Daughters of the Winter Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  Beginning one’s reign by presenting one’s subjects with a bill several times larger than any in recorded history was perhaps not the optimal way to establish a long and fruitful relationship. Not unreasonably given future events, Parliament balked and instead chastised Charles for agreeing to all the tolerant Catholic clauses in his marriage contract, forcing him to renege. They then went on the offensive and tried to impeach Buckingham for, among other transgressions, agreeing to lend Protestant English ships to the Catholic king of France, who, it turned out, intended to use them to help subdue their coreligionists, the Huguenots, who were rebelling at La Rochelle. To save his favorite from disgrace, Charles was forced to dismiss Parliament without obtaining anywhere near the amount of money needed to accomplish his objectives.

  A lack of sufficient funds did not, however, dissuade Charles and the duke of Buckingham from going ahead and putting their ambitious war program into action anyway. Buckingham, after spending years first as James’s favorite and then his son’s, was by far the richest man in England. He bought himself the title of lord admiral, made a cut-rate attempt to spruce up the navy, pronounced the fleet seaworthy, and in October 1625 sent it off to attack the Spanish coast and hopefully bring back some pirated treasure. It was only after the fleet set sail that the commanding officer noticed that there wasn’t nearly enough food or weaponry to support a military operation of any length and that in any event the ammunition supplied didn’t fit the gun barrels. By November they were already on their way back to England, having achieved nothing beyond the loss of four ships and the sacrifice of a significant proportion of English sailors, many of them forced recruits, to storms, disease, and privation.

  The outcry over this disastrous expedition served only to amplify the demands for Buckingham’s censure and removal from office. To counteract this unfortunate trend, Charles, again on the advice of his favorite, decided to embark on an innovative new war strategy. Despite Elizabeth’s and Frederick’s pleas that the promised money and soldiers be sent to help retake the Palatine, the duke of Buckingham instead insisted that the best way to proceed (and, coincidentally, appease his parliamentary critics) was to come to the aid of the rebelling French Protestants at La Rochelle, who were under siege by Louis XIII’s Catholic troops. The fact that this meant attacking his own ally, with whom he had just signed an extensive military treaty whose sole purpose was to return his sister and her husband to their property in Germany, seems not to have occurred to Charles.

  So what remained of the fleet was once again patched up as best it could be, this time on monies raised through forced loans. (Those of Charles’s subjects who refused to contribute were imprisoned, a novel if not particularly effective financing strategy.) By June 1627, the ships were pronounced sound, and the squadron set sail for France with Buckingham personally in command.

  Despite the invigorating presence of the lord admiral, the mighty British fleet had much the same experience fighting the French as it had had with the Spanish. Determined to seize an enemy fort located on the Isle of Rhé, a small landmass just off the coast of La Rochelle, Buckingham launched an assault, only to discover that the scaling ladders he had brought along to scramble over the walls were too short to reach the top. He sent back messengers to England begging for money and reinforcements, but Charles, an art connoisseur, instead used what funds he could scrounge to purchase a collection of paintings by Old Masters (a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, his Italian dealer assured him), so Buckingham was forced to retreat through a narrow strait that allowed the French to decimate the English soldiers with impunity. The entire operation was such a debacle that Louis XIII was able to joke about it. “Alack,” he told the ambassador from Savoy, “if I had known my brother of England had longed so much for the Isle of Rhé, I would have sold it him for half the money it hath cost him.”

  By the time he and his ships limped back to England, Charles’s lord admiral and chief adviser was the most detested man in the realm. (“Who rules the kingdom?—The king. Who rules the king?—The duke. Who rules the duke?—The devil” ran a popular London ditty.) Nonetheless Buckingham refused to admit defeat and convinced Charles to make yet another attempt to relieve the siege of La Rochelle. However, the lord admiral’s luck ran out on August 23, 1628, when he was stabbed to death in Portsmouth, where he had gone to inspect the inevitable repairs on the fleet. The assassin, one of Buckingham’s own seamen, a veteran of the catastrophic Isle of Rhé operation, was regarded as a hero by the general populace, who lit bonfires and proclaimed public prayers in his name when a shattered Charles had him executed for the crime.

  Charles sent the naval force to France anyway, where it sat in the harbor of La Rochelle and watched as the Huguenot inhabitants slowly succumbed to the French Catholic troops under the generalship of Cardinal Richelieu—“in the sight of the English fleet which did effect nothing for them,” as a French Protestant observed bitterly to a member of Charles’s government. The English commander was moved by the suffering of the citizens, but Richelieu’s army and defenses were so daunting that he dared not intervene. On October 18, 1628, the Protestants of La Rochelle surrendered. “There died in this siege, of famine, 16,000 persons. The rest endured a wonderful misery, most of their food being hides, leather, and old gloves,” read the official report from the fleet.

  Such were the results of the confident promises and resolutions, the carefully arranged alliances and military operations undertaken by Charles I on behalf of his sister. And while the king of England busied himself with a futile war against his French ally, the imperial army racked up victory after victory, dealing out death and destruction indiscriminately to all who stood in its path, burning, looting, and savaging the terrified civilian population, as Ferdinand tightened his hold on Germany.

  ONCE AGAIN, ELIZABETH AND FREDERICK could only stand by and watch in dismay as their hopes and prospects were blighted by a lack of support from England. Elizabeth’s uncle the king of Denmark bravely took to the field in a three-pronged, coordinated attack with General Mansfield and Christian of Brunswick (who had already lost an arm in service to the queen of Bohemia), but without English soldiers or money, the effort was doomed. Mansfield flung twelve thousand men over a bridge in Dessau, in northern Germany, about eighty miles southwest of Berlin, only to see nearly half of them brutally cut down by the far superior imperial artillery under the direction of General Wallenstein, Ferdinand’s new, highly competent commander. Christian of Brunswick, who had so bankrupted himself in his lady’s cause that his soldiers were reduced to fighting with iron rods, died despondent and forlorn at the age of twenty-eight of wounds received in battle at Wolfenbüttel, also in northern Germany. The king of Denmark was defeated in a pitched battle with General Tilly’s Catholic forces at nearby Lutter, where six thousand Danish corpses littered the field and all of his artillery was lost before he sounded the retreat.

  It wasn’t until November 1628, just after the French Protestants at La Rochelle surrendered to Cardinal Richelieu’s army, that a stroke of good luck actually fell Elizabeth’s way. Ships from the Dutch East India Company suddenly appeared off the coast of England on their way to Amsterdam, and it was immediately apparent that Holland had been the beneficiary of an unprecedented (if pirated) windfall. “The great prize taken in the West Indies by the Hollanders amounts… to £870,000 or thereabout,” a correspondent from London enthused. “They have also taken the Brazilian fleet, laden with sugars. In that West India Company of Holland, the Queen of Bohemia hath one-eighth part left her by the late Maurice, Prince of Orange, in his last will and testament.”

  One-eighth of nearly £900,000, a small fortune! Enough to try again, to raise a new troop of soldiers with which to pry Heidelberg from Ferdinand’s grasp at last, with maybe even some left over to pay down their household debts! Elizabeth had (of course) just given birth again and couldn’t make the trip, but she sent Frederick to Amsterdam, where the ships were harbored, to inspect the bounty. The treasure had excit
ed the interest of the general population; many people took time to visit and marvel at the haul, and Frederick knew that his eldest son especially would enjoy the spectacle, so on January 7, 1629, he took Frederick Henry, who five days earlier had just turned fifteen, with him.

  Father and son boarded a small sloop with about twenty other people to sail from The Hague to Amsterdam. It was a bitterly cold day, with a strong wind. The sea was crowded with shipping vessels in a hurry to make port, which made it difficult to maneuver. The afternoon light was failing—night comes early in January in Holland—when suddenly out of the gloom came a much larger craft carrying a full cargo of beer. There was no time to get out of the way. The beer-laden galleon struck the boat carrying Frederick and his son with such force that it split it in two. In minutes, it had filled with water and sunk, its passengers pitched into the sea, screaming for help and clinging to the debris as best they could. According to a letter of January 21 reporting these events, “The murthering boat, having a fair wind, would have left them all there; but a skipper of the King’s boat being gotten into it, did with his dagger threaten death to the master thereof, if he would not presently save the King of Bohemia, to whom a cable being cast, he was by that means saved, together with a woman and a lackey that took hold thereof with him.”

  But the other passengers were not so lucky. Frederick could hear his son’s cries—“Save me, father, save me!”—but could not find him in the darkness, though with their last energies, the members of the drowning crew had hoisted the boy to the ship’s mast, which yet stood above the water. The galleon on which the rescued king of Bohemia stood was forced, despite his entreaties, to give up the search. Nineteen people died that night in the frigid sea. The next morning, when Frederick came back to search for bodies, he found his eldest son’s corpse bobbing in the water, the boy’s cloak still wrapped around the mast of the ship and “his cheek fastened by the frost to the said pole.”

  This tragedy, the correspondent continued, “hath been such a wind to the poor father’s and mother’s hearts, as it is much feared that… (she being newly brought to bed, and he much bruised and distempered with that miserable accident) it may endanger their lives.”

  THE COUPLE SURVIVED, but Frederick, who had stood wet and shivering on the deck of the rescue ship in the bitter wind listening to his child’s desperate pleas for help and whose grief must consequently also have carried with it the heavy burden of guilt for having exposed the boy, however unconsciously, to danger, never fully recovered his health and spirits. And the next two years were as dark and discouraging as any Elizabeth had known. Frederick was frequently ill with a nagging cough that the doctors feared was consumption. In the spring of 1630, Charles, whose military ambitions had died with the duke of Buckingham, sent a messenger to his sister and her husband at The Hague to break the news that he had agreed to a peace with Spain that did not include a return of the Palatinate.* The ambassador reported back that thirty-three-year-old Frederick broke down in tears at this interview and threatened to send Elizabeth on the next boat to England to beg alms from her brother “for that he [Frederick] was not able to put bread into her mouth.” In January 1631 they buried their second-to-youngest daughter, the child who had been born just before the terrible episode with the treasure ships, in the tomb next to their eldest son.

  So when later that year the Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus, onetime suitor of Elizabeth, decided to enter the war in Germany on the side of the Protestants, nobody gave it much thought.

  Improbably, it was again Cardinal Richelieu who acted as catalyst. Although he had briefly reclaimed the vital passages through the Swiss Alps for France, these had reverted to Spain when the cardinal had been forced to redeploy his army to subdue the rebellion at La Rochelle. Now he needed another means by which to divert imperial attention and troops (as, clearly, based on recent experience, Charles I was neither competent nor reliable in this regard). After some contemplation, Richelieu looked around and settled on Gustavus as the man for the job. On January 23, 1631, France and Sweden signed the Treaty of Bärwalde, which, in addition to the usual smoke screen of trade and defensive language, specified that Gustavus, a Lutheran, was to lead an extensive army of some thirty thousand men, to be funded by Richelieu, into Germany against the Catholic emperor.*

  This turned out to be an inspired move. Gustavus Adolphus, without question the finest commander of his age, known admiringly as “the Golden King” or “the Lion of the North” for his Nordic coloring and general ferocity in battle, was definitely a man worth backing. Unlike his opponent General Tilly, who was older and not particularly innovative when it came to tactics, the king of Sweden, who had begun fighting as a ten-year-old child in his father’s army, had propelled himself enthusiastically into the study of combat and made it his life’s work. Gustavus saw the various military units—cavalry, infantry, artillery—not as separate battalions but as interlocking gears in a precisely driven machine that he orchestrated and drilled incessantly, like a master conductor rehearsing a particularly complex and strenuous symphony. Before landing in northern Germany, he had the foresight to raise an army of over 40,000 men—not the usual motley conglomerate of enthusiastic but inexperienced knights supplemented by forced recruits, but skilled soldiers, trained in small groups to shoot and reload lightweight muskets so quickly and continuously that the effect was not unlike modern automatic weaponry. Nor did Gustavus bring this vast force over all at once, where there was the chance its ranks would be diminished by lack of food or illness. Instead, he had them shipped over in stages when he knew supplies were adequate, so they arrived fresh and strong.

  The king of Sweden was also shrewd enough to recognize that his prospects for a successful invasion would increase substantially if he could pry allies away from Ferdinand by convincing the Protestant members of the German ruling class to support his efforts. Luckily for Gustavus, he held clout with one such baron who was perfectly situated to assist him in his endeavors: his brother-in-law, the elector of Brandenburg.

  Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of the North

  The elector of Brandenburg, a man who seemingly could be cowed by a strong breeze, whose one ambition had been to pass through life in the comfort and safety of out-of-the-way, provincial Berlin, had had the misfortune first to marry Frederick’s sister and then to have his own sister marry the fearsome Gustavus. Try as he might to wiggle out of it, this put him squarely in the middle of the conflict. With Frederick he had been firm—he would allow the deposed king of Bohemia’s children to remain in Berlin until provision could be made for them in Holland, but he would not take his part against the emperor, and Frederick, having no choice, had acquiesced in this decision. But Gustavus was a different story. The Swedish king had an army, and on June 19, 1631, when the elector of Brandenburg peeked out the window of his safe, comfortable manor house, he saw himself and his family surrounded by some 27,000 shockingly well-armed and obviously able-bodied Swedish soldiers. Of course, he did the only thing he felt he could do under the circumstances—he sent his mother and wife out to negotiate with Gustavus while he hid inside. The result of this parlay was that the elector of Brandenburg abruptly switched sides and agreed to give the king of Sweden everything he wanted.

  Gustavus’s recruiting efforts were also given a strong boost at this critical juncture by the unfortunate actions of the imperial army. While the king of Sweden and his men were marching on Berlin, about 100 miles to the west, Ferdinand’s commander, General Tilly, and his forces were busy attacking the Protestant city of Magdeburg. After a short siege, Tilly’s army of nearly 30,000 men overcame the Magdeburg defenses and stormed the wall, swarming into the city. The slaughter was horrific. Even members of the Catholic minority (who had been living in the city in peace with their Protestant neighbors) were exterminated where they stood. So dire was the situation—so many terrified women, children, and innocent civilians were abused and butchered in the first hours of the attack—that the local burghers decid
ed it was better to die by flames and so set fire to the town rather than allow the imperial soldiers to loot and find shelter among them. “A conflagration arose during the storming, which the enemy, according to the universal testimony of the prisoners, intentionally and wickedly kindled, ‘in order that the city might not bring us any good,’” General Tilly complained to the imperial government in his official report.

  The resulting inferno and destruction shocked even a country already inured to the carnage of over a decade of war. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the elector of Saxony, who had heretofore been bribed by Ferdinand to stay loyal to the empire, and who, with the duke of Bavaria, had been one of the Protestant barons who had originally turned against Frederick, suddenly offered to help the king of Sweden fight against Tilly, giving as his reason the brutalities committed at Magdeburg.