Frederik Hendrik, Count of Nassau, was born in Delft in 1584, the son of Willem I Prince of Orange and his fourth wife Louise de Coligny. He was named after his godfathers Frederick II King of Denmark and Henri IV King of Navarre. When the latter was crowned King of France in 1589, the order of the names of the future Prince was reversed and for a number of years he was called Hendrik Frederik (as inscribed on the foot of the present goblet). Together with his French-born mother he went to France in 1597 where they spent a year at the Court of King Henri IV. On the death of his half-brother Maurits, in 1625, Frederik Hendrik inherited the title of Prince of Orange. Prince Frederik Hendrik married Amalia Countess van Solms-Braunfels in 1625; he died in 's-Gravenhage in 1647

In Dutch history Prince Frederik Hendrik is remembered as an amiable, highly cultured and able man, a shrewd politician and military strategist who succeeded in conquering various towns in the Spanish-occupied Netherlands. In 1632, the year associated with the portrait engraved, he freed towns along the river Meuse (Venlo, Roermond and Maastricht) from Spanish occupation

Another six glasses are known to have been diamond-point engraved with an effigy of the Prince, but these during his life-time. None of these earlier glasses bears the same portrait as the one on the present goblet which appears to be a copy of a print (published by Claes J. Visscher) by an anonymous engraver after a painting by M.J. van Mierevelt. The present goblet was perhaps engraved (by an unrecognised hand) in 1784, the bicentenary of the Prince's birth and of the assassination of his famous father. Quite a number of portraits of past and contemporary Dutch political figures were engraved (mainly in stipple) on goblets in the 1780s, a time of considerble strife between Orangists and anti-Orangists in Holland

We are grateful to Mr. F.G.A.M. Smit for providing this information