Daughters of the Winter Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  The brothers met at Guildford, about thirty miles southwest of London, on July 1, and clearly more than just the negotiations at Westphalia were discussed. The disagreement over English politics aside, Karl Ludwig, nearing his thirtieth birthday, asserted himself as head of the family. The reacquisition of the Palatine, in whatever form that took, came first, and both of his younger brothers consented to accept whatever terms and conditions came out of his negotiations with the empire. There was then the problem of what to do in the wake of d’Epinay’s murder. The family simply could not afford another scandal at this delicate time. Someone was going to have to go back to The Hague to babysit the queen of Bohemia and her court and ensure that there was no repetition of this sort of behavior in the future. Maurice, as the junior member of the company, was assigned this unenviable task. Rupert, who was now prohibited from combat in both Germany and England and who was consequently rapidly running out of places where he was allowed to fight, was sent to Queen Henrietta Maria’s court in exile in France, where Charles I’s eldest son, the Prince of Wales, had also fled. There he was made a field marshal and recruited by the French to fight the Spanish in Flanders. Karl Ludwig remained in England to try to salvage relations with Parliament in the hopes of getting those all-important bequests restored, and to keep an eye on developments.

  Such was the stern reaction of her eldest son to his mother’s midlife flirtation with the marquis d’Epinay. The Winter Queen did not know it yet, but among her children she had just been dethroned.

  It was a condition that seemed to run in the family. For just at that moment, Charles I was facing the capitulation of his own sovereignty to Parliament.

  ALTHOUGH THE KING’S RUSE of disguising himself as a servant had succeeded, and he was able, once he had stolen away from Oxford, to surrender himself to the protection of the Scottish army, this scheme, like so many of Charles’s other undertakings, had not worked out quite according to plan. Rather than coming to an arrangement with their sovereign against Parliament, as Charles had hoped, the Scots instead came to an arrangement with Parliament against their sovereign, Parliament having had the advantage of being able to underscore any commitment to their mutual religious objectives with a payment of hard cash. Accordingly, after extended negotiations and a bribe of £100,000, the Scottish army agreed to hand Charles over and withdraw from England. By August of 1647 the king was under house arrest at his wife’s castle at Hampton Court, about fifteen miles west of London.

  But his cause was by no means lost. In fact, ironically, Charles was actually in a stronger position than he had been since the war started. Five years of opposition rule had not endeared Oliver Cromwell and the other Parliamentarian leaders to the English citizenry. Sympathy had swung in the other direction; the king was now far more popular than his jailers. There were Royalist uprisings all over England, and more than half of the navy rebelled, their captains and crews pledging allegiance to the king and fleeing with their ships to The Hague to organize a counterattack. Even the Scots repented their decision and actually sent emissaries to Charles assuring him of their loyalty and support and offering to invade England again in order to rescue him!

  Under the circumstances, Cromwell, upon whom, as a result of his storied military successes, the leadership of Parliament had devolved, was ready to make a deal that would return Charles, in some fashion, to his throne. Accordingly, the king was treated not as a prisoner of war but as an honored guest who, although he could not leave Hampton Court, was allowed to have servants and company. Even better, negotiations to bring the war to a peaceful conclusion, which was clearly the optimal solution for the kingdom, commenced in earnest.

  Karl Ludwig was among those who visited his uncle that fall, no doubt to encourage Charles to make the compromises necessary to end hostilities, and his account of their interview is revealing. “His Majesty, upon occasion, doth still blame the way I have been in all this time,” he complained to his mother, referring to his having taken the side of Parliament over that of the king. “I do defend it as the only shelter I have, when my public business, and my person, have received so many neglects at Court. Madame, I would not have renewed the sore of his ill-usage of me since the Queen hath had power with him, but that he urged me to it, saying that I should rather have lived on bread and water, than have complied with the Parliament, which, he said I did ‘only to have one chicken more in my dish,’ and that he would have thought it a design more worthy of his nephew if I had gone about to have taken the crown from his head… Neither do I know of anyone, but Our Saviour, that would have ruined himself for those that hate me [Queen Henrietta Maria],” he finished bitterly.*

  Just as it is clear from this letter that Charles’s opinions of his eldest nephew’s behavior had not changed, so did the king remain committed to the policy of recovering his throne without yielding to parliamentary demands. He was particularly inflexible on religious issues. “As the Church can never flourish without the protection of the Crown, so the dependency of the Church upon the Crown is the chiefest support of regal authority,” he opined to his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, in a letter of August 26. “This is that which is so well understood by the… rebels, that no concessions will content them without the change of Church government.”

  Emboldened by the pledges of support from Scotland and the navy and riding the tide of his restored popularity, Charles believed if only he could muster the forces for a new invasion, he would win. To buy time, he went through the motions of negotiating without ever intending to treat it seriously, all the while continuing to intrigue surreptitiously through ciphered letters to Queen Henrietta Maria in France, a subterfuge that Cromwell, who had spies planted all around, soon discovered. Tipped off on November 18, 1647, that the king had smuggled out one such missive by having it sewn into a messenger’s saddle, Cromwell and one of his compatriots rode swiftly to intercept the document. “As soon as we had the letter we opened it,” Cromwell later revealed. “We found the King had acquainted the Queen that he was now courted by both the factions, the Scotch Presbyterians and the army, and which bid fairest should have him, but he thought he should close with the Scots sooner than the others. Upon… finding we were not likely to have any tolerable terms from the King, we immediately, from this time forward, resolved his ruin.”

  But of course Charles didn’t know this, and continued to plot and make plans to escape. He managed with the help of a loyal colonel in the army to steal away from Hampton Court, intending to take a ship to France, but the boat was delayed and he ended up a prisoner again, this time on the Isle of Wight, off the southern coast of England. But there was yet reason for optimism. To the west, Royalist supporters in Wales were in full rebellion, forcing Cromwell to once again take the field. By May 1648 a Scottish invasion was expected daily by the Parliament, and in July, Rupert and the Prince of Wales left France to join Maurice at The Hague, where Rupert was named commander of the royal navy in Holland. By fall, a fleet was in readiness to sail to Charles’s rescue.

  And then, on October 14, 1648, a momentous event occurred on the Continent. An accord had finally been reached, and a peace treaty signed by all the combatants in Germany. The Thirty Years’ War was over.

  THE AGREEMENT, KNOWN AS the Treaty of Westphalia, was as comprehensive and far-reaching a document as has ever been produced in Western civilization. The 135 squabbling delegates had somehow managed to address not simply political and territorial issues but religious divisions as well. The first order of business, of course, had been to come to an understanding with the two occupying foreign powers, Sweden and France. This was accomplished through bribery. Sweden received a cash payment of five million thalers and the province of Pomerania, in northern Germany on the Baltic Sea, which is what it had always wanted. As Pomerania had formerly been part of the electorate of Brandenburg, Frederick William had to be compensated for the diminution of his property. He reluctantly agreed, in the interest of peace, to take two million thalers, the cities of
Halberstadt and Herford, and the promise of Magdeburg in the future in exchange for ceding part of his homeland to the Swedes.

  France got an even bigger prize: Ferdinand, bowing to realities (the French army was in possession of these anyway), formally surrendered the region of Alsace-Lorraine, as well as the towns of Breisach, Benfeld, Neuenburg, and Saverne, all of which had for centuries owed allegiance to the emperor. It was a reward of immense proportions; it gave France control of a hundred miles of the Rhine that had formerly served Germany as protection from invasion; it changed the equation of Europe.*

  Of the many participants in this horrific, decades-long war, by this settlement there is no question that France emerged the clear victor. Never again would the Habsburgs achieve the power or greatness they had assumed at the start of the century was theirs by birthright. Although he did not live to sign the papers, Richelieu’s handprint was nonetheless all over the Treaty of Westphalia—so much so that it might well be considered his last will and testament, his legacy to France.

  The foreign conquerors having been satisfied, the delegates then turned to the problems of Germany and the empire. A general amnesty was declared, and as had been promised earlier in the Peace of Prague, the emperor agreed that 50 percent of the judges and advisers to the imperial court would be Catholic and the other 50 percent Protestant. But he went even further: By the Treaty of Westphalia, no matter how many times Church property had changed hands from Protestant to Catholic or vice versa over the course of the war, everything was thereby ordered to go back to the way it was on January 1, 1624. For nonreligious property, ownership went back to the way it was in 1620, before the war had even begun.

  Except for the Palatinate. But even here there were concessions. The duke of Bavaria got to keep the Upper Palatinate and the title of elector, it was true, but Karl Ludwig was given back the Lower Palatinate, which included the family estate at Heidelberg, and an eighth electorate was created specifically for him. As a further incentive to take the deal, Ferdinand agreed to pay the queen of Bohemia’s younger sons a total of 400,000 thalers, and to provide a marriage portion of 10,000 thalers to each of her daughters as compensation for the loss of the Upper Palatinate. To these terms, Karl Ludwig agreed.

  And so the war ended. Upon the signing of the treaty, trumpets were sounded and heralds sent in every direction to proclaim that all fighting was to cease immediately. Every prisoner was to be set free, and any towns, villages, and castles that had been captured were to be returned.

  There was great rejoicing throughout the empire but the cost of the fearsome struggle remained. In 1619, when Frederick and Elizabeth first entered Prague so hopefully in state, the kingdom of Bohemia, the epicenter of the conflict, had boasted a population of two million subjects. At the time of the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia, the citizenry had been reduced to 700,000. Half of the houses in the realm were vacant or destroyed, and 50 percent of the farmland, scorched by combat, lay fallow. The statistics for central Germany were even worse: there, the duchies lost 75 percent of their inhabitants, 66 percent of their homes, and 80 percent of their livestock. On average, as a whole, Germany lost 50 percent of its population in the Thirty Years’ War, either through carnage, disease, or starvation. It represented the worst holocaust in the history of the world to that date. Even the plague was not so thorough.

  ALTHOUGH THE QUEEN OF BOHEMIA and her family had been forced by the Treaty of Westphalia to cede the Upper Palatinate to the elector of Bavaria, the agreement was nonetheless cause for rejoicing. At least now they could safely return to their beautiful castle in Heidelberg, and Karl Ludwig would still wield some influence in Germany as an elector (although not nearly as much as before). But the news of the signing of the historic agreement had barely had time to sink in before the family was confronted with yet a further ominous development in the struggle for power in England. For on December 15, 1648, exactly two months after peace was declared in Germany, it was resolved by Parliament “that the King be forthwith sent for to be brought under safeguards to Windsor Castle, and there to be secured in order to the bringing of him speedily to justice.”

  The timing of this decree was not coincidental. With the conclusion of the war in Germany, the Puritan leaders of Parliament were concerned that the French court would now turn its attention (and its victorious army) toward England. Certainly this was what Queen Henrietta Maria, who had established herself at St. Germain so as to be near her sympathetic sister-in-law Anne of Austria, was clamoring for. Charles I’s eldest son, the prince of Wales, had already (unsuccessfully) attempted a rescue mission by sea, using the decamped ships of the royal navy. Cromwell and his supporters felt they could not take the risk that the king would escape only to return at the head of a large foreign army that would impose unpalatable conditions on a defeated Parliament. To prevent this possibility, they had determined on an extreme and savage course of action.

  On December 23, Charles was brought under heavy guard from the Isle of Wight to London. There, on January 20, 1649, in an eerie replication of the proceedings against his grandmother Mary, queen of Scots, the king of England stood trial for high treason in front of English judges at Westminster Hall.

  And just as Mary had protested that as a queen, she could be tried only by a gathering of her peers (other members of royalty), so Charles argued that the parliamentary action against him was illegal, as his judges did not have the standing necessary to pass judgment on a king. “It is not my case alone: it is the freedom and liberty of the people of England; and do you pretend what you will, I stand more for their liberties; for if power without law may make laws, may alter the fundamental laws of the Kingdom, I do not know what subject he is in England that can be sure of his life, or anything he calls his own,” he asserted eloquently.

  But of course it didn’t matter, and the trial continued inexorably along its grim path. Again like Mary, the king was not allowed to speak in his own defense. His inquisitors wanted only to hear him confess to his crimes, and when Charles refused to do so and tried to answer the charges, they shouted him down. His trial was concluded more quickly than his grandmother’s, in a mere six days, but the same preordained, pitiless verdict was handed down: that Charles, “as a tyrant, traitor, murderer, and public enemy to the good people of this nation, shall be put to death by the severing of his head from his body.”

  On January 29, the day before his execution was scheduled to take place, his persecutors allowed him to say good-bye to two of his children: his second daughter, thirteen-year-old Elizabeth, and his youngest son, eight-year-old Henry, both of whom were still in England. It was a heartbreaking scene. The children, frightened and bewildered, cried and clung to their father, and Charles in turn had to be strong for their sakes. He spoke gently but as an adult to his daughter to console her, but then had to face the boy. He put Henry on his knee and, perhaps remembering the plan of the conspirators in the long-ago Gunpowder plot, spoke lovingly but firmly to him. “Sweetheart,” he said to his youngest son, “now they will cut off thy father’s head; mark, child, what I say: they will cut off my head and perhaps make thee a king; but, mark what I say: you must not be a king so long as your brothers Charles and James do live; for they will cut off your brothers’ heads when they catch them, and cut off thy head too at the last, and therefore I charge you do not be made a king by them.” “I will sooner be torn in pieces first!” promised the child bravely through his sobs.

  On the morning of the next day, January 30, 1649, Charles was brought to Whitehall. As with Mary, the public was invited to witness the fruits of justice, and so the scaffold had been set up outside the Banqueting House. The execution ceremony was short. The king’s hair was gathered into a white satin nightcap, the better to expose his neck to the ax, just as Mary’s hair had been gathered up and her neck laid bare some sixty years before; he, too, knelt on a cushion and laid his head upon the block. Then, by prearranged signal, he stretched out his arms, indicating his readiness to receive the
blow.

  The executioner’s aim was sure. In this one detail did Charles’s experience of death differ materially from his grandmother’s. His life was severed with the first stroke. “Behold the head of a traitor!” came the cry as the evidence of the executioner’s handiwork was held aloft for all to see.

  Monarchs had died on the battlefield but never before in the history of the realm had a sitting English king been tried, convicted, and sentenced to decapitation. It was a shocking and brutal act from which there was no turning back.

  AT THE HAGUE, THE queen of Bohemia was in the middle of a public holiday celebrating the end of hostilities in Germany and the return of the Lower Palatinate when Karl Ludwig suddenly turned up with the news of her brother’s beheading. Stunned and grief-stricken, she immediately canceled the festivities, and from then on she set apart January 30 as a day of mourning every year until her death.

  Rupert, too, took the news hard. In one of his last letters to his nephew, smuggled out during the period when he still believed the Scottish army would come to his rescue, Charles had written him that “since I saw you, all your actions have more than confirmed the good opinion I have of you. Assuring you that, next my children… I shall have the most care of you, and shall take the first opportunity either to employ you or have your company. And, be confident that this shall be really performed by your most loving Uncle, and constant faithful Friend,” the king had closed with genuine affection. “The bloody and inhumane murder of my late dread uncle of ever renowned memory hath administered to me fresh occasion to be assistant, both in Counsel and to the best of my personal power, to my dear cousin [Charles’s eldest son, formerly the Prince of Wales], now Charles II of England,” read Rupert’s grim response to the execution in a proclamation issued on March 9, 1649.