The Protestant Princess
‘Her daughter-in-law . . . will spend all his estate upon her family and party; she and they have undone her son.’
‘A nest of malignant vipers. The Princess Royal’s and Queen of Bohemia’s court nourishes those creatures.’
The first shot of the Civil Wars had not been fired when the Princess Royal left England with her mother in March 1642 to join her husband, Prince William of Orange, in The Hague. She was still a child, bewildered, stubborn and proud. There was nothing endearing about the ten-year-old Mary and, even if there had been, it is unlikely that her mother-in-law would have acknowledged it, so determined was Princess Amalia not to appear inferior in any way to the English royal family. The union between Orange and Stuart, one of the most important dynastic matches in mid-seventeenth-century Europe, was to play a significant part in shaping the future of the continent but few recognized this at the time, least of all the child bride. In the last century, the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl viewed the Stuart influence on Dutch affairs as baleful and it is true that few of his compatriots have had much positive to say about the Princess Royal. Their reservations are understandable and have a good deal to do with the princess’s personality as well as her unashamed disdain for her new country. She was not an easy girl to like and the disaster which befell her family put a great strain on an acclimatization that was never going to be easy. This was unfortunate because, as has recently been shown, there was a thread of support for royalism and concern for the plight of the Stuarts among Dutch poets and dramatists.1 Mary failed to use this effectively. Unlike her elder brother, Charles II, she was not adaptable. But she had good qualities that have been overlooked, the most important of which were an unswerving loyalty to the Stuart cause and devotion to her son.
Mary grew to adulthood without the guidance of her parents but she was not friendless as she matured. The relationship with her mother was always a distant one, made more difficult over the years by Mary’s strict adherence to the Protestantism of her father. In the United Provinces of the Netherlands she found a more comfortable maternal figure in Elizabeth of Bohemia, a warmhearted and supportive aunt who had brought up a large family in exile and understood the difficulties of living in a strange land. The welfare of ‘my deare neece’, as Elizabeth, using the creative spelling of the time, often referred to Mary in her letters, was close to the heart of Charles I’s elder sister. Mary was more fortunate than she realized in having her aunt and a flock of cousins in the same country. They had many interests in common and were able to offer the emotional support that the highly strung Mary needed. If Elizabeth could not change Mary’s tendency to depression or moderate her questionable political judgement in dealing with Dutch affairs, she was always a foil to the hypercritical Amalia, a malignant viper if ever there was one.
The members of the princess’s English entourage also provided a sense of connection with the country she had left behind, though it is debatable whether, in the sense of allowing Mary to come to terms with her adopted country, this was necessarily a good thing. The princess was, in fact, the first royalist exile of the Civil Wars and the sense of dislocation never really left her. However much she might feel comforted by the sermons of her Anglican chaplain, Thomas Browne, who replaced John Durie in the mid-1640s, or flattered by the advice and attentions of Katherine Stanhope and Katherine’s Dutch husband, the baron van Heenvliet, the lively court of The Hague and her several beautiful country houses could never compensate for the sorrow she felt at leaving England.
Had she been a few years older, and more open-minded, Mary might have been able to appreciate the more positive aspects of life in the small northern European state that had fought its way, through a prolonged period of rebellion in the previous century, to independence from the Spanish Habsburgs that was finally recognized in 1609. So it was a young nation, made up of seven different provinces, established uneasily on the basis of a truce lasting twelve years which the Spanish, manipulating religious and political tensions, sought to undermine.2 Mary’s father-in-law, Frederick Henry, spent much of his time involved in a series of military confrontations with the Spanish that, paradoxically, strengthened his own position as stadtholder of Holland, the most powerful of the seven provinces, while threatening to undermine the stability of the new republic as a whole.3 Trade was key to the survival and prosperity of the United Provinces and the constant interruptions of what seemed like a war without end, coupled with the different priorities of the individual provinces, prolonged the uncertainty. War was expensive and while the majority of politicians in the representative bodies, known as ‘states’, in the individual provinces believed that a negotiated peace was the best way to ensure long-term security, it took until 1648 for the Treaty of Münster to bring about a lasting peace. Even then Zeeland refused to sign but the treaty went ahead.
Against this backdrop of uncertainty it is not surprising that the Stuarts, whose dynasty in Scotland went back to the late fourteenth century, entertained doubts about the viability of the Dutch republic and that Henrietta Maria viewed it primarily as a source of cash to bolster her husband’s dispute with his own rebels. Charles I and his wife had married their eldest daughter into a republic, distasteful in itself, and one that might not last. Their need for financial support, and the fact that the Calvinism of the United Provinces would sit well with Puritans in England, made Mary something of a sacrificial victim. Unfortunately, this is how she always saw herself. But republicanism, at least at the court of Frederick Henry and his wife, did not necessarily mean deprivation.
Eager to take his place among European royalty, protocol and hierarchy were strictly observed at court in a manner which would surely have pleased Charles I. Frederick Henry and his wife were also keen patrons of the arts, including drama, painting and sculpture, collectors of books and, in Princess Amalia’s case, determined to show that their gardens could match those of other European royal houses. Their interests may have been designed to enhance their own standing, both in the republic and beyond, but they were an indication of the future cultural development of the United Provinces as a whole. Mary could not have known that the Dutch were about to enter into a period of great cultural achievement, a flowering of art that would exceed anything that her father, a collector rather than a connoisseur, had achieved in England. It is worth remembering that, in the year the reluctant little bride arrived at The Hague, Rembrandt painted one of the greatest of his works, The Night Watch.4 Their talent for trade, their inventiveness, their formidable navy and their capacity for hard work would make the Dutch a world power, to the considerable consternation of the English and the French, after the mid-seventeenth century.
This was not yet apparent when Frederick Henry died in 1647, leaving his twenty-one-year-old son, Mary’s husband, as head of the House of Orange. Unhappily for William, he was presented with problems that his father never had to face. The most pressing of these was how to exert his authority at a time of peace, when the ill-defined role of stadtholder was not so obviously needed and when his own desire to help his wife’s family was likely to be increasingly at odds with the preoccupations of Dutch politicians who expected to exercise more power in the republic. It would have taken a much more experienced leader than the hot-headed, belligerent William to solve this conundrum and his solution was to bring the republic to the brink of civil war.
Yet even before this crisis, Mary did not find much solace in the company of her husband. The fairy-tale boy and girl romance of their marriage in 1641 did not achieve its promise of happiness. This was not because Princess Amalia came between them. Young William did not get on with his mother either, refusing to take her advice in foreign affairs and generally resenting her attempts at interference. Mary and her husband seem simply to have grown apart, or, perhaps, never to have grown together at all. Aside from differences in temperament and age, the fact that Mary was surrounded by an overwhelmingly English household made it difficult for her to acclimatize. She seems never to have bothered to learn more than a few words of Dutch or to try to understand the complex politics of the United Provinces. She spoke in French at official occasions and this was the language she had in common with Prince William. Then there was the delicate question of when the young couple should start to live together as man and wife. Lady Stanhope was under strict instructions from Mary’s father that the marriage must not be consummated before the princess reached the age of fourteen. Even then, she would have been a year younger than her own mother when Henrietta Maria married Charles I. A nurse was stationed in Mary’s bedroom with the express purpose of guarding the princess’s virginity and there was alarm, as well as some very sharp reproaches, when it was discovered at the beginning of 1644 that William had managed to gain access to Mary’s chamber ‘where he lay with her highness all night’. A furious Katherine Stanhope issued sharp reprimands to the servants who had connived to allow this clandestine visit but could do little more when it was made clear that William had discussed his intentions with both his parents and had their consent. Although Mary had not yet reached the age of puberty, Lady Stanhope watched anxiously for signs of pregnancy, hoping to be able to report these to Henrietta Maria. Amalia van Solms also looked to her daughter-in-law to safeguard the family’s position and her tardiness in this respect only added to the friction between the two women.
The lack of a child was perfectly explicable. Mary did not start menstruating until early 1647 and when she did it was not long until she conceived. A miscarriage in October of that year ended her first pregnancy sorrowfully in what was a difficult year for the House of Orange. Not until the beginning of 1650, so far as is known, did Mary become pregnant again. By that time her husband was deeply enmeshed with helping the Stuarts, more out of his own volition that any personal obligation he seems to have felt for Mary. Unfortunately for Charles II, there was a limit to the financial and practical aid he could expect from William, however well intentioned the young Dutch stadtholder might have been. For the Orange family, their link with the Stuarts was a double-edged sword: it had definitely enhanced their authority, both in the Netherlands and beyond, but it also brought them into conflict with the local authorities, especially in the powerful province of Holland, at a time when the country’s leading politicians were determined to uphold the ideals of republicanism for which they had struggled so long against Spanish domination. William II of Orange, Mary’s husband, saw himself as the leading Dutch noble, a claim that his cousin, William Frederick, count of Nassau-Dietz and stadtholder of Friesland, might have disputed but chose, for the time being, not to challenge. William II, thanks to his father’s military successes and political acumen, had influence and access. What he did not have was sovereign power. A Dutch official wrote a letter explaining this to the French ambassador in the 1630s:
The Prince of Orange is in a position different from the King [of France], who has only to express his wishes. Here he [the prince] needs money to put his ideas into effect, and this goes slowly; it can be obtained only from the provinces . . . by a persuasive demonstration of some major advantage . . . in the midst of such a diversity of interests and opinions, His Highness [the prince] must come to a decision and then, gradually clearing the way, bring matters to where they should be. This cannot be done without much controversy and loss of time.5
So here was the nub for a young, restless stadtholder like William II. The political system of the United Provinces of the Netherlands required patience and subtlety and a wiser head than he possessed to make it work to his advantage. Such a system was anathema to the Stuart ideals of kingship and authority so it is small wonder that Princess Mary was unsympathetic to it. Absorbed in a personal vendetta against the Spanish, whom he loathed, William II made overtures to the French (who were in no better a position to help him than they were the Stuarts) and was determined to get the monies he needed to support a war from the Dutch states-general. In the two years after the death of his father, he pushed this agenda tirelessly. He might have got his way, despite considerable misgivings about the advisability of abandoning the republic’s policy of peace, were it not for the obduracy of the States of Holland, the province’s legislature. By the autumn of 1649, William had decided to use the army to break Holland’s resistance and to arrest the men whom he considered to be his main opponents.
Despite his nature, the young stadtholder was compelled to bide his time. This was partly because he hoped to act in concert with his cousin, William Frederick, but it was also because he needed time to sway public opinion in his favour. There was strong support at popular level, at least in parts of the United Provinces, for the House of Orange and there was a strain of support for royalism among Dutch poets and dramatists that has been largely overlooked in the emphasis on Dutch republicanism. William intended to milk such sentiments as much as he could. His use of pamphlet propaganda brought to mind the importance of this tool in the English Civil Wars. But Prince William was playing a dangerous game. Dismayed by his uncompromising attitude and sensing an opportunity to sow discord, the Spanish government considered the option of offering its support to the recalcitrant Hollanders. There appeared to be a similar threat to the Orangists in July 1650, when a forged document purporting to demonstrate a secret pact between the English parliament and Holland was circulated widely. Its offer of a fleet and 10,000 men to overthrow the stadtholder caused considerable alarm. So it was that in the summer of 1650 William’s entire attention was focussed on a daring attempt to impose his political will on the republic. His wife’s pregnancy, on which the future of his family depended, was not in the forefront of his mind as he laid his plans for what would have amounted to a coup d’état against the Hollanders. He arrested six of his leading opponents but had no intention of stopping there. An attempt to use military force to bring about Holland’s submission failed dramatically on 30 July 1650, when a substantial army of 12,000 men under William Frederick of Friesland managed to get lost in foggy weather and were spotted by a postal courier who was able to alert the Amsterdam city authorities, who shut their gates just in time.
It was evident that some compromise was needed and one was duly achieved the following month, with the removal of some deputies implacably hostile to William and the stadtholder himself, who had lost more face than he might have liked to admit, agreeing to back down on the requirement for an immediate and all-out military campaign against Spain. He had not, however, given up and continued his discussions with the French while hoping to win round his opponents in Amsterdam in due course. Yet his actions caused widespread unease, even among pro-Orangists in other provinces, and his own mother disapproved of the attempts at rapprochement with France, believing neutrality to be a better option. How this uncomfortable stalemate might have eventually resolved itself is unclear but William did not live to realize his dream of transforming the fortunes of his family and establishing it as the undisputed authority in the Netherlands.
He had been a supportive brother-in-law to Charles II and the duke of York, sheltering them, expending money well beyond his means and encouraging their aims. In this, he was certainly at one with his wife but their personal relationship remained distant. In the last months of her pregnancy, he saw little of her, preferring to hunt with his close friends. William had many enemies and the stories of his drinking and womanizing may be overstated but the rosy picture of his marriage to Mary presented by Victorian writers is some way from the truth. Married so young and with a mother so resentful of his wife, their relationship stood little chance of success from the outset. Had he lived to see his child born perhaps they would have grown closer, but it was not to be. William returned to The Hague from his hunting trip at the end of October 1650 feeling unwell and feverish. Soon it was apparent that he had contracted smallpox and his wife, heavily pregnant and horrified by the danger to her husband’s life, was kept well away from him. He died on 6 November, plunging the Netherlands into political uncertainty and Mary into grief and despair. ‘My poor neece,’ wrote Elizabeth of Bohemia to her son Charles Louis, ‘is the most afflicted creature that ever I saw and is changed as she is nothing but skin and bone.’6 But she went on to say that the pregnancy itself seemed to be proceeding normally and, as the mother of thirteen children herself, noted shrewdly that, although the baby was due in fifteen days, she believed that the birth was imminent.
In an age given to hyperbole and when it was only considered right and proper to heighten the sense of lamentation, the oration preached at William’s funeral strikes us today as massively overstated but it did contain some truths about Mary’s vulnerability, characterizing it as a further blow to the Stuart cause:
But all words fail us when we come to cast our eyes on the desolate young princess; young a widow, and with child, and sooner a widow than a mother! How many swords have pierced her soul! How many calamities have beaten upon her, like so many crowding waves, one upon the back of another! What deeps has she seen rolling over her and ready to swallow her! She has nothing to direct her eyes to but heaven, for she can never so little cast her eyes down to the earth, but she finds herself obliged to groan for horror and horror of heart; a mother in banishment; a brother in trouble; a father upon the scaffold, and to fill the measure brimful, a husband in a coffin.7
Yet all was not quite lost. The young widow had one very important duty to perform before she could begin to adapt to this major change in her life. On 14 November 1650 she gave birth to a healthy son. It was her nineteenth birthday.
*
Her brother the king, then still in Scotland, wrote anxiously to Katherine Stanhope:
I have been so long and am so well acquainted with you to believe you need to be entreated to take care of my sister, especially at this time when she hath so much need. Yet because there are not many things in my power by which I may make the affection and kindness I have for her appear, and this may be one, I cannot choose but tell you I shall put the service you do her upon my account . . . How my sister does for her health, and with what discretion bears her misfortune; whether my nephew be lusty and strong, whom he is like, and a hundred such questions I desire the answer of under your hand, because a less evidence will not satisfy the curiosity I have for those I am so much concerned in. What care the States take for the young General, and how kind and careful the Princess of Orange is of whom, and what provision is made for my sister’s present support I hope I shall hear from your husband.’8
The king’s concerns were understandable. If Princess Mary had produced a daughter, it is probably fair to say that both she and the child would have become little more than footnotes to history. But the birth of a prince gave the Orangists hope and was also good news for the Stuarts, though the prospects of such a child ever occupying the English throne must have seemed remote. His European credentials, with ancestors who came from the Netherlands and Germany as well as France and Britain, were strong. His situation at birth, however, was much less certain. A royalist then resident at The Hague gave an overview of events which highlighted a number of the uncertainties faced by the infant prince:
I presume you have before this heard . . . of the death of the prince of Orange, who died about five weeks since of the smallpox . . . About ten days after his death the young prince was born, who is lively and well, but not yet christened, nor the father buried. The Princess Royal is as well as you might imagine a lady in her condition, more cast down with grief and weakness than the joy of a son could revive, but now, with God’s blessing, in a clear likelihood of strength. The late prince in his will settled 15,000 sterling per annum for a dowry to the Princess Royal . . . I hear of no guardian to the young prince; but the infant and the estate is yet wholly in the government of the Princess Royal and her officers, but how long it will so continue, or how soon it will alter, those much wiser than I can little imagine. The States General seem to be kind and civil to the prince and the princess but have named no new general of their armies . . . and are most likely to reserve their power in their own hands.’9
The States-General were never going to name a baby as head of the Dutch army and with the ambitious William Frederick of Friesland harbouring ambitions in that direction, it was hardly surprising that a decision was postponed.
It might have been hoped that the arrival of a male heir would go some way to healing the rift between Princess Mary and Amalia van Solms. In reality, things only got worse. There was an immediate disagreement about the baby’s names, with Mary wanting to call her son Charles, after her father and brother, and Amalia favouring William, a more traditional Dutch name as well as the one of her late son, the father that William III of Orange would never know. Mary gave in and the child was christened William Frederick Henry. The manner of his christening, at which an ostentatious display of his claim to royalty was made, did not sit well with Dutch republicans, who disliked the fact that the prince was dressed in ermine. Mercurius Politicus, the English pro-Commonwealth newspaper, gave a detailed report of the ceremony, saying that an entourage of at least thirty people had accompanied the child and coaches decked out in mourning, drawn by six horses, carried representatives of the States-General, the states of Holland, Utrecht and Zeeland, as well as the towns of Delft, Leiden and Amsterdam. The baby’s godmothers were Princess Amalia and Elizabeth of Bohemia. Given their massive dislike of one another, their joint participation in this ceremony must have added a frisson to the cold January air.
The difficult question of who would be nominated as guardian of the child remained. Within days of his birth, the baron van Heenvliet was writing to Henrietta Maria in Paris to warn her that Princess Amalia was pushing hard for the position of ‘tutrice’ to her grandson but that this was being opposed by the state of Holland.10 Such an outcome would have been equally unacceptable to Mary, though her age and lack of knowledge of the Dutch political and constitutional set-up weakened her influence. Her mother-in-law had acquired a considerable understanding of Dutch politics over the years, realizing that it would strengthen her position when her husband died. Even supposing that Mary had possessed the desire or intelligence to follow such a course herself, it was, in reality, unlikely that, at the age of just nineteen, she would have been considered as sole guardian for her son. Amalia’s attitude to the prospect of Mary being left to direct little William’s affairs alone is made clear in the quotation at the head of this chapter, in which Amalia voiced fears that Mary would squander her grandson’s inheritance in support of the Stuart cause. Nor did either woman make the slightest attempt to keep their unseemly quarrels out of the public eye. A correspondent writing to William Frederick, not himself a disinterested observer of events, reported that the disagreement between the princesses and their households was becoming daily more bitter, with intemperate language being used on both sides.11 The dispute over guardianship dragged on for months until, in August 1651, the supreme court settled the matter by appointing three guardians: Mary, who would have one vote, and Princess Amalia and the elector of Brandenburg (the dowager princess’s son-in-law, husband of her daughter, Louise Henriette), who would share the other vote. The baby prince’s estates were to be administered by the estates council of Nassau. This awkward-sounding compromise was probably the best that Mary could have hoped for, given her age, her fraught relationship with her mother-in-law and the general reservations of a republican administration towards the Stuart royal family.
Although she might not have sensed the opportunity at the time, Mary’s widowhood and the arrangements for her son’s upbringing freed her to concentrate more on her displaced family. She was resolved to help them whenever she could. Her court and courtiers were always at their disposal for refuge and companionship and though she was frequently short of money herself and often reduced to borrowing, she provided such financial aid as was available to her. This was much appreciated but her increasing reliance on Katherine Stanhope and the baron van Heenvliet was viewed anxiously by Edward Hyde and Edward Nicholas, who believed they had good reason not to trust the ascendancy of this redoubtable Anglo–Dutch pair. Hyde went to Paris, summoned by Charles II, after the defeat at Worcester. His wife and daughters he left in the care of the Princess Royal at The Hague. Anne Hyde became one of Mary’s favourite ladies-in-waiting, her future apparently assured as a courtier. Nicholas, still intensely disliked by Henrietta Maria, stayed on, furrowed by increasing poverty, and so fearful that his estates in England would be confiscated that he seriously considered returning.12 His problems were far from unique and, indeed, the Heenvliets themselves had cause for concern which may go a long way to explaining the accusation made against them that their attitude towards the English republic was suspiciously equivocal.
Katherine Stanhope believed that she had taken all the necessary steps to safeguard her son Philip’s English inheritance when she married Heenvliet but the execution of Charles I and the advent of a republican regime jeopardized her careful calculations. The couple might have made themselves indispensable to Princess Mary, who is said to have preferred their country home to the royal palace of the Binnenhof in The Hague, but they could not afford to overlook the threat to their combined family’s prosperity in England. One has to admire the perspicacity of this husband and wife team, who deserve to be better known. They took great care to safeguard the interests of their children. Katherine had left the eldest daughter of her first marriage in England, in the care of her grandmother. Philip, the heir to the Chesterfield title, accompanied his mother to the Netherlands on her marriage to the baron van Heenvliet, as did her younger daughter, Catherine. They were educated and brought up in the Netherlands, Catherine serving as a maid of honour to Princess Mary. Heenvliet himself had three daughters from his first marriage and the middle girl, Walburg, married Thomas Howard, the Princess Royal’s master of the horse. So, on both sides, the couple ensured as bright a future as they could for their offspring while producing two more of their own, a boy, born in 1643 and given the impressive names of Charles Henry, to whom Frederick Henry of Orange and Princess Mary stood as godparents, and a girl, Amelie, born three years later, when Katherine Stanhope was in her late thirties. After the execution of Charles I, the Heenvliets lost no time in trying to ensure the position of the Wotton and Chesterfield estates in England and their own son’s prospects there. In the summer of 1649, Charles II created the three-year-old Charles Henry Kerkhoven (Heenvliet’s family name) Baron Wotton of Marley, as well as renewing the warrant which stated that the Crown had no interest in Katherine Stanhope’s English property.
This was all well and good but the couple were acutely aware that, unless Charles II could regain his throne (which seemed improbable after Worcester), such assurances were scarcely worth the paper they were written on. They needed to be sure that the republican authorities in England would not move against them. At the end of 1651, things were not looking good and it was clear that action was required, even if the course they needed to take did not sit well with the royalist establishment. Katherine wrote to Henrietta Maria providing further details to amplify the explanation Heenvliet had already given Henry Jermyn as to why his wife needed to go to England. Signing herself Katherine Stanhope, rather than using her husband’s title, Katherine explained that her mother had assured her that if she did not come soon, her eldest son’s estate would be lost. She assured the queen that she would return to her duties in the Netherlands as soon as possible.13 Ideally, Philip should have gone himself but he could not be contacted in time and Katherine resolved that she must take on the mantle of compounding for his estates (that is, paying a lump sum to stop the Commonwealth from taking them over) herself.
So the journey was duly made, only for Katherine Stanhope to find herself arrested as soon as she set foot in London and accused of having the intention ‘to carry on designs to the prejudice of the peace’. After two weeks she was freed but the process of ensuring Philip’s lands was a lengthy and expensive one. She did not return to The Hague until the following June, by which time she had secured her son’s Chesterfield estate for £20,000. It is not clear how she obtained such a large sum of money, or why it had taken so long, but the entire business cast suspicion on the activities and motives of the Heenvliets. Sir Edward Nicholas in particular, who disliked the couple intensely and resented their influence on Princess Mary, was not slow in voicing his suspicions. The precise nature of the accusation he levelled at Katherine Stanhope is not known, but the inference is that she had made some kind of accommodation with the English Commonwealth, or passed on information, that was prejudicial to royalist interests. Charles II wrote to Mary expressing his concern but the princess, enraged at this attempt to unseat her favourite and inevitably suspecting her mother-in-law to be behind it, refused to acknowledge that Lady Stanhope was capable of any disloyalty and demanded to know who had accused her.
The affair blew over, and though the Heenvliets’ relationship with Nicholas did not improve, they won over Hyde through their attentions to his family and his own friendship with the unhappy secretary suffered as a result. Hyde was well aware of the Heenvliets’ support for the Louvre party, as Henrietta Maria and her followers in France were known. In fact, the baron was a most assiduous correspondent, writing frequently to the queen and also to Henry Jermyn. He was well aware of the influence that Jermyn was said to have over the queen and sent him numerous memoranda about the disagreements between Mary and Amalia. In August 1651 he wrote to Charles II at some length about the schemes of the Princess Dowager (Amalia’s official title), noting that the Princess Royal was quite open about the fact that her mother-in-law had never liked her. Henrietta Maria’s reaction to the unhappy situation of her daughter is not known. The queen’s followers in Paris had much to occupy their thoughts and there was, in any case, nothing they could do to improve the situation between the two women at The Hague. Henrietta Maria had been spared the problem of a determined and politically active mother-in-law herself but she understood the importance of her daughter to the royalist cause. When Mary’s husband died, the queen wrote to her sister, Christine, that she felt the loss of her son-in-law all the more keenly because ‘all the hopes for the re-establishment of my son lay in him’.14 The birth of her grandson cheered her, however, though she felt she was too old to see him grow to manhood. Little did she know the role he would play in the fate of her husband’s dynasty.
*
Could there have been any enjoyment in court life at The Hague when it was dominated by two women who detested one another and a third, Elizabeth of Bohemia, who was chronically short of money? The answer is a resounding yes. Elizabeth may have been penniless (a circumstance of which she complained frequently to her eldest surviving son, Charles Louis, the elector palatine) but at a time when Dutch culture was flowering, one of its most prominent literary figures, Constantijn Huygens, could not wait to get back to The Hague from the provincial pastimes of Maastricht. There was, he advised an English correspondent considering where to settle in the Low Countries, ‘no such conversation there, nor such pictures, nor such performances, nor such music as we are able to afford you here’.15 Huygens’ opinion in such matters counted for a lot. He had experienced the English court as a young man and knew Francis Bacon and John Donne. Elizabeth and Mary were both keen supporters of dancing and masques – love of display and theatricals ran in the blood of the Stuarts – and these entertainments, widely reported in the European as well as the English press, reinforced the magnificence of royalism, as well as raising morale among the exiles and perhaps among royalists living quietly in England, who did not share the sneering attitude of the republican press.16
Mary spent lavishly on entertainments in her country palace at Honselersdijk and at the Heenvliets’ home in Teylingen, as well as in the Dutch capital itself. The style of the costumes and sets would have pleased her mother as a young woman. She even ventured into political satire with the performance of a play in 1654 (by which time the war with England was over and Cromwell was installed as lord protector) which was entitled A King and No King. The play was not universally well received by royalist supporters, though it may be instructive to note that one of its most outspoken critics was Sir Edward Nicholas, who, on hearing about the play from his son, wrote to Edward Hyde:
All good and discreet persons here, as well Dutch as English and Scots, are extremely scandalised that the Princess Royal (who hath so good a cause to mourn even in sackcloth and ashes for the miseries of her family and the malicious practices against her son) should be not only so insensible of them, but so easily misled . . . in preparing and making her servants and dependents to practice and act a play with such a title as if Cromwell himself had made choice of and appointed it on purpose to have thrown scorn on the King . . .17
Nicholas’s son, however, had interpreted the title as an attack on Cromwell rather than a defence of him but the play was clearly controversial. It was not a new piece (its authors were the Jacobean playwrights Beaumont and Fletcher) and it had been performed several times in Charles I’s court, where Mary may first have heard of it as a child. For her, its performance harked back to a happier time. The princess seems to have been oblivious to criticism and she was keen to exhibit her understanding of French culture when she introduced a comic ballet in the French mode after visiting her mother in France in 1655.
Mary’s avowed support for the royalist cause explains, in part, why her role in supporting exiles from the British Isles in the 1650s is of real significance. To be an exile was to live in a state both precarious and impecunious, without the benefits that came with court life in an established monarchy. The courts of Elizabeth of Bohemia and Mary Stuart (as well as that of Princess Amalia) dispensed patronage and access as well as acting as conduits for information about what was going on at home and how Charles II was faring. At The Hague, royalists of English, Irish and Scottish backgrounds hoped to find positions in Mary’s court. Many were young (older royalists were more inclined to stay at home and deal directly with the Commonwealth and, later, the Protectorate) and some, like Jane Lane, were already part of royalist legend. While the English Commonwealth was at war with the Dutch, between 1652 and 1654, the political tensions between the Dutch republic and the royal ladies, though not inconsiderable, were subsumed by what was, in reality, a dispute over trade and dominance of the North Sea.18 When peace came, Mary’s determination to help did not change, but her ability to provide financial backing was less certain. It did not stop, however, as Daniel O’Neill, the Irishman who played such a fundamental role as royal servant to Charles II, acknowledged in a letter to Jack Ashburnham in June 1654, saying that ‘with infinite industry and trouble I have hitherto, without much incommodating my mistress [Princess Mary], sustained myself and yet hereafter I must live upon her, for there is no other way.’19
Equally significant, and only more recently being explored by scholars of the period, is the importance of Mary’s religion in keeping alive the Protestant traditions of the Church of England and the patronage she gave to displaced Anglican ministers. Henrietta Maria’s court at the Louvre was avowedly Catholic and the Dutch Reformed Church, which Mary was expressly forbidden ever to attend by her chaplain, Browne, too Calvinist for Anglican tastes. The princess and her aunt were determined to keep the Anglican rites, a commitment which earned them the approval of Charles II and caused Cromwell’s representative at The Hague in 1658 to refer to the English church there as a ‘nursery of cavalierism’.20
Certainly Cromwell’s government was uneasy about the role of Mary’s court in the Netherlands and even her brother, the king, had to accept the fact that, while he was pushed from pillar to post by the vagaries of European politics during the 1650s, seemingly always on the move, living with uncertainty from one month to the next, his sister, though far from popular with Dutch politicians, was firmly established in The Hague and that the survival of royalism depended, to some extent, on her. It seems that the logic of this situation was not lost on Mary, who sometimes found herself at odds with Charles and was willing to defy him if he piqued her pride or seemed to be interfering in her personal life.
The advent of peace with England strengthened the position of the Dutch republicans vis-à-vis the House of Orange and notably that of the grand pensionary of Holland, Johan de Witt. Convinced that the future of the United Provinces lay in commercial supremacy, de Witt was also committed to limiting the powers of the office of stadtholder, which he believed had become too extensive, were ill defined and smacked of an unofficial regality that was contrary to the country’s interests. This did not bode well for the young William III of Orange, but the outbreak of war with England brought with it a revival of popular support for the stadtholder’s role, deemed by many citizens to be an important unifying force when the republic was faced with aggression. The Princess Royal was well aware of de Witt’s sentiments and was gratified by the popular response; there were riots in several cities in Holland and de Witt was threatened with assassination. In July 1653 the province of Zeeland, which then held the chair of the States-General, suggested that William III should be nominated as head of the army and navy as soon as he came of age.
Peace between the two warring republics put paid to such temporary optimism about the prince’s future role. Behind the backs of his colleagues, de Witt agreed to a secret clause in the peace treaty with England that barred the Orange family from the stadtholderate in Holland. When the secret clause was revealed, there was much discussion and a great deal of resentment, but it was basically a fait accompli on Cromwell’s part. Mary is said to have wept copiously for three hours when informed of this Act of Exclusion. De Witt had tried to exploit the ill feeling between Mary and her mother-in-law by personally informing Amalia that there was no ill will towards her grandson, an assurance that was taken at face value by the dowager princess, who had learned to tread carefully in her relationships with Holland’s politicians. A subsequent bout of serious illness, perhaps brought on by nervous strain, suggests that Amalia was not convinced by de Witt’s blandishments.
Mary went with her son to Breda in the spring of 1654 to consider her situation. The peace treaty with England also affected her directly in another crucial respect: she was officially forbidden to receive her brothers on Dutch soil again. Distressed but equally determined, Mary decided if they could not come to her, she would go to them. By this time, Charles had been forced out of France by Mazarin’s recognition of the Cromwellian regime and was looking for a permanent base. Mary was happy to travel and Charles equally pleased to meet her. The first of these reunions took place at Spa, in what is now Belgium, a town famed, as its name implies, for the curative effects of its waters. Despite unseasonably bad weather for August, the king, his sister and their entourages (Charles’s swollen by an unexpected gift of money from the Austrian emperor) passed the time pleasantly. But when one of Mary’s attendants contracted smallpox (she subsequently died) the party left Spa for Aix-la-Chapelle. It was here that Charles was finally joined by the loyal but disenchanted Sir Edward Nicholas, who was officially made secretary to the king. The waters at Aix were thought to be every bit as restorative as those at Spa and the town received the Stuart brother and sister and their followers with due reverence. Like many tourists to this ancient city, they were shown the remains of Charlemagne in the great cathedral. Charles II, happy to be in his sister’s company but without any fixed abode, must have envied the success of the great emperor whose skull and right hand were kept as revered relics in Aix’s cathedral. Mary dutifully kissed them, while Charles measured Charlemagne’s sword against his own. Then they returned to the dancing, drinking and pleasant pastimes that formed the main part of their entertainment in this prolonged summer holiday. Strapped for money as he had always been, Charles was effectively able to live off Mary for the time being, as her expenses were paid for by the Dutch States-General. Not everyone was convinced by his apparent bonhomie, however. Thurloe’s spy, who had infiltrated the royal group and reported their every move, noted: ‘For all his dancing, I believe he [the king] has a heavy heart.’ It would have been surprising if, beneath the facade that Charles was so well able, by this time, to construct, he was not anxious about his future. Yet in practical terms, he and his advisers were clear on their next move. As autumn drew on, Charles and Mary moved to Cologne.
Here it would be easier to put down roots. The townspeople and the authorities there seemed to like the Stuarts, so why not stay? It was a handsome city but it was also conveniently close to the Imperial Diet, which had promised him a pension. Alas, that money proved as difficult to winkle out of the imperial electors as a French pension had been from Mazarin, much to the dismay of Charles’s courtiers, who sometimes did not know where their next meal was coming from. But Mary liked the city of Cologne, deeming it a fit place for her brother’s residence, and there she left him, after they had both paid a brief visit to Dusseldorf, to return to her son and spend the winter with him in Holland. The following summer she was again in Cologne but it was her plans for the early part of 1656 that caused a rift between the king and his sister.
*
During the autumn of 1655, Mary resolved to go and visit her mother in Paris. She had not seen Henrietta Maria for twelve years. Never in the strongest health, she convinced herself that she would get better medical advice in France than in Holland. Henrietta Maria was, at first, considerably less keen on receiving her daughter than Mary would have liked, partly because they had been in dispute about a replacement for the unfortunate lady-in-waiting who had died of smallpox at Spa. Mary wanted Edward Hyde’s daughter, Anne, to fill the vacancy but there was still much suspicion between Charles II’s chancellor and the queen mother, and there was vigorous opposition from the Louvre, not to mention, at first, from Hyde himself, who feared it would make him even more unpopular with Henrietta Maria. In fact, it is a testimony to the enduring influence of the queen mother that her daughter feared her reaction so much that she tried to make it appear that the command for Anne Hyde to join Mary’s household came from Charles II. When the appointment was made, Henrietta Maria was highly offended and showed little enthusiasm for a meeting between herself and her daughter. Her opinion changed when, still very much the matriarch, it occurred to her that Mary might not be allowed to see her brother, the duke of York, if the rapprochement between Cromwell and Mazarin forced James to leave France.
The king was unhappy about Mary’s trip. A surge in public opinion in favour of the House of Orange at that time should, he thought, be encouraged in order to safeguard his nephew’s prospects and Mary’s absence in France could undermine the progress being made. So he sent Daniel O’Neill to The Hague to try to dissuade Mary. Perhaps he did not know his sister well enough, since Mary was the sort of woman whose opinions only hardened when faced with opposition. She assured O’Neill that, as everyone believed she was governed by the Heenvliets (who had also been enlisted to dissuade her), the best thing she could do to prove this accusation false was to make the journey to her mother. Faced with this perverse logic, O’Neill confessed himself stumped. ‘It is thought here,’ he told the king, ‘that nothing your majesty can say can persuade her to stay.’ But there were other, more important considerations that should be emphasized in any correspondence with Jermyn and Henrietta Maria, concerning the timing of the visit: ‘The town of Amsterdam does intend, in March, to invite her highness and the little prince thither; and that if she should be absent, the princess dowager will be invited to go along with the prince, whom, if she once gets the possession of, she will never quit, having now got more interest in Holland than the Princess Royal has.’21
Mary was not known for her political sense. She had never bothered to learn more than a few words of Dutch, communicating with politicians and other influential people entirely in French. Given her stubborn nature, something that had been observed in her since childhood, it is hardly surprising that the more she was entreated not to go to France, or at least to postpone the visit until the spring, the more she dug her heels in. Her professed reason for going in the depths of winter – that she wanted to see the carnivals in Paris that heralded the arrival of Lent – seems frivolous, but may be a considerable part of the truth. She was a young woman who enjoyed the company of her siblings and had endured a life where pleasure was in short supply. She may also have been excited to see the French court, having heard of its splendours, and felt that she would be treated in a manner that befitted her position as a royal princess. Much as she and Elizabeth of Bohemia had tried, their courtly entertainments could not come close to what she might experience in Paris. And the thought of seeing her mother again after so long could not easily be put aside.
Nevertheless, her determination to go to France caused friction with the king. Charles II often found it difficult, while in exile, to command the obedience of his family as strictly as he might have hoped. It was not in his easy-going temperament to lay down the law but in this case he feared that if Mary made what amounted to a state visit to France, his own prospects of support from Spain, France’s old enemy, might be compromised. He could not count on Cologne as a permanent base and he might need to take refuge in the Spanish Netherlands at some point. O’Neill had pointed out to Charles and to Heenvliet that there might be considerable expense involved in the trip but none of this had any impact on Mary. A belated reproof from her brother only raised Mary’s hackles. Why, she asked him, had he not spoken of his concerns, especially those relating to the Spanish, while they were together in Cologne? She pointed out that ‘all the world’ must think it reasonable that she should desire to see her mother, ‘which I have not done since I was a child’. She would, she assured him, speak to the Spanish ambassador at The Hague herself before she set off and she was also more confident about the position of her son in the United Provinces. Once she had settled Prince William’s domestic arrangements during her absence, she would be ready to set off.22 And so she did, on 17 January 1655, escorted out of The Hague by count William Frederick of Friesland and other Dutch noblemen. Following her was a sizeable train of carts and wagons, to accommodate the needs of her household and carrying her all-important wardrobe. Mary had every intention of making an impression when she arrived in France and the French were ready to receive her with appropriate fanfare. ‘There is great preparation and disposition to pay her all the honours that she has cause to expect at her arrival, and to divert her during her stay,’ wrote Jermyn.23
Mary was greeted with great ceremony and respect as she journeyed south. Her brother, the duke of York, met her at Peronne, carrying with him a message from their mother that it would be tactful to decline Mazarin’s offer of meeting all her expenses. She arrived in Paris at the beginning of February 1656, where she was reunited with her mother after thirteen long and momentous years. She also met, for the first time, the little sister born in Exeter that she had never seen. Princess Henrietta, now known by the French names of Henriette Anne, was a thin twelve-year-old, brought up in the Catholic faith despite her father’s commands, and very much under the thumb of her mother. She was a great favourite of her eldest brother, the king, but led a restrictive and cash-strapped life in her mother’s household. The arrival of this sophisticated and rather splendid elder sister was the high point of her year.
Installed at the Palais Royal in a suite of rooms that had once belonged to Cardinal Richelieu, Mary intended to make the most of her stay in France. Received with great civility, the number of her visitors fatigued Henrietta Maria, gratified as she was by the response to her eldest daughter. ‘I have to tell you,’ she wrote to Charles II, ‘that she pleases greatly here, from the greatest to the least. She has been today so overwhelmed with visitors that I am dead with it.’24 Mary attended a whirlwind of ballets, balls, parties and theatre productions, surrounded by the glittering court of the young Louis XIV, which had, by this time, put behind it the tumults of the Fronde. It was a very different world from The Hague and there was speculation that the Princess of Orange might have intended more than a pleasant visit with her family by coming to France. Was she looking for a husband? Certainly, Mary was a personable young widow, though the fact that she was the only member of the British royal family not in exile did not improve her prospects. Unkind tongues suggested that she would make a play for the king of France himself. Though such a thought might have occurred to her matchmaking mother, it is unlikely that Mary came to France with the underlying motive of becoming its queen consort. Louis XIV showed no romantic interest in her, perhaps because he was attracted to one of Mazarin’s nieces at the time.
Mary never showed much interest in a second marriage. During the late 1650s her name was linked to that of Harry Jermyn, nephew of Henrietta Maria’s favourite, who had arrived in Holland with the duke of York. When the rumours reached the king, Charles II ordered the younger Jermyn out of the country and back to Brussels. Infuriated, Mary demanded he be allowed back to her court but she was duly reprimanded. Referring to ‘this unhappy business’, he told Mary:
I am sorry to see you take it as you do and think that my severity is the only thing to be satisfied, when I assure you, what I said and counselled you in the thing was merely out of kindness to you . . . and it appears to me very strange that you should think that the continuing of that which is the cause of the report, should be a means of taking it away. I shall say no more, but refer all to my brother [ James]; and only add, that I hope you cannot imagine I am so little careful either of your honour or my own, as to show to the world I know anything of this business, much less to make any public discourse of it.25
This was unusually strong and censorious language from the king, who clearly feared for his sister’s reputation. It is interesting that she used the same logic to argue for Jermyn’s return that she did for her dealings with the Heenvliets in respect of her visit to France. Jermyn himself was known as a womanizer with a penchant for drinking, gambling and bad language. He was far from handsome, being short with a large head and thought generally to be too precious, the sort of gallant whose wit was all learned rather than natural. But he had a formidable reputation as a lover. If Mary was indeed attracted to him, which seems quite possible, since one of his later conquests was Barbara Palmer, the mistress of Charles II, then perhaps her time in France had introduced her to a lifestyle that was much freer than the accepted manners of court life at The Hague.
The Princess Royal stayed in Paris for nearly a year. During this time, she succeeded in improving the uneasy relationship between the king and his mother, charming Cardinal Mazarin (who, with typical political awareness, did not want to burn his bridges entirely with the Stuarts) and resisting her mother’s efforts to convert her to Catholicism. Her father would have been pleased with Mary’s firmness on this point. She might have stayed on in France for even longer, but her son caught the smallpox and she accelerated plans for her departure in November 1657. The French court news-sheet, Gazette de France, was lavish in heaping praises on the princess, recording ‘the caresses and sorrows of the queen, her good mother . . . and of her young sister also (a true angel in miniature)’ in their sorrow at her leaving.
Prince William recovered from the smallpox, though was left with some scarring. His relieved mother, on her return, continued to support her brothers as best she could, convinced that, without her tireless attention, the Stuarts would never be restored. The relationship with Amalia van Solms was, however, beyond salvation. The nomination of her son to the stadtholderate of Holland seemed a distant prospect, but she was determined to fight Amalia for the regency of Orange itself. The city is now part of France but its independent status was vital for the future of Prince William and his family name. At the time of the death of William II, the city’s governor, a protégé of Amalia van Solms, had ignored instructions that Mary should have its governance in the event of her husband’s death. The Princess Royal only discovered this later when she opened a sealed chest containing her husband’s papers. When the opportunity arose, she asked Louis XIV to intervene during her stay in France and a French army removed Count Dohna, the treacherous governor of Orange. The city’s parlement named Mary as regent in October 1658. It was a notable victory over Amalia and her clique but one that would be dearly bought. In an early indication of his acquisitiveness, Louis soon decided that he would have Orange for himself. His promises of support to the Princess Royal were soon forgotten and, without the agreement of the Dutch States-General, who did not want to be drawn into conflict with France over an issue that only affected the Orange family, the city capitulated to French troops in March 1660. Its loss was a blow to Mary but by that time her attention was elsewhere, as her family’s fortunes were changing again.