"We have no desire to enter the private life of the royal family," announced a leading Hague newspaper primly one day last week. "The Queen's living room at least should be out of the sight and hearing of those who have nothing to do in there," echoed another. Thus gingerly did Dutch newspapers take note of what elsewhere was sensational headline news. A long-standing royal secret was at last out in the open.
Idyl at Soestdijk. To all outward appearances, no ruling house in Europe can boast the solid, sobersided respectability of the Dutch House of Orange-Nassau. For an aggregate of 66 years, its last two Queens have reigned with the placidity of huisvrouwen. The marriage of the present Queen Juliana,who succeeded to the throne at the retirement of her mother Wilhelmina in 1948, to German Prince Bernhard zu Lippe-Biesterfeld (a former I.G. Farben representative) was long acclaimed as one of the happiest in Europe. Sentimental Dutch editors were known to refer to their conjugal life at the royal residence as "the idyl at Soestdijk," and even the fact of still another generation without male heirs failed to blight the general Dutch satisfaction in the rulers.
Yet all was not idyllic behind the gleaming white walls of Soestdijk Palace. Prince Bernhard's German birth was a handicap to him among some of his wife's subjects, even though he worked long and hard in England to weld the Dutch resistance forces into an effective unit during World War II. He liked the gay life and fast cars; his Queen was motherly, deeply religious and serious. In 1947 the couple faced a domestic tragedy in the birth of their fourth daughter, Princess Maria Christina (nicknamed Ma-rijke). As a result of German measles suffered by her mother during pregnancy, the little princess was born with cataracts on both eyes. Doctors were able to save some of the vision in one eye, but by the time Marijke was, two, the sight of the other was gone. In desperation, Juliana and her husband were willing to clutch at any straw of hope.
One such straw appeared when Prince Bernhard heard of a wondrous cure performed upon a friend's tuberculous daughter by a woman named Greet Hofmans. Spinster Hofmans (now 61) was a mild-mannered, harsh-voiced woman who was born to poverty and spent a bleak childhood nursing a sick mother. In middle age, after an unrewarding life as a social worker and factory hand, she moved to Holland's hard-bitten north, where piety and superstition often walk hand in hand. There, she said, she had a personal talk with God who offered her miraculous powers for the benefit of her fellow man, if she would renounce all worldly claims. "Of course," Greet Hofmans said, "I accepted." At God's direction, she moved to Hattem, the baronial seat of the Van Heeckeren van Molecatan family. It was there the royal family found her.
Brought to Soestdijk by Bernard and confronted with the half-blind little princess, Greet Hofmans bowed her head in prayer and assured Juliana that the child could be cured. The cure, she said, would be a slow one. To supervise the process, Greet Hofmans herself came to live at the palace, and in time Baron van Heeckeren became the Queen's private secretary.