10
A Royal Education
“I WAS BORN, THEY TELL me, on October 14, 1630,” Sophia would later recall in her memoirs. “Being the twelfth child of the King my father, and of the Queen my mother, I can well believe that my birth caused them but little satisfaction. They were even puzzled to find a name and godparents for me, as all the kings and princes of consideration had already performed this office for the children who came before me.” Consequently, “the plan was adopted of writing various names on slips of paper and casting lots for the one which I should bear; thus chance bestowed on me the name of Sophia,” she revealed.
The twelfth child! It must have felt rather like being the runt of a litter. Sophia certainly perceived herself as being shortchanged of her parents’ attention. When she was an infant, “the Queen my mother sent me to Leyden, which is but three days’ journey from the Hague, and where her Majesty had her whole family brought up apart from herself,” she observed tartly, not understanding that this was how Elizabeth herself had been raised.
Unfulfilled childhoods might be uncomfortable, but in the right hands they make for excellent literature, and clever Sophia, an extremely talented writer, left a memorable portrait of life at the nursery. “At Leyden we had a court quite in the German style,” she explained. “Our hours as well as our curtsies were all laid down by rule.” Her governess “had held the same post with my father when he was a child, and from this fact her probable age may be guessed.” The governess had two daughters “who looked older than their mother… I believe that they prayed to God, and never disturbed man,” she continued, “for their appearance was frightful enough to terrify little children.”
The training of a royal princess, even a five- or six-year-old princess, was taken seriously in the Leyden household. The children were roused at seven o’clock each morning. “I was obliged to go every day en déshabillé to Mlle. Marie de Quat [one of the governess’s daughters], who made me pray and read the Bible,” Sophia reported. “She then set me to learn the ‘Quadrains de Pebrac,’ while she employed the time in brushing her teeth; her grimaces during this performance are more firmly fixed in my memory than the lessons which she tried to teach.”*
By eight thirty, little Sophia was dressed and ready to receive a series of professors in English, French, and German (being a girl, she was mercifully spared Latin); religion (“I learned the Heidelberg catechism in German, and knew it by heart, without understanding a word of it”); and the humanities. “They kept me busy until ten o’clock, except, when to my comfort, kind Providence sent them a cold in the head,” she observed. Academic studies were relieved by a pleasant hour with the dancing master, where she could at least move around a little, and was immediately followed by dinner with her siblings, which seems to have been as much an extension of the ballroom as it was a culinary experience. “This meal always took place with great ceremony at a long table. On entering the dining-room I found all my brothers drawn up in front, with their governors and gentlemen posted behind in the same order side by side. I was obliged by rule to make first a very low curtsy to the princes, a slighter one to the others, another low one on placing myself opposite to them, then another slight one to my governess, who on entering the room with her daughters curtsied very low to me.” Even then, protocol was not yet satisfied: “I was obliged to curtsy again on handing over my gloves to their custody, then again on placing myself opposite to my brothers, again when the gentlemen brought me a large basin in which to wash my hands, again after grace was said, and for the last and ninth time on seating myself at table,” she recalled mournfully.
Dinner—“so arranged that we knew on each day of the week what we were to eat, as is the case in convents”—was followed by a short period of rest. Then came the afternoon’s instruction, which lasted until six o’clock. Her teachers “believed that I should turn out a prodigy of learning because I was so quick, but my only object in applying myself was to give up study when I had acquired all that was necessary, and be no longer forced to endure the weariness of learning.” At six she had another, less formal meal, and was in bed by eight thirty, “having said my prayers and read some chapters in the Bible.”
Sophia, spirited and precocious, chafed under these conditions, particularly as she was well aware that there was a colorful world beyond Leyden accessible to her siblings but denied to her. “Suffice it to say that, as my brothers and sisters grew up, the Queen withdrew them from Leyden. The princes she sent to travel, and kept the princesses to live with herself at the Hague,” she wrote. Her few appearances at her mother’s court as a child did not seem to have been entirely successful. She was once invited to visit so that she could be shown off, “as one would a stud of horses,” to some cousins, one of whom pronounced, after scrutinizing the eight-year-old, that “‘she is thin and ugly; I hope that she does not understand English.’ To my vexation I understood but too well, and was deeply distressed, believing that my ill-fortune was past all remedy,” Sophia confessed.
But of course she wasn’t ugly—none of them were. By her own account, she had her mother’s long curly brown hair and a well-proportioned figure (although she wasn’t as tall as she would have liked, height being prized). But what Sophia lacked in stature she more than made up for in demeanor, for she had “the bearing of a princess.” All those deportment lessons, tiresome though they might have been, had clearly paid off.
When her younger brother, Gustavus Adolphus, died on January 9, 1641, it seemed a superfluous expense to keep the Leyden house open just for one little girl, so Sophia was transferred to the capital to live with her older sisters. Elizabeth’s youngest daughter was absolutely delighted by the change of residence. “I was… ten years of age when I came to live at my mother’s court at the Hague, and I was lost in an ignorant admiration of all that I beheld,” she marveled. “To me it was the joy of Paradise to see such varying kinds of life, and so many people; above all to behold my teachers no more. I was not at all abashed by meeting with three elder sisters, all handsomer and more accomplished than myself, but felt quite pleased that my gaiety and wild spirits should serve to amuse them.”
The Winter Queen’s court was unused to younger children, and at least in the beginning many of the adults seem to have treated Sophia like one of her mother’s pets. But Sophia gave as good as she got (“I made it my business to tease everyone,” she declared), and demonstrated an admirable self-confidence and toleration of raillery. At one point, one of the courtiers, “in order to amuse the Queen, wrote a letter in the name of all her Majesty’s monkeys, electing me to be their queen,” Sophia remembered. “This letter was handed to me in a large company, to see how I would take it. I was too much amused to be angry, so laughed with the rest.”
But the witty, jesting nature of the court at The Hague, so appealing to little Sophia, was only the mask her mother donned to disguise a period of mounting anxiety. For the arrival of the youngest daughter of the Winter Queen in January 1641 coincided with increasingly alarming news out of England, as reflected by the sudden determination of Charles I to marry his eldest daughter, Mary, to William, son of the prince of Orange.
WHEN CHARLES, CONFRONTED BY the invasion of a large and proficient Scottish army, was forced to call the Long Parliament to gather the funds and soldiers necessary to meet the crisis, he did not have high hopes of success. After all, he’d had plenty of experience with discordant representative government (which was why he generally tried to rule without one). But even with these reduced expectations, it still came as something of a shock to him to realize in the opening days of the assembly that many of the legislators, particularly those in the predominantly Puritan House of Commons, were actually on the side of the Presbyterian Scots and wanted to keep the invaders in England in order to pressure the king to yield to their demands. In fact, they were willing to pay the expenses of the Scottish army to stay right where it was. To top it off, they immediately charged both Laud, archbishop of Canterbury, and the earl of Strafford, Charles’s top military adviser, with treason and had both men arrested and confined to the Tower.
It was Charles’s (and his kingdom’s) great misfortune that he and his forceful wife, Queen Henrietta Maria, upon whom the far weaker Charles was rapidly becoming almost totally reliant, were both great believers in the art of the shortcut. Neither saw any reason to rebuild trust or grind out what they could of their objectives through an extended and tiresome negotiation, especially with antagonists whom they saw as beneath them. “I see that all these… tumults and disorders have only risen from the meaner sort of people,” Charles would later assert. “I am ready to obey the king, but not to obey 400 of his subjects [the parliament],” Queen Henrietta Maria observed scornfully. The shortcut, in this case, was to bring in funds and soldiers from somewhere outside England to overwhelm the Parliament, dispense with the Scots, and reassert the king’s undisputed authority over his realm.*
But where to obtain these soldiers and funds? Charles’s first thought was Spain, and to this end secretly offered all sorts of inducements—a military pact, a marriage alliance between his eldest son and Philip IV’s daughter, the promise of future naval aid in exchange for a large loan to be paid as soon as possible. But Spain, at war with France and Holland, had no resources to spare and turned him down. Queen Henrietta Maria then applied to her brother Louis XIII in France, but Cardinal Richelieu, whose focus was on the war in Belgium and Germany and whose ends were served nicely by an England in debilitating turmoil, denied her request, going so far as to send an ambassador to her court specifically to make his refusal clear. Undaunted, the queen next entered into secret negotiations with the pope, promising that once back in power, Charles would restore his Catholic subjects to full religious freedom; but the pontiff would only agree to consider sending military aid if the king first converted publicly to Catholicism, a condition that would have ensured Charles’s immediate dethronement in Protestant England and Scotland.
Having run through the most obvious candidates on his list, Charles was forced to broaden his search to the lesser powers, and among these, Holland caught his attention. The prince of Orange was an experienced military commander who took the field regularly and was beginning to score successes in Flanders in combination with his French allies. And Charles could hardly have failed to notice the strength of the Dutch navy, which had recently chased down and destroyed a fleet of some seventy Spanish ships right off the coast of England. Even better, the prince of Orange’s family was stalwartly Protestant, so there could be no objection from Parliament on the basis of religion. Accordingly, on January 6, 1641, Dutch ambassadors arrived in London, and Charles formally agreed to wed his eldest daughter, nine-year-old Mary, to fourteen-year-old William, son of the prince of Orange.
The announcement of this marriage pierced his sister Elizabeth’s vanity like a well-aimed sword thrust. Not knowing Charles’s true motivation behind the alliance, she could not fathom it. Yes, of course, the prince of Orange was her dear friend and most trusted ally; yes, his family had been staggeringly generous and supportive throughout her steady, unrelenting misfortune; but it was always understood, at least from her point of view, that she was his social and political superior. She had graciously arranged a match between him and one of her ladies-in-waiting, for goodness’ sake! Now that woman’s son was to ally himself with the royal family of England? It wasn’t possible! “I cannot see what the king can gain by precipitating this marriage,” the queen of Bohemia complained to a confidant at Charles’s court. “They [the Dutch] seek to get my eldest Niece but that I hope will not be granted it being too low for her… I pray you do your best in this… you may think what interest I have in it both for my Brother’s honor, my Niece’s good, and my children’s,” she wheedled.
Plans for the marriage went forward despite her objections, and in April the young groom left for London at the head of a large retinue to which Karl Ludwig (who was just hanging around The Hague anyway, not doing very much and sponging off his mother) was attached. His mission was both to try yet again to get military aid to take back the Palatinate and to act as an eyewitness and report to Elizabeth about the true state of her brother’s affairs in England. Although it was traditional for the bride’s family to provide a dowry, in this case it was the Dutch wedding party who brought £200,000 to the king of England as a gift. The marriage was celebrated at Whitehall on May 2, 1641. Charles, grateful for the cash infusion and still hoping that his new in-laws would agree to lead an army into England to rescue him from his own subjects, made a point of raising William above his own nephew in a matter of precedence. Karl Ludwig was so insulted by this breach of etiquette that he refused to attend the nuptial feast.
William II, prince of Orange, and Mary on their wedding day
But he stayed on in England as a member of his uncle’s court after the wedding and so was in a position to appreciate firsthand the escalating political crisis as well as his aunt and uncle’s rapidly declining popularity. It must have been quite an education. On May 9, violence in the streets of London threatened to spill over into Whitehall, forcing Charles to sign the earl of Strafford’s death warrant. His chief military adviser and loyal friend had been found guilty of conspiring to bring an army over from Ireland to initiate a Catholic overthrow of the realm in support of the king and the bishops. “‘If my own person were only in danger, I would gladly venture it to save Lord Strafford’s life; but seeing my wife, children, and all my kingdom are concerned in it, I am forced to give way unto it,’” Karl Ludwig reported his uncle as saying as he signed the order. “And he cried as he said these things,” he added in his letter to his mother. In August, after the Scottish army had finally been bribed to return home, Karl Ludwig accompanied Charles to Edinburgh, where the king, at the queen’s urging, went to try to get a new army of Scottish troops together, this time to fight for him. They refused in spite of Charles’s giving in to every one of their demands. The prince of Orange, too, declined to participate in the English king’s wild military schemes, and by November 25, 1641, Charles and Karl Ludwig were back in London, having accomplished nothing beyond reducing the royal prerogative in Scotland and making the representatives of the Long Parliament, who were still in session, even more suspicious of their sovereign’s intrigues than before.
By this time Karl Ludwig, whose family had lost everything and who had grown up in straitened circumstances struggling for opportunity, and who was consequently far more pragmatic and circumspect than his uncle, had seen enough, and did his best to intervene, but to no avail. “The Queen doth all,” his mother lamented to her contact at the English court that November. “My son advised [the King] to reconcilement with the Parliament; but the Queen wouldn’t hear of it.”
With the troubles of England in mind, the close of Sophia’s first year at her mother’s court held the promise of yet another gloomy, worry-filled Christmas. And then, the mood at The Hague was suddenly lifted by an unexpectedly cheerful event. Out of the blue, on December 20, 1641, her brother Rupert came home.
FOR SOMEONE WHO HAD just spent three years in an imperial fortress in Linz, Austria (about a hundred miles west of Vienna), Rupert certainly looked hale enough. “Prince Rupert arrived here in perfect health, but lean and weary, having come… from Hamburg since the Friday noon,” the English ambassador to Holland informed his government. “Myself, at eight o’clock in the evening, coming out of the court gate, had the good luck to receive him first of any; no other creature expecting his coming so soon. Whereby himself carried the news of his being come to the Queen, newly set at supper. You may imagine what joy there was!” the ambassador exclaimed.
How eleven-year-old Sophia must have loved hearing the story of this dashing, grown-up brother’s adventures! For Rupert’s captivity had been far from dull. He had hardly ever been confined to his cell except for a few brief periods when the emperor made a series of futile attempts, first, to convert his prisoner to Catholicism; second (when the first failed utterly), to get him at least to apologize for rebelling (another suggestion that Rupert coolly rebuffed); and third, to persuade him to fight on the imperial side. To this last offer, the twenty-year-old stalwart retorted that “he received the proposal rather as an affront than as a favor, and that he would never take arms against the champions of his father’s cause.”
But Rupert, tall and darkly good-looking, had an insolent charm that his imperial hosts admired. The owner of the castle in which he was confined had a very pretty daughter (“one of the brightest beauties of the age,” one of her contemporaries confirmed), and she interceded on Rupert’s behalf and seems to have helped him to while away the hours in a pleasant fashion so that “the Prince’s former favors were improved into familiarities, as continued visits, invitations and the like.”* In those interludes when he was not fully occupied with amour, Rupert had been allowed to ride, play tennis, draw (Louisa was not the only member of the family with artistic talent), and even hunt. He had also acquired a white poodle, whom he named Boye, and who became his constant companion, as a gift from the English ambassador at Vienna.
But a cage—even one as delightful as this one appears to have been—is still a cage, and Rupert chafed to get out. Here he had help from an unlikely source: the emperor’s younger brother, Archduke Leopold, recently promoted to commander in chief of the imperial army. Leopold, who was only six years older than Rupert, had heard much about the prisoner and, curious to meet this charismatic man of action, came for a visit. The two became fast friends. Soon Rupert was going on extended hunting parties and was invited to all the fashionable houses in the vicinity. He was “beloved by all,” an imperial soldier confessed. “His behavior so obligeth the cavaliers of this country that they wait upon him and serve him as if they were his subjects.”
Archduke Leopold spoke to his brother, and the emperor softened sufficiently that the English ambassador attached to the imperial court, who happened to be one of Elizabeth’s closest friends, was able to arrange for Rupert’s release—provided that he agreed never to fight against the empire again. Although this precluded him from any future military action to restore the Palatinate to his family, Rupert, who was tired of his prolonged stay in Austria and wanted to go home, agreed. The emperor still required a sign of the prisoner’s submission, but even this was disguised to accommodate Rupert’s acute chivalric sensibilities. An imperial hunting party was arranged to which the captive was invited, and when, as expected, he led the field, he was given the hand of the emperor to kiss as a mark of favor—and just like that, he was free. Even then, he was so popular he could not get away without spending a week in Vienna, where, according to a courtier, “There were few persons of quality by whom he was not visited and treated… the ladies also vied in their civilities, and labored to detain him… by their charms.”
Elizabeth was very happy to have Rupert (along with Boye the poodle) home and safe, but she soon wondered what she was to do with him. He had given his word of honor that he would not fight against the emperor in Germany, and this was the focus of all of her energies, the only arena in which she had some influence and could help place her sons. So where was fiery Rupert, who clearly belonged in an army, to go?
And then, as if on cue, civil war broke out in England.
THE CONFLICT BETWEEN CHARLES and the Long Parliament, which had simmered along for over a year, was by Christmas 1641 so fraught that it was clear to court observers that it would take only the slightest impetus to break out into open hostilities. This push was obligingly provided at the start of the new year by Queen Henrietta Maria.
Henrietta Maria, who despite having lived in England for sixteen years was still rigidly, royally French Catholic to her core, could not understand why her husband did not simply stand up to the mulish members of the opposition, who were just a lot of vulgar commoners in her opinion. It was she who kept coming up with one improbable scheme after another to raise a foreign army to force the kingdom to submit to Charles’s authority. As she was not very discreet about her intrigues, intelligence about her plots seeped out to the legislators, often through the medium of her good friend, the duplicitous Lady Carlisle, who happened also to be intimate with one of the opposition leaders in Parliament. As a result, on January 2, 1642, Charles was informed by reliable sources that five members of the House of Commons had gotten together, reviewed the evidence, and concluded that there were sufficient grounds for concern. They were therefore intending, at the earliest possible moment, to accuse his wife of treason.
Having just gone through all of this with his close friend and adviser the earl of Strafford, Charles well knew what that meant. First would come the accusation, then the arrest. Henrietta Maria would be consigned to the Tower. There would be a trial, followed immediately by a guilty verdict. And then Charles would be obliged to sign his wife’s death warrant.
Henrietta Maria was the dearest person in the world to him, his rock, his soul, the mother of his children. They had two choices: the queen could flee the kingdom, or Charles could turn the tables by preemptively raiding the House of Commons in the company of an armed guard, charging and arresting the five ringleaders for treason, and putting them in the Tower. His wife had no doubts about which alternative she preferred. “Go, you coward, and pull these rogues out by the ears, or never see my face more,” she screeched at him two days later on the morning of January 4.
So Charles went. But he didn’t go right away. He had to get an armed guard together—some three or four hundred men—which took time; and then he had to go find Karl Ludwig, whom he wanted to accompany him; and so it wasn’t until about three o’clock in the afternoon that Charles and Karl Ludwig, yet again an eyewitness to his uncle’s somewhat peculiar governing methods, actually climbed into a coach stationed outside the door at Whitehall. At which point Charles cried out, “Let my faithful subjects and soldiers follow me!” and took off toward the House of Commons with hundreds of armed men behind him.
Unfortunately, by that time his wife, who had assumed he would leave that morning right after she told him to, had already triumphantly let Lady Carlisle in on the secret that the king had gone off to storm the Parliament and arrest the five traitors. Lady Carlisle, in turn, had managed to smuggle a message to her contact at the House of Commons, warning the victims to flee. So when Charles and his mob of soldiers arrived, entered the building, and demanded that the members turn over the five ringleaders, they weren’t there. He and his men were forced to back down and leave empty-handed.
It was a very big deal for a king to break into the House of Commons in this way. No sovereign had ever attempted it before. And now Charles had done it—and come away with nothing. The doctrine of the divine right of kings, embraced by James the century before and handed down lovingly to his son, was dealt a deathblow in that instant by the long, sure lance of representative government. Charles’s blunder was obvious, and it turned the people against him. “Parliament! Privilege of Parliament!” they jeered at him in the streets on his way back to Whitehall.
“Never did he treat me for a moment with less kindness than before it happened, though I had ruined him,” Henrietta Maria confessed later to a friend.
NOW THE QUEEN REALLY did have to flee. The royal family retired to Windsor so quietly that even their servants were unaware of their plans and did not have the castle ready for them. The queen had taken the precaution of smuggling as many of the crown jewels as could be comfortably transported out with her, in case it should be necessary to pawn them for future expenses. Charles appealed to the prince of Orange again for help and arranged for a ship to be prepared on the pretext that the queen had decided to escort her ten-year-old daughter, Mary, to her new husband at The Hague. On February 12, 1642, Charles and Henrietta, with Mary and the jewels in tow, made for Dover “in such post-haste that I never heard the like for persons of such dignity,” reported a member of the court. On February 23, Charles said good-bye to his wife and daughter. They sailed that day for Holland.
The queen of Bohemia and her daughters were at Elizabeth’s hunting lodge in Rhenen when the news arrived of their relatives’ flight. The entire family at once changed their plans and hurried back to The Hague in order to be present when the queen of England and her daughter arrived. To her great delight, Sophia was singled out to be among the first to welcome the visitors as they docked at port. “The Queen my mother went to meet her [Queen Henrietta Maria]… and I was chosen out from among my sisters as being the fittest companion for the young princess [Mary], who was but a little younger than myself,” Sophia remembered with pride. Her initial impression of her aunt was somewhat muted, however. “The fine portraits of Van Dyck had given me such an idea of the beauty of all English ladies, that I was surprised to find the Queen (so beautiful in her picture) a little woman with long lean arms, crooked shoulders, and teeth protruding from her mouth like guns from a fort,” Sophia confessed.
But the fugitive queen, reliant on the goodwill of her hosts and knowing how important it was to appear charming and sympathetic to her husband’s family, exerted herself in her cause and at least succeeded in winning over her twelve-year-old niece. “After careful inspection, I found she had beautiful eyes, a well-shaped nose, and an admirable complexion,” Sophia conceded. “She did me the honor to say that she thought me rather like her daughter. So pleased was I, that from that time forward I considered her quite handsome. I also heard the English milords say to each other that, when grown up, I should eclipse all my sisters. This remark gave me a liking for the whole English nation,” she admitted merrily.
Her mother was not so easily taken in. Although the English ambassador stationed at The Hague reported that outwardly the Winter Queen and her sister-in-law were “very kind, one to another,” privately Elizabeth expressed strong reservations about Charles’s wife. “I find by all the Queen’s and her people’s discourse that they do not desire an agreement between his Majesty and his Parliament, but that all be done by force, and rail abominably at the Parliament. I hear all and say nothing,” she wrote grimly to her closest correspondent.
Meanwhile, back in England, the king gathered his two sons, twelve-year-old Charles and eight-year-old James, and, with Karl Ludwig still by his side, made for York, in the north, where his strongest supporters resided. Although Parliament took control of the navy and began to raise its own militia, there were yet trained troops that remained loyal to the monarchy, and Charles spent all that spring and early summer recruiting men and arms in preparation for civil war. For her part, Queen Henrietta Maria, from her exile in The Hague, commissioned Rupert to be commanding general of her husband’s Horse (the cavalry) and sent him and his younger brother Maurice, along with a large cache of weapons, mostly musketry and shot, to England. They arrived on August 22, 1642, just in time to join Charles and his two young sons at the top of a hill in the town of Nottingham. There, in the midst of a driving storm, the king had the royal standard, ancient symbol of war, unfurled, and by a proclamation read out to the heraldry of trumpets, officially called upon his loyal subjects to fight for king and country against the Parliament.
Significantly absent from this lofty scene, however, was Karl Ludwig, who had been his uncle’s constant companion for over a year and who had no doubt gleaned enough from the experience to anticipate how it was all going to turn out. His fight, he knew, was in Germany, where Charles, despite his many protestations of support, had in fact been of minimal aid to him in the past and certainly could in no way be counted upon for the foreseeable future. And so Karl Ludwig had prudently decided to slip away and sail back to The Hague just as his younger brothers were enthusiastically approaching. They might have waved to each other from their passing ships.