Daughters of the Winter Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  Princess Elizabeth, Louise Hollandine, Henrietta Maria, and Sophia

  The Court of the Prince of Orange at The Hague

  Princess Elizabeth

  … at age twelve

  7

  A Royal Refugee

  PRINCESS ELIZABETH, BORN IN HEIDELBERG on November 27, 1618, during the fleetingly gentle time that preceded her father’s election as king of Bohemia, was her parents’ third child and eldest daughter. When her mother and father left for Prague that fateful autumn, she and her older brother Karl Ludwig were left behind in the care of her grandmother, Frederick’s mother, Louise Juliana. Elizabeth was ten months old. She was not yet two when the Spanish troops under General Spinola invaded the Lower Palatinate, and Louise Juliana, fearing capture, gathered her two small charges and, together with her unmarried daughter Catherine, who had also been living in the ancestral castle in Heidelberg, fled first to Stuttgart and then, the following year, to another of Louise Juliana’s daughters, the electress of Brandenburg, in Berlin.

  Grandmother, spinster aunt, and children arrived to find that the deposed king and queen of Bohemia, who were wanted by the emperor, had accepted the prince of Orange’s invitation to establish themselves at Dutch expense in The Hague and had already moved on, leaving the infant Maurice with the electress. With nowhere else to go, the four of them—forty-five-year-old Louise Juliana, twenty-seven-year-old Catherine, four-and-a-half-year-old Karl Ludwig, and two-and-a-half-year-old Elizabeth—settled down in a country manor belonging to the elector and electress in out-of-the-way Krossen, about forty miles south of Berlin, to try to ride out the war.

  And so Princess Elizabeth’s earliest years—though likely she did not remember them—were marked by upheaval, fear, and loss. But she most certainly would have remembered when her brother and closest childhood companion, Karl Ludwig, was sent for by her parents to come live with the rest of the family in the nursery in Leyden in 1624, leaving behind Elizabeth and Maurice. She received letters from Karl Ludwig and from her eldest brother, Frederick Henry, as well as little gifts that were intended to build affection between the siblings despite the distance that separated them, but it is difficult to believe that she was not in some way conscious of having been left out. Luckily, whatever disappointment the princess might have felt was compensated for by her grandmother and aunt, who provided both love and stability.

  By the time the king and queen of Bohemia did call these final two children to Holland, in the fall of 1628, Elizabeth was nearly ten and her brother seven. Neither had seen their parents since infancy. The only mother they had ever known was Louise Juliana, supplemented by the maternal efforts of their aunts, the electress of Brandenburg and the unmarried Catherine. The only home they knew was Germany. And now, suddenly, they were instructed to go off to Leyden to become part of a dauntingly crowded family they were aware of only through an intermittent correspondence. It must have felt a little like being unceremoniously shipped off to the doubtful care of a headmistress at a foreign boarding school.

  And Elizabeth could not have arrived in Holland at a worse moment. She’d barely had time to make the acquaintance of her siblings and have her first Christmas away from her grandmother when her eldest brother, Frederick Henry, who had so sweetly attempted to keep up a relationship with her all those years in Krossen and who was so clearly adored by everyone, died tragically, and the strangers who were her parents went into a paralyzed mourning. Thirteen-year-old Karl Ludwig, the new heir to the Palatinate (and the only sibling, other than Maurice, whom she vaguely knew), was brought to The Hague to live. At least initially, Elizabeth seems to have been left with the other children, but within two years, following the English tradition, she as well as Rupert would also be summoned to live at their parents’ court as each came of age.

  These were the years of the Winter King and Queen’s deepest depression, and their eldest daughter, sensitive and bookish, could not have helped but be affected by the general despair. Frederick was often ill, and no sooner had he recovered than he left to join the king of Sweden in Germany, in early 1632. Her mother remained but had an uneasy relationship with her eldest daughter. Their personalities were very different. The queen of Bohemia complained in a letter that Princess Elizabeth was too easily swayed by anyone who showed her affection, and questioned her daughter’s judgment and attitude. For her part, Princess Elizabeth, bereft of her devoted grandmother, felt that her mother was cold and critical to her and far more loving to her brothers and sisters. The glamorous court at The Hague with its endless stream of accomplished and witty visitors, so different from the quiet backwater of Krossen where she had grown up, made the adolescent Elizabeth feel awkward and self-conscious. She was plagued by her looks, as teenage girls often are, although but for a prominent nose, she seems to have been very attractive. Her youngest sister, Sophia, reported that Elizabeth “had black hair, a dazzling complexion, brown sparkling eyes, a well-shaped forehead, beautiful cherry lips, and a sharp aquiline nose, which was rather apt to turn red.” This nose was evidently the bane of the princess’s existence. Whenever it turned red, “she hid herself from the world,” Sophia continued. “I remember that my sister, Princess Louisa, who was not so sensitive, asked her on one such unlucky occasion to come upstairs to the Queen [her mother], as it was the usual hour for visiting her. Princess Elizabeth said, ‘Would you have me go with this nose?’ The other replied, ‘Will you wait till you get another?’”

  It is perhaps not surprising then that Princess Elizabeth, who was highly intelligent, should turn to the one pursuit at which she excelled: scholarship. And in this area, at least, her new home in The Hague offered educational resources and opportunities far superior to any she would have been exposed to had she stayed in Berlin. Wealthy and tolerant (by seventeenth-century standards), Holland was a magnet for academics and artists alike, some of them religious exiles from their native lands. The Hague was bursting with experts in navigation, engineering, and mathematics, all on the cutting edge of science, as well as humanists and historians, and many found their way to the queen of Bohemia’s drawing room; even the younger children at the house in Leyden had regular dinners with visiting professors. As she became more familiar with her surroundings, Princess Elizabeth, whose former studies had been weighted heavily toward Calvinist religious training, was exposed to first-rate tutors with access to sophisticated books and papers in exciting new fields.

  And then, just two days after her fourteenth birthday, the father she had barely known died.

  THE BEREAVEMENT WAS SO unexpected, coming as it did on the heels of Frederick’s letter confidently predicting that all was well, and such a catastrophe to the family’s hopes that it was judged best to have a doctor communicate the news to his widow, in case she should break down completely. This Elizabeth nearly did.* “It was the first time that ever I was frightened,” the queen of Bohemia confessed in a letter to one of her oldest and dearest confidants. “I… could neither cry nor speak nor eat nor drink for three days.” In fact, she stayed in bed for eight days. By her own admission, she had lost her best friend.

  But when she emerged from her darkened room, she did so with an unshakable purpose—to defeat her enemies and install Karl Ludwig, Frederick’s heir, in her husband’s homeland and reclaim his inheritance. Her first move was to secure the alliance with Sweden. Even before she answered her brother Charles’s heartfelt letter of condolence—“Never did I rail at any opportunity for writing to you excepting this one,” he penned sadly—she wrote to Axel Oxenstierna, chancellor of Sweden, who had assumed command of the Swedish military effort in Germany after Gustavus Adolphus’s death. She entreated him to continue with the plan to retake the Palatinate, and received in reply the assurance that Sweden remained faithful to the goal of returning her children’s legacy. She saw to it that sixteen-year-old Karl Ludwig inherited all of his father’s titles, and sent representatives to the Protestant barons in Germany urging them to continue to fight until all of her so
n’s property in the Palatine was restored and certainly not to allow any peace that did not include the recognition of his right to the title of elector. She reached out to the States General of Holland, composing an emotional address, which was read out in assembly, thanking the legislators for all they had done for her family in the past and pleading for their continued support.

  In the first wave of grief, Charles generously insisted that his sister come home, and sent a delegation to The Hague to hasten her journey. So sincere was the king of England in his desire to have Elizabeth return that he ordered her old rooms prepared for her at Whitehall and additional accommodations made ready for her children at one of his own country houses. But as much as the queen of Bohemia had longed for such an invitation from her father when she and Frederick had fled Prague, she now refused this kind offer. Although she politely gave as her reason the specious excuse that the German custom of mourning forbade the widow from leaving the house for an extended period, what Elizabeth really seemed to want was to stay close to the prince of Orange, who was ever her mainstay and whose interests were much more allied with hers, and to keep her independence, a condition that promised to be somewhat trickier at her brother’s court.*

  The results of the queen of Bohemia’s first flurry of diplomacy after her husband’s death were extremely promising. For by spring 1633, the Swedish army had actually retaken Heidelberg, and Chancellor Oxenstierna, true to his word, was ready to deliver it to Karl Ludwig, provided that Sweden was compensated for its expenses in driving out the Spanish troops. Elizabeth immediately dispatched an ambassador to Charles to beg for the requisite funds and arranged to send Karl Ludwig (along with his thirteen-year-old brother Rupert, who was very precocious when it came to swordplay and other martial games and who begged to go so relentlessly that she finally gave in) to Germany in the care of the prince of Orange because “I think he cannot too soon be a soldier.”

  Nothing bespoke the success of the queen of Bohemia’s efforts, or the perception that this time her brother, the king of England, would honor his promise to defend the Palatine, more than the advantageous marriage alliances that suddenly seemed possible for her children. To draw England into the war in Germany on the side of the Protestants, there were rumors that Chancellor Oxenstierna was willing to marry Gustavus Adolphus’s only child and heir, six-year-old Christina, to Karl Ludwig, provided that Charles I would furnish his nephew with the money and troops necessary to continue the struggle against the Habsburgs. As early as June 1633, the English secretary of state proposed to Elizabeth that she wed her second daughter, eleven-year-old Louise Hollandine, to the son of the elector of Saxony, whose allegiance was (rightly) feared to be wavering. And it was also at this moment that the new king of Poland, who had ascended to the throne the year before during that same fateful month of November that had seen the deaths of the kings of Sweden and Bohemia, began a determined campaign to win the hand of the Winter Queen’s eldest daughter, Princess Elizabeth.

  WLADYSLAW IV, THE PROSPECTIVE bridegroom, was thirty-seven years old when his father died and he replaced him as king of Poland. His grandfather had once ruled Sweden, and the new sovereign felt that he had strong claim to that throne as well. He judged that now might be a good time to go after it, what with Gustavus Adolphus dead and his daughter, Christina, installed as queen. Six-year-old Christina didn’t seem like she’d put up nearly as robust a fight as her fearsome parent.

  But even up against a child, he was still going to need allies, and the king of England (about whom Wladyslaw seemed to know very little) was high on his list. If he married the queen of Bohemia’s eldest daughter, Wladyslaw reasoned, he might be able to lure Charles, her uncle, to his side in his contest for the Swedish throne. Surely the king of England would want to see his niece crowned queen of both Poland and Sweden. Of course, Princess Elizabeth would have to convert—Poland was an overwhelmingly Catholic country and the governing Polish aristocracy would never accept a Protestant as queen—but the hopeful suitor was confident that this could be arranged.

  Accordingly, Wladyslaw sent an ambassador to The Hague in the summer of 1633 to obtain a portrait of the fourteen-year-old princess and assess her mother’s probable reaction. The queen of Bohemia, who would have fought with her life any attempt to convert her daughter to Catholicism, clearly did not take the prospect of a union with Poland seriously. “It is meant… only for a show to get friends against Sweden,” she sniffed dismissively to a friend.

  But Wladyslaw was not to be swayed. Having gotten nowhere with the mother, he now determined to go behind her back and send an emissary to the English court—specifically, to Princess Elizabeth’s aunt Henrietta Maria, the queen, whom he knew to be Catholic. The sovereign’s instructions to his envoy on this occasion were very precise. “When he has had his official audience of the King, the ambassador must ask for a private one from the Queen, and to her majesty must say that the King of Poland has by no means given up the idea of uniting himself to the eldest daughter of the late Elector,” the envoy’s commission read. “The King of Poland consequently hopes in the Queen of England for obtaining from her niece, the Princess Palatine, the conversion of the latter to the Catholic faith; and suggests that, to facilitate matters, her Majesty should, under some pretext that may appear natural to the Queen of Bohemia, invite the young princess upon a visit to her uncle. The conversion would then doubtless follow easily enough. If the Queen of England could only give the simple assurance that her niece would abjure her heresy, without further binding herself, it might be possible at once to commence the matrimonial negotiations.”

  Alas for Wladyslaw and his innovative (if unscrupulous) approach to lovemaking, the Polish king had seriously misread the appetite of the English court at this juncture for meddling in European affairs. For although in spirit Charles sincerely wished his sister and her children well and desired his nephew’s reinstatement in the Palatine, in practice he found that he did not after all wish for it sufficiently to take the unpleasant steps necessary to secure it. In fact, since the duke of Buckingham’s death, Charles, like his father before him, had embraced the charms of peace. He found that he loved his wife, who had already given him a son and heir, Charles, born on May 29, 1630; a daughter, Mary, on November 4, 1631; and, most recently, a second son, James, on October 14, 1633.* He had a new adviser, Bishop Laud (again like his father, Charles allied himself with the Anglican Church, which recognized the king as the ultimate authority, and not with the unruly Puritans, who believed that they, as members of the elect, had the right to tell the sovereign what to do), as well as a new treasurer, whose job it was to find the revenues necessary to run the kingdom without ever having to call another parliament. For Charles had discovered that he disliked parliaments every bit as much as his father had and was determined to rule without them. The last one, in 1629, had descended into such a rout that he’d had to dissolve the proceedings by fiat and have the most outspoken of its members imprisoned.

  So when the queen of Bohemia sent her secretary to London to beg for the funds Chancellor Oxenstierna had demanded in order to secure Heidelberg for Karl Ludwig, Charles found himself unable to comply publicly with her request, as only by convening parliament could he hope to raise the necessary sum, and this, of course, he refused to do. Secretly, he gave his approval to try to raise the money from private sources, but Elizabeth’s secretary was overly zealous in her cause and made so many enemies at court that the attempt failed. And when by the next year it became clear that England was not, after all, going to tangibly aid the anti-imperial cause in Germany, the Swedes and their Protestant allies looked around for someone who would. And there was Cardinal Richelieu, who was still funding the Swedish army and willing to make a deal.

  The upshot of these negotiations was that Louis XIII raised a force of some 35,000 Frenchmen, who crossed into Germany through Lorraine and into Alsace in September of 1634. By December they occupied Heidelberg. And on April 30, 1635, the French king and Chancell
or Oxenstierna signed the Treaty of Compiègne, which split the west bank of the Rhine between France and Sweden, prompting the elector of Saxony and the elector of Brandenburg to go over to the imperial side. Everybody changed dance partners all over again except that this time, the queen of Bohemia and her family were left on the sidelines as wallflowers.

  The atmosphere of defeat associated with the court at The Hague, the sense of having been outmaneuvered by Richelieu and betrayed by Oxenstierna, and the attendant loss of prestige and influence were unmistakable.

  The king of Poland shrugged his shoulders and married the emperor’s daughter.

  Louise Hollandine

  A seventeenth-century Dutch artist in his studio

  8

  Child of Light and Dark

  THE WINTER QUEEN’S SECOND DAUGHTER, vivacious, free-spirited Louise Hollandine, whom everyone called Louisa, inherited her mother’s fun-loving outlook and easy temperament, qualities that were only enhanced by her childhood experience. In contrast to her older sister, Princess Elizabeth, who had been hurried from place to place and left out of the larger family circle, Louisa’s early years had been stable and placid. As the first child born in her parents’ adopted country, she felt no pull, like her older siblings, to Germany; nor did she have to overcome linguistic or cultural differences in order to assimilate to her surroundings. Born on April 17, 1622, she was not yet two years old when the prince of Orange provided her parents with a residence in Leyden specifically to house their children, and, with Frederick Henry and Rupert, she moved in as the nursery’s first female occupant. She was already comfortable with its routines and safely established as head girl when every year or so a new sibling arrived.