Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory (9 page)

The wedding ceremony was conducted by the King’s former personal chaplain and favourite Anglican prelate, Matthew Wren, Bishop of Ely, in the chapel of the Palace of Whitehall.
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Charles and Henrietta Maria, father and mother of the bride, were seated together prominently on a raised dais, to distinguish them in rank from the Orange party.

So uncharacteristically low-key were the ceremonies to celebrate the marriage that there was some suspicion on the Dutch side that the Stuarts might default on the contract should their political circumstances improve and a more prestigious royal bridegroom become available. Charles refused point blank to allow his daughter to travel back to The Hague with her new husband, while at the obligatory ‘bedding of the bride’ which took place before the bridegroom’s departure for home, elaborate precautions were taken to make it clear that the marriage had not been consummated. It was not a good sign, one member of William’s entourage wrote, that such care had been taken to demonstrate to the world that the bride’s virginity had been left intact: ‘In the presence of the King, Queen, ambassadors and some bishops, the Princess being put to bed in a double shirt, sewn fast below and above, between two sheets, over which two more were spread in which the Prince was lying.’
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Matters were, however, soon taken out of the English King’s hands. In early 1642, Charles’s flight from London and his subsequent declaration of war against his Parliament at York marked the beginning of civil war in England – an internal conflict which lasted seven years, devastated the country, and culminated in the execution of the King on 30 January 1649. On 7 February 1642, Charles escorted his wife and eldest daughter from Windsor Castle to Dover, from where it had been decided that Princess Mary and Queen Henrietta Maria should embark for the safety of the Netherlands, and the protection of the royal couple’s new son-in-law. Two weeks later, after lingering farewells, the Queen and the Princess sailed out of Dover on a modest ship, the
Lion
, with an escorting flotilla. King Charles galloped along the white cliffs, waving to his wife and daughter until they were long out of sight. Queen Henrietta Maria had prudently taken with her most of the Crown Jewels, with the intention of pawning them in The Hague to raise much-needed funds for an army to support her husband’s cause.

The Queen and her daughter were received at The Hague with enormous pomp and ceremony, as befitted their elevated royal status. Frederik Hendrik resigned himself to bearing most of the costs of this extravagant display of prestige and status – particularly since it had the desired effect of greatly impressing the Dutch people.

In the months that followed, Frederik Hendrik and Amalia toured the northern Netherlands with their new daughter-in-law, dazzling the Dutch citizens with the scale and splendour of their entourage. In May there was a lavish reception in Amsterdam, at which allegorical scenes depicted historical marriages made between Counts of Holland and English Princesses, thereby implying that the house of Orange too had now achieved sovereign status. The massive costs of such entertainments fell to the Stadholder and the States General. Frederik Hendrik, for whom the expenditure formed part of a conscious strategy of dynastic aggrandisement, absorbed his share without demur. Only occasionally did the Dutch administration complain, protesting that the English Queen ‘for her amusement’ travelled with great ostentation ‘at the country’s expense, with a retinue of 600 persons’ (the number of followers given here probably included the Stadholder’s retinue as well as those of Henrietta Maria and Princess Mary).
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Queen Henrietta Maria’s purpose in remaining in the Low Countries, though, was primarily to raise a substantial cash sum to purchase men and munitions for her husband’s Royalist cause, secured against the jewels she had carried out of England. These were valued at 1,265,300 Dutch guilders; bankers in Amsterdam, however, were reluctant to deal with them. The stones were too large, and besides, the English Parliament had lodged a formal complaint with the ambassador for the Low Countries in London, protesting that the Crown Jewels were state property and that the Queen had no authority to dispose of them. It became clear that unless Frederik Hendrik was willing to add his own personal security, no bank would be prepared to lend against the pieces of jewellery. This is precisely what the Prince proceeded to do, thereby effectively providing concrete support for the Royalists at the outbreak of the English Civil War in August 1642, in spite of the clearly expressed resolve of the States General to remain neutral.

Royal mother and daughter together exerted considerable emotional pressure on their new relations for financial assistance, men and ships to assist Charles I, thereby driving a wedge between the Stadholder and his government. Charles I was quick to take advantage of his daughter’s new access to the material and military resources of the house of Orange, and pressed her to seek assistance from them. ‘Dearest daughter’, he wrote to her, ‘I desire you to assist me to procure from your Father in Law the loane of a good ship to be sent hither to attend my commands. It is that I may safely send and receive Expresses to and from your Mother.’
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In February 1643 Queen Henrietta Maria left the Dutch Republic for France, taking with her large quantities of munitions for her husband’s cause. Frederik Hendrik persuaded the Dutch government to turn a blind eye to these, ‘because without [the armaments] there is no appearance at all that the Queen will depart, but only that she continues to stay with us to the great detriment of the country’.
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Left alone with her new family, Princess Mary celebrated her twelfth birthday at The Hague in November, on which occasion it was considered that she had formally consented to the marriage as binding, as required under English law.

In June 1644, Henrietta Maria dispatched an emissary from her residence in Paris to The Hague, proposing a marriage between her eldest son, the Prince of Wales – the future Charles II – and Frederik Hendrik and Amalia van Solms’s eldest daughter, Louise Henriette. These first negotiations failed, but the English Queen sent her representative back in early 1645. She did not want a large dowry, but rather intensive assistance from the Dutch Republic at sea, against the English Parliamentary forces. Frederik Hendrik rejected any such combination of political and dynastic arrangements, though he declared himself entirely ready to countenance the marriage, and offered a generous dowry. Negotiations continued until April 1645, when Henrietta Maria learned that Frederik Hendrik had secured a more reliable (and ultimately more advantageous) match for his daughter with the Elector of Brandenburg. Their marriage took place in December 1646.
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Shortly after negotiations had been broken off concerning a second Orange–Stuart marriage, in October 1645, the complete correspondence between Henrietta Maria’s envoy and Frederik Hendrik was captured by Parliamentary forces in a skirmish near Sherborn in Yorkshire. It was published for propaganda purposes, to reveal to the English public the extent of the royal family’s negotiations with foreign powers in its attempt to secure victory on behalf of the Crown over the people. The following spring the contents of the ‘King’s cabinet’ relating to the proposed Orange–Stuart match were translated into Dutch and circulated in the United Provinces, in an attempt to arouse republican indignation at the Stadholder’s high-handed use of the Dutch Republic as a marital bargaining counter in the international power play for territory between ruling royal dynasties. Among the Dutch, however, the exchanges were read rather as confirmation that Frederik Hendrik had eventually fended off any such politically dangerous English suggestions.
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In 1658 one final attempt was made by the house of Orange to contract a marriage between Prince Charles – now the exiled Charles II – and Louise Henriette’s younger sister. Negotiations continued for a year before they eventually broke down. Once again this was due to the elderly Dowager, widow of Stadholder Frederik Hendrik and mother of William II, Amalia van Solms, who decided that, after eight years of the English Commonwealth, there was no serious prospect of Charles regaining the English throne. Or perhaps she was put off the match by Charles’s indiscreet and sexually predatory conduct, philandering with the ladies-in-waiting at her court in The Hague: in 1649 his mistress Lucy Walter had given birth to the future Duke of Monmouth in Rotterdam. Charles subsequently fathered illegitimate children by Elizabeth Killigrew, Viscountess Shannon, and Catherine Pegge.

Hardly more than a year later, and very much against the odds, in 1660 King Charles I’s wayward son was reinstated as the reigning English monarch. In May 1662 a highly advantageous marriage was contracted between Charles II and the Portuguese Catholic Princess Catherine of Braganza. She brought with her an exceptionally large dowry in both goods and territory (which included the ports of Tangier and Bombay). There must have been many in the Protestant Low Countries – not least Amalia herself – who now regretted the failure of the attempt to ally him by marriage with the reliably Protestant house of Orange. Nor did marriage put an end to Charles’s wandering eye. In stark contrast to his official childlessness, he acknowledged nine illegitimate children before his death in 1685, six of them boys.

The on-off negotiations between the princely house of Orange and the royal house of Stuart throughout the middle years of the seventeenth century are a strong reminder of the deep dynastic ties that bound together the English and the Dutch. In the protracted diplomatic relations between France and England during the seventeenth century, historians have been quick to point out how the interventions of Queen Henrietta Maria (daughter of Henri IV of France) and, a generation later, Charles II’s younger sister Henriette (married to Philippe, Duke of Orléans), influenced events within the British Isles.

The double bond, in the period 1641–88, between the ruling houses of England and the Dutch Republic has received far less attention. Yet throughout these years, first Princess Mary (wife of William II) and then her niece, also Princess Mary (wife of William III), exercised significant influence over decision-making on both sides of the Narrow Sea.

We shall never know whether Mary of Modena’s son had been substituted in the lying-in chamber in a warming pan, or was actually of Stuart royal blood. But like many potent myths, the story of the ‘warming-pan plot’, circulating right across Europe, was as powerful as an instrument of history as if it were established fact. Though the story of plots and substitutions is largely discounted by historians today, it was equally widely believed in England and abroad during the fraught summer of 1688, and persisted for a generation afterwards. Since the Queen went on to bear James a daughter in exile in France, the claim that she was incapable of bearing healthy children was plainly false. At the same time, by spiriting away the pretended heir to the throne, James and his wife removed the possibility of any kind of ‘trial’ of whether the supposed Prince of Wales was indeed genuine. An inquiry was started early in 1689, but was dropped on the grounds that it was by now impossible to establish the truth. As a sympathiser with James’s cause wrote in early February 1689:

There is no room for the examination of the little gents title which perhaps will be hearafter the best proof he has of his title that after ‘twas in their power to examine his birth they durst not refer it to a free parliament as was pretended.
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As late as 1712 Queen Anne remained convinced that the baby who had almost ousted her from succession to the throne had been substituted in the delivery room. When her physician David Hamilton told her that he believed ‘that the Pretender was not the real son of King James, with my arguments against it’, the Queen ‘received this with chearfulness, and by asking me several questions about the thing’.
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But by the time of William and Mary’s coronation on 11 April 1689, the legitimacy or otherwise of the baby was immaterial to the arguments mustered to affirm the legal legitimacy of their claim to the throne.

Neither will we ever know whether William of Orange had intended to seize the English throne when he launched his invasion in November 1688. In a later
Mémoire
, Mary implied that William invaded England with the intention of dethroning James. This may, however, have been her retrospective view of events, since for some years before the invasion she had hoped that William would one day be King. King James himself said on 27 November 1688 that he thought William had come to England to seize the Crown. This remark clearly tells us about the King’s state of mind at the time, but it does not help us decide what were William’s actual intentions. Whatever the case, the public actions of English officials underlined the finality of what William had done. By 18 December, when they knew James was in William’s custody, they began greeting the Prince symbolically and ceremonially as if he were King.
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We do know that as early as 1670, when William paid his visit to England to reclaim the large sums owed to him by the English royal family, he was delighted by the evident enthusiasm of the Protestant party, and their clear approval of the fact that he stood close to the throne in the line of inheritance. On that occasion, the seventy-two-year-old Sir Constantijn Huygens (Constantijn junior’s father) certainly encouraged him to believe that his ultimate royal destiny (he was not yet Stadholder) might lie in England.

Devoted lifelong servant of the house of Orange (both in and out of power), and unashamed anglophile, Sir Constantijn could think of no more glorious future for his young Orange protégé, on the threshold of regaining his royal standing in the Low Countries, than to consolidate still further the bonds between his family and the similarly restored Stuarts. In spite of his age and infirmity, Huygens senior worked unstintingly during his London visit to develop a strong and durable relationship between Charles II and the young nephew who would, though neither of them could know it, one day ascend the English throne as King William III.