Caged No More

In her first appearance as Queen of The Netherlands, Wilhelmina Helena Pauline Maria stood on the balcony of her palace in Amsterdam and stared with a small child's wonder at her cheering subjects.

"Mama," she asked, "do all these people belong to me?" "No, my child," replied the Queen-Regent, "it is you who belong to all these people." It was a hard lesson for a strongwilled, privileged little girl of ten to learn, but Wilhelmina learned it well; long after her abdication in 1948, the people to whom she belonged continued to refer to her affectionately as "the Old Queen." Last week, at 82, the Old Queen died in her sleep at Het Loo, the palace where she had spent her first years and her last.

During her 50-year reign, she was a symbol of continuity in a changing world.

When she ascended the throne, Victoria was still Queen and men still looked to the future with easy confidence. When she stepped down, Holland was clearing away the ruins of World War II, and soon, with the loss of the fabled East Indies, the Dutch empire, once the third largest in the world (after the British and French), shrank to one-fourth of its size.

But through it all the doughty Queen ruled by the motto of the House of Orange: Je maintiendrai--I will maintain.

The Only Man. "Maintain" was not really the word. "Prevail" was more like it. All her life she spoke of the pomp and protocol that enveloped her as "the cage," and she never ceased struggling to escape its confines. As a constitutional monarch she had limited executive powers; yet she learned statecraft so thoroughly that Cabinet ministers were constantly being stumped by her sharp questioning. In exile during World War II, so efficient was she that one escaped Dutch Resistance fighter marveled. "The government in London was a bunch of chattering wives, but there was one man: the Queen."

Frugal and unfrivolous, she epitomized the solid Dutch virtues. Though she dressed like a dumpy Dutch huisvrouw in her frumpy hats, flat shoes and baggy tweeds, she was one of the world's richest women. She had a personal income of $5,000,000 a year from the East Indies alone. Even after Indonesia won its independence, she was worth at least $100 million in real estate, Royal Dutch Shell stock, paintings and bank holdings.

Wilhelmina was the child of a May and December marriage. King William III married the German Princess Emma of Waldeck-Pyrmont when he was 62 and she 20. Wilhelmina, their only child, was sole heir to the 400-year-old Orange-Nassau line. Closely sheltered, she led so desperately lonely a life that she once admonished one of her dolls, "If you are naughty, I shall make you into a queen, and then you won't have any other little children to play with." Null & Void. In her solitude, she developed a faith so intensely personal that whenever her English governess insisted on praying with her, she wrote: "I declared the prayer null and void." She was an imperious little girl. One morning, when she knocked at her mother's bedroom door and was asked "Who's there?", she replied: "The Queen of The Netherlands." Wilhelmina kept Holland out of World War I only to become embroiled in controversy after it was all over. Unannounced, Germany's defeated Kaiser Wilhelm entered the neutral Netherlands and requested--and got--sanctuary. It was to the Kaiser that Wilhelmina addressed what is probably her best-known remark.

During an earlier meeting, after the Kaiser boasted of his seven-foot German guardsmen, she replied: "When we open our dikes, the waters are ten feet deep." But in World War II it was the Dutch who were engulfed in a German tide.

Nazi paratroopers and Panzer divisions blitzed Holland in May 1940, and Wilhelmina was hustled out of The Hague in an armored truck and put aboard a British destroyer.

White Funeral. War's end brought political squabbling, economic hardship and an exhausting rebellion in the East Indies, and Wilhelmina found it was too much for her. "I have finished my walk," she said, and in September 1948, her golden jubilee as Queen, she turned the throne over to her only child, Princess Juliana.

While crowds outside Amsterdam's Royal Palace cheered "Long live Wilhelmina," the Old Queen slipped out the back door and ordered her chauffeur to drive to The Hague. Halfway there, she turned to her ever present security guards and said, imperious as ever: "Gentlemen, I am a princess now, I am not a queen. So thank you for your services. Will you leave the car, please?" The two baffled guards hitchhiked the rest of the way.

Even in retirement at Het Loo ("The Grove"), she did not lay down the burden entirely. She had one wing of the magnificent 17th century palace converted into quarters for invalided Resistance fighters and refugees from Hungary and Indonesia. She painted, took walks, but no longer was she spry enough for bicycling. With her death, she had finally escaped from her earthly cage. And, as she requested, she will be given a "white funeral" because, as she wrote in her memoirs, it symbolizes "the certainty of faith that death is the beginning of life."

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