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Part 1
Familial structures, hierarchies and power![]()
1 Leadership, governance and complicit roles
In Section 1, ‘Familial Structures, Hierarchies and Power’, we examine hierarchies, networks and structures that enabled power within the House of Orange-Nassau. What sorts of power to advance the House were possible for those in specific roles within the hierarchy, and how flexible were these roles to changes and pressures? We thus deconstruct positions of power, where power is understood relationally: between men and women; in hierarchies among men; and in particular sexual, class, social, race, and religious contexts that may constitute parallel forms and hierarchies of power.
In these chapters, we delve inside the hierarchical structure of the House, examining specific examples from across three centuries and different contexts, to explore the ways in which gender informs models of leadership and subordination, and the ways in which access to power held the potential to equalise individuals of different genders. As well as the publicly acknowledged leaders of the House, we therefore also examine complicit and subordinate masculinities and female roles—which could constitute strategic choices for individuals.1 We thus give much-needed focus to the practices of women and subordinate men to uphold governance by men, as they supported and developed images and ideals of the House’s leaders.2 In the following chapters, we analyse various familial positions, roles or status within the House, in order to explore the possibilities and expressions of power in each. We understand the term power, as outlined in the Introduction, in varied forms, including the power to preserve and protect this dynastic branch, to advance it, to determine its trajectory, to represent it and finally to assert its interests and influence others within and beyond the House.
The chapters in this section place particular emphasis on the letter as a mechanism for establishing and articulating expectations of roles within the House, as well as enacting forms of power. As Sophie Ruppel has suggested, the letter became ‘the most important instrument of activity for European aristocracy’ in the seventeenth century.3 The extensive Orange-Nassau correspondence provides an opportunity to chart a range of interactions among family members, from both male and female members, over a three-hundred-year period. Orange-Nassau correspondence can be understood as an aristocratic performance of alliances, hierarchies and power in shifting contexts that was often expressed in explicitly emotional terms. It also reveals the nature of other actions undertaken by House members, such as gift-giving, visits and networking, that sustained family bonds. We argue therefore that the analysis of letters opens up new perspectives not just on the actions of House members, but also on the emotional qualities of epistolary practice.4 Recent scholarship has pointed out that letters could be critical to the maintenance of ‘bonds of emotions’ between people who were geographically dispersed, as was common for elite families.5 Correspondence could create, sustain and perhaps even mythologise relationships among its members, and offered a site for the expression of particular sets of feelings between specific correspondents.6 In particular, family members used different expressions of emotion to control, to subordinate or to create closer relationships with other members in order to achieve both House and personal goals.7 Letters were not only exchanged between participants but also circulated within the extended family. A courier might carry missives to a third party who would pass on the text with their own letter to the intended recipient. The ability of the transmitter to read the missive depended on the relationships of the family members concerned. Moreover, others were not written by the dynastic members themselves but by various secretaries, making interpretation of the ‘personal’ and attention to the ‘autograph’ particularly important aspects of their epistolary practice.
This section commences with analysis of House leadership and practices of governance, examining the tensions between normative discourses and lived experiences and their manifestations in a range of different contexts and sources. Our analysis offers a counterpoint to the focus of much scholarship on the early modern German family, in which the notion of Familienordnung has been influential.8 As Cordula Nolte has articulated, in principle within this system, the
ruler thus dominated the family network, … This is reflected in the family communication via letters, which proves him to have been the central person of the communication net as well. His relations to his wife, his siblings, his children and other relatives are well-documented, whereas during his lifetime comparatively little is known about the communication between other family members.9
A particular Familienordnung may appear to assign particular structures and roles, perhaps even emotional expressions, to individuals within a family, but the idea of family was an idea in process, in constant renegotiation by its members, and susceptible to change at particular crisis points.10
Leading or governing was the exercise of power, but we argue that this power needed to be legitimised, and was transient, socially contested and often unstable. Moreover, the transfer of the right to govern is a particularly vulnerable and anxious process.11 R.W. Connell’s terminology of the ‘patriarchal dividend’ provides an interesting way to focus attention on the social status, power and privilege associated with ruling positions of men.12 We explore the tools available for men to access and maintain, but also to question, power and argue that pater familias was both an imagined principle and one that was lived. As an imagined principle, it implemented the rule of the father. As a lived principle, it was negotiated between several members of the House, including sons and daughters, and reflected not just the strength but also the fragility of early modern aristocratic manhood. Women and other men were vital to the establishment and proof of male governance—in relation to their sexual and reproductive activities, their speech, and in leaders’ interactions with them and as subordinates demonstrating leaders’ capacity to protect and maintain them.13 We investigate how family members employed different resources in order to gain or maintain the right to advance the House of Orange-Nassau.
Performing the patriarch
This section analyses documents the experiences and expressions of men who were perceived by those within and beyond the House to be at its head. As Sophie Ruppel has argued, the very term and concept of fatherhood was not exclusively an expression of biological family relations, but a social relation indicating rank, seniority and power, and thus the carrier was interchangeable to a degree, as the role of father could be bestowed on brothers and uncles.14 Prescriptive literature about parents and children articulated reciprocal duties and obligations of each to the other and outlined the responsibilities of men as heads of their household and family.15 Fathers, sons and siblings negotiated masculinities, authority and even affection with each other, and children connected with father-substitutes such as tutors, masters, and even lodgers in elite homes.16 Here we attempt to tease out the particular ideas and practices of pater familias for men in positions of power in the House of Orange-Nassau, asking who could be the patriarch, what were its characteristics, its limits, its tensions and challenges? How was male leadership in the House of Orange-Nassau complicated by the demands of fulfilling a political role in the Low Countries and as the patriarch of the House’s hierarchy? How did they express power through correspondence in particular? What are the affective modes of their expressions and enactment of power through letters?
To date, the historiography of this branch of the Nassau dynasty has focussed strongly upon the leading male protagonists, the Princes of Orange, who were the visible face of the House. Studies of their relationships with the States, international rulers and military campaigns have been undertaken and, to a lesser extent, their networking and patronage activities have been examined.17 This has also shaped access to sources for the House’s history, leading to the editing and publication of the texts, especially letters, of these men. The work of the editing team commenced by Groen van Prinsterer, for example, projects a narrow view of the activities of Nassau family members, obscuring the work of many subordinate and particularly female participants.18 The work of other individuals for the House is also effaced by demarcations of Dutch political history during this period in relation to the stadtholder, such as the ‘Stadtholderless’ periods. These periods were ones in which women and subordinate men of the family and its affiliates as well as its allies worked hard to maintain a strong visible presence for the House. In addition, scholars have examined the political movement of Orangism in the Netherlands and abroad in its literary and visual forms, and the anti-Orange opposition in the eighteenth century.19 We argue that these foci of attention have obscured the important contribution of other participants from within and beyond the House to its fortunes.
Critical to the wider lens of our analysis are the definitions of power and politics in line with recent scholarship.20 As J.P.J. Duindam has argued, ‘Dynastic power is based on the transmission of power from generation to generation; spouses, mothers, heirs and siblings are the building blocks of dynasticism’.21 Thus, we examine the House’s strategies, motivations and practice of power as it was managed by a wide variety of family members. We understand power within a hierarchy, with individuals and the House collectively both able to enact particular forms at precise moments and in particular contexts. Moreover, as established in the introduction, we understand the House as both a conceptual and a real practice of kin relationships. This incorporates the contribution of not just an immediate, legitimate or domestic family unit, but also those networks of kin, affiliates, and dependent service providers of varied kinds. While our focus remains upon the House of Orange-Nassau, we argue that forms of power generated and exercised by individuals of the House cannot be understood independently of the other Nassau dynastic branches, or a series of its courtiers, retainers and cultural agents who stood likewise to gain from its success.
An initial aspect of the House of Orange-Nassau practice of power in this period is to be found in the actions undertaken to provide leadership to the revolt of the Low Countries and their peoples against the Spanish Habsburg monarchs. These activities would earn Willem van Nassau, Prince of Orange (1533–84), the title ‘Father of the Fatherland’ (Plate 1). The military aspect of the House’s actions has been well documented.22 In particular, the role of Willem in leading and negotiating the break away of the northern States is crucial to the story of Dutch nationhood. However, even in these events, Willem’s brothers were critical to his success. Willem’s younger brother, Ludwig (1538–74), numbered among the Confederacy of Noblemen, or the Compromise, who in 1566 had signalled their disapproval of the persecution of Protestants led by Margaret of Parma (1522–86), then regent of the Low Countries. He had also drafted the document of petition itself.23 In 1568, at the Battle of Heiligerlee, Ludwig with his younger brother Adolf (1540–68) led infantry and cavalry through Friesland to Heiligerlee to face Johan de Ligne, Duke of Aremberg (c. 1525–68). The battle was a military triumphant for Ludwig, but it cost Adolf his life.
Ludwig went on to fight further battles against Habsburg forces at Jemmingen in July 1568. He then joined the French Huguenot leader Admiral Gaspard II de Coligny (1519–72) to participate in two battles of the French Wars of Religion at Jarnac (March 1569) and Moncontour (October 1569). While both were lost for the Huguenots, Ludwig’s involvement affirmed the Nassau affinity with international Protestant movements, forged a personal connection with the Colignys (Willem would later marry the Admiral’s daughter Louise (1555–1620) as his fourth wife), and asserted the Nassau dynasty’s claim to the principality of Orange which lay surrounded by French territories. Ludwig then took Mons (May–September 1572) for Willem, finally negotiating a surrender of the city back to Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alva (1507–82), after having successfully diverted Alva’s attention away from the Northern States which were able to recover and regain their strength. These activities were crucial to Willem’s later international networks and actions.
Willem called upon his brothers on many occasions to support the conflict in military and political ways. In 1574, for example, Willem asked for Ludwig’s support to divert Spanish attention to save Middelburg in the south and Leiden further north. Ludwig, with their younger brother Heinrich (1550–74), raised a mercenary army of German infantry and cavalry, and met Willem at Maastricht. The Battle of Mookerheyde against the Spanish in April 1574 pro...
