King's coat of William I of the Netherlands
The regalia worn by the current head of the Netherlands Willem-Alexander on his inauguration goes back to the royal cloak of William I of the Netherlands . Remnants of this king's cloak are still on today's robe six generations later. The first version was worn by Prince Wilhelm I when he was appointed king in 1815.
The ascension of prince and enthronement to King William I, called "homage" in the Netherlands, laid the basis for the following generations of rulers of the House of Orange , the ruling royal family of the Netherlands.
General
A royal coat is a traditional, representative, mostly sleeveless piece of clothing worn by heads of state. The Dutch royal mantle (originally "troon mantle" ) of the respective king or queen consists of red velvet with gold embroidered Dutch heraldic lions; it is lined and trimmed with ermine fur . Since the Dutch heads are no longer crowned, but only solemnly paid homage to them at the inauguration, it is more appropriate to call it the royal mantle and not, as in other countries, the coronation mantle .
The ermine was said to be of such “purity” that it “would rather run through fire than into something unclean”. These ideas probably caused ermine fur to be used only for clothing of the very highest dignitaries for centuries, although there were and are many far more valuable furs. Ermine is generally considered to be the fur of emperors and kings. In England, King Edward III proclaimed . around the middle of the 14th century the ermine to the royal fur. The attached ermine tails with their black tail tips ("spotted" ermine) are characteristic of the fur as a symbol of status. As a heraldic fur work , the stylized ermine also appears as a rank or symbol of power in the coats of arms of many royal houses.
The prince's or king's cloak made of purple velvet is a cloak trimmed and lined with ermine, a shape that emerged from the cloak used by the upper classes at the time. Velvet has been the preferred material for sumptuous robes since the end of the Middle Ages . Since the middle of the 12th century, the fashion for these sleeveless coats favored fur linings and trimmings, and ermine gradually became the chosen fur of princely persons, as well as for the highest clerical dignitaries. In the early 14th century the shoulder-width fur collar was added; Also set with ermine, it is characteristic of the princely coat in the future, especially when the wide collar shape disappeared from general fashion in the 15th century. Often the regalia is completed by a headgear trimmed with ermine, often reminiscent of a crown. The large ermine collar is missing from the princely lady's mantle.
History of today's Dutch royal mantle
Today's ermine cloak, last worn by Willem-Alexander in his tribute on April 30, 2013, has its origins in 1815. The first version was used for the coronation of William I created. Apart from the introduction of the next royal head of state, he was in the fur preservation of the court skinning workers for more than 130 years . During this time, the company also carried out repairs, changes and renewals.
The crowned Nassau lions, attached to the first version of the cloak and armed with a sword and a bundle of arrows, have stood the test of time and are back to today's, last version.
The coat of Wilhelm I.
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In the inventory list of the estate of King Wilhelm I (1772–1843) from 1844, two red velvet coats are listed, one worn for his inauguration as Sovereign Prince of the Netherlands on March 30, 1814 in Amsterdam, the other for his coronation on March 21, 1814. September 1815 in Brussels. Why a new robe was made within a year may be explained in the design of the first coat. This is described in the inventory as "transposed with ermine", the second as "fed with ermine". The first coat from 1814 probably only had an ermine border and was therefore less splendid. It is unknown what else this earlier coat looked like. The unreliable engraving by R. Vinkeles based on a drawing by JW Pieneman shows an open-fronted coat, trimmed with ermine and an additional cape made of ermine. In any case, it was found not to be good enough for the royal ordination.
A report by the Supreme Aristocratic Council shows that a design was made for a new royal coat. Today's knowledge of the appearance of the coat worn at the royal coronation on September 21, 1815 is based on a portrait of WB van der Kooy from 1818, commissioned by the Overijssel estates. The robe was very massive; the velvet cape, lined with ermine and edged all around with hermelin, had a mighty train. The lush, two-skin-wide trimmings on the front edges merge into a stand-up collar, which was common in men's fashion at the time, cut short and high. The piece was held together over the chest by a diamond jewelry clasp. Evenly distributed gold-embroidered Dutch heraldic lions were sewn onto the red velvet. During the enthronement, the cape was decorated with the star of the Order of the Garter below the left shoulder .
Under his coat Wilhelm I wore a dark blue, silver-embroidered skirt with red lapels and a high red collar; including white tights and riding boots. A round black hat with a lush white plume on the folded edge complemented the royal costume.
It is likely that Paul Christian Arbeiter was entrusted with the production of the ermine fur for the king's cloak. The fur cutter, who comes from a German family of craftsmen, had been appointed court kürschner by Wilhelm a year earlier .
The coat of Wilhelm II.
Wilhelm II. (1792–1849) took office a month and a half after his father had abdicated. Before Wilhelm II's “homage” on November 28, 1840, the furrier worker replaced the original stand-up collar of the king's cloak with a large cape . He charged the coming king 90 guilders for this. The freshening of the ermine lining and the ermine lining cost 12 guilders, the repair of the fur including the new pelts required for it 45 guilders. In addition, the Hague-based company Arbeiter took on the storage of the royal coat for over 130 years, along with the rest of the royal family's furs when it was not needed. Until 1948, the company carried out the repairs and renewals that were required before each enthronement.
The cape over the cloak enabled the budding king to wear the cloak closed. Nevertheless, he opted for the more difficult version, in which the part was only hooked onto the shoulders and held together with a gold cord in front of the chest. The actual fastening remained hidden under the mighty epaulettes .
The skirt worn under the coat corresponded to that of the volunteer soldiers of the "Tiendaagse Veldtocht", a military skirt again inspired by Russian uniforms from 1812. Tiendaagse Veldtocht, the 10-day campaign, was an unsuccessful attempt by Wilhelm I in 1831 to end an uprising that had broken out in Belgium the year before. A cylinder-shaped headgear was part of the uniform of the White Hussars No. 6, over which his brother-in-law Tsar Alexander I had given him the command of honor in 1816.
Wilhelm II was more powerfully built than his father. Presumably that was why he wore the coat set back on his back shoulder, no longer tied together at the front of the neck by a brooch, but held wide apart by a cord with a tassel.
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The coat of Wilhelm III.
When Wilhelm II died in 1849, the Crown Prince succeeded him as King Wilhelm III. (1817–1890) to the royal and grand ducal dignity. For him, the coat was not visibly changed. When he was enthroned on May 12, 1849, he wore it like his father.
Wilhelmina with a royal cloak
Queen Wilhelmina (1898)
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Wilhelmina's coat
After King Wilhelm III. Had died in 1890, ten-year-old Wilhelmina (1880–1962) became queen. Until she came of age on her 18th birthday, she was still under the guardianship of her mother. Queen Wilhelmina was the first woman to take the Dutch throne. Her enthronement took place on September 6, 1898. For the only 18-year-old monarch, perhaps nothing has been changed on the royal cloak, perhaps the shoulders and the pelerine have been made narrower. The part with the cape fit perfectly into the bourgeois fashion of the time, the ladies often put on small fur shoulder cloaks outside of the courtyard. Two of the four aides wore the train, the other two held their cloaks in the middle to ease the pressure on their shoulders. During the homage, the train was held by all four adjutants.
A lady in the palace of Queen Mother Emma wrote in her diary that Wilhelmina found the chair on which her father sat during his homage to be a bit old, "but since my father used it, I will also use it, as well as his ermine coat".
On September 4, 1948, Wilhelmina abdicated in favor of her daughter Juliana.
Juliana's coat
Juliana (1909-2004) was introduced to her royal office on September 6, 1948, after her mother Wilhelmina abdicated.
At the time, Nico de Groot was working as a young furrier for the fur couturier Arbeiter in The Hague on Laan van Meerdervoort, the longest avenue in the Netherlands. He later recalled the excitement when the news arrived that the ermine coat was needed to “pay homage” to Juliana: “Mr Bakels, our manager, let Queen Wilhelmina know that the coat was in very poor condition was. The velvet was gone and the ermine should have been replaced. Queen Wilhelmina replied that ermine was too expensive and that we should use rabbit fur for the restoration. ”The offered restoration then did not take place, instead the coat was picked up. Thereupon there was great dejection in the court skinning. There was also little consolation there that Juliana ordered three guanaco fur jackets for the oldest princesses, which were worn by the girls during the enthronement ceremony.
The old royal cloak with the long train was brought over to the royal palace. There, the future queen had a study set up for the 19-year-old Basel couturier Erwin Dolder, whom she had met through a friend, the Dutch industrialist wife Valti van Leeuwen. There he worked the blue dress that Juliana wore under the red cape when she was enthroned, and he also designed the headdress with jewels from her family property. After the unattractive robe arrived, Dolder bought new velvet for the coat in his hometown in the fashion house "Zum wilden Mann", a specialty shop with a large fabric department (based on Jean-Martin Leonhardt, owner of a fashion house in Arosa and long-time friend of Dolders). The velvet coat was sewn in the Basel curtain sewing workshop in Klingele, where people were used to dealing with such large areas of fabric. Dolder provided the pattern. He had changed the shape a little, the corners were now rounded. While the overlying cap was previously only attached to the coat at the neck, Dolder now also connected the two parts at the front edges. At the Basel Plisseeanstalt Schwestern H. & F. Kerber he had the old lion embroidery, 80 motifs according to the invoice, re-appliqued.
Since three years after the end of the war there was no ermine fur in the Netherlands, Dolder had a new ermine lining and a mostly new ermine peel skinned at Pelzhaus Goldfarb in Basel, also on his own initiative. He only informed the prospective queen that it was no longer the original royal cloak when she was dressed on the day of her enthronement. Only a small part of the ermine and the gold-embroidered lions still came from the old coat.
The couturier Erwin Dolder
Erwin Roger Dolder (* 1928 in Basel; † 1970) was the only child of the Basel porter Oscar Dolder and the housewife Rosa Adèle Dolder. Between 1944 and 1946 he attended the women's school in Basel, where he learned to tailor. He then worked for the Basel couturier Fred Spillmann . He didn't have any children.
In October 1948, a few weeks after Juliana's enthronement, Dolder returned to Basel. He received a check for a good 3,000 guilders from the royal bookkeeping. A copy of the check is preserved, along with other mementos from the highlights of Dolder's career. It is unclear whether it was payment for the royal coat or for other clothing made for Juliana. The art historian Dieuwke Grijpma, who has dealt intensively with the history of the royal mantle, calculated that the renewal of the mantle would have cost between 9,000 and 12,500 guilders. She therefore thinks it is likely that Juliana did not pay for the new coat because she had not commissioned a renewal.
If you follow the memory of Rolf Leimgruber, a furrier from the Goldfarb company, in whose workshop the ermine lining was made, the order was not paid for there either. It was a considerable sum, the failure of which hurt the owner of the company considerably. The still very young and also somewhat naive Dolder had set the original price far too low, probably in order to obtain the promising contract that was promising considerable renown. The invoices and correspondence kept in the Federal Archives in Bern show that the liabilities of the Dutch royal family in Switzerland ultimately totaled 28,509 Swiss francs. When Swiss lawyers threatened a scandal, the queen's treasurer intervened and arranged for 13,000 francs to be paid, but the bill from the Goldfarb fur house was not included. Leimgruber assumes that this was the reason why queens were generally no longer allowed to be talked about in the presence of his boss - at least not without Victor Goldfarb “furious”. Dolder paid a small part with money borrowed from his parents.
It is said that Queen Juliana gave her then court tailor the unauthorized renewal of the king's cloak, provided that he did not make this public. If the promise was made, at least Dolder did not keep it, he told the story to his friends. Riet en Wim, the owner of an antiquarian bookshop from Delft, later reported how she and her husband visited Dolder: “When we sat down, Erwin put a huge fused velvet rag on the floor in front of us. There were bright red spots all over the rag that looked like little lions. Erwin told us that it was once the old royal coat and that he had made a new coat for Juliana. He had sewn the lions of the old coat onto the new one. ”There were also many visitors to Basel's gay scene who had seen Dolder wear the old king's coat in the 1960s as a“ gift from Queen Juliana ”.
In the first and subsequent years, Dolder was in Paris, where he made wardrobes for Zarah Leander , Norma Shearer and Edith Piaf, among others . For a while he worked in London and then in various South American countries, where he was also allowed to work on a dress for Evita Peron .
In an interview, Dolder told an Argentine journalist about the Dutch coronation cloak: “I had devised a special system for how the heavy cloak would rest on her shoulders without a clasp at the moment she had to raise her hand to take the oath . It only took a moment and the cape was all around her shoulders ”.
In 1963 he returned to Holland, where his friend Valti van Leeuwen set up a studio and an apartment for him and his parents in her house. Again he worked for Queen Juliane and other noble ladies of the court. The pay was obviously bad, his customers expected a celebrity bonus from him, and he did not always get paid for his services. Dolder probably also lived beyond his means; it was said that he had no right relationship with money. In any case, at the end of 1956 he was so indebted that he was deported from the Netherlands after his residence permit had expired. He did not succeed in re-establishing himself in Basel, and in the end he even had to go to prison there because of again high liabilities. During his stay abroad he had left the remnants of the old royal cloak with his mother. In the last years of his life he wore it on regular visits to gay bars, nothing is known about the whereabouts of the relic. In 1970 Erwin Dolder died of a brain tumor.
Beatrix's coat
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Queen Juliana no longer gave the royal cloak to the furrier in the fur preservation. Instead, she kept it in a small lead box. When it was removed in 1980 because of the impending enthronement of daughter Beatrix (* 1938), it was discovered that the fur was "incredibly wrinkled" and the red velvet had rubbed off on the ermine and the silk lining . Therefore, the production of a new ermine peel was arranged under the responsibility of the Amsterdam couturière Theresia Vreugdenhil (1929–2012). Apparently, however, the old, yellowed ermine tails were not replaced with new ones. The ermine fur of the coat, lining and trimming should not be renewed again. The parts of the hood that were still usable were used to repair the fur lining, but were not enough. The hair, which was once snow-white, was now so yellowed that it could not be repaired or supplemented with new pelts. Beatrix's seamstress therefore asked her customers whether they still had ermine clothes there. Three customers answered. The ermine cape was used by Elly Brenninkmeyer-Maurer, the wife of the boss of the company C & A Brenninkmeyer . The Brenninkmeyers never revealed the story to the outside world, only in their family circle it was always called "a royal coat with fur from C&A".
On the official photos on the occasion of Beatrix's enthronement, it can be seen that the cut of the coat was not changed during the repair and adjustment, at least in length, the front parts of the larger Beatrix end visibly higher than that of Juliana. Two additional toggle fasteners at shoulder height ensured a secure hold during the oath ceremony with the arm raised. All of her four aides were required to wear the rounded cloak train.
The dress worn underneath is the creation of Theresia Vreugdenhil, it was taken into custody by Huis ten Bosch in 1984 . In many royal houses it is customary to display the robes for viewing. Various requests for this before the ceremony were refused, and a related request from the Museum of the History of the Dutch Royal Family Paleis het Loo to the Queen after the enthronement was refused.
Willem-Alexander's coat
With the inauguration of Willem-Alexander (* 1967) on April 30, 2013, the question of whether his coat was still the original from 1814 received public attention. The Reichsinformationsdienst (RVD) had announced in advance that the prospective king would wear the coat from 1815 when he was inaugurated. Willem-Alexander portrayed the piece as a symbol of the stability of the Dutch royal family in a television interview: "I just stand for the continuity of a system of 200 years, the coat is part of it". He mentioned the silver wire lions on top, all of which had darkened and needed a little polishing. Otherwise the coat taken out of the box would be completely ready for use after it had been cleaned and repaired a little. However, Dieuwke Grijpma had meanwhile researched the history of the coat and found that only the embroidered, somewhat oxidized lions of the original coat remained.
In response to a parliamentary question, Prime Minister Mark Rutte replied (in March, just under two months before the enthronement): “The historical coat is backed with ermine fur. No fur has been used for the coat since the inauguration in 1980. This is also not intended. "
In order to make the coat appear as long as possible, Willem-Alexander carried it back on his shoulder, similar to his mother Beatrix, including a tailcoat with an orange-blue sash. The somewhat bulky fall of the coat during the enthronement ceremonies indicates that the ermine fur was previously stabilized by an insert to prevent the fine leather, which is rotten due to natural aging, from tearing.
At the beginning of 2014, the painter Saskia Vugts was commissioned by the municipality of Vught to create an official, life-size portrait of King Willem-Alexander in a royal cloak for the throne room of the old town hall.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f g Eelco Elzenga: Theater van sta . Rijksmuseum Paleis Het Loo (eds.), Apeldoorn, 1990, pp. 5, 9, 12 (Dutch).
- ↑ a b c d e f g h Dieuwke Grijpma, Dorine Hermans: Kringloopmantel. In: de Volkskraat , Amsterdam, March 18, 2013, p. 2, V3-V4 (Dutch).
- ↑ a b Dr. Eva Nienholdt, Berlin: fur on rulers' robes, on secular and religious religious and official costumes . In: The fur industry , Hermelin-Verlag Dr. Paul Schöps, Berlin, Ffm., Leipzig, Vienna. Volume IX / New Series, No. 3, 1958, pp. 132-138
- ↑ Editor: Ermine for the English coronation robe . In: Die Pelzwirtschaft , Verlag Die Pelzwirtschaft, Berlin, probably 1953, p. 361
- ↑ a b c d e f g h Dieuwke Grijpma: The unpaid royal coat from Basel. In: bz, Brennpunkt Basel , Northwestern Switzerland , April 29, 2013, p. 18.
- ^ Wilhelm I on a portrait by Joseph Paelinck (1781–1839), 1819 .
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Dieuwke Grijpma: Kleren voor de elite. Balans (Hsgr.), 1999, pp. 32, 34-43. ISBN 90 5018 4472 (Dutch).
- ↑ a b c Dieuwke Grijpma, Dorine Hermans: 'Oude' Koningsmantel will be genaaid in 1948 in gordijnatelier . In: De Volkskrant , September 30, 2013, pp. 4–5 (Dutch).
- ↑ Remco Meijer: A bad copy with 'C & A-bont'. In: de Volkskrant , Amsterdam, March 18, 2013, p. 2 (Dutch).
- ↑ Interview from April 27, 2013, quote: "Je state nu eenmal voor de continuiteit van een systeem van 200 jaar, dus daar hoort die mantel bij."
- ↑ https://www.bol.com, AM Tobacco: Kleren voor de elite . Retrieved May 18, 2016 (Dutch).
- ↑ http://www.omroepbrabant.nl, Jan de Vries: Saskia Vugts maakt ook voor Vught portret van koning Willem-Alexander . January 8, 2014. Retrieved May 21, 2016.
- ↑ saskiavugts.nl: The Making of ... (The production of ...) ( Memento of the original December 6, 2016 Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link is automatically inserted and not yet tested. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved December 4, 2016.
