Poet and important figure in the Réveil, the anti-modernist spiritual revival in the Dutch Reformed Church of the Netherlands, which also included de Clercq’s friend, Willem Bilderdijk. He was born in Amsterdam, the child of wealthy grain merchants and studied French, German and Greek with the intention of becoming a preacher, but his ambitions were thwarted by the French invasion of 1813. De Clercq then travelled in northern Germany and the Baltic and visited St Petersburg in 1816, returning home in 1817 to manage the family grain business and marry Caroline Boissevain (1799–1879). In 1824 he moved to The Hague to become secretary of the Netherlands Trading Society. In this role he attempted to put into practice his preference for small-scale industries over the factories that he perceived as harmful to workers. In later life he fell into a serious depression and died in 1844. De Clercq and Southey corresponded in 1824 when de Clercq sent him Katherina Bilderdijk’s (1776–1830) Rodrigo de Goth, Koning van Spanje (1823–1824), a Dutch translation of Southey’s Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814).