Games and Godliness in Old Holland

What part did sport play in the life of the Dutch people during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? On the face of it, this might seem an odd question to ask. Today, it is true, Dutch sporting prowess is considerable. Dutch football teams enjoy a world reputation, and stars like Ruud Gullit and Marco van Basten are household names. But we tend to assume that this is a comparatively recent development. We hardly think of the contemporaries of Rembrandt and De Ruyter as people much given to sporting activities; they were certainly not regarded as such by the many foreign observers who wrote about the Dutch Republic in its heyday. To them, the reputation of the Netherlands was almost exclusively commercial: a nation, so it was said, interested only in the making of money.

Voltaire believed that the Dutch state was best understood simply as a great trading company. And if its citizens ever took time off from their business pursuits, they spent it in eating and drinking. The drunken Dutchman, the swag-bellied Hollander – these were stock characters in European literature of the time.