Prince Rupert

He was a jewel of the Holy Roman Empire.

In sum, he had everything, if only he had been satisfied … [fn22]

Frederick’s doomed opportunism had huge ramifications. It accelerated a conflict that had ready combatants on both sides, and breathed life into the intricate alliances and bitter religious rivalries of Western Europe. During the ensuing Thirty Years’ War, spiritual concerns would be frequently cited. However, the predominant issues confronting the German lands were political and secular.

For Rupert and his siblings, their father’s miscalculation condemned them to a fragile future. Their childhood, instead of taking place in the glorious palace at Heidelberg, would be spent in exile.

Chapter Two

Childhood

‘The news is, that the Prince Palsgrave, with his lady and children, are come to The Hague in Holland, having made a long progress, or rather a pilgrimage, about Germany from Prague.’

Letter of James Howell, a gossip, 1620

Rupert’s childhood was set against his family’s constant expectation of restoration. The prince’s youngest sister Sophie remembered her siblings’ favourite game: a fantasy return journey to Heidelberg. The children would sit on chairs, pretending they were coaches, and then undertake the make-believe ride ‘home’. There were stops, to rest the horses and refresh the travellers, before the longed for destination was reached. Whether this dream homecoming could ever become reality depended on their father and his ability to knit together an alliance strong enough to defeat a many-headed enemy.

By mid 1622, Frederick had lost not just his Bohemian kingdom, but also all his Palatine lands. Their reclamation remained his focus for the rest of his life. The Spaniards proposed that the Palsgrave’s heir, Frederick Henry, be raised at Emperor Ferdinand’s court, in Austria. He would then marry a Habsburg princess and, on coming of age, would be restored to his father’s electorate. The compromise was clearly unacceptable: Frederick Henry would have to become Roman Catholic if he wanted a peaceful return of his ancestral lands. By rejecting this formula, Frederick elected to fight for his crowns, not bargain for them.

Though grateful for the sanctuary offered by the United Provinces, Frederick was keen to minimise his period as a Dutch pensioner: ‘May it please God,’ he wrote to Elizabeth, ‘to give us a little corner of the world, to live there happily together, it is all the good fortune that I desire. But staying at The Hague hardly appeals to me.’[fn1] Despite his humiliating displacement, Frederick’s marriage continued to be happy and bear fruit, the nursery receiving a new royal recruit on an almost annual basis: Louisa Hollandina was born in 1622 and was made a godchild of the States-General (which resulted in a useful, additional pension, of £200 per year); Louis, the seventh child, appeared in 1623; Edward followed, in 1625; Henrietta, in 1626; Philip, in 1627; Charlotte, in 1629; Sophie, in 1630; and Gustavus, in 1632. There were thirteen children in all: Rupert had seven brothers and five sisters.

Given the continuing expansion of their brood, Frederick and Elizabeth were thankful when, in 1623, the Prince of Orange offered the loan of one of his larger houses. The Prinsenhof had once been a convent dedicated to the memory of St Barbara. It was situated in Leyden, a town known for its learning and for its textile industry, and fronted onto a canal. A bridge over this waterway led to the town’s famed university, which produced large numbers of Protestant priests, and which the Palatine princes attended. The Prinsenhof, long since demolished, was Rupert’s family’s principal home from when he was aged 3 until he turned 21.

Frederick also established a hunting lodge for the family at Rhenen. This was halfway between Arnhem and Utrecht, on the Lek, a tributary of the lower Rhine. The building had previously been a monastery and was a gift from the province of Utrecht, which also provided some of the house’s furniture. It had none of the grandeur of the castle at Heidelberg, but Frederick oversaw renovations, determined to provide a retreat fit for his queen. The diarist John Evelyn visited Elizabeth there in the summer of 1641. He recalled Rhenen being ‘a neat palace or country house, built after the Italian manner’.[fn2]

Queen Elizabeth retired to Rhenen for much of each summer: she loved the place for its tranquillity, beauty, and, above all, its lack of ceremony, which led to a welcome reduction in household expenditure. The exiles were living from hand to mouth, selling valuables to fund their lives. It was a family joke that they frequently dined on pearls and diamonds, since pawned jewels underwrote the domestic budget. Of the children, Rupert was the one who loved his time at Rhenen the most — from an early age he had a passion for hunting and the outdoors.

*

It was believed that upper-class children should be taught to read as soon as they could talk. Rupert had an early and easy facility with words: ‘Rupert is here blithe and well,’ Frederick Henry wrote to Charles Louis. ‘He is beginning to talk, and his first words were “Praise the Lord” in Bohemian.’[fn3] By the age of 3, Rupert was able to speak some English, Czech, and French. ‘Little Rupert is very clever’, his father wrote to Elizabeth, in 1622, ‘to understand so many languages.’[fn4] While still young, he mastered Dutch, but had no time for Latin and Greek. He insisted that dead languages were no use to him, for he was going to be a soldier.

Elizabeth and Frederick had both been brought up away from their parents. Despite this, Frederick was a warm father: Sophie recalled in middle age her father’s ‘tenderness for children, which was one of his most lovely qualities’.[fn5] However, Elizabeth’s maternal instincts were muted. The children remembered their mother ‘preferring the antics of her monkeys and lap-dogs to those of her babies’.[fn6] Indeed, she even seemed more enamoured of her guinea pigs than she was of her offspring.

The Palatine children were placed in the care of a middle-aged couple, Monsieur and Madame de Plessen. ‘Madame Ples’ had been Frederick’s governess when he was a boy. Frederick wrote instructions, outlining the upbringing he wanted for his heir, Frederick Henry: ‘Be careful to breed him in the love of English and of my people, for that must be his best living; and, above all things, take heed he prove not a Puritan, which is incompatible with Princes who live by order, but they by confusion.’[fn7] Rupert and the other princes and princesses were brought up with similar guidelines in place.

Rupert was an inquisitive child, who particularly enjoyed natural history, collecting objects of interest with his elder sister Elizabeth. He had a scientific mind that found maths and calculations easy, and chemical experiments fun. He was also artistic: he and his sister Louise were extremely able painters and they received tuition from the Court artist Gerard van Honthorst. With so many siblings, there was always someone on hand who shared your tastes.

We do not know the exact routine of Rupert’s schooldays. The boys and the girls were educated separately, but female education was in no way inferior to that of the males. The Netherlands at this time was enjoying a flowering of intellectual life, and one of its stars was Anna Maria van Schurmann, ‘the Dutch Minerva’, who lectured at the universities of Leyden and Utrecht. Both sexes were given a thorough grounding in logic and mathematics; writing and drawing; singing and playing instruments. The school day was full and needed structure. Princess Sophie remembered a demanding schedule, which made the children greet minor illness as a fortunate release from drudgery.

Sophie and her sisters rose at seven each morning. They spent the first part of the morning praying, reading the Bible, and attending tutorials. Dancing lessons, from ten until eleven o’clock, provided a welcome break from religious and academic instruction. At eleven o’clock the princes would return from university for lunch. This took place around a long table and was conducted with all the formality of a functioning court. The children could easily forget that their royal family was in exile: ‘When I entered’, Sophie remembered, ‘my brothers were ranged opposite with their Governor and Gentlemen-in-Waiting behind them. I had to make a deep curtsey to the Princes and a little one to the others; a very deep one on taking my place, and a little one to my Governess who with her daughters made a very deep one to me on entering …’[fn8] There were further curtseys when the royal children handed their gloves to attendants, another on reaching forward to wash their hands in a bowl, and a final flurry of bobbing when taking their place at table.

Sophie’s recollections betray a childhood of stultifying monotony. ‘All was so regulated that one knew on each day of the week what one would eat, like in a Convent.’[fn9] Rigid Calvinism underpinned the timetable: on Sundays and Wednesdays a pair of priests or professors would eat with the children, their conversation always focused on religion. The girls would then have a rest until two o’clock in the afternoon, when another series of lessons would begin. Supper at six was only a brief respite in a day devoted to God. Bible readings and prayers aided the digestion, until the children’s bedtime at half past eight. This was Sophie and her sisters’ daily routine until they were 9 or 10 years old.

The linchpin of the children’s instruction was the need to become ‘Jesuit-proof’.[fn10] Frederick felt this could be more easily achieved through learning the Heidelberg Catechism, the embodiment of the Palatinate’s Calvinist state religion, by heart. Upholding Protestantism against Catholicism had caused the family’s displacement, and Frederick and Elizabeth were determined that the children should remember this and celebrate it as the honourable — if regrettable — consequence of virtuous devotion. Their sacrifice could never be viewed as being in vain, if it remained wrapped in the shroud of martyrdom.

The exiles were repeatedly touched by tragedy. Young Louis died of a fever while teething, prompting Elizabeth to write: ‘He was the prettiest child I had, and the first I ever lost.’[fn11] An even heavier blow fell in January 1629. Frederick Henry, the eldest prince, had become the Elector’s constant companion. Sir Henry Wotton, in his Reliquiae, called the boy ‘a gentleman of very sweet hope’. We can glimpse exuberance and a boyish charm in a letter he wrote to his grandfather, James I, when aged 9:

Sire,

I kiss your hand. I would fain see your Majesty. I can say Nominativo hic, haec, hoc, and all five declensions, and a part of pronomen, and a part of verbum. I have two horses alive that can go up my stairs, a black horse and a chestnut horse.

I pray God to bless your Majesty.

Your Majesty’s

Obedient Grandchild

Frederick Henry [fn12]

Frederick V had hoped to prosper by investing in a Dutch naval expedition. Its return was imminent and it was known to have several captured Spanish galleons in tow. The Palsgrave took 15-year-old Frederick Henry with him to Haarlem-Meere, to see the ships make harbour. However, in order to save time, or perhaps money, Frederick took his son aboard a packed public ferry. It was foggy and, in the confusion of a busy port, their vessel was rammed by a bigger boat and quickly sank. The Elector was thrown clear of the ferry and clung to a rope till pulled from the water. His son was not so fortunate: Frederick could hear him calling, ‘Save me, father! Save me!’ However, in the gloom it proved impossible to locate the boy, and soon his cries stopped. The next morning Frederick Henry was found, his lifeless body tangled in the ferry’s rigging.

Frederick never recovered from the death of his favourite child. He wrote to inform Charles I of the loss, but found it impossible to describe the depth of his agony: ‘It having pleased God to add to my preceding hardships a new affliction, the pain of which cannot be expressed with the pen.’[fn13] Charles reacted with sincere compassion. On a practical note, he transferred the £300 annual pension previously drawn by Frederick’s second son (and his own godson), Charles Louis, to Rupert.

Charles Louis was now the Palatine heir. He was a more serious character than Frederick Henry. He had spent much of his childhood with his sister Elizabeth at their grandmother’s house in Krossen. In 1627, they moved to Leyden. Charles Louis was reserved and prickly, and found it difficult to adjust to life with his fun-loving, energetic siblings. They called their earnest brother ‘Timon’, after the people-hating central figure of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. It was a nickname Rupert used against his elder brother all his life.

Rupert was developing a strongly individual personality. In contrast to Timon’s cold reserve, Rupert was fiery, mischievous, and passionate. His family called him ‘Robert le Diable’ — Rupert the Devil — and marvelled at his bravery and perseverance. A tale from Rupert’s youth gives a snapshot of his energetic and uncompromising nature.

The Prince took part in a hunting party hosted by his mother. During the chase, the fox tried to escape the hounds by slipping down a hole. Rupert was in time to see one of his favourite dogs disappear after the fox, until it, too, was out of sight. The prince, worried when the hound failed to reappear, started to wriggle into the earth as well. A man called Billingsby, watching first fox, then hound, then prince, go underground, entered the hole himself, took hold of Rupert’s heels, and pulled him out. The prince reappeared, still holding firmly onto the dogs’ back legs. The hound shared its master’s determination: in its jaws was the fox.

*

Although Elizabeth was happy to live away from her children during their nursery phase, she moved them from Leyden when they became adolescents. She kept her daughters by her side, at The Hague. The three elder girls, Elizabeth, Louisa Hollandina, and Henrietta, were physically very attractive, and were noted adornments at the Winter Queen’s court. Sophie, who arrived in 1641, was less good-looking, yet she had a wonderful brain and a very quick wit, and became extremely popular. The boys, however, were not needed at court. Elizabeth wanted them to train for their life’s purpose, the retrieval of their father’s lost lands.

The Elector was dependent on the continued support of others. The United Provinces provided his home and a basic pension, but outside Protestant aid was needed, if the Palatine and Bohemia were ever to be regained. In 1625, Denmark, England, France, Sweden, Transylvania, and various German territories expressed their joint intention of assisting Frederick in his quest.

England’s involvement seemed to promise much: James I had died in 1625 and had been succeeded by Elizabeth’s brother, Charles. On his deathbed James regretted his stubborn refusal to help the Palatine cause and urged his heir to right the wrong. Charles I was sympathetic to Frederick’s plight and the Elector played on his compassion: he sent Charles a portrait by Poelenberg of his seven elder children (Henrietta and Philip were considered too young for inclusion), with hunting trophies at their feet, in a classical landscape. The grand canvas was accompanied by a humble message: ‘The great portrait in which your Majesty will see all your little servants and maidens whom you bring up.’[fn14] Frederick was determined that his brother-in-law should honour family obligations, in a way that his late father-in-law had repeatedly failed to do. Charles demonstrated his loyal intentions by declaring war on Spain in support of Frederick. When, in 1625, Charles sent the Duke of Buckingham to attack Cadiz, the royal favourite flew the Palatine flag as his battle standard. It brought him no luck: the attack was a disaster.

For the next four years, England remained at war with Spain. In 1627 Charles declared that: ‘He had no other original quarrel with Spain but the cause of his dear sister, which he could no more distinguish from his own than nature had done their bloods, so would he never lend ear to any terms of composition, without her knowledge, consent and council.’[fn15] These were noble sentiments, sincerely meant. However, in 1629, Charles decided to dispense with Parliament for the foreseeable future, and soon found that the raft of questionable fundraising measures he relied on was incapable of supporting a costly foreign policy. The king made immediate peace with France, but found it harder to agree terms with Spain: the issue of the Palatinate could not be resolved to both sides’ satisfaction. In the end it was simply left out of the peace treaty. From 1630, Frederick was once more left without English military aid.

Yet it was at this point that Frederick enjoyed his greatest hope of restoration. In the autumn of 1629, Sweden and Poland signed a six-year truce. This left the Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus, free to enter the Thirty Years’ War. The following year he landed in Germany with 10,000 men and in September 1631 he trounced the Imperial army at the battle of Breitenfeld. Frederick believed this was the first steppingstone to ultimate victory. He was flattered by the compliments paid to him by the Swedish military genius. Gustavus Adolphus, meanwhile, appreciated that Germany could only find peace if the Palatine was returned to its electoral family.

Frederick spent much of his time away from home, on campaign, his sense of princely duty overriding his longing to be with his wife and children. In January 1632 he set off on what he anticipated would be the pivotal campaign — the one that would see him restored at last. Before he left, he wrote to Charles I asking him to look after his wife and children while he was gone. The fighting went well: in May, Frederick accompanied Gustavus Adolphus into Munich, the capital of enemy Bavaria. The Swedish king insisted that Frederick lodge in the abandoned palace of his great adversary, Maximilian. While there, Frederick found many of his cannon, captured at White Mountain a dozen years earlier. He dared to think that the tide had turned — that he would soon be back with his family, in the castle at Heidelberg.

Such thoughts fuelled Frederick’s terrible homesickness. He and his wife kept up a passionate and constant correspondence, their letters accompanied by gifts, and miniatures of themselves and their children. Frederick wrote to Elizabeth from Munich: ‘I am very pleased that Rupert is in your good books, and that Charles is doing so well … God make me so happy as to be able to see you again soon!’[fn16] In fact, the Palsgrave would never be reunited with his wife and children again.

With ultimate victory in sight, the relationship with Gustavus Adolphus had begun to sour. The Swede insisted that, in return for his restoration, the Palsgrave must guarantee equal rights to his Lutheran and Calvinist subjects. Frederick took offence at this perceived meddling in his sovereignty. He decided to return to his family, rather than resolve the disagreement. Riding from Munich to Mentz, he was struck down by a serious fever, which left him delirious and short of breath. When it seemed that he was over the worst of it, news arrived of the battle of Latzen: his Swedish allies had narrowly won the day, but Gustavus Adolphus had perished in the thick of the fighting.

Frederick was consumed by depression: his hopes had rested on the continuing military success of the warrior king. Gustavus Adophus’s death made everything desperate, once more. A few days later, to his doctor’s surprise, Frederick died, meekly surrendering a life that had promised so much, but whose defining moment had been the risky acceptance of the Bohemian crown. Frederick was buried in a grave so anonymous that soon its whereabouts were forgotten.

The following month, on Christmas Eve, Elizabeth wrote to her brother Charles I that she was ‘the most wretched creature that ever lived in this world, and this shall I ever be, having lost the best friend that I ever had, in whom was all my delight’.[fn17] She had genuinely adored her husband and wore mourning for the rest of her life. A decade later guests commented on how her receiving chamber was still hung with black velvet. Elizabeth remembered all the significant moments she had shared with Frederick and marked the anniversaries of his death by fasting.

The Winter Queen remained as loyal to her husband’s aims as to his memory. ‘The subjects of this good Prince’, wrote two Englishmen who fought in Gustavus Adolphus’s army, ‘may have plentiful matter of consolation, from that most heroical, and masculine spirited princess, his Queen; and from that sweet and numerous issue, which he bath left behind him: which promises them an entire affranchisement, one day again; and the resettling of a family so many ways considerable, as is one of the first and ancientliest descended, of all Europe. An issue so fair; and for their numbers, such a blessing: as were not only prepared by God, for a present comfort to their widowed mother: but (which their own excellent towardliness, gives pregnant hopes of), for the raising of their own fair family again; and engrafting the Palatine branches, into most of the great Houses of the Empire.’[fn18] The widow focused her energy on helping Charles Louis reclaim his father’s lost crown.

Elizabeth received an invitation from her brother Charles to return to England, where he could look after her and her fatherless children. She declined, claiming that she would rather travel home when not in mourning. Elizabeth also pointedly mentioned the military support that the United Provinces were offering Charles Louis for the 1633 campaigning season. She asked, though, that Charles offer his protection to her many children. Apart from God, she said, Charles was their ‘sole resource’.[fn19]

Chapter Three

Boy Soldier

‘The Low-countreys are (without all controversie) worthily stiled the Academie of warre, where the art militarie (if any where) truly flourisheth …’

Militarie Instructions for the Cavallrie, 1632

Tales of brave forefathers heightened Rupert’s early appetite for warfare. His most impressive fighting ancestor was Frederick the Victorious, Count Palatine from 1425 until 1476. An inspirational leader, Frederick was celebrated for his personal bravery and his penchant for the full cavalry charge. In July 1460, at the battle of Pfeddersheim, Frederick led his 2,000 horsemen in an assault against the combined forces of the Archbishop of Mainz, the Count of Leiningen, and Ludwig the Black. Frederick’s battle cry was: ‘Today Prince Elector, or no more!’ This do or die attitude brought total success: Frederick’s enemies were shattered by the Palatine horse and fled the field. The tactics remained the same through the Palsgrave’s subsequent years of triumph.

As Rupert contemplated a life in arms, the romance of ancestral glory was tempered by the shocking reality of the Thirty Years’ War. The conflict cost tens of thousands of civilian lives and was felt with particular brutality in the Palatinate: located at the crossroads of destruction, its population of 600,000 would be reduced by two-thirds by the conclusion of hostilities. Emperor Ferdinand II used his position as the shield-bearer of Roman Catholicism to annihilate his opponents. Rupert grew up hearing first-hand reports of outrageous Papist cruelty.

When the Catholic League under Tilly captured Magdeburg, in 1631, its excesses were broadcast round Europe. ‘The church of St John was full of womenfolk’, wrote an eyewitness, Salvius, to the Riksrad of Hamburg, ‘whom they locked in from the outside, thereafter throwing burning torches through the windows. The Croats and Walloons behaved mercilessly, throwing children into the fire and tying the more beautiful and well-off women citizens to their stirrups, made off with them behind their horses out of town. They spiked small children onto their lances, waved them around and cast them into the flames. Turks, Tartars and heathens could not have been more cruel.’[fn1]