Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [76]
In summer 1648 Elizabeth Boyle returned to England in disgrace, before the Killigrew wedding guests were assembled, and was whisked out of sight to avoid awkward questions being asked about her thickening waistline. She and her husband spent the remainder of their lives mostly out of the public gaze, on their estates in Ireland. Her daughter, Charlotte Jemima Henrietta Fitzcharles – one of a number of illegitimate children Charles later acknowledged – was brought up as a Boyle.51 Shortly after the Restoration, Charles II elevated Francis Boyle to the Irish title of First Viscount of Shannon – a reward for his loyalty in not bringing his wife’s unseemly behaviour to public attention twelve years earlier.
Six years after the hushed-up scandal of Elizabeth’s royal affair, her brother Thomas Killigrew, soldier and dramatist, also joined the English exiles in the northern Netherlands. His experiences on both sides of the Narrow Sea formed his later interests, and offer a compelling example of the easy commerce through the middle of the seventeenth century between English and Dutch social and cultural circles.52
A courtier and dramatist, Thomas Killigrew became a page of honour to Charles I in 1632, and began composing plays for performance by Henrietta Maria’s court circle in 1635. He married Cecilia Crofts, a maid of honour to the Queen, but she died, tragically, three years later (van Dyck’s 1638 double portrait of Thomas and Cecilia’s brother is a mourning picture). Thomas joined his brother-in-law Francis Boyle, his brother Robert and their tutor on their ‘grand tour’ of European cities.53
As the situation in England deteriorated for those with Royalist sympathies in the late 1640s, Thomas Killigrew again left for the Continent. In 1652 he was briefly in The Hague, in the entourage of Charles I’s third son, Henry, Duke of Gloucester. He returned there in 1654, when he met and married Charlotte van Hesse-Piershil, the eldest and well-provided-for daughter of Johan van Hesse, gentleman of the Prince of Orange. The couple were married on 28 January 1655 – she had the good sense to draw up a prenuptial agreement, to protect the greater part of her inheritance from her new English husband – and shortly afterwards moved to Maastricht. Thomas Killigrew spent the rest of the Commonwealth years in the United Provinces, enjoying the lifestyle of the prosperous, cultivated families who moved in the circles of the princely courts at The Hague. He owed his appointment in 1655 as a captain in the service of the States General to Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia’s intercession with Charles II, her nephew, and to the latter’s mediation with Willem Frederik of Nassau-Dietz, Stadholder of Friesland. He appears to have performed sensitive missions (including a spot of spying, perhaps for both sides) as groom of the bedchamber for the peripatetic, exiled Charles II.
In his diary for 24 May 1660, Pepys records meeting Thomas Killigrew, ‘a gentleman of great esteem with the King’, on board the Charles, the boat on which Charles II returned in triumph to England. Thomas’s pregnant wife and the three children, however, prolonged their stay in Maastricht – Charlotte did not settle in England till after the birth in July of their son Robert. By the end of the year she and her three sons were naturalised, and in June 1662 Charlotte was made first lady of the privy chamber.
Thomas was less successful than his Dutch wife in securing royal employment, and for a while he retained his Maastricht connections (including obtaining formal citizenship there). In July 1660, however, the English King issued Killigrew and Sir William Davenant with a royal warrant ‘to erect two playhouses [in London], [and] to control the charges to be