Daughters of the Winter Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  The resulting deluge of protests from foreign courts was sufficient to give even a man of Richelieu’s equanimity pause. The younger children being of no interest to him, a safe passage was immediately granted to all three boys. To the great relief of his mother and sisters, Maurice was back in The Hague by January 1640, followed two months later by Edward and Philip.

  But Karl Ludwig was a different story. The best the cardinal would offer his captive was an improvement in accommodations: he would release the heir to the Palatinate from his cramped prison cell and allow him to live in comfort with the English ambassador in Paris, but only if Karl Ludwig swore that he would not leave France without permission and under no condition approach the army in Alsace. To sweeten this deal, Richelieu shrewdly promised to enter into negotiations to help the younger man to recover his inheritance by providing money and arms—if he could convince his uncle the king of England to do the same. Karl Ludwig, faced either way with a prolonged stay on French soil, on the whole much preferred Paris to prison, and accepted the cardinal’s terms.

  Although Richelieu’s posture seemed reasonable, even generous, it was only for show. The cardinal knew that there was no danger of having to make good on his offer to help as long as Charles I’s participation was also required. The king of England, under pressure from his Scottish Presbyterian subjects, who had put together an army and were threatening to invade from the north in order to achieve their political and religious objectives, had been forced to call a parliament in order to raise enough money to meet this crisis. This was the first time in eleven years that Charles had called a parliament, having previously met his financial needs through the expedient of forced taxes and loans and throwing the people who refused to pay them into prison. As might be expected, the assembly did not go well. The Puritan legislators, who were in the majority, turned out to be in sympathy with the Scottish Presbyterians. They, too, resented the influence of the bishops, particularly Laud, over the king, and they were none too fond of Charles’s Catholic queen either, who was rumored to be conducting secret negotiations with the pope for money and soldiers to help her husband. This defiant congress, which opened on April 13, 1640, concentrated on voicing its grievances rather than approving the necessary funding and was consequently speedily dissolved by the king on May 5, earning it the apt if not particularly inventive nickname of the Short Parliament.

  In the wake of this unhelpful exercise in representative government, Charles, who believed that the Puritans, for all their loud troublemaking, were in the minority and that his subjects would rally to his side in the event of a Scottish invasion, sought to assert his royal prerogative. He turned as always to Laud, now archbishop of Canterbury, who on May 16 arranged a gift from his fellow bishops of £20,000 a year to the Crown. Laud also threw the power of the pulpit behind the throne by ordering that the doctrine of “the most high and sacred order of kings is of Divine right” be read out four times a year in church.

  The Puritans, with whom the Winter Queen and her family were still wildly popular, fired back by inciting violence in the streets and by etching “God Save the King, confound the Queen and her Children, and give us the Palsgrave [Karl Ludwig] to reign in this kingdom” into a window at Whitehall with a diamond blade, an inscription that did not improve Charles’s relationship with his nephew. In fact, by August, when the Scots invaded and took Newcastle, on the coast in northern England, Richelieu was so confident that the king of England’s troubles would engulf him that he let Karl Ludwig go home to The Hague on the condition that he promise not to interfere in Germany without French permission.

  Henrietta Maria’s and her sisters’ relief at having their eldest brother home and safe was very great. Although the family continued to worry about Rupert, who was still incarcerated in faraway Austria, there had been talk that he would be freed soon in exchange for a Polish prince who had been taken prisoner by the French. It seemed as though the family’s prospects, if not entirely cheerful, had at least stabilized. But unlike her daughters’, Elizabeth’s joy was tempered by the news of the Scottish invasion of England. The Winter Queen, forced by circumstance to be more of a politician than her brother, followed Charles I’s combative policies at home with some alarm. “The distractions of my own country doth so much trouble me as I know not what to write,” she confessed in a letter to a friend on October 11, 1640. “By your own you may guess my sadness, all true honest hearts here wish the king would call a parliament and there let them find out who have done ill or well.”

  His sister’s political insight proved astute. Charles, unable to turn back the Scots by force of arms due to a lack of funds, soldiers, and morale and fearing that if they remained unchecked, they might well advance all the way to London, at length agreed to call for another parliament to consider the Scottish demands. And so, on November 30, 1640, the governing body representing England came together again in a session that, in direct contrast to its predecessor, would forever be known, ominously, as the Long Parliament.

  It is highly unlikely that Henrietta Maria, only fourteen, would have understood the significance of these events. In any case, she would have been far more concerned that winter with the health of her youngest brother, Gustavus Adolphus, a charming little boy, very good-looking, who had been sickly from birth and who that Christmas had become seriously ill. The type of infection was not recorded but whatever it was, the child was in acute pain and “died soon afterwards in such terrible suffering that one shudders to think about it,” her younger sister, on whom this trauma clearly made a deep impression, remembered half a century later.

  In her grief at her son’s death, the Winter Queen made the decision finally to disband the royal nursery at Leyden. In January 1641 the servants were dismissed and its last remaining occupant, her fourth daughter and youngest child, Sophia, was transferred to the court at The Hague.

  Sophia

  Sophia’s aunt, Queen Henrietta Maria, by Van Dyck

  10

  A Royal Education

  “I WAS BORN, THEY TELL me, on October 14, 1630,” Sophia would later recall in her memoirs. “Being the twelfth child of the King my father, and of the Queen my mother, I can well believe that my birth caused them but little satisfaction. They were even puzzled to find a name and godparents for me, as all the kings and princes of consideration had already performed this office for the children who came before me.” Consequently, “the plan was adopted of writing various names on slips of paper and casting lots for the one which I should bear; thus chance bestowed on me the name of Sophia,” she revealed.

  The twelfth child! It must have felt rather like being the runt of a litter. Sophia certainly perceived herself as being shortchanged of her parents’ attention. When she was an infant, “the Queen my mother sent me to Leyden, which is but three days’ journey from the Hague, and where her Majesty had her whole family brought up apart from herself,” she observed tartly, not understanding that this was how Elizabeth herself had been raised.

  Unfulfilled childhoods might be uncomfortable, but in the right hands they make for excellent literature, and clever Sophia, an extremely talented writer, left a memorable portrait of life at the nursery. “At Leyden we had a court quite in the German style,” she explained. “Our hours as well as our curtsies were all laid down by rule.” Her governess “had held the same post with my father when he was a child, and from this fact her probable age may be guessed.” The governess had two daughters “who looked older than their mother… I believe that they prayed to God, and never disturbed man,” she continued, “for their appearance was frightful enough to terrify little children.”

  The training of a royal princess, even a five- or six-year-old princess, was taken seriously in the Leyden household. The children were roused at seven o’clock each morning. “I was obliged to go every day en déshabillé to Mlle. Marie de Quat [one of the governess’s daughters], who made me pray and read the Bible,” Sophia reported. “She then set me to learn the ‘Quadrains de
Pebrac,’ while she employed the time in brushing her teeth; her grimaces during this performance are more firmly fixed in my memory than the lessons which she tried to teach.”*

  By eight thirty, little Sophia was dressed and ready to receive a series of professors in English, French, and German (being a girl, she was mercifully spared Latin); religion (“I learned the Heidelberg catechism in German, and knew it by heart, without understanding a word of it”); and the humanities. “They kept me busy until ten o’clock, except, when to my comfort, kind Providence sent them a cold in the head,” she observed. Academic studies were relieved by a pleasant hour with the dancing master, where she could at least move around a little, and was immediately followed by dinner with her siblings, which seems to have been as much an extension of the ballroom as it was a culinary experience. “This meal always took place with great ceremony at a long table. On entering the dining-room I found all my brothers drawn up in front, with their governors and gentlemen posted behind in the same order side by side. I was obliged by rule to make first a very low curtsy to the princes, a slighter one to the others, another low one on placing myself opposite to them, then another slight one to my governess, who on entering the room with her daughters curtsied very low to me.” Even then, protocol was not yet satisfied: “I was obliged to curtsy again on handing over my gloves to their custody, then again on placing myself opposite to my brothers, again when the gentlemen brought me a large basin in which to wash my hands, again after grace was said, and for the last and ninth time on seating myself at table,” she recalled mournfully.

  Dinner—“so arranged that we knew on each day of the week what we were to eat, as is the case in convents”—was followed by a short period of rest. Then came the afternoon’s instruction, which lasted until six o’clock. Her teachers “believed that I should turn out a prodigy of learning because I was so quick, but my only object in applying myself was to give up study when I had acquired all that was necessary, and be no longer forced to endure the weariness of learning.” At six she had another, less formal meal, and was in bed by eight thirty, “having said my prayers and read some chapters in the Bible.”

  Sophia, spirited and precocious, chafed under these conditions, particularly as she was well aware that there was a colorful world beyond Leyden accessible to her siblings but denied to her. “Suffice it to say that, as my brothers and sisters grew up, the Queen withdrew them from Leyden. The princes she sent to travel, and kept the princesses to live with herself at the Hague,” she wrote. Her few appearances at her mother’s court as a child did not seem to have been entirely successful. She was once invited to visit so that she could be shown off, “as one would a stud of horses,” to some cousins, one of whom pronounced, after scrutinizing the eight-year-old, that “‘she is thin and ugly; I hope that she does not understand English.’ To my vexation I understood but too well, and was deeply distressed, believing that my ill-fortune was past all remedy,” Sophia confessed.

  But of course she wasn’t ugly—none of them were. By her own account, she had her mother’s long curly brown hair and a well-proportioned figure (although she wasn’t as tall as she would have liked, height being prized). But what Sophia lacked in stature she more than made up for in demeanor, for she had “the bearing of a princess.” All those deportment lessons, tiresome though they might have been, had clearly paid off.

  When her younger brother, Gustavus Adolphus, died on January 9, 1641, it seemed a superfluous expense to keep the Leyden house open just for one little girl, so Sophia was transferred to the capital to live with her older sisters. Elizabeth’s youngest daughter was absolutely delighted by the change of residence. “I was… ten years of age when I came to live at my mother’s court at the Hague, and I was lost in an ignorant admiration of all that I beheld,” she marveled. “To me it was the joy of Paradise to see such varying kinds of life, and so many people; above all to behold my teachers no more. I was not at all abashed by meeting with three elder sisters, all handsomer and more accomplished than myself, but felt quite pleased that my gaiety and wild spirits should serve to amuse them.”

  The Winter Queen’s court was unused to younger children, and at least in the beginning many of the adults seem to have treated Sophia like one of her mother’s pets. But Sophia gave as good as she got (“I made it my business to tease everyone,” she declared), and demonstrated an admirable self-confidence and toleration of raillery. At one point, one of the courtiers, “in order to amuse the Queen, wrote a letter in the name of all her Majesty’s monkeys, electing me to be their queen,” Sophia remembered. “This letter was handed to me in a large company, to see how I would take it. I was too much amused to be angry, so laughed with the rest.”

  But the witty, jesting nature of the court at The Hague, so appealing to little Sophia, was only the mask her mother donned to disguise a period of mounting anxiety. For the arrival of the youngest daughter of the Winter Queen in January 1641 coincided with increasingly alarming news out of England, as reflected by the sudden determination of Charles I to marry his eldest daughter, Mary, to William, son of the prince of Orange.

  WHEN CHARLES, CONFRONTED BY the invasion of a large and proficient Scottish army, was forced to call the Long Parliament to gather the funds and soldiers necessary to meet the crisis, he did not have high hopes of success. After all, he’d had plenty of experience with discordant representative government (which was why he generally tried to rule without one). But even with these reduced expectations, it still came as something of a shock to him to realize in the opening days of the assembly that many of the legislators, particularly those in the predominantly Puritan House of Commons, were actually on the side of the Presbyterian Scots and wanted to keep the invaders in England in order to pressure the king to yield to their demands. In fact, they were willing to pay the expenses of the Scottish army to stay right where it was. To top it off, they immediately charged both Laud, archbishop of Canterbury, and the earl of Strafford, Charles’s top military adviser, with treason and had both men arrested and confined to the Tower.

  It was Charles’s (and his kingdom’s) great misfortune that he and his forceful wife, Queen Henrietta Maria, upon whom the far weaker Charles was rapidly becoming almost totally reliant, were both great believers in the art of the shortcut. Neither saw any reason to rebuild trust or grind out what they could of their objectives through an extended and tiresome negotiation, especially with antagonists whom they saw as beneath them. “I see that all these… tumults and disorders have only risen from the meaner sort of people,” Charles would later assert. “I am ready to obey the king, but not to obey 400 of his subjects [the parliament],” Queen Henrietta Maria observed scornfully. The shortcut, in this case, was to bring in funds and soldiers from somewhere outside England to overwhelm the Parliament, dispense with the Scots, and reassert the king’s undisputed authority over his realm.*

  But where to obtain these soldiers and funds? Charles’s first thought was Spain, and to this end secretly offered all sorts of inducements—a military pact, a marriage alliance between his eldest son and Philip IV’s daughter, the promise of future naval aid in exchange for a large loan to be paid as soon as possible. But Spain, at war with France and Holland, had no resources to spare and turned him down. Queen Henrietta Maria then applied to her brother Louis XIII in France, but Cardinal Richelieu, whose focus was on the war in Belgium and Germany and whose ends were served nicely by an England in debilitating turmoil, denied her request, going so far as to send an ambassador to her court specifically to make his refusal clear. Undaunted, the queen next entered into secret negotiations with the pope, promising that once back in power, Charles would restore his Catholic subjects to full religious freedom; but the pontiff would only agree to consider sending military aid if the king first converted publicly to Catholicism, a condition that would have ensured Charles’s immediate dethronement in Protestant England and Scotland.

  Having run through the most obvious candidates on his list, Char
les was forced to broaden his search to the lesser powers, and among these, Holland caught his attention. The prince of Orange was an experienced military commander who took the field regularly and was beginning to score successes in Flanders in combination with his French allies. And Charles could hardly have failed to notice the strength of the Dutch navy, which had recently chased down and destroyed a fleet of some seventy Spanish ships right off the coast of England. Even better, the prince of Orange’s family was stalwartly Protestant, so there could be no objection from Parliament on the basis of religion. Accordingly, on January 6, 1641, Dutch ambassadors arrived in London, and Charles formally agreed to wed his eldest daughter, nine-year-old Mary, to fourteen-year-old William, son of the prince of Orange.

  The announcement of this marriage pierced his sister Elizabeth’s vanity like a well-aimed sword thrust. Not knowing Charles’s true motivation behind the alliance, she could not fathom it. Yes, of course, the prince of Orange was her dear friend and most trusted ally; yes, his family had been staggeringly generous and supportive throughout her steady, unrelenting misfortune; but it was always understood, at least from her point of view, that she was his social and political superior. She had graciously arranged a match between him and one of her ladies-in-waiting, for goodness’ sake! Now that woman’s son was to ally himself with the royal family of England? It wasn’t possible! “I cannot see what the king can gain by precipitating this marriage,” the queen of Bohemia complained to a confidant at Charles’s court. “They [the Dutch] seek to get my eldest Niece but that I hope will not be granted it being too low for her… I pray you do your best in this… you may think what interest I have in it both for my Brother’s honor, my Niece’s good, and my children’s,” she wheedled.