Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [32]
In the 1630s, a dynastic alliance with the ruling line of the neighbouring Protestant power was an obvious, if ambitious, aim for William III’s grandfather, Frederik Hendrik, and his wife Amalia van Solms. In addition to the obvious strategic advantages of consolidating Protestant influence in the region, an Orange–Stuart marriage was particularly attractive to the Stadholder’s ambitious wife, who had met and married her husband while serving as lady-in-waiting to Charles I’s sister Elizabeth of Bohemia, resident in The Hague with her court since the early 1620s. By marrying her son to the former Queen of Bohemia’s niece, Amalia could reasonably consider herself to have risen to comparable royal status with her former royal mistress.
The immediate incentive for an Anglo–Dutch match, however, was a pressing political one. In 1639, Charles I, who during the period of his ‘personal rule’ (rule without recourse to Parliament) had drawn increasingly close to Catholic Spain, allowed the Hapsburg Spanish ruler Philip IV to send a large fleet towards Flanders via English waters and harbours, and there was talk of a marriage between Charles’s eldest daughter and the Spanish Crown Prince.17
In late 1639, the senior Dutch ambassador François van Aerssen, Heer van Sommelsdijck, was sent to England to negotiate closer relations with the United Provinces, including the re-ratification of an existing peace treaty between the two countries. Charles proved reluctant to jeopardise his relations with Spain by throwing in his lot with the Dutch, but in the course of their discussions, van Aerssen learned that the King was interested in a marriage between the Stadholder’s son William and one of his daughters. At the end of 1640, after protracted negotiations between representatives of the Stadholder and the English King, it was agreed that Frederik Hendrik and Amalia’s only son, the future William II of Orange, would marry Charles I’s five-year-old second daughter, Elizabeth.
The Stadholder and his wife would naturally have preferred their son to marry Charles’s eldest daughter, but this was perhaps too much to expect. Indeed, Frederik Hendrik’s ambassadors – first Jan van der Kerckhoven, Lord of Heenvliet, and then van Aerssen – had been trying unsuccessfully to pursue this even more attractive marriage proposition since the previous year. As van Aerssen pointed out to the English King, a marriage between his eldest daughter and the Dutch Stadholder’s son would bring family benefits beyond those of mere strategic political alliance with Spain:
By this marriage you will gain for yourself a first claim on the affections and interests of His Highness and the United Provinces, while if you seek kinship with a house of greater power than your own [like Spain], you can expect nothing from their ambitions, but will only lose your daughter, whom you will force into wedding interests opposed to your own.18
When van Aerssen advanced this argument in late 1639, he was roundly rebuffed. The match, he was told, was out of the question. Princess Mary was to become the bride of a member of the ruling house of Spain, thereby securing the ‘Spanish Match’ Charles had failed to secure for himself a decade and a half earlier. The eldest daughter of so elevated a royal line as the Stuarts could, in any case, hardly become the bride of a mere minor princely house like that of Orange.
In England, however, the political situation was steadily worsening for Charles I, and it looked increasingly unlikely that Parliamentary consent would be forthcoming for a Spanish, Catholic match for his daughter, or indeed that the Spanish Hapsburgs would any longer be interested, as Charles’s political power waned. A significant Protestant match, on the other hand, might go some way to allaying the fears of an increasingly nervous and suspicious Parliament.
In spite of the growing sense of foreboding at the English court, the political situation there probably looked less discouraging to Frederik Hendrik in the Low Countries than it did to the Spanish. Unlike most other