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The exemplary private life that Queen W'ilhelmina lived blended well with her shrewd qualities as a ruler. Not a breath of scandal has ever touched her. Few if any bits of gossip ever got through the cold, exclusive circle of Dutch nobility that surrounded the court. She was the good mother, the conscientious leader, the faithful churchgoer. Because of her strong Calvinism, her words came to carry almost a scriptural weight among the nobility of The Hague and Utrecht, the patrician families of Amsterdam, all the older townspeople and villagers in the strongly Protestant North. Nor could it be said that she was intolerant; Jews and Catholics came to idolize her.
Her outwardly democratic, thrifty way of living pleased the liberty-loving, saving Dutch. Her palaces were really only big homes. Her Majesty's grocer used the same entrance to the Palace at The Hague as did Her Majesty. The Queen could often be seen by The Hague's inhabitants sewing by a Palace window. There were never unduly elaborate entertainments, there were no expensive State trips for the Royal Family.
As she grew older she grew fatter, even more conscientious. She gave up hunting and riding, took to the bicycle. She made it a daily rule to rise at 6 a.m., usually beginning her royal chores with an hour's work in the spacious garden at the back of the Palace. Nowadays, once a week the Queen receives her Ministers, and woe be to him who does not know his subject well. The Queen has been so long at her job that she can ask the most difficult questions; when a Minister cannot answer them he is told to study up and sent home. In what spare time Her Majesty permits herself she paints landscapes and cows.
Major ripple on the placid surface of Queen Wilhelmina's personal life of late has been the acquisition of a son-in-law in Prince Bernhard zu Lippe-Biesterfeld, whose line has not enjoyed temporal sovereignty in the hilly little Principality of Lippe-Detmold since 1849. Nobody in The Netherlands had ever heard of the Prince before his engagement to Juliana was announced, but all knew that he must fit the proper specifications of a Prince Consort. He must be of royal blood, a Protestant, of flawless character, in perfect health. He was all that, but he also proved to have a few rather mild modern ideas. He liked cocktails, he was fond of speeding. He was said to have lost his head a bit when he suddenly found himself minus debts and with a yearly allowance of $106,000 from the Government. Her Majesty did not approve, but she was said to have softened up a bit when she became a grandmother. A girl, Beatrix, was born to the Prince and Princess in January 1938, another daughter, Irene, last August.
Diplomatist. "Given to duty and very clever in carrying it out," was the way Fisherman-Essayist Henry van Dyke described Queen Wilhelmina in the days when he was U. S. Minister to her court.
As a diplomatist, Her Majesty did not have many serious problems to be clever about in the first part of her reign. There was friction with Venezuela over the Dutch-owned islands of Curasao; the problem of protecting trade interests in Turkey and China; concern over Mexico's program, even then taking shape, of annexing foreign oil properties.