12
A Scandal in Bohemia
LOUISE HOLLANDINE WAS APPROACHING HER twentieth birthday in the spring of 1642, the year that Princess Elizabeth began her friendship with Descartes. Dark-haired, pretty, and lively, with an artist’s aesthetic and joie de vivre, she seems to have had none of her older sister’s complaints about the tedium of life at court; but this might have been because her future at this stage looked far rosier than that of the scholarly Elizabeth. The year had started with an extremely encouraging sign: an exploratory probe from Berlin indicating the renewed interest of Louisa’s old beau Frederick William, eldest son of the elector of Brandenburg, in marrying her. “I will acquaint you with a business which I pray take no notice of to anybody till I desire it,” wrote the queen of Bohemia conspiratorially to one of her closest friends in England on January 6. “The Elector of Brandenburg hath designe to match with Princesse Lewisse [Louisa], he hath had it ever since he was here but now it begins to come out, and hath made [his] grandmother to write of it to me,” she continued, fluctuating between caution and exultation.
The Winter Queen’s enthusiasm was not misplaced: her second daughter (and, indeed, the family as a whole) could not have hoped for a more appropriate or advantageous match. Frederick William was twenty-two to Louisa’s twenty; he was a staunch Calvinist who had remained faithful to her family and supported her brother’s claim to the Palatinate over that of the duke of Bavaria; he was intelligent and energetic; and he loved her. Even better, the objections Frederick William’s father, the elector of Brandenburg, had originally raised to the match were no longer relevant, as the elector had fortuitously died two years earlier. Frederick William, as head of the family, was now in control of his own affairs.
And unlike his father, Frederick William possessed courage, determination, and a political acumen astonishing in so young a ruler. Within two years of his ascension to the electorate, to protect his subjects from the ruin of war, he had concluded an armistice with Sweden in which, for a lump-sum payment of 140,000 crowns and a thousand bushels of corn a year, the Swedes agreed not to violate Brandenburg territory; he deposed his old nemesis, the Catholic minister who had tried to poison him when he had been recalled from The Hague the first time, clearing the way for a change in policy; and he had declared himself and Brandenburg neutral in the conflict against the emperor, pending the restitution of the Palatine to Karl Ludwig. In addition to all of this, he had martial experience, having served, like the queen of Bohemia’s own sons, in the army of the prince of Orange during his stay in Holland. He was what has been recognized throughout centuries of matchmaking as a catch.
But then again, so was she. For by this time Louisa’s renown as an artist rivaled that of her sister for scholarship. Richard Lovelace, one of seventeenth-century England’s foremost lyricists, who was in Holland during this period, was so captivated by Louise Hollandine that he wrote a long poem about her, in which he painted her portrait in words. Entitled “Princesse Loysa Drawing,” it began: “I saw a little deity,/Minerva in epitomy,/Whom Venus, at first blush surpris’d…” In a series of stanzas, Lovelace compared the princess’s skill at bringing her subjects to life to the power of various Greek gods and goddesses. “To live, and love, belov’d again:/Ah, this is true divinity!” ran one line; and in another, Venus chided Adonis: “See here a pow’r [Louisa’s] above the slow/Weak execution of thy bow.” The poem ended tenderly, “See, see! The darts by which we burn’d/Are bright Loysa’s pencills turn’d;/With which she now enliveth more Beauties,/then they destroy’d before.”
Although ostensibly extolling her talents as an artist, there is no mistaking the poem’s romantic undertone; Lovelace had clearly been inspired by more than his subject’s pencils. And he was no tongue-tied courtier. Described by an English politician of the period as “the most amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld… much admired and adored by the female sex,” Lovelace had sufficient experience with women to be a shrewd judge of feminine charms. That he would be so taken with the Winter Queen’s second daughter is indicative of the sort of frank admiration she aroused in members of the opposite sex. No wonder, then, that her cousin Frederick William, smitten, remembered her from his teenage years at The Hague and wished to marry her.
Wasting no time, by March 1642, an envoy from the queen of Bohemia had arrived in Berlin charged with negotiating the terms of the marriage alliance. The talks were already well under way when the news broke that Charles I had planted his standard at Nottingham and declared war against his own Parliament.
AT FIRST, THE REPORTS coming out of England were heartening. On October 23, 1642, the royal army had its first major engagement with the opposition forces at the tiny hamlet of Edgehill, about a hundred miles northwest of London, at which Rupert and his cavalry distinguished themselves, causing the enemy troops under an obscure Parliamentarian leader by the name of Oliver Cromwell to break ranks and flee. If Rupert had not chased after them, leaving the rest of Charles’s divisions unprotected, the battle would have been a resounding success. As it was, although the losses were severe, the royal army held the field and the victory, and if his uncle had agreed, as Rupert urged, to push on immediately to Westminster, the war might have been over and the throne secured through a position of strength. But Charles had cautiously demurred. The enemy was able to regroup, and the chance was lost. Worse, Oliver Cromwell had learned from his stinging defeat at Rupert’s hands. “Your troops,” he informed his superior commander after the battle, “are most of them old decayed serving men, and tapsters, and such kind of fellows, and their troops are gentlemen’s sons, younger sons, and persons of quality; do you think that the spirits of such base and mean fellows [the Parliamentarian troops] will ever be able to encounter gentlemen [Rupert’s cavalry], that have honor and courage and resolution in them? You must get men of a spirit… that is likely to go on as far as gentlemen will go; or else you will be beaten still.” And Cromwell was commissioned at once to go and begin recruiting and training a new kind of army.
Still, there was no denying that with his nephew’s help, the king had won the first round against the enemy. And the following year, the royal army received a big boost when his wife, Queen Henrietta Maria, managed to raise enough money on the jewels she had smuggled out of England to buy herself an arsenal—among which were six badly needed cannons—along with some 2,000 infantry and 1,000 cavalry. By February 1643 the queen of England had left The Hague to sail triumphantly back to her husband at the head of this impressive force, just in time for the spring campaign.
The additions helped—the offensive was sporadically successful, with Rupert’s taking of the city of Bristol in July as a high point—but there was no real forward movement, no one victory that could be capitalized on to overwhelm the opposition. And with the passage of time, momentum began to shift slowly toward Parliament, which had spent most of 1643 productively mounting a force specifically designed to combat Rupert’s cavaliers. “My troops increase,” Cromwell crowed that year to his superiors. “I have a lovely company. You would respect them did you know them.”
And then, in the summer of 1644, the pendulum swung decidedly against Charles I with the entrance of the Scottish army into the English war—on the side of Parliament. Henrietta Maria, weakened by a recent pregnancy and fearing capture by the invaders, was compelled to flee the kingdom so quickly that she did not even have time to name the daughter she gave birth to on June 6.* (This time, the queen of England eschewed Holland in favor of her homeland of France, where her sympathetic sister-in-law Anne of Austria, the queen mother, took her in.) Charles sent Rupert and an army of some 17,000 men to meet the threat, commanding him to attack the Scottish troops, who had rendezvoused with Cromwell’s divisions for a combined enemy force of nearly 28,000 soldiers.† On July 2, 1644, the two opposing battalions met at Marston Moor, about seven miles west of Charles’s home base of York.
It was late in the day, in a driving rain, when Rupert and his men finally reached the battleground, and by the time they had organized and set up their artillery and defenses (which as usual had the cavalry in the front line, just behind a ditch, the better to seize the offensive), it was close to seven in the evening. Between the rapidly failing daylight and the darkly overcast sky it was concluded that there would not be enough time to prosecute a battle before nightfall, and so the attack was put off until the morning. Rupert, with his men, had just settled himself on the ground with a plate of food for supper when suddenly came the ominous sound of the drumming of hoofs, and without further warning Cromwell burst out of the rain and gloom, thundering down on them at the head of an imposing cavalry division.
Rupert was on his horse in an instant and managed to summon his front line for a counterattack. But his opponent, by taking the offensive, had deprived Rupert of his customary tactic. The royal army, already severely outnumbered, was forced to fight a defensive action. And this time, Cromwell’s troops did not turn and run from the cavaliers’ swords as they had in the past but stayed resolutely in place and fought so doughtily that Rupert later nicknamed them “Ironsides” (for the iron caps, back, and breastplates, rather than knightly armor, that they wore). “Whereupon followed a very hot encounter for the space of three hours,” the Parliamentarian generals reported in their official dispatch of these events to London on July 5. “Whereof by the great blessing and good providence of God the issue was the total routing of the enemy’s army, with the loss of all their ordnance to the number of 20 [pieces], their ammunition… and 10,000 arms. There were killed on the spot about 3,000 of the enemy, whereof many were chief officers, and 1,500 prisoners taken.” By contrast, the Parliamentarian army lost only a handful of officers and less than three hundred foot soldiers.
It was Rupert’s first serious defeat. He survived, “escaping narrowly, by the goodness of his horse,” but he lost more than his army on that dark night. Left on the field among the dead, many of whose bodies, having been stripped of all of their possessions by the victors, gleamed whitely in the moonlight, was also to be found the still, lifeless form of Rupert’s beloved poodle Boye, who had been the prince’s brave and constant companion since his imprisonment in Austria. The animal had obviously been specifically targeted for death. “Here also was slain that accursed cur, which is here mentioned… because the Prince’s dog hath been so much spoken of, and was prized by his master more than creatures of much more worth,” gloated another Parliamentarian report in the aftermath of the fighting.
The battle at Marston Moor marked the beginning of the end for the Royalist cause. Rupert realized this. Although he managed to reunite with what was left of his cavalry after this fiasco and continued to prosecute the war as best he could, he counseled his uncle to come to terms with Parliament. Peace negotiations did in fact commence but Charles never had any intention of compromising; rather, egged on by Henrietta Maria, with whom he was in constant (and damning) correspondence and who was doing all she could from her position in France to raise funds and recruit Catholic allies to provide reinforcements, he was intent upon regaining his throne and all of his former sovereign powers by force. In the spring of 1645, just as Rupert’s brother Edward was getting married to Anna de Gonzaga in Paris, Charles insisted that Rupert and his brother Maurice (who had not been present at the battle of Marston Moor) bring what troops they still had to Northampton, in central England, about sixty miles north of London.* They complied, and on May 9, 1645, they rendezvoused with Charles at the town of Naseby to meet the enemy. The Royalist forces had managed to scrape together just 11,000 men. Their adversaries could count on twice that number.
The outcome was predictable. Although Rupert, stationed on the side, succeeded in cutting through the enemy’s left flank, Charles, in the center, was less successful. “One charge more, gentlemen! One charge more and the day is ours!” the king called out, positioning himself at the head of the infantry—but instead of charging forward as these brave words would indicate, he instead allowed himself to be turned away at the last moment by a solicitous courtier who, concerned for his sovereign’s safety, grasped the bridle of his horse and led him off the field. The infantry, correctly inferring that this was not a good sign, also tried to turn back and was cut down in its confusion by the opposing army. There was nothing Rupert, who was furiously trying to fight his way to his uncle, could do to help. Five thousand of Charles’s soldiers, nearly half his forces, were killed or captured that day. In addition, all of his armaments and luggage were taken, including the royal standard. More important, the king lost all of his private papers, including his wife’s letters. When these were subsequently made public, it was clear to all of England that the king had been duplicitous about the peace negotiations and had merely been stalling for time.
And now, at last, Rupert saw what had become obvious to his brother Karl Ludwig during the time that he had spent with the king just before the outbreak of hostilities and the most likely reason that he had not stayed to fight beside him: his uncle was not competent to prosecute a war. He was too easily led astray by optimistic dreams that resulted in impractical strategies; he refused to face harsh realities. Even after the bloodbath at Naseby, Charles persisted in believing that he could still win if only he could raise more soldiers. He had a new fantasy that involved retreating to Scotland, of all places, and there regrouping. This was for Rupert the last straw. “My Lord,” he wrote bluntly on July 28, 1645, to one of his uncle’s council, “it is now in everybody’s mouth, that the King is going for Scotland. I must confess it to be a strange resolution, considering not only in what condition he will leave all behind him, but what probability there is for him to get thither… If I were desired to deliver my opinion what other ways the King should take, this should be my opinion, which your Lordship may declare to the King. His Majesty hath now no way left to preserve his posterity, kingdom, and nobility, but by a treaty. I believe it a more prudent way to retain something, than to lose all,” he concluded grimly.
For daring, swashbuckling Rupert, the warrior whose greatest pleasure was in the fight, who almost from childhood knew no more glorious existence than to charge forward at the head of a line of cavalry into battle to write such a letter tells more of the story behind the outcome of the civil war than mere speeches or statistics ever could. As he gave up all hope in his uncle the king, so did England—and, with it, the rest of Europe.
AS IT BECAME INCREASINGLY obvious that Charles I would not prevail in his struggle to regain his throne, the pressure on his sister’s court at The Hague intensified. It had been four years since Parliament had cut off funding to the queen of Bohemia, and what credit she had managed to scrape together on the promise of future repayment dried up completely once the outcome of the battle at Naseby was made public. She was responsible not only for herself and her four daughters but also for her youngest son, Philip, who had been hurriedly recalled from France after Edward’s marriage. (Karl Ludwig remained in London in the hopes of getting his income reinstated, but although he did manage to convince Parliament of his fidelity, they declined to support him beyond the token disbursement of a few hundred pounds.) To limit expenses, Princess Elizabeth undertook negotiations to send eighteen-year-old Philip to Venice as a mercenary soldier. The queen of Bohemia disapproved of this sort of employment, but in light of the dire nature of the family’s finances and the willingness of the Venetians to pay up-front for military service, there seemed little choice. Still, hammering out the details of the contract, which of course had to be conducted by letter, took time, and for the moment Philip was stuck at home.
Worse, to compound the Winter Queen’s distress, the opposition sent spies into Holland to monitor her court’s every movement and intercept her mail. Being under such close surveillance only heightened the tension and created an atmosphere of fear and suspicion of which innuendo and gossip were the natural by-products. “Slander just then was very prevalent at the Hague,” Sophia remembered. “It had become a kind of fashion for the wits to sit in judgment on everybody’s words and actions.”
And into this already fraught environment, in the spring of 1646, came a man.
He was a Frenchman of an uncertain but debonair age, good-looking, sensual, and polished. Much about his background remains murky. A stranger in Holland, he gave his title as the marquis d’Epinay, and let it be known that he was a Huguenot—the name by which Protestants were called in France—who had quit his homeland after his fiancée had had her head turned (and apparently the rest of her body with it) by an unscrupulous prince of the blood, a member of the extended French royal family. But there were also reports that he was merely Monsieur Epinay, a captain in the army, and that it had been he who had seduced the prince’s mistress, not the other way around; and who, after having been discovered, felt the most prudent course was to emigrate quickly, so as to be out of his powerful rival’s reach. Whichever of these versions was true, as a matter of course, he was attracted to the Winter Queen’s predominantly female court, and being a Protestant, was naturally welcomed at her salon, where in a remarkably short space of time he managed to ingratiate himself with her. There is a name for gentlemen of this sort that has been handed down through the centuries and is entirely appropriate in this instance. The marquis d’Epinay was a cad.
As one, her children knew it and despised him, watching in mounting consternation his hold on their mother. But the Winter Queen, about to turn fifty, had been used to male attention all her life, and it had been fourteen long years since her husband died. The marquis, with his perfect French manners and worldly air, flattered and played up to her. Before long, she announced that she was considering attaching him to her household as a member of her private council and allowing him to advise her on financial matters.
What followed is a scandal as shadowy as the marquis’s—or the monsieur’s—background. Because this episode was seized upon with glee as propaganda in Europe’s various power struggles, it was written up in several periodicals. These accounts support the general outline of the story but vary in the details. So, depending on whether the source was Dutch, German, or French, on the evening of June 20, 1646 (or perhaps the afternoon or night before), the queen of Bohemia’s eighteen-year-old son, Philip, was out for a pleasant walk or some other form of after-dinner entertainment with his friends when he encountered the marquis d’Epinay, who was out for a similar purpose with some of his friends. There ensued an altercation during which the marquis, in an attempt to humiliate Philip, taunted him by claiming to have had “bonnes fortunes” with his mother, or with his sister Louisa, or with both (depending again on the source). Philip, as the man of the household, was beside himself and either challenged the marquis to a duel or rushed at him with his friends. He had to remain unsatisfied, however, as his tormentor, shielded by his entourage, managed to get away. But the next day, while out riding in his carriage, Philip saw him again on the street, and this time the marquis was alone. Ordering his carriage to stop, Philip leaped out, and rushed at d’Epinay. Again there is confusion among the accounts. Some report that the marquis was unarmed; some assert that he drew his sword and wounded his assailant first; but all agree that Philip pulled his hunting knife from its sheath, plunged it into the marquis d’Epinay’s breast, and then threw it aside and escaped in his carriage, leaving his victim dead in the street.
To the great displeasure of her children, the queen of Bohemia took the side of the murdered courtier over that of her son and refused all communication with Philip, who had fled across the border; nor in the aftermath of the crime would she allow him to return to her court. She was reported to have “bowed weeping from her high sphere, bewailing the misfortune of having such a son.” Philip appealed to Karl Ludwig, as the head of the family, to intercede on his behalf, which he did with alacrity. “Madam,” wrote Karl Ludwig to his mother from England on July 10, 1646, “give me leave to beg pardon in my brother Philip’s behalf, which I should have done sooner, if I could have thought that he had needed it. The consideration of his youth, of the affront he received, of the blemish had lain upon him all his life-time, if he had not resented it, but much more that of his blood, and of his nearness to you, and to him to whose ashes you have ever professed more love and value than to anything upon earth [Dad], cannot but be sufficient to efface any ill impressions which the unworthy representation of the fact by those who joy in the divisions of our family, may have made in your mind against him. But I hope I am deceived in what I hear of this… since I will still be confident that the good of your children, the honor of your family, and your own, will prevail with you against any other considerations,” he concluded severely. His eldest sister, utterly appalled, confronted her mother indignantly to her face, asserting, “that Philip needed no apology,” a verdict that provoked a quarrel of sufficient magnitude that twenty-seven-year-old Princess Elizabeth abruptly packed her belongings and went to live with her cousins in Berlin.
It seems likely from the violence of her children’s reactions that the queen of Bohemia was guilty, at the very least, of the appearance of indiscretion. Her affections had been so far engaged that it was certainly possible she had been intimate with d’Epinay and so was at least partially responsible for the tragedy. But what held for the mother does not seem to have been true for her daughter. For nowhere is there a mention that anyone in the family ever censured Louisa for her role in these events, and unquestionably Karl Ludwig, had he been informed of any impropriety on her part, would have seen it as his duty to write and reprimand her. Nor would Princess Elizabeth have focused her anger solely on her mother had Louisa been complicit in a love affair with the marquis. Princess Elizabeth had long since taken over the maternal duties of the household, and watched over her younger sisters with a sharp eye. Louise Hollandine seems to have been guilty of nothing more than being a beautiful twenty-four-year-old princess at the height of her powers to attract men, and she had indeed attracted the attention of a roué like the marquis d’Epinay. Of course it is impossible to know for sure, but certainly he would not have been the first man in history to have seduced the mother in an attempt to divert suspicion from his true designs on the daughter.
But it didn’t matter that Louisa was no more than an innocent bystander in this episode. Between her brother’s turning Catholic, her uncle’s dispossession, and now this new notoriety, she was caught up in the wreckage of her family’s reputation. Frederick William, who would go on to a brilliant career and become famous in the annals of history as the Great Elector, the founder of Prussia, and the great-grandfather of Frederick the Great, reluctantly decided that he needed a wife who brought money, the prospect of military aid, and an unblemished dignity to the table. Negotiations with the queen of Bohemia’s emissary were broken off, and the coveted suitor entered into an alternate nuptial alliance.
Later that same year, Frederick William and his entourage arrived in great state at The Hague. There, on December 7, 1646, he married his far less attractive cousin, the daughter of the prince of Orange. As a matter of course, the Winter Queen’s family was invited to the festivities, so Louisa had the singular privilege of witnessing her former suitor wed her cousin of lesser rank but better prospects and of rising with the rest of the company to wish the couple joy.
Marriage portrait of Frederick William, the Great Elector of Brandenburg, and the princess of Orange