Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [84]
One example of such a court masque for the performance of which we have an unusually full record shows the way in which the activities and interests of the three English-influenced courts were intertwined and interactive. On 17 January 1655, Elizabeth of Bohemia wrote to her nephew, Charles II (himself in exile), describing an entertainment at The Hague at which ‘your sister [Princess Mary] was very well dressed, like an Amazon’. A portrait by Hanneman of the Princess Royal survives, which perhaps recalls this occasion, in which she is fabulously turned out in an Amazonian feather cloak, with sumptuous pearls and an elaborately exotic headdress, attended by an African boy page.
This masque or ‘ballet’ was conceived and performed during a particularly difficult period for both the house of Orange and, above all, the Stuarts. In July 1653, under renewed pressure from the government in England, the Estates of Holland and the States General passed resolutions decreeing that neither members of the Stuart royal family nor their loyal supporters should any longer be afforded shelter, assistance or maintenance on Dutch soil. The Ballet de la Carmesse was therefore carefully ‘French’ in taste and style – its music and verse devised in fashionable French style (Princess Mary had recently returned from a stay with her mother, Henrietta Maria, in Paris). At the same time, the entertainment was performed at a time when Mary was fighting for the survival of her five-year-old son’s rights, as Prince of Orange, to the privileges of the Stadholdership and command of the Dutch military. The continuing presence in The Hague of Mary’s aunt, Elizabeth of Bohemia, was of the utmost importance to this campaign, and the masque’s affirmation of the ‘triumph’ of the masquers over adversity was understood as a mark of Elizabeth’s public support for Prince William.22 La Carmesse provided an opportunity for a public display of support for Princess Mary and her son by leading Dutch nobility, at just the moment when the dynasty could well use a public acknowledgement of Dutch élite backing for the Orange– Stuart cause against the Dutch Republic.
The entertainment is a romance in verse, in which the gentlemen charm the beautiful ladies, and the ladies confess that their souls have been ravished by the dashing young men and their dancing, and was printed for immediate circulation among the participants (two copies survive). Significantly (since traditionally historians tell us that the three royal Princesses and their entourages were constantly at odds with one another), it was an occasion for shared enjoyment between the three courts – Princess Mary attended, as did the Dowager Amalia’s daughter, suitably chaperoned.
The ballet had the desired effect – its performance was reported with enthusiasm in the European capitals, and its success equated with the continued buoyancy of the Orange–Stuart cause. Sir Alexander Hume, the Princess Royal, Mary Stuart’s head of household, described the event to Sir Edward Nicholas, Charles II’s Secretary of State in exile:
Her Royall Highnesse [Princess Mary] and the Princesse Dowager [Amalia van Solms] haue interchanged visites and converse very civilly together. Yesternight at her Highnesses desire the Princesse Dowagere gaue her daughter Mademoiselle d’Orange leaue to accompany our Princesse to a balette [ballet] that some 9 or 10 young gentlemen presented to the Queen of Bohemia and her Highnesse at a place in the town of purpose fitted for it, which lasted from 9 or 10 a clock at night till 4 of the morning, and if it had not been to satisfy our Princesse, the other would not have suffered her daughter to be so late abroad.23
The event made the gossip columns, including the social column of the Paris daily newspaper:
Yesterday evening at The