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in the process of being written (possibly ghosted by himself), for which
his intimate friend ‘Mage Crofts’ need only wait a week:
But more of this in the answer to the Queen of Bohemia’s
damoyselle that wrote the voyadge of North Holland, for which
I beseech your lordship believe her cossen here shall not be
unthankfull. . . . I pray you, my lord, commande my goshippe
[gossip] and fellow Mage Crofts to forgive me but till next week. 13
Spring 1625 was a momentous time at the English and Dutch courts.
On 27 March (early April by continental calculation) the English king,
James I, had died, to be succeeded by his son Charles I, Elizabeth of
Bohemia’s devoted brother, and a strong supporter of the Protestant
Palatinate cause for which her father had systematically refused to give
political or military support. This in spite of his daughter’s passionate
epistolary entreaties for him to help restore her and her husband to
their former territories (seized by the Catholic Hapsburg Emperor
Ferdinand in 1620). 14 In the Netherlands, Stadholder Maurits had died
without issue on 23 April (though he had plenty of offspring, he had
never married). On his deathbed Maurits had insisted that his halfbrother
Frederik Hendrik marry his current mistress Amalia von Solms,
chief maid of honour to Elizabeth of Bohemia, to ensure the continuity
of the Nassau line. Sir Constantijn Huygens successfully lobbied to
become Frederik Hendrik’s first secretary under the new regime, before
the end of April.
That summer, Amalia van Solms, the new Stadholder’s new wife,
together with Elizabeth of Bohemia (her former employer), toured
North Holland in triumph, to celebrate Amalia’s meteoric rise from
one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting to Princess of Orange, and the fact
that Elizabeth’s brother Charles I was now King of England, giving the
Bohemian exiles more status and, they hoped, significant influence
in the Protestant political league in mainland Europe. It was a joyous
trip, full of expectation and excitement, and (to judge from the brief
extracts quoted by Green) its jubilant atmosphere was vividly captured
in Margaret Croft’s intercepted letter.
It has to be said, however, that in her biography of the Queen of
Bohemia Green sounds a little reluctant about having to rely on this
particular document:
13 Cit. Green, Elizabeth Electress Palatine, p. 245, n. 2.
14 An Imperial edict formally deprived Frederick of the Palatinate in 1623.
Temptation in the Archives 7