16
A Desperate Plan
ALL THROUGH THE TUMULTUOUS PERIOD following the murder of d’Epinay, which encompassed the Peace of Westphalia and the assassination of Charles I, Louise Hollandine, alone among her sisters, exhibited no inclination to leave her mother’s court. The Hague, a center of both political and artistic activity, full of color and visitors, suited Louisa. Highly focused on developing her aesthetic, she had the freedom to spend hours sketching and painting while her mother, determined to do everything in her power to avenge her brother’s death and regain the throne of England for her nephew Charles II, entertained a steady stream of ambassadors, displaced Royalists, and other politicians. To those who frequented the Winter Queen’s court, this charming daughter, so vivacious in company and yet so serious about her work, must have represented an island of loveliness in the midst of a raging storm.
In 1649, Sophia, who had not yet left The Hague to go to live with Karl Ludwig in Heidelberg, and who was consequently in a position to observe these events firsthand, remembered one visitor in particular who had clearly fallen under her sister’s spell: the marquis of Montrose. “Being a good general, and a man of great ability, he [Montrose] believed everything to be attainable by his courage and talent, and was certain of re-establishing the young King [Charles II] if his Majesty would appoint him Viceroy of Scotland, and after so signal a service, bestow on him the hand of my sister, Princess Louisa,” she reported. “The commission was granted by the King,” she added.
Montrose! James Graham, the marquis of Montrose, in love with and engaged to marry Louisa! Americans have never heard of Montrose, but in Britain his name is still synonymous with the romantic ideal of true nobility. Born into a high-ranking Scottish family, gratifyingly handsome, a superb athlete and an even better general, Montrose was also a poet and statesman of no mean ability. His was a spirit that flamed bright and reached far, as these verses, penned when he was younger, attest: “He either fears his fate too much/Or his deserts are small/That dares not put it to the touch/To gain or lose it all.”
Although a Protestant, Montrose rejected the machinations of the Presbyterian ministers in Scotland against Charles I as self-serving and dangerous. “The perpetual cause of the controversies between the prince and his subjects, is the ambitious designs of rule in great men, veiled under the specious pretext of Religion and the subjects’ Liberties, seconded with the arguments and false positions of seditious preachers,” he argued as early as 1640. “Do ye not know, when the monarchical government [the king] is shaken, the great ones [the nobles] strive for the garland with your blood and your fortunes?” he demanded in a public document addressed to the citizens of Scotland. “Whereby you gain nothing… and the kingdom fall again into the hands of ONE, who of necessity must, and for reason of state will, tyrannize over you,” he warned grimly.*
But Montrose had done more than simply stand up to Argyll and his Presbyterian cronies (known as the Covenanters, for a document they had drafted that would force the king to accede to all of their religious demands) in fine speeches. He had sworn undying loyalty to Charles I and undertaken almost single-handedly to restore him to the throne by leading the Royalist cause in Scotland. His military exploits in this capacity were legendary. Having been declared an enemy of the state and excommunicated by Argyll, Montrose had been forced to sneak back into his own territory in the Highlands of central Scotland disguised as a servant. There, he had rendezvoused with a bedraggled troop of some 2,300 Irishmen recruited to the Royalist cause by another Scotsman. They had no artillery; three emaciated horses represented their cavalry; and those with muskets had only enough ammunition to fire a single round. As there weren’t enough clubs, pikes, and swords to outfit every soldier, nearly a third of the company would have to resort to throwing rocks when they went into battle.
But Montrose was daring, he had surprise on his side, and he knew the surrounding area well. Moreover, the Irish were career soldiers and they were desperate. He fell with his ragtag force on the city of Perth, and although outnumbered four to one, succeeded in taking the town as well as all of the enemy’s artillery, arms, ammunition, and supplies. From there he had launched a brilliant series of attacks against Argyll’s personal lands, prompting his enraged adversary to offer a reward of 20,000 Scottish pounds for Montrose’s head. By the winter of 1645, Argyll and his clan, the Campbells, had put together two armies of sufficient strength to trap Montrose’s small regiment of men between them and crush it. But in a truly astonishing feat of military genius, Montrose, unable to move either forward or backward, chose instead to go—up. For two days he led his men, without food, in the dead of January, over the Lochaber mountains to Loch Ness, struggling through the snow and ice, then doubled back behind Argyll’s men and overwhelmed the superior Campbell force in a surprise flanking assault. An onlooker memorialized the resulting struggle in verse:
Heard ye not! heard ye not! how that whirlwind, the Gael [Montrose];—
To Lochaber swept down from Loch Ness to Loch Eil—
And the Campbells, to meet them in battle-array,
Like the billow came on,—and were broke like its spray!
Long, long shall our war-song exult in that day…
Though the bones of my kindred, unhonor’d unurn’d
Mark the desolate path where the Campbells have burn’d,—
Be it so! From that foray they never return’d!
But after Rupert was defeated in England, and the king had given himself over to the Scottish army, Argyll insisted that Charles I order Montrose to lay down his arms and leave Scotland, and Charles had been forced to comply. Montrose, following the king’s command, had sailed to France to confer with Queen Henrietta Maria. Then came word of Charles I’s execution. Devastated, Montrose swore “before God, angels, and men, that I will dedicate the remainder of my life to avenging the death of the royal martyr, and re-establishing his son upon his father’s throne,” and wrote in a condolence letter to Charles II that “I never had passion on earth so great as that to do the King your father service.”
This, then, was the caliber of man who knelt at Louisa’s feet in the summer of 1649 and declared his love for her. True, at thirty-eight, he was a decade older than she was, and he was not of as high a rank as her former suitor the elector of Brandenburg. But as marital consolation prizes went, the marquis of Montrose was in a class by himself.
There was just one little thing he had to do before they could wed. He had to reprise his earlier exploits and win Scotland for Charles II.
THE VIOLENT OVERTHROW OF a legitimate authority, such as occurred at the time of the beheading of Charles I, is almost always accompanied by a struggle for power, as various factions compete for influence over the policies of any potential successor. This was especially true in the case of Charles II, who was only eighteen when his father died and obviously in need of experienced counsel to navigate the difficult path ahead. The problem was that even among his staunchest supporters, there was intense disagreement on how to proceed in the wake of the crisis. Almost immediately, two distinct camps emerged, one originating at his mother’s court in France, the other at his aunt’s in The Hague, each with its own plan for reclaiming the English throne. In the year that followed the king’s execution, the rivalry between these two circles grew so acute that it would not be an exaggeration to characterize the conflict as in some form a contest for the young heir’s soul.
Marquis of Montrose
At the heart of the argument was what to do about Scotland. Argyll was still in power and in March 1649 he sent an embassy to The Hague with an offer for Charles II. If the young king would promise to uphold the covenant and thereby place himself under the authority of the Scottish Presbyterian Church, Scotland would recognize him as king and fight to return him to the throne of England. As part of this deal, Charles would also be required to “abandon the Marquis of Montrose, as a man unworthy to come near his person, or into the society of any good men, because he is excommunicated,” explained an observer with firsthand information about the Scottish propositions.
One of the chief advisers to Queen Henrietta Maria was another Scotsman, the duke of Hamilton, long a rival to the marquis of Montrose, and he strongly counseled both Charles II and his mother to accept Argyll’s terms. But the opposing faction, led by the queen of Bohemia, argued just as strenuously against this alliance on the grounds that it had been Argyll and his Covenanters who had treacherously handed Charles I over to Cromwell for a bribe of £100,000 after the king had surrendered to the Scottish army and so were not to be trusted or dealt with on principle. The queen of Bohemia’s faction proposed instead to send Montrose and as large a force as he could muster to Scotland, as their intelligence indicated that Argyll was very unpopular and that the opposition clans could be rallied to rise up in favor of Charles II. Indeed, an envoy, arriving later by ship, “in the name of the whole kingdom, did intreat and press Montrose, earnestly, to go to Scotland… for his presence was able to do the business, and would undoubtedly bring twenty thousand together for the King’s service; all men being weary and impatient to live any longer under that bondage [Argyll’s], pressing down their estates, their persons, and their consciences.”
While he was with his aunt, Charles II agreed to reject Argyll’s terms and instead concurred with the plan to send Montrose to Scotland. But in June he left The Hague to go to Breda, about fifty miles south, to meet with his mother’s advisers. The queen of Bohemia, worried that, once out of her sight, the young king would vacillate, sent Montrose to Breda as well to ensure that her nephew stayed true to his former commitment. “My Lord,” she wrote to the marquis on June 24, “I have found that the Prince of Orange will again extremely press the King to grant the Commissioners’ desires, and so ruin him through your sides. I give you this warning of it, that you may be provided to hinder it… For God’s sake leave not the King as long as he is at Breda; for without question there is nothing that will be omitted to ruin you and your friends and so the King at last.” Then again on July 4, hearing that Queen Henrietta Maria’s counselors continued to induce Charles II to accept Argyll’s terms, she urged Montrose, “I do not desire you should quit Brussels while there is danger of change… I can add nothing but my wishes that you may persuade the King for his good.”*
The Winter Queen’s strategy worked: Montrose’s presence at Breda secured the king’s commitment to the Scottish expedition. On June 22, 1649, Charles II formally commanded Montrose to raise a force and invade Scotland in his name. Knowing his aunt’s doubts, to reassure both her and his Scottish champion, the young king gave his word not to betray their trust. “Montrose: Whereas the necessity of my affairs has obliged me to renew your former trusts and commissions concerning the Kingdom of Scotland; the more to encourage you unto my service, and render you confident of my resolutions, both touching myself and you, I have thought to signify to you, that… I will not do anything that shall be prejudicial to your commission,” Charles pledged in a private letter just before leaving for France to consult with his mother personally at her court in St. Germain. Yet even with this written guarantee, the queen of Bohemia, who shared the same disparaging view of her sister-in-law as did her eldest son Karl Ludwig, fretted. “I pray God keep the King in his constancy to you and his other true friends and servants,” she affirmed to Montrose in a letter of August 4. “Till he be gone from where he is [Queen Henrietta Maria’s court at St. Germain], I shall be in pain.”
Montrose, having received his orders, left the king’s side to begin the process of gathering an army of sufficient strength to achieve his objectives. He came back to Holland in August to confer with the Winter Queen at her hunting lodge at Rhenen (which also gave him the opportunity to visit Louisa and say good-bye), but by September he was in Hamburg and then Denmark and Sweden on a whirlwind tour of northern Europe to gain allies and purchase supplies. To encourage him and remind him of the steadfastness of his commitment, on January 12, 1650, Charles II sent Montrose the blue ribbon signifying the Order of the Garter, England’s highest chivalric honor, and reiterated his command “to proceed vigorously and effectively in your undertaking… We doubt not but all our loyal and well-affected subjects of Scotland will cordially and effectually join with you, and by that addition of strength either dispose those who are otherwise minded to make reasonable demands to us in a Treaty, or be able to force them to it by arms, in case of their obstinate refusal.”
But the queen of Bohemia had been right to worry; these commands were all for show. For while he was with his mother, she and the duke of Hamilton had convinced Charles to ally himself with Argyll and accept the Covenanters’ terms, particularly after Argyll had offered the king not only the support of the realm but a hefty bribe of £300,000 if he agreed to sign a treaty—“otherwise, to give him no money at all,” as an English observer familiar with these proceedings noted. Although the decision was made in January, it was judged best to let Montrose go on with his mission as a way to keep the pressure on Argyll and ensure that Charles II received the best possible terms (the “reasonable demands” alluded to in his letter awarding the ribbon of the Garter) during the negotiations.
It was an act of almost unfathomable perfidy. By April 12, 1650, when Montrose and his small force landed at the very northern tip of Scotland, the king’s acquiescence to the Covenanters’ terms was already widely known throughout the realm, and it was understood that Charles II had chosen Argyll over Montrose. Consequently, there would be no general uprising against the current government—no 20,000 Scottish troops would appear to rendezvous with the Royalist expedition. Instead, Argyll’s troops would be waiting for him. Only Montrose did not know that he and his men were walking into a trap.
Argyll
He might yet have succeeded—or at least held out—had the expedition gone as planned, but he had lost half his army, a thousand men, when their ships went down in a storm during the crossing. These he was forced to replace with green recruits from the island of Orkney, men who had never fought in battle before. Besides the Orkney conscripts, he had only some 500 experienced Danish and German troops, as well as fifty officers, nearly all of them friends and former comrades-in-arms, who made up his cavalry.
Still, Argyll took no chances. He sent no less than three armies this time to destroy his rival. On April 27, the Covenant divisions ambushed Montrose and his men at the pass at Caithness, on the northern coast. Over two hundred cavalry, sent from the first army, thundered down on their prey. The Orkney recruits panicked and fled and were cut down and massacred by soldiers and guns from the other two Covenant forces. Montrose’s remaining 550 men were easily surrounded, overwhelmed, and compelled to surrender. As it became clear they were trapped, Montrose’s men convinced him to try to get away to find reinforcements. Montrose, bleeding profusely from a number of wounds, escaped into the wilderness with a pair of his officers.
For two days they stumbled, lost, through the unfamiliar terrain. They separated to improve their chances of finding aid. His loyal companions were never heard from again and it is presumed that they perished of starvation. Montrose himself was reduced to gnawing his gloves to survive before happening upon an isolated farm, where he was given bread, milk, and a change of clothing to hide his identity. But he had a price on his head, and the next day he was spotted and given up by a laborer hoping to claim the reward (much to his disappointment, the informer ended up being paid in oatmeal). The day after he was taken, on May 1, 1650, Charles II officially signed the Treaty of Breda with the Scottish Covenanters. Four days later, Charles again wrote to Montrose, commanding him to lay down his arms as required by the treaty.
But by this time, Montrose, still in his peasant clothes, bleeding and ill from his untended wounds, was in the hands of one of Argyll’s generals. In a chilling re-creation of the last journey of Christ, in this condition he was paraded south through Scotland all the way to Edinburgh. “The 7th of May, 1650, at Lovat, he sat upon a little shelty horse, without a saddle, but a quilt of rags and straw, and pieces of ropes for stirups,” recorded an eyewitness. “His feet fastened under the horse’s belly with a tether; a bit halter for a bridle; a ragged old dark reddish plaid; a montrer cap, called magirky, on his head [to further humiliate him, a sort of Scottish crown of thorns]; a musketeer on each side… Thus conducted through the country, near Inverness… where he desired to alight, he called for a draught of water, being then in the first crisis of a high fever.” By May 18 he was outside Edinburgh, where he was transferred to an executioner’s cart in which a special chair had been installed; he was bound with rope to this mock throne, and another demeaning form of headgear, this time the hangman’s own red cap, placed on his head.
He was condemned to the gallows, after which his body was sentenced to be quartered, yet a further humiliation, as by right of birth and honor he ought to have been beheaded; hanging and quartering was for thieves and villains. On Tuesday, May 21, 1650, he was brought to the marketplace on High Street, where a scaffold had been erected. He was allowed a last speech—“I am sorry if this manner of my end be scandalous to any good Christian here. Doth it not often happen to the righteous according to the way of the unrighteous? Doth not sometimes a just man perish in his righteousness, and a wicked man prosper in his wickedness and malice?” he asked. Then, as a final indignity, his arms were tied behind his back and he struggled up the gibbet in this awkward position, “where, having freely pardoned the executioner, he desired him that, at the uplifting of his hands, he could tumble him over, which was accordingly done by the weeping hangman…”
They left his corpse to swing publicly for three hours, then cut up the body and sent his appendages to various cities as a reminder to the populace of the fruits of defiance. “I saw his arm upon the Justice-port of Aberdeen; another upon the South-port of Dundee; his head upon the Tolbooth of Edinburgh,” reported a visitor. “Also, I saw it taken down and Argyle’s head put up in the place of it,” he added thoughtfully after the inevitable fall of that strongman, although this was still over a decade in the future and therefore of dubious consolation to Montrose and those who loved him.
On May 25, four days after the execution, the parliamentary annals of Scotland recorded that its officials had received “a letter from the King’s Majesty [Charles II] to the Parliament, dated from Breda, 12th May 1650, showing, that he was heartily sorry that James Graham had invaded this kingdom, and how he had discharged him from doing the same; and earnestly desires the Estates of Parliament to do himself that justice as not to believe that he was accessory to the said invasion in the least degree.”
The gruesome details of Montrose’s martyrdom were broadcast all over Europe. The queen of Bohemia, Louisa, and Sophia were all at Breda with Charles II when they discovered what had happened. “Montrose meanwhile went to Scotland, and the [Scottish] Parliament, dreading his influence and valor, sent deputies to the King at Breda—where I also was with the Queen my mother—offering the crown of Scotland on condition that he gave up Montrose, swore to the Covenant, and acknowledged the Parliament as lawful. The King suffered himself to be persuaded by the enemies of Montrose to grant all this in order to secure the crown for himself,” Sophia reported in her memoirs. “I was deeply shocked; the more so on hearing that the gallant Montrose had been put to a cruel death, as may be read in the history of England.”
Unlike Sophia, Louisa did not leave a record of her feelings regarding the torture and murder of her fiancé. But it may be presumed from her later actions that she considered his treatment at the hands of the Presbyterians to be far from God.
THUS BEGAN A PERIOD of escalating repression, privation, and sorrow for Louise Hollandine.
She had barely six months to mourn the loss of her lover when her family was forced to endure yet more tragedy. Her youngest brother Philip’s experience with the Venetians having proved unsatisfactory, he had become involved in an uprising in France by some discontented noblemen seeking to unseat Cardinal Mazarin. On February 16, 1651, twenty-three-year-old Philip fell in battle during the siege of a fortress at Rethel, in northern France, about twenty-five miles north of Reims. His death was followed almost immediately by word that thirty-year-old Maurice had been lost at sea and presumed drowned in a hurricane somewhere near the coast of Anguilla on February 26.* This degree of affliction (which would be followed that September by news of her sister Henrietta Maria’s demise) was unprecedented even for a family as inured to adversity as Louisa’s, and it provoked an unusual visit: her brother Edward, the reprobate Catholic, arrived at The Hague that summer to condole personally with his mother and sister.
It was the first time he had been back in Holland since his conversion and marriage. Two years younger than Louisa, Edward had been barely out of his teens the last time she had seen him; now he was wealthy, self-assured, and married with children of his own. In the shock and grief of having lost two sons in succession, the queen of Bohemia was more than prepared to forgive Edward his transgressions, and he was welcomed back into the family.
His stay coincided with the arrival in Holland of an embassy of some 250 functionaries sent by Cromwell to try to promote an alliance between the English Puritans and the Dutch States as a means of depriving Charles II of support. Despite her hatred of the faction that had assassinated her brother, the queen of Bohemia was nonetheless petitioning these envoys for payment of the over £100,000 she argued was owed to her by virtue of lifetime bequests made by the English government before the civil war, which had been withheld by Parliament for nearly a decade. Necessity drove her to this extreme; her credit had long since been exhausted and it was a daily struggle to put food on the table. Despite this, she refused to toady and communicated with Cromwell’s ambassadors entirely through Dutch intermediaries, forbidding everyone in her household to come into direct contact with them.
But Edward had no compunctions about confronting the men he considered to be the enemy. Soon after his arrival, he and a few friends were out riding when they came upon a coach carrying senior members of Cromwell’s embassy. According to Dutch news reports of this event, they then blocked the carriage’s passage, forcing it to stop, and taunted its occupants, calling them “rascals and dogs.” As the coach was protected by an armed guard whose members substantially outnumbered Edward and his companions, the envoys were eventually allowed to pass without a struggle. But two days later Edward again accosted the parliamentary diplomats and their retinue, and this time he had over a dozen men carrying swords and daggers at his side. A clash ensued and several members of the English suite were wounded before Edward and his friends escaped. The envoys complained vociferously to their Dutch hosts. “It was England that received the affront done by the petty, paltry thing called Prince, whose very nursing was paid for out of the purse of England; and therefore we are confident those in power here among the Dutch cannot but consult so far with their own honors as to make a severe vindication, answerable to a crime of so high a nature,” fumed one of the functionaries. The matter was referred to the Dutch court of justice, which did nothing beyond issuing a stern warning to Edward to have “a better tongue another time.” Although it diminished her chances of recouping her income, his mother could not help but take great satisfaction at this insult to her brother’s executioners. “You will have heard of the high business between my son and their pretended ambassadors, whom Ned called by their true names,” she reported in a letter to Charles II soon after this incident. To further infuriate and demean the parliamentary delegation and demonstrate that he was not afraid of them, Edward prolonged his stay at his mother’s house by an extra week before continuing with his planned itinerary of calling on Karl Ludwig in Heidelberg before returning home to Paris.
Louisa, too, applauded her brother’s exploit and was happy to have him back as an accepted member of the family. Of all her male siblings, Edward was closest to her in age; she and he had been among the first occupants of the nursery at Leiden. They had been together all through childhood and into adolescence and this was a strong tie between them. And she could not have failed to note that alone at her mother’s court, Edward, the Catholic, was not intimidated by the increasingly ominous atmosphere surrounding The Hague and had the courage to say and do what they all felt.
THAT CROMWELL’S AMBASSADORS WERE able to influence the political and religious environment in Holland was due almost entirely to a change in leadership in the house of Orange. Frederick Henry, the old prince who had ever been the Winter Queen’s true friend and generous benefactor, had died in 1647 and been succeeded by his son William II, husband of Charles I’s daughter Mary. But William II’s tenure as prince of Orange had been extremely short as he, too, had died—of smallpox—in October 1650. Although his nineteen-year-old wife, Mary, delivered a son on November 4, a week after her husband’s death, the infant was obviously too young to rule. This left a vacancy in leadership, and into this vacancy stepped the dowager princess of Orange, the queen of Bohemia’s former lady-in-waiting Amelia de Solms, with the alacrity and determination of a bill collector holding a winning lottery ticket.
She had first to dispense with any possible competition from Mary, who, as the widowed mother of the heir to the house of Orange, was the natural claimant to her son’s regency. The battle between these two began within weeks of William II’s death with a bitter dispute over the naming of the infant; Mary wanted to call her son Charles, after his martyred grandfather, while Amelia insisted on William, after her beloved son. The struggle continued right up until January 5, 1651, the day of the baptism. The hundreds of assembled guests had to wait two hours at the church while Mary, under siege in the royal apartments, did her best to hold her ground against her relentless mother-in-law. In the end she was forced to give in, and her son was christened William III at a ceremony notable for his mother’s refusing to attend.
But Amelia did not content herself with symbolic victories. She went after Mary’s legal rights as well. She took the matter to court and had herself, along with her son-in-law Frederick William, the elector of Brandenburg, named as co-guardians with her daughter-in-law of little William III. As the elector lived in Berlin, this left Amelia in charge of her grandson’s education, estates, and income. Small wonder that Mary spent the preponderance of her time in Holland in the company of her sympathetic aunt the queen of Bohemia and her cousin Louisa, and got away from The Hague altogether whenever she could.
Louisa was no politician—unlike her mother, she left no letters commenting on the feud between the princess of Orange and her mother-in-law. But her support of Mary may be discerned in a scene she painted during this period depicting the finding of Erichthonius. According to Greek mythology, Erichthonius, who would grow up to rule Athens, was the adopted son of the goddess Athena. Soon after his birth, to keep him safe, Athena hid Erichthonius in a box that she then bestowed upon the three daughters of the king of Athens, accompanied by strict instructions never to lift the lid and peek inside. Of course, curiosity overwhelmed the sisters, and they betrayed their commission and opened the box. There, they found a baby who was half serpent, a discovery that caused them to go mad. Rubens had famously painted this scene in 1632; Louise Hollandine no doubt was influenced by his work as she was by that of her mentor, Gerrit van Honthorst, who often composed allegorical portraits (like The Triumph of the Winter Queen) in which he depicted those who sat for him in classical costumes and attitudes.
But unlike the Rubens portrayal, in Louisa’s hands, the scene has strong political overtones and could easily be interpreted as a metaphor for her cousin’s predicament. The baby coming out of the box is Mary’s son, William III; the female figure in the foreground, in the act of being pushed away by one of the other sisters, is Mary herself.* Although the women in the background look at the baby, the baby reaches only for Mary his mother, while she in turn gazes out at the viewer with quiet, thoughtful dignity. The painting, one of Louisa’s finest, is an example of how far she had progressed. The child has no father; he is compromised by a serpent; the woman at the forefront is beautiful and vulnerable. Knowing the circumstances under which it was painted, it is likely that this was intended as a political statement highlighting Mary’s victimization.
Unfortunately, all of these factors—their public support of Mary and the Royalist cause, Edward’s sneers and hostility toward the Puritan ambassadors, and the death of their longtime protector the prince of Orange—made Louisa and her mother easy targets for Cromwell and his agents. The simplest way to attack them was financially, and this the English Parliament did very effectively by charging the wealthy Lord Craven (who had essentially been supporting the queen of Bohemia for years) with treason, which conveniently allowed them to strip him of his estates and income. By November 3, 1653, the Winter Queen’s situation was sufficiently dire for her to write that it was “as no parable but the certain truth, the next week I shall have no food to eat, having no money nor credit for any; and this week, if there be none found, I shall neither have meat, nor bread, nor candles.”
Karl Ludwig was appealed to but he was in no position to underwrite a separate residence for his mother and rebuild Heidelberg at the same time. Moreover, he was already supporting his sister Sophia and was father to a son and daughter with another child on the way. His solution was to invite his mother to come live with him in Germany. This proposal the queen of Bohemia, in her midfifties and set in her ways, refused even to consider. She would not leave, she harrumphed to Lord Craven, “although she supposed he [Karl Ludwig] meant to starve her out of the Hague, as he would a blockaded fortress.”
But it was becoming increasingly clear to Louisa that the situation was untenable, and that as a thirty-one-year-old spinster whose last good chance for marriage had been massacred on the shores of Scotland, she was a financial burden on those around her. There were women who made a living painting in the seventeenth century, but they were not of royal blood like Louise Hollandine; this expedient was forbidden her by her rank. Already Princess Elizabeth, anticipating that something must be done to secure her middle sister’s future, had taken it upon herself to write to a cousin who ran a Protestant women’s abbey in Herford, Germany, some two hundred miles east of The Hague, asking if there was space for Louisa, and she urged her sister to contact the abbess directly and accept this vocation. “I have not before taken the liberty of troubling your Grace [the abbess] with my worthless writing,” Louisa was forced to respond, “but now as I understand from my sister in Berlin that you have the kindness to wish me to have a place in your institution, for which I am very highly obliged to you… I beg you would further do me the kindness to let me know how I should pay over the three hundred rix thalers which one must give to purchase a position in the institution.”
But the abbess was in no hurry to comply with her cousin’s request. The negotiations dragged on for a year, then two, despite Princess Elizabeth’s best efforts. “My sister could wait upon you for a day or for four days, and bring letters of recommendation,” she petitioned the abbess again in 1655, “but if it is inconvenient or your Grace should have other views so that you do not wish it, write to me openly, for you know well that she [Louisa] cannot act otherwise than candidly and does not like others to act differently to her,” she warned.
Princess Elizabeth no doubt meant well, as she had when she had helped to arrange the ill-fated Transylvanian marriage for Henrietta Maria. But although it is clear from these lines that she understood Louise Hollandine’s character, she could not know the effect that the abusive political and religious climate at The Hague would have on her sister’s conscience. For after a brief war over commercial rights, Cromwell had managed to persuade the Dutch that it was in the best interest of the two Protestant nations to ally, and a treaty was signed at Westminster. As a result, the Puritan movement in Holland was empowered and over the next few years, public conformity in religious practice—the necessity, for example, of proving loyalty by adhering to certain rites at Christmas—became a source of not-so-subtle intimidation. Even the queen of Bohemia, impoverished and harassed, gave up and accepted Karl Ludwig’s invitation to Heidelberg, but when she and her daughter tried to leave The Hague, they were prevented by their many creditors.
And it was at this point that Louisa came to a decision that must have been building up inside of her for years. Turning secretly to her brother Edward and a mutual friend, the princess of Hohenzollern, Louise Hollandine began laying the foundation for a new life. It must have taken months to organize, but by the winter of 1657 she had gathered her nerve, and early on the morning of December 19, at the age of thirty-five, she crept quietly out of the house to the harbor, where a boat was waiting. Her mother rose several hours later and when she remarked on her daughter’s absence was handed the following letter, which had been left behind for her: “Madam,” Louisa had written, “the respect which I have for your Majesty is too great to permit me to do anything purposely to displease you; and God knows that no impulse, except that of His spirit, could ever have induced me to undertake any action, however reasonable, without having first communicated it to you; but in this contingency, the affair being… one in which I should doubtless have found your Majesty opposed to the guidings of Divine Providence in my behalf, I could not act otherwise… I must tell you, then, madam, that the Christmas festivals being so near, I have been obliged to withdraw from your Majesty, from fear of being desired to receive the [Protestant] sacrament against my conscience, since at length it has pleased God to discover to me the surest way to salvation, and to give me to know that the Catholic religion is the only way… I trust you will pardon me for a course which… I have only resolved to adopt from the pure motive of assuring the repose of my soul… that I have no other aim than that of securing a tranquil retreat, where I may have full leisure for the service of God, and to testify to you in all things that I am, and wish to remain all my life, Your Majesty’s most humble and most obedient servant, Louisa.”
Louise Hollandine was converting to Catholicism.
Her mother was naturally quite upset by this turn of events and searched her daughter’s room, where she found two letters from the princess of Hohenzollern, herself a Catholic, containing helpful suggestions for how Louisa might make her escape. One plot had the runaway pretending that she wanted to visit Antwerp to see her brother Edward, who had taken it on himself to secure the necessary travel documents; the other was to steal away silently, leaving a letter explaining her motives. As Louisa had evidently decided on the second approach, the princess of Hohenzollern had arranged to bring the fugitive by barge to her own home in Bergen op Zoom, some fifty-five miles to the south. From there it was arranged that she would officially convert and then retire to a convent in Antwerp.
The queen of Bohemia’s first step was to write an angry letter to the princess of Hohenzollern, accusing her of betraying her trust. To this, both the princess and Louisa replied that the desire to convert had been entirely Louisa’s choice and that the princess had collaborated only after Louisa had confided this decision to her friend. But her mother, believing that her daughter could yet be brought back, applied to the governing Dutch States for satisfaction. They, in turn, stripped the princess of Hohenzollern of some of her privileges including her right to name the magistrates in her hometown of Bergen op Zoom, unless she could prove her innocence in the affair.
It was at this point that the story turned ugly. The princess of Hohenzollern, stung, wrote back sharply to the queen of Bohemia justifying her conduct by insinuating that Louisa had fled for reasons “highly prejudicial to her honor” (i.e., she was pregnant). The Winter Queen, displaying some truly questionable maternal judgment, showed the States this letter and demanded that the princess of Hohenzollern be censured for lying about Louisa’s moral conduct. Of course, after that the newspapers got wind of it, the gossip became propaganda for the Parliamentary party, and that was the end of Louise Hollandine’s reputation. She was gleefully painted as a fallen woman.
To console her aunt, Mary, princess of Orange, together with her brother, Charles II, offered to act as intermediaries. “The King and my niece… were at Antwerp, and went to see Louisa in the monastery,” the queen of Bohemia reported to Rupert on March 4, 1658. “The king and my niece did chide Louisa for her change of religion, and leaving me so unhandsomely; she answered that she was very well satisfied with her change, but very sorry that she had displeased me… The bishop of Antwerp has written a letter to your brother Edward, where he clears Louise of that base calumny [the supposed pregnancy]; yet Ned is so willful as he excuses the Princess of Zollern,” she fumed.*
Evidently it was perceived after this visit that Antwerp was rather too close to Protestant territory to ensure that the new convert would be safe from further entreaties or possibly even extradition, for within a month Edward had arranged for Louisa to come to France. “Your sister Louisa is arrived at Chaillot, her brother [Edward] went and fetched her from Rouen; the queen went to see her the next day; the King of France went thither the week after,” the Winter Queen complained to Rupert. “They are very civil to her. The queen wrote to me that she will have a care of her as of her own daughter, and begs her pardon; I have excused it as handsomely as I could, and entreated her not to take it ill, but only to think what she would do if she had had the same misfortune,” she added bitterly.
On April 20, 1659, Louise Hollandine was officially accepted into the Catholic Church by the papal nuncio in Paris and was granted an income by the French Crown. A year later she took her vows as a nun and disappeared into the abbey of Maubuisson, about twenty miles northwest of Paris, one of the oldest and most prestigious convents in France.