Hieronymus van Beverningh

In 1653 (the year in which Johan de Witt became Grand Pensionary) Beverningh was made a member of the Holland delegation in the States-General of the Netherlands.

[citation needed] De Witt would have been happy to have a sent a single negotiator, but the other provinces would not agree, so together with another Holland Regent, Willem Nieupoort, and representatives of the provinces of Zeeland (Paulus van de Perre) and Friesland (Allart Pieter van Jongestall),[4] Beverningh was sent as a plenipotentiary to the Commonwealth of England to negotiate the Treaty of Westminster (1654) that was to end the First Anglo-Dutch War.

The already complicated negotiations were made more difficult when they reached an apparent impasse over the English demand that the young Prince of Orange William III (three years of age at the time) would be excluded from the offices that his father, William II, Prince of Orange and other ancestors had held in the Republic, like that of Stadtholder of Holland and Zeeland, and Captain general of the Union.

[4] Meanwhile, the clerk of De Witt, Jan van Messem, betrayed the secret existence of the Act to the stadtholder of Friesland, William's kinsman Willem Frederik of Nassau-Dietz.

[5] The resulting scandal was eventually laid to rest, but the States of Friesland blocked Beverningh's appointment as thesaurier-generaal (Treasurer) of the Union, that was first proposed by Holland in 1654, until 1657 (during which time the function was formally left vacant).

[3]: 535 Besides his office of Treasurer, which he would fulfil till 1665, and that of representative in the States-General, Beverningh regularly undertook important diplomatic missions for the Republic.

Finally, in 1678 he helped negotiate the Treaty of Nijmegen that ended the Franco-Dutch War[1]: 191–198 Meanwhile, he was appointed schout and later burgemeester of his native city.

In these later years he embarked on a scientific career that would bring him plaudits from colleagues including Carl Linnaeus, who would later credit the discovery of a nasturtium (Tropaeus majus) to him.

This garden inspired the German botanist Jacobus Breynius to write his Prodromus fasciculi rariorum plantarum in Hortis Hollandiae (vol.

[citation needed] Beverningh also acted as a maecenas, enabling the German born botanist Paul Hermann to travel to Ceylon (currently Sri Lanka), a journey that resulted in his Paradisus Batavus (1698), a standard work about orchids.