Part ii
. pp. 98-9.)
Footnote 11:
Part of a stanza in a song in _The Lords’ Masque_, accompanying a dance of stars, may be quoted, if only to suggest the contemporary pronunciation of the King’s name:
‘So bravely crown it [the night] with your beams, That it may live in fame As long as Rhenus or the Thames Are known by either name.’
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It was not till after Easter that the young Electress and her husband were allowed to take their departure from London, nor till the beginning of June that, after a semi-royal progress from Holland up the Rhine, they at last set foot in Heidelberg. The greater part of the Electress’ English suite, which included Francis Quarles and Nicolas Ferrar, soon afterwards left her—Lord Harington, by a pathetic fate, dying on the way at Worms, so that his wife returned home a widow. Elizabeth’s life in her new home was for many a day much what it had latterly been in her old—a round of Court festivities, banquets, and hunting-expeditions. Nor does she, after the protracted honeymoon was over, seem to have ceased to be preoccupied with the trivialities of her daily life. We may discount the report of a divine who visited her husband’s Court, that ‘she is not often heard to speak of God ... she is fond of grandeur and the precedence of rank.’ And we may excuse her for not allowing the ascendancy of the Court-preacher, Abraham Scultetus, to dominate her thoughts and conduct, in spite of the potent authority exercised by this divine, afterwards one of the most vigorous of the anti-Remonstrants at Dort (where he had the satisfaction of seeing that Heidelberg Catechism, which Sophia was so ruefully to remember as the religious _pabulum_ of her youth, adopted as the symbol of the Dutch Church). At Heidelberg she had her own English Chaplain.[12] For the rest, it seems to have been the use of her horse and gun which, on the occasion of the death of her firstborn child, assuaged the first sharp sorrow of her married life. While the high state kept by King James’ daughter—with her army of ladies-in-waiting, chamberlains, chaplains, and the rest—could not fail to heighten the splendour and swell the outlay of the Palatine Court, her influence must have helped to soften and refine its tone, though in neither respect was the ground unprepared. It may safely be ascribed to Elizabeth and to her bringing-up that the place of German was taken by French as the Court tongue at Heidelberg. Her husband, whose favourite extravagance was that of building, was much engaged at this time in perfecting the Castle gardens in the most approved French style, and in adding a new ‘English wing’ to the Electoral residence itself. On January 1st, 1617, she gave birth to her eldest son, and half the Protestant Powers of Europe were represented round the baptismal font. The fortunes of the family had sunk low, when, fifteen years later, this Prince—Henry Frederick—was, in his unhappy father’s sight, drowned off Haarlem. On December 22nd, 1617, another son was born to the Electoral couple, Charles Lewis, afterwards Elector Palatine; and on December 26th, 1618, followed the birth of their eldest daughter, Elizabeth.
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Footnote 12:
Alexander Chapman, Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, D.D. 1610, and Archdeacon of Stow and Prebendary of Lincoln in the same year. In 1618 he was appointed Prebendary of Canterbury, where, on his death in 1629, ‘an elegant Monument of blue and white Marble, with a demy Effigie of him thereon, was erected to his memory by his Brother.’ See R. Masters’ _History of C.C.C._, pp. 264-5. He was possibly the donor of the speaking likeness of Elizabeth which hangs in the Master’s Lodge at Corpus.
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There were, however, certain drawbacks to the perfect contentment of Elizabeth in the ‘merry’ Heidelberg days, which readily revealed themselves to the eye of the sympathising observer. Even at a distance she dwelt as it were in the shadow of the paternal throne; and the pride of her father, to which her own seems to have very readily responded, obliged her to assert extravagant claims in matters of precedence. As to these pretensions full information is furnished by the communicative pen of Sir Henry Wotton, who in April, 1616, when on his way to Turin and Venice, spent six days in the Electoral Court at Heidelberg. He had some public business of moment to transact with the Elector, to whom he submitted a plan for a league with Savoy, which Frederick approved and promised to lay before the Princes of the Union. But it was his chief duty to give some account to the King of the Court of Heidelberg, and of the treatment there extended to the King’s daughter in those matters which her father had so much at heart. Sir Henry Wotton, whose deep admiration for Elizabeth, expressed in undying verse, has indissolubly linked his name with her own, addressed himself to his task with even more than his usual diligence. He describes the Electoral Court as one ‘of great sobriety,’ and very well attended. The Elector he found ‘_par boutades_ merry, but for the most part cogitative, or, as they here call it, melancolique; his chiefest object was money, and his principal delight architecture.’ The Electress, although already at that time ‘the mother of one of the sweetest children,’ still retained ‘her former virginal verdure in her complexion and features.’ Very manifestly, though the ambassador approaches the subject with many courtly involutions, things had not at first, and did not even now, run quite smoothly between the Elector and his consort. At first, some trouble was caused by the ‘emulation’ of servants—in other words, rubs between the English and the German members of the Court; and now there remained the cardinal difficulty about ‘placing her Highness.’ The claim which James I had set up before his daughter’s departure from England, and which Frederick had then promised to allow, that she should have precedence in her husband’s and other non-royal Courts, had proved one which Frederick found it impossible in practice to reconcile with self-respect; and Wotton hardly bettered the situation by trying to prove too much.[13] The problem was ultimately settled in no very satisfactory fashion; the Electoral pair decided to pay no further visits to other Courts; and Louisa Juliana, the Electress Dowager, whom Elizabeth had expected to give her the _pas_, withdrew for some time from her son’s Court.
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Footnote 13:
‘My Lady,’ he argued, ‘was not to be considered only as the daughter of a King, like the daughters of France, but did carry in her person the possibility of succession to three Crowns.’
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Wotton had judiciously recommended the Elector to state his case to the King through a nobleman particularly valued by the Electress—Hans Meinhard von Schönberg (Schombergh), Marshal of the Palatinate. Schönberg had, in March, 1615, married Anne Sutton, daughter of Lord Dudley, a favourite lady-in-waiting of Elizabeth, with whom she had remained after Lady Harington’s departure; but she had been taken from him by death in the following December. Schönberg’s advice, the Electress informed Wotton, had been of the utmost value to her, ‘though by divers provocations and offences, of the greatest part for her sake, he had been moved and had himself resolved to be gone.’ (He was now serving as a colonel under Maurice of Nassau.) She also spoke with gratitude of the attentions of Frau von Pless (who had been her husband’s governess), though she desiderated the company of another English lady of Anne Sutton’s age. With the services of the English secretary, Albertus Morton (Wotton’s nephew), whom her father had sent to her, Elizabeth was well content.
We must conclude from this report that the English-born Electress had to bear at Heidelberg some of the unpopularity incurred by her countrymen who, in search of amusement or employment, swelled her Court without being attached to it; and that she had also to suffer from the consequences of a self-consciousness fostered by her father. It is further clear that, in one way or another, she came at this early period of her career to be oppressed by a burden of debt which it was not easy, with or without good advice, to shake off. Perhaps these features of her life as Electress Palatine should be called to mind, before the customary version of her conduct at the crisis of her consort’s destinies and her own is unhesitatingly followed. In 1619, the great opportunity for which the Palatine diplomatists had been so long scheming arrived at last. It has been seen that the idea of the Bohemian Crown had been present to them for some time; probably, the first suggestion of it arose in the course of the negotiations carried on by the Palatine Government in 1605-7, the chief advocate of the notion being Lösenius, while it was actively supported by Christian of Anhalt.[14] But, though the chance of carrying it into execution was now before the Palatines, it found them and their allies, great and small, unprepared. They had not succeeded in turning to account the strong feeling which prevailed in many quarters against the choice as Emperor of the Archduke Ferdinand of Styria, the destined head of the House of Austria, and the formally acknowledged successor to the Bohemian and Hungarian thrones. They had dallied with idle thoughts of the King of France and the Duke of Lorraine, and had then concentrated their efforts upon the paradoxical device of securing as a candidate the head of the Catholic branch of the House of Wittelsbach, Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, who was also the head of the Catholic League. But Maximilian, though by the tradition of his House jealous of Habsburg, better knew his own mind and his own interests. Thus, when (in March, 1619) the Emperor Matthias passed away, the Elector Palatine wasted the little time remaining in protests; and, when the day of election arrived (August 28), after some empty words accepted the predetermined vote in favour of Ferdinand of Styria. The pupil of the Jesuits was seated on the Imperial throne; but, on the very evening when this defeat of the Palatine policy was proclaimed at Frankfort, the news arrived that it had scored a victory at Prague. Here, only a year previously (1618), the troubles between the government and the Utraquists had come to an outbreak, and on the Hradschin had been perpetrated the _defenestration_ (ejection through the window) of certain Ministers of the Crown, which it is usual to regard as the opening of the Thirty Years’ War. Quite unable to establish his authority in Bohemia, Ferdinand had been actually menaced in his palace at Vienna by the Utraquist chiefs, with an army at their back. And now it was announced that, after deposing Ferdinand, the Bohemian Estates had elected Frederick V Elector Palatine King of Bohemia in his stead.
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Footnote 14:
See M. Ritter, _Deutsche Geschichte in der Zeit d. dreissigjähr. Krieges_, Vol. ii. p. 201.
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‘Thou hast it now.’ After a few diplomatic operations by Achatius von Dohna, the Elector Palatine had only to stretch his hand from Amberg across the Bohemian frontier, and a great historic throne was his,[15] with its large territorial dependencies, and with a second electoral vote ensuring the majority in the College to the Protestant interest. He was Calvinist enough in his habits of mind to be able afterwards to declare conscientiously that, in accepting this Crown, he obeyed an inner voice, which he thought spoke the will of God. And, certainly, there was no pressure of advice to urge him in this direction. His Council, setting forth the _pros_ and _cons_ in the argumentative fashion of the day, could only find six reasons in favour of acceptance to balance fourteen against; and the gist of their opinion was after all that everything depended on the support the Elector would receive in a forward policy. But at most of the friendly Courts opinion was found to be adverse; and while Maurice of Orange and others eagerly advised acceptance, Maximilian of Bavaria with honourable candour raised a clear voice of warning. As for Frederick’s father-in-law King James, he was not at present prepared to depart from his masterly attitude of declining to pronounce against acceptance, while desiring not to be supposed to have advised in favour of it. Whether or not a strong protest from James before Frederick’s formal acceptance of the Crown might have arrested that final step, no such protest was made.
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Footnote 15:
‘Then County Palatine, and now a King.’ (_Tamburlaine_,