In 1580 Stadtholder Willem Lodewijk van Nassau-Dillenburg purchased and took up residence at the Rolkemahuis in Leeuwarden, which had been built in 1564 for Philips II Boudewijn van Loo, the rentmeester-generaal to Philip II. In 1603 Willem Lodewijk…

Originally the Binnenhof Court in The Hague was the residence of the counts of Holland. From the sixteenth century onwards the stadtholders of Holland took up residence here and they built their court, which was known as the Stadhouderskwartier, in…

Mary was a daughter of the Stuart king James II of England, Scotland, and Ireland and his first wife Anne Hyde. As a result of her marriage in 1677 to her cousin, Stadtholder Willem III of Oranje-Nassau, she became Princess of Orange [Oranje] and…

In 1641, at the age of ten, Mary — the eldest daughter of the Stuart king Charles I — married Willem II van Oranje-Nassau (1626–1650). Following the death of his father, Frederik Hendrik, in 1647, Willem succeeded as stadholder and Mary received the…

Amalia von Solms (1602–1675) was born in Braunfels, the third daughter of Count Johann Albrecht I of Solms-Braunfels, and became lady-in-waiting to the ‘Winter Queen’, Elizabeth Stuart, around 1615. When Elizabeth’s court-in-exile moved to The Hague,…

A daughter of Stadtholder Frederik Hendrik van Oranje-Nassau and his wife Amalia von Solms-Braunfels, Albertine Agnes van Oranje-Nassau was the first member of the Oranje-Nassau dynasty to marry into the family of Nassau-Dietz.

In 1696, following the death of her husband Hendrik Casimir II (1657–1696), Henriette Amalia von Anhalt-Dessau became regent on behalf of her son Johan Willem Friso (1687–1711), and she held this post until he came of age in 1707.

Although no letters from Henriette Amalia to her son have survived, a total of 231 letters from the other side of the correspondence — from Johan Willem Friso to his mother — have been preserved. The majority of these were sent from the battlefields…

On 31 October 1664 Willem Frederik van Nassau-Dietz, stadtholder of Friesland, Groningen, and Drenthe, and husband of Albertine Agnes, died of the injuries sustained when his own gun went off accidentally and destroyed the lower part of his face.…

Of the 151 letters currently in Sophia Hedwig's catalogue, twenty letters were written by her son Hendrik Casimir, who sent frequent reports to his mother about both his wellbeing and the military actions of what became known as the Eighty Years War…