A Brill Calendar: August 31

Few members of the House Orange-Nassau were raised and educated with such consummate care and circumspection as Wilhelmina Helena Paulina Maria (The Hague, August 31 1880 – Palace Het Loo, November 28 1962).

When all her three half-brothers from Willem’s earlier marriage with Queen Sophie had died – the longest-living of them, Alexander, passing away June 21 1884 – the Orange-Nassau dynasty was for the first time in its history without legitimate male issue.

When the Princess succeeded her sire - after the death of her father Willem III (1890) and the ensuing Regency of the Dowager-Queen, Emma (1858 – 1934) - on September 6 1898 as a ravishing young Queen of The Netherlands, her mother had done everything she could have done to bolster the viability of the Orange Monarchy in a subtly planned and executed ‘charm-offensive’.

During the two final decades of the 19th century, European societies witness a veritable revolution of social and cultural life; in almost any perspective, but especially in education on a national, government-controlled level. In the history of the Monarchy, Wilhelmina is the last Head of State who was strictly privately educated. The doors of Leyden University, with its lecture-halls, laboratories, libraries, work-shops and examinations remained closed to the young Princess; (with a sense of profound deference, of course). She was served by courtiers and servants, rather than by scholars and scientists.

It is seldom that protocol in Europe changes briskly. Professor Cees Fasseur’s full-length biography of young Wilhelmina, ‘Wilhelmina – De jonge koningin’, published 1998, one century after the accession, tells the story of her education in a flurry of emancipation for the first time in – often hilarious - detail. Its chapter ‘Leraren en Hoogleraren’ (‘Teachers and Professors’) made for stunning reading.