5
The Winter Queen
IT TURNS OUT THAT QUEENS are not made with crowns and scepters after all. They are made with adversity.
After their alarming departure from the castle of Prague, Elizabeth and Frederick (along with the visiting English ambassadors, much startled by this turn of events) took refuge briefly in the home of a loyal member of the Bohemian aristocracy at the edge of the city. They were soon joined by what remained of Frederick’s government and supporters, including his general and many of his officer corps. One small solace of this otherwise crushing loss was that the imperial troops had managed to slay only about 1,600 Bohemian soldiers at White Mountain—the rest had scrambled away too quickly to be killed. This left open the prospect of a counterattack. “I have learned from the English agent… that the defeat will not bring ruin. The slain were not numerous and if they had money they could easily gather their forces together again,” the Venetian ambassador in Savoy reported to the doge. The English diplomats recovered sufficiently to volunteer to negotiate with General Buquoi and the duke of Bavaria, and sent letters asking to arrange a meeting. When they received no answer, it was determined to fall back on Silesia, which still held out against Ferdinand, in order to regroup.
By this time Frederick and Elizabeth had accumulated quite an entourage. Those of the Bohemian aristocracy most closely allied with the couple feared to stay behind and face the violence of imperial retribution.* They had packed up what they could of their household belongings, which meant that the procession of refugees from Prague was encumbered by some three hundred wagons and carts. It was a harrowing journey, as the exact position of the enemy was unknown, so the king and queen were often forced to take back roads too rough for the wheels of Elizabeth’s carriage, necessitating that she ride horseback behind a soldier in her heavily pregnant state. The baggage carts were preyed upon by thieves; the royal attendants were menaced by small bands of roving dragoons; the entire party feared capture by imperial forces sent to overtake them. Throughout this ordeal, neither Frederick nor his wife gave in to despair and in fact made a point of projecting an aura of calm good humor. The English ambassadors who accompanied them part of the way were struck particularly with the courage displayed by Elizabeth, “who truly saw the state she was in, [yet] did not let fall herself below the dignity of a queen, and kept the freedom of her countenance and discourse, with such an unchangeable temper, as at once did raise in all capable men this one thought—that her mind could not be brought under fortune.”
Within a week they had made it to the relative safety of Breslau, where Frederick established an interim court in an attempt to reunite and augment his forces. But Silesia was under attack from the elector of Saxony. There was no way to know how long it could hold out, and Elizabeth was rapidly approaching the time of her confinement, during which she could not travel. She had to leave her husband and find a safer place to have her baby, and she had to find it fast. She decided to try for Berlin, where Frederick’s sister, married to the elector of Brandenburg, lived. But to get there she was going to have to slip past the elector of Saxony’s army.
She took one-year-old Rupert and a small personal guard of horsemen. Baron Dohna, the Bohemian diplomat who had served as Frederick’s loyal ambassador to England and one of the few members of his court familiar with the terrain, courageously volunteered to lead the way. It was winter, with snow and frigid temperatures. Elizabeth was already exhausted from the flight from Prague and ill from her pregnancy. She had to stay off the main road and often traveled by night to take advantage of the darkness. She didn’t know the local language; she could have been betrayed at any time; she didn’t know whom to trust and whom to fear. It must have been terrifying.
Somehow, she and her retinue escaped enemy notice and arrived at Frankfort-on-Oder on November 25. Two days later she approached Berlin, only to discover that her sister and brother-in-law were away from home. Upon appeal, the servants and town council refused to risk imperial wrath by offering her hospitality. With everything that had happened to her, this was probably her most desolate moment.
She couldn’t go back and she couldn’t go forward. The elector of Brandenburg owned an isolated fortress, the château of Custrin, about fifty miles east of Berlin. Since it was primarily used as a summer residence, it was currently uninhabited. “They shall find neither food nor fuel for man, nor fodder for horse—no wine in the cellar—no corn in the granary—nothing but misery and starvation,” the elector of Brandenburg warned Frederick grimly in a letter. But this was the only option available to her, and so it was to this cold, lonely manor, miles from civilization, that Elizabeth and her small entourage trudged.
NEWS OF THE IMPERIAL victory at White Mountain and the subsequent flight of Frederick and Elizabeth from Prague spread rapidly through Europe. “This be the fifteenth day since the date of that victory in Bohemia, which hath filled all this Court and town with jollity,” the English ambassador at Vienna, assigned to negotiate with the emperor, glumly wrote home to London on November 22. Ferdinand was indeed in high spirits. In his hurry to evacuate Prague, Frederick had left behind his crown and insignia as well as many important government papers. The duke of Bavaria had exultantly forwarded these items to the emperor as spoils of the campaign. The very first thing Ferdinand did with his loot was to locate the signed Letter of Majesty, the legal document ensuring the religious freedom of the kingdom, and tear it in two.
Throughout Germany, especially in those areas where Catholicism dominated, Frederick and his wife were derided and lampooned in cartoons, songs, and pamphlets; they were labeled the Winter King and Queen for having ruled only a single season. The Lutherans too joined in the general mockery, and for this reason the imperial victory has long been interpreted not simply as a political triumph but more generally as a wholesale rejection of Calvinism. Of course, the Lutheran reaction may have been genuine, but with Ferdinand’s troops hovering close by, ready to quash any resistance, it is just possible that, given the vulnerability of their position, the other Protestant sects were simply doing their best to distance themselves from so pathetic a failure. If Frederick had triumphed instead of folding up ignominiously at White Mountain and had chased down and destroyed the imperial forces, it is difficult to see the Lutheran majority of Germany voluntarily choosing to scorn him and side with Ferdinand.
By contrast, the loss of Bohemia and the Palatinate was greeted in England with profound grief, followed quickly by anger. “Everyone laments the misfortunes of the King Palatine, and the unhappy fate of the beloved queen, who in her flight never had a helping hand from her father to protect and accompany her,” reported the Venetian ambassador on December 11, 1620, in a letter to the doge. “Tears, sighs, and loud expressions of wrath are seen and heard in every direction.” Even James was sufficiently afflicted by the plight of his daughter and her family to take the unusual step of deviating from official routine. “Whereas, on the preceding days, without any concern about the bitter weather prevailing he could not have enough hunting of the hare in that cold and wind ridden country, he has since then remained constantly shut up in his room in great sadness and dejection, forbidding the courtiers any kind of game or recreation,” the envoy noted.
And now at last the situation seemed dire enough to provoke the king to action. A parliament was called for January 30, 1621, the first in seven years, to determine the English response to the crisis. (James, still wedded to the principle of the divine right of kings, did not think much of representative government, but in this case he had no choice; he had overspent his income and needed the support of the assembled legislators to raise funds.) Although in his opening statement, the king refused aid for the recovery of Bohemia, claiming that his son-in-law had gone against his advice by accepting the crown of that realm, he did vow to see the Palatinate returned to his grandchildren, who were the legitimate heirs “and had never offended anyone.” He would begin as always by negotiating, but this time if the talks did not yield progress, he committed himself to raising an army of 30,000 men and taking back the property by force, even if it meant “to imperil his three kingdoms and risk his own life and shed the blood of his own son,” and he laid his hand upon Charles’s bowed head in a particularly dramatic gesture to underscore his sincerity. The king’s initiative was hailed by the majority of the representatives present, although they rather balked at the expense and voted to raise only £160,000, nowhere near the sum necessary to provision the number of troops requested. Still, it was not an insignificant pledge of support and certainly an encouraging move after the months of indecision.
Unfortunately, it arrived too late to help Frederick recover his regiments in Silesia, forcing him to abandon the hope of a swift counterattack. By December Buquoi’s men had reached Moravia, and despite Frederick’s appeals to hold firm, the local government capitulated and went to the emperor. Faced with advancing imperial troops from the north, south, and west, the Silesians knew themselves defeated and advised their king to withdraw in the hope that he would return at some future date to liberate them. Frederick reluctantly departed Breslau and joined Elizabeth in her isolation at Custrin, arriving on December 21, 1620. Less than a month later, she gave birth to her fifth child, a boy whom the couple named Maurice after her husband’s uncle the prince of Orange, renowned for his martial abilities, because, as his mother observed, when he grew up he would “have to be a warrior.”
AS SOON AS ELIZABETH was well enough to travel, she and Frederick made plans to leave Custrin. This was out of necessity as much as desire. Ferdinand, who would have liked nothing better than to capture his adversary, had issued an imperial decree forbidding any German prince from providing shelter to the couple and their followers. The elector of Brandenburg, Frederick’s brother-in-law, had so far resisted complying, but he did not have the resources to hold out should the emperor decide to send an army to punish him for his disobedience and seize the helpless king and queen. Once again, they had to flee.
But where to go? There is no question that Elizabeth, exhausted and frightened, wanted England. She had not been back since her marriage although she had expressed a longing to return as early as 1617, after the birth of her second son, Karl Ludwig. “The Lady Elizabeth, we hear, makes great means to come over hither… and is so bent to it that she will hardly be stayed,” a member of the English court had reported at the time. Now, especially, after such a traumatic episode, spiritually wounded by deprivation, hardship, and humiliation, she craved the solace of safety, familiarity, and love that she associated with England and home.
It must therefore have come as a particularly cruel disappointment to discover that, despite her father’s having sent her an emissary with £20,000 to help defray the costs of travel, he refused to see either her or her husband, or indeed any member of her family. On January 25, 1621, just nine days after the birth of Maurice, James instructed his ambassador at The Hague to prevent Frederick and Elizabeth from returning to England at all costs. “So great is our mislike of such a course… as we do hereby command you, in case he [Frederick] pass by that way with an intention to repair to this place… to divert him by good persuasions from proceeding any further in that journey… and if our daughter also do come into those parts, with any intention to transport herself hither you do use all possible means at this time to divert her; and rather than fail, to charge her, in our name and upon our blessing, that she do not come,” the king wrote in a panic.
Although James gave his customary worry of compromising the negotiations for the return of the Palatinate as the official reason for refusing his daughter and her family access to England, his true motivation was more complex. Above all, he feared the political power of his daughter’s popularity. There was a strong feeling against Catholic Spain in England, particularly among the growing Puritan party, and despite everything that had happened, James still cherished the idea of marrying his one remaining son, Charles, to the daughter of the Spanish king. Elizabeth’s magnetic presence in England could only aid her cause and stiffen the resistance against a Catholic alliance; should she take up permanent residence in her homeland, it was even possible that the kingdom might choose Elizabeth over Charles as its future sovereign. “I think they have reason there [Spain], if they love themselves, to wish you and yours rather to succeed unto me than my daughter and her children,” James would later write tellingly to Charles. In fact, it was not Spain who cared to prevent Elizabeth or her family from inheriting the throne of England—it was her father. So apprehensive was James about Elizabeth’s potential influence in the government that he would not allow any of her sons to visit or be educated in England, even for their own safety.
But it went deeper than mere fear for Charles’s ascension or the defense of his own policies. Possibly to distance himself from any lingering guilt he might have felt over his role in their humiliation, James blamed the disastrous Bohemian campaign on Frederick and Elizabeth alone. By this time, he had convinced himself that they had deliberately and maliciously set themselves in opposition to his express wishes, and his resentment was palpable. As he saw it, he had been forced into the position of having to defend Frederick’s claim to the Palatinate; that’s why he spoke only of his grandchildren’s rights, and not his son-in-law’s. “You speak to me of Italy, Bohemia, Germany, Flanders and the whole world. I cannot do everything!” James whined at his councillors.
Despite his talk of war, the king didn’t care if the Palatinate was returned promptly; he was willing to let the emperor have it during his lifetime in exchange for a promise that ultimately, after Ferdinand’s death, it would revert to Frederick’s children. Coincidentally, this line of thinking fed nicely into James’s natural inclination against spending money or raising troops. Having had many years of experience with the king of England, the Venetian ambassador was able to recognize this truth instantly. “His Majesty fears the troubles and the burdens of war more than any prince who ever lived and his real idea is to patch things up as best he may,” he observed bluntly to the doge in a letter of March 5, 1621. It would obviously be much more difficult to break this news to Elizabeth and Frederick in person, or to ignore their plight if they were a presence at court, where his ministers and the general population would see their faces and be reminded daily of the human cost of their suffering.
James did not even have the courage to tell his daughter and son-in-law that they were not welcome in England directly by letter or messenger; they had to find out through back channels. Although Elizabeth held her head high and pretended that she had never had any intention of availing herself of her father’s hospitality, she must have felt this final mortification keenly. They had already packed up their few belongings at Custrin and arranged to leave the new baby, Maurice, barely two months old, with Frederick’s sister in Berlin. For one long, dark moment, it must have seemed to Elizabeth as though she and her husband were all alone in the world.
And then her new son’s namesake, Maurice of Nassau, prince of Orange, stepped gallantly into the void left by her father and invited Elizabeth and Frederick to take up residence in The Hague in a house provided by the governing body, the States General.* This offer was gratefully accepted and by the first week in April 1621, the deposed king and queen of Bohemia, with one-and-a-half-year-old Rupert in tow, had reached Holland. There “they were met by the Prince of Orange and all his court, and so conducted to this town in coaches; the whole way, as well by water as land, betwixt this and the entrance into Delft, by reason of a great concourse of people coming from all parts, being like a continued street,” the English ambassador to The Hague reported. “And their being saluted here, since their coming, by all the councils and assemblies, is an argument [that] the affection of this state, from the highest to the lowest, is not changed by the change of these princes’ fortune.” After all that she had been through, the adoration of the crowd, and especially the couple’s reception as visiting royalty, must have cheered Elizabeth and somewhat eased the ache in her heart.
But there is no doubt that she had been wounded, and despite her efforts to hide her feelings behind a mask of dignity, the hurt and bitterness crept out in her private correspondence. “I have seen a genuine letter of the Queen of Bohemia, written to one of the leading Countesses here, an intimate friend of hers, saying how she has reached The Hague after a long and toilsome journey, where she enjoys more popularity among the people, with her husband, than she has ever experienced anywhere else, and where she will stay awhile, seeing she cannot come where she ought,” confided the Venetian ambassador to the doge on April 30. “She adds: Everyone is awaiting some good resolution from his Majesty [James]; for my part I expect very little, but it will only redound to the triumph of our enemies who mock and jest at him.”
THE PRINCE OF ORANGE was as kind as her father was callous. At public expense, Elizabeth and Frederick were given a grand residence, one of the finest in the city, in which to live; it was even redecorated so that the rooms would reflect their kingly status. The couple was further allotted an allowance of 10,000 florins a month to help with the housekeeping. Reunited with their eldest child, seven-year-old Frederick Henry, who had been living in Holland with his father’s relatives since his escape from Prague the previous September, Elizabeth and Frederick and their two small sons moved into their new home in The Hague, and with renewed determination they set themselves to the task of recovering all that they had lost.
And there was reason for optimism. The Spanish troops had not, after all, succeeded in occupying all of the Palatinate—the couple’s beautiful ancestral home in Heidelberg was yet under the control of patriots loyal to Frederick, supplemented by a small remnant of his Bohemian forces, who had regrouped under the direction of one of his former commanders, General Mansfield. Even better, the hated king of Spain, Philip III, had died on March 31, just as Frederick and Elizabeth were making their grand entrance into Holland. The exiled king and queen of Bohemia took this news as something of a good omen; his successor, Philip IV, was only sixteen, and the kingdom might be weakened by the transition. “You will have heard of the death of the king of Spain,” Elizabeth wrote coolly to a friend in England upon receiving this intelligence. “May all his race perish so, especially the women.”
But as both his daughter and the Venetian secretary had so astutely predicted, despite his theatrics at Parliament, James was not in fact enthusiastic about sending soldiers into battle, especially when it was so much easier and less expensive to dispatch yet another emissary to negotiate with the emperor. This new English envoy duly arrived in Vienna in May. Ferdinand, who had no intention of reinstating Frederick as elector of the Palatinate—he informed the Spanish secretly by letter that he “would rather cherish a crushed snake in his bosom”—pretended to consider James’s proposals, one of which involved Frederick’s publicly getting down on his knees and begging the emperor’s forgiveness. The bargaining was not without its compensations, however, at least from Ferdinand’s point of view. He was able to use the time consumed by these negotiations to advantage, surreptitiously directing ever more imperial troops, now under the command of a general named Tilly, into the Palatinate to try to dislodge Mansfield’s forces.
By August, Frederick, who understood very well what was happening, could stand it no longer, and with his wife’s aid took action. Elizabeth, who like the emperor had also used the past few months productively by actively soliciting allies to her husband’s cause through letters and heartfelt personal appeals, had succeeded in recruiting a particularly helpful young partisan by the name of Prince Christian of Brunswick. Christian was twenty-two years old, devoutly Protestant, an enthusiastic warrior, and much taken with the beautiful dethroned queen of Bohemia. In the chivalric spirit of the age, he devoted himself to her service, dramatically taking possession of one of her gloves as a token of her favor and promising, with a grand flourish, “Madam, I will give it you in the Palatinate!”
To this end, the prince gallantly mustered a cavalry of a thousand knights and offered to help Frederick lead them to Heidelberg to shore up Mansfield’s defenses and retake his inheritance. This was exactly what Frederick, who had no money for troops on his own, had hoped for; even if he did end up having to negotiate with Ferdinand, it would be from a much stronger position if he won back his territory or held on to at least part of it.
He had already agreed to this proposal and left The Hague to meet up with Christian’s forces in Germany when James was alerted to his son-in-law’s intentions. Incensed that Frederick had undertaken an initiative without consulting him and fearful yet again of jeopardizing the endless negotiations in Vienna, the king demanded that his son-in-law remove himself from the battlefield. “The commandment I have from his Majesty is this, that… it is his pleasure that you deal roundly with his son-in-law… giving him to understand that his Majesty will not only quit him absolutely, but give direct assistance against him, unless he continue constant to all of his Majesty’s desires,” the English secretary in charge of transmitting these singular orders wrote to his counterpart in Holland. Frederick, faced with the prospect of losing all help from England in the future or perhaps even having his powerful father-in-law turn against him altogether, was forced to decline Christian’s offer and return to The Hague. Two months later, the English envoy in Vienna gave up in disgust at Ferdinand’s duplicity and returned to London. Even James had to admit that the emperor had not been negotiating in good faith.
That was 1621.
In 1622, Frederick and Elizabeth tried again. After the failure of James’s diplomatic initiative in Vienna, a parliament was called in England and an additional £30,000 allocated to prosecute the war in the Palatinate, a sum that the exiled couple took, not unreasonably, as a sign of encouragement. While James continued to lobby for a negotiated settlement—this time dispatching an emissary to Spain in the hopes that the government there would exert pressure on the emperor to compromise—he did send this money to his daughter and son-in-law. But by that point, Elizabeth and Frederick were so heavily in debt that they had to use it to pay off their creditors rather than give the money to help protect Heidelberg. With no funds with which to keep his army together, Mansfield, Frederick’s general in the Palatinate, was in danger of having to surrender what was left of the family estates to the emperor.
Frantic to prevent the complete forfeiture of their remaining property, at the end of March, a once-again heavily pregnant Elizabeth sent her husband off to Germany through hostile territory on yet another daring mission. So great was the risk of capture that Frederick shaved off his telltale goatee and adopted the dress of a humble merchant. In this disguise he was able to pass discreetly from town to town, although occasionally he was forced to stay in inns frequented by imperial soldiers. He played his part so well that none around him realized that the unassuming man in the common room of the tavern lifting his glass to the health and success of the emperor and the ignominious defeat of the Elector Palatinate was in fact the Winter King.
By April 17, 1622, just as Elizabeth was giving birth to the couple’s sixth child, a daughter (whom she christened Louise Hollandine in grateful acknowledgment of all the Dutch had done for her), Frederick had arrived in Germersheim, about thirty miles southwest of Heidelberg. His general was already engaged in surrender talks with an imperial envoy; there was no time to lose. Like a cinema star in a 1930s adventure film, Frederick abruptly flung away his merchant’s cloak and revealed himself to Mansfield, who immediately withdrew from the negotiations and renewed his commitment to his liege lord to defend the Palatinate.
And now, at last, through this bold initiative, Frederick’s cause gained momentum. The news of his arrival spread quickly through the countryside, revitalizing his campaign and brightening the hearts of his subjects. On April 27, just ten days after his daughter’s birth, he and Mansfield, in the company of an army of some 17,000 men, scattered the imperial forces under General Tilly, and Frederick had the intense satisfaction of reclaiming the city of Heidelberg as his own.*
Even better, Prince Christian of Brunswick, who had not forgotten his promise to Elizabeth, had raised an additional ten thousand men and was leading this battalion south from Westphalia to join with Frederick’s army. The prince’s progress was slowed somewhat by his acute need for money to pay his soldiers. Toward this end, he had developed an effective, if unique, method of fund-raising. Stopping at every city and town he came to, Christian delivered letters on scorched paper that read simply, “Fire! Fire! Blood! Blood!” He clearly had a flair for catchphrases, as the citizens who received this cryptic communication knew to hand over piles of silver to make him go away.
It was this fondness for specie that was to be Christian’s—and his patron’s—downfall. After the imperial defeat at Heidelberg, General Tilly had replenished his army with Spanish soldiers, and now strove to intercept Christian’s forces on their way to rendezvous with Frederick’s. The prince could have waited for Mansfield’s army to give battle, but fearful of losing his treasure, he instead engaged the enemy. He saved his loot but lost his soldiers, an action for which he was roundly condemned by Frederick and Mansfield.
As a result of this loss, Frederick and his generals, who now no longer had the men needed to confront Tilly, were obliged to fall back to Alsace. Along the way, Mansfield and Christian quarreled, refusing to cooperate with one another; nor could either stop his soldiers from looting and ravaging the local villagers. In despair, Frederick saw all the goodwill he had engendered by liberating his subjects from the imperial forces disintegrate in the frenzy of carnage. The only way to prevent further destruction to his countrymen was to dismiss his generals and their unruly recruits from his service. This he did in August, in the most tactful way possible: “Be it known to all,” Frederick published in an official decree, “that the Elector Palatine… being destitute of all human assistance, he perceives it impracticable to make farther use of them [his army], except to their own great inconvenience and detriment: he, therefore, with all due resignation of mind… like a friend, with all imaginable tenderness and humanity, not only absolves them from the oath they have taken to him, but permits them to consult their safety and interest, as far as may be possible, elsewhere.”
With no organized force to oppose him, Tilly immediately went back to besieging Heidelberg, and on September 21, 1622, the town surrendered. Frederick was devastated by this loss, particularly as the imperial soldiers inflicted their customary vengeance on the local population. “My poor Heidelberg taken!” he wrote to Elizabeth on September 30. “All sorts of cruelties have been exercised there: the whole town pillaged, and… the handsomest part of it, burnt. God visits us very severely: I am sadly distressed, at the misery of these poor people.” By October 19 he was back once more with his wife in The Hague, where, to add insult to injury, he was greeted with the news that Ferdinand intended to formally invest the duke of Bavaria as elector of the Palatinate at a grand ceremony in Vienna, now that Heidelberg was back under imperial control.
In England, this depressing turn of events prompted a new outpouring of public sentiment in Elizabeth’s favor. Prince Charles, now nearly twenty-two years old and recovered from all of his childhood maladies, begged his father to be allowed to lead an army to his sister’s defense; there was call for another parliament to raise new funds for the war effort and possibly even an authorization for the navy to become involved. But James remained committed to a negotiated settlement, particularly as the Spanish government, to keep England out of the war, tantalizingly held out the prospect of a match between the still unmarried Charles and the Infanta Maria Anna, the seventeen-year-old sister of the young Philip IV. James leaped on this possibility, believing that a wedding between England and Spain would solve all of his problems at once: Charles would be married magnificently, as befit his rank, and could start a family, thus ensuring his (and not Elizabeth’s) succession to the throne, while the return of the Palatinate could be incorporated into the nuptial agreement as part of Maria Anna’s dowry. So appealing was this alternative that the king once again refused to listen to the information gleaned by his own agents. “We have here at present a sudden strong noise (derived as they say by express intelligence from the court of Spain) that the Infanta Maria hath… besought the King of Spain not to press her any further about the match of Prince Charles,” the English ambassador stationed in Venice had reported earlier that year. “And this very week I am advertized from home that the ambassador of the State of Venice did confidently affirm that the Infanta Maria was otherwise to be disposed.” James’s refusal to surrender the dream of a prestigious Spanish marriage for Charles capped another year of profound frustration for his daughter. “The king, my father, is cozened and abused, but will not see it till it be too late,” Elizabeth wrote in despair to a friend on December 5.
That was 1622.
Matters came to a head in 1623. This time it was Charles who, emulating his brother-in-law, donned a disguise in order to slip unnoticed into Spain, in a last-ditch effort to secure the fair Maria Anna’s hand in marriage. On February 19, he and his father’s favorite, the handsome duke of Buckingham, who had helped hatch this novel plot, donned large hats and provincial attire and sailed for France; in these outfits they arrived in Paris two days later, where they fooled no one. By March 7 they were in Madrid, the French government having discreetly looked the other way as they journeyed south through the countryside sampling the local fare, collecting souvenirs of rustic life, and generally behaving like tourists on holiday.
Their bucolic merrymaking must have made them slightly more conspicuous than they’d planned, because the Spanish government seemed not much surprised when it was eventually revealed that the heir to the throne of England had taken it into his head to drop by for an impromptu visit. Eighteen-year-old Philip IV and his advisers were astute enough to treat this romantic escapade for the foolish political maneuver it was, and played along with straight faces. Charles and the duke of Buckingham were entertained as honored guests, and the conditions of a possible marriage between the English prince and the Spanish Infanta were duly considered and consigned to the usual negotiations. These discussions, touching as they did on such critical subjects as the difference in religion between the bride and groom (she was a devout Catholic, he an equally pious Protestant) and the return of the Palatinate, naturally took time, particularly as the Spanish mediators loaded on all sorts of conditions sure to be repugnant to England, such as freedom of worship for all English Catholics and permission for Maria Anna to raise her children according to her religious beliefs and not Charles’s. The days stretched to weeks, the weeks to months, during which time Charles was treated to only fleeting glimpses of his prospective fiancée.
Committed to the success of the alliance, to aid his son’s cause, James raided the crown jewels and sent an astonishing array of precious stones to be given as presents to Maria Anna, in the hope of bribing her to acquiescence.* The ardent bridegroom himself, convinced that love would conquer all, even climbed a wall and waylaid his shy sweetheart, going down on his knees to propose while she was out in the privacy of her garden. This contrivance, while suitably quixotic, did not, alas, elicit the desired effect; rather, it caused the Infanta to immediately go down on her knees in front of her brother the king and beg to be allowed to go into a nunnery rather than marry Charles.
Lacking money and troops and so helpless to affect their fate, Elizabeth and Frederick were reduced by Charles’s Spanish adventure to the role of sidelined spectators. It is a sign of how deep their resignation was, and how little hope they had of a successful conclusion to their struggle, that in April they accepted yet another gift from the prince of Orange—the use of a second house, this one in Leyden, for the purpose of rearing their children. Elizabeth was pregnant again and they needed more space. Also, she was used to the idea of guardians, and parents living apart from their offspring, as this was how she had been raised. She and Frederick were still divided from three of their children: Karl Ludwig and Princess Elizabeth (neither of whom had seen their parents in four years), and Maurice, the baby born at Custrin. These children were all together at a country house outside Berlin, where his mother had eventually found her way after Bohemia fell. The residence in Leyden was a first step toward perhaps one day soon reuniting the family. In the meantime, nine-year-old Frederick Henry, four-year-old Rupert, and one-year-old Louise Hollandine, as well as the new baby, whom they named Louis, after the French king (as a snub to Spain), moved into the country house that summer.*
Charles in his wooing days
By July, Charles, bored with wooing and ready to go home, abruptly gave in and agreed to a marriage treaty that was notable for its utter absence of any mention of the Palatinate and that gave the Spanish government everything it wanted, including a clause allowing Maria Anna to leave her husband and the marriage at any time to enter a convent if she so desired. On September 18, he sailed back to England without his bride (another condition of the agreement; the Infanta would remain in Spain until the pope issued a dispensation allowing the two to marry). By the time he landed it had occurred to Charles that he had been used badly by the Spanish and that perhaps he did not really want to be married to a woman so fond of nuns. Accordingly, he reneged on the treaty. For once, Elizabeth’s ordeal came in handy: to save his son from acute embarrassment over his role in this foreign-policy fiasco, James pretended that the agreement had been scotched because “I like not to marry my son with a portion of my daughter’s tears” (although he, too, had signed the original wedding contract).
And with this final if reluctant surrender of the dream of the Spanish match, the pendulum of fortune swung ever so temptingly in Elizabeth’s direction once more. Because both Charles and his traveling companion the duke of Buckingham attributed their humiliation in Spain to the mendacity of their hosts—“There is nothing but trickery and deceit in the whole business!” the duke of Buckingham fumed, conveniently forgetting that it was Charles who had broken his word—they sought vengeance by threatening once again to have England intervene militarily in the Palatinate. “Since my dear brother’s return into England all is changed from being Spanish in which I assure you that Buckingham doth most nobly and faithfully for me,” Elizabeth wrote exultantly to a friend on March 1, 1624.
James tried to resist, but the king was old and sick. The years of heavy eating and drinking had taken their toll. “I remember Mr. French of the spicery, who sometimes did present him with the first strawberries, cherries, and other fruits, and kneeling to the King, had some speech… that he did desire his Majesty to accept them, and that he was sorry there were no better, with such like complimental words. But the King never had the patience to hear him one word, but his hand was in the basket,” reported a bishop of James’s acquaintance. Corpulent, afflicted with gout and arthritis, James was often confined to bed that winter. Early in the spring of 1625 he tried to make his usual hunting progression and came down with a fever. “Yet now, being grown toward sixty, it did a little weaken his body, and going from Theobalds to Newmarket, and stirring abroad when, as the coldness of the year was not yet past almost, it could not be prevented but he fall into a quartan ague,” the bishop continued.
It was at his Theobalds estate at the beginning of March that the illness really took hold. James did not do much to help himself, continuing to drink heavily and refusing to listen to his doctors. By March 24 it was clear that the king was dying. He asked for Charles, and the two were alone together for several hours. So private was this conference that no one was allowed into any of the surrounding rooms for fear that their secrets might be discovered.
Three days later, in the early morning hours of March 27, 1625, James cried out for his son again. Charles came in his nightgown but his father had already lost consciousness. James I, king of England, died near noon that day, the new king by his side. He left no message for his daughter, not a single trinket or kind word for her or any member of her family. He departed life without ever having seen even one of his grandchildren or making any provision for them.
“He enjoyed life for fifty-nine years, for fifty-eight of which he was King of Scotland, and for twenty-four he governed the whole of Great Britain,” the Venetian ambassador wrote home to the doge by way of a eulogy. “He spent his days in study, in peace, and in hunting.”
James might have spent his days in peace but he left behind a war that would last for thirty years.