One of my favorite parts of history is reading old letters and diaries. Sometimes they make you feel closer to the person who wrote them. Sometimes they contain predictions for the future. And sometimes they deliver devastating insults where the only possible reaction is to shout
"BURN" like Ashton Kutcher's character on That
70s Show. Queen Sophie of the Netherlands has the
best collection of smackdowns I've ever come across, on full display in
the book A Stranger in the Hague, edited by Sydney
Jackman and Hella Haasse. A princess of Württemberg unhappily
married to King Willem III of the Netherlands, she hated both her husband and his mother. She hated the Dutch language and the smell of Amsterdam's canals. She hated Prussia's arrogance and Bismarck's - well, everything. She hated the greedy, lazy kids of the next generation. When I read her letters, I ended up with 10 single-spaced pages of notes on sick
burns she meted out to everyone in the firmament of European monarchies, from
Queen Victoria to Emperor Franz Josef. But she also
loved her father, was a voracious reader, and just wanted
to be left alone to write about Charles I, her historical obsession. In another life, she could have made a good academic. She also had some scary accurate predictions for the political situation in mid-19th
century Europe, predicting the rise of Prussia to the
detriment of Britain and France. So why was she grumpy all the time? For
starters, she was smarter than most people around
her, but not allowed to do anything about it. Back home in Württemberg, her father - King Wilhelm I - had treated her as a confidante. They talked politics, and she translated his official state papers. In Holland, over the long years of forced inactivity and marital discord, her soul atrophied. She wrote, "The dullness of my life is not to be
believed." In another letter she quoted Byron to encapsulate her life: "Byron speaks somewhere of the 'leafless desert of the mind, the waste of feelings unemployed.' It
struck me as so true, so applicable to me..." Sophie would have fared much better in our time, when she could control her own
destiny and make her own choices. Instead, she
found herself subject to stifling royal etiquette and soul-crushing rules foisted upon her by the husband she loathed. Sophie and Willem's hatred for each other descended into farce. When she was deathly ill in 1875, Willem sang and played piano under her bedroom window to keep her from sleeping. When she died two years later, she was buried with her wedding dress and veil
because she believed that was the actual day her life had ended. A great deal of that life had been spent writing letters to her British best friend, Lady Marian Malet. She felt
comfortable enough with Lady Malet to share the sick burns I'm sharing with you in this video. As grouchy as Sophie seems in her letters,
I have to admire her. In a time when women were still essentially window
dressings, she clearly had OPINIONS. Let's see what
they were, shall we? Emperor Napoleon III of France married a
Spanish countess, Eugénie de Montijo. Sophie, who had
Bonaparte cousins, was clearly on #TeamNapoleon. She thought Napoleon had married beneath himself, picking a woman who was beautiful but
vain and empty-headed. In 1863, her opinion of Eugénie hadn't improved: "She is frivolous, childish, without any real dignity. She is
not a sovereign, she is not a grand dame, and though she is since more than 10 years on one of the first thrones of
Europe, she has never felt the duty and the
right of her position. It is his great misery
to have found in her a trouble, no companion, and all her grace and beauty cannot compensate this." Yikes. Okay, so we know Sophie thinks rulers
should have dignity. Well, how did she feel about Queen
Victoria, one of the most dignified monarchs of all time? Was she a fan? Nope. In 1858, Sophie wrote: "The Queen is a little woman, her virtues, her vices, her loves, and her hatreds are little. The
only real sterling good quality she has - English all over - is her truth. I never knew anyone
who really loved her." Jesus, Sophie, tell us how you really feel. So monarchs should be grand as well as dignified. Well, how about the Prussians? A monarchy with traditions based on the army's pomp
and circumstance should fit the bill, right? Dream on, says Sophie. Queen Augusta of Prussia, her first cousin, rated this sick burn in an 1861 letter: "Nobody in the world likes the Queen of Prussia. She is, without cruelty, something like
the Queen Mother here - a creature without anything genuine,
artificial from head to foot. Her cleverness - and she is clever - her
information are [sic] all unnatural and unpleasing...The
poor woman feels it and is always discontented." A few years later, she would call Augusta "the painted Queen of Prussia." If you expected her to give her
relatives a pass, you're sadly mistaken. In fact, her worst venom was reserved
specifically for said family members. Her aunt by marriage, Princess Marianne
of the Netherlands, was admittedly an unconventional
princess. She left her womanizing Prussian husband
in 1845 and lived independently with her lover,
giving birth to their son a few years later. Did Sophie admire her guts? Not on paper. After Marianne left her husband, Sophie
wrote: "I despise the princess above anyone, for
there is not in her an atom of morality, but I pity her. She is much more wretched than myself. I am not very wretched just now. I read books and reviews, I go to bed at nine." Thank goodness for small favors, right? But Sophie unleashed her most vivid descriptive powers when it came to describing her sister-in-law, also named Sophie. This Sophie married the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar, but returned to the Netherlands for family visits. On one such visit in 1872,
Sophie wrote: "The Grand Duchess of Weimar, Princess Sophie, is here. She is perfectly hideous, with such a smell you cannot come near her. Then, that small bundle of greasy fat imitates her mother's ways and manners, which is
extremely ridiculous, and I sit and listen as to the ghost of
Queen Anna, returned to tease and annoy." Ah yes, Queen Anna - Sophie's mother-in-law, aunt, and bête noire. Anna was born Grand Duchess Anna
Pavlovna of Russia, the younger sister of Sophie's mom, Grand
Duchess Ekaterina Pavlovna. Anna had been jealous of her glamorous
older sister, and it didn't take much to reactivate
that negative feeling on behalf of Ekaterina's daughter. Anna thought that Sophie, proud and intelligent, was out to manipulate her son and essentially rule the kingdom one day. It might have been true. For her part, Sophie believed Anna intentionally drove a wedge between
herself and Willem and worked to widen it every day of
their lives. Three years after her marriage, Sophie
describes Anna as "hard and wicked as ever." Wicked is one of her favorite words when it comes to her mother-in-law. Did she give Anna a break when her husband, King Willem II, died in 1849? Nope. Sophie wrote, "To her, I went with
pity for she loses all. but when I saw her
rage, her disgusting violence, not one soft or
tender feeling, but only frenzy, I turned from her with disgust. She will do what she can to disunite me from my husband, I never felt her so thoroughly wicked as now." In a possible bid to retain power and spy on Sophie, Anna suggested
to her son, now King Willem III, that he buck
tradition and choose Sophie's court ladies. Naturally, she offered her own. Sophie saw this suggestion in a letter of Anna's on Willem's desk and blew a gasket. She wrote, "...the treachery and viciousness of this woman is not to be
believed." Anna claimed she was only trying to help Willem, calling Sophie "a corrosive and
pernicious element... haughty and sly...his greatest scourge
on this earth." Time healed no wounds. Three years later, Sophie was still on her guard against Anna. She wrote, "...the old Queen, like a she tiger is lying in the bush and the best thing
for perverse people and furious animals is to stare in their
eyes, never turn our backs on them." When Anna died in 1865, Sophie was sick, too,
but she got out of her bed and went to say her goodbyes. She wrote, "the Queen Mother is going. That life of intense selfishness and wickedness is closing." A week later, when she found out Anna had left her and her kids out
of her will, she wrote that Anna was a "wicked
old woman" who has "shown herself wicked in death as in life." There's that word again: wicked. I can't help but wonder what
Sophie would have made of The Wizard of Oz's Wicked Witch. Would she have thought Anna was worse? Sophie only outlived Anna by 12 years. Without her mother-in-law as a focal point for her anger, she focused it on her husband. In her next-to-last letter, she told Lady Malet that her life was full of despair, that she'd lost her hope for the world. She died on June 20, 1877. Sophie fascinates me. Her letters contain
much more than insults - that's just what I responded to
initially. She writes to Lady Malet about books, politics, family members, the weather, travel, and a whole lot more. Yes, she comes across as sad. Yes, she comes across as grouchy. But she also reminds me a little of myself. But in terms of just wanting to be left alone to read, write, and research interesting periods of history, Sophie is a woman after my own heart. To see my list of sources, check the video description. I did my best with any foreign pronunciations in this video, and I apologize if I got anything terribly wrong. If you enjoyed this video, please leave a comment, like, or subscribe. Thanks so much for watching... until next time!
