EMLC Early Modern Low Countries 2543-1587 Stichting EMLC, supported by Utrecht University Library Open Access Journals The Netherlands emlc.23012 10.51750/emlc.23012 Article The Roles of Ambassadresses in Early Modern Diplomacy: The Promise of Digitised Seventeenth-Century Dutch Newspapers Lamal Nina

Nina Lamal is a researcher at nl-Lab and Huygens Institute. Her research focuses on diplomacy and politics, the transnational history of media, communication and publishing in the early modern Low Countries, Italy, and the Holy Roman Empire. She is the author of Italian Communication on the Revolt in the Low Countries (Leiden 2023) and editor of the digital edition of the letters of Christofforo Suriano, the first Venetian envoy to the Dutch Republic from 1616 to 1623 (https://suriano.huygens.knaw.nl). Other recent publications include ‘The Politics of Persuasion. Foreign Powers and the first Italian Newspapers (Cuadernos de Historia Moderna, 2024), a co-edited special issue with Jan Machielsen on ‘Jesuits and Print’ (Journal of Jesuit Studies, 2023), and an essay with Helmer Helmers, ‘Dutch Diplomacy in the Seventeenth Century. An Introduction’, in the volume Early Modern Diplomacy (Berlin 2024).

 04 2025 9 1 88 100 Copyright: The Author(s). 2025 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Despite a recent surge in scholarship recognising the vital role of women in early modern diplomacy, the role of women in Dutch seventeenth-century embassies has been completely overlooked. This significant blind spot in Dutch scholarship skews our view of how the Dutch Republic, a new player on the international stage, practiced its diplomacy. This essay focuses on the role of ambassadresses, the wives of ambassadors, who joined their husband on a diplomatic mission. More specifically, it explores the potential of using digitised seventeenth-century Dutch newspapers as a valuable resource for finding more material to research the role of diplomats’ wives in shaping Dutch and European diplomacy.

 Keywords ambassadress diplomacy peace conference family archives newspapers correspondence

In 1679, the French court painter Henri Gascar was sent to the city of Nijmegen to capture the signing of the peace treaty between France and Spain a year earlier.1 The painting offers a scene familiar to historians of early modern diplomacy: the male signatories and negotiators gather around a table (fig. 1). However, if we look more closely, we also see several women peeking through the back door to watch the signing ceremony. Despite a surge in studies in the past two decades on women in international politics, this painting continues to epitomise the discipline of diplomatic history, still largely seen and studied as a world populated by men, with women operating only in the background.2

Henri Gascar, The Peace of Nijmegen, 1679, oil on canvas, 161 × 274,5 cm, Nijmegen, Valkhof Museum, 1978.05.2.

Within the history of early modern diplomacy, an increasing number of case studies focus on the rise of ‘ambassadresses’, women who accompanied their husbands on diplomatic missions.3 Gemma Allen has demonstrated that English resident ambassadors were only occasionally accompanied by their wives at the end of the sixteenth century, but that in the following century wives began to join their husbands far more often.4 Their increased presence in embassies is reflected in the appearance of the title ‘ambassadress’ in different European vernacular languages to refer to an ambassador’s spouse.5 With this new title also came ceremonial and political privileges at some of the larger European courts. There has as yet been no systematic examination of the ambassadorial wives in early modern Dutch diplomacy, so our current knowledge is largely based on a few English and Spanish ambassadresses. We do not, for instance, even know whether it was common for women to join their husbands to their diplomatic posts in the seventeenth century, let alone understand their roles within embassies.6 This dearth of studies stands in sharp contrast to growing attention for women and ambassadresses in European diplomacy and a large body of scholarship devoted to the roles and activities of women in other areas of early modern Dutch society, as is highlighted in the various contributions to this special issue. This gap implicitly reinforces the idea that women were not involved in shaping Dutch international relations.7 The Dutch Republic was a new player in European diplomatic circles in the early seventeenth century, and I contend that it is crucial to include the role of women to understand how this new state and its representatives portrayed themselves on the international stage and how this influenced European diplomatic practices.8

So far, scholars recovering women’s roles in early modern and modern diplomacy have relied primarily on diaries, thus highlighting that the ambassador and his wife shared diplomatic tasks as working couple.9 This case study will instead explore the potential of seventeenth-century Dutch newspapers as a source from which we may start tracing the presence of women in Dutch embassies and subsequently explore their involvement in diplomatic affairs. I will rely mostly on the online repository Delpher, launched in 2013 by the Royal Library of the Netherlands, which provides access to full text digitised Dutch-language newspapers, books, and journals. For the seventeenth century, Delpher currently contains 14,385 digitised newspaper issues.10 Before the digitisation of these newspapers, it would have been a gargantuan task to try and find references to women in these Dutch-language newspapers, as they often survive in very few copies dispersed across countless European libraries and archives. Yet it is important to keep in mind that Delpher does not offer a complete overview of the available material, so the higher prevalence of examples in this article from the second half of the seventeenth century might be simply due to the higher numbers of newspapers incorporated for this period.11 Despite this resource having provided access to such an unparalleled amount of material for upwards of a decade, much of this material remains unexamined from a gendered perspective.

A partial explanation why such research has not yet happened may lie in the fact that digitisation often constitutes just the first step.12 The digitisation of seventeenth-century newspapers did not make the texts easily searchable, as the ocr undertaken on the corpus is somewhat unreliable due to a combination of the black letter type used in the newspapers and the multiple spelling variants (such as ambassatrice and ambassadrice). Both these problems have been remedied through Het Couranten Corpus, an important citizen science initiative led by Nicoline van der Sijs and launched in 2022.13 It thus seems high time to explore how newspapers can be used more fruitfully for research on early modern Netherlandish women in general, and their role in international politics specifically. This short essay is explorative and does not claim to offer a complete picture of the phenomenon but rather aims to show its potential and propose some new avenues for future research on women, politics, and diplomacy in early modern Europe.

Diplomatic Sociability

It is crucial to consider the nature of newspapers as a source as they were, by and large, filled with reports on political, diplomatic, and military events.14 In gathering information, newspaper editors and publishers relied primarily on incoming diplomatic dispatches and handwritten newsletters. As several historians have observed, ambassadors rarely referenced either the presence or involvement of their wives and daughters in diplomatic affairs in official correspondence.15 Newspapers rarely give the proper names of women, and they are at times referred to as ‘ambassadrice’ followed by the last name of their husband, for instance ‘Mervouwe ambassadrice Heemskerck’ refers to Cornelia Pauw, the wife of Coenraad van Heemkerck.16 These instances highlight that the specific term was also adopted into the Dutch language mainly in the second half of the seventeenth century.

Printed newspapers can help to establish whether wives accompanied their husbands on a diplomatic mission. For instance, in July 1686, the newspaper Oprechte Haerlemsche Courant reported that Cornelia Pauw had already returned from Spain to The Hague, adding that upon her arrival she had received visits from various important people.17 Pauw thus returned a month earlier than her husband from the court in Madrid, where they had been living for six years. Using newspapers we can track her whereabouts: she stayed in The Hague when her husband was sent as resident ambassador to Constantinople (1692-1694), but did join him on his last embassy to Paris (1698-1701).18 These traces offer researchers important clues to further investigate the roles of women in ambassadorial missions. Such an approach can be illustrated by the following example: in March 1676, a newspaper included the report that Hiëronymus van Beverningk’s wife stayed in Nijmegen. Van Beverningk was a seasoned and very successful diplomat, and had at this moment been entrusted with negotiations for a series of separate peace treaties in Nijmegen between the Dutch Republic and different European powers including Spain.19 Given that we know very little about Johanna Le Gillon (fig. 2), his wife, some historians have presumed that she stayed at their home in Gouda while Van Beverningk carried out his duties as negotiator.20 Newspaper articles, however, suggest the opposite: Le Gillon was already in her husband’s temporary lodging in Nijmegen before the foreign delegates had arrived in the city.

Caspar Netscher, Private reception of the Dutch ambassador van Beverningk by the Spanish queen regent Maria-Anna of Austria on 2 March 1671, 1671-1675, oil on canvas, 70 × 79 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Johanna le Gillon is placed in the foreground of the painting, but we know she had not joined him on his embassy to Madrid.

Why is it important to know whether she was accompanying her husband? Due to the temporary nature of peace conferences, and the absence of a court, aristocratic society had to be created on the spot. Ambassadorial wives played a crucial role in the arranging and managing of hospitality events. Organising dinners and other type of festivities were important ways to project soft power but also provided equally vital moments when matters could be discussed in less official settings.21 The Amsterdamse courant included a report that the Danish ambassadress Karen Krabbe had organised festivities and a ball on 10 March 1677 in Nijmegen for all the other ambassadorial women present in the city.22 Such a female-only gathering was meant to forge personal connections and foster goodwill, crucial elements in helping to broker peace. During peace negotiations, festivities were a recurrent phenomenon, and newspaper editors frequently reported on such events. In October 1677, for instance, Magdalena Stenbock, the wife of the Swedish ambassador hosted a ball in Nijmegen; one month later Dorothy Osborne, the wife of the English ambassador, followed suit to celebrate the successful marriage negotiations between William of Orange and Mary Stuart.23 This last celebration was a highly significant event: Osborne had acted as a go-between facilitating the marriage negotiations and their successful conclusion signalled to all negotiating parties in Nijmegen an Anglo-Dutch rapprochement.24 In current scholarship, it is primarily eighteenth-century salons and spa towns that have been considered as settings in which women were able to undertake unofficial diplomatic activities.25 The role of women and the interplay between sociability and diplomacy at these large European peace conferences, so many of which took place in the Dutch Republic from 1648 onwards, requires further international research.26

 Honour

Newspapers allow us to establish more firmly whether a wife joined her husband on an (extra)ordinary mission, and can also be used to start searching for additional archival material left by these women. In March 1690, for instance, newspapers reported on the death of Peter Battier, the Dutch extraordinary envoy in Madrid, and reports of the transportation of his body to The Hague by his wife Johanna Agnes van Lintelo were published over the following months.27 The Van Lintelo case has proven particularly rich. The family archive still contains Johanna’s account book of her journey from Madrid to The Hague.28 She recorded her monthly expenditure on the interleaved blank pages of a printed almanac for the year 1690. Keeping track of her expenses was important, as upon her arrival, she submitted requests to the States-General for the payment of her husband’s salary and for the reimbursement of the costs incurred on her long journey.29 Once Van Lintelo had returned to The Hague in June 1690, she continued the practice of recording her costs, including for funeral arrangements and the payment of messengers, and even the salaries of her maidservants. When she had settled her many debts, she crossed them out in her almanac.30 The almanac thus offers additional information about female household management as well as wages for a variety of individuals (including women) in noble Dutch families and ambassadorial households. Scholars have argued that bookkeeping and accounting in almanacs was a relatively common activity and practice for elite women in early modern England.31 This specific source, then, is not just of interest to historians of diplomacy, but also to other disciplines, highlighting the potential of this resource to help trace the ambassadorial wives, and in doing so providing additional source material often kept in family archives.

These ambassadresses appear often in newspapers when their husbands are not present. This observation concurs with plenty of other evidence we have for other social groups of women: they become far more visible in early modern sources when they become a widow. When her husband passed away, Johanna Agnes van Lintelo surfaces in the archives of the States-General, for example. She wrote a letter from Madrid informing the States-General of her husband’s death.32 Yet it was Pecquin, the embassy secretary, who informed the Spanish court of Battier’s death. He immediately requested that the States-General sent him letters of credence, as without an official ambassador all the negotiations with the Spanish king were suspended. Following the logic of representation in early modern diplomacy, the States-General were now not represented in Madrid, as the title and office could not simply be passed onto someone else.

Van Lintelo seems to have been preparing to return to the Dutch Republic, and almost apologises for having to write a second letter to the States-General. She explains that her hand was forced due to exceptional circumstance: she details an attack she had suffered from the embassy personnel of Maria Rosina Sophia of Dietrichstein, the imperial ambassadress in Madrid.33 Apparently, the relationship between Johanna’s husband and the imperial ambassadress had been quite strained and now, according to Johanna, Maria Rosina Sophia wanted to take revenge. The pretext was that the imperial ambassadress felt that one of her ladies had not been treated with sufficient respect by Johanna, and she had thus sent her stable master and lackeys to the Dutch embassy. These men even drew their weapons. Their actions were, according to Johanna, an insult to the States-General. As she was still consulting with acquaintances whether she should complain to the king about her treatment, she requested guidance on what to do next. In signing this specific letter, she added the word bedroefd (which can be understood as saddened, grieved, distressed, or sorrowful) to the normal closing signature, indicating that she was quite shaken by the entire experience.34 The actions of the imperial ambassadress’s personnel could have led to a diplomatic incident, as the embassy secretary in his letter stressed that the coat of arms of the States-General had been in full display on the embassy building.35 The king had even allowed her to keep these on the house. State symbols were a crucial aspect in early modern diplomacy, as their presence helped to determine whether this was a personal attack against Van Lintelo herself or an attack on the Dutch Republic. There was no agreement among contemporaries for how long an envoy’s widow can gain preceding rights and ceremonies.36 The States-General, however, deferred action on the matter, presumably calculating that it was not worth causing a stir as Van Lintelo was going to leave Madrid soon. Nevertheless, her letter to the States-General offers a unique lens into the gendered world of early modern diplomacy. It was not simply one where women hosted sociable events for one another and were able to smoothen the process of peace talks, as we have seen in the case of the peace conference in Nijmegen, but equally one where the honour, rank, and social prestige of individuals of the ambassadorial household led to violent confrontations between women and their servants.

 Conclusion

While newspapers offer us only small bits of information, the inclusion of these reports highlight what was thought to be important information for seventeenth-century readers. The movements and social activities of diplomatic agents was increasingly considered newsworthy and thus started to appear more frequently in newspapers. As such, these newspapers provide scholars with further opportunities to trace the social world of embassies in The Hague. There were also reports on touristic visits, such as the imperial agent Lisola taking his wife Cécile to Amsterdam, and reports about important festivities at embassies.37 For instance, in 1674 Margareta Ehrenstéen, the only daughter of the Swedish ambassador in The Hague, married Nils Gyldenstolpe in the Swedish embassy in The Hague in the presence of several prominent figures, including William Temple and Dorothy Osborne, the English ambassadorial couple, according to the Haegse Dinghsdagse Post-tydinge (fig. 3).38 A next and much-needed step would be to include the French-language newspapers printed in the Dutch Republic (so far by and large still excluded from digitisation initiatives in the Netherlands), which were read by the political elites throughout early modern Europe and may offer other or even more material to work with.

Haegse Dinghsdagse Post-tydinge, printed in The Hague on 6 November 1674, with a report about the marriage of Margareta Ehrenstéen with Nils Gyldenstolpe in the Swedish embassy. Copy held in Russian State Archives, scan available via Delpher.

These newspapers provide us with clues of how to turn to other source material that may offer more information to reconstruct the role of women within early modern embassies. The additional archival material unearthed in case of Van Lintelo shows that such an approach allows us to study the ambassadorial households and the power relations between foreign embassies in specific European cities in more depth. The death of an ambassador in office seems to be a particularly fruitful moment to study the history of diplomacy, as it allows us to uncover those individuals running an embassy who are most of the time not present in the official records.39 Newspapers offer us a quick way to trace reporting on these deaths and provide interesting points of departure to find additional material written by the ambassadorial wives. In 1697, for instance, another Dutch ambassador, Adriaan van Citters, passed away in Madrid.40 A letter that his wife Josina Parduyn wrote to one of their children have survived in the family archive.41 The same archive also contains material about their wedding, and personal and official letters both received and sent by the couple during their time in London and Madrid, as well as material concerning Parduyn’s return journey from Madrid to The Hague.42 Such additional archival material is valuable for reconstructing how diplomatic couples maintained their network and family ties whilst being abroad, and for understanding the roles Dutch women played in shaping these connections.

Wives of diplomats are not the only women mentioned in these newspapers. A potential avenue for future research is to examine on a more long-term basis how different women appear and are represented in these newspapers and other European newspapers. The numerous advertisements placed in seventeenth-century Dutch newspapers may offer an excellent starting point to get a sense of the different groups of women appearing in this medium, and to analyse whether there are some significant changes between the seventeenth and eighteenth century.43 Lastly, and more broadly, it seems that the history of early modern news has not yet addressed the question how early modern society constructed information as gendered. As this essay has shown, there is still a lot of work to be done to research this question within the history of news, and to acknowledge the repercussions this has for our current ways of writing about early modern communication.44

 Bibliography Archival Sources Arnhem, Gelders Archief, Familie van Lintelo 44, Aanteekenboek van Johanna Agnes van Lintelo, 1690. The Hague, Nationaal Archief (hereafter na), States-General (hereafter SG) 3322, Resolutions 1690. The Hague, na, sg 7086, Incoming letters from Spain, 1690. The Hague, na, sg 7549, Requests, 1690. Utrecht, Het Utrechts Archief (hereafter hua), Family Des Tombes, 719 and 722, Correspondence of Josina Parduyn and Arnoud van Citters, 1689-1701. hua, Family Des Tombes 734, Stukken betreffende de terugreis, 1697-1698. hua, Family Des Tombes 787, Letters addressed to Caspar van Citters and Magdalena Verheye, 1694-1734. Secondary Literature Allen, Gemma, ‘The Rise of the Ambassadress. English Ambassadorial Wives and Early Modern Diplomatic Culture’, The Historical Journal 62 (2019/3) 617-638. Amsterdamse Saturdaghse Courant, no. 11 (Amsterdam: Smient, 13 Maart 1677). Amsterdamse Saturdaegse Courant (Amsterdam: Commelin, 11 March 1690). Baars, Rosanne, ‘Constantinople Confidential. News and Information in the Diary of Jean-Louis Rigo (c. 1686-1756), Secretary of the Dutch Embassy in Istanbul’, Lias 41 (2014/2) 143-171. Bastian, Corina, Eva Kathrin Dade, Hillard von Thiessen, and Christian Windler (eds.), Das Geschlecht der Diplomatie. Geschlechterrollen in de Aussenbeziehungen vom Spätmittelalter bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Cologne 2014). Bots, Hans, The Peace of Nijmegen, 1676-1678/79 (Amsterdam 1980). Brunert, Marie-Elisabeth, ‘Interzession als Praktik. Zur Rolle von Diplomatengattinnen auf dem Westfälischen Friedenskongress’, in Dorothée Goetze and Lena Oetzel (eds.), Warum Friedenschliessen zo Schwer ist (Münster 2019) 209-225. Bunout, Estelle, Maud Ehrmann, and Frédéric Clavert (eds.), Digitised Newspapers. A New Eldorado for Historians. Reflections on Tools, Methods and Epistemology (Berlin 2023). Comptoir Almanach op ’t jaer onses heeren Jesu Christi M DC LXXXX (The Hague: Geselle, [1689]). Connor, Rebecca Elisabeth, Women, Accounting and Narrative. Keeping Books in Eighteenth-Century England (London 2004). Der Weduwen, Arthur, ‘Towards a Complete Bibliography of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Newspapers. Delpher and its Applications’, Tijdschrift voor Tijdschriftstudies 38 (2015) 21-27. Der Weduwen, Arthur, Dutch and Flemish newspapers of the Seventeenth Century, 1618-1700 (Leiden 2017). Der Weduwen, Arthur, and Andrew Pettegree, The Dutch Republic and the Birth of Modern Advertising (Leiden 2020). Desenclos, Camille, ‘Women’s Place in Diplomacy through the French Diplomatic Correspondences (early 17th Century)’, in Roberta Anderson, Laura Oliván Santaliesta, and Suna Suner (eds.), Gender and Diplomacy. Women and Men in European and Ottoman Embassies from the 15th to the 18th Century (Vienna 2021) 45-61. Dyrmann, Kristine, ‘Spa Diplomacy. Charlotte Schimmelmann at Bad Pyrmont, 1789-94’, The International History Review 44 (2022/5) 1035-1047. Ebben, Maurits, ‘Het Staatse ambassadegebouw in de zeventiende eeuw. Het logement van Hendrick van Reede van Renswoude in Madrid, 1656-1659’, Virtus 25 (2018) 29-56. Erlandsson, Susanna, ‘Off the Record. Margaret van Kleffens and the Gendered History of Dutch World War II Diplomacy’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 21 (2019) 29-46. Erlandsson, Susanna, and Rimko van der Maar, ‘Trouw aan Buitenlandse Zaken. Margaret van Kleffens, Anne van Roijen, de ambassade in Washington en de betekenis van het diplomatiek partnerschap voor de naoorlogse Nederlandse buitenlandse betrekkingen’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 134 (2021/3) 361-384. Extraordinaire Haerlemse Donderdaeghse Courant, no. 7 (Haarlem: Casteleyn, 14 February 1669). Extraordinaire Haerlemse Donderdaeghse Courant, no. 27 (Haarlem: Casteleyn, 4 July 1686). Extraordinaire Haerlemse Donderdaegse Courant, no. 40 (Haarlem: Casteleyn, 18 April 1699). Groesen, Michiel van, ‘Digital Gatekeeper of the Past. Delpher and the Emergence of the Press in the Dutch Golden Age’, Tijdschrift voor Tijdschriftstudies 38 (2015) 9-19. Haegse Dinghsdagse Post-tydinge, no. 72 (The Hague: Hoeckwater, 6 November 1674). Hagen, Edwina, President van Nederland. Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck, 1761-1825 (Amsterdam 2012). Helmers, Helmer, and Nina Lamal, ‘Dutch Diplomacy in the Seventeenth Century. An Introduction’, in Dorothée Goetze and Lena Oetzel (eds.), Early Modern European Diplomacy. A Handbook (Berlin 2024) 221-252. Heringa, Jan, De eer en hoogheid van de staat. Over de plaats der Verenigde Nederlanden in het diplomatieke leven van de zeventiende eeuw (Groningen 1961). James, Carolyn, ‘Women and Diplomacy in the Early Modern Period’, in Dorothée Goetze and Lena Oetzel (eds.), Early Modern European Diplomacy. A Handbook (Berlin 2024) 541-558. Kühnel, Florian, ‘ “Minister-Like Cleverness, Understanding and Influence on Affairs”. Ambassadresses in Everyday Business and Courtly Ceremonies at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century’, in Tracey A. Sowerby and Jan Hennings (eds.), Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World, c. 1410-1800 (London 2017) 130-146. Kühnel, Florian, ‘The Ambassador is Dead – Long Live the Ambassadress. Gender, Rank and Proxy Representation in Early Modern Diplomacy’, The International History Review 44 (2022/5) 1004-1020. Lindström, Peter, and Svante Norrhem, ‘Diplomats and Kin Networks. Diplomatic Strategy and Gender in Sweden, 1648-1740’, in James Daybell and Svante Norrhem (eds.), Gender and Political Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1400-1800 (London 2016) 68-85. Oetzel, Lena, ‘Räume des Informellen. Perspektiven auf Verhandlungspraktiken frühneuzeitlicher Kongressdiplomatie’, Frühneuzeit-Info 33 (2022) 49-66. Oliván Santaliestra, Laura, ‘Judith Rebecca von Wrbna and Maria Sophia von Dietrichstein. Two Imperial Ambassadresses from the Kingdom of Bohemia at the Court of Madrid (1653-1674)’, Theatrum Historiae 19 (2016) 95-117. Oliván Santaliestra, Laura, ‘Lady Anne Fanshawe, ambassadress of England at the court of Madrid (1664-1666)’, in Glenda Sluga and Carolyn James (eds.), Women, Diplomacy and International Politics since 1500 (London 2016) 68-85. Oprechte Haerlemse Saturdaegse Courant, no. 42 (Haarlem: Casteleyn, 16 October 1677). Oprechte Haerlemsche Dingsdaegse Courant, no. 46 (Haarlem: Casteleyn, 16 November 1677). Oprechte Haerlemse Dingsdaegse Courant, no. 11 (Haarlem: Casteleyn, 14 March 1690). Oprechte Haerlemse Dingsdaegse Courant, no. 17 (Haarlem: Casteleyn, 25 April 1690). Oprechte Haerlemse Saturdaegse Courant, no. 18 (Haarlem: Casteleyn, 30 April 1697). Oprechte Haerlemse Dingsdaegse Courant, no. 41 (Haarlem: Casteleyn, 25 April 1699). Owens, Patricia, Erased. A History of International Thought Without Men (Princeton 2025). Parker Aronson, Stacey L., Female Criminality and ‘Fake News’ in Early Modern Spanish Pliegos Sueltos (London 2022). Schutte, Onno, Repertorium der Nederlandse vertegenwoordigers, residerende in het buitenland 1584-1810 (The Hague 1976). Sluga, Glenda, and Carolyn James (eds.), Women, Diplomacy and International Politics since 1500 (London 2016). Temple, William, Memoirs of What Past in Christendom, From the War Begun 1672 to the Peace Concluded 1679 (London: Chiswell, 1693). Tickner, J. Ann, ‘Still Engaging from the Margins?’, in Jill Steans and Daniela Tepe (eds.), Handbook on Gender in World Politics (Northampton 2016) 5-12. Troost, Wout, Hiëronymus van Beverningk tijdens het Rampjaar 1672 (Zupthen 2021). Utrechtse Vrydaese courant, no. 35 (Utrecht: Broer Appelaar, 2 May 1698).

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions. For the negotiations at Nijmegen, see Bots, The Peace of Nijmegen.

Owens, Erased; Tickner, ‘Still Engaging from the Margins?’.

Bastian et al. (eds.), Das Geslecht der Diplomatie; Sluga and James (eds.), Women, Diplomacy. For a recent overview on the topic, see James, ‘Women and Diplomacy’.

These are the only numbers we have so far: by end of the seventeenth century, 57 percent were accompanied by their wives: Allen, ‘The Rise’, 620.

Oliván Santaliestra, ‘Lady Anne’; Kühnel, ‘ “Minister-like” ’.

A brief reference in Heringa, De eer, 14. In 2024, Rosanne Baars received funding from the Dutch Research Council (nwo) for her postdoctoral research project ‘Women, Intelligence, and Diplomacy in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul’.

Hagen’s biography of Schimmelpennick, President van Nederland, is an exception. She has devoted ample attention to the role of his wife Catharina. The same problem has been highlighted for twentieth-century diplomacy: Erlandsson and Van der Maar, ‘Trouw aan Buitenlandse Zaken’, 361-364.

Helmers and Lamal, ‘Dutch Diplomacy’.

Baars, ‘Constantinople Confidential’, 154-158; Erlandsson, ‘Off the record’, 34-37.

The downloadable overviews of incorporated newspapers are incredibly useful to researchers, as they may easily check how many copies of a specific title are included: www.delpher.nl/ (Accessed on 9 November 2023).

For caveats: Van Groesen, ‘Digital Gatekeeper’; Der Weduwen, ‘Towards a complete Bibliography’.

Bunout, Ehrmann, and Clavert (eds.), Digitised Newspapers.

Couranten Corpus currently contains thirteen Dutch-language newspapers, accessible via https://ivdnt.org/corpora-lexica/courantencorpus (Accessed on 10 February 2025).

Der Weduwen, Dutch and Flemish newspapers, i, 5-24.

Desenclos, ‘Women’s Place’.

I have chosen to use the proper names of these women as much as possible in the main text. To identify them, I have used Schutte, Repertorium. To avoid confusion about which issue I am citing I have chosen to transcribe their seventeenth-century headings (including the variant spellings) instead of referring to the standard title: Utrechtse Vrydaegse Courant, no. 35, 2 May 1698.

Extraordinaire Haerlemse Donderdaeghse Courant, no. 27, 4 July 1686.

Utrechtse Vrydaegse Courant, no. 35, 2 May 1698. Her whereabouts in Paris are reported in Extraordinaire Haerlemse Donderdaegse Courant, no. 40, 18 April 1699, and her arrival in The Hague in Oprechte Haerlemse Dingsdaegse Courant, no. 41, 25 April 1699.

Troost, Hiëronymus van Beverningk, 33-45.

Troost, Hiëronymus van Beverningk, 142.

Oetzel, ‘Räume des Informellen’, 49-66.

Amsterdamse Saturdaghse Courant 1677, no. 11, 13 March 1677.

Oprechte Haerlemse Saturdaegse Courant, no. 42, 16 October 1677; Oprechte Haerlemsche Dingsdaegse Courant, no. 46, 16 November 1677. Stenbrock became well-known for hosting parties: Lindström and Norrhem, ‘Diplomats and Kin’, 72-74.

Her involvement is based on comments by Temple in his Memoirs, pp. 154-155. Thanks to Jacob Baxter for bringing her involvement in brokering the marriage to my attention.

Dyrmann, ‘Spa Diplomacy’, 1035-1047.

Brunert, ‘Interzession als Praktik’, 209-225; Hagen, President van Nederland, 145-148, 172-177.

The first report of his death is in Amsterdamse Saturdaegse Courant, unnumbered, 11 March 1690. See also Oprechte Haerlemse Dingsdaegse Courant, no. 11, 14 March 1690.

Arnhem, Gelders Archief, Familie van Lintelo 44, Aanteekenboek van Johanna Agnes van Lintelo, 1690.

The Hague, Nationaal Archief (hereafter na), States-General (hereafter sg) 3322, Resolution, 9 September 1690, fol. 313v. See also na, sg 7549, request by Van Lintelo submitted on her behalf by Beeckman, 9 September 1690.

She used a copy of Comptoir Almanach.

Connor, Women, Accounting.

na, sg 7086, Van Lintelo to States-General, Madrid, 22 February 1690.

For more information, see Oliván Santaliestra, ‘Judith Rebecca’, 105-116.

na, sg 7086, Van Lintelo to States-General, Madrid, 8 March 1690. She signed her letter ‘Onderdanichst gehoorsaamste en bedroefde dienaerse J. Agnes van Lineto Douariere de Batter’. Her earlier letter included ‘Onderdanichst gehoorsame dienares’.

na, sg 7086, Pecquin to States-General, Madrid, 30 March 1690, reports that the heraldic symbols of the States-General were only taken down on the day Lintelo left. Also included in Oprechte Haerlemse Dingsdaegse Courant, no. 17, 25 April 1690. On the importance of these symbols and embassy buildings, see Ebben, ‘Het Staatse ambassadegebouw’, 41-42.

Kühnel, ‘The Ambassador is Dead’, 1006.

Extraordinaire Haerlemse Donderdaeghse Courant, no. 7, 14 February 1669. The word used in the newspapers is ‘gemaelinne’, not ambassadress, because her husband was not officially appointed as an ambassador by the Holy Roman Emperor.

Haegse Dinghsdagse Post-tydinge, no. 72, 6 November 1674.

Kühnel, ‘The Ambassador is Dead’.

Oprechte Haerlemse Saturdaegse Courant, no. 18, 30 April 1697.

Utrecht, Het Utrechts Archief (hereafter hua), Family Des Tombes 787, Josina Parduyn to Caspar van Citters, Madrid, 6 December 1696; hua, Family Des Tombes 734, Josina Parduyn to one of her children, Madrid 11 April 1697.

hua, Family Des Tombes 719 and 722, Correspondence of Josina Parduyn and Arnoud van Citters, 1689-1701. hua, Family Des Tombes 734, contains a detailed itinerary of her journey (including where she ate and slept).

Der Weduwen and Pettegree, The Dutch Republic, have published the first 6,000 advertisements in Dutch newspapers until 1672.

When studying the representation of women in news, scholars have focussed primarily on murder pamphlets, a particular type of sensationalist publication narrating tales of female murderers: Aronson, Female Criminality.