Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier

by Charles Spencer

  Rupert expected to be rewarded for his exertions. He was no richer now than he had been when embarking on his voyage. Indeed, a decade of devoted service to the Royalist cause had failed to advance his personal fortune one jot. Whereas he had tolerated relative poverty in furtherance of his uncle’s aims, he now returned from a series of death-defying adventures eager to live in a style that befitted his princely birth.

  After much bad feeling on both sides, Charles and Rupert reached a compromise, dividing the limited spoils between them. Rupert saw that his men and the creditors in Toulon were properly repaid. To compensate for the poor return he had received from his exertions, Rupert accepted one commodity that his impoverished kinsman could confer: status. An observer reported to London: ‘Prince Rupert flourishes with his Blackamoors and new liveries, and so doth his cousin Charles, they having shared the monies made of the prize goods at Nantes; and in recompense Rupert is made Master of the Horse.’[468]

  The prince stayed in France, slowly recovering from the hardships of his voyage, his famed reserves of energy sapped. In June 1653, while in this weakened condition, he went to swim in the Seine and nearly drowned. This incident is indicative of a general change that had overtaken Rupert during his extreme exertions at sea: the fiery, confident, athletic young man who had set off for Kinsale had returned an altogether more sombre and muted figure. A series of lucky escapes, compounded by the loss of Maurice, had made him aware of his own mortality. Rupert’s changed outlook betrayed the fact that he had reached middle age prematurely, after a youth of repeated hard knocks. There was, from now on, a hardness about him. It had formed, like the barnacles on his ships’ keels, during his protracted sea quest. It was never to leave him.

  *

  Rupert ended his marathon voyage at the age of 33. He was keen to find a wife, but his financial means failed to match his princely rank: he could not wed while unable to provide his spouse with the means to live, entertain, and dress like a princess. After the disruption of the Civil War, the aristocracy found a satisfactory balance between status and fortune difficult to find. The Duke (previously Marquess) of Ormonde, the Royalist figurehead in Ireland, later wrote about his struggle to find a suitable bride for his son: ‘Where there is birth and an unblemished family there is but little money to be had; f10,000 is the most that can be expected in such cases: where money is to be had there is neither birth nor alliance to be expected, and none of those that I can hear of have such surety as to counterweight the defect of quality.’[469]

  Rupert epitomised this conundrum: he was a man of the highest birth, but impoverished. It was easier for his sisters to attract the attentions of eligible men. Elizabeth of Bohemia wrote to Secretary Nicholas in October 1654, ‘about a match betwixt Prince Adolphus the King of Sweden’s brother and Sophie; he has desired it very handsome’.[470] When this proposal failed, Sophie married the Bishop of Osnaburg, who would succeed his brother as the Elector of Hanover. Princess Elizabeth, who Descartes described as having ‘angelic looks’ and an ‘incomparable’ mind, found a serious suitor in Ladislaw, the young King of Poland, but Ladislaw expected his bride to become a Roman Catholic, a transfer of religious loyalties that she refused to contemplate. After this disappointment, Elizabeth moved to the Lutheran Abbey of Herford, rising to become its abbess. The strawberry blonde Princess Henrietta, whose oval face had a lilies and roses complexion, was the beauty of the family. She married Prince Ragotski in 1651, but died the same year. Rupert’s career as soldier and sailor had provided him with more fame and respect than any of his sisters. However, his poverty undermined his marital prospects.

  The end of the Thirty Years’ War restored part of the Palatine lands to the prince’s elder brother, Charles Louis. The Holy Roman Emperor had also agreed to make provision for the Elector’s siblings, but Rupert was still a younger son. In England, at this time, a petition to Parliament challenged the concept and custom of primogeniture. ‘I do not deny but that there is a priority, a precedency of place, a civil respect due to the elder from the younger,’ wrote Champianus Northtonus in a pamphlet accompanying his request, ‘and before the Law, a blessing and special privilege and prerogative annexed to their birth, but I have not read that by virtue of that birthright, that then they had power to detain all the inheritance from the younger’.[471] This was the thinking of some of the aggrieved younger brothers of London, in 1654.

  Similar thoughts exercised Rupert as he prepared to leave for Heidelberg that same year, intending to secure his patrimony. The Palatinate had no history of everything going to the firstborn son: Rupert’s uncle — Frederick V’s brother — had been included in his father’s Will, with a bequest of ‘a domain in the low Palatinate worth about 100,000 florins’.[472]

  Rupert found life in the Stuart court-in-exile as frustrating as ever. He had maintained his close association with Sir Edward Herbert, and joined with lords Jermyn and Gerard in the faction opposed to the dominance of Clarendon in the council. However, Charles stood by his favourite and Rupert eventually threw in the towel, resigning the Mastership of the Horse and informing his cousin: ‘that he was resolved to look after his own affairs in Germany, and first to visit his brother in the Palatinate, and require what was due from him for his appanage, and then to go to the Emperor to receive the money that was due to him upon the treaty of Munster.’[473] He quit Paris in June 1654.

  Rupert’s visit with his brother was a disaster. Charles Louis has been portrayed by Rupert’s more partisan biographers as cold, calculating, and mean; whereas Rupert and Maurice had been prepared to sacrifice all for the Royalist cause, Charles Louis had collaborated with their enemies, hoping they might help him reclaim the Palatinate. However, it was Charles Louis’s duty to seek such a restoration: his father, Frederick V, had died heartbroken after his similar aims had been frustrated. Charles Louis would have been failing his hereditary duty if he had not made this task his priority.

  After the Thirty Years’ War, the Palatinate was ruined, its population either displaced or dead. Charles Louis was summoned to the Electors’ Diet in Prague in 1653, to discuss his future role with the Emperor, Ferdinand III. The two men met on White Mountain, where Frederick V’s army had been defeated in an hour a generation earlier. This meeting was so successful that it was assumed Charles Louis would soon be given back his father’s forfeited lands. The Emperor gave him a new title — Imperial Arch Treasurer — and Charles Louis looked forward with optimism to the next Diet at Ratisbon. There, Charles Louis was given a new, eighth electorate. His ancestors had been the senior electors. He was now the junior one. However, he had at least regained a seat round the table of Imperial influence.

  Charles Louis faced a daunting task, trying to make good the ravages of war and patch up his broken lands. As he embarked on this great challenge, Rupert appeared in Heidelberg, for a short stay en route for the Emperor’s Court. The younger prince arrived with a flourish at the end of June: his entourage had an African theme, with three black servants, the black boy brought back from his voyages, and a menagerie of parrots and monkeys. His reception was warm, a Commonwealth pamphlet recording that the prince was ‘met without the city by the Prince Elector his brother, accompanied of much Nobility and Gentry’, before adding, ‘but as for his brother Maurice, you are not like to hear any more news of him.’[474]

  Rupert was clear that he wanted part of the restored lands for himself. He asked for the county of Simmern, which his uncle had surrendered, before returning to Heidelberg. However, since this was the area from which Charles Louis and his heirs took their family name, it was an unrealistic demand. When Charles Louis tried to explain that he would grant his brother lands, but that reduced circumstances meant he could not meet Rupert’s ambitions, the younger brother sulked. He refused to accept the offer of Laubach, claiming its terrain was wet and unhealthy. The alternative, Umstadt, was also rejected: it was a border territory, whose ownership was constantly disputed by neighbours. Rupert did

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  not want to become his brother’s border guard, his life a constant fight against marauding Hessians.

  During the summer of 1654, the brothers’ relationship worsened. They had never been close, but now the gorge between them broadened. Both were stubborn and each struck the other as totally unreasonable. It seemed to Rupert that he was destined to be treated like Orlando, in Shakespeare’s As You Like It: a third son, due a slice of the family’s inheritance, but denied his birthright by a selfish and greedy elder brother.

  Rupert’s stay with his brother lasted three weeks. It was extended, after word arrived that the Imperial heir, the King of the Romans, had died of smallpox in Vienna. The superstitious citizens had been hit by an earthquake just before the death, and then witnessed a comet in the sky, before hearing the cathedral bells ringing by themselves. Now the Emperor was extremely ill. It seemed wise to avoid such a God-forsaken place, so Rupert chose instead to accompany Charles Louis on a tour of his dependencies. Parliamentarians, always eager for news of the prince, read that: ‘The Prince Elector, with his brother Prince Rupert, are returned to Heidelberg from their journey into the Duchy of Lautren, and the Counties of Strembergh and Creutznach, and there have taken throughout the new oath of allegiance.’[475] All the local nobility turned out to welcome Rupert home.

  However, even when the brothers tried to relax together, problems arose. The country sports they both enjoyed were poorly executed and intensified Rupert’s brooding resentment. He found his brother’s gamekeepers and huntsmen hopelessly amateur and offered to bring his English hounds, at his own expense, to replace the Elector’s pack. When the brothers went shooting, Rupert complained that the beaters gave him little warning when birds were approaching. Charles Louis, perhaps made jittery by his brother’s constant complaints, at one point accidentally let his gun off, singeing Rupert’s wig in the process. He was lucky not to be killed.

  To complicate matters further Rupert unwittingly became a participant in his brother’s unhappy love life. Charles Louis and his wife Charlotte had a terrible marriage: the Elector believed himself the victim of constant nagging, while the Electress felt her husband to be dismissive and cold. When Rupert arrived, Charlotte began to think of this dashing, unmarried, younger brother as a possible lover, to distract her from conjugal misery. The same thought does not appear to have crossed Rupert’s mind. Although the prince was glad to have an ally who shared his low opinion of his brother, Rupert seems to have ignored the increasingly obvious advances of his sister-in-law. In fact, Rupert had noticed a tall and striking 17-year-old, Louise von Degenfeld, who served as one of Charlotte’s ladies-in-waiting. Unfortunately, Charles Louis had also spotted her charms and had started sending her love notes in Italian, in which he apologised for being old, while encouraging her to become his mistress. Louise declined, refusing to compromise her honour. This made Charles Louis even keener and he contemplated making the virtuous girl his wife. Eager to scupper this plan, Charlotte insisted on remaining married, and looked to make any contact between her husband and Louise extremely difficult.

  All of these elements — the tortured marriage, the secret passions, the misdirected love, the jealous suspicion — led to a farcical climax, recounted by the princes’ youngest sister Sophie in her memoirs:

  The Elector had at last become fed up with the bad moods of his wife ... and had chosen as a mistress one of the ladies-in-waiting, named la baronne de Degenfeld, that the Electress was making for some time sleep in her bedroom. The business had gone on for quite a long time without the electress being aware of it, because she had not noticed the love that my brother Rupert had for this girl, in whose eyes she wanted to appear the most beautiful girl in her court. She discovered this love by a note that the prince wrote to this girl, which she believed to be for the electress, and which she passed to her [mistress] in closed hands. The electress believed it [was] also [intended for her], which made her say to the prince: ‘I do not know why you complain of me, nor what reason I have ever given you to doubt my affection.’[476]

  This conversation made the prince blush violently and the Electress realised by his confusion that the note had not been intended for her. She vented her embarrassment and anger on Louise, accusing her of being a slut.

  A few nights later, the Electress was woken by a noise, which turned out to be the Elector getting into Louise’s bed. Charlotte attacked the young girl viciously, biting deep into her little finger. The damage would have been much worse, but the Elector pushed himself between the two women and shouted for guards to come to his assistance. A truce between the women was arranged, but combusted spectacularly when the Electress discovered a hidden cache of love notes and jewels sent by her husband to his young love.

  Charles Louis’s sisters Elizabeth and Sophie walked in on the quarrel. They found Louise cowering behind her admirer, while Charlotte screamed abuse at them both, the jewels in her hand. Charlotte turned to her sisters-in-law and asked through her tears: ‘Princesses, this is the whore’s reward. Should it not be mine?’ Sophie thought this a wonderfully absurd question and got an attack of the giggles. Charlotte, hysterical, started to laugh and cry at the same time. However, when Charles Louis ventured that the gems should really be returned to Louise, Charlotte hurled the jewels round the room and screamed: ‘If they can not be mine, then there they are!’[477]

  Charles Louis locked Louise in a room for safety. When his wife went for supper, he let her out and moved her to a room above his bedroom. He then had a hole cut in his ceiling, so he could access his mistress by ladder. The ever-vigilant Charlotte discovered this route and was about to mount the ladder with a knife in her hand when her ladies-in-waiting forcibly restrained her.

  Charlotte would not allow a divorce, so Louise became Charles Louis’s morganatic wife. She bore him thirteen children and died during her fourteenth pregnancy.

  *

  The Thirty Years’ War had left much of mainland Europe in a dire state: the battlefield had claimed tens of thousands of victims, but the civilian population had also suffered from the devastation, rape, and pillage that came in the wake of warfare. The result was a pestilential landscape that had heaped repeated horrors on communities across the Continent: ‘In some of the villages’, Rupert’s sister Princess Elizabeth wrote to the philosopher Descartes, ‘there has been such a plague of the flies they call cousins that many men and animals have been stifled and rendered deaf and blind; they come in a cloud and go away in the same manner. The inhabitants attribute it to sorcery, but I account for it by the unusual floods from the river, lasting until April, when it was very warm’.[478] There were few opportunities for Rupert to ply his warrior trade in lands preoccupied with recovery, after the ravages of the three previous decades. He flirted with the idea of fighting for the Duke of Modena in 1655, but the plan was sabotaged by the French. In 1657 he briefly served the King of Hungary, ‘who they say will owe his Empirate to his sword’.[479]

  Meanwhile, Charles Louis was having trouble re-establishing himself in his returned lands. He had been given back Galsheim, a town near Bingen. Yet the Elector of Mainz claimed that one of his dependants, the Baron of Bremble, had a lifelong interest in the property, which produced useful revenue. Mainz turned out Charles Louis’s officers, ordered new fortifications to be built, and had the Palatine coat of arms pulled down and thrown into the Rhine. Both Electors prepared to fight. Later in 1654, the Bishop of Speyer twice refused to let one of the Palsgrave’s convoys pass through Deidesheim, even though it belonged to Charles Louis. He despatched 1,000 musketeers, backed up by a small cavalry force, which broke down the town’s main gates and made the bishop’s men flee to the safety of the castle. The Duke of Neuburg was also keeping lands in the county of Gulick from Charles Louis.

  Rupert could have been a useful military ally for his brother. However, his relationship with Charles Louis was sour enough for him not to want to help. Rupert decided to retire to a quieter life, where he could
immerse himself in his great passion, scientific experimentation. ‘Prince Rupert was fond of those sciences which soften and adorn a hero’s private hours; and knew how to mix them with his minutes of amusement, without dedicating his life to their pursuit,’ wrote an admiring Lord Orford, a significant naval and political figure in the late seventeenth century, ‘like us who, wanting capacity for momentous views, make serious study of what is only the transitory occupation of a genius.’ Orford believed that, with Rupert’s artistic abilities, if Charles I’s reign had been peaceful: ‘How agreeably had the prince’s congenial propensity flattered and confirmed the inclination of his uncle! How the muse of arts would have repaid the patronage of the monarch, when, for his first artist, she would have presented him with his nephew!’[480]

  Art and science combined in one of his more famous contributions to English life. While in Germany in the mid 1650s, Rupert was walking among some soldiers early one morning when he spotted a guard fiddling with his musket. The prince asked him what he was doing. The guard replied that the dew had rusted his gun and so he was scraping it clean. Rupert checked the soldier’s progress: ‘The Prince looking at it, was struck with something like a figure eaten into the barrel, with innumerable little holes closed together, like friezed work on gold or silver, part of which the soldier had scraped away ... He concluded, that some contrivance might be found to cover a brass plate with such a grained ground of fine pressed holes, which would undoubtedly give an impression all black, and that by scraping away proper parts, the smooth superficies would leave the rest of the paper white.’[481] This was the beginning of Rupert’s association with mezzotint engraving.

  Some have credited the Prince with being mezzotint’s creator, but it seems more likely that ‘mezzotinto’ was the invention of Colonel Ludwig von Sielen. Sielen’s family was from Cologne, but he spent many years in the United Provinces. In August 1642, when Prince Rupert was rallying to Charles I’s standard at Nottingham, Sielen proudly showed his patron, Amelia Elizabeth of Hesse-Cassel, an engraving the likes of which, he claimed, had never been seen before: ‘There is not a single engraver, a single artist of any kind, who can account for, or guess how this work is done, for, as Your Highness well knows, only three methods of work are recognised in engraving, viz: 1st, engraving or cutting; 2nd, biting with acid or etching; 3rd, a method very little used, executed in small dots made with punches, but which is difficult and so arduous that it is seldom practised. My method of operation is quite different from any of these although one only notices small dots and not a single line; and if in some parts this work seems to be done in hatching, it is notwithstanding, entirely dotted ...’[482]