Daughters of the Winter Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  Unfortunately, with so many noblemen (not to mention their wives and daughters) squabbling for dominance, the rituals of protocol were jealously guarded in Germany. Who sat at whose table, whose derriere merited the comfort of a prestigious armchair rather than the cushion of a lowly stool, which gentleman or lady should be allowed to pass Elizabeth her cup or serve her a slice of meat but could not do the same for a German of the same rank as the Elector Palatine—these details caused endless difficulties.* It was particularly galling to Frederick’s mother to always have to cede to her daughter-in-law the place of honor at social gatherings, and of course she complained to her son.

  Sir Henry Wotton, an English ambassador visiting Heidelberg, reported to James that when he had praised Frederick for yielding to his wife’s rank at a recent dinner party, the elector suddenly broke out and “fell plainly to tell me that though indeed he had done it… yet he could do it no more; that it was against the custom of the whole country; that all the Electors and Princes found it strange… that King’s daughters had been matched before in his race, and with other German princes, but still placed under their husbands in public feasts.” To which the ambassador replied sternly “that my Lady [Elizabeth] was not to be considered only as the daughter of a King, like the daughters of France, but did carry in her person the possibility of succession to three Crowns.”* The issue was eventually resolved by Frederick’s mother staying home whenever she and her daughter-in-law were invited anywhere together or by Elizabeth’s absenting herself from any social function where she would not be granted preferred standing.

  It is testament to the genuine affection between Elizabeth and Frederick that they did not turn against each other as a result of this destructive requirement. If it had been anyone but James who had commanded her to keep up a royal appearance, Elizabeth would have rejected the idea and accepted her husband’s rank. The count of Shomberg, in his letters, described her as being unhappy with the controversy she caused and wishing she could be more amenable to local custom. But Elizabeth yearned for her father’s love and approval and sought only to please him. In letter after letter home to him she reiterated her devotion, as in this short note, typical of her style and intensity: “Being desirous by all means I can to keep my self still in your M. [Majesty’s] remembrance, I would not let pass so good an occasion as this bearer returning to England to present my most humble duty and service to your M. by these, beseeching your M. to continue me still in your gracious favor it being the greatest comfort I have to think that your M. doth vouchsafe to love and favor me, which I shall ever strive to deserve, in obeying with all humbleness whatsoever your M. is pleased to command her who shall ever pray to God with all her heart for your happiness and that she may ever be worthy of the title of Your Most humble and obedient daughter and servant, Elizabeth,” she implored. It is clear from her writing that Elizabeth took her father’s authority as the law.

  And yet, despite the obstacle of her rank, Elizabeth’s life with Frederick at Heidelberg was a comfortable and quiet one. To the great joy of both England and the Palatinate, on January 2, 1614, less than a year into the marriage, she fulfilled the primary duty of wedlock and delivered a son, whom the couple named Frederick Henry, after both his father and the memory of Elizabeth’s cherished brother. This child was followed closely by another son, Karl Ludwig,* on December 24, 1616. The dynasty had been established, the ties between husband and wife were strong, and the gardens, now filled with English musk roses, flourished. Elizabeth found herself pregnant yet again. The days passed gently in prosperous contentment.

  And then, in the spring of 1618, an uprising broke out in Bohemia.

  INSURRECTION WAS HARDLY AN uncommon event in Bohemia. It would not be misleading to characterize the history of the region as a state of permanent public disorder punctuated by brief periods of sullen wariness. Yet even by this admittedly cynical status quo, the revolt of 1618 stood out.

  The genesis of the upheaval had its roots in the reign of the previous Holy Roman emperor, Rudolf II. Like his predecessors, Rudolf was a scion of the Habsburg dynasty. The Habsburgs were the undisputed moguls of Europe. In addition to truculent Bohemia, one family member or another ruled Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Spanish Netherlands (present-day Flanders and Belgium), and large portions of Italy, including Milan, Naples, and Sicily, not to mention the extremely lucrative holdings of Mexico and South America in the New World. There were in fact so many Habsburgs stretched so broadly with so much property to protect that often the only suitable candidate for marriage to a Habsburg was another Habsburg. While these unions did result in more Habsburgs, sadly, they were not always of the finest quality.

  Rudolf II, for example, manifested the sort of eccentric personality not commonly associated with functioning, well-adjusted adults. He was a recluse in whom the traits of the quack, the voyeur, and the paranoid were put to combined use in a quest for quasi-scientific advancement, lechery, and the hoarding of questionable art. For more than thirty years, from 1576 until 1608, he was not only emperor but also king of Hungary, Bohemia, and Austria, which technically made him one of the most powerful rulers on earth. However, as he never left his gloomy castle in Prague, his impressive domain seems to have been of doubtful use to him. He was afraid to sire a legitimate heir for fear that his son would grow up and murder him for his empire, so he never married and instead consorted with local prostitutes and lowborn women. What Rudolf was really interested in was turning iron into gold and accumulating a prodigious art collection devoted mostly to etchings depicting satyrs and large, bare-breasted dominatrices. In the handful of religious paintings created expressly for the emperor by his personal court artist, even the Baby Jesus leered.

  Rudolf II

  If he had contented himself with squandering the imperial treasury on his erotica and the occult, as well as the junk heap of petrified ostrich eggs, stuffed birds, porcelain knickknacks, and other rare curiosities enthusiastically hawked to him by every flimflam dealer in Europe, it’s possible that Rudolf would have lived out his days in relative peace and prosperity. But Rudolf, who had been raised by Jesuits, was also a devout and intolerant Catholic who outlawed Protestantism in Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia, even though Lutherans, Calvinists, and other Protestant sects made up a two-thirds majority of the population in those kingdoms. To add insult to injury, he then appropriated the churches formerly owned by the Protestants and gave them to the Catholic minority.

  The outcry over this policy was sufficient to attract the attention of the other Habsburgs, who were already concerned about Rudolf’s peculiar governing style, and gave them the excuse they needed to get rid of him. A family meeting was hastily called at which it was decided to depose Rudolf in favor of his much more competent younger brother, Matthias. Accordingly, in 1608, Matthias raised an army of some 10,000 men and invaded Bohemia. He no sooner appeared at the border than an additional battalion of 25,000 disgruntled Protestant Bohemians joined him, and together this force marched on Prague and succeeded in capturing Rudolf in his castle. Having no choice, Rudolf ceded the kingdoms of Hungary and Austria to his brother. It took a little more persuasion and another army, but Bohemia and the imperial crown also went to Matthias, in 1610. Rudolf, who in his fury crushed under his heel the pen he had used to sign the abdication decree forced upon him by his brother, died the following year denouncing his subjects. “Prague, unthankful Prague, who hast been so highly elevated by me, now thou spurnest thy benefactor!” he raged. “May the curse and vengeance of God fall on thee and on all Bohemia!”

  Matthias, although a Catholic like the rest of the family, understood that he could not govern if the majority of the population was against him, so he was much more tolerant than his brother had been. Under his rule, the religious liberties that had been taken away during Rudolf’s reign were restored in a decree known as the Letter of Majesty. By this charter, the Protestants were again allowed to hold official administrative positions and to practice
their beliefs openly. Their churches were returned to them and they were even granted the right to erect new ones.

  But Matthias was already fifty-three years old and childless when he took over the empire. As he neared his sixtieth birthday, it became clear that, to facilitate an orderly transition after his death, he would have to name a successor while he was still alive. In 1616, after some wrangling, Matthias nominated his cousin Ferdinand of Styria as king of Bohemia and the future Holy Roman emperor.* The Bohemians, overwhelmingly Protestant, were appalled. Ferdinand, raised by Jesuits, was yet another intolerant, fervent Catholic—in some ways, even worse than Rudolf. Ferdinand had not only outlawed Protestantism in Styria, he’d expelled anyone who insisted on practicing the religion, and taken the expedient of importing Catholics from the surrounding duchies to fill their place. He used dogs to hunt down those Protestants who violated his order, chasing his victims into Catholic churches, where they were then forced to convert.

  But Matthias insisted, and a diet was held in Prague in June 1617 to proclaim Ferdinand king of Bohemia, as a first step toward his eventually succeeding to the empire. Many of the local Protestant noblemen had been advised in advance of this assembly that if they opposed the emperor’s candidate, “it would be well for them to have each two heads.” Somewhat cowed by this threat, the delegates decided that they would accept Matthias’s choice but only if Ferdinand formally agreed to abide by the religious freedoms promised in the Letter of Majesty. Ferdinand, who considered all Protestants heretics and therefore not people with whom it was necessary to be absolutely truthful, had no trouble agreeing to this condition. Still wary but believing they had secured their liberty of conscience, the Protestant delegates dropped their opposition to Ferdinand, and he was crowned king of Bohemia in grand ceremony at the castle of Prague on June 19, 1617.

  Of course, no sooner had Ferdinand secured his throne than he reneged on his promise. Ominously, when both he and Matthias departed Prague for Vienna soon after the coronation, three Catholic ministers were left in power as regents. In November, new orders came through appointing judges to investigate whether the charters of the Protestant churches were in order. Within a month, two newly constructed houses of worship had been identified as being in violation of imperial law and the buildings were confiscated. One was given to Catholic parishioners; the other was demolished.

  Infuriated, the Protestants sent a list of their grievances to Matthias, and when the emperor refused to concede to their demands, called for a second diet, to be held in Prague in May 1618. Emboldened by their experience with Rudolf, the delegates arrived in a feisty mood. Many of them were armed. The most perspicacious of the three Catholic ministers left in charge by Ferdinand took one look and fled the city. The other two, whose names were Slawata and Martinetz, as well as their secretary, remained to try to instill order. Sometime between nine and ten o’clock in the morning of May 23, a mob of Protestant delegates swarmed into the castle to confront the imperial regents and determine the fate of the kingdom. After a short conference, it was resolved that Slawata and Martinetz had conspired with Ferdinand and Matthias to subvert the Letter of Majesty.

  There remained then only the problem of how to deal with the culprits. The assembly decided to abide by a long-standing tradition known as defenestration or, in more accessible language, “Let us follow the ancient custom of Bohemia and hurl them from the window,” one of the delegates suggested. This solution was warmly embraced, and immediately out went Martinetz. “Noble lords, another awaits your vengeance,” came the next call. “Jesus! Mary!” cried the hapless Slawata. “Let us see whether his Mary will help him,” the delegates jeered, then dragged the struggling Slawata to the nearest casement and also threw him out the window, followed by his secretary, for good measure.

  It was a frightening eighty-foot drop to the ditch below, but luckily for the three victims, the castle of Prague was not very hygienic. In fact, the whole place was surrounded by a mountainous sewage dump. Cushioned by this dung heap, all three men survived the fall and scrambled to safety. “Behold, his Mary has helped him!” one of the perpetrators of the act, leaning out the window from above, exclaimed in astonishment.

  Having signaled their dissatisfaction with their new king’s policies by this quaint but nonetheless effective method, the Protestant delegates installed an interim government of their own choosing and prepared for war.

  The defenestration of Prague

  FERDINAND WAS IN HUNGARY making the usual empty promises about religious freedom to the Protestant population in order to secure the throne when he got the news that his Bohemian subjects had revolted. Although Matthias counseled concessions to restore peace, Ferdinand insisted instead on fielding an army to bring his unruly kingdom to heel. The problem was, he was a little slow about it, and the Bohemians beat him to it. With help from their Protestant neighbors Silesia and Moravia, they managed to pull together a respectable battalion of some 15,000 men. Ferdinand, by contrast, was able to marshal only about 12,000 soldiers, as the Protestant populations of Austria and Hungary, who were in sympathy with the Bohemians, refused to contribute to the effort.

  On November 9, 1618, these two forces met at the tiny village of Lomnice, in southeast Bohemia, about seventeen miles outside the regional city of Brno. There, in a battle notable for the lack of artillery on either side, the Bohemians thoroughly trounced their opponents. They then followed up on this remarkable achievement by invading Austria with the intent of marching on Vienna, a Catholic city, to try to force Matthias, who as emperor had the authority to overrule Ferdinand, to restore the religious liberties promised under the Letter of Majesty.

  This valiant attempt was ultimately suppressed, not by Ferdinand or Matthias, but by the brutality of winter. The Bohemians lost eight thousand men to terrible privations and illness and were forced to retreat. But the political victory was theirs. The initiative sparked a crisis that threatened the empire to its core. The regional Protestant majorities sensed that their moment had come, that the time was finally right to rise up and shake off the tyranny of tradition as represented by the Catholic Habsburgs. Suddenly, Ferdinand faced revolts in Austria and Hungary as well as Silesia and Moravia. He found himself lectured on freedom of religion in his own halls by the very subjects he had duped by false promises into crowning him king. The threat was so great, he was forced to summon a contingent of imperial archers as protection against a personal assault.

  And then, on March 20, 1619, just when it seemed the situation could not become more complicated or critical, a broken and ill Matthias breathed his last, leaving vacant the all-important position of Holy Roman emperor.

  THE EFFECT OF THESE events on Frederick and Elizabeth, sitting in their charming château in Heidelberg (now the parents of a third child, a daughter, Princess Elizabeth, born November 27, 1618), is well documented. Their warm interest in the affairs of Bohemia was palpable; this was the opportunity they had been waiting for, what their marriage had been arranged to accomplish! Frederick immediately offered aid and encouragement to the Bohemians and sent a private messenger to Prague to evaluate the situation firsthand. He tried to secure money and supplies from Savoy and England on behalf of the kingdom, but disappointingly, James disregarded his entreaties, preferring a negotiated settlement or at least to delay until the question of who would succeed Matthias was settled. Elizabeth and Frederick consoled themselves with the thought that they would not have long to wait. In accordance with imperial tradition and law, a meeting of the seven electors (of whom Frederick was one) responsible for choosing the next Holy Roman emperor would begin in Frankfurt on July 20.

  Frederick did not attend the electoral diet personally, but sent proxies with instructions on how to cast the vote for the Palatinate. Instead, Frederick went to stay in the town of Amberg, in his own territory near the border with Bohemia, so he could get news from his agent in Prague as quickly as possible. The Protestant majority in Bohemia had called an emergency session with the i
ntent to depose Ferdinand and substitute a new sovereign in his place. It was critical that this be done quickly, as the king of Bohemia was also one of the seven electors responsible for choosing the new emperor. Of the remaining six, three were confirmed Catholics and three were Protestants.* It was possible, then, that whoever legitimately ruled Bohemia at the time of the election would cast the deciding vote.

  Ferdinand, as Matthias’s acknowledged successor, made a point of arriving early in Frankfurt to ease the process of his own election. The Bohemians sent a delegation to try to prevent him from casting a vote, arguing that he had violated his vows and should therefore not be considered as representing the kingdom in the election, but Ferdinand managed to have them excluded from the deliberations. These turned out to be extensive, however, and the diet dragged on into late August as the electors squabbled among themselves about whether it would be better to resolve the question of who ruled Bohemia before they chose the emperor, or after. Any delay worked in the Protestants’ favor, and Frederick, receiving updates on the ongoing negotiations from his agents in both Frankfurt and Prague, felt himself on the verge of triumph. “I have heard nothing from Bohemia this week, but it seems likely that, instead of gaining a crown at Frankfurt, Ferdinand may chance to lose two,” he observed to Elizabeth from his perch in Amberg on August 13, 1619. “God grant him that grace! What a happy prince is he, to be hated by everybody.”