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Temptation in the Archives

Essays in Golden Age Dutch Culture

UCL Press

Temptation in the Archives

This is the story of a paper-chase – a seemingly fruitless search in the archives, which eventually yielded a seventeenth-century letter I had been trying to find for several years. It is a cautionary tale about the trust we historians place in documents and records, and how badly we want each precious piece of evidence to add to the historical picture. And it is a story which illustrates in a number of ways the essential uncertainty which underlies, and ultimately gives purpose to, archival research in the humanities – in spite of the reassuring materiality of the hundreds-of-years-old piece of paper we hold in our hand.

* * *

In 2009, at the end of a period working on seventeenth-century Holland for my book Going Dutch, I took up a Fellowship at the Royal Library in The Hague, working on their large holding of the correspondence of Sir Constantijn Huygens. While researching his early career I came across a sequence of almost-illegible letters in French, exchanged in the 1620s between Huygens and someone he addressed – with some familiarity – as 'Mademoiselle Croft' (or occasionally just as 'Croft'). The letters piqued my curiosity – not least because the assiduous editor of Huygens's substantial surviving correspondence, J. A. Worp, had chosen not to transcribe them in full in his 'complete' edition. As for Croft, nobody of that name had figured anywhere in any of the Huygens materials I had read until then.

Born in 1596, Constantijn Huygens was a Dutch polymath diplomat, poet and musician, who, as personal secretary to the Stadholder, Frederik Hendrik, is acknowledged to have played a prominent part in the artistic and cultural flowering at the court in the northern Netherlands of Frederik Hendrik and his wife Amalia von Solms in the decades following the death of his half-brother, the previous Stadholder, Maurits of Nassau in 1625. Although Sir Constantijn is little appreciated here in Britain, he has a formidable reputation in the Netherlands, where he is regarded as almost singlehandedly having been responsible for raising the international profile of the court of Frederik Hendrik and Amalia in The Hague, transforming it into one of the most celebrated in Europe for its cultivation, artistic splendour and general ostentation and glamour.

Electronic resources enables trawling systematically for evidence of individuals to yield a richer haul of relevant documents and references today than in those when we had to rely on writing formal letters of inquiry to the custodians of local archives to request information. Yet I could find nothing about Margaret Croft beyond the fact that she had been a maid of honour to Elizabeth of Bohemia, sister of Charles I and wife of Frederick, Elector Palatine.

So it was natural that I should consult the acknowledged expert on Elizabeth of Bohemia, Dr Nadine Akkerman, who as well as editing the three volumes of Elizabeth's letters, is embarking on a much-anticipated modern biography for Oxford University Press. She pointed me in the direction of an obscure 1909 biography of the Queen of Bohemia in which Margaret Croft's name does occur a number of times: Mary Anne Everett Green's Elizabeth Electress Palatine and Queen of Bohemia (an expanded reissue of a brief biographical essay Green had first published in 1855).

Croft appears several times in Green's book, which, after the fashion of its age, has what to us feels like a slightly saccharine, sentimental tone to its conscientious excavation of the lives of prominent ladies from the historical archives. Croft attracts Green's attention both because of her amorous adventures at court and because she was deemed to be the author of a significant letter, chronicling an important Dutch 'royal tour', which took place in 1625. Green writes 'During the summer of 1625 the King and Queen [of Bohemia] with the Princess of Orange [Amalia von Solms], undertook a journey into North Holland. [A] record of their excursion ... was written by a young lady of the Court [Margaret Croft].'

As far as I am aware, this is the only eye-witness account of a 'triumphal tour' taken by the new Dutch Stadholder and his (also new) wife, together with Elizabeth and Frederick of Bohemia. Green's selective quotations from this letter were tantalisingly vivid. I made a note to follow up this one substantial piece of evidence directly involving Croft at a later date.

* * *

There is no portrait of Madge Crofts (as Elizabeth of Bohemia affectionately calls her), as far as I can discover. We can, however, see ladies very like her from Elizabeth of Bohemia's court circle in a book of watercolour sketches of the Northern Netherlands made in the 1620s, which includes several 'from life' studies of Elizabeth of Bohemia and Amalia von Solms and their entourages.

The closest we have to an actual physical glimpse of her – a unique trace of her hand on paper – is a note in The National Archives at Kew, where it is catalogued as 'possibly to Lord Conway' (I cannot find out on what basis).

The note reads: 'I beseech yo[ur] Lo[rdship] to reade this inclosed and let me know yo[u]r pleasure, Yo[u]r most humble and most obedient seruant Marg[are]t Croft'.

As a start, I think this nicely conveys a possible role for Margaret as intermediary and facilitator: she passes a written communication to an English nobleman, and offers her services to carry out its instructions.

Margaret appears to have come over to The Hague with the English Ambassador Sir Dudley Carleton's wife in 1623 and to have joined the household of the exiled Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia (Charles I's sister, who was, of course, herself English by birth) a year later. She is associated (mostly by hearsay) with a number of sentimental scandals at the court of Elizabeth of Bohemia, of which more shortly. In 1637 she fell out with Princess Elizabeth, the Queen's eldest daughter, and was 'let go' while on a visit to England. Queen Elizabeth lobbied her brother Charles I and other prominent English court figures such as Archbishop Laud by letter to have Margaret paid a considerable sum as compensation for her thirteen years' service.

In her biography of Elizabeth of Bohemia, Green tells us that in November 1625, the Queen (an inveterate match-maker) made serious attempts to broker a marriage between Margaret Croft and Henry Erskine, younger son of the Scottish Earl of Marr. Elizabeth wrote to the Earl, in a letter delivered by his son, returning from what had evidently been an enjoyable sojourn at the Palatine Court in The Hague, as follows:

I cannot lett your worthie sonne returne to you without these lines, to continue you the assurance of my affection. He will acquaint you with a business that neerlie concernes him, which is an affection he hath taken to a gentlewoman that serves me; whom he desires with your consent, to make his wife. ... For the gentlewoman, Crofts, I can assure you she is an honest discreet woman and doth carie herself verie well. If I had not this good opinion of her, I should not intreate you, as I doe by these, that you will give him your consent to marrie her.

In spite of Elizabeth's assurance that 'he hath not made anie acquainted with it because you shoulde know it first', and that she herself 'came to the knowledge of it by chaunce, for seing him much with her I did suspect it, and asking him the question he confest to me his love', this affair had surely come to the attention of the court in The Hague.

We do not know what the Earl of Marr's response was to this letter, but we can be certain that a family as close to the Scottish and English thrones as the Marrs would not have countenanced a marriage to a non-noble maid of honour – not even for a younger son by a second marriage. We may assume, therefore, that Margaret had been associated with Henry Erskine for some time at Elizabeth's court, and that their relationship was court gossip. When permission for the marriage was not forthcoming, her reputation must surely have suffered. Subsequently, her name is associated romantically with a number of prominent figures in Dutch court circles.

* * *

Constantijn Huygens had probably made Margaret Croft's acquaintance when he took up his new post as Secretary to Frederik Hendrik in April 1625 and moved from the bourgeoisie into court circles in The Hague. In 2009–10 I was interested in a decorous, semi-formal and chaste series of epistolary exchanges between Huygens and a young woman named Dorothea van Dorp – a neighbour in the élite Het Plein district, a childhood friend and reputedly his fiancée. What I found remarkable about the fragmentary correspondence with Margaret Croft was how markedly it differed in tone and content from the Van Dorp correspondence.

The first of his surviving notes to Croft is dated (in Huygens's hand, in the margin of the draft) 5 August 1627, 'devant Groll' [outside Grolle] – that is, during the annual summer military campaign against the French on which Huygens accompanied the Stadholder. Its tone is flirtatious and conspiratorial – perhaps surprisingly, considering that Constantijn had been married for little more than four months at the time. Huygens suggests that he has been encouraged to write because the Count of Hanau – by insinuation, Margaret's lover or protector – has taken him into his confidence.

Over the next several months, Huygens keeps Margaret Croft informed of the fact that intercepted letters threaten to make known some 'indiscretion' and damage to her and others' reputations, and implies that only his own intervention will keep the matter from publicknowledge. There is little doubt that he intends to suggest that favours are owed by Mademoiselle Croft to himself, for his services in interceding in this way. Such favours may indeed have been forthcoming – a letter in the same run, written to her much later, in 1633, implies familiarity, not only between Constantijn and Margaret, but also between her and his sister Constantia, and closes in terms of intense affection.

The tone of these letters is teasing and familiar. It suggests that the court circles of the Stadholder and the King and Queen of Bohemia were worlds away from the decorous middle-class salons of Huygens and his literary friends like P. C. Hooft, whose exchanges of letters with educated artistic Dutch women have been closely studied by historians like myself.

This, then, was the context in which I encountered and became intrigued by Madge Croft. To be honest, although I wrote and published a paper which included the correspondence to which I have just alluded (my paper on Dorothea van Dorp), Croft remained a puzzle to me, and I continued to worry that the scribbled notes I had transcribed did not contain enough of substance to allow me to understand the circumstances under which they were written, nor to do justice to the relationship – whatever that really was – between Margaret and Constantijn.

* * *

So now let's go back to that letter I was so anxious to find in the archives, the one Green had seen in the Public Record Office (as the The National Archives [TNA] then was), and which she associated with Madge Croft and her activities at the court of Elizabeth of Bohemia.

Green's scrupulously archivally based biography of Elizabeth of Bohemia quotes selectively from a letter in French written by Margaret Croft in summer 1625 and intercepted on its way to her cousin in England. The letter is an eye-witness account, chronicling events on a celebratory tour of North Holland, taken by the 'royal' ladies of the courts at The Hague – Elizabeth of Bohemia, Amalia von Solms and their entourages. It apparently circulated widely that autumn under the title 'Copie d'une lettre interceptée et dechiffrée en passant entre une des dames d'honneur de la reyne de Boheme et une demoiselle sa cousine en Angleterre'. I think we can safely attribute the letter to Margaret Croft. Sir George Goring wrote to the English Ambassador Sir Dudley Carleton on 8 September 1625 that a response to this letter was in the process of being written (possibly ghosted by himself), for which his intimate friend 'Mage Crofts' need only wait a week:

But more of this in the answer to the Queen of Bohemia's damoyselle that wrote the voyadge of North Holland, for which I beseech your lordship believe her cossen here shall not be unthankfull. ... I pray you, my lord, commande my goshippe [gossip] and fellow Mage Crofts to forgive me but till next week.

Spring 1625 was a momentous time at the English and Dutch courts. On 27 March (early April by continental calculation) the English king, James I, had died, to be succeeded by his son Charles I, Elizabeth of Bohemia's devoted brother, and a strong supporter of the Protestant Palatinate cause for which her father had systematically refused to give political or military support. This in spite of his daughter's passionate epistolary entreaties for him to help restore her and her husband to their former territories (seized by the Catholic Hapsburg Emperor Ferdinand in 1620). In the Netherlands, Stadholder Maurits had died without issue on 23 April (though he had plenty of offspring, he had never married). On his deathbed Maurits had insisted that his half-brother Frederik Hendrik marry his current mistress Amalia von Solms, chief maid of honour to Elizabeth of Bohemia, to ensure the continuity of the Nassau line. Sir Constantijn Huygens successfully lobbied to become Frederik Hendrik's first secretary under the new regime, before the end of April.

That summer, Amalia van Solms, the new Stadholder's new wife, together with Elizabeth of Bohemia (her former employer), toured North Holland in triumph, to celebrate Amalia's meteoric rise from one of Elizabeth's ladies-in-waiting to Princess of Orange, and the fact that Elizabeth's brother Charles I was now King of England, giving the Bohemian exiles more status and, they hoped, significant influence in the Protestant political league in mainland Europe. It was a joyous trip, full of expectation and excitement, and (to judge from the brief extracts quoted by Green) its jubilant atmosphere was vividly captured in Margaret Croft's intercepted letter.

It has to be said, however, that in her biography of the Queen of Bohemia Green sounds a little reluctant about having to rely on this particular document:

As the record of [Elizabeth of Bohemia and Amalia von Solms'] excursion, though minute, was written by a young lady of the Court [Margaret Croft], whose only thought was amusement, we must be content with such details as are afforded in her sprightly narrative, from which all serious subjects are banished.

It is a pity (reading between the lines, we can hear Green saying) that this eye-witness account of an important otherwise-unrecorded journey is written in such a frivolous fashion, thereby detracting from the fundamental seriousness of the occasion. The frivolity is to be contrasted with (say) the published accounts of the lavish occasions along the route of the journey Elizabeth of Bohemia had made in 1613 for her marriage to Frederick.

So I set off to decide about the contents of the letter for myself. In late 2010, with Green's State Papers Holland reference number in the (now) TNA, my colleague at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, Dr Robyn Adams and I went in search of Margaret Croft's letter. We spent a long, frustrating and fruitless day there, in spite of the fact that we were ably assisted by TNA's ever-helpful staff, and failed to find any trace of the letter we were looking for. Yet all of us were convinced that it must be there somewhere. All of us were confident that Green must have seen the document, and equally sure that a document once in the TNA would never have been destroyed – it will simply have been misplaced.

I began to suspect it had been misplaced deliberately. Green had clearly been disconcerted by the contents of the letter, and its 'sprightly' tone – unseemly perhaps, coming from a lady of Elizabeth's court. Perhaps she had cannily lodged it out of place in the archive, where it was safe, but where the curious could only find it again with difficulty.

Then, in August 2012, Nadine Akkerman emailed me to say she had come across a published transcription of the Croft letter, quite by chance. It was included as an appendix to Martin Royalton-Kisch's 1988 facsimile edition of Adriaen van der Venne's 1620s watercolour picture album, to which I referred earlier. Royalton-Kisch made nothing at all of the letter (indeed, did not translate it from the original French), but gave the correct State Papers reference – one whole volume away from the one on which Robyn Adams and I had based our search. Instead of being in State Papers Holland, Margaret Croft's letter was in State Papers German:

The National Archives, State Papers German 81/33 folios 147–50. Calendar entry title: 'Queen of Bohemia's Maid of Honour to a Cousin. Endorsement fo. 150v: "Copie d'vne lettre jnterceptée & deschiffrée en passant entre vne des filles d'honneur de la Royne de Boheme, & vne Damoisselle sa Cousine en Angleterre".'

Within days Nadine had retrieved scans of the letter and emailed them to me – Oh! the joys of the State Papers online – and I had translated it. You can imagine our excitement. Were we finally going to be able to unravel the mystery of the strikingly active, manipulative role Margaret Croft appeared to play in the lives of several influential men at the courts of England and the Netherlands? Would the letter explain the innuendo in Constantijn Huygens's notes to Margaret Croft?

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Excerpted from Temptation in the Archives by Lisa Jardine. Copyright © 2015 Lisa Jardine. Excerpted by permission of UCL Press.
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