But it went deeper than mere fear for Charles’s ascension or the defense of his own policies. Possibly to distance himself from any lingering guilt he might have felt over his role in their humiliation, James blamed the disastrous Bohemian campaign on Frederick and Elizabeth alone. By this time, he had convinced himself that they had deliberately and maliciously set themselves in opposition to his express wishes, and his resentment was palpable. As he saw it, he had been forced into the position of having to defend Frederick’s claim to the Palatinate; that’s why he spoke only of his grandchildren’s rights, and not his son-in-law’s. “You speak to me of Italy, Bohemia, Germany, Flanders and the whole world. I cannot do everything!” James whined at his councillors.
Despite his talk of war, the king didn’t care if the Palatinate was returned promptly; he was willing to let the emperor have it during his lifetime in exchange for a promise that ultimately, after Ferdinand’s death, it would revert to Frederick’s children. Coincidentally, this line of thinking fed nicely into James’s natural inclination against spending money or raising troops. Having had many years of experience with the king of England, the Venetian ambassador was able to recognize this truth instantly. “His Majesty fears the troubles and the burdens of war more than any prince who ever lived and his real idea is to patch things up as best he may,” he observed bluntly to the doge in a letter of March 5, 1621. It would obviously be much more difficult to break this news to Elizabeth and Frederick in person, or to ignore their plight if they were a presence at court, where his ministers and the general population would see their faces and be reminded daily of the human cost of their suffering.
James did not even have the courage to tell his daughter and son-in-law that they were not welcome in England directly by letter or messenger; they had to find out through back channels. Although Elizabeth held her head high and pretended that she had never had any intention of availing herself of her father’s hospitality, she must have felt this final mortification keenly. They had already packed up their few belongings at Custrin and arranged to leave the new baby, Maurice, barely two months old, with Frederick’s sister in Berlin. For one long, dark moment, it must have seemed to Elizabeth as though she and her husband were all alone in the world.
And then her new son’s namesake, Maurice of Nassau, prince of Orange, stepped gallantly into the void left by her father and invited Elizabeth and Frederick to take up residence in The Hague in a house provided by the governing body, the States General.* This offer was gratefully accepted and by the first week in April 1621, the deposed king and queen of Bohemia, with one-and-a-half-year-old Rupert in tow, had reached Holland. There “they were met by the Prince of Orange and all his court, and so conducted to this town in coaches; the whole way, as well by water as land, betwixt this and the entrance into Delft, by reason of a great concourse of people coming from all parts, being like a continued street,” the English ambassador to The Hague reported. “And their being saluted here, since their coming, by all the councils and assemblies, is an argument [that] the affection of this state, from the highest to the lowest, is not changed by the change of these princes’ fortune.” After all that she had been through, the adoration of the crowd, and especially the couple’s reception as visiting royalty, must have cheered Elizabeth and somewhat eased the ache in her heart.
But there is no doubt that she had been wounded, and despite her efforts to hide her feelings behind a mask of dignity, the hurt and bitterness crept out in her private correspondence. “I have seen a genuine letter of the Queen of Bohemia, written to one of the leading Countesses here, an intimate friend of hers, saying how she has reached The Hague after a long and toilsome journey, where she enjoys more popularity among the people, with her husband, than she has ever experienced anywhere else, and where she will stay awhile, seeing she cannot come where she ought,” confided the Venetian ambassador to the doge on April 30. “She adds: Everyone is awaiting some good resolution from his Majesty [James]; for my part I expect very little, but it will only redound to the triumph of our enemies who mock and jest at him.”
THE PRINCE OF ORANGE was as kind as her father was callous. At public expense, Elizabeth and Frederick were given a grand residence, one of the finest in the city, in which to live; it was even redecorated so that the rooms would reflect their kingly status. The couple was further allotted an allowance of 10,000 florins a month to help with the housekeeping. Reunited with their eldest child, seven-year-old Frederick Henry, who had been living in Holland with his father’s relatives since his escape from Prague the previous September, Elizabeth and Frederick and their two small sons moved into their new home in The Hague, and with renewed determination they set themselves to the task of recovering all that they had lost.
And there was reason for optimism. The Spanish troops had not, after all, succeeded in occupying all of the Palatinate—the couple’s beautiful ancestral home in Heidelberg was yet under the control of patriots loyal to Frederick, supplemented by a small remnant of his Bohemian forces, who had regrouped under the direction of one of his former commanders, General Mansfield. Even better, the hated king of Spain, Philip III, had died on March 31, just as Frederick and Elizabeth were making their grand entrance into Holland. The exiled king and queen of Bohemia took this news as something of a good omen; his successor, Philip IV, was only sixteen, and the kingdom might be weakened by the transition. “You will have heard of the death of the king of Spain,” Elizabeth wrote coolly to a friend in England upon receiving this intelligence. “May all his race perish so, especially the women.”
But as both his daughter and the Venetian secretary had so astutely predicted, despite his theatrics at Parliament, James was not in fact enthusiastic about sending soldiers into battle, especially when it was so much easier and less expensive to dispatch yet another emissary to negotiate with the emperor. This new English envoy duly arrived in Vienna in May. Ferdinand, who had no intention of reinstating Frederick as elector of the Palatinate—he informed the Spanish secretly by letter that he “would rather cherish a crushed snake in his bosom”—pretended to consider James’s proposals, one of which involved Frederick’s publicly getting down on his knees and begging the emperor’s forgiveness. The bargaining was not without its compensations, however, at least from Ferdinand’s point of view. He was able to use the time consumed by these negotiations to advantage, surreptitiously directing ever more imperial troops, now under the command of a general named Tilly, into the Palatinate to try to dislodge Mansfield’s forces.
By August, Frederick, who understood very well what was happening, could stand it no longer, and with his wife’s aid took action. Elizabeth, who like the emperor had also used the past few months productively by actively soliciting allies to her husband’s cause through letters and heartfelt personal appeals, had succeeded in recruiting a particularly helpful young partisan by the name of Prince Christian of Brunswick. Christian was twenty-two years old, devoutly Protestant, an enthusiastic warrior, and much taken with the beautiful dethroned queen of Bohemia. In the chivalric spirit of the age, he devoted himself to her service, dramatically taking possession of one of her gloves as a token of her favor and promising, with a grand flourish, “Madam, I will give it you in the Palatinate!”
To this end, the prince gallantly mustered a cavalry of a thousand knights and offered to help Frederick lead them to Heidelberg to shore up Mansfield’s defenses and retake his inheritance. This was exactly what Frederick, who had no money for troops on his own, had hoped for; even if he did end up having to negotiate with Ferdinand, it would be from a much stronger position if he won back his territory or held on to at least part of it.
He had already agreed to this proposal and left The Hague to meet up with Christian’s forces in Germany when James was alerted to his son-in-law’s intentions. Incensed that Frederick had undertaken an initiative without consulting him and fearful yet again of jeopardizing the endless negotiations in Vienna, the king demanded that his son-in-law
remove himself from the battlefield. “The commandment I have from his Majesty is this, that… it is his pleasure that you deal roundly with his son-in-law… giving him to understand that his Majesty will not only quit him absolutely, but give direct assistance against him, unless he continue constant to all of his Majesty’s desires,” the English secretary in charge of transmitting these singular orders wrote to his counterpart in Holland. Frederick, faced with the prospect of losing all help from England in the future or perhaps even having his powerful father-in-law turn against him altogether, was forced to decline Christian’s offer and return to The Hague. Two months later, the English envoy in Vienna gave up in disgust at Ferdinand’s duplicity and returned to London. Even James had to admit that the emperor had not been negotiating in good faith.
That was 1621.
In 1622, Frederick and Elizabeth tried again. After the failure of James’s diplomatic initiative in Vienna, a parliament was called in England and an additional £30,000 allocated to prosecute the war in the Palatinate, a sum that the exiled couple took, not unreasonably, as a sign of encouragement. While James continued to lobby for a negotiated settlement—this time dispatching an emissary to Spain in the hopes that the government there would exert pressure on the emperor to compromise—he did send this money to his daughter and son-in-law. But by that point, Elizabeth and Frederick were so heavily in debt that they had to use it to pay off their creditors rather than give the money to help protect Heidelberg. With no funds with which to keep his army together, Mansfield, Frederick’s general in the Palatinate, was in danger of having to surrender what was left of the family estates to the emperor.
Frantic to prevent the complete forfeiture of their remaining property, at the end of March, a once-again heavily pregnant Elizabeth sent her husband off to Germany through hostile territory on yet another daring mission. So great was the risk of capture that Frederick shaved off his telltale goatee and adopted the dress of a humble merchant. In this disguise he was able to pass discreetly from town to town, although occasionally he was forced to stay in inns frequented by imperial soldiers. He played his part so well that none around him realized that the unassuming man in the common room of the tavern lifting his glass to the health and success of the emperor and the ignominious defeat of the Elector Palatinate was in fact the Winter King.
By April 17, 1622, just as Elizabeth was giving birth to the couple’s sixth child, a daughter (whom she christened Louise Hollandine in grateful acknowledgment of all the Dutch had done for her), Frederick had arrived in Germersheim, about thirty miles southwest of Heidelberg. His general was already engaged in surrender talks with an imperial envoy; there was no time to lose. Like a cinema star in a 1930s adventure film, Frederick abruptly flung away his merchant’s cloak and revealed himself to Mansfield, who immediately withdrew from the negotiations and renewed his commitment to his liege lord to defend the Palatinate.
And now, at last, through this bold initiative, Frederick’s cause gained momentum. The news of his arrival spread quickly through the countryside, revitalizing his campaign and brightening the hearts of his subjects. On April 27, just ten days after his daughter’s birth, he and Mansfield, in the company of an army of some 17,000 men, scattered the imperial forces under General Tilly, and Frederick had the intense satisfaction of reclaiming the city of Heidelberg as his own.*
Even better, Prince Christian of Brunswick, who had not forgotten his promise to Elizabeth, had raised an additional ten thousand men and was leading this battalion south from Westphalia to join with Frederick’s army. The prince’s progress was slowed somewhat by his acute need for money to pay his soldiers. Toward this end, he had developed an effective, if unique, method of fund-raising. Stopping at every city and town he came to, Christian delivered letters on scorched paper that read simply, “Fire! Fire! Blood! Blood!” He clearly had a flair for catchphrases, as the citizens who received this cryptic communication knew to hand over piles of silver to make him go away.
It was this fondness for specie that was to be Christian’s—and his patron’s—downfall. After the imperial defeat at Heidelberg, General Tilly had replenished his army with Spanish soldiers, and now strove to intercept Christian’s forces on their way to rendezvous with Frederick’s. The prince could have waited for Mansfield’s army to give battle, but fearful of losing his treasure, he instead engaged the enemy. He saved his loot but lost his soldiers, an action for which he was roundly condemned by Frederick and Mansfield.
As a result of this loss, Frederick and his generals, who now no longer had the men needed to confront Tilly, were obliged to fall back to Alsace. Along the way, Mansfield and Christian quarreled, refusing to cooperate with one another; nor could either stop his soldiers from looting and ravaging the local villagers. In despair, Frederick saw all the goodwill he had engendered by liberating his subjects from the imperial forces disintegrate in the frenzy of carnage. The only way to prevent further destruction to his countrymen was to dismiss his generals and their unruly recruits from his service. This he did in August, in the most tactful way possible: “Be it known to all,” Frederick published in an official decree, “that the Elector Palatine… being destitute of all human assistance, he perceives it impracticable to make farther use of them [his army], except to their own great inconvenience and detriment: he, therefore, with all due resignation of mind… like a friend, with all imaginable tenderness and humanity, not only absolves them from the oath they have taken to him, but permits them to consult their safety and interest, as far as may be possible, elsewhere.”
With no organized force to oppose him, Tilly immediately went back to besieging Heidelberg, and on September 21, 1622, the town surrendered. Frederick was devastated by this loss, particularly as the imperial soldiers inflicted their customary vengeance on the local population. “My poor Heidelberg taken!” he wrote to Elizabeth on September 30. “All sorts of cruelties have been exercised there: the whole town pillaged, and… the handsomest part of it, burnt. God visits us very severely: I am sadly distressed, at the misery of these poor people.” By October 19 he was back once more with his wife in The Hague, where, to add insult to injury, he was greeted with the news that Ferdinand intended to formally invest the duke of Bavaria as elector of the Palatinate at a grand ceremony in Vienna, now that Heidelberg was back under imperial control.
In England, this depressing turn of events prompted a new outpouring of public sentiment in Elizabeth’s favor. Prince Charles, now nearly twenty-two years old and recovered from all of his childhood maladies, begged his father to be allowed to lead an army to his sister’s defense; there was call for another parliament to raise new funds for the war effort and possibly even an authorization for the navy to become involved. But James remained committed to a negotiated settlement, particularly as the Spanish government, to keep England out of the war, tantalizingly held out the prospect of a match between the still unmarried Charles and the Infanta Maria Anna, the seventeen-year-old sister of the young Philip IV. James leaped on this possibility, believing that a wedding between England and Spain would solve all of his problems at once: Charles would be married magnificently, as befit his rank, and could start a family, thus ensuring his (and not Elizabeth’s) succession to the throne, while the return of the Palatinate could be incorporated into the nuptial agreement as part of Maria Anna’s dowry. So appealing was this alternative that the king once again refused to listen to the information gleaned by his own agents. “We have here at present a sudden strong noise (derived as they say by express intelligence from the court of Spain) that the Infanta Maria hath… besought the King of Spain not to press her any further about the match of Prince Charles,” the English ambassador stationed in Venice had reported earlier that year. “And this very week I am advertized from home that the ambassador of the State of Venice did confidently affirm that the Infanta Maria was otherwise to be disposed.” James’s refusal to surrender the dream of a prestigious Spanish marriage for Charles capped another year of p
rofound frustration for his daughter. “The king, my father, is cozened and abused, but will not see it till it be too late,” Elizabeth wrote in despair to a friend on December 5.
That was 1622.
Matters came to a head in 1623. This time it was Charles who, emulating his brother-in-law, donned a disguise in order to slip unnoticed into Spain, in a last-ditch effort to secure the fair Maria Anna’s hand in marriage. On February 19, he and his father’s favorite, the handsome duke of Buckingham, who had helped hatch this novel plot, donned large hats and provincial attire and sailed for France; in these outfits they arrived in Paris two days later, where they fooled no one. By March 7 they were in Madrid, the French government having discreetly looked the other way as they journeyed south through the countryside sampling the local fare, collecting souvenirs of rustic life, and generally behaving like tourists on holiday.
Their bucolic merrymaking must have made them slightly more conspicuous than they’d planned, because the Spanish government seemed not much surprised when it was eventually revealed that the heir to the throne of England had taken it into his head to drop by for an impromptu visit. Eighteen-year-old Philip IV and his advisers were astute enough to treat this romantic escapade for the foolish political maneuver it was, and played along with straight faces. Charles and the duke of Buckingham were entertained as honored guests, and the conditions of a possible marriage between the English prince and the Spanish Infanta were duly considered and consigned to the usual negotiations. These discussions, touching as they did on such critical subjects as the difference in religion between the bride and groom (she was a devout Catholic, he an equally pious Protestant) and the return of the Palatinate, naturally took time, particularly as the Spanish mediators loaded on all sorts of conditions sure to be repugnant to England, such as freedom of worship for all English Catholics and permission for Maria Anna to raise her children according to her religious beliefs and not Charles’s. The days stretched to weeks, the weeks to months, during which time Charles was treated to only fleeting glimpses of his prospective fiancée.
Daughters of the Winter Queen Page 10
