Daughters of the Winter Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  In her niece’s passionate plea, Louise Hollandine might perhaps have heard echoes of her own persecution at her mother’s court at The Hague. But the abbess was now sixty years old and had been withdrawn from the world for nearly two decades. She knew the difference between a true calling and a flight from trouble.

  In the end, though, it didn’t matter what her aunt thought; this was France, and France was Louis XIV. He was quite specific about his sister-in-law’s plan to retire to Maubuisson. “Get the idea out of your head,” the king told Liselotte bluntly. “For as long as I live I will never give my consent, and will oppose it if necessary with force. You are Madame, and it is your duty to uphold the position.” She would soon see what he meant by that.

  HER FATHER’S DEATH MEANT that the Lower Palatinate passed to Liselotte’s brother, Karl, the elector’s only legitimate heir. Karl Ludwig had been right to worry about this succession: although married for more than a decade, his son, who had been sickly his whole life, remained childless, and outlived his father by less than five years. He died on May 26, 1685, at the age of thirty-four.

  It was at this point that the reason Louis XIV had not demanded a large dowry for his brother’s German wife—had agreed to the marriage with Liselotte at all—became clear. There’s no need to ask for money or property up-front when you intend to take everything anyway. Just as he had with the War for the Queen’s Rights, Louis XIV (ignoring the inconvenient clause in her wedding contract wherein Liselotte had specifically renounced any claim to her father’s estate), much to his sister-in-law’s dismay, now used her as an excuse to invade and annex the Lower Palatinate.

  French troops under the direction of the dauphin laid siege to Philippsburg at the end of September 1688; the city surrendered on October 29. Mannheim and Heidelberg soon followed suit. The French soldiers were particularly savage, burning and looting everything in their path. A frantic Liselotte, desperate to stop the slaughter, made herself very unpopular at Versailles. She was accused of being unpatriotic, especially after she pleaded with Louis to exercise restraint. “If they were to kill me for it, I should still find it impossible not to regret—or, rather, deplore—being made the pretext for my country’s destruction,” Liselotte agonized to Sophia in a letter of April 20, 1689. “I cannot look on in cold blood while with one blow they destroy poor Mannheim, and with it everything which cost my late father so much trouble and thought. When I think of all the places they have had blown up, I am filled with such horror that each night, just as I am falling asleep, I seem to find myself at Heidelberg or Mannheim, gazing upon the ravages they have committed, then I wake up shuddering… I am especially heartbroken because the King actually stayed his hand from these devastations until after I had craved leniency for Heidelberg and Mannheim.”

  The carnage continued. The French were as merciless in the second half of the century as the Spanish and imperial soldiers of the Thirty Years’ War had been in the first. “What really grieves me most is that my name should have been used to deceive the poor inhabitants of the Palatinate, and that these poor harmless creatures should have been led by their affection for my father to believe that the best thing they could do would be to submit with a good grace,” a bereft Liselotte mourned. “I am heartbroken, and cannot rid myself of the thought that not only were they disappointed in their hopes and their affection harshly rewarded, but that through this same affection they have been brought to the depths of despair and plunged into lifelong misery.”

  Louis XIV’s brutal usurpation of the Palatinate would mark the zenith of French expansion beyond its borders. A quarter century of brazen aggression had spurred the Sun King’s opponents to put aside their differences in order to launch a concerted action against him. As a result, bit by bit over the next decades, France would be forced to surrender almost all of the territory it had acquired during the first half of Louis’s rule.

  But it would be too late for the Palatinate. The beautiful castle of Heidelberg, where once long before a hopeful Frederick had tenderly refurbished a suite of rooms to please his young bride, Elizabeth, only to see it destroyed in the Thirty Years’ War, and which was afterward painstakingly restored to its former glory by his son Karl Ludwig, was gleefully demolished all over again by French artillery. And with this newest occupation came the final blow, as the ancestral lands, after so much hardship and effort, passed forever out of the family’s control. “Now the King is the sole master in the Palatinate,” Liselotte despaired.

  WHAT LOUISE HOLLANDINE THOUGHT of Louis XIV’s foreign policy, and specifically the destruction of the Palatinate, is unknown. Unlike her sisters and niece, Louisa had never visited her father’s homeland and so harbored no fond memories of Heidelberg, its castle, or its subjects. Of those of her family still alive, she was the most removed from affairs in Germany.

  But domestically, within France, there was a new initiative on the part of the Crown in which the abbess of Maubuisson was deeply interested. This was the Sun King’s determination to impose a single religion on his realm by forcibly converting the entire Protestant population, known as Huguenots, and which by best estimates exceeded over one million French subjects, to Catholicism.

  Although he must have been mulling it over for some time, this new pet project of Louis’s did not really gain momentum until after the death of his wife, the queen, in 1683. Within a year, he had secretly married his latest mistress, Madame de Maintenon (who had been the devoted confidante of the king’s former mistress the Marquise de Montespan, which gives an idea of what friendship was like at the Sun King’s court). The marriage was not acknowledged because Madame de Maintenon was in no way elite enough to be the wife of so grand a monarch as Louis XIV. She was not of high aristocratic birth; she had been born a Huguenot before converting; she had been married previously to a bawdy French satirist. Madame de Maintenon made up for these considerable deficiencies by adopting an air of cloying sanctity, and it was to this trait, her piety, that Louis was most attracted. Although it was never enunciated (it clearly wouldn’t do to say it aloud), the Sun King, taking the thirteenth-century Saint Louis IX’s example, aspired to canonization and felt that Madame de Maintenon was just the spouse to get him there. Liselotte hated her and called her, variously, “the Maintenon woman,” “the old bawd,” “the old wretch,” and “the dirty old slut.” “The Great Man [Louis XIV] is incredibly simple with regard to religious matters,” Liselotte informed Sophia. “This arises from the fact that he has never learnt anything about religion, has never read the Bible, and thoroughly believes everything they tell him on this subject. Moreover, when he had a mistress who was not pious he was not pious either. Now that he has fallen in love with a woman who talks of nothing but penitence he believes everything she tells him.”

  And so, to do God’s work and save his subjects’ souls, on October 22, 1685, Louis revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had guaranteed the Huguenots freedom of worship in France for a century.* Instead, he instituted a campaign of reconciliation—or “Reunion,” as it was fondly known—aimed at convincing his misguided Protestant subjects to abjure their heresy and return to the one true religion, Catholicism. This was how Louis’s inspired new approach to spiritual enlightenment operated: “A day was appointed for the conversion of a certain district, and the dragoons [soldiers] made their appearance accordingly,” recorded an eyewitness. “They took possession of the Protestants’ houses; destroyed all that they could not consume or carry away; turned the parlors into stables for their horses; treated the owners of the houses with every species of cruelty, depriving them of food, beating them, burning some alive, half-roasting others and letting them go… and many other tortures were inflicted even more horrible than the above named.” An English bishop who happened to be traveling in France at the time backed up this story. “Men and women of all ages who would not yield were not only stripped of all they had, but kept long from sleep, driven from place to place and hunted out of their retirements,” he testified. “The wome
n were carried into nunneries, in many of which they were almost starved, whipped, and barbarously treated.”

  Not surprisingly, this treatment resulted in a mass exodus, as panicked Huguenots eluded capture or pretended to convert and then fled. An estimated 60,000 French Protestants poured across the border into Switzerland in the first months after the revocation. Another 50,000 headed to England. Frederick William, the elector of Brandenburg, was so incensed by Louis’s policy that he published his own Edict of Potsdam two weeks later, on November 8, 1685, in which he invited all of the persecuted Huguenots to immigrate to his territory. Hundreds of thousands of French refugees took him up on it and surged into Germany and the Netherlands. Those men unlucky enough to be caught by Louis’s dragoons along the way were sent to the galleys or tortured. Anyone who died without accepting last rites and absolution from a Catholic priest was denied a proper burial, and his or her naked body was dragged through the streets and left to be eaten by dogs and rats.

  With such an incentive, a thriving business dedicated to smuggling Protestants out of France developed. Children—who under Louis’s directives were wrested from their families in order to be brought up Catholic if their parents refused to cooperate—were hidden in empty wine casks and shipped to safe havens like the Channel Islands. Wealthy Huguenots disguised themselves as sheep farmers and servants and paid guides and sea captains to get them out. In total, France lost an estimated 400,000 to 600,000 of its population in a little over a year.

  Of course, there were thousands who could not escape, and fearful for their lives and property, agreed to renounce their religion. Louis was thus hailed as a hero by the court and the French clergy, who determinedly looked the other way at the king’s methods, pretending that these were all genuine conversions. “This new grandeur, Sire, comes not from the number of your conquests, from the provinces reduced to subjection to you, from Europe of which you have become the arbiter,” the bishop of Valence gushed. “It comes from that innumerable crowd of conversions that have been effected by your orders, by your solicitude, by your liberality… and all this—without violence, without arms, and even much less by the force of your edicts than by your exemplary piety.” But they knew—they all knew. “Soldiers are strange apostles. I believe them better suited for killing, violating, and robbing, than for persuading,” Queen Christina, who had famously converted to Catholicism, observed coolly in a letter of February 2, 1686. “I pray with all my heart that this false joy and triumph of the church may not someday cost her tears and sorrows. In the meantime, it must be known for the honor of Rome that here all those that are men of merit and understanding and are animated by true zeal, do no more lick up the spittle of the French court in this case than I do.”

  For Louisa, who like the rest of the French clergy ignored the dragoons’ brutality and saw only that large numbers of formerly obdurate Huguenots had been convinced finally to forgo heresy and embrace the true word of God, Louis XIV’s insistence on uniformity of faith was a source of hope. She had long desired that she might bring her youngest sister to Catholicism, but not being much of a religious scholar herself, she had been unable to shake clever Sophia from her Protestant views. The abbess’s educational shortcomings were remedied, however, by the arrival in 1689 of a new resident at Maubuisson, Madame de Brinon.

  Madame de Brinon, a zealous Catholic and proud pedant, had previously been employed as the headmistress at St. Cyr, a prestigious girls’ school founded by her bosom friend and benefactor Madame de Maintenon, whom she had known and supported for years. Unfortunately, with her patroness’s rise to the highest levels of the court, Madame de Brinon had assumed a corresponding ascent in rank and had rather overstepped her social station, an indiscretion for which she had been unceremoniously sacked. “What I am going to relate is a fact,” Madame de Sévigné, a close observer of the court, informed her daughter in a letter of December 10, 1688. “Madame de Brinon, the very soul of St. Cyr, and the intimate friend of Madame de Maintenon, is no longer at St. Cyr; she quitted that place four days ago; Madame Hanover, who loves her, brought her back to the Hôtel de Guise, where she still remains. There does not seem to be any misunderstanding between her and Madame de Maintenon… this increases our curiosity to know the subject of her disgrace. Everyone is whispering about it without knowing more,” she gossiped. Madame Hanover was none other than Anna de Gonzaga’s daughter Bénédicte, on a visit to Paris. Concerned for Madame de Brinon’s reputation and looking for an out-of-the-way spot where her discomfited friend might ride out the scandal, Bénédicte remembered her aunt Louisa.

  And so Madame de Brinon came to live at Maubuisson, where, by virtue of her superior religious training and the general air of authority she had acquired as an educator of young ladies, she was accorded the position of secretary to the abbess. Under Madame de Brinon’s direction, Louise Hollandine renewed her campaign for Sophia’s soul. In 1690, she sent her sister a copy of a book by Louis XIV’s own court historian listing the arguments in favor of Catholicism. Sophia, who was sponsoring a conclave in Germany that was trying to resolve the doctrinal differences between Protestants and Catholics peaceably through reason and compromise, had a look at it and handed the book over to her secretary, the brilliant philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, with instructions to begin a dialogue. Encouraged, Madame de Brinon forwarded her own thoughts on religious dogma and enlisted the aid of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, bishop of Meaux, who was considered France’s most gifted orator and was much sought after at all the fashionable funerals for his eulogies.*

  Unfortunately for Louisa, her secretary was no match for Sophia’s. “It must be owned that Madame de Brinon expatiates perfectly well on saints and images, and that she talks like a doctor of the Sorbonne,” Leibniz observed. “If the thoughts and the expressions of the people were regulated thus, there would be no harm; but things of the kind are exaggerated in a strange manner,” he warned.

  Still, Madame de Brinon persisted. When she was unable to make headway with Leibniz, she approached Sophia directly. “I pray to God with all my heart, Madam, that he enlighten your spirit… in order to ensure the salvation of Your Highness, whom I always hope will be disabused from some errors she has been brought up on, if she wants to join her vows to ours and ask God to put her on the path to the truth,” she opined loftily. To which Sophia replied tartly that “the tranquility of mind which the good Lord has given me… is a blessing so great that he would not have wanted a person whom he had not chosen to be among his elect to be favored with it.” She added, “What gives me a very bad idea of Catholics is what is happening in France at present to the people of our religion, which is not at all Christian and shows that it is a very evil religion which authorizes so many evil actions… All England, Holland and Germany are witnesses to this fine religion, as they are filled with refugees, some of whom have been thrown into prison, others have had their children taken away, and all have had their goods confiscated. That is very Christian! How many have been killed for having prayed to God and having sung the Psalms!”

  It is tempting to assume that the aging Louisa, who after all had once been a Protestant and endured harassment for her religious beliefs, did not herself condone the pitiless treatment to which hundreds of thousands of French Huguenots were subjected. But that would be a mistake. “I have again visited my aunt, the Abbesse de Maubuisson, and I found her, God be thanked, even more alert and cheerful than the last time,” Liselotte wrote in a letter dated August 6, 1699. “She is gayer and more lively than I am, and her sight and hearing are better than mine, although she is thirty years older. She was seventy-seven years old on April 1st. She is painting a beautiful picture for her sister… It represents the Golden Calf, after the style of Poussin.”

  As always, Louisa expressed herself most fully in her art. The story of the Golden Calf comes from the book of Exodus in the Old Testament. While Moses was away receiving the Ten Commandments from God, the Israelites he had brought out of slavery became uneasy
and begged his brother Aaron to make them an idol to which they could pray; Aaron obliged them by melting down the jewelry they had brought with them from Egypt and using it to mold a golden calf. Moses returned to find his followers praying to the false deity and smashed the tablets he had brought back with him. God, too, was very angry. Calling the Israelites a stiff-necked people, He smote them for their apostasy and replaced them with new disciples.

  The message of this allegorical scene that Louisa was painting for Sophia was chilling and unmistakable. By stubbornly refusing to convert to Catholicism, the Huguenots had deservedly drawn upon themselves the wrath of God.

  LOUISE HOLLANDINE WOULD LIVE for another ten years, during which time the damage done to France as a result of the persecution of the Huguenots, many of whom had been skilled laborers, became manifest. Shops and mills disappeared; revenues plunged; farmland went untended. “The greater part of our manufacturing establishments have been transported by the Protestant refugees to foreign lands so that we now receive from abroad more than we send thither,” an official in Rouen lamented. The army estimated that over 20,000 of its troops, including officers and elite soldiers—Huguenots who had formerly served loyally on behalf of France—went over to the enemy and were now fighting against their homeland. By the turn of the century, between war and religion, Louis XIV had decimated his kingdom. “Never in my life have I seen such miserable times,” Liselotte exclaimed. “The common people are dying like flies. The mills have stopped working and many people have therefore died of hunger.”