Daughters of the Winter Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  They left his corpse to swing publicly for three hours, then cut up the body and sent his appendages to various cities as a reminder to the populace of the fruits of defiance. “I saw his arm upon the Justice-port of Aberdeen; another upon the South-port of Dundee; his head upon the Tolbooth of Edinburgh,” reported a visitor. “Also, I saw it taken down and Argyle’s head put up in the place of it,” he added thoughtfully after the inevitable fall of that strongman, although this was still over a decade in the future and therefore of dubious consolation to Montrose and those who loved him.

  On May 25, four days after the execution, the parliamentary annals of Scotland recorded that its officials had received “a letter from the King’s Majesty [Charles II] to the Parliament, dated from Breda, 12th May 1650, showing, that he was heartily sorry that James Graham had invaded this kingdom, and how he had discharged him from doing the same; and earnestly desires the Estates of Parliament to do himself that justice as not to believe that he was accessory to the said invasion in the least degree.”

  The gruesome details of Montrose’s martyrdom were broadcast all over Europe. The queen of Bohemia, Louisa, and Sophia were all at Breda with Charles II when they discovered what had happened. “Montrose meanwhile went to Scotland, and the [Scottish] Parliament, dreading his influence and valor, sent deputies to the King at Breda—where I also was with the Queen my mother—offering the crown of Scotland on condition that he gave up Montrose, swore to the Covenant, and acknowledged the Parliament as lawful. The King suffered himself to be persuaded by the enemies of Montrose to grant all this in order to secure the crown for himself,” Sophia reported in her memoirs. “I was deeply shocked; the more so on hearing that the gallant Montrose had been put to a cruel death, as may be read in the history of England.”

  Unlike Sophia, Louisa did not leave a record of her feelings regarding the torture and murder of her fiancé. But it may be presumed from her later actions that she considered his treatment at the hands of the Presbyterians to be far from God.

  THUS BEGAN A PERIOD of escalating repression, privation, and sorrow for Louise Hollandine.

  She had barely six months to mourn the loss of her lover when her family was forced to endure yet more tragedy. Her youngest brother Philip’s experience with the Venetians having proved unsatisfactory, he had become involved in an uprising in France by some discontented noblemen seeking to unseat Cardinal Mazarin. On February 16, 1651, twenty-three-year-old Philip fell in battle during the siege of a fortress at Rethel, in northern France, about twenty-five miles north of Reims. His death was followed almost immediately by word that thirty-year-old Maurice had been lost at sea and presumed drowned in a hurricane somewhere near the coast of Anguilla on February 26.* This degree of affliction (which would be followed that September by news of her sister Henrietta Maria’s demise) was unprecedented even for a family as inured to adversity as Louisa’s, and it provoked an unusual visit: her brother Edward, the reprobate Catholic, arrived at The Hague that summer to condole personally with his mother and sister.

  It was the first time he had been back in Holland since his conversion and marriage. Two years younger than Louisa, Edward had been barely out of his teens the last time she had seen him; now he was wealthy, self-assured, and married with children of his own. In the shock and grief of having lost two sons in succession, the queen of Bohemia was more than prepared to forgive Edward his transgressions, and he was welcomed back into the family.

  His stay coincided with the arrival in Holland of an embassy of some 250 functionaries sent by Cromwell to try to promote an alliance between the English Puritans and the Dutch States as a means of depriving Charles II of support. Despite her hatred of the faction that had assassinated her brother, the queen of Bohemia was nonetheless petitioning these envoys for payment of the over £100,000 she argued was owed to her by virtue of lifetime bequests made by the English government before the civil war, which had been withheld by Parliament for nearly a decade. Necessity drove her to this extreme; her credit had long since been exhausted and it was a daily struggle to put food on the table. Despite this, she refused to toady and communicated with Cromwell’s ambassadors entirely through Dutch intermediaries, forbidding everyone in her household to come into direct contact with them.

  But Edward had no compunctions about confronting the men he considered to be the enemy. Soon after his arrival, he and a few friends were out riding when they came upon a coach carrying senior members of Cromwell’s embassy. According to Dutch news reports of this event, they then blocked the carriage’s passage, forcing it to stop, and taunted its occupants, calling them “rascals and dogs.” As the coach was protected by an armed guard whose members substantially outnumbered Edward and his companions, the envoys were eventually allowed to pass without a struggle. But two days later Edward again accosted the parliamentary diplomats and their retinue, and this time he had over a dozen men carrying swords and daggers at his side. A clash ensued and several members of the English suite were wounded before Edward and his friends escaped. The envoys complained vociferously to their Dutch hosts. “It was England that received the affront done by the petty, paltry thing called Prince, whose very nursing was paid for out of the purse of England; and therefore we are confident those in power here among the Dutch cannot but consult so far with their own honors as to make a severe vindication, answerable to a crime of so high a nature,” fumed one of the functionaries. The matter was referred to the Dutch court of justice, which did nothing beyond issuing a stern warning to Edward to have “a better tongue another time.” Although it diminished her chances of recouping her income, his mother could not help but take great satisfaction at this insult to her brother’s executioners. “You will have heard of the high business between my son and their pretended ambassadors, whom Ned called by their true names,” she reported in a letter to Charles II soon after this incident. To further infuriate and demean the parliamentary delegation and demonstrate that he was not afraid of them, Edward prolonged his stay at his mother’s house by an extra week before continuing with his planned itinerary of calling on Karl Ludwig in Heidelberg before returning home to Paris.

  Louisa, too, applauded her brother’s exploit and was happy to have him back as an accepted member of the family. Of all her male siblings, Edward was closest to her in age; she and he had been among the first occupants of the nursery at Leiden. They had been together all through childhood and into adolescence and this was a strong tie between them. And she could not have failed to note that alone at her mother’s court, Edward, the Catholic, was not intimidated by the increasingly ominous atmosphere surrounding The Hague and had the courage to say and do what they all felt.

  THAT CROMWELL’S AMBASSADORS WERE able to influence the political and religious environment in Holland was due almost entirely to a change in leadership in the house of Orange. Frederick Henry, the old prince who had ever been the Winter Queen’s true friend and generous benefactor, had died in 1647 and been succeeded by his son William II, husband of Charles I’s daughter Mary. But William II’s tenure as prince of Orange had been extremely short as he, too, had died—of smallpox—in October 1650. Although his nineteen-year-old wife, Mary, delivered a son on November 4, a week after her husband’s death, the infant was obviously too young to rule. This left a vacancy in leadership, and into this vacancy stepped the dowager princess of Orange, the queen of Bohemia’s former lady-in-waiting Amelia de Solms, with the alacrity and determination of a bill collector holding a winning lottery ticket.

  She had first to dispense with any possible competition from Mary, who, as the widowed mother of the heir to the house of Orange, was the natural claimant to her son’s regency. The battle between these two began within weeks of William II’s death with a bitter dispute over the naming of the infant; Mary wanted to call her son Charles, after his martyred grandfather, while Amelia insisted on William, after her beloved son. The struggle continued right up until January 5, 1651, the day of the baptism. The hundreds of
assembled guests had to wait two hours at the church while Mary, under siege in the royal apartments, did her best to hold her ground against her relentless mother-in-law. In the end she was forced to give in, and her son was christened William III at a ceremony notable for his mother’s refusing to attend.

  But Amelia did not content herself with symbolic victories. She went after Mary’s legal rights as well. She took the matter to court and had herself, along with her son-in-law Frederick William, the elector of Brandenburg, named as co-guardians with her daughter-in-law of little William III. As the elector lived in Berlin, this left Amelia in charge of her grandson’s education, estates, and income. Small wonder that Mary spent the preponderance of her time in Holland in the company of her sympathetic aunt the queen of Bohemia and her cousin Louisa, and got away from The Hague altogether whenever she could.

  Louisa was no politician—unlike her mother, she left no letters commenting on the feud between the princess of Orange and her mother-in-law. But her support of Mary may be discerned in a scene she painted during this period depicting the finding of Erichthonius. According to Greek mythology, Erichthonius, who would grow up to rule Athens, was the adopted son of the goddess Athena. Soon after his birth, to keep him safe, Athena hid Erichthonius in a box that she then bestowed upon the three daughters of the king of Athens, accompanied by strict instructions never to lift the lid and peek inside. Of course, curiosity overwhelmed the sisters, and they betrayed their commission and opened the box. There, they found a baby who was half serpent, a discovery that caused them to go mad. Rubens had famously painted this scene in 1632; Louise Hollandine no doubt was influenced by his work as she was by that of her mentor, Gerrit van Honthorst, who often composed allegorical portraits (like The Triumph of the Winter Queen) in which he depicted those who sat for him in classical costumes and attitudes.

  But unlike the Rubens portrayal, in Louisa’s hands, the scene has strong political overtones and could easily be interpreted as a metaphor for her cousin’s predicament. The baby coming out of the box is Mary’s son, William III; the female figure in the foreground, in the act of being pushed away by one of the other sisters, is Mary herself.* Although the women in the background look at the baby, the baby reaches only for Mary his mother, while she in turn gazes out at the viewer with quiet, thoughtful dignity. The painting, one of Louisa’s finest, is an example of how far she had progressed. The child has no father; he is compromised by a serpent; the woman at the forefront is beautiful and vulnerable. Knowing the circumstances under which it was painted, it is likely that this was intended as a political statement highlighting Mary’s victimization.

  Unfortunately, all of these factors—their public support of Mary and the Royalist cause, Edward’s sneers and hostility toward the Puritan ambassadors, and the death of their longtime protector the prince of Orange—made Louisa and her mother easy targets for Cromwell and his agents. The simplest way to attack them was financially, and this the English Parliament did very effectively by charging the wealthy Lord Craven (who had essentially been supporting the queen of Bohemia for years) with treason, which conveniently allowed them to strip him of his estates and income. By November 3, 1653, the Winter Queen’s situation was sufficiently dire for her to write that it was “as no parable but the certain truth, the next week I shall have no food to eat, having no money nor credit for any; and this week, if there be none found, I shall neither have meat, nor bread, nor candles.”

  Karl Ludwig was appealed to but he was in no position to underwrite a separate residence for his mother and rebuild Heidelberg at the same time. Moreover, he was already supporting his sister Sophia and was father to a son and daughter with another child on the way. His solution was to invite his mother to come live with him in Germany. This proposal the queen of Bohemia, in her midfifties and set in her ways, refused even to consider. She would not leave, she harrumphed to Lord Craven, “although she supposed he [Karl Ludwig] meant to starve her out of the Hague, as he would a blockaded fortress.”

  But it was becoming increasingly clear to Louisa that the situation was untenable, and that as a thirty-one-year-old spinster whose last good chance for marriage had been massacred on the shores of Scotland, she was a financial burden on those around her. There were women who made a living painting in the seventeenth century, but they were not of royal blood like Louise Hollandine; this expedient was forbidden her by her rank. Already Princess Elizabeth, anticipating that something must be done to secure her middle sister’s future, had taken it upon herself to write to a cousin who ran a Protestant women’s abbey in Herford, Germany, some two hundred miles east of The Hague, asking if there was space for Louisa, and she urged her sister to contact the abbess directly and accept this vocation. “I have not before taken the liberty of troubling your Grace [the abbess] with my worthless writing,” Louisa was forced to respond, “but now as I understand from my sister in Berlin that you have the kindness to wish me to have a place in your institution, for which I am very highly obliged to you… I beg you would further do me the kindness to let me know how I should pay over the three hundred rix thalers which one must give to purchase a position in the institution.”

  But the abbess was in no hurry to comply with her cousin’s request. The negotiations dragged on for a year, then two, despite Princess Elizabeth’s best efforts. “My sister could wait upon you for a day or for four days, and bring letters of recommendation,” she petitioned the abbess again in 1655, “but if it is inconvenient or your Grace should have other views so that you do not wish it, write to me openly, for you know well that she [Louisa] cannot act otherwise than candidly and does not like others to act differently to her,” she warned.

  Princess Elizabeth no doubt meant well, as she had when she had helped to arrange the ill-fated Transylvanian marriage for Henrietta Maria. But although it is clear from these lines that she understood Louise Hollandine’s character, she could not know the effect that the abusive political and religious climate at The Hague would have on her sister’s conscience. For after a brief war over commercial rights, Cromwell had managed to persuade the Dutch that it was in the best interest of the two Protestant nations to ally, and a treaty was signed at Westminster. As a result, the Puritan movement in Holland was empowered and over the next few years, public conformity in religious practice—the necessity, for example, of proving loyalty by adhering to certain rites at Christmas—became a source of not-so-subtle intimidation. Even the queen of Bohemia, impoverished and harassed, gave up and accepted Karl Ludwig’s invitation to Heidelberg, but when she and her daughter tried to leave The Hague, they were prevented by their many creditors.

  And it was at this point that Louisa came to a decision that must have been building up inside of her for years. Turning secretly to her brother Edward and a mutual friend, the princess of Hohenzollern, Louise Hollandine began laying the foundation for a new life. It must have taken months to organize, but by the winter of 1657 she had gathered her nerve, and early on the morning of December 19, at the age of thirty-five, she crept quietly out of the house to the harbor, where a boat was waiting. Her mother rose several hours later and when she remarked on her daughter’s absence was handed the following letter, which had been left behind for her: “Madam,” Louisa had written, “the respect which I have for your Majesty is too great to permit me to do anything purposely to displease you; and God knows that no impulse, except that of His spirit, could ever have induced me to undertake any action, however reasonable, without having first communicated it to you; but in this contingency, the affair being… one in which I should doubtless have found your Majesty opposed to the guidings of Divine Providence in my behalf, I could not act otherwise… I must tell you, then, madam, that the Christmas festivals being so near, I have been obliged to withdraw from your Majesty, from fear of being desired to receive the [Protestant] sacrament against my conscience, since at length it has pleased God to discover to me the surest way to salvation, and to give me to know that the Catholic rel
igion is the only way… I trust you will pardon me for a course which… I have only resolved to adopt from the pure motive of assuring the repose of my soul… that I have no other aim than that of securing a tranquil retreat, where I may have full leisure for the service of God, and to testify to you in all things that I am, and wish to remain all my life, Your Majesty’s most humble and most obedient servant, Louisa.”

  Louise Hollandine was converting to Catholicism.

  Her mother was naturally quite upset by this turn of events and searched her daughter’s room, where she found two letters from the princess of Hohenzollern, herself a Catholic, containing helpful suggestions for how Louisa might make her escape. One plot had the runaway pretending that she wanted to visit Antwerp to see her brother Edward, who had taken it on himself to secure the necessary travel documents; the other was to steal away silently, leaving a letter explaining her motives. As Louisa had evidently decided on the second approach, the princess of Hohenzollern had arranged to bring the fugitive by barge to her own home in Bergen op Zoom, some fifty-five miles to the south. From there it was arranged that she would officially convert and then retire to a convent in Antwerp.

  The queen of Bohemia’s first step was to write an angry letter to the princess of Hohenzollern, accusing her of betraying her trust. To this, both the princess and Louisa replied that the desire to convert had been entirely Louisa’s choice and that the princess had collaborated only after Louisa had confided this decision to her friend. But her mother, believing that her daughter could yet be brought back, applied to the governing Dutch States for satisfaction. They, in turn, stripped the princess of Hohenzollern of some of her privileges including her right to name the magistrates in her hometown of Bergen op Zoom, unless she could prove her innocence in the affair.