CHAPTER III.
THE WISDOM OF SERPENTS. (1676-1681.)
Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall. SHAKSPEARE.
The sun of Eléonore’s triumph had no sooner reached its meridian than its radiance began to be overcast. The first cloud was the death of the young Prince Augustus Frederick of Wolfenbüttel, who was killed by a cannon-ball at the siege of Phillipsburg a few months after his betrothal to Sophie Dorothea. His death, though it seemed comparatively unimportant, was destined to exercise an evil influence over the fortunes of the House of Celle, and it snapped the strongest band of union between the Celle-Wolfenbüttel party. The child Princess was happily unconscious of her loss. The betrothal was merely a matter of policy, to take effect later; the courtship was yet to come; and when the tidings came to Celle of the death of her betrothed she was too young to mourn him.
At first the Prince’s death affected but little the _entente_ between the courts of Celle and Wolfenbüttel. Duke Antony Ulrich continued the close friend of Eléonore; he had another son, more nearly the age of Sophie Dorothea, and he held him in reserve; for the hour of a fresh arrangement was not yet, and other plans were in the air.
Meanwhile the little Princess blossomed into lovely girlhood, the spoiled darling of her father’s court. She was trained in all the accomplishments suitable to her rank, but the more solid part of her education seems to have been neglected, and with the promise of great beauty she early developed a passion for admiration which lasted all her life. Now that she was a princess her mother was careful to keep her away from all suitors not of equal rank. The early intimacy between the handsome young Königsmarck and Sophie Dorothea was broken off, and Königsmarck was given a hint to leave Celle. He repaired to England to finish his education, and he and the Princess did not meet again for many years, and by that time she was a wife and the mother of two children. Eléonore was justified of her wisdom, for when Sophie Dorothea was scarcely more than twelve years old her aunt, the Countess de Reuss, found in a drawer of the little Princess’s _bonheur du jour_ a love-letter from a court page. The boy was banished for his audacity into lifelong exile, and the governess, whose connivance was responsible, was first imprisoned and then sent away in disgrace. The news of this affair, which was but a childish folly after all, got bruited abroad, and reached the ears of the alert Duchess Sophia. That lady was never tired of tirading against her sister-in-law, the “little clot of dirt” as she invariably calls her in her letters to her niece, and she seized on this incident to point her moral. “Is it not a pity,” she wrote to the Duchess of Orleans, “that Ernest Augustus and myself should have made such a blunder and called to our court that ‘little clot of dirt,’ the more so that we had at hand the Biegle, whom William liked well enough, though she was not so fascinating as his French vixen, who really is a splendid _Stückfleisch_? She would have done very well, and at least have remained in her proper place. Never mind, Sophie Dorothea will avenge us all; she is a little _canaille_, and we shall see.”
This, to put it mildly, shows a loose moral view on the part of the Duchess Sophia, to say nothing of the coarseness of expression. Her prophecy about the little Princess did not seem very likely of fulfilment then. The death of Augustus Frederick of Wolfenbüttel left the field open, and an alliance with the great House of Lüneburg-Celle was eagerly courted. The beauty and wealth of Sophie Dorothea, though she was only just in her teens, made her a desirable bride, and it was no longer the sons of the nobility who sought her hand, but princes of the reigning Houses of Europe. A cousin of William of Orange, Henry Casimir of Nassau-Dietz, was one of them; for another, the Duke of Celle had almost arranged a match for his daughter with Prince George of Denmark (afterwards the husband of Queen Anne of England) when the Queen of Denmark interposed, and, with much violence and many expletives, broke off the match. This lady had once received Eléonore at dinner, but had refused her the kiss of honour. In revenge, Eléonore had commented on the badness of the Queen’s _cuisine_; so they were far from friends. Probably the Duchess Sophia, who was very friendly with the Queen of Denmark, had a hand in bringing about the failure of these negotiations, for we find her writing: “Well done! Fancy a king’s son for that bit of a bastard! Upon my word, one has to come from Poitou to be so impudent!”
[Illustration: THE CASTLE OF CELLE.]
The gibe was of course aimed at Eléonore, who found herself on this occasion outwitted by her sister-in-law. Up to this time Eléonore’s influence with her husband was not sensibly impaired. His thoughts were still engrossed with her advancement, and he first made a new treaty, by which his wife was allowed the title of Duchess of Lüneburg-Celle; and, secondly, drew up an agreement to further safeguard her rights and those of her daughter to the rich estates of Wilhelmsburg. Both these documents were countersigned by the wily Ernest Augustus, whose consent was necessary, but who was only induced to yield by a high price being paid for his complaisance.
The Duke of Celle thought his wife worthy of any pecuniary sacrifice at this time. Her conduct was so irreproachable as a wife and a mother that she won the esteem even of those who were prejudiced against her. Grave, dignified, and beautiful, she held her husband’s truant affections much longer than any one would have supposed, and was careful by her conduct to make good the position to which she had been raised. Her bitterest enemies were unable to tarnish her fair name, and this is no mean tribute to her virtue and prudence when we remember the age in which she lived and the circumstances surrounding her. Under Eléonore’s rule the court of Celle became a model of decorum. The jovial Duke, though wealthy and hospitable, hated display and ostentation, and loved nothing so much as a quiet life. His tastes were those of an English country squire. He was a fine judge of wine, and had many rare vintages in his cellar; he had three hundred and seventy horses in his stables, mostly English or bred in England; his kennels, too, were largely filled with dogs of English breed. He was a mighty Nimrod, devoted to out-door sports. A little business with his Ministers and a good deal of hunting—that was his programme for the day, and in the evening he loved nothing better than to share the joys of the domestic hearth with his wife and child. Eléonore, unlike most ladies who have risen in the world, seemed equally averse to display for its own sake, and shunned rather than courted the trappings of state. So the court of Celle was peaceful and virtuous, perhaps a little dull.
It was far different at the court of Hanover.
The death of Duke John Frederick without issue in 1679 had now brought Ernest Augustus and Sophia to reign over Hanover as well as Osnabrück. Duke John Frederick was not greatly mourned, and his reign, though merry, had been brief. Like his brothers, he was fond of Italy, and acquired there a love of foreign ways and a liking for the Roman Catholic religion, to which he became a convert. Louis XIV., who regarded himself as a defender of the faith, gave this ducal convert a handsome pension, and treated him with marked favour. John Frederick’s eyes were dazzled by the glory of the Grand Monarque, whose splendour was the wonder of Europe, and he tried to turn Hanover into an imitation Versailles: pseudo-classical statues were erected in the gardens; fountains were dotted about the terraces; there were fireworks, masquerades, and pastoral plays, Italian singers and French dancers; many foreign _monsignori_ flitted about the court, and mass was again sung in the churches. The honest Hanoverians rubbed their eyes and knew not what to make of it all. But alien though their Duke was in some things, he had one taste in common with his long-suffering subjects—he loved his beer, and, after a prolonged course of hard drinking, he died from an overspell of it. As the Duchess Sophia wrote, “He died as a true German should, glass in hand”.
This “true German” being gathered to his fathers, Duke Ernest Augustus and Duchess Sophia made haste to reign in his stead. Sophia thanked Heaven for having thus placed her husband out of the reach of his enemies, “as which the whole court of Celle had now to be regarded”. It was indeed a notable accession of dignity and wealth. Both were ambitious and loved money and ostentation; they now had a chance of gratifying their tastes. In a smaller way Ernest Augustus had also imitated Louis XIV.’s court, at Osnabrück, and it seemed to that “most Christian” monarch that the new Duke of Hanover would follow his brother in matters of religion. He therefore despatched a plenipotentiary, the complaisant de Gourville, to sound him on the subject and to offer the same bait in the way of pension as he had dangled before the eyes of John Frederick. But Ernest Augustus was now not so needy, and he had other objects in view, so he replied oracularly that though no doubt a change of religion would be advantageous to his House he himself was too old to change. All religions were much the same to Sophia; but she disliked being meddled with in spiritual matters, and had her own interests, too—her English interests, then remote—which would certainly be imperilled by a change of faith. So the worthy pair, after taking counsel together, hit on a compromise by not educating their daughter Sophia Charlotte in any faith, so that she might marry the most promising prince who offered himself, whether he were Catholic or Protestant. When sounded later on the subject of her daughter’s faith, the Duchess answered, “She is of no religion as yet”. It was lucky that Sophia turned a deaf ear to the blandishments of the French King and the Pope, or the House of Hanover and the Protestant succession would never have reigned in England.
Though under the new _régime_ the court of Hanover differed in religious ceremonial from that of Versailles, in other respects it was a bad imitation, and the grafting of spurious French architecture on the little mediæval German town produced many incongruous effects, as incongruous as the aping of French manners and French morals. For the court of Hanover imitated not only the pleasures of Versailles, but also its vices. Unlike his brother George William, matrimony had effected no change in the laxities of Ernest Augustus, and the explanation is probably to be found in the fact that his was a marriage of policy, while the other’s was a marriage of love. Ernest Augustus was a man of six times the ability of George William. He was selfish and scheming, but there was a certain splendid good nature about him, and though his court was dissolute, it was always brilliant. The money for his pleasures, for he was as great a spendthrift as his brother was the reverse of one, he raised either by squeezing George William or by equipping regiments of his subjects and selling them to foreign service, as, for instance, to fight the Emperor’s enemies on the Danube. This was in the approved style of the Grand Monarque, who always had a war on hand by way of a kingly pastime. Louis, like Solomon of old, had also his beautiful favourites in great array, who reaped rich rewards of wealth and influence. This period of European history may be said to mark the apotheosis of military and political adventurers and royal mistresses. There was no court without its adventurers, and a king was hardly a king without a bevy of mistresses. Many of them were women of noble birth, who embarked on the career with the encouragement of their parents and guardians, and even of their husbands. Louise de Querouaille, afterwards Duchess of Portsmouth, went over from France to England to win the favour of Charles II. In the same way Clara Elizabeth and Catherine Marie Meisenbug journeyed to Osnabrück in the hope of capturing the good-will of Ernest Augustus and his son.
Clara Elizabeth and Catherine Marie were of noble birth. Their father, Count Carl Philip Meisenbug, was a needy military adventurer, and their faces were their only fortune. Their good looks, combined with much impudence, a lively wit, and an utter absence of principle, sufficed to form a very attractive pair in those days. When they were only in their teens Count Meisenbug took his daughters to Paris with the hope of seeing them shine at the court of Louis XIV., a sort of Mecca to which all these worldly pilgrims were then bound. But the established royal favourites there did not view the fair intruders with favour, and gave them a hint that it would be better to decamp, or Paris would soon be too hot to hold them. The Meisenbugs, who were poor and therefore powerless, needed no second warning. Fear lent them wings; they packed up with all despatch, and, looking about for a likely spot to push their fortunes, they hit upon the little court of Ernest Augustus, and set out thither with all speed.
The court was then at Osnabrück, and it so chanced that the _demoiselles_ Meisenbug arrived just when the two eldest sons of Ernest Augustus, George Louis and Frederick Augustus, had returned from their travels, accompanied by their governors Platen and Bussche. The needy Count lost no time in presenting his daughters at court, and evidently they created a favourable impression, for we find them helping at a _fête_ in honour of the young Princes’ return. The _demoiselles_ Meisenbug, who were fresh from all the graces and amusements of Versailles, composed a little pastoral play in French, which they craved permission to perform before the Duke and Duchess, and the performance was the most successful feature of the festival. It was given at night in the gardens, which were illuminated for the occasion. The young ladies appeared, as befitted their pastoral simplicity, in the guise of shepherdesses, and recited their lines so prettily, and danced and sang in so charming a way that they delighted their audience and especially won the hearts of the governors Platen and Bussche. Having made so favourable an impression, the sisters remained at Osnabrück to follow up their advantage. It suited them well. It was a cheap town to live in; they had the _entrée_ of the court, and the free-and-easy air of the place gave them room to develop their schemes. At that time the young adventuresses had to moderate their ambitions. Ernest Augustus was far above them, and Prince George Louis was only a boy, and was sent away directly on military service. But meantime the Meisenbugs made the best of their opportunities. Platen and Bussche were both rising men, and enjoyed the confidence of the court. Failing higher game, the sisters resolved on making a conquest of them, and they unmasked their batteries with such success that before long they were comfortably settled in life, Clara Elizabeth as the wife of Platen, and Catherine Marie as the wife of Bussche.
Attached now for good or evil to the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg, the sisters shared in its improved fortunes, and when the court of Ernest Augustus migrated to Hanover they went there too.
Of the two sisters, Clara Elizabeth, now Madame Platen, was immeasurably the superior, if not in youth and beauty, in cleverness and audacity. This woman is one of the worst instances in history of the evil influence of the court mistress. She had no redeeming qualities; she was unscrupulous, ambitious, and shamelessly corrupt. She was possessed of the immense power of one who has a fixed purpose in life, and who will stick at nothing to obtain it. Having obtained the first object of her ambition, a safe and respectable position, she was wise enough to recognise an identity of interest with her husband, and to see that as he advanced she would advance with him. To this end she sought to obtain influence over Ernest Augustus. Platen, after his marriage, was promoted to a confidential position, and when the court went to Hanover he was raised to the responsible post of Minister. His wife thus found herself within the charmed circle and within touch of what she most desired—power. A masterful disposition gave her complete sway over her husband; she dictated to Platen, who, in turn, advised Ernest Augustus. But this was too circuitous a method for Madame Platen, who wished to be next the Duke himself. Before long a post was found for her in the service of the Duchess Sophia, and thus she came frequently before the notice of Ernest Augustus. She played her cards very discreetly, and, with the connivance of her husband, brought all her arts, flatteries, and fascinations to bear upon the Duke; so that Ernest Augustus was first astonished at her cleverness, next flattered by her pretended admiration for himself, and then fascinated by her good looks. In a short time her influence over him was supreme. Not content with having won the Duke, Madame Platen determined also to bring the son under her influence. When Prince George Louis returned from his military service she threw her sister, Madame Bussche, in his way. Her sister was younger and prettier than Madame Platen, but much less clever and wholly under the influence of this imperious woman. The precocious young Prince fell captive to the charms of Madame Bussche, who also had a complaisant husband. Thus Madame Platen became all-powerful at the court of Hanover. It is an ugly chapter in the history of the Hanoverian House, but one that cannot be ignored.
Some court mistresses have been real politicians, and their influence on public affairs has been for good and not evil. But Madame Platen was hardly a political woman of the first rank; she was incapable of taking a wide view of affairs, and her efforts were directed towards the immediate aggrandisement of the principality of Hanover, without a thought of the larger interests outside. Into the family feud between Celle and Hanover she entered with zest, and made common cause with Ernest Augustus and Sophia against Eléonore and the Celle-Wolfenbüttel party. She noted the growing intimacy between George William and Antony Ulrich, which she shrewdly suspected boded no good to the fortunes of the court of Hanover. Her methods were essentially those of the backstairs, and she persuaded Ernest Augustus to employ spies at Celle to report all that went on there. In this way she acquired a knowledge of the disposition of the Ministers who held office at Celle. The most powerful of them all was Bernstorff, the Duke’s Prime Minister. Bernstorff was an ambitious and avaricious man with little principle, who had already shown jealousy of the influence which Eléonore exercised over her husband and resented her interference in affairs of state. Madame Platen saw in him an instrument for her designs; she approached him with many promises, and some more substantial pledges from Ernest Augustus—_item_, a gold snuff-box set with diamonds, and similar tokens of good-will. Bernstorff was quite willing to listen to these overtures; he was anxious to become a great landed proprietor, and Ernest Augustus promised to advance his wishes in this and other respects if he would carry out his plans. He was opposed to the Celle-Wolfenbüttel party headed by the Duchess Eléonore, he desired nothing better than her downfall; so he took the bribe, and confidential communications were opened up with Hanover. In particular he warned Ernest Augustus of the schemes of Duke Antony Ulrich, who was now urging the betrothal of his second son to the little Sophie Dorothea. These communications were not nominally carried on between responsible Ministers, but between a spy at Celle and Madame Platen at Hanover, so that if anything transpired they could both be disowned by the responsible officials; but in reality Madame Platen was dictating the policy of Hanover.
A pretty picture of moral and political corruption, it must be confessed. One wonders what the haughty Duchess Sophia thought of it all, and by what inexplicable means this inscrutable woman was brought to become a passive witness of the double capture by audacious adventuresses of her husband and her son. Her policy was always to ignore anything she could not help; and in this case she seems to have offered no protest. The key to this riddle is probably to be found in her character. The moral objection would not appeal to her, for though the Duchess Sophia in her own personal conduct was absolutely above reproach, and there is abundant evidence to prove she held that the virtue of princesses should be above suspicion, yet she had been trained in a school and an age which did not demand the same standard of morality from men as from women, least of all from princes. In her day women of the Platen type were as much a part of the _entourage_ of a court as the lackeys in the kitchen or the grooms in the stables, and since this was so, why not Madame Platen as well as another? Sophia had done her duty to Ernest Augustus in every sense of the word. She had been a good and faithful wife; she had upheld the dignity of the courts of Osnabrück and Hanover; she had borne her husband six children, five sons and a daughter; and though they had never any love in the highest sense for one another, yet in time affection seems to have sprung up between this curious couple, and they got on very well together, mainly on the principle of leaving each other alone. According to his lights, and possibly her lights also, Ernest Augustus was a good husband; he always treated his consort with profound respect, and outwardly he fulfilled the letter of his contract with her, it was only in the spirit he failed, but Sophia probably did not care about that. She was his duchess, the mother of his sons, the great lady of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and that sufficed her. She was fond of her children, too, especially of the younger boys and her daughter, but for George Louis, her eldest son, she had very little love. She therefore probably regarded his affair with Madame Bussche with indifference. Nor did religious scruples enter to any extent. She was a free-thinking woman, who, from a philosophic eminence, looked down upon all dogma with contempt. “The Princess Sophia,” says Dean Lockier, “was a woman of good sense and excellent conversation. I was very well acquainted with her. She sat very loose in her religious principles, and used to take a particular pleasure in setting a heretic (infidel), whenever she could meet such, and one of her chaplains disputing together.” This is a quaint characteristic; and we may picture Sophia’s face as she baited her chaplain with some truculent infidel, and chuckled while they fought together, finally dismissing them with “A plague on both your houses”.[16]
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Footnote 16:
A similar pastime was frequently indulged in by her grand-daughter-in-law, Queen Caroline, wife of George II., who was also most tolerant of her husband’s mistresses. No doubt she learned both these peculiarities from Sophia.
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Hitherto we have viewed this Princess in a somewhat unamiable light—the side she showed to Eléonore; it is only fair to turn the other side of the shield. Her failings were the failings of her time, her virtues were all her own. Reared in a dissolute court, married into a vicious one, no word of scandal was ever breathed against her moral character. She remained beyond and apart, a serene and haughty figure, head and shoulders above the mean, coarse, voluptuous, lying crowd with which she was surrounded. Whatever was pure and of good repute, whatever made for the higher and intellectual life, turned to Sophia at the court of Hanover. She was a woman of great parts, speaking five languages—Low Dutch, German, French, Italian, and English—fluently, and was learned in the literature of them all. She attracted to Hanover some of the choicest intellectual spirits of the age, and among them was the great and learned Leibniz, whose friend and patron she was. In turn he warmly respected and admired her: she was the “Serena” of his letters, and together they discussed those subtle philosophies beside which such things as court intrigues and court courtesans were as nothing worth.
It was doubtless her communing in these serene altitudes, together with the considerations before mentioned, which enabled the Duchess Sophia to ignore Madame Platen and lesser annoyances. Outwardly she received from the court mistress every mark of respect and homage. However impudent, brazen, and intriguing Madame Platen might be, she was always submissive and decorous before the Duchess Sophia, always her very humble lady-in-waiting. The Duchess was not of a jealous temperament, and in matters where her rank and her rights were not imperilled her heart did not enter. Madame Platen would always be Madame Platen; she could never rise, for instance, to the heights of the upstart Eléonore, and arrogate to herself the position of an equal of the daughter of kings; and so long as she kept her place, what matter? Besides, according to her lights, the woman was working for the greater glory of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg and against the hated Eléonore. These seem the ostensible grounds on which it can be explained why the Duchess Sophia allowed, without protest, such a power near her throne. But there was perhaps another reason, too, which overshadowed all the rest.
The great and splendid inheritance of the throne of England already flitted before Sophia’s dazzled eyes. English events absorbed her to the exclusion of others, and the affairs of the court of Hanover were mere village politics beside them. Sophia had one virtue for which every Englishman will love her. She loved “her country,” as she called England, with all her heart and soul and strength; “her country,” which she had never seen, which she was destined never to see; “her country,” over which her grandfather had reigned a well-nigh absolute monarch; “her country,” to which her mother had gone back, as to home, to end her days; “her country,” for which her brother, the dashing Prince Rupert, had fought on the King’s side throughout the Great Rebellion; “her country,” over which her son was to reign and her children’s children from generation to generation. The reproach of being German and alien in sympathy, later, often urged against the House of Hanover, could never have been brought against Sophia, for her heart was as “entirely English” as Queen Anne’s. She early imbibed her love for England and things English. She spoke the language fluently, far better than many a Stuart. She was learned in England’s history, its customs, and its laws. She had an English maid always with her. In her youth she had been within measurable distance of becoming Queen Consort of England; in her old age she was within an ace of being Queen Regnant.[17] It is a pity she was never Queen of England. She would have been another and a wiser Elizabeth, whom in many ways she strongly resembled—in her love of statecraft, her broad and liberal view of things, her contempt for jarring creeds, her wisdom and resource. Yes, it is a thousand pities she was never Queen of England; she would have made a wiser ruler than any of her Stuart cousins, and a far better than any of her descendants, save only the present illustrious occupant of the throne, and his revered mother, whose long and beneficent reign won for her the first place among England’s monarchs of any dynasty.
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Footnote 17:
She died less than three months before Queen Anne.
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