Letter from Frederick H. Boland to Josephine McNeill (The Hague)

Dear Minister,
We read with much interest your report of the 11th February¹ describing your presentation of credentials. Everything seems to have gone off very well.

The account of your conversation with Queen Juliana reminds me to tell you an incident from the unwritten history of Ireland's neutrality in the war. Early on the morning on which Holland and Belgium were invaded,² Maffey requested an interview with de Valera and asked him whether the Irish Government would have any objection to his inviting Princess Juliana and her children to spend the war in Ireland. If I am not mistaken, Maffey's daughter, Penelope, now Mrs. Aitken, had met Princess Juliana and was on friendly terms with her. De Valera replied that the Irish Government would have no objection, and Maffey accordingly wired Princess Juliana extending the invitation. In the event, the invitation issued was not accepted and Princess Juliana and her children spent the war in Canada.

It was a day or two following this interview that de Valera made the speech in Galway³ in the course of which he said it would be unworthy of a small country if he did not issue a public protest against the German invasion of Holland and Belgium. This utterance was the occasion, a few days later, of one of the several official protests which we received from the German Government during the war about our neutrality.

I am glad that you saw poor old Weenink. We have the most pleasant recollections of him. I can still remember his dignified grief when he came to see me, on the same morning as Maffey saw de Valera, to inform us officially of the invasion of his country. Get him to tell you some time of the VE Day present which he sent to Queen Juliana's children. He bought two lambs for them here but there was a delay in shipment and, by the time they reached Holland, they were full grown sheep!