Daughters of the Winter Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  Plans for the marriage went forward despite her objections, and in April the young groom left for London at the head of a large retinue to which Karl Ludwig (who was just hanging around The Hague anyway, not doing very much and sponging off his mother) was attached. His mission was both to try yet again to get military aid to take back the Palatinate and to act as an eyewitness and report to Elizabeth about the true state of her brother’s affairs in England. Although it was traditional for the bride’s family to provide a dowry, in this case it was the Dutch wedding party who brought £200,000 to the king of England as a gift. The marriage was celebrated at Whitehall on May 2, 1641. Charles, grateful for the cash infusion and still hoping that his new in-laws would agree to lead an army into England to rescue him from his own subjects, made a point of raising William above his own nephew in a matter of precedence. Karl Ludwig was so insulted by this breach of etiquette that he refused to attend the nuptial feast.

  William II, prince of Orange, and Mary on their wedding day

  But he stayed on in England as a member of his uncle’s court after the wedding and so was in a position to appreciate firsthand the escalating political crisis as well as his aunt and uncle’s rapidly declining popularity. It must have been quite an education. On May 9, violence in the streets of London threatened to spill over into Whitehall, forcing Charles to sign the earl of Strafford’s death warrant. His chief military adviser and loyal friend had been found guilty of conspiring to bring an army over from Ireland to initiate a Catholic overthrow of the realm in support of the king and the bishops. “‘If my own person were only in danger, I would gladly venture it to save Lord Strafford’s life; but seeing my wife, children, and all my kingdom are concerned in it, I am forced to give way unto it,’” Karl Ludwig reported his uncle as saying as he signed the order. “And he cried as he said these things,” he added in his letter to his mother. In August, after the Scottish army had finally been bribed to return home, Karl Ludwig accompanied Charles to Edinburgh, where the king, at the queen’s urging, went to try to get a new army of Scottish troops together, this time to fight for him. They refused in spite of Charles’s giving in to every one of their demands. The prince of Orange, too, declined to participate in the English king’s wild military schemes, and by November 25, 1641, Charles and Karl Ludwig were back in London, having accomplished nothing beyond reducing the royal prerogative in Scotland and making the representatives of the Long Parliament, who were still in session, even more suspicious of their sovereign’s intrigues than before.

  By this time Karl Ludwig, whose family had lost everything and who had grown up in straitened circumstances struggling for opportunity, and who was consequently far more pragmatic and circumspect than his uncle, had seen enough, and did his best to intervene, but to no avail. “The Queen doth all,” his mother lamented to her contact at the English court that November. “My son advised [the King] to reconcilement with the Parliament; but the Queen wouldn’t hear of it.”

  With the troubles of England in mind, the close of Sophia’s first year at her mother’s court held the promise of yet another gloomy, worry-filled Christmas. And then, the mood at The Hague was suddenly lifted by an unexpectedly cheerful event. Out of the blue, on December 20, 1641, her brother Rupert came home.

  FOR SOMEONE WHO HAD just spent three years in an imperial fortress in Linz, Austria (about a hundred miles west of Vienna), Rupert certainly looked hale enough. “Prince Rupert arrived here in perfect health, but lean and weary, having come… from Hamburg since the Friday noon,” the English ambassador to Holland informed his government. “Myself, at eight o’clock in the evening, coming out of the court gate, had the good luck to receive him first of any; no other creature expecting his coming so soon. Whereby himself carried the news of his being come to the Queen, newly set at supper. You may imagine what joy there was!” the ambassador exclaimed.

  How eleven-year-old Sophia must have loved hearing the story of this dashing, grown-up brother’s adventures! For Rupert’s captivity had been far from dull. He had hardly ever been confined to his cell except for a few brief periods when the emperor made a series of futile attempts, first, to convert his prisoner to Catholicism; second (when the first failed utterly), to get him at least to apologize for rebelling (another suggestion that Rupert coolly rebuffed); and third, to persuade him to fight on the imperial side. To this last offer, the twenty-year-old stalwart retorted that “he received the proposal rather as an affront than as a favor, and that he would never take arms against the champions of his father’s cause.”

  But Rupert, tall and darkly good-looking, had an insolent charm that his imperial hosts admired. The owner of the castle in which he was confined had a very pretty daughter (“one of the brightest beauties of the age,” one of her contemporaries confirmed), and she interceded on Rupert’s behalf and seems to have helped him to while away the hours in a pleasant fashion so that “the Prince’s former favors were improved into familiarities, as continued visits, invitations and the like.”* In those interludes when he was not fully occupied with amour, Rupert had been allowed to ride, play tennis, draw (Louisa was not the only member of the family with artistic talent), and even hunt. He had also acquired a white poodle, whom he named Boye, and who became his constant companion, as a gift from the English ambassador at Vienna.

  But a cage—even one as delightful as this one appears to have been—is still a cage, and Rupert chafed to get out. Here he had help from an unlikely source: the emperor’s younger brother, Archduke Leopold, recently promoted to commander in chief of the imperial army. Leopold, who was only six years older than Rupert, had heard much about the prisoner and, curious to meet this charismatic man of action, came for a visit. The two became fast friends. Soon Rupert was going on extended hunting parties and was invited to all the fashionable houses in the vicinity. He was “beloved by all,” an imperial soldier confessed. “His behavior so obligeth the cavaliers of this country that they wait upon him and serve him as if they were his subjects.”

  Archduke Leopold spoke to his brother, and the emperor softened sufficiently that the English ambassador attached to the imperial court, who happened to be one of Elizabeth’s closest friends, was able to arrange for Rupert’s release—provided that he agreed never to fight against the empire again. Although this precluded him from any future military action to restore the Palatinate to his family, Rupert, who was tired of his prolonged stay in Austria and wanted to go home, agreed. The emperor still required a sign of the prisoner’s submission, but even this was disguised to accommodate Rupert’s acute chivalric sensibilities. An imperial hunting party was arranged to which the captive was invited, and when, as expected, he led the field, he was given the hand of the emperor to kiss as a mark of favor—and just like that, he was free. Even then, he was so popular he could not get away without spending a week in Vienna, where, according to a courtier, “There were few persons of quality by whom he was not visited and treated… the ladies also vied in their civilities, and labored to detain him… by their charms.”

  Elizabeth was very happy to have Rupert (along with Boye the poodle) home and safe, but she soon wondered what she was to do with him. He had given his word of honor that he would not fight against the emperor in Germany, and this was the focus of all of her energies, the only arena in which she had some influence and could help place her sons. So where was fiery Rupert, who clearly belonged in an army, to go?

  And then, as if on cue, civil war broke out in England.

  THE CONFLICT BETWEEN CHARLES and the Long Parliament, which had simmered along for over a year, was by Christmas 1641 so fraught that it was clear to court observers that it would take only the slightest impetus to break out into open hostilities. This push was obligingly provided at the start of the new year by Queen Henrietta Maria.

  Henrietta Maria, who despite having lived in England for sixteen years was still rigidly, royally French Catholic to her core, could not understand why her husband did not simply stand u
p to the mulish members of the opposition, who were just a lot of vulgar commoners in her opinion. It was she who kept coming up with one improbable scheme after another to raise a foreign army to force the kingdom to submit to Charles’s authority. As she was not very discreet about her intrigues, intelligence about her plots seeped out to the legislators, often through the medium of her good friend, the duplicitous Lady Carlisle, who happened also to be intimate with one of the opposition leaders in Parliament. As a result, on January 2, 1642, Charles was informed by reliable sources that five members of the House of Commons had gotten together, reviewed the evidence, and concluded that there were sufficient grounds for concern. They were therefore intending, at the earliest possible moment, to accuse his wife of treason.

  Having just gone through all of this with his close friend and adviser the earl of Strafford, Charles well knew what that meant. First would come the accusation, then the arrest. Henrietta Maria would be consigned to the Tower. There would be a trial, followed immediately by a guilty verdict. And then Charles would be obliged to sign his wife’s death warrant.

  Henrietta Maria was the dearest person in the world to him, his rock, his soul, the mother of his children. They had two choices: the queen could flee the kingdom, or Charles could turn the tables by preemptively raiding the House of Commons in the company of an armed guard, charging and arresting the five ringleaders for treason, and putting them in the Tower. His wife had no doubts about which alternative she preferred. “Go, you coward, and pull these rogues out by the ears, or never see my face more,” she screeched at him two days later on the morning of January 4.

  So Charles went. But he didn’t go right away. He had to get an armed guard together—some three or four hundred men—which took time; and then he had to go find Karl Ludwig, whom he wanted to accompany him; and so it wasn’t until about three o’clock in the afternoon that Charles and Karl Ludwig, yet again an eyewitness to his uncle’s somewhat peculiar governing methods, actually climbed into a coach stationed outside the door at Whitehall. At which point Charles cried out, “Let my faithful subjects and soldiers follow me!” and took off toward the House of Commons with hundreds of armed men behind him.

  Unfortunately, by that time his wife, who had assumed he would leave that morning right after she told him to, had already triumphantly let Lady Carlisle in on the secret that the king had gone off to storm the Parliament and arrest the five traitors. Lady Carlisle, in turn, had managed to smuggle a message to her contact at the House of Commons, warning the victims to flee. So when Charles and his mob of soldiers arrived, entered the building, and demanded that the members turn over the five ringleaders, they weren’t there. He and his men were forced to back down and leave empty-handed.

  It was a very big deal for a king to break into the House of Commons in this way. No sovereign had ever attempted it before. And now Charles had done it—and come away with nothing. The doctrine of the divine right of kings, embraced by James the century before and handed down lovingly to his son, was dealt a deathblow in that instant by the long, sure lance of representative government. Charles’s blunder was obvious, and it turned the people against him. “Parliament! Privilege of Parliament!” they jeered at him in the streets on his way back to Whitehall.

  “Never did he treat me for a moment with less kindness than before it happened, though I had ruined him,” Henrietta Maria confessed later to a friend.

  NOW THE QUEEN REALLY did have to flee. The royal family retired to Windsor so quietly that even their servants were unaware of their plans and did not have the castle ready for them. The queen had taken the precaution of smuggling as many of the crown jewels as could be comfortably transported out with her, in case it should be necessary to pawn them for future expenses. Charles appealed to the prince of Orange again for help and arranged for a ship to be prepared on the pretext that the queen had decided to escort her ten-year-old daughter, Mary, to her new husband at The Hague. On February 12, 1642, Charles and Henrietta, with Mary and the jewels in tow, made for Dover “in such post-haste that I never heard the like for persons of such dignity,” reported a member of the court. On February 23, Charles said good-bye to his wife and daughter. They sailed that day for Holland.

  The queen of Bohemia and her daughters were at Elizabeth’s hunting lodge in Rhenen when the news arrived of their relatives’ flight. The entire family at once changed their plans and hurried back to The Hague in order to be present when the queen of England and her daughter arrived. To her great delight, Sophia was singled out to be among the first to welcome the visitors as they docked at port. “The Queen my mother went to meet her [Queen Henrietta Maria]… and I was chosen out from among my sisters as being the fittest companion for the young princess [Mary], who was but a little younger than myself,” Sophia remembered with pride. Her initial impression of her aunt was somewhat muted, however. “The fine portraits of Van Dyck had given me such an idea of the beauty of all English ladies, that I was surprised to find the Queen (so beautiful in her picture) a little woman with long lean arms, crooked shoulders, and teeth protruding from her mouth like guns from a fort,” Sophia confessed.

  But the fugitive queen, reliant on the goodwill of her hosts and knowing how important it was to appear charming and sympathetic to her husband’s family, exerted herself in her cause and at least succeeded in winning over her twelve-year-old niece. “After careful inspection, I found she had beautiful eyes, a well-shaped nose, and an admirable complexion,” Sophia conceded. “She did me the honor to say that she thought me rather like her daughter. So pleased was I, that from that time forward I considered her quite handsome. I also heard the English milords say to each other that, when grown up, I should eclipse all my sisters. This remark gave me a liking for the whole English nation,” she admitted merrily.

  Her mother was not so easily taken in. Although the English ambassador stationed at The Hague reported that outwardly the Winter Queen and her sister-in-law were “very kind, one to another,” privately Elizabeth expressed strong reservations about Charles’s wife. “I find by all the Queen’s and her people’s discourse that they do not desire an agreement between his Majesty and his Parliament, but that all be done by force, and rail abominably at the Parliament. I hear all and say nothing,” she wrote grimly to her closest correspondent.

  Meanwhile, back in England, the king gathered his two sons, twelve-year-old Charles and eight-year-old James, and, with Karl Ludwig still by his side, made for York, in the north, where his strongest supporters resided. Although Parliament took control of the navy and began to raise its own militia, there were yet trained troops that remained loyal to the monarchy, and Charles spent all that spring and early summer recruiting men and arms in preparation for civil war. For her part, Queen Henrietta Maria, from her exile in The Hague, commissioned Rupert to be commanding general of her husband’s Horse (the cavalry) and sent him and his younger brother Maurice, along with a large cache of weapons, mostly musketry and shot, to England. They arrived on August 22, 1642, just in time to join Charles and his two young sons at the top of a hill in the town of Nottingham. There, in the midst of a driving storm, the king had the royal standard, ancient symbol of war, unfurled, and by a proclamation read out to the heraldry of trumpets, officially called upon his loyal subjects to fight for king and country against the Parliament.

  Significantly absent from this lofty scene, however, was Karl Ludwig, who had been his uncle’s constant companion for over a year and who had no doubt gleaned enough from the experience to anticipate how it was all going to turn out. His fight, he knew, was in Germany, where Charles, despite his many protestations of support, had in fact been of minimal aid to him in the past and certainly could in no way be counted upon for the foreseeable future. And so Karl Ludwig had prudently decided to slip away and sail back to The Hague just as his younger brothers were enthusiastically approaching. They might have waved to each other from their passing ships.

  Princess Elizabeth

  �
� at The Hague

  11

  The Visiting Philosopher

  “IN MY TIME, WHICH WAS 1642,” reminisced a French physician who settled in Leyden and eventually became dean of the College of Orange, “there used in Holland to exist the following custom: the ladies of the Hague used to delight in going in boats from the Hague to Leyden or to Delft; they were dressed as women of the burgher class and mixed in the crowd so as to hear all that might be said upon the great ones of the earth, touching whom they tried to provoke all present to converse. Often they heard much that concerned themselves, and even—their manners being something rather extraordinary—they seldom returned without some cavalier having offered them his services. The said cavaliers, however, were, for the most part, terribly disappointed in their hopes of having made acquaintance with females of a certain kind, for when they landed from the boats, there was invariably a coach in waiting, which carried the fair adventuresses all alone,” the doctor snickered. “Elizabeth, the eldest of the Bohemian princesses, would sometimes join these parties,” he noted.

  By the time Karl Ludwig returned to The Hague, in the fall of 1642, Princess Elizabeth was nearly twenty-four years old. It had been seven long years since the king of Poland had actively solicited her hand, and except for a brief scheme floated by her mother to marry her eldest daughter to a German duke in order to help Karl Ludwig’s war effort—a plan that unfortunately had to be abandoned when the prospective bridegroom died of fever before anyone had a chance to sound him out on the subject—she had had no other proposal. A highly intelligent woman, Princess Elizabeth must have known that her principal asset had always been her position as the niece of a rich and powerful uncle who might be coaxed to do something for his only sister’s eldest daughter, and that consequently her chances for marriage had decreased even more with the recent outbreak of civil war in England. Without the promise of English money or influence, she was simply one of four poor, landless sisters of superior breeding but dubious title whose religious affiliation precluded any alliance with a Catholic, a proviso that unfortunately significantly reduced the pool of potential suitors. Princess Elizabeth would have been starkly aware that she was rapidly approaching an age where, youth and childbearing being prized, she would no longer be considered desirable, and so she must steel herself to spinsterhood.