• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1165 0

in the second half of the 1640s and the 1650s, as the English Civil Wars and their aftermath unravelled the comfortable lives of many with Royalist sympathies, the fortunes of several of the Killigrew children became entwined with those of their Dutch neighbours. A letter Nicholas Lanier sent to Constantijn Huygens in 1646 captures the flavour of those unstable times. Lanier writes from Antwerp, where he and his family have just found a precarious refuge. They have been beset by calamities along the way: ‘The common calamitie of our cuntrey and of every one of us in particular – espetially servants of the King – by odd and ill accidents are even become prodigious’:

My poore wife with her two maydes between Gand [Ghent] and Bruges by a partie of Hollands soldiers were pillaged of all they had; she lost two trunkes with her cloaths and all she had. Among others ther was one caried prisoner to Sluce; he was once Sir Antony van Dyke’s man; he is releast and sent me word that he solicited the Rynegrave for my wives two trunks, telling him that she was a frend and retayner to Mylady of Arundell.46

The purpose of Lanier’s writing to Huygens is to secure from him a passport in the Stadholder’s name, to travel from Antwerp, which he considers a ‘prison, or denne of theeves – for myselfe was robd returning from France hither’, to the United Provinces. ‘If this favour may be obtayn’d, I most humbly desier, it may be directed for me to Mr. Dewarte [Duarte].’ He also hoped Huygens might be able to intervene in the matter of the missing trunks (these were eventually returned).47

In August 1646, Sir Robert Killigrew’s daughter Elizabeth also travelled to the Netherlands, arriving at The Hague with her husband Francis Boyle, a son of the Earl of Cork, and his younger brother, the future scientist and Fellow of the Royal Society, Robert Boyle. Elizabeth and Francis had been married at Whitehall Palace, where Elizabeth was one of Queen Henrietta Maria’s ladies-in-waiting, in 1638. Francis had been only fifteen, his brother, in attendance at the formalities representing his family in Ireland, just ten.48The two boys had been packed off on a Grand Tour of the Continent with their tutor immediately after the wedding, deferring the consummation of the marriage for propriety’s sake. On that tour, the party were joined by Elizabeth’s brother Thomas Killigrew, who had recently lost his own wife tragically.

Now, as civil war raged in England, the young Boyle couple had been granted a passport to leave England to become members of the household of Princess Mary of Orange.49 For them as for so many others, the English-speaking court across the water was a haven from the social and political upheavals at home.

Just a year and a half later, however, in February 1648, Robert Boyle left England for The Hague, at relatively short notice, ‘to accompany his brother Francis in conducting his wife from the Hague’.50 There was a Boyle family emergency. Following a rather public affair with the exiled Charles II – possibly the first of his many ‘flings’ during his European exile – Elizabeth Killigrew was pregnant. Robert Boyle went to help his brother to salvage his self-esteem as Elizabeth’s husband, and to hush up, as far as possible, a Boyle family scandal.

We can pinpoint the birth of Elizabeth’s baby to late summer 1648, because there was a family wedding at The Hague that autumn, which Francis and his wife ought to have attended, but from which they were noticeably absent. In October 1648, Frederik van Nassau-Zuijlenstein, the illegitimate son of the recently deceased Stadholder, Frederik Hendrik, and a person of considerable importance at the court, married Elizabeth Killigrew’s cousin, Mary Killigrew, another English lady-in-waiting to Princess Mary Stuart.

The marriage between Mary Killigrew and Frederik van Nassau-Zuijlenstein was to prove particularly important for future relations between England and the Dutch Republic, since it was to this couple (conveniently bicultural and bilingual in English and Dutch, and loyal supporters of the Stuarts)