Worse, to compound the Winter Queen’s distress, the opposition sent spies into Holland to monitor her court’s every movement and intercept her mail. Being under such close surveillance only heightened the tension and created an atmosphere of fear and suspicion of which innuendo and gossip were the natural by-products. “Slander just then was very prevalent at the Hague,” Sophia remembered. “It had become a kind of fashion for the wits to sit in judgment on everybody’s words and actions.”
And into this already fraught environment, in the spring of 1646, came a man.
He was a Frenchman of an uncertain but debonair age, good-looking, sensual, and polished. Much about his background remains murky. A stranger in Holland, he gave his title as the marquis d’Epinay, and let it be known that he was a Huguenot—the name by which Protestants were called in France—who had quit his homeland after his fiancée had had her head turned (and apparently the rest of her body with it) by an unscrupulous prince of the blood, a member of the extended French royal family. But there were also reports that he was merely Monsieur Epinay, a captain in the army, and that it had been he who had seduced the prince’s mistress, not the other way around; and who, after having been discovered, felt the most prudent course was to emigrate quickly, so as to be out of his powerful rival’s reach. Whichever of these versions was true, as a matter of course, he was attracted to the Winter Queen’s predominantly female court, and being a Protestant, was naturally welcomed at her salon, where in a remarkably short space of time he managed to ingratiate himself with her. There is a name for gentlemen of this sort that has been handed down through the centuries and is entirely appropriate in this instance. The marquis d’Epinay was a cad.
As one, her children knew it and despised him, watching in mounting consternation his hold on their mother. But the Winter Queen, about to turn fifty, had been used to male attention all her life, and it had been fourteen long years since her husband died. The marquis, with his perfect French manners and worldly air, flattered and played up to her. Before long, she announced that she was considering attaching him to her household as a member of her private council and allowing him to advise her on financial matters.
What followed is a scandal as shadowy as the marquis’s—or the monsieur’s—background. Because this episode was seized upon with glee as propaganda in Europe’s various power struggles, it was written up in several periodicals. These accounts support the general outline of the story but vary in the details. So, depending on whether the source was Dutch, German, or French, on the evening of June 20, 1646 (or perhaps the afternoon or night before), the queen of Bohemia’s eighteen-year-old son, Philip, was out for a pleasant walk or some other form of after-dinner entertainment with his friends when he encountered the marquis d’Epinay, who was out for a similar purpose with some of his friends. There ensued an altercation during which the marquis, in an attempt to humiliate Philip, taunted him by claiming to have had “bonnes fortunes” with his mother, or with his sister Louisa, or with both (depending again on the source). Philip, as the man of the household, was beside himself and either challenged the marquis to a duel or rushed at him with his friends. He had to remain unsatisfied, however, as his tormentor, shielded by his entourage, managed to get away. But the next day, while out riding in his carriage, Philip saw him again on the street, and this time the marquis was alone. Ordering his carriage to stop, Philip leaped out, and rushed at d’Epinay. Again there is confusion among the accounts. Some report that the marquis was unarmed; some assert that he drew his sword and wounded his assailant first; but all agree that Philip pulled his hunting knife from its sheath, plunged it into the marquis d’Epinay’s breast, and then threw it aside and escaped in his carriage, leaving his victim dead in the street.
To the great displeasure of her children, the queen of Bohemia took the side of the murdered courtier over that of her son and refused all communication with Philip, who had fled across the border; nor in the aftermath of the crime would she allow him to return to her court. She was reported to have “bowed weeping from her high sphere, bewailing the misfortune of having such a son.” Philip appealed to Karl Ludwig, as the head of the family, to intercede on his behalf, which he did with alacrity. “Madam,” wrote Karl Ludwig to his mother from England on July 10, 1646, “give me leave to beg pardon in my brother Philip’s behalf, which I should have done sooner, if I could have thought that he had needed it. The consideration of his youth, of the affront he received, of the blemish had lain upon him all his life-time, if he had not resented it, but much more that of his blood, and of his nearness to you, and to him to whose ashes you have ever professed more love and value than to anything upon earth [Dad], cannot but be sufficient to efface any ill impressions which the unworthy representation of the fact by those who joy in the divisions of our family, may have made in your mind against him. But I hope I am deceived in what I hear of this… since I will still be confident that the good of your children, the honor of your family, and your own, will prevail with you against any other considerations,” he concluded severely. His eldest sister, utterly appalled, confronted her mother indignantly to her face, asserting, “that Philip needed no apology,” a verdict that provoked a quarrel of sufficient magnitude that twenty-seven-year-old Princess Elizabeth abruptly packed her belongings and went to live with her cousins in Berlin.
It seems likely from the violence of her children’s reactions that the queen of Bohemia was guilty, at the very least, of the appearance of indiscretion. Her affections had been so far engaged that it was certainly possible she had been intimate with d’Epinay and so was at least partially responsible for the tragedy. But what held for the mother does not seem to have been true for her daughter. For nowhere is there a mention that anyone in the family ever censured Louisa for her role in these events, and unquestionably Karl Ludwig, had he been informed of any impropriety on her part, would have seen it as his duty to write and reprimand her. Nor would Princess Elizabeth have focused her anger solely on her mother had Louisa been complicit in a love affair with the marquis. Princess Elizabeth had long since taken over the maternal duties of the household, and watched over her younger sisters with a sharp eye. Louise Hollandine seems to have been guilty of nothing more than being a beautiful twenty-four-year-old princess at the height of her powers to attract men, and she had indeed attracted the attention of a roué like the marquis d’Epinay. Of course it is impossible to know for sure, but certainly he would not have been the first man in history to have seduced the mother in an attempt to divert suspicion from his true designs on the daughter.
But it didn’t matter that Louisa was no more than an innocent bystander in this episode. Between her brother’s turning Catholic, her uncle’s dispossession, and now this new notoriety, she was caught up in the wreckage of her family’s reputation. Frederick William, who would go on to a brilliant career and become famous in the annals of history as the Great Elector, the founder of Prussia, and the great-grandfather of Frederick the Great, reluctantly decided that he needed a wife who brought money, the prospect of military aid, and an unblemished dignity to the table. Negotiations with the queen of Bohemia’s emissary were broken off, and the coveted suitor entered into an alternate nuptial alliance.
Later that same year, Frederick William and his entourage arrived in great state at The Hague. There, on December 7, 1646, he married his far less attractive cousin, the daughter of the prince of Orange. As a matter of course, the Winter Queen’s family was invited to the festivities, so Louisa had the singular privilege of witnessing her former suitor wed her cousin of lesser rank but better prospects and of rising with the rest of the company to wish the couple joy.
Marriage portrait of Frederick William, the Great Elector of Brandenburg, and the princess of Orange
Princess Henrietta Maria
… as a young woman of marriageable age
13
Honor and Duty
OF ALL OF HER SIBLINGS, pretty, bright-haired Princess Henrietta Ma
ria was perhaps the most fragile, not simply in health but also in spirit. She had just turned twenty in the summer of 1646 and she was deeply affected by the divisions in her family caused by the murder of d’Epinay. Her brother Philip was nearest to her in age—less than fifteen months separated them—and she was closer to him than to any of the other children save Edward, with whom (as a Catholic) she was now not allowed to communicate. Her eldest sister, Princess Elizabeth, upon whom the preponderance of household responsibility had long since devolved, had from childhood been more of a mother to Henrietta Maria than had the queen of Bohemia.
Now both were gone: Philip to Karl Ludwig in England as a prelude to his employment as a mercenary soldier in Venice, a project over which his eldest brother voiced concern—“I could wish my brother Rupert or Maurice would undertake the Venetian business, my brother Philip being very young for such a task,” Karl Ludwig warned his mother by letter—and Princess Elizabeth to her cousins in Berlin, where she clearly intended to stay for as long as possible. “I must remind you of the promise you made me of quitting your agreeable solitude to give me the happiness of seeing you before my departure deprives me of the hope of it for six or seven months, which is the longest time which the queen, my mother, and my brother, and the opinion of the friends of our family prescribe for my absence,” she wrote to Descartes just before she left.
Princess Henrietta Maria held out for as long as she could, but when December came and her eldest sister still showed no signs of returning, she took the opportunity of Frederick William’s marriage to the princess of Orange (who was only a year younger than Henrietta Maria and had been one of her closest friends since childhood) to accompany the bridal couple back to Berlin so she could be with Elizabeth. It was the first time the princess had ever been out of Holland or on any kind of a long journey at all, and the upshot of this was that she no sooner arrived than she fell sick. “My sister Henriette has been so ill we thought we should have lost her,” Princess Elizabeth confided to Descartes in a letter of February 1647.
But under the care of her older sister, who had nursed her before and knew how best to restore her, Princess Henrietta Maria made a full recovery and was soon on her feet again and out enjoying the rounds of sleighing parties and evening balls that characterized fashionable society in Berlin. She was regularly in the company of Frederick William’s family, and his mother, the dowager electress (the queen of Bohemia’s sister-in-law), became particularly fond of this shy niece. Such a sweet, pretty girl should not go unmarried like her elder sisters, the dowager electress thought, and she was determined to do something for her.
And astoundingly, in one of those abrupt, head-shaking turnarounds in history, the dowager electress’s ambition of a prestigious match for her niece, which would have been nearly impossible six months earlier, seemed suddenly plausible. For by 1647, the emperor was on the cusp of signing a general peace that included a settlement for Karl Ludwig and the Palatinate. As a result, for the first time in decades, the prospects of the family of the Winter Queen genuinely seemed to be on the rise.
THE PEACE PROCESS IN Germany, like the war itself, was an exceedingly complex and extended affair. Originally scheduled to begin in 1642, it took the 135 participating delegates, each with his own staff, nearly three years just to decide where the talks should be held and a further six months to straighten out life-and-death issues like which ambassadors had the right to be referred to as “Excellency.” In the end, it was decided that the province of Westphalia, in northern Germany, was the most convenient spot to hammer out a treaty, but even then they could not locate a town large enough to accommodate everyone, so the French ambassadors held their deliberations in the city of Münster while the Swedish diplomats convened in the town of Osnabrück, a day’s carriage ride away. This forced the imperial envoy, who had to come to terms with both these powers before any general peace could be signed into law, to engage in the seventeenth-century version of shuttle diplomacy for the duration of the negotiations, an additional three years.
That a gathering this crowded and fractured would succeed in coming to any agreement is testament to the collective public exhaustion brought about by the seemingly interminable decades of wholesale slaughter and destruction. So many people had been killed, so many towns leveled and fields burned over and over, that there really wasn’t much territory left that could sustain the armies that swarmed to conquer it. The duke of Bavaria in particular—he who had been accorded the Palatinate and the coveted title of elector by the emperor in exchange for originally ousting Frederick and Elizabeth from Bohemia—now found himself presiding over a desolate wasteland and was so desperate to stop the carnage that he was even willing to give back some of his lands if it would mean an end to the fighting. Ferdinand, the emperor, having already lost key regions to the armies of France and Sweden, was also eager to achieve a political solution before more of his hereditary estate could be occupied and annexed. In Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus’s daughter, Queen Christina, had recently come of age and taken control of her government, and she, too, strongly desired peace, provided that Sweden was adequately compensated for its efforts. Even in France, Cardinal Mazarin, who had succeeded Richelieu as chief adviser to the Crown, recognized that the time to make peace was from a position of strength, a status that a string of recent French victories, including a battle at Rocroy on the border with Belgium that decimated the Spanish army, had helpfully provided.
Karl Ludwig, still in England, was not present at these negotiations. But his cause was upheld by the Protestant Germans and Swedes, not out of any sense of loyalty but from religious self-interest. If the duke of Bavaria was allowed to keep the Palatinate and the title of elector, that would mean that of the six German electors, four would now be Catholic and only two Protestant, with the kingship of Bohemia (held again by Ferdinand, the emperor) as the seventh. The Catholics would thus hold a decisive majority where before the war the German electors had been split evenly between the religions, three and three. This the Protestants could not allow. Yet the duke of Bavaria, while willing to return some of the Palatinate to Karl Ludwig, was adamantly opposed to yielding his rank as elector, an impasse that called for some creative problem-solving. By the summer of 1646, the delegates had come up with what they felt was a workable compromise, which they forwarded to Karl Ludwig in London just as the civil war in England seemed to be winding down.
AS RUPERT HAD PREDICTED, the later stages of combat had not gone at all well for Charles I. After the disastrous battle at Naseby, the king had refused to listen to his nephew’s advice to treat for peace and instead sent him to hold the town of Bristol, the last Royalist stronghold. But no sooner had Rupert arrived than the city was surrounded and attacked by a Parliamentarian army substantially larger and better equipped than the prince’s forces. He could have fallen back upon the castle and withstood a siege for several weeks, but that would have left the town itself undefended, and he could not in good conscience do this in the absence of “any probability of relief in any reasonable time,” as Rupert reported in his official declaration of these events. As it was, “the city had thereby been exposed to the spoil and fury of the enemy, so many gallant men who had so long and faithfully served his Majesty, whose safeties his Highness [Rupert] conceived himself in honor obliged to preserve as dearly as his own, had been left to the slaughter and rage of a prevailing enemy.” So instead of fighting to the death, Rupert surrendered Bristol on terms that guaranteed that no harm would come to its inhabitants.
Charles was furious and accused Rupert of high treason, claiming that he had been in the process of raising a new army and hurrying to his nephew’s aid when he was given the news of the capitulation. To this allegation Rupert pointed out that as the Scottish army had already taken Gloucester, through which Charles would have had to march to get to Bristol, “can any rational man imagine them [the Scots] so stupidly inactive, as to suffer his Majesty to pass so near them without opposition, considering what effective
forces they had, and their commanders neither ignorant or idle to entertain opportunities for action?” To clear his name, Rupert, along with his brother Maurice, fought their way back to Oxford, Charles’s home base, and demanded a hearing. A court-martial was held at which Rupert argued his case and was declared innocent, and Charles forgave him.
The king then decided that his best option was to slip away from Oxford in disguise and give himself up to the Scottish army rather than Parliament, another course of action against which Rupert argued so vehemently that to console him, Charles signed an official document relieving the prince of any responsibility for the decision. Then, clothed as a servant, the king of England stole away from Oxford with a small party to try to surrender himself to the faction that he considered the lesser of two evils.
After Charles decamped, Rupert and Maurice agreed to relinquish Oxford to Parliament without a fight provided that they were allowed a safe passage to leave the kingdom, a condition that Parliament granted. Here the prudence of Karl Ludwig’s having refused to support his uncle’s position when he believed the Crown to have been in the wrong and instead allying himself with Parliament was made manifest, for it is doubtful that the commanding general of the Royalist army would have gotten away so easily had not his elder brother been trusted by the government. Karl Ludwig was even allowed to meet with his younger siblings before they left. “Having received information from Münster and Osnaburgh [Osnabrück], that in whatsoever shall be agreed at the general treaty concerning my interests, the consent of all my brothers will be required, I am desirous to confer with my brothers Rupert and Maurice, afore their departure out of this kingdom, about this, and other domestic affairs which do concern us,” he wrote to Parliament on June 30, 1646. “Whereby I do not at all intend to retard my said brothers’ journey; but shall endeavor to efface any such impressions as the enemies of these kingdoms, and of our family beyond seas (making use of their present distresses), may fix upon them, to their own and our family prejudice.”
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