Prince Rupert

Wikipedia

Prince Rupert
Count Palatine of the Rhine
Issue
Dudley Bard (1666-86)[1] Ruperta (1671)[1]
Full name
Ruprecht Pfalzgraf bei Rhein, Herzog von Bayern
Detail Titles and styles
Count Palatine of the Rhine Duke of Cumberland Earl of Holderness
Father	Frederick V, Elector Palatine
Mother	Elizabeth Stuart
Born	7 December 1619(1619-12-07) Prague
Died	29 November 1682 (aged 62) Westminster, London, England
Burial	Westminster Abbey, London, England

Rupert, Count Palatine of the Rhine, Duke of Bavaria (German: Ruprecht Pfalzgraf bei Rhein, Herzog von Bayern), commonly called Prince Rupert of the Rhine, (17 December 1619 – 29 November 1682), soldier, inventor and amateur artist in mezzotint, was a younger son of Frederick V, Elector Palatine and Elizabeth Stuart, and the nephew of King Charles I of England, who created him Duke of Cumberland and Earl of Holderness.

Prince Rupert had a very varied career. He was a soldier from a young age, fighting against Spain in the Netherlands and the Holy Roman Empire in Germany. Aged 23, he was appointed commander of the Royalist cavalry during the English Civil War. He surrendered after the Battle of Naseby and was banished from the British Isles. He spent some time in Royalist forces in exile, first on land then at sea. He then became a buccaneer in the Caribbean. Following the restoration, Rupert returned to England, becoming a naval commander, inventor, artist and first Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. Prince Rupert died in England in 1682, aged 62.

[edit] Early life

Prince Rupert of the Rhine

Rupert was born in Prague in 1619 at the time of the Thirty Years' War. Soon after his birth, the family fled from Bohemia to the Netherlands where Rupert spent his childhood. He was almost left behind until a court member, thinking the swaddled prince was a bundle of household goods, tossed him onto a carriage. His mother, Elizabeth Stuart, sometimes known as the "Winter Queen" (due to her reign as Queen of Bohemia lasting a single winter in 1619), was a daughter of King James I of England and sister of King Charles I of England. Consequently, Rupert and his brother Maurice supported their uncle Charles when the English Civil War began in 1642.

He took to soldiering early. At the age of fourteen he fought alongside the Protestant Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange at the siege of Rheinberg in 1633, and against Spain at Breda in 1638 in the Eighty Years' War in the Netherlands.

As a child he was at times badly behaved and earned himself the nickname "Robert The Devil". His childhood was not easy; the family had little money after leaving Prague, and he was still a teenager when his elder brother and his father died. Nevertheless Rupert was an exceptional student, becoming fluent in several European languages and excelling in art and mathematics. By the time he was 18 he stood about 6ft 4in tall and had become a dashing young prince.

In the Thirty Years' War, aged 19, Rupert fought for the alliance of Protestants and France at the Battle of Vlotho (17 October 1638) during the invasion of Westphalia. The forces of the Imperial General Hatzfeld captured him, imprisoning him in Linz, Austria, where he studied military textbooks. He was released on parole in 1641, on the condition that he never bear arms against the Holy Roman Emperor again.

[edit] Career during the English Civil War

Illustration of a pamphlet titled "The Cruel Practices of Prince Rupert" (1643).

In 1642, aged 23, King Charles appointed him to lead the Royalist cavalry during the English Civil War, and he largely deserves the credit for their early successes. His dashing reputation earned him the nickname of the "Mad Cavalier". He took a white standard breed poodle dog, named "Boye", into battle with him on several occasions. Throughout the Civil War the soldiers of Parliament feared this dog, claiming it had supernatural powers (see familiar). This Poodle was Prince Rupert's constant companion until the dog's death at the Battle of Marston Moor (2 July 1644).

Rupert became General of the Horse, and his reputation prospered after routing a Parliamentarian force at Powick Bridge (23 September 1642); however he overextended himself at the Battle of Edgehill (23 October 1642) and left the Royalist forces unsupported by cavalry at a critical time, which perhaps cost them the victory.

After Edgehill Rupert asked Charles for a swift cavalry attack on London before the Earl of Essex's army could return. The King's senior counselors, however, urged him to advance slowly on the capital with the whole army. By the time they arrived, the city had organized defenses against them and the Royalists had perhaps lost their best chance of winning the war.

Rupert continued to impress militarily. In 1643 he captured Bristol and in 1644 led the relief of Newark, and York and its castle. He commanded much of the royalist army at its defeat at Marston Moor. In November 1644 Rupert gained appointment as General of the Royalist army, which increased already marked tensions between him and a number of the king's counselors. In May 1645 Rupert captured Leicester but a reversal at the Battle of Naseby a month later would prove politically damaging.

After Naseby, Rupert regarded the Royalist cause as lost, and urged Charles to conclude a peace with Parliament. Charles, ever the political ingenue, still believed he could win the war. Faced with an impossible situation, Rupert surrendered Bristol in September 1645; in response, Charles dismissed him from his service. After demanding a court-martial, which acquitted him, Rupert played no further part in the Royalist army command. After the siege of Oxford in 1646, Parliament banished both him and his brother from England.

[edit] After the Civil War

For some time after this Rupert commanded the troops formed of English exiles in the French army, and received a wound at Marshal de Gassion's siege of La Bassée in 1647. Then, following a degree of reconciliation with Charles, he obtained command of a Royalist fleet. A long and unprofitable naval campaign followed, which extended from Kinsale to Lisbon and from Toulon to Cape Verde. However, following a naval defeat by Admiral Robert Blake, Rupert took refuge in the West Indies. There he followed the life of a buccaneer, preying on English shipping. It was during this time period that his beloved brother Maurice, who captained one of the ships in Rupert's small flotilla, was killed. But the prince again quarreled with the Royalist advisers, and spent six obscure years (1654 to 1660) in Germany and the Netherlands, vainly attempting (as also before and afterwards) to obtain his rightful apanage as a younger son from his brother Charles I Louis, Elector Palatine.

[edit] Career following the Restoration

Following the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, Rupert returned to the service of England, accepting an annuity and becoming a member of the privy council. He never again fought on land, but, turning admiral like Blake and Monk, he played a brilliant part in the Second Anglo-Dutch War as actual supreme commander of the British fleet from June 1666, gaining a victory in the St James's Day Battle. His efforts in the Third Anglo-Dutch War met with humiliating failure at the Battles of Schooneveld and the Battle of Texel.

At some point Rupert, a talented amateur artist, had learned of the printmaking process of mezzotint invented in 1642 by Ludwig von Siegen, a German Lieutenant-Colonel who was also an amateur artist. Whether the two ever met is a subject of scholarly controversy, but Siegen had worked as chamberlain, and probably part-tutor, to Rupert's young cousin William VI, Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, with whom Rupert discussed the technique in letters from 1654.

Rupert produced a few stylish prints in the technique, mostly copies of paintings, and introduced it to England after the Restoration. John Evelyn wrongly credited him as its inventor in 1662; apparently though Rupert invented, or perfected, the "rocker", a key tool in the process. It was Wallerant Vaillant, Rupert's artistic assistant or tutor, who first popularized the process and exploited it commercially.

In 1670, Rupert became the first Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, after having sponsored an expedition of Radisson and des Groseilliers into Hudson Bay. Rupert's HBC secretary was Sir James Hayes (Radisson named the Hayes River, Manitoba in his honour). The HBC was granted a trading monopoly in the whole Hudson Bay watershed area, an immense territory named Rupert's Land. In 1869, control of this territory reverted to the British and Canadian governments.^[2] After his retirement from the active military in around 1674, he engaged in scientific research. He is usually credited with the invention of a form of gunpowder and an alloy named "Prince's metal" in his honour. He is also credited with the invention of Prince Rupert's Drops, glass teardrops which explode when the tail is cracked. He also erected a water-mill on Hackney Marshes for a revolutionary method of boring guns, however his secret died with him, and the enterprise failed^[3].

In retirement, he continued to hold important governmental posts; from 1673, when he was 54, to 1679, he served as England's Lord High Admiral. He did not marry but lived in the 1670s with a Drury Lane actress named Peg Hughes and had a daughter by her, named Ruperta. Ruperta married Emanuel Scrope Howe, (1663-1709), brother of 1st Viscount Howe (1648-1713), and had five children, Sophia, William, Emanuel, James and Henrietta.

Prince Rupert died at his house in Spring Gardens, Westminster, on 19 November 1682, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Prince Rupert, British Columbia and the Rupert River in Quebec are named after him.

[edit] Ancestors

[edit] In fiction

Prince Rupert is the protagonist of Poul Anderson's alternate history/fantasy book A Midsummer Tempest, where the Prince, with the help of various Shakespearean characters who are actual persons in this timeline, eventually defeats Cromwell and wins the English Civil War.

[edit] Notes

[edit] Bibliography

• Ashley, Maurice. Rupert of the Rhine. London: H. Davis, MacGibbon, 1976.

• Fergusson, Bernard. Rupert of the Rhine. London: Collins, 1952.

• Irwin, Margaret. The Stranger Prince: The Story of Rupert of the Rhine. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937.

• Kitson, Frank. Prince Rupert: Portrait of a Soldier. London: Constable, 1994. ISBN 0094737002.

• Morrah, Patrick. Prince Rupert of the Rhine. London: Constable, 1976.

• Petrie, Charles. King Charles, Prince Rupert, and the Civil War: From Original Letters. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974.

• Spencer, Charles. Prince Rupert, The Last Cavalier. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007. ISBN 978-0-297-84610-9

• Thomson, George Malcolm. Warrior Prince: Prince Rupert of the Rhine. London: Secker & Warburg, 1976.

• Warburton, Eliot. Memoirs of Prince Rupert, and the Cavaliers. London: R. Bentley, 1849; vol. 1, vol. 2, vol. 3.

• Wilkinson, Clennell. Prince Rupert, the Cavalier. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1935.

[edit] See also

• Prince Rupert's Drop - teardrop shaped glass drops which shatter into powder if the tail end is tweaked.
• Prince's metal - a brass alloy of 75% copper and 25% zinc used as a gold imitation
• Ludwig von Siegen - Soldier & Inventor of Mezzotint

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Prince Rupert of the Rhine

• Prince Rupert of the Rhine biography

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

This text was last fetched from this Wikipedia page (where you can edit it) on
15 May 2008, 3:05pm under the terms of the GFDL.

1893 text

This text was written as a footnote in the 1893 Wheatley transcription of the diary, the same one that is used for the diary entries on this site.

Annotations

• N Paul Brewster on Tue 30 Sep 2003, 01:19am

  L&M: “Prince Rupert, first cousin of Charles II, had in the Civil War and afterwards quarrelled with Charles I and most of the royalists including Hyde. Since 1654 he had absented himself from Court. The King now gave him an annuity (which ran from this day [29 Sep 1660]) but nothing else … He was not admitted to the Privy Council until April 1662.”

• N Paul Brewster on Tue 30 Sep 2003, 01:21am

  Here’s a site with a biography:
  http://www.british-civil-wars.co.uk/biog/rupert.htm

• N john lauer on Tue 30 Sep 2003, 03:17am

  Rupert introduced “Prince Rupert’s Drops”
  to the Royal Society in March of 1660-61. They are tear-drop shaped glass, highly stressed by rapid cooling in water, and so very resistant to crushing by hammer blows, but they explode when the tail is broken off in the fingers! Google the quoted title for many detailed references. Modern day stressed plate windows for autos, which shatter into small cubes when scratched deeply, demonstrate the same effect.

• N David Chapman on Thu 2 Oct 2003, 01:50am

  Here is a link to genealogical info for Rupert:

  http://richhillsoftware.com/dave/genealogy/getperson.php?personID=I20919&tree=james6

• N anonymous on Mon 25 Oct 2004, 08:13pm

  Gentlemen, I had thought or, rather, hoped that Prince Rupert, Duke of Cumberland, was a man of integrity until I read that he was the father of two bastard children by two ladies.

• N vicente on Mon 25 Oct 2004, 09:52pm

• N vicenzo on Mon 28 Feb 2005, 03:59am

  Prince Rupert was considered by some to be a pyrate in 1650’s, upsetting the Dutch off and on the Guinea coast along with with his daring Adm. Holmes [Royal African Company] and using the word Hoogmogendheiden for his troubles, in saxon [anglo] it be Hogan Morgan , High Mightyness.

• N Jeannine on Thu 24 Nov 2005, 12:13am

  Rupert’s portrait by Lely
  http://www.nmm.ac.uk/mag/pages/mnuExplore/PaintingDetail.cfm?lettera=&ID=BHC2989&name=Sir%20Peter%20Lely&action=ArtistTitle

• N in Aqua Scripto on Sat 3 Dec 2005, 02:58am

  from :Dirk Background info: on Prince Rupert’s Drops

  http://www.pepysdiary.com/p/1357.php#c7549
  Annotations 13 January 1661/62:
  http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1662/01/13/#c26520
  And further down that same page - pictures:
  http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1662/01/13/#c26535
  + from Terry F. http://faraday.physics.uiowa.edu/mech/1R20.70.htm

• N jeannine on Sun 8 Jan 2006, 07:16pm

  From Grammont’s footnotes
  Grandson of James the First, whose actions during the civil wars are well known. He was born 19th December, 1619, and died at his house in Spring Gardens, November 22, 1682. Lord Clarendon says of him, that “he was rough and passionate, and loved not debate; liked what was proposed, as he liked the persons who proposed it; and was so great an enemy to Digby and Colepepper, who were only present in the debates of the war with the officers, that he crossed all they proposed.” — History of the Rebellion, vol. ii. p. 554. He is supposed to have invented the art of mezzotinto. —

  http://www.pseudopodium.org/repress/grammont/notes03.html see note 78

  Lord Orford’s contrast to this character of Prince Rupert is too just to be here omitted. “Born with the taste of an uncle whom his sword was not fortunate in defending, Prince Rupert was fond of those sciences which soften and adorn a hero’s private hours, and knew how to mix them with his minutes of amusement, without dedicating his life to their pursuit, like us, who, wanting capacity for momentous views, make serious study of what is only the transitory occupation of a genius. Had the court of the first Charles been peaceful, how agreeably had the prince’s congenial propensity flattered and confirmed the inclination of his uncle! How the muse of arts would have repaid the patronage of the monarch, when, for his first artist, she would have presented him with his nephew! How different a figure did the same prince make in a reign of dissimilar complexion! The philosophic warrior, who could relax himself into the ornament of a refined court, was thought a savage mechanic, when courtiers were only voluptuous wits. Let me transcribe a picture of Prince Rupert, drawn by a man who was far from having the least portion of wit in that age, who was superior to its indelicacy, and who yet was so overborne by its prejudices, that he had the complaisance to ridicule virtue, merit, talents. — But Prince Rupert, alas! was an awkward lover!” Lord Orford here inserts the character in the text, and then adds, “What pity that we, who wish to transmit this prince’s resemblance to posterity on a fairer canvas, have none of these inimitable colours to enface the harsher likeness! We can but oppose facts to wit, truth to satire. — How unequal the pencils! yet what these lines cannot do, they may suggest: they may induce the reader to reflect, that if the prince was defective in the transient varnish of a court, he at least was adorned by the arts with that polish which alone can make a court attract the attention of subsequent ages.” — Catalogue of Engravers, p. 135, 8vo. ed.
  [Lord Orford thus relates the circumstance of his inventing mezzo-tinto: “We must take up the prince in his laboratory, begrimed, uncombed, perhaps in a dirty shirt; on the day I am going to mention, he certainly had not shaved and powdered to charm Miss Hughes, for it happened in his retirement at Brussels, after the catastrophe of his uncle. Going out early one morning, he observed the sentinel, at some distance from his post, very busy doing something to his piece. The prince asked what he was about? He replied, the dew had fallen in the night, had made his fusil rusty, and that he was scraping and cleaning it. The prince looking at it, was struck with something like a figure eaten into the barrel, with innumerable little holes closed together, like friezed work on gold or silver, part of which the fellow had scraped away.

  “One knows what a mere good officer would have said on such an accident; if a fashionable officer, he might have damned the poor fellow, and given him a shilling: but the Génie fécond en expériences from so trifling an accident conceived mezzotinto. The prince concluded that some contrivance might be found to cover a brass plate with such a grained ground of fine pressed holes, which would undoubtedly give an impression all black, and that by scraping away proper parts, the smooth superficies would leave the rest of the paper white. Communicating his idea to Wallerant Vaillant, a painter whom he maintained, they made several experiments, and at last invented a steel roller, cut with tools to make teeth like a file or rasp, with projecting points, which effectually produced the black grounds; those being scraped away and diminished at pleasure, left the gradations of light.”

  Evelyn, in his Diary, March 13, 1661, says: “This afternoon, Prince Rupert shewed me with his own hands the new way of graving called mezzotinto, which afterwards, by his permission, I published in my history of Chalcography; this set so many artists on work, that they soon arrived to the perfection it is since come, emulating the tenderest miniatures.”

  Pepys, in his Diary, February 4, 1664-5, says: “My Lord Bellasses told us an odd passage; how the king having put out Prince Rupert of his generalship, upon some miscarriage at Bristol, and Sir Richard Willis of his governorship of Newark, at the entreaty of the gentry of the county, and put in my Lord Bellasses; the great officers of the king’s army mutinied, and* came in that manner with swords drawn, into the market-place of the town where the king was; which the king hearing, says: ‘I must horse.’ And there himself personally, when everybody expected they should have been opposed, the king came, and cried to the head of the mutineers, wtiich was Prince Rupert, ‘Nephew, I command you to be gone.’ So the prince, in all his fury and discontent, withdrew, and his company scattered.”

  Dallaway says: “He was the author of several inventions of decided utility, in his own profession, of a method to bore cannons, and of a mixed metal, of which they should be composed, and of great improvement in the manufacture of gunpowder. He communicated to Christopher Kirby a method of tempering steel for the best fish-hooks ever made in England.”

  Prince Rupert was also famous for his play at tennis, and for being an excellent shot. A particular instance of his skill is mentioned by Plot, where he is said to have sent two balls successively, with a horse-pistol, through the weather-cock of St. Mary’s steeple at Stafford. The distance was sixty yards, and the feat was performed in the presence of Charles I.]

  http://www.pseudopodium.org/repress/grammont/notes05.html see note 151
  

• N jeannine on Sun 8 Jan 2006, 09:01pm

  Prince Rupert had a daughter Ruperta by Margaret Hughes (actress) and a son, Dudley Rupert by Francesca, daughter of Henry Brad, Viscount Bellomont, both illegitimate, but both provided for in his will. He also provided well for Margaret Hughes after his death. (Footnote from Grammont 1910 version, not online)

• N jeannine on Tue 16 May 2006, 03:42pm

  Another link
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Rupert

• N Michael Robinson on Mon 4 Jun 2007, 07:50pm

  For Rupert’s connection with the process and early history of mezzotint in England see:-

  The invention of the mezzotint process is particularly associated with Ludwig von Siegen (1609-c.1680), an obscure name but certainly a name familiar in the history of printmaking, but also with Prince Rupert, Count Palatine (1619-1682) also known as ‘Rupert of the Rhine’ a much more famous individual perhaps best known as the exiled Palatinate Prince and dashing Royalist Cavalry Commander during the English Civil War. …” Continued in detail:-
  http://www.npg.org.uk/live/mellonmezzotint.asp

• N Michael Robinson on Mon 4 Jun 2007, 07:52pm

  For Rupert’s connection with the process and early history of mezzotint in England see:-

  The invention of the mezzotint process is particularly associated with Ludwig von Siegen (1609-c.1680), an obscure name but certainly a name familiar in the history of printmaking, but also with Prince Rupert, Count Palatine (1619-1682) also known as ‘Rupert of the Rhine’ a much more famous individual perhaps best known as the exiled Palatinate Prince and dashing Royalist Cavalry Commander during the English Civil War. …” Continued in detail:-
  http://www.npg.org.uk/live/mellonmezzotint.asp

References in the diary

1660

Sep: 29

1662

May: 1
Oct: 27
Dec: 1

1663

Feb: 8

1664

Jan: 20
Jun: 3, 4, 20
Jul: 15
Aug: 31
Sep: 5, 6, 19
Oct: 5, 12, 18, 24, 31

1665

Jan: 15
Feb: 4
Mar: 4