By Mytens.
THE youngest child of William the Silent, Prince of Orange. Born at Delft, christened with great rejoicings, and named after his two godfathers, the kings of Denmark and Navarre. His mother, Louisa de Coligny, had been early marked out for misfortune; her father, the brave Gaspard de Chatillon, High Admiral of France, and her first husband, the Sieur de Teligny, were both victims of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. So sad a fate has surely befallen few women, to see a beloved parent and two husbands fall by the hands of cruel assassins. When she was first left a widow, Louisa de Coligny escaped into Switzerland, and after a time became the fourth wife of William the Silent, Prince of Orange. During their short union, she endeared herself to her husband and the whole country by the tender care she bestowed on her step-children. At the time of William’s murder, Frederic Henry was but an infant. ‘I am left,’ says the unhappy widow, ‘with a six-months’ child, sole pledge of my dead lord, my only pleasure and consolation.’
A letter to England gives a most pathetic account of a visit paid to her a short time after the Prince’s murder. ‘I found the Princess,’ says the writer, ‘in a most dark, melancholy little chamber; and it was a twice sorrowful sight to behold her heaviness and apparel, augmented by the wofulness of the place; and truly the perplexity I found her in was not only for the consideration for things past, but for that which might follow hereafter. The Princess de Chimay was with her, herself a dolorous lady.’
The widow’s grief had been insulted by the discourse of an unfeeling preacher at Leyden, who, alluding to the murder of the Prince, attributed it to the vengeance of God on the ‘French marriage,’ and the wicked pomp with which the child’s christening had been solemnised.
Motley’s portrait of Louisa deserves to be transcribed: ‘A small, well-formed woman, with delicate features, exquisite complexion, and very beautiful dark eyes, that seemed in after years, as they looked from beneath her coif, to be dim with unshed tears; remarkable powers of mind, sweetness of disposition, a winning manner, and a gentle voice.’
Such a woman soon became dear to the honest Hollanders, and was indeed a good monitress, not only to her own child, but to Prince Maurice, who loved and honoured her, and was inclined on most occasions to listen to her counsels.
She devoted herself in the first years of her widowhood to superintending the education of Frederic Henry or Henry Frederic, as he is called by different historians. The Stadtholder, Maurice, seems to have been much attached to his half-brother, who, while still a child, proved his apt and willing scholar in the art of warfare. The boy stood under fire for the first time when only thirteen, and was with the army when the siege of Nieuport was projected. Now, this enterprise was considered so hazardous, that Maurice determined his brother should remain in a place of safety, on whom, in the event of his own death, the hopes of the nation would be centred. But this decision was most repugnant to the brave boy’s inclinations, and he besought the General, with clasped hands and urgent prayers, to allow him to share in the glory and danger of the day. There was too much sympathy between those two noble spirits that Maurice should find it in his heart to withstand the young soldier’s persistent supplication. He sent for a new suit of armour, in which Frederic, bravely equipped, side by side with his young kinsman, De Coligny, participated in the honours of that memorable victory.
In the early days of his government, Maurice had pledged himself to his stepmother to remain unmarried, by which means her son would succeed as Stadtholder; but it was supposed that he went further, and whispered to her that Frederic should inherit a kingly crown if the Princess would assist him in obtaining the sovereignty, which he (Maurice) so ardently desired.
In 1605 the young Prince was in command of a body of veterans in an attack on the Spaniards, at Mühlheim, by the Rhine, when Maurice, riding up on the opposite shore, perceived with dismay that a panic had seized the usually steady and valiant troops. He saw his brother fighting manfully in the thickest of the fray, his gilded armour and waving orange plumes making him the aim of every marksman. On that occasion, at all events, Maurice did not ‘keep silence.’ He tore up and down the bank, taunting and cursing the soldiers who were deserting their brave young commander, and his loud and angry expostulations rallied the fugitives, and saved his brother’s life.