Daughters of the Winter Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  * In light of future events, staying out of England would prove to be a very wise decision.

  * It is interesting that the queen of Bohemia, whose children’s names read like a litany of whoever happened to be helping her at the moment, never named any of her sons James.

  * The prince of Orange’s wife, Amelia de Solms, one of the queen of Bohemia’s former ladies-in-waiting, branched out a little and had her portrait painted in 1631 by the popular new young artist Rembrandt van Rijn. But Rembrandt, with his keen observation and emphasis on detailing every wrinkle, painted her in profile, giving special attention to her double chin, so after that she stayed with Honthorst.

  † If you want to see what Leyden looked like while Louise Hollandine and her siblings were growing up, you have only to glance at Rembrandt’s work before 1630. He took all of his subjects (except for his many self-portraits) from the streets of the town. After that he moved to Amsterdam, where the demand for his portraits was so great that “he had not only to be paid but to be prayed” to take on a subject, a local wag quipped.

  * It’s hanging in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where it was recently restored. Go see it.

  * There’s no hard data on what caused this behavior but somehow I suspect that excessive alcohol consumption was involved.

  * Clearly, not much had changed in Scotland since the days when James had had to contend with his equally intractable subjects.

  * Fifty Quatrains, Containing Useful Precepts for the Guidance of Man by Gui de Faur Pibrac, a sixteenth-century author, was considered a standard educational text for the period.

  * In Charles’s defense, he genuinely believed that all of his problems were the work of a few troublemakers and that overall his subjects supported him. Richard Nixon, another leader inclined toward expedience, famously labeled this helpful population as “the great silent majority” and also used it to justify his actions.

  * He seems really to have fallen in love with her. Rupert “never named her after in life, without demonstration of the highest admiration and expressing a devotion to serve her,” a chronicler of the period observed.

  * It has been suggested that Descartes was in fact a spy, not a soldier, and this theory has merit in my view.

  † An approach that later became known as the Cartesian method.

  * Please don’t be concerned if you don’t understand this question, or the material in any of the other letters that follow. Personally, I’ve no idea what the two of them were talking about either; what seems to be important here is that they understood each other.

  * To the great amusement of the royal forces, Rupert taught Boye to lift his leg whenever the name Pym (head of the House of Commons) was mentioned.

  * Rupert apparently inspired as much admiration for his good looks as he did for his derring-do. A memoir by a gentlewoman who lived through the civil war affirmed that “when the Prince broke up his quarters, the neighboring ladies not only went to see him march out of the town, but some of them were actually gone along with him!”

  * Marie de Gonzaga would fulfill her father’s wishes by becoming the second wife of Wladyslaw IV, king of Poland, Princess Elizabeth’s old beau, after the death of his first spouse, the emperor’s daughter.

  † Grandson of Henri, duke of Guise, with whom Marguerite de Valois, youngest daughter of Catherine de’ Medici, fell in love before being forced instead to marry her cousin Henry, king of Navarre (the future Henry IV of France). It would appear that virile good looks and outstanding physiques were part of the genetic makeup of the family.

  * To give a sense of what Edward was up against, the most powerful man in the kingdom, Cardinal Mazarin, would later take on Anna de Gonzaga—and lose.

  * Interestingly, she seems to have turned to metaphysics as a way for her mind to control her body and emotions and lead to inner peace, something like the seventeenth-century version of yoga.

  * Charles called the child Henrietta Maria after his wife, who in the urgency and danger of her departure had been forced to leave the baby behind in the care of a trusted lady-in-waiting.

  † “Wherefore I command and conjure you, by the duty and affection which I know you bear me, that… you immediately march… with all your force to the relief of York… You may believe that nothing but an extreme necessity could make me write thus,” implored Charles in a letter of June 14. “Had not [the king]… this year given a fatal direction to that excellent Prince Rupert to have fought the Scotch army, surely that great Prince and soldier had never so precipitately fought them,” a Royalist officer who knew Rupert well concluded.

  * Rupert was apprised of his brother’s marriage by a letter from an English correspondent in Paris dated May 5, 1645. “Your Highness is to know a romance story that concerns you here, in the person of Prince Edward. He is last week married privately to the Princess Anne… [His new wife] is very rich; six or seven thousand pounds a year sterling is the least that can fall to her, maybe more: and is a very beautiful young lady.”

  * Karl Ludwig has been treated rather unfairly by historians who uniformly accuse him of abandoning his uncle in order to obtain money from Parliament. But it is clear that Karl Ludwig, who was the only member of his family actually present in England during the run-up to the civil war, consistently gave the king solid advice to moderate his approach and was frustrated at every turn by the outlandish schemes of the queen, whose counsel Charles took instead. Karl Ludwig, whose father had precipitated the Thirty Years’ War, viewed his uncle’s behavior as similarly self-destructive and refused to encourage him. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, for the family to lose one kingdom (Bohemia) may be characterized as misfortune; to lose two (England) seemed to Karl Ludwig like carelessness.

  * This ceding of Alsace-Lorraine would contribute to hostilities between France and Germany for the next two and a half centuries, up to and including the two World Wars.

  * In fact, it was 569 miles to the southeast, and this in a time when the roads were poor or nonexistent.

  * “Lord Craven was a very valuable friend, for he possessed a purse better furnished than my own from which to provide presents for my partisans. He always had refreshments standing ready, and used to give away quantities of little ornaments, such as would delight young people. He needed all these attractions to make him agreeable, and to enable us to tease him a little in private,” Sophia observed.

  * Descartes, famously following his precept to always seek out the positive when dealing with adversity, had written to her in the aftermath of Charles’s beheading: “Although the death we speak of, being so violent, may seem at first far worse… it is undeniable that without his last trial the gentleness and other virtues of the dead king would never have been so remarked and so esteemed as they will be in future by whoever shall read his history.” How much consolation this view of Charles’s sufferings, not to mention his minimal achievements, afforded Elizabeth is unclear.

  * To please Descartes, Elizabeth dutifully wrote a letter to Christina as a way of initiating a correspondence, but Christina, who was interested in Descartes, not a rival female disciple, chose not to answer her.

  * Although the “ONE” to whom Montrose referred was his archenemy Archibald Campbell, marquis of Argyll, who led the Scottish Presbyterians during the years of the English civil war and joined with the Puritans in the rebellion against Charles I, he thus also correctly predicted the dictatorial rise of Oliver Cromwell.

  * It was during this period, while he was at Breda, that Montrose had his portrait painted and sent to the queen of Bohemia. “I give you many thanks for your picture,” she added in a postscript to her letter of June 24. “I have hung it in my cabinet to fright away ‘the Brethern.’” (The Brethern was the Winter Queen’s scornful nickname for Argyll’s Covenanters.) Her receipt of this portrait, combined with her many affectionate letters to Montrose, have led some historians to speculate that these two were having an affair. But there is no evidence of this; rather, the queen of Bohemia had
portraits of all of her family around her, like a modern-day photograph album. That Montrose sent her this likeness could instead be interpreted as further evidence of his future role as the queen of Bohemia’s son-in-law.

  * Rupert, who survived the storm, was so broken by his brother’s death that for years he refused to believe it, and continued to hold out hope that Maurice had somehow escaped.

  * This would not be the only time that Mary sat for Louisa. On August 6, 1654, Charles II wrote to his aunt that “I have now received my sister’s picture that my dear cousin the Princess Louisa was pleased to draw, and do desire your Majesty thank her for me, for tis a most excellent picture.”

  * Edward was clearly invested in his sister’s conversion. “Madam, I received yours of November 29 so late that I can give you but a word in way of return,” he wrote to Louisa from Paris on December 31, 1657. “I am transported with joy concerning that which you write, and doubt not but God will bless your design… The Queen [of France] had already propounded Challiot, a nunnery of the order of St. Marie, whither the Queen of England doth continually resort, and there you may be instructed in the manner how to live in this condition without engaging yourself at all… there are many persons in convents to whom pensions are given, and they are respected as queens.”

  * “His Majesty [Ferdinand] received him at the Weissen Berg [White Mountain], where our father had been defeated by the late Emperor,” Sophia noted. “This caused the courtiers to say that my brother gained there more than my father had lost.”

  * Years later Karl Ludwig had real need of Rupert and begged him for help but was turned down in a way that indicated that the wound had still not healed. “Your Belovedness has caused me to take a solemn oath to God that I will never more set foot in the Palatinate; and my sworn, if regrettable, oath I will keep,” Rupert responded with bitterness.

  * Karl, Liselotte’s brother, would later say of his upbringing, “I carry with me the stigma of oppression. My young days were poisoned and I have known but little happiness in this life.”

  * His mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, was not among those who advised him to capitulate and was in fact horrified at her son’s acceptance of these terms. Although she had initially favored a treaty with Scotland and had helped set up Montrose, she had never counseled him to take the Covenant or betray his Catholic subjects.

  * Her creditors, too, clamored for her jewels, but luckily the chairman of the special committee established by the States General charged with adjudicating her affairs was a man of sound principles and discernment. “Must not a queen have some jewels for her entertainment?” he scolded the hapless vendors, and ruled in her favor.

  * Elizabeth was referring to the arrears on her royal allowance, stopped at the time of the civil war in England, and the 10,000-thaler dowry promised under the Peace of Westphalia. Neither payment materialized. Parliament had more pressing expenses and the emperor ruled that dowries were due only to those of the Winter Queen’s daughters who married.

  * He had a son, Dudley, by this marriage to whom he left his property but whom he never formally recognized. He also had an illegitimate daughter, Ruperta, by an actress with whom he had a brief affair.

  * Sadly, Edward did not live long enough to witness his daughter’s marriage. He died of an unspecified illness in Paris on March 10, 1663, at the age of thirty-eight, nine months before the wedding. He was attended on his deathbed by a Capuchin friar, a local priest, and his German manservant. According to the servant, his last words were “Voilà un Huguenot,” although whether he was referring to himself or his German steward is unclear.

  * Henrietta was the daughter that Charles I’s wife, Henrietta Maria, had given birth to in England during the civil war and been forced to abandon when she fled to France. The child was kept safe by a loyal lady-in-waiting who managed to smuggle her out of England to her mother’s court in St. Germain when she was two years old. Henrietta grew up in France and was married to Philippe in 1661. The marriage was unhappy and it certainly didn’t help that Louis XIV took a romantic interest in her. Henrietta died at the age of twenty-five, just ten days after returning from a clandestine embassy to England and only a few hours after drinking a glass of iced chicory water. She went to her grave screaming that she had been poisoned. An autopsy by her physicians revealed that she had succumbed to natural causes, most likely peritonitis, but most of the French court continued to believe that she had been murdered. For more on Henrietta’s death and the evidence against her having been poisoned, see Notes.

  * The Edict of Nantes had been proclaimed law by Henry IV, Louis XIV’s grandfather, in April 1598. Henry IV had been the leader of the Huguenot faction for over two decades and had converted to Catholicism only when it became clear that France would not accept a Protestant king. His Edict of Nantes grew out of the old Edicts of Toleration that Catherine de’ Medici had passed legalizing Protestantism in an effort to wrest political power from the Guise family, leaders of the Catholic faction in France. Catherine would turn on her former Huguenot allies in 1572 by orchestrating the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

  * The bishop of Meaux’s career was made when he gave the funeral orations for both Liselotte’s predecessor, Henrietta, duchess of Orléans, and Louis XIV’s first wife, the queen of France. So celebrated was he that when Anna de Gonzaga died in August 1685, her daughter the princess de Condé demanded that Bossuet eulogize her mother as well.

  * Since she was the aunt of Madame and therefore a member of the extended royal family, the great Bossuet himself delivered her eulogy.

  * Osnabrück had been the town chosen to house the Swedish delegation during the Treaty of Westphalia negotiations.

  * Ironically, Sophia’s advancement to bishopess meant that all three sisters held positions of authority in a religious community at exactly the same time—but what a difference in their experience of church life!

  * If Sophia, the youngest, had been brought up not to flirt, much less engage in love affairs, it is highly likely that this was the way all of the queen of Bohemia’s daughters were raised—another strong argument against Louisa’s having delivered fourteen illegitimate children while living at her mother’s court at The Hague.

  * He was so young that the University of Leipsic refused to grant him his degree even though he had sailed through all of the requirements. He went to the University of Altdorf in Nuremberg instead, and upon examining him, the masters immediately granted him a doctorate and offered him a teaching position.

  * To anticipate those critics who will inevitably claim that I have overstated Sophia’s role as a philosopher in her own right, I point to the recent scholarship of Dr. Lloyd Strickland of the University of Wales. After collecting and translating all of the correspondence among Leibniz and Sophia and Figuelotte, Dr. Strickland concluded, “It does both [Sophia and Figuelotte] a disservice to suppose that their place in the history of philosophy can be secured only through the services they rendered to Leibniz. Likewise, it does both a disservice to depict… their interest in philosophy as a passive one, since there is clear evidence that both actively engaged in philosophical discussion proper, and had contributions to make to the philosophical debates of their day.”

  * This perhaps gives a sense of why Rupert decided to keep his marriage to a Catholic woman secret.

  * Catholics had to apply for a special dispensation from the pope in order to marry a first cousin, as the union fell within proscribed boundaries. There was, however, no similar restriction for Protestants.

  * “‘This is a fair and beautiful princess, worthy of the highest destiny. May I ask what religion she has been brought up in?’ a courtier who saw Figuelotte in 1679 when she was eleven years old asked. ‘She has none at present,’ Sophia answered coolly. ‘When we know what prince will be her husband, she will be instructed in his religion.’” Although this is likely an example of the duchess of Hanover’s making fun with a straight face—her daughter was brought up Protestant—there i
s an element of truth in it, as (again, before Louis XIV’s persecution of the Huguenots) she would almost certainly have instructed Figuelotte to convert to Catholicism in order to marry Louis XIV after the death of his first wife.

  * Also named Sophia Dorothea; no wonder no one understands this period.

  * Also named James, for maximum confusion.

  * He was close; she would have her seventy-first birthday in October. But you get the idea.

  * Except, of course, for one son, the duke of Gloucester, who died just before his eleventh birthday.

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