Cultural Marketing of William III: A Religious Turn in Katharina Lescailje’s Political Poetry

Abstract

William III (1650–1702) and his wife Mary II (1662–1695) have been praised extensively by Dutch poets. One gets the impression that the government of the King-Stadholder was widely appreciated in the Dutch Republic, while in fact his position was not uncontested and this image was partly constructed in laudatory poems. The laudations for William were univocal in their praise and particularly religious in tone. The example of the Amsterdam female poet Katharina Lescailje (1649–1711) highlights both aspects of the poetry about William and Mary. The resounding praise for William, as well as the religious tone in the poems written during the 1680s, was in remarkable opposition to her earlier political poems, written in the 1670s. In this article Lescailje's political poems from the period 1672–1702 are examined in order to explain both the ideological and religious shift in her work.