Daughters of the Winter Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  This humble disclaimer notwithstanding, her correspondent took offense; the letter that came back was a very long, full-on defense of Edward’s conversion to Catholicism, for Descartes was as passionate about his dogma as she was about hers. “I cannot deny that I was surprised to hear of your Highness’s anger, even to the inconvenience of her health, by a thing that the greater part of the world finds right [bonne], and which for many forceful reasons render it excusable to the rest,” he began coldly. He then went on to scold her for her reaction and to put Edward’s behavior, and that of those who had advised him to convert, in the best possible light, although at the very end, possibly realizing that he had been harsh, he added: “It is with the ingenuousness and frankness that I profess to observe in all my actions that I also particularly profess to be, etc.” (which was the way he signed all his letters, implying yours truly, in your service, and so forth).

  She had asked him always for honesty, and that is what he gave her: there was nothing of the courtier in this letter. Nonetheless, it took Princess Elizabeth several months to renew the correspondence. The reason for this is unclear, as certainly the events of 1646 were sufficiently distracting to take up so much of her attention that there was no time to dally in the world of metaphysics. Or it could have been that truth is subjective after all.

  Louise Hollandine

  Portrait of Boye the dog, by Louise Hollandine (Photographic Survey, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London)

  12

  A Scandal in Bohemia

  LOUISE HOLLANDINE WAS APPROACHING HER twentieth birthday in the spring of 1642, the year that Princess Elizabeth began her friendship with Descartes. Dark-haired, pretty, and lively, with an artist’s aesthetic and joie de vivre, she seems to have had none of her older sister’s complaints about the tedium of life at court; but this might have been because her future at this stage looked far rosier than that of the scholarly Elizabeth. The year had started with an extremely encouraging sign: an exploratory probe from Berlin indicating the renewed interest of Louisa’s old beau Frederick William, eldest son of the elector of Brandenburg, in marrying her. “I will acquaint you with a business which I pray take no notice of to anybody till I desire it,” wrote the queen of Bohemia conspiratorially to one of her closest friends in England on January 6. “The Elector of Brandenburg hath designe to match with Princesse Lewisse [Louisa], he hath had it ever since he was here but now it begins to come out, and hath made [his] grandmother to write of it to me,” she continued, fluctuating between caution and exultation.

  The Winter Queen’s enthusiasm was not misplaced: her second daughter (and, indeed, the family as a whole) could not have hoped for a more appropriate or advantageous match. Frederick William was twenty-two to Louisa’s twenty; he was a staunch Calvinist who had remained faithful to her family and supported her brother’s claim to the Palatinate over that of the duke of Bavaria; he was intelligent and energetic; and he loved her. Even better, the objections Frederick William’s father, the elector of Brandenburg, had originally raised to the match were no longer relevant, as the elector had fortuitously died two years earlier. Frederick William, as head of the family, was now in control of his own affairs.

  And unlike his father, Frederick William possessed courage, determination, and a political acumen astonishing in so young a ruler. Within two years of his ascension to the electorate, to protect his subjects from the ruin of war, he had concluded an armistice with Sweden in which, for a lump-sum payment of 140,000 crowns and a thousand bushels of corn a year, the Swedes agreed not to violate Brandenburg territory; he deposed his old nemesis, the Catholic minister who had tried to poison him when he had been recalled from The Hague the first time, clearing the way for a change in policy; and he had declared himself and Brandenburg neutral in the conflict against the emperor, pending the restitution of the Palatine to Karl Ludwig. In addition to all of this, he had martial experience, having served, like the queen of Bohemia’s own sons, in the army of the prince of Orange during his stay in Holland. He was what has been recognized throughout centuries of matchmaking as a catch.

  But then again, so was she. For by this time Louisa’s renown as an artist rivaled that of her sister for scholarship. Richard Lovelace, one of seventeenth-century England’s foremost lyricists, who was in Holland during this period, was so captivated by Louise Hollandine that he wrote a long poem about her, in which he painted her portrait in words. Entitled “Princesse Loysa Drawing,” it began: “I saw a little deity,/Minerva in epitomy,/Whom Venus, at first blush surpris’d…” In a series of stanzas, Lovelace compared the princess’s skill at bringing her subjects to life to the power of various Greek gods and goddesses. “To live, and love, belov’d again:/Ah, this is true divinity!” ran one line; and in another, Venus chided Adonis: “See here a pow’r [Louisa’s] above the slow/Weak execution of thy bow.” The poem ended tenderly, “See, see! The darts by which we burn’d/Are bright Loysa’s pencills turn’d;/With which she now enliveth more Beauties,/then they destroy’d before.”

  Although ostensibly extolling her talents as an artist, there is no mistaking the poem’s romantic undertone; Lovelace had clearly been inspired by more than his subject’s pencils. And he was no tongue-tied courtier. Described by an English politician of the period as “the most amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld… much admired and adored by the female sex,” Lovelace had sufficient experience with women to be a shrewd judge of feminine charms. That he would be so taken with the Winter Queen’s second daughter is indicative of the sort of frank admiration she aroused in members of the opposite sex. No wonder, then, that her cousin Frederick William, smitten, remembered her from his teenage years at The Hague and wished to marry her.

  Wasting no time, by March 1642, an envoy from the queen of Bohemia had arrived in Berlin charged with negotiating the terms of the marriage alliance. The talks were already well under way when the news broke that Charles I had planted his standard at Nottingham and declared war against his own Parliament.

  AT FIRST, THE REPORTS coming out of England were heartening. On October 23, 1642, the royal army had its first major engagement with the opposition forces at the tiny hamlet of Edgehill, about a hundred miles northwest of London, at which Rupert and his cavalry distinguished themselves, causing the enemy troops under an obscure Parliamentarian leader by the name of Oliver Cromwell to break ranks and flee. If Rupert had not chased after them, leaving the rest of Charles’s divisions unprotected, the battle would have been a resounding success. As it was, although the losses were severe, the royal army held the field and the victory, and if his uncle had agreed, as Rupert urged, to push on immediately to Westminster, the war might have been over and the throne secured through a position of strength. But Charles had cautiously demurred. The enemy was able to regroup, and the chance was lost. Worse, Oliver Cromwell had learned from his stinging defeat at Rupert’s hands. “Your troops,” he informed his superior commander after the battle, “are most of them old decayed serving men, and tapsters, and such kind of fellows, and their troops are gentlemen’s sons, younger sons, and persons of quality; do you think that the spirits of such base and mean fellows [the Parliamentarian troops] will ever be able to encounter gentlemen [Rupert’s cavalry], that have honor and courage and resolution in them? You must get men of a spirit… that is likely to go on as far as gentlemen will go; or else you will be beaten still.” And Cromwell was commissioned at once to go and begin recruiting and training a new kind of army.

  Still, there was no denying that with his nephew’s help, the king had won the first round against the enemy. And the following year, the royal army received a big boost when his wife, Queen Henrietta Maria, managed to raise enough money on the jewels she had smuggled out of England to buy herself an arsenal—among which were six badly needed cannons—along with some 2,000 infantry and 1,000 cavalry. By February 1643 the queen of England had left The Hague to sail triumphantly back to her husband at the head of this impressive force, just in
time for the spring campaign.

  The additions helped—the offensive was sporadically successful, with Rupert’s taking of the city of Bristol in July as a high point—but there was no real forward movement, no one victory that could be capitalized on to overwhelm the opposition. And with the passage of time, momentum began to shift slowly toward Parliament, which had spent most of 1643 productively mounting a force specifically designed to combat Rupert’s cavaliers. “My troops increase,” Cromwell crowed that year to his superiors. “I have a lovely company. You would respect them did you know them.”

  And then, in the summer of 1644, the pendulum swung decidedly against Charles I with the entrance of the Scottish army into the English war—on the side of Parliament. Henrietta Maria, weakened by a recent pregnancy and fearing capture by the invaders, was compelled to flee the kingdom so quickly that she did not even have time to name the daughter she gave birth to on June 6.* (This time, the queen of England eschewed Holland in favor of her homeland of France, where her sympathetic sister-in-law Anne of Austria, the queen mother, took her in.) Charles sent Rupert and an army of some 17,000 men to meet the threat, commanding him to attack the Scottish troops, who had rendezvoused with Cromwell’s divisions for a combined enemy force of nearly 28,000 soldiers.† On July 2, 1644, the two opposing battalions met at Marston Moor, about seven miles west of Charles’s home base of York.

  It was late in the day, in a driving rain, when Rupert and his men finally reached the battleground, and by the time they had organized and set up their artillery and defenses (which as usual had the cavalry in the front line, just behind a ditch, the better to seize the offensive), it was close to seven in the evening. Between the rapidly failing daylight and the darkly overcast sky it was concluded that there would not be enough time to prosecute a battle before nightfall, and so the attack was put off until the morning. Rupert, with his men, had just settled himself on the ground with a plate of food for supper when suddenly came the ominous sound of the drumming of hoofs, and without further warning Cromwell burst out of the rain and gloom, thundering down on them at the head of an imposing cavalry division.

  Rupert was on his horse in an instant and managed to summon his front line for a counterattack. But his opponent, by taking the offensive, had deprived Rupert of his customary tactic. The royal army, already severely outnumbered, was forced to fight a defensive action. And this time, Cromwell’s troops did not turn and run from the cavaliers’ swords as they had in the past but stayed resolutely in place and fought so doughtily that Rupert later nicknamed them “Ironsides” (for the iron caps, back, and breastplates, rather than knightly armor, that they wore). “Whereupon followed a very hot encounter for the space of three hours,” the Parliamentarian generals reported in their official dispatch of these events to London on July 5. “Whereof by the great blessing and good providence of God the issue was the total routing of the enemy’s army, with the loss of all their ordnance to the number of 20 [pieces], their ammunition… and 10,000 arms. There were killed on the spot about 3,000 of the enemy, whereof many were chief officers, and 1,500 prisoners taken.” By contrast, the Parliamentarian army lost only a handful of officers and less than three hundred foot soldiers.

  It was Rupert’s first serious defeat. He survived, “escaping narrowly, by the goodness of his horse,” but he lost more than his army on that dark night. Left on the field among the dead, many of whose bodies, having been stripped of all of their possessions by the victors, gleamed whitely in the moonlight, was also to be found the still, lifeless form of Rupert’s beloved poodle Boye, who had been the prince’s brave and constant companion since his imprisonment in Austria. The animal had obviously been specifically targeted for death. “Here also was slain that accursed cur, which is here mentioned… because the Prince’s dog hath been so much spoken of, and was prized by his master more than creatures of much more worth,” gloated another Parliamentarian report in the aftermath of the fighting.

  The battle at Marston Moor marked the beginning of the end for the Royalist cause. Rupert realized this. Although he managed to reunite with what was left of his cavalry after this fiasco and continued to prosecute the war as best he could, he counseled his uncle to come to terms with Parliament. Peace negotiations did in fact commence but Charles never had any intention of compromising; rather, egged on by Henrietta Maria, with whom he was in constant (and damning) correspondence and who was doing all she could from her position in France to raise funds and recruit Catholic allies to provide reinforcements, he was intent upon regaining his throne and all of his former sovereign powers by force. In the spring of 1645, just as Rupert’s brother Edward was getting married to Anna de Gonzaga in Paris, Charles insisted that Rupert and his brother Maurice (who had not been present at the battle of Marston Moor) bring what troops they still had to Northampton, in central England, about sixty miles north of London.* They complied, and on May 9, 1645, they rendezvoused with Charles at the town of Naseby to meet the enemy. The Royalist forces had managed to scrape together just 11,000 men. Their adversaries could count on twice that number.

  The outcome was predictable. Although Rupert, stationed on the side, succeeded in cutting through the enemy’s left flank, Charles, in the center, was less successful. “One charge more, gentlemen! One charge more and the day is ours!” the king called out, positioning himself at the head of the infantry—but instead of charging forward as these brave words would indicate, he instead allowed himself to be turned away at the last moment by a solicitous courtier who, concerned for his sovereign’s safety, grasped the bridle of his horse and led him off the field. The infantry, correctly inferring that this was not a good sign, also tried to turn back and was cut down in its confusion by the opposing army. There was nothing Rupert, who was furiously trying to fight his way to his uncle, could do to help. Five thousand of Charles’s soldiers, nearly half his forces, were killed or captured that day. In addition, all of his armaments and luggage were taken, including the royal standard. More important, the king lost all of his private papers, including his wife’s letters. When these were subsequently made public, it was clear to all of England that the king had been duplicitous about the peace negotiations and had merely been stalling for time.

  And now, at last, Rupert saw what had become obvious to his brother Karl Ludwig during the time that he had spent with the king just before the outbreak of hostilities and the most likely reason that he had not stayed to fight beside him: his uncle was not competent to prosecute a war. He was too easily led astray by optimistic dreams that resulted in impractical strategies; he refused to face harsh realities. Even after the bloodbath at Naseby, Charles persisted in believing that he could still win if only he could raise more soldiers. He had a new fantasy that involved retreating to Scotland, of all places, and there regrouping. This was for Rupert the last straw. “My Lord,” he wrote bluntly on July 28, 1645, to one of his uncle’s council, “it is now in everybody’s mouth, that the King is going for Scotland. I must confess it to be a strange resolution, considering not only in what condition he will leave all behind him, but what probability there is for him to get thither… If I were desired to deliver my opinion what other ways the King should take, this should be my opinion, which your Lordship may declare to the King. His Majesty hath now no way left to preserve his posterity, kingdom, and nobility, but by a treaty. I believe it a more prudent way to retain something, than to lose all,” he concluded grimly.

  For daring, swashbuckling Rupert, the warrior whose greatest pleasure was in the fight, who almost from childhood knew no more glorious existence than to charge forward at the head of a line of cavalry into battle to write such a letter tells more of the story behind the outcome of the civil war than mere speeches or statistics ever could. As he gave up all hope in his uncle the king, so did England—and, with it, the rest of Europe.

  AS IT BECAME INCREASINGLY obvious that Charles I would not prevail in his struggle to regain his throne, the pressure on his sister’s court
at The Hague intensified. It had been four years since Parliament had cut off funding to the queen of Bohemia, and what credit she had managed to scrape together on the promise of future repayment dried up completely once the outcome of the battle at Naseby was made public. She was responsible not only for herself and her four daughters but also for her youngest son, Philip, who had been hurriedly recalled from France after Edward’s marriage. (Karl Ludwig remained in London in the hopes of getting his income reinstated, but although he did manage to convince Parliament of his fidelity, they declined to support him beyond the token disbursement of a few hundred pounds.) To limit expenses, Princess Elizabeth undertook negotiations to send eighteen-year-old Philip to Venice as a mercenary soldier. The queen of Bohemia disapproved of this sort of employment, but in light of the dire nature of the family’s finances and the willingness of the Venetians to pay up-front for military service, there seemed little choice. Still, hammering out the details of the contract, which of course had to be conducted by letter, took time, and for the moment Philip was stuck at home.