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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."