“Can I take the fool with me to Mainz?” asked Friedrich.
“What do you want with the fool?”
He had to appear there like a ruler, he explained in his awkward way. A court simply required a fool.
“Well, if you think it will help.”
And so they departed, her husband and the fool and Count Hudenitz and then also, so that the retinue wouldn’t look too small, the cook. She saw them receding against the gray November sky. From the window she watched them until they were out of sight. Some time passed. The movement of the trees in the wind was scarcely perceptible. Nothing else stirred.
She sat down in her old favorite spot, the chair between window and fireplace, in which there had not been a fire in a long time. She would have liked to ask her lady’s maid for another blanket, but unfortunately her lady’s maid had run away the day before yesterday. A new one would be found. There were always some commoners who wanted their daughter to serve a queen—even if it was a mocked queen, of whom funny little pictures circulated. In Catholic lands it was claimed that she had slept with every nobleman of Prague; she had long been aware of this, and she could do nothing about it but be especially dignified and kind and queenly. She and Friedrich had been placed under the imperial ban, and anyone who wanted to kill them could do so without any priest denying him blessing and salvation.
It began to snow. She closed her eyes and whistled softly to herself. People called her poor Friedrich the Winter King, but when it grew cold, he froze quite terribly. Soon the snow in the garden would be knee-deep, and no one would shovel the path, for her gardener too had disappeared. She would write to Christian von Braunschweig and ask him for a few men to shovel snow pour Dieu et pour elle.
She thought of the day that had changed everything. The day when the letter had come and, with it, doom. All the signatures: in sweeping strokes, one name as unpronounceable as the next. Lords she had never heard of were offering the Elector Friedrich the crown of Bohemia. They no longer wanted their old king who, in personal union, was also the Kaiser; their new ruler should be a Protestant. To seal their decision, they had thrown the imperial governors out the window of Prague Castle.
Only they had fallen into a pile of shit and had survived. There was always a lot of shit below castle windows due to all the chamber pots being emptied every day. The stupid thing was that thereupon in all the land the Jesuits preached that an angel had caught the governors and set them gently on the ground.
No sooner had the letter arrived than Friedrich wrote to Papa.
Dearest Son-in-Law, Papa replied by mounted courier, don’t do it under any circumstances.
Then Friedrich asked the princes of the Protestant Union. For days messengers came, breathless men on steaming horses, and every letter said the same thing: don’t be stupid, Your Serene Electoral Highness, don’t do it.
Friedrich asked anyone he could find. One must think it through carefully, he explained time and again. Bohemia was not part of the Empire’s territory; to accept the crown was thus, according to the opinion of authoritative legal scholars, not a violation of the oath of allegiance to the Imperial Majesty.
Don’t do it, Papa wrote again.
Only now did he ask Liz. She had been waiting for it; she was prepared.
It was late in the evening, and they were in the bedroom, surrounded by little flames standing motionless in the air—only the most expensive wax candles burned so still.
“Don’t be stupid,” she said too. Then she let a moment pass and added: “How often is one offered a crown?”
That was the moment that had changed their lives, the moment for which he never forgave her. For the rest of her life she would see it before her eyes: their four-poster bed with the coat of arms of the House of Wittelsbach on the canopy, the candle flames reflected in the carafe on the bedside table, the enormous painting of a woman with a little dog on the wall. Later she couldn’t remember who had painted it—it didn’t matter, they hadn’t taken it with them to Prague, it was lost.
“How often is one offered a crown? How often does it happen that it is a deed pleasing to God to accept it? The Bohemian Protestants were given the letter of tolerance, then it was taken back, the noose keeps tightening. You alone can help them.”
All at once she felt as if this bedroom with the four-poster bed, wall painting, and carafe were a stage and as if she were speaking before a hall full of spectators in spellbound silence. She thought of the great dramatist, the hovering magical power of his sentences; she felt as if she were surrounded by the shades of future historians, as if it weren’t she who spoke but the actress who later, in a play in which this moment occurred, had the task of portraying Princess Elizabeth Stuart. The play was about the future of Christendom and a kingship and a Kaiser. If she persuaded her husband, the world would take one course, and if she didn’t persuade him, it would take another course.
She stood up, walked up and down with measured steps, and delivered her speech.
She spoke of God and of duties. She spoke of the faith of the simple people and of the faith of the wise. She spoke of Calvin, who had taught all humanity not to take life lightly but as a test that one could fail every day, and once you had failed, you were a failure forever. She spoke of the obligation to take risks with pride and courage. She spoke of Julius Caesar, who, with the words “The die is cast,” had crossed the Rubicon.
“Caesar?”
“Let me finish!”
“But I wouldn’t be Caesar, I would be his enemy. At best I’d be Brutus. The Kaiser is Caesar!”
“In this analogy you are Caesar.”
“The Kaiser is Caesar, Liz. Caesar means Kaiser! It’s the same word.”
Perhaps it was the same word, she exclaimed, but that didn’t change the fact that in this analogy Caesar was not the Kaiser, even if Caesar meant Kaiser, rather he was the man who crossed the Rubicon and cast the die, and looking at it that way, Caesar was he, Friedrich, because he wanted to defeat his enemies, and not the Kaiser in Vienna, even if he bore the title Caesar!
“But Caesar didn’t defeat his enemies. His enemies stabbed him to death!”
“Anyone can stab anyone, that doesn’t mean anything! But they are forgotten, and Caesar’s name lives on!”
“Yes, and do you know where? In the word Kaiser!”
“When you’re King of Bohemia and I’m Queen, Papa will send us help. And when the Union of Protestant Princes sees that the English are protecting Prague, they will rally around us. The crown of Bohemia is the drop that makes the ocean—”
“The barrel! A drop makes the barrel overflow. A drop in the ocean, that stands for futility. You mean the barrel.”
“For God’s sake, this language!”
“That has nothing to do with German, that’s logic.”
At that point she had lost her patience and shouted at him to be quiet and listen, and he had murmured an apology and gone silent. And she had said everything once again: Rubicon, the die, God with us, and she noticed with pride that it sounded better the third time; now she had strung the right sentences together.
“Your father will send soldiers?”
She looked him in the eyes. This was the moment, now everything was up to her: everything that would happen as of now, all the centuries, the whole immeasurable future, everything hinged on her answer.
“He is my father, he won’t abandon me.”
And even though she knew that they would have the same conversation again the next day and the day after that, she also knew that the decision had been made and that she would be crowned in Prague’s cathedral and that she would have a court theater with the best players in the world.