been lost, and forlornly pathetic was the letter indicted by the elder boys to their uncle, King Charles: "We commit ourselves and the protection of our rights into your gracious arms, humbly beseeching your Majesty so to look upon us as upon those who have neither friends, nor fortune, nor greater honour in this world, than belongs to your Royal blood. Unless you please to maintain that in us God knoweth what may become of your Majesty's nephews. "CHARLES. "RUPERT. "MAURICE. "EDWARD."[30] Hard, in truth, was the position of Elizabeth, left to struggle as she might for her large and impecunious family. She had lost, besides Henry, two children who had died in infancy. There remained ten, six sons and four daughters, the eldest scarcely sixteen, and all wholly dependent on the generosity of their friends and relations. The States of Holland at once granted to the Queen the same yearly sum which they had allowed to her husband, and while her brother, Charles I, prospered, and the Stadtholder {16} Henry still lived, she did not suffer the depths of poverty to which she afterwards sank. Yet money was, as her son Charles put it, "very hard to come by";[31] they were always in debt, and it is recorded by another son, that their house was "greatly vexed by rats and mice, but more by creditors."[32] Happily for herself, Elizabeth was possessed of two things of which no misfortune could deprive her, namely, a buoyant nature and a perfect constitution. "For, though I have cause enough to be sad, I am still of my wild humour to be merry in spite of fortune," she once wrote to her faithful friend, Sir Thomas Roe.[33] And her children inherited her high spirits. "I was then of so gay a disposition that everything amused me," wrote Sophie; "our family misfortunes had no power to depress my spirits, though we were, at times, obliged to make even richer repasts than that of Cleopatra, and often had nothing at our Court but pearls and diamonds to eat."[34] And as it was with Sophie so it was with the others; despair was unknown to them, and for long it was their favourite game to play that they were travelling back to the lost Palatinate, and had entered a public-house on the way.[35] Nor did they less inherit their mother's iron constitution. "Bodily health is an inheritance from our mother which no one can dispute with us," declared Sophie; "the best we ever had from her, of which Rupert has taken a double share."[36]