Letters form the Dutch and Frisian Stadtholders’ wives 1605 – 1725

This project is dedicated to the letters of the wives of the stadtholders of the Dutch Republic: those from the Orange and Stuart courts in The Hague and those from the Frisian Court in Leeuwarden. Most of these royal consorts’ letters had not previously been made accessible or digitised. This digital edition enables new academic research into the influence these women had on political, cultural and social processes, both within and beyond the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.

In collaboration with Koninklijke Verzamelingen in The Hague and Oxford University’s (Women) Early Modern Letters Online, (W)EMLO, the Huygens Institute has currently processed over 8,469 letters and made them available via the EMLO portal. Here, not only is the metadata of the entire corpus fully searchable, but each stadtholder’s wife also has her own catalogue in which the correspondence can be consulted separately.

Overarching page featuring 8,469 letters from eleven stadtholder’s wives

The website also provides access to a digital exhibition, which includes short biographies of the wives of the 17th-century Dutch and Frisian stadtholders and a selection of sample letters. A zoomable map also shows the main residences of the 17th-century Dutch and Frisian stadtholders and their wives.

For more detailed information about the women and their correspondence, see Wives of the Stadtholders.

Since 29 September 2023, the correspondence (4,112 letters) of Anna of Hanover, wife of William IV of Orange-Nassau, has been added.

Work is currently underway to enter the letters of Marie Louise of Hesse-Kassel and Wilhelmina of Prussia.