the absence of any generally accepted standard of supervision.³⁸

In complementary fashion, Andrew Lossky (1985) remembered: ‘the friendly and informal atmosphere of these meetings’, in which

one could present for general discussion any problem of the seventeenth or eighteenth century, no matter how tentative or inchoate one’s own ideas on it were, and the resulting exchange of views was of inestimable value for everybody in attendance. Many a good and novel idea that later found its way into the published works of the participants had its origin in Dr Hatton’s seminar.³⁹

Renewal under Ernst Kossmann

In 1957 Ernst Heinrich Kossmann (1922–2003) succeeded Renier, initially as reader and then in 1962 as professor of Dutch history. Born in Leiden and partially of German-Jewish descent, Kossmann had suffered under the Nazis, being made a forced labourer in German-annexed Strasbourg, an experience captured in the 1950 novel De Nederlaag (‘the Defeat’) by his twin brother Alfred.⁴⁰ After the Second World War, Kossmann spent time in Paris and Leiden cultivating a commitment to historical scholarship with his wife, Johanna, née Putto. He received his PhD in 1954 from the University of Leiden with a thesis on France’s seventeenth-century civil war, La Fronde, as Johanna established a reputation as an historian of the Low Countries in her own right.⁴¹ Under the auspices of Geyl’s recommendation, the couple then moved to London in 1957, where Ernst’s new position at University College went hand-in-hand with him taking over the Seminar at the IHR. His arrival in turn precipitated a change in nomenclature, for henceforth the seminar was titled the Seminar on Dutch History, Domestic and International.⁴² In some ways this shift marked the culmination of what Geyl had started back in the mid-1920s, for Dutch history had now fully supplanted diplomatic history as the Seminar’s focus; and, in contrast, Hatton made the Seminar on International History of the Eighteenth Century her own. Kossmann later (2003) remembered his arrival at the IHR as follows:

And then there was the postgraduate seminar, the highest form of education in existence. It was an honour for an academic to lead such a seminar of his own. I inherited one from Renier and did not know at all what to do with it. After all, Renier had only left two undergraduates and not a single postgraduate student – deliberately, for he had not taken on any more students for some time since, he said, he could not be sure that these would be in as good hands with his successor as in his. In fact, in the beginning, this Seminar was only attended by colleagues who had some connection with Geyl, Renier, the Netherlands and Dutch history. Among them were women and men of quality, creative people with well-known œuvres to their name or in the process of writing them, experienced researchers who knew many languages, had lived in all kinds of foreign countries for a long time and had worked in the archives: the lively and original Charles Boxer, the young Graham Gibbs, Alice Carter, who taught at the London School of Economics, the Norwegian historian Ragnhild Hatton, who had completed a PhD under Renier, the Spanish Isabel de Madariaga, and many others.⁴³

As the Seminar found new strength and vigour, Kossmann was struck by the quality of the intellectual exchanges between the seminarians, who by now were almost exclusively professional historians. In his reminiscences, he recalled:

a company that met every other week, expecting something would happen and debated with an eloquence that was completely overwhelming to me in the beginning. Especially the women made an impression. Most certainly I have never known a group of historians who, at such a breath-taking pace, exchanged their insights with so much erudition, such a mastery of the finest details of the sometimes rather exotic subjects in which they were interested, in such a powerful tone. What did I, a provincial from Leiden, have to offer these people?⁴⁴

Kossmann’s self-deprecation here can be counterbalanced by the insights of his former student, the intellectual historian Frank Ankersmit (2007):

He had an unusually strong and fascinating personality – I never met anyone even remotely coming close to what he was like. Just to give you an idea: he was all that one might associate with François Guizot, very much aloof, very intelligent, both impossible to get close to and yet very much accessible and blessed with the rhetorical powers of a Pericles. If he had chosen a political career, the recent history of my country would have been unrecognisable from what it is now. It rarely happened, but if he really felt that it was necessary, he could raise a rhetorical storm blowing away everything and everybody. Indeed, when thinking of him, I never am sure what impressed me most, his scholarship or his personality. He was a truly wonderful man.⁴⁵

But Kossmann’s intellectual leadership not only reinvigorated the Seminar but also elicited innovation. A collaboration with the historian John Selwyn Bromley (initially of Keble College, Oxford, and then of the University of Southampton) established a series of conferences on Anglo-Dutch history, resulting in five volumes of essays between 1960 and 1975.⁴⁶ These developments provided opportunities for cross-fertilization with the activities of the Seminar. Several times a year, Ernst and Johanna presented to the Seminar extensive critical reviews of newly published literature on the history of the Low Countries. These interventions provided both the academic calendar and individual seminar discussions with a greater degree of structure and established a formative relationship with the Kossmanns’ contributions to the ‘bulletin critique de l’historiographie néerlandaise’ in the historical journal Revue du Nord (est. 1910). Of these activities, Kossmann recalled:

we divided the material into equal portions as much as possible; mostly it boiled down to Johanna taking care of prehistory and the Middle Ages, as well as of economic and church history, whereas I looked after the rest and edited the whole thing in French. Since we viewed this bulletin as a means of raising interest in Dutch historiography abroad, we made our judgments in benevolent prose without, by the way, forcing ourselves to praise if we did not like a particular publication … thanks to our diligent missionary work, we have now and then been able to give a certain meaning to the difficult seminar that I had inherited.⁴⁷

Taken together, the conferences and seminars, which now even more frequently than before were attended by visitors and guest speakers from the Low Countries, helped internationalize the field, which until then had too often been seen through the narrow prism of Vaderlandse geschiedenis (history of the Fatherland).⁴⁸ While this fact may sound banal in an age when international scholarly communication and exchange is taken for granted, at the time this was highly innovative and paved the way for scholarly practices of today. The Seminar had also, quite organically and imperceptibly, changed its remit from postgraduate teaching to a broader sense of scholarship and research.

The Seminar under Koen Swart

After the Kossmanns left for Groningen in 1966, Koenraad (Koen) Swart (1916–92) took on the chair of Dutch history: an appointment not much to the liking of Geyl, who passed away later that year. That said, Swart was the first convenor of the Seminar to arrive at the IHR as a senior academic with considerable experience. He had studied law and history at Leiden as one of the last students of the pioneering cultural historian Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) and then attended the Nuremberg Trials on behalf of the Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (‘National Institute for War Documentation’) in 1947–9. Thereafter he taught at institutions in the USA, including the University of Illinois at Urbana (1950–52), Georgetown University (1952–3), Brenau College (1954–6) and Agnes Scott College (1956–66); and he became a naturalized American.⁴⁹ Having worked mainly on French history during this period, it came as a great surprise to him to be approached to fill the prestigious chair of Dutch history at UCL.⁵⁰

Swart’s leadership of the Seminar worked to exemplify a now established tradition of setting Dutch and Belgian history in an international context with a view to furthering an interest in the subject in Britain and the wider English-speaking world. The Seminar continued the practice begun by the Kossmanns to produce surveys of recent Dutch historiography, but this time as a collaborative effort and in English, not French. From 1973 to 1982, the Seminar published a bibliography of recent Dutch and Belgian historiography in volumes six to ten of the Acta Historiae Neerlandicae (renamed in 1978 as The Low Countries Yearbook), and then in 1981, bundled and complemented by indexes, as volume one of the Nederlands Historisch Genootschap’s new bibliographical series.⁵¹ The writing of the annual surveys of historical literature gave the Seminar a certain solidarity and cohesion, which was further enhanced by social adjuncts and meals with speakers that had become a regular fixture by this time. Furthermore, Swart was recognized as ‘the central figure in the Seminar in the history of the Low Countries, where he stimulated young English researchers in their study of Dutch history from, in his opinion, a healthy distance’.⁵² Indeed, Swart certainly did much to encourage a new generation of Low Countries historians, including Geoffrey Parker, Leslie Price, Alastair Duke, Rosemary Jones, Renée Gerson, Chris Emery and Jonathan Israel.

Of Swart’s own works, his William of Orange and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1572–84 is known best: incomplete at the time of Swart’s passing in 1992, it was published posthumously first in 1994 and then in English translation with accompanying introductory chapters by Alastair Duke and Jonathan Israel in 2003.⁵³

The Seminar under Jonathan Israel, and after

In 1984, Jonathan Israel (b. 1946) was appointed as Swart’s successor as the chair of Dutch history. Having been educated at Oxford and Cambridge, Israel had been working at UCL for a decade when he took up the post, and significantly he was the first British academic to do so. His second book The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World (1982) was followed by other ground-breaking works on Low Countries history as well as on the ‘radical’ Enlightenment and the intellectual origins of modern democracy more widely.

As Swart eased himself into retirement he co-convened the Seminar with Israel for the academic year 1985–6. Thereafter, Israel took on sole responsibility of the convenorship. However, perhaps in recognition of the intensification of university teaching and research, it was not long before a more fluid arrangement of co-convenorship became the norm. When Israel undertook research leave in 1991–2, Alastair Duke of the University of Southampton and Graham Gibbs of the University of Oxford stood in as co-convenors, before all three of them continued the role jointly afterwards. In 1994–5, Gibbs moved to the University of Liverpool and was replaced by Lesley Gilbert from the Department of Dutch Studies, which had re-joined UCL after Bedford College merged with Royal Holloway in 1985. However, Gilbert herself departed in 1996–7. The following year, Israel and Duke were joined by Renée Gerson of London Guildhall University, Judith Pollmann of Somerville College, Oxford, and Stuart Moore of the University of Southampton; the latter four continued running the seminar after Israel moved to the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, in 2000–2001.⁵⁴

In 2002–3 the newly appointed, and still present, incumbent of the chair of Dutch history, Benjamin Kaplan, arrived at the IHR. Educated at Harvard, he specializes in religious history of early modern Europe, in particular of the Low Countries. A year after that, Gerson and Moore retired from the convenorship, Duke left in 2005–6, and then Pollmann in 2008–9, after her appointment as professor for early modern Dutch history at Leiden in 2005. New co-convenors included Anne Goldgar of King’s College London and Raingard Esser of the University of the West of England, Bristol. In 2011–12, this author (like Lesley Gilbert from the UCL Department of Dutch) joined for the outgoing Esser, who had taken up a professorship in Groningen. Joanna Woodall of the Courtauld Institute also provided much needed art historical expertise throughout. In 2017–18, Liesbeth Corens of Queen Mary became the latest co-convenor. In 2019–20, Goldgar moved to the University of Southern California, Los Angeles; however, due to the Seminar’s temporary move online, necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, she has been able to continue as a convenor for the time being. The great success of the first season of the Low Countries History Seminar in this new medium, which allowed the ‘fabled’ events to be followed worldwide, make it seem likely that some form of hybrid seminar will emerge in the post-COVID-19 age.

Extant records make it possible to consider the Seminar’s speakers and their papers only from 1990–91 onwards. In terms of geographical distribution over these past thirty years, about two thirds of the speakers had UK-based affiliations, of which over a third were from the University of London, whilst about a quarter were from Dutch institutions. Speakers were also, unsurprisingly, drawn from the USA and Belgium, but also from other European countries, as well as from Canada and Israel. About two thirds of the speakers were male, one third female, with an upwards trend: in the past decade the percentage of female speakers has been approaching 40 per cent.

Organizational pragmatism has played an increasing role in shaping the Seminar’s calendar. It operates with gratefully received financial support from the Stichting Professor van Winter Fund, the Friends of the IHR, Flanders House (the diplomatic representation of the Government of Flanders in the UK) and an anonymous donor. Inevitably, however, travel expenses remain modest and so many speakers are invited while staying in the London-Oxford-Cambridge ‘golden triangle’ for archival research or visiting fellowships and the like, often irrespective of the type of history they are pursuing. This phenomenon complements the way the personal choices and networks of co-convenors inform the content of the Seminar for any given year. Close collaboration between the Low Countries Seminar and the Seminar for Economic History, both scheduled on Friday afternoons, has also led to regular joint seminar meetings since the early 2000s.

In looking at the topical change over the decades, one thing that is striking is that the Seminar has diversified a lot and become more interdisciplinary. Art historians started making regular appearances in the mid-1990s, with not just scholars but also practitioners from galleries and museums, including the National Gallery, the Ashmolean Museum and the Rijksmuseum. Whereas political, international and religious aspects of Low Countries history remain popular throughout the recent life of the Seminar, a gradual increase in papers on social, cultural and intellectual history can be witnessed, reflecting both general trends in the field (for example, moving away from privileging elites) and the convenors’ evolving interests and preferences. A renewed emphasis on the history of colonization emerged in the mid-2000s. Considerations of gender history started to appear in the late 2000s with the history of minorities growing through the 2010s. There have also been a number of papers on the history of science and technology and the odd foray into digital history. In terms of chronological coverage, there has been a widening of scope to include occasional seminars on medieval times as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, although overall a focus on the early modern period has remained largely intact.⁵⁵ In terms of format, the focus on intense learned discussion continues, although the Seminar has accommodated changes, such as the way speakers now typically rely on PowerPoint slides for the presentation of the initial paper.

Conclusion

The Low Countries History Seminar has evolved over the decades, constantly reinventing something of the ethos of Pollard’s ‘history laboratory’.⁵⁶ From the late 1950s onwards, it became an incubator of, or else a catalyst for, an astonishing surge of research publications on Low Countries history in English, embedding the subject in a more international perspective – or the ‘colonization of Dutch history’ by British historians, as Swart called it in 1984.⁵⁷ However, Swart also reminds us to see this against the background of Britain having become less insular and more European in its political culture at the time. Obviously, after recent political events, the situation is different now; and it will be interesting to see how post-Brexit life will affect Anglo-Dutch relations in academia as well as in wider society.

Notes

1. * I would like to thank my co-convenors, past and present, as well as David Manning, Warren Oliver and Reinier Salverda for their help and support in writing this chapter. I am also grateful to Zoë Karens, former archivist at the IHR, for providing me with access to and valuable advice on the material.

2. 1.  For an in-depth evaluation of Geyl’s time in London, see S. van Rossem and U. Tiedau (ed.), Pieter Geyl and Britain: Encounters, Controversies and Impact (London, 2022): http://doi.org/10.14296/vfsr7023 [accessed 20 Dec. 2022].

3. 2.  We only have Geyl’s account of the conflict. Given his pugnacious nature it is not unreasonable to assume that there might have been another side to the story as well.

4. 3.  Harting subsequently went on to inaugurate the Anglo-Dutch student exchange programme that still carries his name, one of the oldest such internationalization schemes in European Higher Education, see Harting Scheme: https://hartingscheme.wordpress.com/history-of-the-scheme/ [accessed 21 Dec. 2021].

5. 4.  P. Geyl, Ik Die Zo Weinig In Mijn Verleden Leef: Autobiografie 1887–1940, ed. W. Berkelaar, L. Dorsman and P. van Hees (Amsterdam, 2009), p. 151. N.B. The translation from the original Dutch, like for all quotations in this chapter, is my own.

6. 5.  M. Thompson, ‘ “Making History”: A Short History of the Institute of Historical Research’ (2008): https://archives.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/IHR.html [accessed 10 Nov. 2020].

7. 6.  Geyl, Autobiografie, p. 152.

8. 7.  Once relocated to Senate House in 1947–8, a designated Low Countries Room was kept for the Seminar until 2014, when ‘modernization’ decreed that this space sadly had to give way to a computer training room.

9. 8.  Geyl, Autobiografie, p. 152.

10. 9.  Institute of Historical Research, Wohl Library: IHR/2/1/13, J. Haantjes to A. F. Pollard (15 Jan. 1926); IHR/1/1/5, IHR committee minutes (20 Jan. 1926). For details on Haantjes, see the biography in Frisian language by J. H. Brouwer, Oantinkens oan Jacob Haantjes, 1899–1956, meast út syn briefwiksel (Ljouwert, 1960).

11. 10.  J. B. Trapp, ‘Beer, Esmond Samuel de (1895–1990)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online, 2004): http://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/39804 [accessed 1 Dec. 2022].

12. 11.  For evidence of Montgomery’s scholarship, see R. Geikie, The Dutch Barrier 1705–1719, ed. I. Montgomery, with a memoir of the author by G. M. Trevelyan and intro. by P. Geyl (Cambridge, 1930).

13. 12.  M. C. Trevelyan, William the Third and the Defence of Holland, 1672–4 (London, 1930). For Mary Caroline Moorman [née Trevelyan] (1905–94), see D. Cannadine, ‘Trevelyan [née Ward], Janet Penrose (1879–1956)’, ODNB (2019): http://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780198614128.013.369122 [accessed 1 Dec. 2022].

14. 13.  See the biography of her son ‘Douglas Oran Keir Campbell’, in Dictionary of Scottish Architects (2016): http://www.scottisharchitects.org.uk/architect_full.php?id=403281 [accessed 8 May 2021].

15. 14.  S. T. Bindoff, The Scheldt Question: To 1839 (London, 1945); P. Geyl, The Netherlands Divided, 1609–1648, transl. S. T. Bindoff (London, 1936); P. Geyl, The Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century, transl. S. T. Bindoff (London/New York, 1964); P. Collinson, ‘Bindoff, Stanley Thomas [Tim] (1908–1980)’, ODNB (2004): http://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/58737 [accessed 1 Dec. 2022].

16. 15.  E. H. Kossmann, Familiearchief: Notities over voorouders, tijdgenoten en mijzelf (Amsterdam, 2003), p. 74. For a brief biography of Carter-Le Mesurier, see Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Amsterdam: https://nias.knaw.nl/fellow/carter-le-mesurier-a-c/ [accessed 8 May 2021].

17. 16.  A. C. Carter, The Dutch Republic in Europe in the Seven Years War (London, 1971), p. ix.

18. 17.  A. Duke, ‘Ik die zo weinig in mijn verleden leef … Autobiografie 1887–1940, by Pieter Geyl’, Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies, xxxvi (2012), 88–90, at p. 88.

19. 18.  For more details, see R. Ensel, ‘Debating Toynbee after the Holocaust: Pieter Geyl as a Post-war Public Intellectual’, in Pieter Geyl and Britain: Encounters, Controversies and Impact, ed. S. van Rossem and U. Tiedau (London, 2022), pp. 147–63.

20. 19.  V. Mehta, Fly and the Fly Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (London, 1963), p. 122. The author was a prominent journalist of the New Yorker magazine.

21. 20.  P. Geyl, ‘Prof. G. J. Renier: The Dutch and the English’, The Times, 6 Sept. 1962, p. 12.

22. 21.  G. Renier, Great Britain and the Establishment of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, 1813–1815: A Study in British Foreign Policy (London, 1930).

23. 22.  Geyl, ‘Prof. G. J. Renier: The Dutch and the English’, p. 12.

24. 23.  O. Renier, Before the Bonfire (Shipston-on-Stour, 1984), p. 131.

25. 24.  UCL Calendar 1934–35, p. lxix and p. 67. G. Renier, ‘Dutch History in England’, Pollardian, xvii (Spring Term, 1957), 3–4.

26. 25.  Geyl, Autobiografie, pp. 277–80. Also see P. van Hees, ‘Utrecht-Londen: De briefwisseling tussen Pieter Geyl en Gustaaf Renier’, Maatstaf, 35 (1987): 162–8.

27. 26.  R. Hatton, ‘Professor G. J. Renier as the Leader of a Postgraduate Seminar’, Pollardian, xvii (Spring Term, 1957), 7–8, at p. 8. See also: Renier, Before the Bonfire, p. 129.

28. 27.  Hatton, ‘Professor G. J. Renier’, p. 7.

29. 28.  Hatton, ‘Professor G. J. Renier’, p. 8.

30. 29.  Institute of Historical Research: Twenty-fifth Annual Report 1945–46 (London, 1946), p. 13; W. G. Beasley, ‘Introduction: A Personal Memoir’, in Collected Writings of W. G. Beasley (Richmond, 2001), pp. 1–10.

31. 30.  O. Renier and V. Rubinstein, Assigned to Listen: The Evesham Experience, 1939–43 (London, 1986); ‘Prof. G. J. Renier: The Dutch and the English’, The Times, 6 Sept. 1962, p. 12.

32. 31.  Institute for Historical Research: Thirty-fifth Annual Report 1955–56 (London, 1957), p. 17.

33. 32.  Cambridge University Library (CUL) MS RCMS 240/2/4: Remarks by Dutch History Seminar (6 Apr. 1948), associated correspondence and documents in CUL MS RCMS 240/2/1–5. For more on the de la Penha family’s claim, see L. M. Freeman, Early American Jews (Cambridge, MA, 1934), pp. 146–51; ‘Who Owns Labrador? The Historic Facts of an Unsolved Mystery’, The Knickerbocker: The Magazine of the Low Countries, (1945), pp. 28f. The family’s claims were dismissed by Canadian courts in 1927, 1950 and 1983.

34. 33.  Kossmann, Familiearchief, p. 160.

35. 34.  G. Renier, ‘Dutch History in England’, p. 4. Cf. O. Renier, Before the Bonfire, p. 132.

36. 35.  A. Lossky, ‘Ragnhild Marie Hatton’, Studies in History and Politics / Études d’Histoire et de Politique [special issue Essays in European History in Honour of Ragnhild Hatton, ed. K. Schweizer and J. Black], iv (1985), 13–17, at p. 13: curiously there is an account of how her interest in Low Countries history was inspired by an English cannon ball stuck in the brickwork of Bergen Cathedral, a relic of the second Anglo-Dutch war (1665–7).

37. 36.  A. Lossky, ‘Ragnhild Marie Hatton’, p. 15.

38. 37.  Institute of Historical Research, Wohl Library: IHR/2/1/418: G. J. Renier to J. G. Edwards (13 May 1954) and T. Milne to G. J. Renier (2 Jul. 1954). The request was granted by the IHR committee on 30 Jun. 1954.

39. 38.  Hatton, ‘Professor G. J. Renier’, pp. 7–8; quoted after Renier, Before the Bonfire, p. 129.

40. 39.  Lossky, ‘Ragnhild Marie Hatton’, p. 17.

41. 40. H. L. Wesseling., ‘Ernst Heinrich Kossmann’, Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde, 2003–2004, 106–25, at p. 108.

42. 41.  F. R. Ankersmit, ‘Ernst Kossmann, 31 Januari 1922–8 November 2003’, Levensberichten en herdenkingen 2005 (Amsterdam, 2005), pp. 66–75, at p. 69.

43. 42.  Institute of Historical Research, Wohl Library: IHR/1/1/32: IHR committee meeting minutes for 15 May 1957.

44. 43.  Kossmann, Familiearchief, p. 149. For details on Isabel de Madariaga, see S. Dixon, ‘Madariaga, Isabel Margaret de (1919–2014)’, ODNB (2018): http://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780198614128.013.108901 [accessed 1 Dec. 2022]. For details on Charles Boxer, see J. S. Cummins, ‘Boxer, Charles Ralph (1904–2000)’, ODNB (2007): http://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/74008 [accessed 1 Dec. 2022].

45. 44.  Kossmann, Familiearchief, p. 149.

46. 45.  M. Moskalewicz, ‘Sublime Experience and Politics: Interview with Professor Frank Ankersmit’, Rethinking History, xi (2007), 251–74.

47. 46.  For the first, see J. S. Bromley and E. H. Kossmann (ed.), Britain and the Netherlands, intro. P. Geyl (London, 1960). Kossmann himself published widely on the theory of history, amongst other topics, but his most famous publication in English is The Low Countries, 1780–1940 (Oxford, 1978), published in the Oxford History of Modern Europe series.

48. 47.  Kossmann, Familiearchief, p. 150.

49. 48.  B. Kaplan, Reformation and the Practice of Toleration: Dutch Religious History in the Early Modern Era (Leiden, 2019), pp. 1–26.

50. 49.  J. Israel, ‘K. W. Swart: His Career as a Historian’, in William of Orange and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1572–84, ed. R. P. Fagel et al. (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 1–7, at p. 2.

51. 50.  M. Witlox, ‘Interview met Professor K. W. Swart’, Spiegel Historiael (Feb. 1984), p. 103, quoted after Israel, ‘K. W. Swart’, p. 2.

52. 51.  A. C. Carter et al. (ed.), Historical Research in the Low Countries 1970–1975 (The Hague, 1981).

53. 52.  S. Groenveld, ‘Koenraad Wolter Swart. Rotterdam 16 Oktober 1916–Wassenaar 27 Juli 1992’, Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde (Leiden, 1993), pp. 133–8, at p. 138.

54. 53.  K. W. Swart, Willem van Oranje en de Nederlandse opstand, 1572–84 (The Hague, 1994); K. W. Swart, William of Orange and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1572–84, trans. J. C. Grayson, ed. R. P. Fagel et al., intro. chaps. A. Duke and J. Israel (Aldershot, 2003).

55. 54.  This information is drawn from the IHR’s annual reports, but sometimes the reality might have been slightly different to that which was noted for the record.

56. 55.  Cf. M. Wintle, ‘Research and Teaching in Dutch History in the United Kingdom: A First Survey’, Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies, xiv (1990), 104–11.

57. 56.  A. F. Pollard, Factors in Modern History (London, 1924); cited in D. Birch and J. Horn (comp.), The History Laboratory: The Institute of Historical Research 1921–96 (London, 1996), p. 127. See also A. Cobban, ‘Small Seminars in History’, The Times, Supplement on University College London, 3 Mar. 1965, p. ii.

58. 57.  Witlox, ‘Interview met Professor K. W. Swart’, quoted after Israel, ‘K. W. Swart’, p. 2.

References