ABSTRACT
Ostentatious practices of material culture, including the building of impressive architectural and horticultural complexes, performing ritual ceremonies, and extensive gift-giving, as well as co-ordinating furnishings, displaying luxury objects, and acquiring exotic floral and faunal collections, were by no means the unique preserve of this dynasty or the House of Orange-Nassau in particular. These were behaviours shared with a number of elite transnational dynasties.2 However, there were specific contexts, related to their political position in the Low Countries, their dynastic situation of princely, rather than royal, origins, and the repeated female regencies for young princes, that made certain material forms desirable and strategic for the House of OrangeNassau. The House promoted a specific identity and consolidated its power through conscious Orange branding, in a materialised form that had national, dynastic, and individual consequences. This branding was a significant tool in moments of dynastic and political crisis – such as at the deaths of Willem I, Willem II, who left a pregnant widow, and Willem III who left no direct heir – or at specific times of political tension in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when anti-Orangist parties emerged. It was utilised strategically by many individuals within the House, as well as by a wide variety of others beyond it, whose labours shaped the overarching trajectory and expansion of the House in the early modern period.
