Princesses Behaving Badly

by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

  LOCKED AWAY

  The next morning, Sophia Dorothea, her bags packed, waited for her children to pay their usual morning call. Instead she was visited by a palace official, who came to inform her that she was confined to her rooms until further notice. Her belongings were searched; the incriminating letters were found. Three days later, her lady-in-waiting told her that Königsmarck was dead.

  Sophia Dorothea was now in custody while her father and father-in-law argued over what to do. A divorce was clearly necessary, but they also knew that pressing the adultery angle would produce uncomfortable questions all around. Already people were wondering what happened to the dashing young count. The only viable solution was to claim desertion on her part. Thus on December 28, 1694, the marriage was dissolved; as the guilty party, Sophia Dorothea would not be permitted to remarry. But at least she’d be free.

  Wrong. Yet again, her father betrayed her: Part of his agreement stipulated that Sophia Dorothea would remain a state prisoner at the castle of Ahlden, an estate protected by a river on one side and a moat on the other. The concern was that Sophia Dorothea might make a tempting hostage for George Louis’s political rivals, notably France and those Britons who resisted the imposition of a German royal on the English throne. The 28-year-old princess simply could not be at liberty for the rest of her life.

  It wasn’t until she was locked away that Sophia Dorothea understood the full horror of what was happening: She was cut off completely from her two young children. Her father refused ever to see her again and would not allow her mother to visit. All her servants were forced to take an oath of loyalty to the elector and encouraged to report anything suspicious. Sophia Dorothea was allowed outside only after her doctors told her jailers that she needed fresh air. Even then, she was permitted nothing more than a short walk in the back garden, under guard. Entire areas of the castle were off-limits. Once, a fire started near her wing, but escape would have taken her through a gallery that was forbidden to her. Trapped, she waited at the threshold, clutching her jewelry box, for someone to escort her to safety.

  The German public and nobility were shocked by Sophia Dorothea’s unjust imprisonment, but the several attempts to rescue her failed. Now called the Duchess of Ahlden, she spent the last 33 years of her life at the castle. She died on November 13, 1726, at the age of 60.

  The day he heard the news, George, now King of England, went to the theater to see a comedy with his two mistresses. He forbade his son, the future king George II, from making any public demonstration of grief. Only Sophia Dorothea’s daughter, now the queen of Prussia, was able to mourn her mother publicly. George had Sophia Dorothea buried at the ducal vaults in Celle, at night and without ceremony, her grave marked only with her name and the dates of her birth and death.

  In the end, however, Sophia Dorothea may have had her revenge, at least according to legend. Several years before her death, a French fortuneteller told superstitious George I that if he were at all responsible for Sophia Dorothea’s demise, he’d die too within the year. (She’d been paid to say that by Sophia Dorothea’s mother, shh.) The pronouncement spooked him, though not enough to free his poor ex-wife. But that wasn’t all—on her deathbed, Sophia Dorothea supposedly cursed his name and wrote him a letter reproaching him for his cruelty. The letter reached him on June 21, 1727. Reading her last words calling him to appear before God and account for his crimes, George supposedly had a stroke and died.

  MARRIAGE OR INSANE ASYLUM?

  Leopold II, King of the Belgians, was a cruel monarch and an even worse father. His wife, a woman who seemed to prefer her horses to her children, wasn’t much better. Not surprisingly, then, the couple’s eldest daughter, Princess Louise Marie Amélie, channeled her anger and frustration into making the many shopkeepers, dressmakers, and jewelry stores in Europe rich.

  Born in 1858, Princess Louise was acutely aware that she was not the longed-for male heir her father wanted. She grew up in a household marked by coldness, indifferent cruelty, and austerity. At age 15, she married her second cousin, Prince Philip of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, a heavily whiskered man 14 years her senior. She had absolutely no idea what to expect from their wedding night—no one had ever told her—and she ran away when she got an inkling of what was up. She was later found in her nightdress hiding in the greenhouses.

  The newlyweds moved to Vienna, where the cosmopolitan lifestyle of the Austrian court soothed Louise’s fears. She threw herself into flirtations, scandalous love affairs, pretty dresses, and buying lots and lots of stuff. Two children later, the princess still hadn’t slowed down. Then, in 1895, after 20 years of marriage, she fell in love with Geza Mattachich, who was a Croatian count and dashing officer in the Austrian army who was 10 years her junior; the attraction, she’d later claim, was like an electric shock. Two years later, it was her turn to shock when she ran away with him. “You are taking big risks for a few passing successes of nice dresses, compliments or love declarations,” her mother wrote in a pleading letter. “They won’t last longer than bubbles of soap! Stop the stories that are circulating, dry the tears of your mother.” Her father refused to allow her to divorce, but Louise was not to be dissuaded. She moved to France, settling in Nice, where she could live with her lover unimpeded by the court.

  But Louise’s profligate ways soon caught up with her. After spending everything on hotels, clothing, and jewelry, the broke royal was forced to sell it all off, right down to her underwear, in what sounds like a big, glittery yard sale. The proceeds still didn’t cover the millions she owed. Both King Leopold and her estranged husband refused to cover her debts, leading creditors to break through her door and take everything that wasn’t nailed down.

  So Louise and Mattachich allegedly turned criminal, forging promissory notes in the name of her sister. (Some claimed that the charges were trumped up by her father and husband.) After a short time on the lam, Mattachich was arrested for fraud and thrown in jail. Louise, meanwhile, was given an ultimatum by her father: return to your husband or be committed to an insane asylum. She chose the latter and was interned at a hospital run by an Austrian court physician. In 1902 the New York Times reported that the princess, held “practically a prisoner” at a “retreat” for the past two years, had been declared “hopelessly insane.”

  Louise spent six years as an inmate until Mattachich broke her out. The couple escaped to Paris, where they lived in poverty. Even after Louise finally obtained a divorce in 1907, she and Mattachich were no better off. Louise’s father disowned her, and the rest of her life was spent wandering Europe with Mattachich by her side, hounded by creditors. In 1921 Louise penned her memoirs, both in an effort to repair her tattered reputation and to earn some much-needed money. Though she dedicated the book to her father, “the great man” and “great king,” she wrote, “I owe nothing but misfortune to my royal origin. Ever since I was born, I have suffered and been deceived.”

  Ever-faithful Mattachich died in Paris in October 1923; Louise would last less than a year, dying with his portrait clutched to her chest in March 1924.

  Sarah Winnemucca

  THE PRINCESS ACCUSED OF COLLABORATING

  CA. 1844–OCTOBER 17, 1891

  THE NORTHERN PAIUTE NATION AND THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

  The headline in the Washington, D.C., National Tribune read, “Princess Winnemucca: No Longer the Wild Indian Girl But a Lady of Culture From Boston.” It was January 29, 1885, and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, popularly known as Princess Winnemucca or Princess Sally of the Northern Paiute people, was on a lecture tour in the Northeast.

  Sarah, whose original name was Thocmetony (meaning “shell flower”), was lecturing about the appalling conditions her people were subjected to while living on reservations, but you wouldn’t know that from the article. In a mocking tone typical of writings about Native Americans during this era, the reporter noted that since Sarah had abandoned her heathen ways, her people regarded her with suspicion. “They know that she has adopted the garb of the white sis
ters and it is even suspected that she uses soap and comb occasionally. To the genuine Piute, these things are inconsistent with the traditions of the race.” The conclusion: “She was regarded as a little queer by everybody.”

  The reporter got at least one thing right: Sarah was regarded as a little odd by just about everybody. Though they might champion her cause, most white Americans didn’t think of the “Indian princess” as one of them, and the Paiutes sometimes saw her as a collaborator on the payroll of the U.S. government—a government that seemed to think the solution to the “Indian problem” was starvation and disease. Sarah just couldn’t win.

  IN LIKE A LION

  Sarah is best known for her 1883 autobiography, Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Their Claims, the first memoir written and published by a Native American woman. Her story begins: “I was born somewhere near 1844, but am not sure of the precise time. I was a very small child when the first white people came to our country. They came like a lion, yes, like a roaring lion, and have continued to do so ever since, and I have never forgotten their first coming.”

  When white settlers arrived in the American West in the 1840s, the Northern Paiutes were a small nomadic tribe of hunter-gatherers who crisscrossed what is now Nevada, California, and Oregon. The settlers, meanwhile, were hell-bent on westward expansion and digging for all the gold in them thar hills, and native tribes were in the way.

  Sarah reported that when her grandfather, a chief, first met the settlers, he welcomed them and acted as their guide. Sarah’s people kept the newcomers alive through a difficult winter and followed her grandfather’s wishes to treat them as “brothers.” Sarah’s father, Chief Winnemucca, was more circumspect and tended to keep his distance from whites. Not surprising, given that the settlers tended to repay the natives by burning down their winter stores, indiscriminately shooting them, and polluting their drinking water. There were good white people, too, Sarah noted, those who gave the Indians clothing, who shared medicine with her when she was covered in poison oak, who recognized that the Indians should be treated with respect. But there weren’t many of that sort, and more settlers arrived every month.

  Early on, Sarah may have realized something that others did not: to survive the roaring lion, you had to know how to talk to it. Fortunately for her, she had always had a great facility with languages, having learned Spanish before the age of 10, after members of her family married Spanish colonials in California. She proved just as adept at English, which she learned from a white family while she was in domestic service in Nevada (this family was also probably first to call her Sarah). By 1859 Sarah was acting as a translator for her family when she realized that white settlers wanted to deal with someone they considered an authority. So she implied to several government agents that her father was the “Big Chief” of the Northern Paiute nation, not just the head of his band of 150 followers. This little white lie allowed Chief Winnemucca to speak on behalf of his people, and Sarah to call herself a princess.

  Life could be extremely dangerous for an Indian trying to find a place on the border between the “civilized” and the “savage.” One example of the danger Sarah faced appears in her book: she describes how a contingent of white soldiers, armed with a flimsy claim that her people had stolen some cattle, slaughtered an entire village, down to the last child. “It is always the whites that begin the wars, for their own selfish purposes,” she wrote.

  In 1872 the Northern Paiute were “given” the Malheur Reservation in Oregon, and Sarah’s family moved there. At first, the site was overseen by Samuel Parrish, an agent who, Sarah said, treated the Indians fairly. After four years, he was replaced by the villainous William Rinehart, who stole their goods, refused to pay them for work, and cheated them at every pass. Under his feckless watch, many Indian families starved. Paiutes who were suspected of a crime were executed without a trial. Much of the land that was supposed to be set aside for them was illegally seized by white settlers, leaving the Indians less area for hunting and food gathering. He even closed the school. Sarah’s efforts to secure sufficient food for her people and to alert the authorities about the conditions at Malheur were ignored, even though she signed her letters “Princess Winnemucca.”

  In 1878, those Indians who had remained on the reservation mounted a revolt, led by the Bannock tribe. Sarah and her family sided with the U.S. government. When her father and his band were captured and held captive by the Bannocks, Sarah rode 223 miles in 48 hours to free them, leading them to the relative safety of a U.S. Army fort. Later, she worked as a translator, guide, and scout for the American forces. After the Bannock War, however, the federal government didn’t bother with distinctions of loyalty. All the Paiutes who may or may not have sided with the rebels were deemed enemies and became, overnight, prisoners of war. In January, they were forced to march 350 miles through waist-deep snow to Yakima Reservation in Washington. Nearly one in five died during the journey, many of them small children or the elderly. More would die when they reached the reservation, including Sarah’s sister. There wasn’t nearly enough food, warm clothing, or fuel for fires to keep the Indians alive.

  THE PRINCESS AND THE PRESIDENT

  Desperate to save her people from slow, certain death in Yakima, Sarah went east to agitate on their behalf and speak to officials in Washington, D.C. She went as a princess, a role with which she was more than familiar. In 1864 Sarah, her father, and her sister had toured as an Indian “royal family,” acting out tableaux vivants of popular native myths and stories. Wearing feathered headdresses, the family would enter the theater in a sort of royal procession, surrounded by a phalanx of braves. They’d then perform stereotypical scenes, the “Noble Savage” ideal of the Pocahontas story, mingled with some “Savage Savage” takes on the “Grand Scalp Dance” and “War Dance.”

  That Sarah acted out roles ascribed by white culture is a complicated and uncomfortable fact of history. But one benefit of her days on the stage was that she learned how to get people’s attention. For lectures and performances, she wore what she claimed—and what audiences assumed—was traditional native princess clothing: fantastic bedazzled and fringed ensembles, sometimes made of buckskin, other times of cloth, sporting the kind of ready-made decorations found on lampshades and curtains. To complete the look, her long black hair was loose and topped with a beaded or feathered tiara. She accessorized with beaded bangles and carried a velvet bag embroidered with a cupid. A picture of “Princess Sarah” in her “Native” costume serves as the frontispiece of her 1883 autobiography. Attendees at her lectures and public appearances could buy pictures of the princess in full regalia, with proceeds going to support her travel expenses and her tribe.

  Sarah knew what she was doing. Her costume conjured a romantic image of the doomed, noble, white-friendly Indian princess, which struck a chord with those who felt a bit queasy about that whole Manifest Destiny thing. At the height of her popularity, stories of Sarah’s family and life filled newspapers and magazines. As many as 1,500 people would file in to see her, and she gave more than 400 lectures in five years. She also grabbed the attention of social reformers like Mary Peabody Mann, widow of education reformer Horace Mann, and Mary’s sister Elizabeth Peabody, who became Sarah’s patrons.

  But though Sarah used her “civilized Indian Princess” persona as a gimmick, once she had people’s attention she didn’t pull any punches. Between entertaining stories and tales of Native American history, she excoriated her public for the injustices being suffered by the Paiute and other tribes. In her autobiography, she writes, “Oh, my dear good Christian people, how long are you going to stand by and see us suffer at your hands?”

  Sarah repeatedly used words like savage, civilized, and Christian throughout her autobiography, cleverly playing with the meanings of each. Writing about how her people helped the white settlers, she says, “They gave them as much as they had to eat. They did not hold out their hands and say: ‘You can’t have anything to eat unless you pay me.’ No, no
such word was used by us savages at that time.” And though they may believe themselves to be civilized, white people are presented as hypocrites: “You dare cry out Liberty, when you hold us in places against our will, driving us from place to place as if we were beasts.”

  In late 1878, Sarah’s repeated efforts to be heard by the federal government finally paid off: she was able to say her piece to President Rutherford Hayes and Carl Schurz, secretary of the interior. Not that it did a lot of good. Though she was given written promises that the Paiute would be escorted back to Malheur, such oaths were quickly broken.

  SMEAR CAMPAIGN

  The failure of the feds to make good on their commitments made Sarah’s relationship with her people all the more problematic. Though she’d spent years working on their behalf, she was sometimes seen as acting in collusion with the U.S. government, a collaborator at best and a traitor at worst. Some of her most ardent efforts failed miserably. After the Bannock War, for example, she convinced her people to gather at Fort Harney so that they could be moved back to the Malheur Reservation. But the government had lied, and instead of Malheur they were forced on a death march to Yakima Reservation. When a group of five women tried to flee, Sarah and her sister were deployed to hunt them down and bring them back. That Sarah was on the federal payroll, reportedly given a yearly pension of $600 and a house in Orgeon for her services in the Bannock War, didn’t help either.

  The fact is, even though Sarah was working extremely hard for her people, she didn’t necessarily want to live like them. In 1870 she told a newspaper reporter, “I like the Indian life tolerably well.… I would rather be with my people, but not to live with them as they live. I was not raised so.… My happiest life has been spent in Santa Clara while at school and living among the whites.” Underscoring this point, she married a succession of three white men, including an agent of the very government agency that treated her people so badly. She was also a proponent of what sounds like assimilation, which angered people then just as it does now. But Sarah placed her people’s physical survival over their cultural survival, meaning that, for her, assimilation was preferable to slow starvation on a reservation.