A long row of two portraits side by side. Every pair seems identical:same pose, same decoration. Yet each time they are two different women:Elizabeth Stuart and Amalia van Solms. In the seventeenth century they fought out their rivalry at the court of The Hague, among other things by having portraits painted. The exhibition 'Rivals at the Hague Court' in the Haags Historisch Museum is about this struggle.
“My interest in Elizabeth started after I wondered if the negative things that were written about her in history books were really true,” says Nadine Akkerman, assistant professor in the English program at Leiden University. deciphering it, I found out that the image of her was totally wrong.”
Elizabeth Stuart has played an important role in Akkerman's research since 2001. After her PhD in 2008 on research into some of the letters, Akkerman started commenting on all of Elizabeth's letters. These letters, totaling more than two thousand and scattered in countless archives around the world, will be published in three volumes by Oxford University Press. Akkerman hopes that her research into Elizabeth will bring more attention to the undervalued role of women in history.
Chasing ladies
In any case, the years of research into Elizabeth Stuart already forms the basis for the exhibition 'Rivals at the Hague Court'. Elizabeth Stuart, Princess of England and Queen of Bohemia, and her lady-in-waiting Amalia van Solms, play the leading role.
Elizabeth is also known as the Winter Queen because of her short reign in Bohemia. In 1621 she and her husband Frederik van Palatinate had to flee Bohemia. After being refused entry to England and Germany, she ends up in The Hague with her retinue of 223 people, including Amalia.
Amalia marries the future stadtholder Frederik Hendrik van Oranje in The Hague. As a result, she is promoted from lady-in-waiting to princess and becomes equal in status to Elizabeth. This creates a fierce rivalry between the two ladies. They try to outdo each other by, among other things, having increasingly beautiful portraits made and throwing increasingly larger parties. This creates a real court culture in The Hague. They are also each other's rivals in the marriage market. Both try to marry off their children as best they can.
At the end of their lives, the tide turns:Elizabeth is completely broke and Amalia has more than enough money as Princess of Orange. Amalia is also more successful than Elizabeth in marrying off her children. Akkerman:“In those two respects you can say that Amalia has won the rivalry. But the ladies have both been able to have a grandson on the throne of England and Elizabeth is allowed to return to her native England at the end of her life. Elizabeth wins a little that way.”
The research behind the story
Akkerman was responsible for the research for the exhibition. By combining all the information about Elizabeth with six months of research into Amalia's letters, she has been able to paint a good picture of their rivalry.
Akkerman has also delved into themes such as the Thirty Years' War, hairstyles, plays and dynastic rivalry. Use is made of secondary literature and primary sources, such as diaries and paintings from that time. The rivalry is highlighted in the exhibition on the basis of portraits, jewellery, films about their letters and accompanying texts.
An example from the exhibition is the painting 'Keur Baart Angst' by Jan van Goyen and Jacob van der Merck. The meaning of this painting was recently discovered by Willem Jan Hoogsteder, partly through Akkerman's research. Hoogsteder found out that the painting is not about Elizabeth, but about her daughter Louisa. She was not allowed to marry her lover because she was considered too low for him. He was eventually paired with one of Amalia's daughters. This is a great example of the rivalry between Elizabeth and Amalia in the marriage market.
Revaluation
To deepen Amalia, Akkerman consulted the MA theses of students Ineke Goudswaard (art history, UvA) and Naomi Bikker (history, Leiden). Due to the limited time of the investigation into Amalia, Akkerman can say a little less about her, but it is certain that she was not a passive woman. “The prevailing image of her as an arrogant, vain woman has been painted by men who envied her for not marrying her children off to them.”
There is also a misconception about Elizabeth, according to Akkerman's research. “Two things are always said about Elizabeth:that she loved her dogs and monkeys more than her children and that she was a great lover of literature, something that was not considered positive.” The first comment comes from a diary of one of her children who is angry with her at that moment. The rest of the diary is all praise, so that one sentence that was picked is a distorted view of Elizabeth. The fact that Elizabeth was a literature lover is true. However, this was only appreciated after new insights, namely that much literature from that time was politically charged. According to Akkerman, this indicates that Elizabeth was indeed interested in politics.
This latter insight is reinforced by the fact that Elizabeth wrote half of her letters in secret language. These letters contained important, politically sensitive information that was not to be read by the enemy. Akkerman was able to decipher this secret language and as a result discovered a lot of missing information about the seventeenth century. "Nothing was known about the location of a certain person, but the letters showed that he was simply with Elizabeth in The Hague." The exhibition shows films about how letters were deciphered and sealed at that time.
“Elizabeth and Amalia have both fallen victim to the notion that letters from women do not need to be studied in order to understand politics in the seventeenth century. There wouldn't be anything relevant in this anyway. The image of women in the history books has been painted by the opinions of others and therefore they are not considered politically interesting.”
According to Akkerman, a great deal of research is needed to re-evaluate the role of women in seventeenth-century politics. So it will take a while before a new image emerges of women in history who stood their ground politically.