Faced with the prospect of military rule, and resentful of the many years of imposed Puritan values and behavior, the mood of the realm swung definitively in favor of restoring Charles II to the throne. By this time the exiled monarch had been away from England so long that nobody knew much about him, which definitely added to his appeal. He wasn’t familiar enough to be despised as were the other alternatives, which made him the most attractive option by default. This popular bias was underscored on March 15, 1660, by a Royalist sympathizer who took a ladder and a can of paint to the spot where Parliament had replaced a statue of Charles I with a damning inscription celebrating his execution and labeling him a tyrant, and effaced it, jubilantly tossing his hat into the air and shouting, “God bless King Charles the Second!”
Charles was now nearly thirty years old. The many setbacks he had weathered made him sensible of his good fortune, and he leaped at this opportunity. He entered into secret negotiations with General Monk, Cromwell’s successor as commander of the English army, to assure him of his goodwill. More important, he penned a masterful letter to Parliament promising amnesty for those who had fought against the Crown. “We do assure you upon our royal word that none of our predecessors have had a greater esteem of Parliaments than we have in our judgment as well as from our obligation,” he wrote from Breda on April 14, 1660. “We do believe them to be so vital a part of the constitution of the kingdom, and so necessary for the government of it, that we well know neither prince nor people can be in any tolerable degree happy without them. And therefore you may be confident that we shall always look upon their counsels as the best we can receive, and shall be as tender of their privileges, and as careful to preserve and protect them, as of that which is most near to Ourself, and most necessary to our own preservation.”
That did it. The document was made public in the House of Commons on May 1, and “the house upon reading the letter, ordered £50,000 to be forthwith provided to send to His Majesty for his present supply; and a committee chosen to return an answer of thanks to His Majesty for his gracious letter; and the letter be kept among the records of the Parliament; and in all this not so much as one No,” reported the famous English diarist Samuel Pepys. “Great joy all yesterday at London, and at night more bonfires than ever, and ringing of bells, and drinking of the King’s health upon their knees in the streets,” he added.
In that instant, Charles II was restored to his throne. And not a moment too soon for the queen of Bohemia.
IT HAD BEEN TWO and a half years since Louise Hollandine had deserted both Protestantism and her mother, and in that time the Winter Queen had struggled every day to keep up a genteel front despite her straitened circumstances. Although in the wake of her daughter’s departure, the States General of Holland had out of sympathy voted to provide her with a monthly stipend of 10,000 livres, this only covered basic living expenses. She needed far more than that to pay back the debts she had incurred over the past dozen years, when Cromwell had cut off her income along with her brother’s head, and she naturally turned to Karl Ludwig for financial aid. But Karl Ludwig, with two families to support and a tendency toward extreme caution, not to say miserliness, steadfastly resisted her entreaties. His solution was for her to sell her jewels, a suggestion that she rejected as adamantly as he refused her entreaties to provide for her.*
Charles II
The result of this standoff between mother and son was a series of increasingly insistent dunning letters, followed by equally aggrieved responses. “You sent me one seven thousand for living,” the queen of Bohemia complained to Karl Ludwig. “I had not lacked fine bread and candles if you had helped me as you promised. But sixteen thousand guilders could not do it, living as I do, much less than I should, which made me, in a manner, beg the State’s assistance; and as it is, I cannot give my servants their wages.” “I very well remember that your Majesty seldom wrote to me but on money subjects since I was in Germany, which I do not blame your Majesty for, but only I am sorry that often times I could not answer you but with my leg,” he shot back.
Then came Charles II’s extraordinary reversal of fortune and, with it, the prospect of a brighter future. Ever her nephew’s loyal supporter, the Winter Queen had been with Charles at Breda when he composed his astute missive to Parliament and had shared in the glory of his reception at The Hague, where the English fleet was sent to convey their sovereign home to London. According to Pepys, who was among those who made the voyage, the very first thing the English ambassadors did upon debarking in Holland on May 14, 1660, was to pay their respects to the royal family by making a special trip “to kiss the Queen of Bohemia’s hands.” Three days later, Pepys himself was part of another entourage who met the queen, “who used us very respectfully; her hand we all kissed. She seems a very debonaire, but plain lady,” he commented. (He meant her dress, which reflected her poverty, not her face. Pepys was merciless in his judgments of the clothing worn by others, especially his superiors, as reflecting their relative standing at court. Thus the Winter Queen’s insistence upon keeping her jewels.) On May 24, the day of Charles’s departure for England, she came aboard ship to see him off and “dined in a great deal of state, the Royal company by themselves in the coach, which was a blessed sight to see.” By September, in yet another sign of favor, Parliament voted to restore her annual allowance of £10,000, along with those for Charles’s sisters.
But the good news was tempered as always by tragedy. Also in September 1660 came word that her nephew Henry, the little boy who had sat sobbing on Charles I’s knee the day before his execution and bravely promised he would not be made king before his brothers, had died of smallpox at the age of twenty. He was followed to the grave on Christmas Eve of the same year by his sister Mary, princess of Orange, who had accompanied Charles II to England and who fell victim to the same disease. The Winter Queen, who had been almost a second mother to Mary, felt her loss keenly and wept over her orphaned son, ten-year-old William III, prince of Orange, who had been left at The Hague with his grandmother, Amelia de Solms. Then too, after the jubilation of Charles’s restoration, The Hague seemed lonely and provincial. “This place is very dull now, for there is very little company,” the queen of Bohemia lamented in a letter of February 15, 1661. Rupert, who had been recalled by Charles II to England, visited her at this time and confirmed her low spirits. “I found the poor woman very much dejected,” he confided to a friend.
And so, after forty years of residence, the Winter Queen decided to leave her adopted homeland, this time for good. Karl Ludwig again reluctantly invited her to Heidelberg, thinking that in this way he might at least rid himself of the unwanted Charlotte, who was continuing to hang around. “When your Majesty is here, it will be but one family; for nobody will dare to contest against anything that shall be for your service and convenience: and if any trouble should have been that way, those that would control might in better manners [Charlotte] quit the house to your Majesty than you to them; which myself would not have refused,” he assured her. But when he discovered that his mother had no intention of taking on his marital problems but instead wanted him to make ready a separate residence for her in Frankenthal, which was hers legitimately through her dowry, he went to great lengths to dissuade her. “Sure your Majesty hath forgot in what condition the house of Frankenthal is in, when you were pleased to write of preparing it for you,” he exclaimed in mock consternation. “For no preparation would have made that fit for your living in it, but a whole new building, which to do on a sudden, or in a few years, my purse was never yet in a condition for it… As for the accidents fallen out in my domestic affairs, it is likely they had not happened if your Majesty had been present,” he added loftily if somewhat hypocritically.
She was saved by the ever loyal Lord Craven, whose fortune and estates had been returned to him with the restoration of the monarchy. It was he who insisted that she come to live with him in London, pointing out that she stood a much better chance of securing the funds necessa
ry to pay off her Dutch creditors if she were around to lobby Parliament personally for the money, an argument that made so much sense that the States General not only let her go but made available one of their own ships to transport her.
By the middle of May 1661, all was in readiness. Sophia, accompanied by her two inseparable dukes, was at Rotterdam to see her mother off when a letter arrived from Charles II requesting that she not sail for England. He knew very well that as a member of the royal family, his aunt deserved an income and to live in the royal apartments at Whitehall, and he did not want the expense. This ungenerous communication the queen of Bohemia, who was coming as Lord Craven’s guest and not her nephew’s, happily chose to ignore, noting to Rupert in a letter of May 19 that she “was already shipped, and had taken farewell of all at the Hague, public and private,” and that if she didn’t go she “would be supposed disaffected to the King, which would make me despised in all places… I go, I thank God He has given me courage. I shall not do as a poor niece, but will resolve all misfortunes.”
Her calculated risk paid off: she was at Lord Craven’s house in Drury Lane by May 24 and was allowed to remain, Charles II bowing to the inevitable and settling an annuity of £12,000 on her. In fact, he was fond of his aunt, and took her to the opera on July 2 as a mark of favor, which settled any lingering doubts among the court as to her being welcome. “I am glad your Majesty has so much reason to be satisfied with the King your nephew, which must be still more pleasant to him,” Sophia wrote in a letter of August 14, 1661, in response to her mother’s description of these events.
And now, at last, the queen of Bohemia was happy, back in the bustling, longed-for city that she had left half a century before as a vulnerable young bride still mourning the death of her beloved older brother Henry. The annuity bestowed by Charles II was sufficient to allow her a degree of financial independence, and she made plans to lease a house in town from the earl of Leicester at the beginning of the year so as not to impose too long on Lord Craven’s hospitality. She even wrote to Princess Elizabeth, whom she had not seen in years, inviting her to come to London to share the new house with her. Although her eldest daughter did not take her up on this kind offer, Rupert, her favorite son—she signed her letters to him “I love you ever, my dear Rupert”—had pledged himself to Charles II’s service and was expected in London by the end of the year, so she would not be completely bereft of family.
He only just made it in time. On January 29, 1662, the Winter Queen moved into her new quarters and soon afterward began coughing up blood. Charles sent his own doctors and belatedly offered an establishment within the royal palace of Whitehall, but it was too late. She was too ill to be moved. He and Rupert were with her at the end; she made her son executor of her will and made her nephew promise to send the annuity he had assigned her to her Dutch creditors and continue it until the debt was paid in full. She died early in the morning of February 13, 1662, at the age of sixty-five, one day shy of what would have been her forty-ninth wedding anniversary.
Although the court went into mourning, to many of those surrounding Charles II, who had not known her in her youth and beauty and were unfamiliar with her story, the queen of Bohemia was simply an old woman who had clung to the margins of power by virtue of her rank. “My royal tenant is departed; it seems the fates did not think it fit that I should have the honor, which indeed I never much desired, to be the landlord of a Queen,” the earl of Leicester shrugged in a letter to a friend. But this does the Winter Queen a disservice. Rather, she should be remembered for the admiration she inspired, which was captured in this poem, written in 1620 by her close friend the English ambassador Sir Henry Wotton:
On His Mistress, the Queen of Bohemia
You meaner beauties of the night,
That poorly satisfy our eyes
More by your number than your light;
You common people of the skies;
What are you when the moon shall rise?
You curious chanters of the wood,
That warble forth Dame Nature’s lays,
Thinking your passions understood
By your weak accents; what’s your praise,
When Philomel her voice shall raise?
You violets that first appear,
By your pure purple mantles known
Like the proud virgins of the year,
As if the spring were all your own;
What are you when the rose is blown?
So, when my mistress shall be seen
In form and beauty of her mind,
By virtue first, then choice, a Queen,
Tell me if she were not designed
The eclipse and glory of her kind?
She was buried in Westminster Abbey in the royal vault near her father. It was the closest she had been to him since she was sixteen.
PART III
The Legacy of Mary, Queen of Scots
Mary, queen of Scots
… and her great-granddaughter, Sophia
Princess Elizabeth
… in Germany
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Abbess of Herford
FOR PRINCESS ELIZABETH, THE RESTORATION of her cousin Charles II to the throne and even the death of her mother (whom she seems never to have forgiven for the d’Epinay affair) had very little impact on her life. Of much greater moment was the highly unseemly public disintegration of Karl Ludwig’s relationship with his wife, Charlotte, and his subsequent somewhat-less-than-official remarriage to Louise von Degenfeldt. When she discovered that her older brother not only expected her to recognize Louise as his legitimate spouse but had every intention of moving his new family into the castle at Heidelberg despite the fact that his former wife was still living there, Princess Elizabeth, who had taken Charlotte’s side from the beginning, was appalled. There was an argument, and in 1659, soon after Sophia’s marriage and removal to Hanover, Elizabeth too packed up her few belongings and went to live with her relatives in Berlin.
But this could in no way be viewed as a long-term solution. Elizabeth was a forty-year-old spinster without financial resources. She was too proud and of too high birth to accept charity from her relations; she needed a position where she could settle into old age with honor and dignity. In the century in which she lived, this meant the Church.
Luckily, thanks to the Peace of Westphalia, there was now a Protestant women’s order more or less in the family: the abbey of Herford (about fifty miles west of Hanover, where Sophia now lived). Herford was one of the consolation prizes that the elector of Brandenburg (still Frederick William, Louisa’s former suitor) had received from the emperor in exchange for the surrender of territory to Sweden at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. Elizabeth had formerly tried to place Louisa at this institution before her sister’s unexpected flight from The Hague and conversion to Catholicism.
This time, it was a position for herself that she sought when she wrote to her cousin the abbess. But because of her royal title, she desired not simply to join the order but also to run it after the death of her relative. She must have anticipated some resistance to this blatant nepotism because she made an effort to preempt any doubts the abbess might have as to her motives or qualifications. “If I came to the Institution I should never have the presumption to think of reforming anything which your Grace could not do, nor of keeping a greater state than you have done so as to bring the Abbey into debt,” she rushed to assure her cousin. “I have no desire to make great banquets which is not fitting for any Abbess; I can add 1000 thalers yearly, and if God grants me more (from the claims I have on the English and Imperial Courts) I will use it to secure my favor,” she wheedled outright.*
But the cousin, who had never met Elizabeth, had no wish to be hurried to the grave or second-guessed in administration by some haughty distant relation. She stalled, raising doubts as to the fitness of a princess for the humble retirement of religious life. “If you knew me aright you would know that I have no ambition and ask no more than a retreat for my old
age, which I may perhaps find at Herford,” Elizabeth rejoined in frustration in the fall of 1659.
Finally, after over a year of correspondence, she managed to convince her cousin to consent to the plan—“As your Grace has assured me in your honored letter of March 22 that you will accept me as Canoness, I have sent… 300 thalers,” Elizabeth confirmed quickly in a letter dated April 17, 1660, making sure to secure the position with a down payment—only to discover that her nomination could not proceed without the vote of the order itself. Alas, the results of a preliminary caucus of this august body were not encouraging. Many of the other women in the order shared the suspicions of the abbess and moved to reject this well-connected interloper. “I am heartily sorry for the disagreement with the Chapter, and cannot but blame the Canonesses who fomented it,” Elizabeth fumed to her cousin. “It is a bad trade to stir up strife, but to restore peace and order is the part of wisdom that brings the best repute,” she admonished virtuously.
Unfortunately, the sisters of the abbey—particularly one Fraulein Lisgen, who until Elizabeth’s sudden appearance had clearly been expecting to take over—continued to protest her appointment, necessitating more drastic measures. In October 1660, Elizabeth undertook the trouble and expense to travel to Herford and stay for ten days at the abbey, as a sort of extended employment interview. She also urged the elector of Brandenburg (whom she saw regularly in Berlin) and other distinguished acquaintances to write to the chapter on her behalf. As this only served to confirm the order’s fears that a decision in her favor would be forced upon them, these maneuvers did not have the desired effect. “If your Grace would listen to your memory rather than to the false reports… you would not suppose that the loss of Fr. Lisgen’s vote would drive me to such extremities as should do injury to the Institution,” Elizabeth was forced to defend herself in a letter of December 8. “If the Elector or other good friends could be helpful to me… it could not possibly be any prejudice to your Grace… It robs the Institution of no freedom… and why should it not be permitted me to employ my friends to influence the sisters to carry out your wishes, as for Fr. Lisgen to induce hers to work against them to return an unfavorable answer?”
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