The Winter King

To celebrate the winter solstice, Ferrebeekeeper presented a gallery of winter monarchs—icy kings, queens, and princesses who symbolically represent the frozen majesty of winter.  However European history contains a real “winter king” Frederick V (1596 – 1632), a Calvinist intellectual and mystic who was famous for building the Hortus Palatinus, one of the most renowned of Baroque gardens.  Frederick V was not called “the winter king” because he personified the savage nature of winter.  He received the nickname from enemies who derisively predicted that he would only be king of Bohemia for a single winter–and his enemies were entirely right.  The short life of Frederick V was a series of missteps, blunders, catastrophes, and regrets.  Today he is principally remembered for starting the Thirty Years War—Europe’s most destructive conflict until the age of Napoleon (or maybe until World War I).

Portrait of Frederick (Michiel Jansz. van Mierevelt, 1613)

Frederick V was born as heir to the Electoral Palatinate, a powerful feudal territory whose lord was one of the hereditary electors responsible for choosing the Holy Roman Emperor.  His father, Count Palatinate Frederick IV, died young from “extravagant living” (Frederick IV was an alcoholic who left control of his lands to a regent while he sat in the palace and drank).  Thus, when Frederick V was 14 he became one of Germany’s most powerful lords—although shadows were already gathering around him.  The Golden Bull of 1356 which determined important constitutional aspects of the Holy Roman Empire stipulated that “Frederick’s closest male relative would serve as his guardian and as regent of Electoral Palatinate until Frederick reached the age of majority.”  The tangled ancestry of German nobility is evident in Frederick’s crest–so chaotically garish that it would even make Nascar proud—but it was determined that (Catholic) Count Palatine of Neuburg was his closest relative.  Frederick V’s family was traditionally Calvinist and so this solution was not acceptable.  The ensuing dispute eventually resulted in an early majority for young Ferdinand V (who became his own master at the age of 17) but it ensured a toxic legacy among the religiously divided Electors.

The Coat of Arms of Frederick V of the Palatinate...Good grief...

Frederick V also was married at the age of 16 to Elizabeth Stuart (daughter of James I) at the royal chapel at the Palace of Whitehall. In 1614, when he was 18,  Frederick attended a meeting of the Protestant Union (a group of powerful German Lords who championed the Protestant cause).  During the meeting, Frederick became ill with a fever.  Although he had displayed some initial promise as a ruler, after the illness Frederick’s character changed.  He became depressed and listless and left many critical decisions to his chancellor, Christian I, Prince of Anhalt-Bernburg (the same minister who had ruled on behalf of Frederick IV).  It was against such a background that the crown of Bohemia was thrust upon him.

Frederick V wearing the Crown of St. Wenceslas (Gerard van Honthorst, 1634, oil on canvas)

Bohemia was an elective monarchy which chose its own king, but, despite this high title, said king answered to the Holy Roman Emperor.  In fact since 1555 the Holy Roman Emperor had always also been the King of Bohemia, but thanks to religious controversy and schism sweeping Europe, Bohemia’s Protestant electors were in no mood to elect and affirm the Catholic Emperor Ferdinand II.  Frederick V, callow, melancholic, and sick, was elected as king of Bohemia in 1619 amidst the turmoil of the Bohemian revolt.  Frederick was crowned with the (magical cursed) Crown of Saint Wenceslas in St. Vitus Cathedral on 4 November 1619. At the time Bohemia was not exactly a proper kingdom (having been held for so long by the Holy Roman Emperor) and Frederick V soon found he had only very limited ability to raise funds.  This became important when Emperor Ferdinand II decided to take the field to contest Bohemia.  The Emperor’s army was ably led by Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly, who seized Frederick V’s ancestral lands in the Central Palatinate before marching on Prague.  On 8 November 1620, Frederick V’s army was destroyed in the Battle of White Mountain.  Bohemia was lost, its people were cruelly ground beneath the popish & authoritarian foot of Ferdinand II, and Frederick V was forced into exile–first to Silesia and ultimately to the Hague in Holland.

The Battle of White Mountain (Peter Snayers, 1620)

Since he maintained the pageantry and splendor of a royal court while in the Hague, Frederick V quickly lavished away the huge sums of money which foreign potentates had granted him to pursue his cause.  He was unlucky too. On a trip to view the captured Spanish treasure fleet,  his boat capsized, which caused his eldest son, Frederick Henry of the Palatinate to drown (which also drowned hopes for a marriage between Frederick Henry and a Spanish princess).  Frederick V alienated and refused Gustavus Adolphus, the one sovereign who could have regained his throne and lands for him (although Gustavus would also have demanded that Frederick V become a subject).  Frederick died in1632, of a “pestilential fever”. His internal organs were buried in Oppenheim, but his preserved body was slated for final burial elsewhere.  Unfortunately, while in transit Frederick V’s dead body somehow got caught up in the Spanish assault on Frankenthal and vanished.  His final resting place is unknown (although we do know where his internal organs are interred).

Frederick V's daughter Sophia, dressed as an Indian (Painted by her sister, Louise Hollandine of the Palatinate around 1644)

Frederick’s life was ruined by reaching for a crown which should never have been his (and which, at the time, actually conferred little royal dignity or authority anyway). Yet this troubling legacy of ruination resulted in an end he would probably never have foreseen.  Frederick V had married the daughter of James I of England.  England had its own religious sectarian problems which were ended by Parliament when it signed the Act of Settlement in 1701.  The document settled the English secession for once and all on an obscure Protestant heir—Frederick’s  youngest daughter Sophia, Electress of Hanover.  Sophia, a patroness of art, philosophy, music, and culture, died in 1714, just before Queen Anne of England passed away, but her son George inherited the crown that would have been hers.  All subsequent monarchs of Great Britain were (and are) direct descendants of the unlucky Winter King.

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Cranach’s Symbol

The Signature of Lucas Cranach the Elder

Some artists sign their works with a symbol instead of with their written name.  My favorite of all these artist’s symbols was the one employed by the great German gothic painter Lucas Cranach.  Ferrebeekeeper has already written about Lucas Cranach’s troubling allegory Melancholy, his fascination with severed heads and femme fatales, and his magnificent depiction of animals.  Cranach usually signed his works with a black winged serpent holding a ruby ring in its jaws and wearing a crown. It fills me with frustration that I didn’t think of it first—imagine signing the water bill with that!

There are various different versions of the serpent.  Cranach changed it around—especially when he signed printed artworks.  Elector Frederick the Wise granted the winged serpent with a crown and ruby ring to Cranach as a coat of arms on January 6^th, 1508, but nobody is sure what it means.  Some art historians have speculated that it is an astrological or alchemical symbol.  Others believe it may be a lost pun concerning some aspect of Cranach’s name or have some allegorical meaning too subtle to fathom.  The actual explanation seems lost in mystery (which is probably how Cranach would like it).  Whenever I see a Cranach painting in a museum, the search for his serpent sigil is part of the fun.

Detail from "Cupid" (Lucas Cranach the Elder, c.1530)

Detail from "Venus Standing in a Landscape" (Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1529)

Cranach’s Animal Painting

Albrecht of Brandenburg as St. Jerome in his Study (Lucas Cranch the Elder, 1527)

In addition to troubling paintings of severed heads and dark allegories of German society, Lucas Cranach the Elder liked to paint animals.  He painted several splendid pictures of Adam and Eve in a paradise teaming with creatures (including human headed parrots and unicorns) and he also frequently portrayed the bloody business of large scale stag-hunts by the aristocracy.  One of my favorite of Cranach’s animal paintings is the one above titled, which was completed in 1527.  A generous supporter of the arts (and personal friend of Erasmus), Albrecht was the Elector and Archbishop of Mainz.  Ironically, to secure this position, Albrecht had taken out an immense loan “to discharge the expenses of his elevation.”  In order to pay this money back he obtained permission from Pope Leo X to sell indulgences.  The agent Albrecht utilized to sell these indulgences, John Tetzel, was so odious and grasping that Luther wrote his 95 theses partly as a direct response to Tetzel. Albrecht was the first to notify the papacy of Luther’s theses (which he suspected might be heretical).

Although dressed as a 16^th century cardinal, Albrecht is affecting the style and symbols of Saint Jerome, the 4^th century hermit and scholar who had translated the bible into Latin.  Jerome was frequently painted with a tame lion due to an ahistorical medieval legend about how he had removed a thorn from a marauding lion’s paw (and thus gained the creature’s friendship).  Cranach expands on this iconography to fill the painting with animals including not just a pensive lion, but also an industrious beaver, a pheasant, a rabbit, and a stag.  In gothic iconography, the stag represented Christ and here we see a handsome stag beneath a crucifix apparently speaking to Jerome.  The ecclesiastical contemplation and tame animals of the foreground are contrasted starkly with the more realistic background, where aristocratic hunters ride back to their great hall with their hounds while real stags joust with their horns in the forest.