Henric Piccardt
Henric Piccardt (25 March 1636, Woltersum – 6 May 1712, Harkstede) was an ambitious Dutch lawyer who made good at the court of young king Louis XIV of France in Paris where he became a published poet in French. Returning to the Netherlands, he rose to become syndic of the Ommelanden of Groningen and the untitled lord of the majestic manor at Slochteren, the Fraeylemaborg.
Piccardt hailed from Stad en Ommelanden – the city of Groningen and the semi-autonomous surrounding lands in the northern Netherlands. He was the son of Gualtherus Piccardt (1602–1678), the Protestant pastor of Woltersum, and his first wife Harmtien Hindriks Olinghe (c.1608–1641). He had a sister; his two brothers studied theology and entered the ministry. Henric chose to read law at the university of Groningen, soon moving on to the university of Franeker in Friesland (1657–1658). Here he promoted in law on December 14, 1658 publishing his Oratio de eloquentia & conjunctione ejusdem cum jurisprudentia. Apparently without his father’s permission he traveled to the Protestant university of Orléans in France where he earned a doctorate cum laude in law around 1660.
Although Louis XIV would be attacking the Dutch Republic in 1672, he enjoyed a short-lived but generally favorable press in the Dutch Republic in the early 1660s. At this time Piccardt came to Paris. From gleanings of his now lost autobiography, his nineteenth-century biographers tell a romantic story of Henric – black patch over one eye – earning his keep by singing songs on the Pont Neuf to the strumming of his harp. Passing ladies found him fetching, befriended him and introduced Henric to the pleasures of courtly life in the evenings. He is said to have then raised Louis XIV’s jealousies by sporting with one of the latter’s mistresses. Allegedly spirited out of Paris by friendly Freemasons, he is to have made his way back to the Netherlands by way of Italy and Germany. This tale is repeated in catalogues for historical exhibitions in northern manors. Whatever the merits of this account, more accurate information can be extracted from a volume of poetry - in the then fashionable style of 'baroque noir' - that Piccardt published at Paris in 1663: Les poésies françoises dediées à Madame Suzanne de Pons, Dame de la Gastevine (Paris: Jacques le Gras). The prefaces indicate not only some of Piccardt’s friends and their evaluation of him but also his own ideas on literary style. Moreover, many of the poems (sonnets but also madrigals etc.) are dedicated to courtisans who can be identified, and some describe his experiences at festivities of the court (such as the great Ballet des Arts, January 8, 1663, written by Isaac de Benserade and Jean-Baptiste Lully with a main role for Louis XIV). Piccardt moved especially in Huguenot circles of nobility, and he seems to have worked, too, as a tutor or governor of their sons. His remarkable success at court is clear from his appointment by Louix XIV as Gentilhomme ordinaire de la chambre du Roi de France. Piccardt was well-acquainted with nobility in the orbits of Louis II de Bourbon-Condé (1621–1686), called “Le Grande Condé”, and Henri de Massué, marquis de Ruvigny (1610–1689), and he visited, too, the salon of madame Caron, née Constantia Boudaen, intimate with the scientific and scholarly Huygens family. In the course of his travels, Piccardt became close to the family of the burgomaster of Leipzig, Christian Lorenz von Adlershelm (1606–1684). Christina Regina directed the family’s unique Cabinet of Natural Curiosities, and Henric was briefly engaged to her sister Johanna (1630–1680), who dedicated to him her Verteutschte Stratonica (Amsterdam, 1666).
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