Part II
, Act i, Sc. i. l. 103.)
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Frederick’s mother, Louisa Juliana, though a woman cast in no ignoble mould, is said to have burst into tears and fallen ill on hearing of her son’s election to the Bohemian throne. On the other hand, it has again and again been asserted, or at least represented as highly probable, that it was the urgent representations of the Electress Elizabeth which determined her consort to cast the die; and everybody has heard the anecdote of her taunting him with the avowal that she would rather partake of sour-krout with a King, than of a joint of roast meat with an Elector. Elizabeth is unlikely either to have forgotten herself so far, or to have sought for any analogy between her own position and that of the Bohemian Princess who shortly after Wyclif’s death had mounted the English throne. Moreover, we have the statement of her grand-daughter, the free-spoken Duchess of Orleans, that at the time of the Bohemian offer the Electress knew nothing at all about the matter, her thoughts being in those days entirely absorbed by plays, masquerades, and the reading of romances. No doubt the Duchess, though deeply attached to her father’s house, is not to be absolutely trusted in her statements as to all the members of her father’s family; but her account of the condition of Elizabeth’s mind at the time when she was first brought face to face with the chief problem of her life, harmonises with all we know as to its previous current. After all, however, the point is not very material. Even before her husband had actually decided to become a King, she stood forth every inch a Queen; nor was it with a light heart, or in a spirit inflated with vanity or ambition, that at the last she left the decision in his hands. She was, in her own words, prepared to bow to the will of God, and, if need were, to suffer what He should see fit to ordain. Of her worldly goods she at the same time declared herself ready to make any reasonable sacrifice, by pledging her jewels, or whatever else of value she possessed. Early in October (1619) the last bridge had been burnt.
From this time forward, Elizabeth’s troubles came thick upon her; and indeed, but for a very imperfect return of prosperity towards the close of her life, they may be said never to have ceased again on earth. When, with Frederick, she quitted the Palatinate for Bohemia towards the end of October, they left behind them at Heidelberg, in the care of the Electress Dowager Louisa Juliana, their two children Charles Lewis and Elizabeth; but, though the former was long his mother’s favourite, it was hardly in her way to be deeply affected by a separation from her babes. The part which the new King and Queen were called upon to play during the twelve-month of their residence at Prague was from the outset the reverse of easy. The self-conscious and stiff-necked Bohemian Estates had not the least intention of being ruled in fact as well as in name by the sovereign of their making; while part at least of the population was steeped in ignorance like the peasants who welcomed his entry with shouts of ‘Vivat rex _Ferdinandus_!’[16] In Frederick’s mistake of importing and maintaining among Utraquist (i.e. Lutheran) surroundings, a rigid and aggressive Calvinism, incarnate in the iconoclastic Scultetus, Elizabeth probably had no share; for, as is worth remembering in connexion with the rather complicated religious history of her children, she never became a Calvinist herself or displayed any liking for Calvinistic ways. She did her best to gain popularity for herself and her consort, checking the insolence provoked among her courtiers by the uncouth manners and customs of her new subjects, and delighting all and sundry by pleasant English ‘hand-shakes.’ Now and then, offence was given by such innovations as the holding of Court balls on great Church holidays, and by the fashions of the attire worn on these occasions by the Queen and her ladies; and more serious umbrage was taken at the King’s conclusion of an alliance with the Calvinist Transylvanian, and at the project of another with the Sultan himself. Finally, there was the eternal difficulty as to ways and means, alike in Silesia (where the royal pair had been received with great rejoicing) and in Bohemia itself. Among all these agitations Elizabeth’s spirits from time to time flagged, both before and after the birth of her third son; for the changeful story of Prince Rupert’s life began at Prague in December, 1619.
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Footnote 16:
The entry of Frederick into Prague, and his handsome reception by the three Estates ‘after the manner of our ancient Kings,’ was witnessed by Jacob Böhme.
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Within less than a year from this date the brief glories of her Bohemian royalty had ‘turned to coal.’ In July King James, while sending Sir Edward Conway and Sir Richard Weston to Prague, ordered Sir Henry Wotton to repair to Vienna, where, if the King of Bohemia consented, he was to propose the settlement of the difficulty by means of an Imperial Diet; while to all Princes visited by him on the way he was to protest his master’s abstinence from any participation in the election to the Bohemian Crown. The choice of Wotton for this singularly futile mission was in itself extraordinarily infelicitous; very naturally, however, his task impressed itself at once upon the chosen ambassador’s vivid imagination. For it was on the eve of his departure for Vienna that Wotton, ‘being in Greenwitche Parke, made a sonnet to the Queen of Bohemia,’ of which he sent copies to Lady Wotton and Lord Zouche, and as to which Wotton’s latest biographer remarks, with perfect truth, that ‘such is the magic of art, these verses have done more than anything else, perhaps, to make both’ Ambassador and Queen ‘remembered.’[17] Neither the Prague nor the Vienna mission had any effect whatever; indeed, before Conway and Weston’s reply reached Wotton, all was over. Early in September the Leaguers under Maximilian of Bavaria, the head of the rival Wittelsbach line, had joined their forces against him, while Spinola’s Spaniards were approaching the Palatinate. Soon the enemies of the new Bohemian monarchy had closed in upon it. The battle of the White Hill was waged and lost in an hour (November 8th); and, though Frederick can hardly be blamed for the actual loss of the battle, in his accidental absence from which there was nothing disgraceful,[18] he had entirely failed to take precautions for the event of such a catastrophe, and lacked the self-confidence which alone could have made possible further resistance on the spot. Thus, though he did not at first quite understand the full significance of his overthrow, Bohemia had passed for ever out of the weak hands of the Winter—or Twelfth Night—King. When, on the evening of the rout, the long stream of vehicles, headed by Queen Elizabeth’s coach, ebbed out of Prague, bearing with it whatsoever was portable of the Protestant interest, no hopes remained except such as were wholly illusory. But Elizabeth intended that, even though Bohemia was lost and the Palatinate, which, as Louisa Juliana had formerly lamented, had ‘gone into Bohemia,’ might prove to be lost with it, the drama so swiftly played out should have no ignoble epilogue. She had resolved—in her own words—‘not to desert her husband, and, if he was to perish, to perish by his side.’ Fate dealt with her after no such sudden fashion; but she was true to the spirit of her vow.
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Footnote 17:
See L. Pearsall Smith, _Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton_, Vol. i. p. 171.
Footnote 18:
The _Mercure Français_ stated that he took part in the battle, and lost his ribbon of the Garter on the occasion! (Charvériat, _Histoire de la Guerre de Trente Ans_, Vol. i. p. 235, note.)
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From Prague Frederick and Elizabeth first made their way into Silesia, then still a dependency of Bohemia; but soon Frederick, though, owing to Wotton’s protest against the invasion of the Palatinate, the ban of the Empire did not descend on him till the following January, had to realise the position to which he was reduced. He sent on his wife before him, to seek shelter in the dominions of his brother-in-law, the Elector George William of Brandenburg. This Prince, a Calvinist and one of those who had advised the acceptance of the Bohemian Crown, was afraid at the same time of the Swedes and of the Emperor, to whose policy he had not yet rallied; and in after days the great Elector’s sister, the brave Duchess Louisa Charlotte of Courland, recognising in the experiences of her own married life some analogy to those of her Aunt Elizabeth’s, recalled as memorable the impunity with which her father had afforded a passing refuge to his unfortunate relatives.[19] The intimacy between the two Calvinist Electoral Houses was to survive backslidings on the part of Brandenburg in the course of the great War, and was at a later date to be very notably renewed, in spite of the perennial jealousy between the two dynasties and governments, by the marriage of Elizabeth’s grand-daughter Sophia Charlotte with the future first Prussian King. But, in these early days, the welcome extended by the Elector George William to his fugitive kinsfolk was limited to the coldest courtesies. At Küstrin, where on Christmas Day, 1620, Elizabeth gave birth to her fifth child, the Prince Maurice to be known in later life as Rupert’s _fidus Achates_, the royal mother and her attendants are said to have hardly had enough to eat, and, when in January, 1621, they were joined by her husband from Breslau, he brought no good tidings with him. The Union was on the eve of dissolution; an offer of aid from the Sultan, so at least it was rumoured, had been refused by Frederick; and the vacillations of King James were more hopeless than ever. At Berlin, where the fugitives were received by Frederick’s sister, the Electress Elizabeth Charlotte, they were glad to leave behind them the infant Maurice in the faithful charge of his grandmother Louisa Juliana, who, with his elder brother and sister in her care, had taken her departure from Heidelberg even before the battle of Prague. Her own estates, together with those of her second son Lewis Philip, long remained sequestrated; though neither of them had taken any part in the Bohemian business. The boys were afterwards removed to Holland; but the young Princess Elizabeth continued under her grandmother’s care till her ninth year, chiefly at Krossen in Silesia. This early training and the closer connexion into which it brought her with the Brandenburg Electoral family, were to exercise a notable influence upon her character and upon her later personal history.
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Footnote 19:
See A. Seraphim, _Eine Schwester des grossen Kurfürsten_, &c. (_Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Gesch. d. Hauses Hohenzollern II._). Berlin, 1901.
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From Berlin her parents, luckless emigrants, had still been obliged to move on, Queen Elizabeth journeying to Wolfenbüttel, the residence of the elder branch of the House of Brunswick, Frederick roaming about the Lower Saxon Circle in quest of military or other aid. Finally, they entered the Netherlands together by way of the Rhine. Everywhere in the Low Countries they were warmly welcomed, not only as kinsfolk of the House of Orange, but also as fellow-martyrs of those Protestant refugees to whom, in the Elector Frederick III’s days, the Palatinate had accorded so hospitable a reception. On April 14th, 1621, they were received with the utmost cordiality by the great Stadholder, Maurice of Orange, in the midst of a large assemblage of princes, nobles, and foreign ambassadors; and soon the States-General of the United Provinces, and the States of Holland and Friesland in particular, gave substantial expression to the universal warmth of the public welcome.
But the arm of the young Dutch Republic, though strenuous, was not long enough to reach effectively into the heart of the Empire. In the previous autumn, Frederick Henry of Nassau, the Stadholder’s brother, had made a show of protecting the Palatinate with a couple of thousand men, among whom there was an English contingent; but the effort had come to nothing. Already in 1620 the greater part of the Lower Palatinate had been occupied by the Spaniards; and in 1621, after Frederick had been placed under the ban of the Empire and the execution of the sentence had been entrusted to the expectant Duke of Bavaria, the inhabitants of the Upper Palatinate were called upon to forswear their allegiance. Frederick’s cause was upheld only by the English volunteers under Sir Horace Vere and by Mansfeld’s mercenaries. The Union had dissolved itself in the spring, and after midsummer James, while still cherishing the hope of bringing to pass a friendly intervention by Spain, was attempting through his ambassador Digby to obtain favourable terms at Vienna. Before the year was out, Maximilian of Bavaria had, with the aid of Rome, obtained an imperial promise of the reversion of the forfeited Electorate; and the future, as well as the present, seemed wholly dark for the Electoral couple and their children. Near or far, no ally seemed prepared to strike a blow in their interests, except that already, in 1621, the Queen of Hearts—as she came to be called in the days when she exercised no other sovereignty[20]—had found a true knight neither anxious, like King James, about probabilities of failure, nor, like the great _condottiere_ Mansfeld, solely intent upon the main chance. This was Duke Christian of Brunswick, the administrator or (as an English letter of the time aptly calls him) the ‘temporal bishop’ of the see of Halberstadt.[21] There is no evidence of his having ever met, or so much as corresponded with, the Queen; but Sir Thomas Roe distinctly states that it was only for her sake that he had engaged in the war, and he made much the same confession himself to his mother; while the story of his having worn in his helmet a glove belonging to the Queen, which he had vowed to restore to her in reconquered Prague, can be traced back as far as 1646. After losing an arm, he rode forth in 1624 with a substitute made of iron. Though a poet’s son, he was as rough a campaigner as any of the captains of the age; and in 1625 a flagrant act of violence placed him under a cloud. In the following year a fever ended the excesses of his military career, his wild defiances of Spain and the League, and his romantic passion, which, as we know from a letter written by his sister, Sophia of Nassau-Dietz, pined almost to the last for some mark of recognition by its object.[22] Elizabeth’s power of attracting the sympathy of soldiers, which had been so conspicuously exhibited in the case of Christian of Halberstadt, and to which afterwards Lord Craven’s life-long devotion was to testify, was further exemplified by the goodwill shown to her in these times of distress by her martial kinsmen of the House of Orange. The readiness of the great captain Maurice of Nassau to further her interests so far as in him lay was shared by his younger brother, Prince Frederick Henry, who, in 1625, succeeded him in the stadholdership, and between whom and one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting, attached to her person since her Heidelberg days, Maurice a few weeks before his death arranged a marriage. But the new Princess of Orange proved to be as proud as the beautiful Countess Amalia von Solms had been poor; and, before long, her desire of furthering the interests of the House into which she had been admitted made her hostile to those of the family of her former mistress.
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Footnote 20:
The origin of the application of this title seems unknown. It had been formerly connected in a peculiar fashion with Elizabeth’s august godmother. (See the weird story in H. Clifford’s _Life of Jane Dormer_, how not long before Queen Elizabeth’s death a playing-card, the Queen of Hearts, with an iron nail knocked through the head, was found at the bottom of her chair. Soon afterwards all hopes of her recovery were abandoned.)
Footnote 21:
Halberstadt was one of those sees which had by special treaties with the Chapters been made hereditary in particular Protestant princely families. (Opel, _Niedersächs. Krieg_, Vol. i. p. 193.)
Footnote 22:
It must at the same time be allowed that the epithets applied to James I by Christian after the breakdown of the scheme of 1623 could hardly under any circumstances have been condoned by the King’s daughter. (See Ritter, _Deutsche Geschichte_, &c., Vol. iii. p. 253.)
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The charm of Elizabeth’s beauty, and the stimulus of her high spirit, also inspired with a warm personal concern in her affairs, those of her father’s numerous diplomatists who were or became known to her. Sir Henry Wotton seems never to have seen her again after their ‘merry hour’ of meeting at Heidelberg; but he remained stedfast in his admiration for his ‘Royal Mistress,’ and among the intimate letters of the days of his retirement at Eton are those which he addressed to her, then a half-forgotten exile at the Hague. In his will he left to the Prince of Wales her picture, with an inscription[23] which reappears, with slight modifications, in two of his published pieces. Wotton’s successor at Venice, Sir Dudley Carleton (afterwards Viscount Dorchester), who had likewise been received by the Electoral pair at Heidelberg, and who was English ambassador at the Hague when the fugitives arrived there, cheerfully gave up his house for their use; besides judiciously exerting himself in their interest both in this and in his second embassy to the United Provinces. Lord Herbert of Cherbury was warmly thanked by Elizabeth for his exertions at Paris; and Lord Conway did his best for her cause with the Emperor at Prague. Lord Doncaster (afterwards Earl of Carlisle) had, during his futile mission before the Bohemian crisis, gained her goodwill in such a degree as to be honoured by her with the intimate nickname of ‘camel-face’; and it was through him that his eloquent chaplain Donne was privileged to ‘deliver mesages’ to the Queen when in sore straits. More to the purpose were the active services of Sir Thomas Roe, the ‘honest fatt Thom’ of her correspondence; but, although these had begun before this diplomatist’s return from Eastern Europe, he does not seem to have come into much personal contact with her before 1628.
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Footnote 23:
‘_Inter Fortunæ sortem, extra Imperium._’ (See L. Pearsall Smith, _u.s._, Vol. i. p. 297, note.)
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Only a few brief indications can be given here of the general course of the exiled family’s fortunes during the quarter of a century which elapsed, before a definitive settlement of the Palatinate problem was at last reached in the Peace of Westphalia. Negotiations were at first carried on in Sweden, through Ludwig Camerarius, who from 1623 directed the diplomacy of the Palatine House, with the purpose of engaging King Gustavus Adolphus in offensive operations, in the course of which the latter intended that Frederick should appear in the Palatinate at the head of an army; but the perennial Danish jealousy of Sweden put a stop to the plan. About the same time (1623-4) the faithful Rusdorf sought, by negotiations in London, to obtain fair terms for his master at Vienna, Frederick signifying his willingness to allow his eldest son (Frederick Henry) to be educated at Vienna, with a view to his marriage with an Imperial Princess; but the overtures came to nothing, as did the specious offers of the disguised Capuchin della Rota. These latter proved, in truth, to be mere pretences on the part of Maximilian of Bavaria, who, in 1624, was received into the College of Electors in Frederick’s place. Towards the close of 1623, King James I, who earlier in the year had broken off negotiations with Mansfeld and Christian of Halberstadt and concluded a truce with the Infanta at Brussels, which Frederick was obliged to ratify, had at last been undeceived as to the intentions of Spain. He saw at last how during the Spanish marriage negotiations he had been tricked into the false hope that good terms would be obtained by Spanish mediation for the Palatines; and, during the last year of his reign, when war with Spain was becoming more and more imminent, a treaty promising an English army for the recovery of the Palatinate was concluded with Mansfeld, who was for the moment the lion of London, whither he was soon followed on a similar errand by Christian of Halberstadt. Thus, when in March, 1625, James I was succeeded on the English throne by Charles I, Elizabeth’s hopes rallied with pathetic buoyancy, and she cherished the hope that her brother’s approaching French marriage would further advance the interests of her family. There can be no doubt of Charles I’s intention to serve his sister and her children; and his wishes on this head were shared by Buckingham. The Duke is even said, when visiting the Palatine family at Leyden, not long before his assassination in January, 1629, to have had in his head a scheme—which, if fate had so willed it, might have had strange consequences for the British Succession—of a marriage between his daughter Lady Mary Villiers and Elizabeth’s eldest son, Prince Frederick Henry. But, as is well known, the history of Charles I’s foreign policy during the first part of his reign, in which the question of the recovery of the Palatinate could not possibly hold the central place as it had in his father’s, had, as Eliot summed it up in his scathing speech, been one of constant and utter failure. Afterwards, of course, the King was so hopelessly at issue with his Parliament, that all chance of effective intervention had come to an end. Mansfeld’s army at first remained inactive in the Low Countries, where it was not increased, except by fragments of the levies of Christian of Halberstadt, which a tempest had scattered at sea. Instead of reinforcing the mercenary troops, the English expedition which sailed under Lord Wimbledon in October, 1625, had orders for Cadiz. When, in 1625, Elizabeth’s uncle, Christian IV of Denmark, at last took the field as chief of the Lower Saxon Circle, the death of his namesake soon deprived him of his best commander; and, in 1626, Mansfeld, after being defeated by Wallenstein at Dessau, was ‘chased’ by him into Hungary, whence, after making over his army to Bethlen Gabor, he took his departure only to die. In August of the same year, Tilly entirely overcame Christian IV at Lutter, and the ‘Danish War’ was virtually at an end. Henceforth, no further intention was entertained either at Vienna or at Munich of granting any terms to Frederick, although, on Cardinal Khlesl’s principle of never either dropping negotiations or concluding them, conditions were still offered him. In return for the restoration of part of his paternal dominions, he was, while renouncing both the Bohemian Crown and the Electoral dignity, to pay the costs of the war, and to consent to bring up his children as Catholics; but the former condition he could not, and the latter he would not, accept. It is said that, at this very time (1627), the unhappy ex-Elector paid a secret visit to the Palatinate, whose fate seemed sealed for ever by the Austro-Bavarian treaty of the following year. The Spaniards held the left bank of the Rhine and the Bavarians the right; conversion was forced upon the inhabitants, who began to emigrate rather than submit to it; and, when, in June, 1630, Rusdorf presented a letter from his master at Ratisbon, where the Bavarian policy was conspicuously to the front, the Emperor had no answer to return except a demand of unconditional submission. Had the Palatine family yielded to this demand, and accepted the further condition of conversion to the Church of Rome, they might perhaps have been allowed some sort of domicile in the Empire. But they were of a different metal, and held out, though their prospects had never been gloomier; for, in the same year, peace was concluded between England and Spain, and whatever hopes had been placed upon King Charles’ anti-Spanish policy were thus brought to nought.
Yet, soon after these events—in July, 1630—Gustavus Adolphus landed on the Pomeranian coast, and in him the Palatine family hoped to find both an avenger and a deliverer. The Electress Dowager Louisa Juliana met him at Berlin, and after his great victory at Breitenfeld he approached the Palatinate. Before the end of 1631 most of it had been recaptured and re-Protestantised; and early in the following year Frederick was on his way to meet the conquering hero. Frederick’s Dutch hosts had furnished him forth with great liberality, and the number of state coaches with which he arrived at Frankfort, in February, 1632, had been increased to two score by Gustavus Adolphus himself, who treated him with great courtesy as King of Bohemia. But the future of the Palatinate was left undiscussed between the two Kings; nor was it till after Gustavus had continued his victorious progress through Bavaria, that he proposed a settlement. It showed unmistakably that the treatment of the Palatinate formed but a subsidiary part of his great design, and filled Frederick, who was looking for restoration to his patrimony, with alarm. For, besides other onerous conditions, there were imposed on him the admission of Swedish garrisons to some of his chief towns, the concession of the supreme military command to Gustavus, and the grant of equal rights to the Lutherans in the Calvinistic half of the Palatinate. Hard as these terms seemed to Frederick, amicable negotiations were still in progress between him and the great Swedish King, when the awful news arrived of the death of Gustavus on the field of Lützen. Frederick had a little before this fallen ill of a fever; but, as if driven by his doom, he once more began to wander from town to town, till, on November 29th, 1632, thirteen days after the death of Gustavus, he breathed his last at Mainz. The homeless wanderer’s heart was buried in the church at Oppenheim, in his own Palatinate; his corpse was hurriedly borne hither and thither—being carried off from Frankenthal by Bernhard of Weimar on his retreat in 1635, to preserve it from desecration—till it was at last composed in peace within the walls of Metz.[24]
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Footnote 24:
Elizabeth bore no love to the Swedish royal family, partly because of these memories, partly perhaps because of the Danish blood in her. (‘The States,’ she writes on one occasion, ‘are justly punished for assisting the Queen of Sweden against my uncle’ (Christian IV). She detested Gustavus’ daughter Christina. On the death of the Queen Dowager Maria Eleonora, she writes: ‘Queen Mother is dead, which makes her rap out with many an oth.’ (_Unpublished Letters of the Queen of Bohemia to Sir Edward Nicholas_, _Antiq. Soc. Publ._ 1857 (xvi).)
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After Frederick’s death, the regency of the Palatinate was assumed by his brother Louis Philip, who was married to a Brandenburg Princess (Maria Eleonora); but though under his rule Heidelberg was recovered, and with the aid of foreign (especially Scottish) beneficence the prosperity of the Palatinate began to revive, the fatal day of Nördlingen (September 6th, 1634) undid all the work of the previous two years, and the sufferings of the Palatinate from both ‘friends’ and foes—from Swedes and Bavarians—began afresh. After the Peace of Prague, in 1635, the Swedes fell back upon the Main, and after Heidelberg had been once more occupied by the Imperialists, the Palatinate remained for some five years under the government of the Emperor, which banished all Calvinist and Lutheran preachers with their families and households, and in every way promoted the decay of University and schools. It cannot be said that the general condition of the population, whose sufferings were of the most heartrending description, and productive of that awful brutalisation which is so characteristic of the later period of the Thirty Years’ War, was much affected by changes in the occupation of the country.[25] The renewal of warfare in these parts, in 1640 and again in 1644, brought in the French and their German allies and the Bavarians to augment these troubles. It will be noted below how the dispossessed heir of the Palatinate bore himself in these evil years, and what he finally saved for his House out of so pitiful a wreck. The Bohemian Crown was, of course, a thing of the past, though to the end Elizabeth retained the royal title.[26]
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Footnote 25:
The project of despatching a Scottish army in 1639 to occupy the Palatinate broke down because of a disagreement between Leslie and the Covenanters.
Footnote 26:
It would seem as if after her husband’s death she had for a time approved the style of ‘the King’s only sister.’ (See Wotton’s letter _ap._ L. P. Smith, _u.s._, Vol. ii. p. 342.) When, on the marriage of her daughter Princess Henrietta in 1651, her son Charles Lewis took exception to the title ‘Queen of Bohemia,’ Elizabeth wrote to him indignantly that ‘leauing it you doe me so much wrong as to the memorie of your dead father, as if you disapproved his actions’; and declared that whatever public instrument she might at any time have to sign, she would never sign it without the royal style. _Letters_, &c., ed. by A. Wendland, p. 16.
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The birth at the Hague, on October 14th, 1630, of Sophia, the youngest of the children of Frederick and Elizabeth, had preceded the death of her father by very little more than two years. Her mother, it must be remembered, was then still in the full flower of her womanhood—in the thirty-fifth year of her age—an eager horsewoman and fond of the pleasures of the chase; and in mind she remained not less vigorous than in body, venting her wrath freely on both enemies and neutrals—on that ‘devil’ the Emperor and that ‘beast’ the Elector of Saxony, just as at a later date she had to search in the Book of _Revelation_ for analogues fitly expressing her sentiments concerning Oliver Cromwell. Yet private as well as public griefs had helped to sadden her heart as well as to sober her spirit even before the death of her husband, whose affection towards her had remained unchanged, showing itself in little expressions of care and tenderness such as abound in his letters almost to the day of his death. In 1624, they had lost an infant son, Lewis; and, in January, 1629, their first-born, Frederick Henry, a boy of fifteen, was (as already noted) drowned off Haarlem as he was travelling back in the common passengers’ boat with his father from Amsterdam, whither Frederick had gone to collect the share of the profits from a captured Spanish treasure-fleet assigned to him by Maurice of Nassau. The infant Princess Charlotte was laid in the grave by her brother’s side only three days before the christening of Sophia. But, as there survived five brothers (to whom a sixth, significantly named Gustavus, was added two years after Sophia’s birth), the statement may perhaps be credited with which her _Memoirs_ open, that her arrival in this world caused no excess of joy to her parents. She relates that her name—the name which narrowly missed marking the beginning of a new English dynasty, and which, in token of its popularity in this country, was bestowed upon his heroine by the author of one of the masterpieces of our literature—was drawn by lot out of several written for the purpose on slips of paper, because of the small choice of godmothers remaining in the case of so large a family. Sophia’s destinies were not encumbered by a second name like that which her sister Louisa Hollandina bore in honour of her godfathers; although the States of Friesland, who undertook the same responsibility for the infant Sophia, presented her with a pension of forty pounds for life and handsome supplementary gifts. So soon as it was possible to transport her, she was sent to Leyden by her mother, who preferred that her children should be brought up at a distance from herself, ‘since,’ says Sophia, ‘the sight of her monkeys and dogs was more pleasing to her than that of ourselves.’ At Leyden, therefore, Sophia spent her early childhood, chiefly in the company of her youngest brother Gustavus, who died nine years after his birth. Her graphic reminiscences of her tender years chiefly turn on the cumbrous etiquette (_tout à fait à l’allemande_) by which she was environed, and on the lessons in the Heidelberg Catechism (which she ‘knew by heart without understanding it’) imparted by her venerable governess, Frau von Pless, with the assistance of her two daughters, ladies of ‘awe-inspiring’ presence, whose age seemed to the child almost equal to her own. ‘Their ways were straight in the eyes of Heaven as before men.’ The good ex-Elector had been consistently careful as to providing sound Calvinistic instruction for his children, and Frau von Pless had been his own instructress in his infancy; but his English wife, at least during part of her residence in the Netherlands, continued to employ the services of a Church of England chaplain. In general, it is clear that at Leyden, and afterwards at the Hague, Sophia, while her wits quickly opened to the demands of life, passed, like the rest of her brothers and sisters, through a training which equipped them more or less efficiently for the struggle before them. In her case, it must also have helped to regulate the remarkable intellectual curiosity with which she was naturally endowed, and which, though it cannot be shown to have carried her to great heights or depths of study or thought, at least enabled her in later life to rise serene above the troubles and trials of the hour. The usual training of the Palatine Princes and Princesses, while including some mathematics, history, and law, appears to have been based in the main upon the study of languages, of which most of them came to have several at command. Their mother they always addressed in English, but among themselves they used French, as had been the custom of their father in his letters to his wife, and as continued to be the practice of Sophia’s son and grandson in domestic conversation, even when they had become British sovereigns.
On Prince Gustavus’ death, in 1641, Sophia, who was herself suffering from illness, quitted Leyden for the Hague, bidding farewell to her _bonnes vieilles_, whom she said she had loved from gratitude and habit, ‘for sympathy rarely exists between old age and youth’—a maxim to be flatly contradicted by the experience of her own later years. At the Hague, where, during the rule of Frederick Henry, his consort Amalia strained every nerve to prove the authority of the House of Orange equal to that of a royal dynasty, the Queen of Bohemia was beginning to find some of the conditions of her life oppressive, and, worst of all, the continuous pressure of debt unbearable. Already in her husband’s time, the generosity of Maurice had furnished them with a pleasant summer retreat at Rheenen, in the wooded country on the Rhine, not far below Arnhem, described by Evelyn as ‘a neate palace or country house, built after the Italian manner, as I remember.’[27] But Sophia, on first arriving at the Hague, found the change so delightful as to make her think that she was ‘enjoying the pleasures of Paradise.’ This early glamour must, however, have soon passed off; for, though blessed with good spirits even in her later years, Sophia was without that gift—sometimes enviable, sometimes dangerous—of seeing things rather as one wishes them to be than as they are, which her brother Charles Lewis described himself as having inherited from their mother. And it was this mother herself to the flaws in whose brilliant and in many respects noble personality Sophia seems to have been from the first unable to shut her eyes. It cannot have been only her love of horses and dogs, or her _penchant_ for what may be called the pleasures of the toilet which affected both Sophia and her eldest sister Elizabeth unsympathetically; there seems to have been in the Queen a vein of frivolity, inherited perhaps from her own mother, which estranged from her these and perhaps some other of her children, though they could not fail to recognise that her life was devoted to the interests of her family as a whole. It must, however, have been to his sister Elizabeth, and not to Sophia, that their brother Charles Lewis refers in expressing a hope that their mother may not find reason ‘to use her with the former coolness.’
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Footnote 27:
As to Rheenen, the best account appears to be contained in J. Kretzschmar, _Mittheilungen zur Geschichte des Heidelberger Schlosses_, pp. 96-132, which I have not seen. There seems at one time to have been a notion of making it over to Prince Rupert; but it afterwards became the property of Sophia, who says that it had cost 40,000 crowns to build (_Briefe an Hannov. Diplomaten_, p. 229). The Electress Sophia, not being able to sell the property at its estimated value, made it over to her son Ernest Augustus.
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Of her eldest brother, Charles Lewis himself, Sophia can have seen but little in the days of the family life at the Hague and Rheenen, although she afterwards grew warmly attached to him and came to regard him, as she says, in the light of a father rather than of an elder brother. He was a prince of remarkable intellectual gifts, which, till on his father’s death he by his mother’s wish took service under William II, Prince of Orange, he had cultivated to so much purpose at the University of Leyden, that he was afterwards credited with a share in the writings of Pufendorf, the chief glory of the restored University of Heidelberg. His disposition resembled his youngest sister’s in not a few points, as their correspondence shows. His nature, like hers, was at bottom both kindly and humorous, and, while both had a turn for sarcastic wit, there was, one must confess, a coarse fibre in both for which the habits and traditions of Palatinate life are not to be held altogether responsible. It must have been because of this natural wit, rather than because of the avarice born of necessity which Charles Lewis displayed in later passages of his career, that he was called _Timon_ by his brothers and sisters, to whom Shakespeare, with whose plays Charles Lewis was not unacquainted, is quite as likely as Lucian to have suggested the nickname. He was through life a friend of English literature, and, so late as 1674, John Philpot’s edition of Camden’s _Remains_ was dedicated to him. There is evidence of his having had other literary tastes—among the nicknames which he gave to his eldest son by Louisa von Degenfeld were those of ‘Pantagruel’ and ‘Lancelot du Lac.’ But his favourite book was the Bible (‘_meinliebotes Evangelium_’). At the same time he was, like his sister Sophia, free-spoken on all subjects; though, on occasion, as is not wonderful when his experiences are remembered, a pathos welled up in him which she, not so much from cynicism as from habitual self-control, steadily repressed.[28] Nor was he free-spoken only; he might be called a free-thinker but for that aforesaid love of the Bible which, together with a double share of his intellectual alertness, he bequeathed to his daughter Elizabeth Charlotte, Duchess of Orleans.
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Footnote 28:
See his extraordinary outburst of passionate woe on receiving the news of the death of a daughter (in 1674) in _Briefe des Kurfürsten Karl Ludwig an die Seinen_, pp. 234-5: ‘I do not know, why the Lord God seeks to try me so—when I have but a few years more to live, and after all did not create myself, and have no conscious desire of committing any sin,’ &c.
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After his father’s death, Charles Lewis had been acknowledged as Elector Palatine by King Charles I and some of the German Protestant Princes; and his mother, though he was and always remained the darling of her heart, would have urged him to assume his place in the Palatinate, had not the battle of Nördlingen placed any such attempt out of the question. Charles Lewis and his brother Rupert were accordingly sent to England (1635). Here for two or three years they led a life of gaiety and dissipation; but they could hardly, in any case, have effected anything to the purpose, even had the young ‘Elector’ devised some more practical scheme than that of asking the hand of the young Queen Christina of Sweden. After their return to Holland, however, the two Princes were, in 1638, stirred to a more vigorous activity on their own account. They began badly by the loss of all their stores at Meppen in Frisia; but they, notwithstanding, resolved to make an armed attempt upon the Palatinate, of which the cost was defrayed by Lord Craven, who himself held a command in it. They were supported by a Swedish force under Major-General King (the Lord Eythin of Marston Moor); but, after siege had been laid to Lemgo, the gallant raid came to an unfortunate end at Vlotho on the Weser, both Rupert and Craven remaining behind in captivity. Hereupon, Charles Lewis, in 1639, once more set forth from Holland with the design of placing himself at the head of the army left without a leader by the death of Duke Bernhard of Weimar; but Cardinal Richelieu, whose schemes the success of the adventure would have thwarted, gave it an unexpected turn by causing Charles Lewis to be arrested and detaining him, for the most part in prison, during several months. In 1640, he used the freedom which he had regained for new efforts, first in Denmark, and then at the Diet of Ratisbon, upon whose walls Swedish guns were playing. Once more, there was much excitement in the ‘Palsgrave’s’ favour in both England and Scotland—it was in fact the last occasion on which King and Parliament might have united in a policy approved by the nation at large; and when, in 1642, the Emperor Ferdinand III propounded a settlement which would, on stringent terms, have restored a portion of the Palatinate, the English ambassador (Sir Thomas Roe) joined the agents of Charles Lewis in protesting against its inadequacy. The horrors of war were renewed in the exhausted Palatinate, and Charles Lewis once more betook himself to England (1644), where he presented a memorandum to Parliament, which allowed him £30 a day for his stay in London, but limited it in the first instance to a fortnight. Early in this year, Louisa Juliana had died, and it almost seemed as if the hopes of her descendants were to be buried with her; for, though a dim prospect of a general peace was opening, there seemed little hope that, in the conflict between the great Crowns, thought would be taken of the Palatinate. In England, the Civil War had been for nearly two years in progress; both Rupert and Maurice had, to their brother’s actual or pretended displeasure, taken service under the King; and it is hardly possible that, at such a time, Charles Lewis could have reckoned on obtaining military or pecuniary support for his schemes for the recovery of his patrimony. He has, accordingly, been supposed to have harboured deeper designs, and these have been connected with Sir Harry Vane’s proposal, rather earlier in the year, of dethroning King Charles I. But whether or not the idea of supplanting his uncle had entered into Charles Lewis’ mind—and Sophia’s mention in her _Memoirs_ of Vane’s previous visit to the Hague lends some colour to the conjecture (she calls him Vain and speaks of him and his large chin without seriousness)—it is certain that the Prince was well received by the Parliamentary leaders.[29] In return for his supposed goodwill to their cause, to which he is stated to have testified even by taking the Covenant and sitting in the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, he was granted an annual allowance of £8,000 and assigned the Deanery at Windsor as a residence, where he thought it most prudent for the time to give himself up to his scientific studies.[30]
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Footnote 29:
As to the possibility of an offer of the Crown to Charles Lewis by the Parliamentary leaders, see W. Michael, _Englische Geschichte_, &c., Vol. i. p. 282.
Footnote 30:
It should be remembered that in this morigeration Charles Lewis had the support, up to a certain point, of his mother, who in the days of the Civil War blamed Queen Henrietta Maria for opposing the attempts of Charles Lewis to bring about a reconciliation between his uncle and the Parliament. Gradually, however, all that the King did seemed right to his sister, and she blamed Charles Lewis for remaining on good terms with the Parliament. See K. Hauck, _Elizabeth, Königin von Böhmen_ (Heidelberg, 1905).
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The career of Prince Rupert, whose personal attractions had eclipsed those of his elder brother during their former joint visit to England, was widely to diverge from Charles Lewis’, now that they both found themselves once more in the land of their maternal ancestry. In those earlier days, Sir Thomas Roe had informed Elizabeth how the King took pleasure in the sprightliness of her second son, from whom, in her fondness for his senior, she had expected so little; and Charles Lewis himself reported to his mother his dismay that _Rupert le Diable_ was always in the company of Queen Henrietta Maria, her ladies, and the Papists. At the same time, Prince Rupert was understood to be engaged in discussing with his uncle the King wild schemes for the foundation of a colony in Madagascar. The Princes were recalled home; the Madagascar scheme collapsed; and Rupert’s Protestantism henceforth stood firm. It has been already seen how he was taken prisoner in the fight at Vlotho (1638). The offer of Lord Craven, who had paid £20,000 for his own ransom, to increase this sum, were he allowed to share Prince Rupert’s captivity, was refused, and the Prince was lodged in captivity at Linz under the care of Count Kufstein. He came forth from it, having resisted all attempts to lure him from his religious belief and into the Emperor’s service; neither, however, was he inclined to avail himself of the prospects of a wealthy Huguenot marriage held out to him in Paris. With his faithful brother Maurice, he hereupon betook himself to England, where they devoted themselves to the cause of the King in his struggle against Parliament, and became the very types and exemplars of the Cavaliers. Across the seas, in New England, the good old Puritan minister Nathaniel Ward, who had held Rupert in his arms as a child, ‘when, if I mistake not, he promised to be a good Prince,’ prayed that even now he might be turned into ‘a right Roundhead, a wise-hearted Palatine, a thankful man to the English,’ and that his soul might be saved, ‘notwithstanding all his God-damn-me’s.’ But the ordinary picture of Prince Rupert as general of the horse, impetuous even to foolhardiness, and as a passionate partisan who could not restrain his vehemence even in the presence of the King himself, conveys no complete view either of his services in the Civil War, or of his character. As to the former, neither the calamity of Marston Moor, for which he was not responsible, as he certainly was for that of Naseby, nor perhaps even the surrender of Bristol, should have been allowed to obscure their lustre. As to his character, he was not less humane than resolute, and self-reliance was combined in him with the nobler kind of self-respect. His intellectual curiosity was a genuine family characteristic, though it happened in him to take a peculiar turn towards applied science and the technicalities of art.[31] After the fall of Oxford, in 1646, the Princes Rupert and Maurice left England, the former to hold a command in France; but, in the year before the execution of King Charles, he once more came forward to serve the sinking cause of the English monarchy, and took charge of the royal fleet. Maurice was, of course, once more found by his side, and, after the King’s death, they engaged in those remote maritime adventures in the course of which the younger brother met his death. Rupert’s earlier naval—or buccaneering—career continued till 1653, when he returned to France, creating a considerable sensation by his entry into Paris ‘like an old Spanish _conquistador_, with Indians, apes and parrots.’[32]
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Footnote 31:
The honour of having discovered the art of engraving in mezzotint, frequently claimed for Prince Rupert, seems due to a Hessian officer named Ludwig von Siegen, who, meeting the Prince at Brussels about 1654, taught him the new process. See Cyril Davenport, _Mezzotints_ (‘The Connoisseur’s Library,’) pp. 52-65.
Footnote 32:
See K. Hauck, _Karl Ludwig, Kurfürst von der Pfalz_ (Leipzig, 1903), p. 252.
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Sophia’s third brother Maurice was, as has been seen, an all but inseparable follower of his elder Rupert, whose equal he can have been neither in military genius nor in general intellectual ability and personal charm—‘he never,’ says Clarendon, who resented the pride of the Palatines, ‘sacrificed to the Graces, nor conversed amongst men of quality, but had most used the company of ordinary and inferior men, with whom he loved to be very familiar.’ Sophia writes to him as to one little interested in intrigues of State, and his preference through life seems to have been for the camp rather than the Court.[33] But, whatever other abatement should be made from the censures with which, like the brother of his heart, he was visited by both Puritan animosity and Royalist spite, he most certainly possessed in a rare degree the soldier’s cardinal virtue of fidelity. Thus we may fain hope that, in accordance with the most trustworthy account, his fate overtook him, whelmed beneath the deep gulf of the Atlantic, and that he was not, as a different tradition would have it, carried off by corsairs to Algiers, there to linger out a forgotten existence.
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Footnote 33:
His mother’s coolness towards him is curious. She communicated the news of his disappearance to Charles Lewis without a word of sympathy, and advised that, should he really be at Algiers, no ‘great inquierie’ should be made, lest his ransom should be fixed at a quite inordinate height, or Cromwell should purchase him from the corsairs. _Letters_, &c., ed. A. Wendland, p. 43.
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The sixth and seventh brothers, Edward and Philip, had been brought up in common; but in their later lives they were much divided. About 1637, they had, with their brother Maurice, been sent to school in Paris, whither, as has been seen, the Palatine family long looked for political succour; and here they remained after Maurice had taken his departure, with a view to beginning his military career. In 1645 the elder of the pair took a step which estranged him not only from his brother Philip, but from the whole of the Palatine family, and which, together with a similar proceeding at a later date on the part of Princess Louisa Hollandina, stands in direct contrast to the general tenour of the family history. Anne of Gonzaga, second daughter of the Duke Charles of Gonzaga-Nevers, afterwards Duke of Mantua, was already a celebrity in French society, when, her amour with Henry of Guise having come to an end which wounded her self-esteem, she in 1645 secretly gave her hand to the Prince Palatine Edward, and henceforth became the ‘_Princesse Palatine_,’ under which name she plays a conspicuous part in the literature of contemporary French memoirs. We have, however, no concern here with her share in public affairs at a rather later time, when (in 1650) she effected a union between the two branches of the Fronde and thus drove Mazarin into temporary exile, and when, after being herself persuaded by the Cardinal to ‘rally’ to Anne of Austria, she (in 1651-2) succeeded in bringing over to the same side the Duke of Bouillon and the great general Turenne.[34] Mazarin, when indicating the price (a great Court office) at which her support might be gained, described her as a _femme intéressée_; but, as M. Chéruel observes, it was not this aspect of her character which was in the mind of Bossuet when, in a funeral discourse, he dwelt on her great qualities of head and heart. In an age of confessional propaganda she was a great proselytiser in high places; and it was a signal instance of her activity in this direction, that she should have exacted Prince Edward’s conversion to the Church of Rome as the condition of her acceptance of his hand. For she thus secured to herself a claim for direct interference in the affairs of the Palatine House, which still possessed a certain importance and might again acquire a greater. Her foresight was justified; for, in course of time, there can be no doubt that she contrived to have a hand in the conversion of Princess Louisa Hollandina, as well as in yet another conversion, which made it possible for Charles Lewis’ daughter Elizabeth Charlotte to become the wife of Louis XIV’s brother, Philip Duke of Orleans. Although the new Princess Palatine had retained her share of the wealth of the Gonzaga, notwithstanding the efforts of her father to accumulate the whole for bestowal on his eldest daughter Marie, who in this same year 1645 became Queen of Poland, the agitation of Edward’s mother at the news of his change of religion was extreme, and was shared by most of her children. Charles Lewis besought his mother ‘with her blessings to lay her curse’ upon Prince Philip, who was about to quit Paris for the Netherlands, should he too ‘change the religion he had been bred in.’ As for Prince Edward, his fortunes were henceforth more or less severed from those of the family, though we find him, in 1651, at the Hague, as he passed the ambassadors of the English Commonwealth in the streets, calling them ‘rogues’ to their faces, and thus doing his best to embroil the United Provinces with the enemies of the House of Stewart.[35] With Edward’s daughter, Benedicta Henrietta, born in 1652, we shall meet again as the wife of John Frederick, Duke of Hanover, Sophia’s brother-in-law. In her the Palatine type, of which Sophia herself and her niece Elizabeth Charlotte were such striking examples, was well-nigh effaced; but it will not be overlooked that by descent she stood nearer to the English Succession than her father’s youngest sister.
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Footnote 34:
See A. Chéruel, _Le rôle politique de la Princesse Palatine pendant la Fronde en 1651_. (_Séances de L’Acad. des Sc. Mor. et Pol._, January-February, 1888.)
Footnote 35:
His mother seems to have been pleased with this outburst, and to have testified to her gratification by presenting to Edward certain family articles of value—more in number than was agreeable to Charles Lewis. Edward, who certainly seems to have had in most things an eye to the main chance, had a cynical vein in him, like some of his brothers and sisters. When he came to Heidelberg in 1658, accompanied by a facetious M. de Jambonneau, Charles Lewis writes to his ‘second’ wife: ‘He turns everything into a joke, so that I cannot bring him on with me.’
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Of Prince Philip’s fateful conduct at the Hague immediately. While, before his return to her mother’s little Court, Sophia had necessarily seen little of him or of her brothers there or at Rheenen, she was, as a matter of course, much thrown into the society of her three sisters. At first, as she tells us, she was by no means troubled to find them handsomer and more accomplished than herself, and admired by everybody; and she was perfectly contented that her juvenile gaiety and _railleries_ should help to amuse them. ‘Even the Queen took pleasure in my fun’; for she was gratified to see the child tormented, so that her wits might be sharpened by the process of being put on her defence. It became the established practice for her to ‘rally’ any and everybody; the clever people were delighted by it, and the others were made afraid of her. Gradually, however, Sophia’s quick ears heard the ‘milords’ at her mother’s Court say to one another that, when she had finished growing, she would surpass all her sisters. And the remark inspired her with an affection for the whole English nation; ‘so greatly is one pleased, when young, to be thought good-looking.’
Elizabeth, the eldest of the Palatine Princesses, though by no means indifferent to the family interests, or without sympathy at any time of her life with the troubles either of her father’s or her mother’s House, was of an introspective turn of mind, grave and thoughtful, and little inclined by nature to the levity inborn in most of her brothers and sisters. Both as imbued with the Calvinism in which she had been so carefully nurtured by her grandmother amidst the congenial Brandenburg surroundings, and perhaps also because, though an accomplished linguist, she alone of the sisterhood had no occasion to learn to speak Dutch, she already as a girl fell into a way of leading much of her life to herself. At the same time, she was always interested in public affairs, and more especially in marriage projects, which in those times formed an important part in politics; and it is noticeable that she continued fond of match-making even after she had herself settled down to a single life. Among the suitors for her hand was the young King Wladislaw IV of Poland, a tolerant and liberal-minded Prince.[36] But the marriage fell through, because the Diet would not hear of their King marrying an ‘English’ Protestant; and Elizabeth, of whose noble character perfect veracity formed one of the noblest traits, refused in her turn to listen to a diplomatic suggestion that she should become a convert to Rome. In January, 1639, there was a notion of making a match between her and Bernhard of Weimar. We are not told that the Electoral Prince Frederick William of Brandenburg—afterwards known as the Great Elector—between whom and Princess Louisa Hollandina a marriage was at one time projected, had ever thought of asking the hand of her elder sister. But he may have met Elizabeth in 1638 at Königsberg, when, after the Peace of Prague, George William was induced by troubles in his Margravate to send his whole family into Prussia, whither some of their Palatine kinsfolk also came; and he was in these years much at Rheenen, where he cannot but have been attracted by the Princess Elizabeth, whose unflinching Protestant sentiment resembled his own, which formed a constant factor in his shifting system of policy. She was afterwards a visitor to Berlin, where, in 1646, Princess Louisa Henrietta of Orange, whose spirit was akin to hers, held her entry as Electress, and at Krossen, where the Dowager Electress (Frederick V’s sister) kept a Court of her own, and where Elizabeth is said to have specially interested herself in the instruction of the Elector Frederick William’s sister Hedwig Sophia, afterwards Landgravine of Hesse-Cassel. We shall see in what fashion the Great Elector ultimately succeeded in providing for the peace and comfort of his kinswoman. Before this time, owing chiefly to her friendship with Descartes, by which she is probably now chiefly remembered, Elizabeth’s mental horizon had unmistakably widened; and, though she retained to the last a sincere piety and (a trace or so of pride of birth apart) a touching modesty of spirit, her growing familiarity with broader philosophical principles gradually freed her from some of the narrowing influences of Calvinism. Descartes’ intimacy with the Princess Palatine, against whose family he had, curiously enough, in former days borne arms in Bohemia, was during her absence from the Hague maintained by an exchange of letters between them, of which the artless Sophia contrived the conveyance.[37] Although the relations between the great thinker and his matchless pupil were not in the least of a kind to suggest clandestine methods, Elizabeth was not, like Queen Christina, independent of control; and Sophia’s services in screening the correspondence from her mother’s unsympathetic notice, while they earned her the gratitude of the first philosopher with whom she was brought into personal relations, show that, notwithstanding her raillery and ridicule of her eldest sister’s moments of distraction, kindly feelings prevailed between them. Elizabeth’s refined beauty, though it was hardly in reference to this that her sisters nicknamed her _la Grecque_, is described by Sophia in her _Memoirs_ very vividly, but not without an admixture of spite.
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Footnote 36:
This was at the time (1636) when Charles I was very active in his negotiations on behalf of the Palatine House, sending Lord Arundel on a special mission to Vienna, projecting an alliance with the States-General and France, and scheming the Polish match mentioned in the text. Everything failed.
Footnote 37:
The correspondence of the Princess Elizabeth and Descartes extends over the years 1643 to 1649. Comte Foucher de Careil, after publishing his _Descartes et la Princesse Palatine_ in 1862, was enabled to supplement the letters of Descartes by those of the Princess in a second volume, published in 1879. A most interesting summary is furnished by V. de Swarte’s attractive _Descartes Directeur Spirituel: Correspondance avec la Princesse Palatine et la Reine Cristine de Suède_ (Paris, 1904).
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The second of the sisterhood, Louisa Hollandina, is stated by Sophia not to have been so beautiful in the days of the Hague and Rheenen as Elizabeth, but, as it seemed to the young critic, of a more pleasing disposition. ‘She applied herself entirely to painting, and her love of this art was so strong, that she made likenesses of people without having ever cast her eyes upon them.’ This master-passion possessed her to the last, although, perhaps, it was only when Honthorst touched up her pictures that they did full justice to his teaching. Some of her handiwork is to be found in the galleries containing portraits of her family; an Annunciation was painted by her at the age of seventy-three, and several other pictures from her hands were bestowed by her upon the parish churches in the vicinity of Maubuisson during the period of her rule there as an Abbess. In her younger days, as we learn from the observant Sophia, Louisa Hollandina, while intent upon painting the portraits of her friends and acquaintances, was too neglectful of her own personal appearance. On the other hand, it seems wholly unjust to infer from the ripple of unaffected gaiety which overspread the calm of her maturer years, that her nature was essentially frivolous. While her life, as we shall see, was one of piety and unselfishness, we may conclude her to have possessed in her youth what she preserved in her old age—much of her youngest sister’s intellectual alertness and vivacity, and perhaps also something of her humorous turn of mind, without attaining to the depth of thought, any more than she had passed through the intellectual training, that distinguished their elder, Elizabeth.
Of Sophia’s third sister, the Princess Henrietta Maria (so named after Charles I’s charming but ill-starred Queen), a portrait is drawn in the _Memoirs_ hardly less attractive than that which pictures her on canvas. But of the younger Henrietta Maria’s disposition and character nothing is recorded, except that she cared only for needlework and preserves, by which latter taste of her sister’s Sophia declares herself to have been the principal gainer. She must, however, have had her share of the delightful vivacity which marked her sisters Louisa Hollandina and Sophia—for the Queen of Bohemia was afterwards vividly reminded of her ways by the irresistible _espièglerie_ of the little Elizabeth Charlotte. Largely through the match-making activity and Protestant sympathies of her sister Elizabeth, a marriage was, in 1651, brought about between Henrietta Maria and Prince Sigismund, a younger son of Prince George I of Transylvania, who had died in 1648, after carrying his throne and country safe through eighteen years of peril, first as the ally of Sweden and France, and then under Turkish pressure in friendly relations with Austria. But she died a few months after her outlandish marriage, and was soon followed to the grave by her husband, who did not live to witness the troubles which in the end overwhelmed his brother, the reigning Prince George II.
Such were the brothers and sisters who were the objects of Sophia’s unstinted affection in the youthful years of which she has drawn so pleasant a picture and which to her were beyond all doubt the happiest of her life. Nor has she refrained from drawing her own portrait as a young girl, with light-brown hair naturally falling into curls, of gay and unembarrassed manners, of a well-shaped but not very tall figure, and with the bearing of a princess. Like most of her family, and especially like her favourite brother Charles Lewis, whom their mother the Queen had been wont to call her ‘little black baby,’ she had the complexion of a _brunette_. Even more than by their royal mien and handsome features, these Palatines were distinguished among other men and women by the _vis vivida_ with which they were hereditarily endowed. Although, however, to their mother display was second nature, and although during her residence in the United Provinces she was in the long run most fortunate in the bounty, interested or other, of her hosts, yet the time came when she could not keep more than the ghost of a Court, and as a matter of fact frequently found herself in sore straits. In 1645 one of her sons describes her Court as worried by rats and mice, but most of all by creditors. And Sophia, who was still young enough to find even financial difficulties good fun, writes that her mother’s banquets were more sumptuous than Cleopatra’s, since in order to provide them she had sacrificed not only pearls but diamonds. Yet even the poorest of royal exiles are rarely left without hangers-on, moved by the remembrance of past kindness or by the expectation of favours to come; and such Court followers as ‘Tom Killigrew,’[38] ‘the elder,’ as he is usually called, and the ‘reverent Dick Harding,’ of whom she often makes humorous mention in her letters, appear to have clung to the Queen’s skirts till the end of her exile was at hand. But she and her family had other friends, or at least one other friend, Lord Craven, whose attachment and devotion were of the sort that gives rather than takes, so much so that one can hardly imagine how but for him she would have tided over her troubles. Of little body, but with a soul full of generosity, he had gone forth in 1631 to serve under the Swedish deliverer; and very soon he had begun to identify himself with the cause of Elizabeth, and to lay at her feet what he had saved of the great fortune bequeathed to him by his father, the Lord Mayor of London.[39] It has been seen how his sword had been drawn and his treasure spent in the futile raid upon the Palatinate; and now he was back at the Hague paying the homage of his service to the unfortunate Queen. But Lord Craven, though at the time little more than forty years of age and destined to outlive by some thirty-five the loved Queen of whom an unauthenticated tradition persists in asserting him to have finally become the clandestine husband, seemed to Sophia’s disrespectful young eyes merely a kind old gentleman with a purse full of money, and with a quantity of little trinkets to bestow upon the young folk. She appears not to have thought him quite so brilliant a member of society as it was his wish to be, although among other things which she heard him say purely for the sake of effect was the assertion that, when he chose, it was in his power to think of nothing at all. Perhaps she shrewdly suspected the _vieux milord_, as she calls him, of a tender sentiment for her mother; perhaps she could not help looking down upon him as, with all his munificence, a new man; for the Palatines were as proud as they were poor.
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Footnote 38:
‘Tom Killigrew is here, who makes a rare relation of the Queen of Sweden.’ (Elizabeth to Sir Edward Nicholas, in Evelyn’s _Diary and Correspondence_, Vol. iv. p. 216.) Not long afterwards, in January, 1655, moved perhaps by the remembrance of the sport made by him of Christina, she makes a humble suit on his behalf to her royal nephew. As late as 1705 Sophia (then Electress Dowager) is found speaking with scant respect of this ancient and faithful, but somewhat volatile, Cornish family, the remembrance of whom still survives at Falmouth. ‘Tom Killigrew’s’ son Robert was anxious to commend himself to the favour of the Electress; but she left it to her ‘posterity’ to attend to his claims. (_Briefe an Hannoverische Diplomaten_, p. 195.)
Footnote 39:
The Earl of Craven took his title from the deanery of that name in Yorkshire, of which his father (Sir William Craven) was a native. See D. Whitaker, _History and Antiquities of the Deanery of Craven_, 3rd edn., by A. W. Mount, Leeds and London, 1878.
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Of their pride—or at least of that of some of the members of the family—a lurid illustration is to be found in an episode of the year 1646 which, tragical in its results, went far towards creating a permanent breach between the Queen of Bohemia and some of her children. Colonel de L’Épinay, formerly a favourite of the Duke of Orleans, had brought with him from France to the Hague the reputation of an _homme à bonnes fortunes_ or lady-killer, something in the style of the Königsmarck to be mentioned on a later page of this biography. He had gained a footing at the Queen of Bohemia’s Court, where probably no very rigorous rules were observed as to affairs of gallantry; and here rumour was once more busy with his supposed triumphs. The Queen of Bohemia herself was said—it does not appear on what authority, but the laws of evidence are not much studied in schools for scandal—to have looked on him with favour. Her daughter Louisa Hollandina was, so far as we know, only connected with de L’Épinay through the malicious pen of Madame de Longueville, who, on her return from a visit to Holland, declared that, after casting eyes on the Princess, she no longer thought that anyone would envy him his crown of martyrdom. In any case, the pride of Prince Philip, who may have known something in France about the earlier adventures of this squire of dames, had taken umbrage at his actual or rumoured proceedings at the Hague. A quarrel ensued between the Prince and de L’Épinay; of which the end was that one evening in June, Prince Philip, returning home late with a single companion, was assaulted by two Frenchmen, and that, while defending himself against them, he recognised de L’Épinay as one of his assailants, and called out his name. De L’Épinay took to flight; but meeting him on the following day in the market-place, Philip rushed upon him and engaged him in a hand-to-hand struggle. In this de L’Épinay lost his life. The deed, possibly for more reasons than one, roused the anger of the Queen of Bohemia against her son Philip; he fled from Holland, and, though Charles Lewis pleaded for him with his mother, she never seems to have been reconciled to him. He was one of the most luckless of the brotherhood. On his leaving Paris, his eldest brother had sought to obtain employment for him under the English Parliament; but the attempt, doubtless made with the view of strengthening Charles Lewis’ own interest in that quarter, proved futile, and the unfortunate Philip was left to his own devices. In 1649, we find him in the company of Charles Lewis (who seems to have had a special kindness for him), on the occasion of the entry of the Elector into the capital town of his diminished patrimony. Philip met with his death in the battle of Rethel in 1650, fighting among the French royalists against Turenne and the Spaniards. On the occasion of the killing of de L’Épinay the Princess Elizabeth appears to have taken her brother Philip’s side; indeed, according to one version of the matter, it was she who had instigated him to commit the fatal deed. In any case, she in 1646 absented herself from her mother’s Court and the Low Countries for more than a year; and, though she seems afterwards to have returned thither for a time and certainly to have been again on good terms with the Queen, her life was henceforth generally led apart from her mother. No deeper sympathy can at any time have existed between them. Princess Louisa Hollandina remained at her mother’s Court for eleven years after the de L’Épinay affair, leading, it is stated, an exemplary life, and gradually falling more and more under the dominion of religious ideas very far removed from the sphere of those which came home to her sister Elizabeth.
Not very long after Sophia’s introduction to her mother’s Court a succession of English visitors were attracted to it, whom the troubles that had broken out on this side of the sea had driven across.[40] In 1642 came Queen Henrietta Maria, to ask assistance from the States-General for King Charles I, and bringing with her the Princess Royal, Mary, the youthful wife of the heir of the House of Orange, upon whom was afterwards to be thrust so important a part in the affairs of her adopted country. By discovering in Sophia a slight resemblance to her own daughter, Madame, Henrietta Maria gratified the authoress of the _Memoirs_ so sincerely as to induce her to revise her first criticism of the little Queen of England’s charms. More direct compliments were before long paid to Sophia by some of the English lords and gentlemen; and, as time went on, the English residents at the Hague began to speculate very eagerly upon her chances of securing the hand of no less a personage than her cousin the Prince of Wales, who at the time of his father’s confinement in the Isle of Wight (which she spells _Weit_) was about to seek a refuge in Holland. But this scheme, or rumour of a scheme, was strongly resented by the Princess of Orange (Amalia von Solms), whose soaring ambition was intent upon gaining the valuable but not very easily negotiable prize for one of her own daughters. While to Mary, the future Princess of Orange, the Queen of Bohemia’s heart seems to have opened with a warmth of feeling which she was not in the habit of manifesting towards her own daughters, a very different sentiment had come to animate her towards Prince Frederick Henry’s consort. Upon the favour of her former dependant, who aspired to be in everything but name a Queen, Elizabeth now herself in a sense depended. We cannot, therefore, place implicit trust in the account of the intrigue the _Memoirs_ state to have been set on foot by Amalia. If the back-stairs information received by Sophia was correct, the Princess of Orange sought to ruin her young kinswoman’s reputation by causing an unmarried son of her own to compromise her by his advances. Though this trick fell through, yet, when the Prince of Wales had reached the Hague in 1648, it soon became evident to the Queen of Bohemia and her daughter that there would not and could not for the present be on his part any question of marriage.
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Footnote 40:
One of the members of the Queen of Bohemia’s Court in Holland was James Harrington, the author of _Oceana_, a relative of her former guardian, Lord Harington. He had just left Oxford, and afterwards took service under Lord Craven.
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Charles remained in Holland after to him, in his turn, a barren royal title had accrued. When the terrible news of the execution of King Charles I arrived in Holland, it came home with the utmost poignancy to his sister and her family. The younger Elizabeth in particular was almost overwhelmed, physically and mentally, by the catastrophe; and for once the philosophical reflexions of Descartes, which certainly fell short of the occasion, afforded her little or no comfort. The time had of course long passed when any service could be rendered to the Palatine family by the King to whose good offices it had of old looked forward so hopefully; and, in this very year 1648, after two years of weary negotiations, which had almost taken the heart out of the efforts of Charles Lewis and his agents, the Peace of Westphalia had at last restored to him part of his patrimony, with the dignity of Elector. The Lower Palatinate with the fair town of Heidelberg was his once more; but the Upper remained with Bavaria, whose Duke retained the first temporal Electorate, while to the Elector Palatine fell only a newly created eighth. Alike for the Palatine House, and for the Electorate recovered by it, the conditions of the Peace were full of disappointment and humiliation; but the worst, at all events, had not happened, when there was some danger of its happening; and Descartes could impress upon his friend and pupil the expediency of her brother’s accepting the half-loaf which Fate had bestowed upon him.
In the meantime, the thoughts of Sophia—and perhaps not hers alone in the family—were still turned chiefly in a different direction. When the most enterprising of the followers of ‘King Charles II,’ the gallant Montrose, early in 1650 started for Scotland with a royal commission, he had, Sophia tells us, resolved on demanding from the King, should the enterprise prove successful, the hand of her sister Louisa Hollandina. Sophia’s own chances of securing her royal cousin’s hand still formed a subject of speculation; and, on his return from France in 1650, the Princess of Orange still thought it worth while to influence the Presbyterian leaders among the King’s suite (Hamilton and Lauderdale) against Sophia, on the ground that she was a bad Presbyterian and in the habit of accompanying his Majesty to Common Prayer. Sophia was with her mother at Breda, when Charles agreed to take the Covenant. This, she writes, was not the only weakness she observed in him. From the first he had shown her pleasant cousinly attentions; but of a sudden, at the instigation of certain of his followers who had designs upon Lord Craven’s purse and took this roundabout way of seeking to open its strings, these attentions developed rather alarmingly. After some extravagant compliments to her charms, which he pronounced superior to those of ‘Mistress Berlo’ (a misspelt _alias_ of Lucy Waters), he informed Sophia that he hoped to see her in England. But, with the same circumspection in dangerous situations which she displayed in later years, she preserved her name free from taint on the occasion of this trying adventure. She had, as she says, wit enough to perceive that this was not the way in which the marriages of great princes are made, more especially as at Breda she noticed that ‘the King,’ who had previously sought opportunities of conversing with her, avoided them in the presence of the Scottish Commissioners. Thus she in her turn sagaciously contrived to keep out of his way; and this first brief vision of an English throne, which had probably excited those around her more than it had moved herself, came to an end. ‘King Charles II’ passed out of the horizon of Sophia’s hopes and calculations; and, when afterwards he returned to Holland, his prospects were much darker, and she was no longer resident at her mother’s court.
It could hardly be but that this episode, although it had touched neither her honour nor her heart, should have made Sophia all the more ready to quit her mother’s court, in which of late years new troubles had begun to add themselves to old sorrows, and which was now no longer the centre of the life of the Palatine family. In 1650 she was evidently rather tired and out of harmony with a sphere of existence in which at the outset she had taken so much pleasure; and this not so much for any special reason as because it was gradually borne in upon her that ‘her joy could not endure there.’ Thus it was settled between her and two ladies in her particular confidence, whom she calls the Ladies Carray (Carr?) and Withypol (the latter is mentioned under the name of ‘fraw Wittepole’ as residing in Heidelberg Castle in 1658), and the good Lord Craven, that she should try a change of scene and life by starting in their company to pay a visit to her brother, the restored Elector Palatine, at Heidelberg. At first her mother the Queen objected, still clinging to the fancy of a match between her youngest daughter and the head of the House of Stewart. At last, however, she acquiesced on being assured that this consummation would not be prevented by the proposed journey; and so, borrowing a vessel from the friendly States of Holland, Sophia, who was now in her twentieth year, and whose travels had hitherto not extended beyond an occasional jaunt to Leyden, Delft, or Rheenen, in the summer of 1650 set forth on her voyage up the Rhine towards Heidelberg and the unknown.
II
EARLY WOMANHOOD AND MARRIAGE (HEIDELBERG, 1650-1658)
A home, to which Elizabeth of Bohemia was fated never to return, was opened to her daughter Sophia. For eight years—from 1650 to 1658—she was the guest of her beloved brother Charles Lewis in that part of the Palatinate which had been at last restored to the family in his person. To these congenial surroundings she easily acclimatised herself; nor did she ever afterwards forget how, before her destiny at last bore her away from Heidelberg and its familiar neighbourhood, the interests of her maiden life had long centred in the affairs of her brother, in his troubles both public and private, and in his children, for whom her large heart never ceased to cherish a peculiar tenderness, even after the welfare of her own numerous family had become the chief anxiety of her existence. She was not at first aware that her departure from Holland had been against her mother’s wish—a fact which she discreetly passes over in her _Memoirs_.[41] After telling of her leisurely journey along the route formerly followed by her parents on their wedding journey home, she graphically describes the forlorn poverty which stared her in the face, when she first entered her brother’s shrunken dominions. He and his Electress met her at Mannheim and took her on with them to Heidelberg, where the castle still lay in ruins, and they had to lodge in the town.
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Footnote 41:
Charles Lewis wrote to his mother in much trouble on the subject, only eliciting the reply that ‘as for Sophia’s journey, I will never keep anie that has a minde to leave me, for I shall never care for anie bodies companie that does not care for mine.’ _Letters_, &c., ed. A. Wendland, p. 9.
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In truth, the Lower Palatinate had barely begun to recover from the tribulations which it had undergone both in the earlier and in the later periods of the Thirty Years’ War; and the population was literally the merest fragment of what it had been before the outbreak of the conflict—one-fiftieth part of it, according to a calculation which it seems almost impossible to accept. Moreover, Charles Lewis only gradually recovered possession even of the moiety of his patrimony allotted to him, nor was it till 1652 that the last Spaniard quitted the land. It is all the more to the honour of this Prince, and in a measure atones for the grievous aberrations of his private life, that after his restoration he should have held his head high in the Electoral College, to which, as his father’s son, he had been so grudgingly readmitted; and still more, that during the whole of his rule—which lasted till 1680—he should have spared neither thought nor effort for the welfare of his sorely tried subjects.
It was not his fault that, while engaged in these beneficent labours, he had again and again to turn the pruning-hook back into a sword.[42] In 1666, he maintained a brave heart through his weary campaigning against French and Lorrainers, although he met with little luck under arms and suffered severely in health. Five years later, he sacrificed the happiness of his daughter Elizabeth Charlotte by yielding to the French demand for her hand, and went near to sacrificing his honour by allowing her, against her own wish or disposition, to be converted to the Church of Rome. When, in 1674, the first of the wars between the Empire and France broke out, Charles Lewis may have indulged in some passing dreams of an Austrasian kingdom under French supremacy; as a matter of fact, he found that neither the Orleans marriage nor his exertions to remain neutral protected his unhappy lands from invasion and its attendant horrors. Things went better when, in 1675, he had thrown in his lot with the Empire; for there can have been no truth in the rumours which made themselves heard in the city of gossip, Venice, that his father’s son was aiming at the Bohemian Crown. The troubles of the Palatinate recommenced when, in 1679-80, the French added to pretended reprisals the monstrous mockery of the so-called _réunions_; but of these Charles Lewis only survived to see the beginnings, and he was spared the bitterness of witnessing the devastation of his beloved Palatinate in the so-called Orleans War, of which his own daughter’s supposed claims were, to her unspeakable anguish, made the pretext. For the rest, the Elector Charles Lewis was a genuine son of the Palatinate, to which he devoted so much care and labour; he loved its good things, including the Bacharach wine, whose praises he sang in homely dithyrambs, and the wealth of choice fruit, mindful of which he denounced the sour pears and bullet grapes outside his own promised land. Like his daughter after him, he was nowhere so happy as in the midst of it, and his very diction is coloured with a proverbial phraseology of native Palatinate growth. As late as 1665, he is found declaring that if ten years more of life were granted him, and no war or pestilence came in the way, he would, _en despit de l’envie_, turn Mannheim into a second Rome. Nor were his thoughts only set upon material things; whether justly or not, he was regarded as one of the most learned princes of his age; he was consistently anxious to revive the prosperity of the University of Heidelberg, and had nearly crowned his efforts on its behalf by securing Spinoza as one of its teachers. The education of his own children was to him a subject of anxious and minute care.[43] In his youth, the evil times on which Charles Lewis had fallen had (it is not uncharitable to assume) taught him to dissimulate; but in his later years he had retained little of the Puritan associations of his earlier manhood except a love of the Bible and a hatred of Rome, and of priests and priestcraft in general. He was, in short, a most liberal-minded and tolerant Prince, who found satisfaction in the _Imitatio Christi_ as well as in the New Testament, who would gladly have made his Palatinate a refuge for persecuted adherents of any religious creed, and whose dedication, not long before his death, of a church (at Mannheim) to _Sancta Concordia_ was far from being an empty pretence. He had, moreover, inherited his mother’s taste for poetry, and during his sojourn in England had acquired considerable familiarity with its literature, and its drama in particular. In a way it brings Sophia herself nearer to us that her favourite brother freely quoted Shakespeare, that a version by him of Ben Jonson’s _Sejanus_ was acted at Heidelberg, and that he was so sturdy a critic as to pronounce the Spanish drama superior to the French, but the English best of all.
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Footnote 42:
The celebrated _Wildfangsstreit_, which was carried on by Charles Lewis in the years 1665 and 1666, is passed by in the text, where few readers would probably care to find it discussed. This strange dispute turned on the rights of the Electors Palatine over bastards and aliens (_Wilden_) in their own and _adjoining_ territories, and troubles which had thence arisen between Charles Lewis and his neighbours, in which the Great Elector of Brandenburg was involved through his alliance of May, 1661, with the Elector Palatine. The Great Elector’s efforts brought about a settlement on the whole favourable to his ally. (See _Urkunden und Aktenstücke zur Gesch. d. Grossen Kurfürsten Friedrich Wilhelm von Brandenburg_, Vol. xi. (_Polit. Verhandl._ Vol. vii.). Ed. F. Hirsch, Berlin, 1887).
Footnote 43:
He drew up elaborate instructions for the tutors and governesses of the Electoral Prince Charles and Princess Elizabeth Charlotte. One of the former was Ezechiel Spanheim, who had accompanied his father, a rigid Calvinist, when the latter had been summoned to Leyden by Elizabeth and the States-General. Ezechiel was himself called from Geneva in 1656 to Heidelberg, where he afterwards passed from theology to diplomacy. It was in the Brandenburg service, which he had entered in 1680, that he was accredited to the English Court, of which he wrote an _Account_ (1706). He was buried in Westminster Abbey.
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But, heavy as were the burdens laid upon the head of the Palatine House after Charles Lewis’ partial restoration, the troubles that came nearest home to him, and that in the end infected the whole atmosphere of his court, were of his own making. He cannot be held accountable for the financial difficulties which obliged him to discourage his mother’s desire to return to the Palatinate; and, even before the troubles in question broke out, more general considerations may have rendered him the reverse of eager for her presence. His policy was to bury the past, which she in a sense typified; and he may have feared her extravagant ways, and thus preferred to lighten her expenditure by inviting his sisters Elizabeth and Sophia to his capital. His offer of some rooms in the _Ottheinrichsbau_ of Heidelberg Castle, which he could not afford to furnish, failed to attract, and the hope which she had cherished, that she might end her days in her own good dowry town of Frankenthal, it was not in his power to fulfil. Meanwhile, the compensation for the temporary occupation of the place by the Spaniards, which had been promised in the Nürnberg settlement of 1651, supplementary to the Peace of Westphalia, remained unpaid by the Emperor. Charles Lewis, who had in the first instance to think of his Electorate and its defences, was without resources enabling him to respond to his mother’s requirements; and the recriminations which followed on her part left the situation unaltered. Even before mother and son had been at odds on this subject, there was a dispute between them as to various heirlooms at the Hague and at Rheenen, which she refused to give up to him as he demanded. In short, their correspondence had reached a most painful stage, and it is pitiful to read the description of the sore straits to which she found herself reduced, just when the cloud seemed to be at last lifting from the fortunes of their House. She was, she wrote, entirely dependent upon the monthly allowance of the States-General; it amounted only to a thousand florins, and was not made for more than a single year, and she had only accepted it as a _pis aller_ when she found it out of the question that her claims on payments from England should be made part of the Anglo-Dutch treaty concluded in 1654. As a matter of fact, her case was a very hard one; for her creditors had never been so pressing as now, when there seemed a chance of payment; the very heirs of the faithful Ludwig Camerarius demanded the redemption of a favourite jewel which she had pawned to them; all her children were in debt like herself, from the high-minded Elizabeth to the volatile Edward; and it is touching to find her entreating a loan of a thousand pounds for the purpose, because the jewel ‘was my brother Prince Henry’s.’ At an earlier date, Charles Lewis had suggested to an agent that it would be desirable for her to approach Cromwell as to the relief of her creditors, but was told in reply that she would certainly never do this, ‘but only break into passion against those that should give such advice.’ So matters went on till other reasons came to a head which made the Elector undesirous of receiving her at his Court; and his seeming ingratitude infused another drop of bitterness in her cup.
The quarrel between Charles Lewis and his brother Rupert, which became mixed up with the cardinal trouble of the elder brother’s later years, and caused great sorrow to their mother, had its origin in the financial difficulties which beset them all. In 1653, the Elector had settled a modest allowance on his brother Edward, and in 1654 he made a similar arrangement with Rupert, who on his arrival in Paris had entered into negotiations on the subject through the Palatine envoy, Pawel von Rammingen. Rupert was to be allowed 2,500 dollars _per annum_, to rise after five years to 4,000, while the Emperor agreed to pay him a substantial sum under the Nürnberg settlement. But Rupert could not sit down contented with this compact, and, quite in the spirit still prevailing in many of the princely Houses of Germany, demanded a share of the Palatinate territory as his younger brother’s portion. Charles Lewis at first dallied with the proposal, which, however, could not be to his mind, more especially as he had no wish for introducing into his Electorate the permanent influence of so martial and combative a spirit as his brother’s. Rupert, however, insisted on his demand, and in 1656, after refusing to receive any further payments of his allowance, asked for an immediate interview. The Elector having declined to receive him at Heidelberg, but offered to meet him at Neustadt, and in the meantime to increase his allowance, the fiery Prince repaired uninvited to the capital, and, having been refused admittance to the castle by the colonel in command, swore an angry oath that he would never return to the Palatinate, and passed on to Mainz. Here he proceeded to lay his grievances before the Arch-Chancellor of the Empire, and then offered his sword to the Emperor. But, though he seems to have actually entered into the Imperial service, he found its atmosphere uncongenial, and, when in 1661 he made another attempt to obtain a high command (in the Turkish War) and at the same time to obtain payment of the sums promised him under the Nürnberg settlement, he was unsuccessful. This failure he ascribed to the intrigues of his brother the Elector, and he now settled down after a fashion in England, whither he had betaken himself on the Restoration. Though it was not till later that the brothers were again on good terms, the dispute between them was settled in 1670, when the arrangement of 1654 was put into force again, Rupert’s allowance being, however, raised from 4,000 to 6,000 dollars, the balance of the Nürnberg compensation paid over, and the Rheenen property being given up to him—an old notion of his mother’s, which he had formerly rejected.[44]
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Footnote 44:
In 1655 she writes to Charles Lewis that she had sent him all that she could spare in the house there, and entreats him at the same time to dismiss the concierge, ‘for he is the veriest beast in the world and knave besides.’ See _Letters_, &c., ed. A. Wendland, p. 67.—I have revised my account of the dispute between Charles Lewis and Rupert with the aid of K. Hauck, _Karl Ludwig, Kurfürst von der Pfalz_, pp. 251 _sqq._
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At the time when Charles Lewis’ quarrel with Rupert broke out, the elder brother was in the midst of a difficulty which, unlike those just described, was essentially of his own making. Of this trouble Sophia’s quick wit had, already on arrival at Mannheim, and first meeting with her brother the Elector and his bride, detected the germs. She had perceived at once that all was not well between the pair. While her brother met her with his usual geniality of manner, the Electress, whose mien was _fort dolente_, said very little. When the party proceeded to Heidelberg, where Sophia had the satisfaction of seating herself in the best-appointed carriage on which she had cast eyes since her departure from the Hague, she found that her praise of this vehicle gave offence to her sister-in-law, to whom it had been presented as her wedding-coach, and in whose opinion it was vastly inferior to one presented to her sister for her marriage with the Prince of Tarento. This afflicting comparison was, however, only the first and slightest clause in her long litany of grievances.
Charlotte Elizabeth, daughter of Landgrave William V of Hesse-Cassel, and his wife, Amalia Elizabeth, seemed marked out by descent as a most fitting consort for the restored Elector Palatine. Her grandfather, Landgrave Maurice, had in his day been one of the foremost representatives of militant Calvinism, and at once the boldest and the most steadfast of all the Princes of the Union. Her mother, the Landgravine Amalia, deserves lasting remembrance as one of the most remarkable Princesses of her age, by whose exertions Hesse-Cassel was preserved from ruin in the Thirty Years’ War, and to whom more than to anyone German Calvinism owed the rights of parity at last secured to it in the Peace of Westphalia. But her married life with the Elector Charles Lewis, which began in February, 1650, proved a singularly unhappy one; nor can there be any pretence but that she was made to suffer grievous and intolerable wrong. It is at the same time undeniable that the aggravating elements in her character—to Sophia’s critical eye there seemed to be such even in her beauty—contributed to the beginning of the end. Sophia rapidly arrived at her own conclusions as to the intellectual capacity of her sister-in-law—what with her love of dress and her stories of Duke Frederick of Würtemberg-Neustadt, not to mention the Brunswick-Lüneburg Dukes, George William and Ernest Augustus, and several other admirers, to whom she had been forced by her mother to prefer her present jealous ‘old’ husband. In his turn, Charles Lewis, although he far too demonstratively adored his handsome wife, confessed that there were defects in her education, which he entreated his shrewd youngest sister to correct. Very soon, however, Sophia perceived that the comedy was taking a serious turn. The quarrel between the pair began with an outburst of jealousy on the part of the Elector, followed, in more violent fashion, by another from the Electress. Charles Lewis hereupon became violently estranged from his consort; and his aversion was deepened by a passion which he conceived for one of his wife’s maids-of-honour, Baroness Louisa von Degenfeld. Perhaps this more decorous Anne Boleyn was rendered all the more attractive in his eyes by her literary turn of mind, if we may judge from their initial correspondence under names borrowed from an Italian novel,[45] and from the liking which she afterwards showed for such classics as Lucian, Corneille, and Molière. For some years or so, however, the husband and wife rubbed on together, two children being born to them. The elder, born 1651, was Charles, afterwards Elector Palatine, the last of the Simmern line, who died less than five years after his father (1685); had he survived, he must of course have stood before Sophia in the English Succession. In most respects he had little character of his own, perhaps
## partly because he had been over-educated; but he was a devout Calvinist,
and would probably have remained such had it been his fate to mount the throne to which, in earlier times, some of the English Parliamentary politicians may have thought of raising his father. The younger of the two children, born 1652, was Elizabeth Charlotte, the _Liselotte_ of her father’s affections and of those of her aunt Sophia, by whom she was
## partly brought up, and a darling of whose later years she became.
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Footnote 45:
This was quite in the style of the age, which loved the mystifications of pseudonyms, and of ciphers without much concealment. Elizabeth mentions that her daughter Sophia writes to her about Berenice’s business (Sophia’s own), and that they are discussing it with Tiribazus (Charles Lewis). _Letters_, &c., p. 91.
-----
For a time the Elector contrived to conceal his amour from his wife; but, in 1657, a letter addressed by Prince Rupert to the Elector’s mistress, by whose beauty and wit he seems to have been attracted on a previous visit, having fallen into the hands of the Electress, and the quarrel between the brothers having probably contributed to exacerbate matters, there was an end of the secret. Put on the track of her husband’s infidelity, the Electress ruthlessly ran him and his mistress to earth; and the result was a public scandal without an equal in the domestic annals of this anything but shamefaced age. The Elector having at last withdrawn from Heidelberg with Louisa von Degenfeld, whom he in the first instance settled with many precautions at Schwetzingen, there ensued a long and disgraceful series of proceedings which, to the unfortunate Electress, must have recalled a notorious episode of her native Hessian history in the days of Landgrave Philip the ‘Magnanimous.’ Salving his conscience as best he might with the obsequious assistance of his court divines, Charles Lewis, early in 1658, married Louisa von Degenfeld as his second wife. He had previously conferred upon her the ancient title of Raugravine Palatine, with a provision that a corresponding titulature was to be transmitted to their issue. From this abnormal union, which lasted till Louisa’s decease, twenty years afterwards, there sprang not less than fourteen children, of whom eight survived their mother. The marriage—if marriage it may be called[46]—supplied him with the felicities of a tranquil home, though for some time he had to keep watch over it with an anxious care, of which the humorous aspect escaped him, against the evil designs imputed by him to ‘X,’ his repudiated wife, and though her Hessian relations long endeavoured to assert her rights. Latterly the ‘second wife’ seems chiefly to have resided with her children at Frankenthal, where the proud Queen of Bohemia had hoped to find repose for her last years. The correspondence between Charles Lewis and Louisa shows him to have been entirely faithful to her, and to have passionately loved his children. But, though his fidelity to his chosen companion was unswerving, the relations between them were disturbed by occasional dissensions. On her death he put forth, together with an account of her Christian ending drawn up by the divine whom he had originally consulted as to his ‘second marriage’ (Hiskias Eleazar Heiland), an elaborate analytical statement of her virtues and shortcomings during their union, for which, with a conscientiousness showing that there was still a drop of Calvinistic blood in his veins, he had himself contributed the most important materials. For his children, the surviving Raugraves and Raugravines, he had intended to make ample provision, but had perplexed himself so much about its conditions, that his legitimate son and successor, the Elector Charles, declared all his father’s arrangements on the subject invalid. Several of the sons afterwards distinguished themselves in the field. Charles Maurice, who was till his death in 1702 a familiar figure at Hanover, and who is the Trimalchio of the banquet ‘after the manner of the ancients’ described in Leibniz’s correspondence with Sophia, drank away his remarkable intellectual powers. But the children of Louisa von Degenfeld were treated kindly by the Dowager Electress Charlotte, and Sophia took them one and all to her heart, more especially the two sisters Louisa and Amalia, ‘_les deux sibylles de Francfort_.’ Louisa was in later years at Hanover appointed Mistress of the Robes; and it is said that there was at one time some intention of entrusting her with a confidential mission to England in connexion with the Succession question.
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Footnote 46:
It is, Elizabeth plainly told her son, ‘both against God’s law and man’s law.’ _Letters_, &c., p. 92.
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After the death, in 1677, of Louisa von Degenfeld, Charles Lewis, having in the first instance (with Sophia’s approval) taken to himself a mistress, was desirous of inducing the Electress to consent to a divorce, which would have enabled him by a ‘third’ marriage to seek to secure the Succession of his (the Simmern) line, resting as it did on the life of his legitimate son Charles only.[47] But Charlotte Elizabeth was not found ready to oblige her erratic husband thus far. Prince Rupert, with whom Charles Lewis had gradually come to be on better terms, had already, in 1675, declined to come to the rescue. The match-making Princess Elizabeth had in vain desired a match between her brother Rupert and her young kinswoman Princess Charlotte Sophia of Courland.[48] That young lady’s aunt, Landgravine Hedwig Sophia of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, opined that nothing would come of the match, especially as Prince Rupert was on the look-out ‘not only for beauty, but for means.’ As a matter of fact, the ardour of Rupert’s aspiring youth had by this time settled down into a sober though still singularly
## active maturity; moreover, he had formed a connexion so close that it
has been suspected to have amounted to a secret marriage, with Francesca Bard, an Irish Roman Catholic lady of good birth, with whom and their child, called ‘Dodley’ (Dudley) by Sophia, the indulgent Palatine family were on friendly terms. But neither this boy nor, of course, Ruperta, Prince Rupert’s daughter by the actress Margaret Hughes, was ever formally acknowledged by him; and thus this brother, too, left no descendant who when the time came, might have forestalled the claims of Sophia and her progeny to the English Succession.
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Footnote 47:
The Queen of Bohemia was very anxious about her grandson, in whose early days she had recorded with satisfaction that the little Prince of Orange (William III) was a year older, but considerably smaller in size.
Footnote 48:
She died at an advanced age as Abbess of Herford.
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Sophia’s own life at Heidelberg, though much clouded by her brother’s domestic troubles, of which more than enough has now been said, and towards which, in its initial stages, she appears to have borne herself with a discretion already habitual to her, was by no means without its agreeable aspects. It had at first been made uncomfortable by the ways of the Electress Charlotte, whose favourite amusements, field sports and the card-table, were not much to Sophia’s personal taste. Still, the life of the Palatine court, though an economy little dreamt of in former days now prevailed there, was not without diversions in which she took pleasure—among them those _Wirthschaften_, a fashionable amusement half-way between a fancy fair and a _bal costumé_, of which the Queen of Bohemia had shared the vogue in Holland. Mention has already been made of Charles Lewis’ familiarity with the literature of the English stage; and the English comedians whom he saw at Frankfort possibly also found their way to Heidelberg. But his sisters had more direct opportunities for keeping up their interest in England and things English, since Charles Lewis seems to have entertained a good many English gentlemen at his capital, where some of them settled down as they have done in later days. Among his English guests was the former Parliamentary General, Sir William Waller, though with the Restoration Charles Lewis became a good Royalist again, and contrived to put himself on good terms with Lord Chancellor Clarendon. We have already seen how Prince Rupert himself was an occasional visitor at Heidelberg, as was his younger brother Edward—though the latter proved so full of ‘_ralierie_’ that Charles Lewis refused to take him to visit the lady whom he wished to be regarded as his wedded wife. Before this, Princess Elizabeth had, in 1648 and again in 1651, arrived as a visitor at the Electoral Court—much changed, as on the latter occasion Sophia and Edward thought, both in outward appearance and in tone of mind, which Sophia expressly attributes to her recent sojourn at Berlin, at the Court of the pious Electress Louisa Henrietta. Perhaps, too, she was saddened by the death of Descartes (1650), and perhaps by a growing estrangement from her mother; in any case, her whole nature was more and more tending towards that contemplative life whose attractiveness for some minds seems so incomprehensible to others. Unfortunately, as Sophia confesses, she was weak enough to join her brother and sister-in-law in rebelling against a certain air of superiority which in their eyes Elizabeth seemed to assume. She warmly interested herself in the Elector’s efforts to give a new life to the University of Heidelberg, where she is said to have acquired a personal reputation by her exposition of the Cartesian philosophy. Sophia’s day for listening to the conversation of philosophers had hardly yet arrived, and she at no time aspired to place herself on what may be called the professorial level. There is no appearance of the two sisters having been permanently alienated from one another; but mutual sympathy could not otherwise than dwindle between one who was preparing to bid farewell to the world, and one who was intent upon establishing her position in it.
The real reason of Sophia’s quitting Holland had been her sense of the uncertainty of her own position there; yet, even had the prospect been wholly agreeable, she could not now look forward to a permanent residence at the strangely distracted Court of her eldest brother. As the solitude of a religious, or of a quasi-religious, life would not have been to her mind (though it was about this time that she sat for her portrait in the costume of a Vestal Virgin), a suitable marriage engagement had, in a word, become a necessity for her. So attractive and high-spirited a princess might fairly expect to find an acceptable husband without having, like her sister Henrietta Maria, to espouse a Transylvanian prince. Unluckily, in the latter part of 1651 or beginning of 1652, Sophia underwent an attack of small-pox, which, as she confesses, seriously impaired her beauty. But she had no mind to take whoever might be the first comer; and not long after her recovery she declined overtures made to her on behalf of the Portuguese Duke of Aveiro; ‘having had thoughts of marrying a King she could not stoop to a subject.’ In much the same mood she about this time broke off an innocent correspondence (on the subject of compositions for the guitar) into which she had entered with a prince with whom she had in her childhood made acquaintance in Holland, and who, when recently passing through Heidelberg on his way to Venice, had seemed to her more charming than ever. This prince, who ‘pleased everybody,’ was no other than her future husband, Duke Ernest Augustus of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Since, however, he was the youngest of four brothers and (as will be seen immediately) without any present prospect whatever of enjoying any territorial dominion of his own, he was clearly not _bon à marier_; and it was best to avoid a kind of gossip of which Sophia had only too vivid an experience.
There appears to have been some talk of other matches for Sophia, and above all of a design of marrying her to a more important personage than the disinherited King of England—the young King of the Romans, who, as such, during the last year of his life bore the designation of Ferdinand IV.[49] It is true that, in 1652, the Elector Charles Lewis had, on the occasion of his being received by the Emperor Ferdinand III within the unconscious walls of Prague, established excellent relations between the Imperial House and himself. But it is difficult to suppose that anything could have come of this scheme, which would have involved as a preliminary transaction the conversion of Sophia to the Church of Rome; and the statement that the young King of the Romans had fallen in love with Sophia, and intended to marry her, rests only on the authority of the Duchess of Orleans. Charles Lewis might, in the interests of the Palatinate, have assented to the match; but Sophia would assuredly have refused it with more determination than was afterwards shown by her niece when the Orleans marriage proposal was pressed upon her. The earlier project, however, came to a speedy end with the death of the young Roman King in 1654.
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Footnote 49:
A match between his grandfather, afterwards Emperor Ferdinand II, and Sophia’s great-aunt on the mother’s side, Princess Hedwig of Denmark, had been suggested in 1617.
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Thus the first suitor proper of Sophia during her stay at her brother’s Court was Prince Adolphus John, brother of the newly crowned King of Sweden, Charles X Gustavus, and like him a scion of the Zweibrücken line of the Palatine House. Though he had no prospects of the throne, he was, as his subsequent conduct at a critical moment after his great brother’s death showed, an ambitious prince, and his suit was favoured by the Electress Charlotte, who would have been pleased to be rid of her sister-in-law. But Sophia looked very coolly on the negotiations that ensued; for she had conceived an aversion to this suitor, which she declares could only have been conquered by a virtuous effort. He was a widower, and was said to have ill-treated his first wife. Fortunately for Sophia, the difficulty of marrying a princess who had been trained as a Calvinist into a rigidly Lutheran land, stood in the way of the proposal; and, though the match was announced with much satisfaction to Secretary Nicholas by the Queen of Bohemia for the information of King Charles II, the negotiations were still incomplete, and the King of Sweden’s approval of his brother’s offer in doubt, when the likelihood of another proposal intervened. The House of Brunswick-Lüneburg, this time in the person of George William, the second of the brothers between whom its territorial inheritance was divided, now appeared upon the scene. It will be more convenient to review at a rather later point the general position and prospects of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg at the time when Sophia definitively threw in her lot with its destinies, and when the first step was thus taken towards its acquiring an interest in the question of the English Succession. At the time of his visit to Heidelberg, in 1656, George William, afterwards the ruler of the Lüneburg-Celle portion of the paternal inheritance, held the Calenberg-Göttingen portion, and resided at Hanover. He had recently been urged to marry by his Estates, who were anxious to avert any likelihood of blending the several divisions of the family inheritance; and, though he had always felt the strongest repugnance to any such step, much preferring to a married life the Venetian pleasures of bachelorhood, he now thought of giving way to the Estates, if they would in return vote an increase in his revenue. George William and his brother Ernest Augustus were united by an intimacy and affection as close as that which in the next generation tied the namesake of the latter to his eldest brother George Lewis (George I); and there is every probability that it was the report of Ernest Augustus after his earlier visit which induced George William to make preliminary enquiries through an agent, George Christopher von Hammerstein, who was much in the confidence of the dynasty. Hereupon he paid a visit to Heidelberg in person, but accompanied by his favourite youngest brother. George William’s attentions to Sophia were well received; and though (for the painful reasons to be indicated below) she could never have been brought to confess it in her _Memoirs_, her heart seems to have been really touched; and it may be added that, through all the vicissitudes which ensued, she retained a kindly feeling towards him. As for the present, she allows that when at last he requested her permission to ask her hand from her brother, she failed to answer like a heroine in romance, ‘for I did not hesitate to say Yes.’ Probably what attracted her in George William, whose political principles must at the time have been a matter of indifference to her, while she could not, like King William III in later days, have much sympathised with his love of hunting and of a good glass of wine, was the comparative refinement of manners which distinguished both him and his younger brothers among the German princes of the day. Though two of the Brunswick-Lüneburg Dukes afterwards came to be known as resolute opponents of the political designs of France, yet George William and Ernest Augustus, as well as their brother John Frederick, belonged to the new school of German princes, who loved the society and cultivated the fashion and manners of Frenchmen, and who with more or less of success sought to model their Courts on Versailles. This fact should not be overlooked; for patriotic Englishmen (especially when in Opposition) afterwards made a constant point of deriding the unrefined Teutonism of the Hanoverian Court. At the same time, George William’s frequent visits to Italy, and especially to Venice, cost a great deal of money to the Estates of his principality; and they were accordingly anxious that he should arrive at a settlement, while he, with a view to the bargain proving to his advantage, kept the engagement to which the Elector Palatine had assented as secret as possible. Of a sudden there came from Venice, whither the brothers had proceeded after their visit to Heidelberg, the unexpected and mortifying news that George William, who had been leading a loose life at Venice, had found it necessary to break off his engagement. Sophia, though ‘too proud to be touched,’ thus found herself placed in a most cruel position. Who can say what in these circumstances might have been the result of an offer made to her on behalf of Ranuccio II, Duke of Parma (dependent, of course, upon her previous conversion), had not her Hanoverian suitor shown himself most anxious to do what in him lay to remedy the wrong which he had inflicted on her? He now proposed that his youngest brother Ernest Augustus should marry her in his stead, taking over with her the principalities at present held by George William, and in return only promising to pay to the latter a comfortable pension. But to this arrangement the third of the four brothers, John Frederick, a prince of much ambition as well as obstinacy of character, very naturally objected as unfair to his own interests, and a serious illness which had befallen Ernest Augustus further delayed proceedings. Thus it was not till 1658 that the transaction was actually carried out, though on lines somewhat different from those first contemplated. Sophia’s hand was transferred from Duke George William to Duke Ernest Augustus, the former undertaking to remain unmarried during the lifetime of his brother and his consort, and in that of any male heirs whom they might leave behind them. This renunciation, for which there were several precedents in the annals of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg and doubtless in that of other German princely houses also,[50] is set forth at length in the original German in Sophia’s _Memoirs_, though even she could not when copying it out be aware of the full significance which it possessed for the future of the family. She knew, however, that of her husband’s three brothers the eldest was childless and the third still unmarried, while the second had renounced the prospect of lawful issue. The possibilities of future importance which her marriage now open to her husband and herself were, therefore, wholly due to the arrangement by which this marriage was accompanied. The renunciation of George William contained in it the germ of the greatness which awaited the line founded in his stead by his brother; while the consequences of the fact that his promise was half broken, half kept, clouded the initial stage of that greatness with the shame of a terrible family catastrophe. Sophia dwells on the weakness and inconstancy of George William in yielding to the demands of his councillors that he should reduce the handsome yearly allowance promised by him to his brother; unhappily, as she hints, the same defects were to be exhibited by him in matters of far greater gravity.
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Footnote 50:
According to Spittler, not less than six of the uncles of George William (brothers of Duke George) promised to remain unmarried.
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Sophia’s engagement to Ernest Augustus was for a time kept secret from her mother; but she seems to have borne the pair no malice, and to have sent her blessing in due course, with congratulatory letters from King Charles, in English to the bride, and in Latin to the bridegroom.[51]
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Footnote 51:
_Letters_, &c., ed. A. Wendland, p. 100.
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The Elector Charles Lewis, however, who acted in the place of a father to his sister, found the expenses of her marriage weigh heavily upon his reduced finances. ‘Besides her due,’ he wrote to the Queen, his mother, by way of excusing himself for being ‘uncapable of what her Majesty was pleased to require of him,’ ‘I am bound to an extraordinary, more especially for the friendship she always shewed me, and because nobody else hath done anything for her.’ Sophia tells us that on Ernest Augustus’ arrival for the wedding she found him lovable, because she had made up her mind to love him; and something of this resolute spirit of attachment may, in the face of many provocations to the contrary, be said to have characterised her relations to him throughout their married life. According to Leibniz, the wedding took place towards the end of September, 1658; but, according to a contemporary authority cited by Sophia’s biographer, Feder, the date was October 17th of that year. She describes the wedding solemnities, which, if not so magnificent or appealing so persuasively to the imagination as those of her mother on the banks of the Thames, showed the Palatine House to be equal to itself in the maintenance of a stately etiquette. A few days afterwards he posted back to Hanover, and she soon followed, attended by an ample escort which he had provided for her. The indispensable Hammerstein conducted the journey, on which her brother, the Elector, accompanied her as far as Weinheim. She held her entry into Hanover on November 19th, being received by the whole family, her mother-in-law, the Duchess Anna Eleonora (widow of Duke George), at its head. On her wedding-day Sophia had, like her niece Charlotte Elizabeth on her subsequent marriage with the Duke of Orleans, renounced any future claims to the Succession in the Palatinate, unconscious of the remoter claims which she was to owe indirectly to her Palatine, as well as directly to her English, blood. But, though she dearly loved her brother, and shed a few tears on parting from him, they would, as she declares, have flowed more abundantly had her heart not been with her husband, and, as we may add, had not her hopes rested on the future which she went forth to meet by his side.
While to Sophia, at an age of life neither late nor very early—for she was near concluding her twenty-eighth year—married life thus opened with its duties, cares, and consolations, it was otherwise with the two sisters of whom she has told us most, and whose life was likewise to be prolonged beyond the period of early womanhood. (Her third sister, Henrietta Maria, had died already in 1661.) Both of them, by a singular dispensation of fate, at a time not far removed from that of her marriage, embraced a religious life, though in two different communions; each was to end her days as the abbess of a conventual establishment, revered and beloved in no ordinary measure by those around her. Since Sophia’s marriage, though it cannot be said to have estranged her from either of these sisters, concentrated her interests upon spheres of
## activity from which theirs were in the main or altogether removed, the
present may be the most appropriate place for recalling the twofold picture of their later lives, whose tranquillity contrasts so strangely with the agitations with which hers was necessarily filled.
The Princess Elizabeth, whom we have seen more or less absorbed in her own high thoughts and ennobling pursuits while still a resident at her mother’s Court in Holland, and again actively interested in the learned studies for which the rule of her brother, the Elector, had once more provided a home at Heidelberg, remained behind in the Palatinate for some three or four years after Sophia’s marriage. They cannot have been happy years, for the scandal of the Elector’s second union was now at its height, and the Electress, on whose side, whatever Charlotte’s faults of temper, her sister-in-law’s high sense of moral rectitude could not fail to range her, still held out, perhaps chiefly for the sake of the Electoral children.[52] When, in 1662, the Electress, her own efforts and those of her kinsfolk having proved vain, at last left Heidelberg for Cassel, Elizabeth followed her thither. In the preceding year her attached cousin, the Elector Frederick William, had named her Coadjutress of the Abbess of Herford, and her ultimate destiny was thus assured. The six years (or the greater part of them) which intervened before she succeeded the Countess Palatine Elizabeth Louisa as Abbess of the Westphalian convent were peacefully spent by her at Cassel, in the society of the Landgravine Hedwig Sophia, a daughter of her aunt, the Electress of Brandenburg, and herself a lady of strong religious feeling and, as her administration of her dower-estate of Schmalkalden showed, a determined Calvinist. Elizabeth’s own Calvinism, it is interesting to note, had, already before she settled for the remainder of her days at Herford, assumed a peculiar hue. She seems about this time to have been much impressed by the Dutch divine, Johannes Cocceius, professor at Leyden, whose personal acquaintance she had made on a visit to her aunt at Krossen. Cocceius, who played an important part in the religious movement known as Pietism, in so far as it affected the Reformed or Calvinistic Church, recalls to us other eminent religious teachers in whom the evangelical and the latitudinarian have been blended. The gist of this teaching was a direct appeal to Scripture and a deprecation of any insistence on the _formulæ_ of dogma. Elizabeth, whose mind had expanded, and whose religious conceptions had deepened under influences very different from the rigid Calvinism of an earlier type, welcomed the simple and profound enthusiasm of Cocceius and of the so-called ‘Lodensteyners,’ whom the endeavour to bring home religion to the individual mind and conscience had all but led into secession or sectarianism. Thus it came to pass that, after Princess Elizabeth had, in 1667, become Abbess of Herford in her own right, her rule was signalised by her sympathetic relations with sectarian movements.
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Footnote 52:
In 1660 and the following year there is a good deal of talk and solemn banter between Dr. Worthington and his correspondent S. Hartlib as to the expected arrival in England of the Princess Elizabeth with her mother. Dr. (Henry) More is repeatedly referred to as specially interested in the hoped-for event. On May 28th, 1661, however, Hartlib reports a profane piece of gossip: ‘I hear a secret of the Princess Elizabeth that Lord Craven is like to marry her. I wish she were in England, that she might marry Dr. More’s Cartesian notions, which would beget a noble offspring of many excellent and fruitful truths.’ (See _Diary and Correspondence of Dr. Worthington_, edited by J. R. Crossley for the Chetham Society, Vols. i. and ii.; and cf. Crossley’s note on the Princess in Vol. i. _s. d._ October 15, 1660. The Princess Elizabeth never came to England.
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In the middle of the seventeenth century the prosperous Westphalian Hanse town of Herford which had always been Lutheran, had lost its position as a free imperial city, and had been finally annexed by the Elector of Brandenburg, as representing the former Protectors of the Abbey. This foundation had been Lutheranised rather less than a century before; but since the time of the Thirty Years’ War the Abbess might be either a Lutheran or a Calvinist, and the Brandenburg influence of course favoured the second alternative. Though she had lost her sovereign rights, she was still regarded as an Estate of the Empire, and as such represented at the Diet; she had a Court of her own, with regular (even hereditary) officers, and a limited jurisdiction; and with her and her Chapter was connected a foundation, which indeed outlasted them, for the education of young ladies of family. The position was thus one of considerable traditional dignity and actual influence; and nothing of either was lost in the tenure of Elizabeth, a true princess as well as a genuine student. She was at the same time well aware that, as a matter of fact, the authority of the Abbess of Herford was dependent upon the stronger arm of the Elector of Brandenburg—in her case a dependence ungrateful neither to the protector nor to the protected.
Thus, when in 1670 she was asked to extend the hospitable shelter of Herford to Jean Labadie and his following of women and men, which from some fifty gradually rose to seven or eight times that number, her first step was to assure herself of the consent of the Great Elector. With him, as with her, religious tolerance was a constant principle; nor is there any reason for assuming that the goodwill shown by her towards both Labadists and Quakers had any other root than Christian humility, wherein for such as she lies the beginning of wisdom It is of course easy to trace the more immediate influences by which she was drawn to the founder of the now half-forgotten sect of Labadists. He had begun his career as a Jesuit, and, after seeking to set up a new congregation within the Church of Rome, had become a convert to Calvinism, and in this new sphere tried the experiment over again with a freer hand, and with greater success. At Geneva he was assisted in his endeavours by the brother of Anna Maria von Schurmann, whose learning had made her the ‘wonder of her age,’ but whose thoughts were now set on other things. Soon afterwards, she permanently associated herself with Labadie’s attempt to realise without delay his scheme of the true Church. After ministering to a small Walloon congregation at Middelburg in Zeeland, he was duly excommunicated; whereupon he carried on his work at Amsterdam, in a small community with peculiar institutions, as a declared schismatic. It was from the tyranny of the Amsterdam mob that, at her friend Anna Maria von Schurmann’s request, the Abbess of Herford summoned, them to take refuge in the ‘liberties’ of her abbey. Very soon, notwithstanding the Elector’s approval of her reception of the fugitives, the Lutheran burghers of Herford raised a loud clamour against the practices of the strangers, and then tried to starve them out, till a commission of enquiry, appointed by the Elector, arrived in the town. During the respite thus obtained another visitor, attracted by motives of curiosity, arrived at Herford in the person of the Abbess’ sister Sophia. She brought with her no faith in supernatural gifts and a mocking tongue; and the account of her visit admirably illustrates the innate difference between the two sisters. The report of the commission was on the whole favourable to the liberties of the strangers; and, after Elizabeth had with much spirit refused to obey a mandate of the Imperial Aulic Tribunal at Speyer ordering their removal, and had journeyed in person to Berlin to bring about a decisive intervention on the part of the Elector, the question was solved in 1672 by the imminence of the French invasion of the Low Countries. This danger obliged Labadie and the majority of his followers to fly t`o Holstein, while the rest remained behind under the protection of the Abbess. Thus closed a noteworthy episode, in the course of which a high-minded and enlightened princess had, on behalf of a band of sectaries with whom her own sympathy can hardly have been other than imperfect, successfully upheld the cause of tolerance against both official and civic bigotry.[53]
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Footnote 53:
The Labadists seem to have ultimately taken refuge in Maryland, where the sect was gradually absorbed and is now almost forgotten. (See Bartlett B. James, _The Labadist Colony in Maryland_, John Hopkins Press, 1899.)
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The last of the Labadists had not yet left Herford, when Elizabeth began to hold intercourse with a sect of greater significance than theirs in modern religious history—the English Quakers, or, as we find her brother Charles Lewis disguising their name, ‘quaquors.’[54] Three years later, in 1667, she received two visits from William Penn and Robert Barclay during their missionary journey in Holland and Germany, including the Palatinate. From Penn’s account of these interviews, and the letters exchanged between him and the Abbess, it is clear that the latter, who was on both occasions attended by her intimate friend, Countess Anna Maria van Hoorn, a canoness of the Abbey, was deeply moved by Penn’s appeals to her heart and conscience. But it is equally clear that the humility which bade her listen prevented her from accepting the conclusion that she, too, was divinely called to teach. Her mind was equipped; her soul alert; but she still waited. Five years later, when she had passed away from the religion of doubts and difficulties, Penn inserted in a new edition of his treatise, _No Cross no Crown_, among the testimonies to the significance of _Serious Dying as well as Living_, the following reminiscence of ‘the late Princess Elizabeth of the Rhine’:—
She chose a single life, as freest of care, and best suited to the study and meditation she always inclined to; and the chiefest diversion she took, next the air, was in some such plain and housewifely entertainment as knitting, &c. She had a small territory, which she has governed so well, that she shewed herself fit for a greater. She would constantly, every Last-day in the week, sit in judgment, and hear and determine cases herself; where her patience, justice, and mercy were admirable; frequently remitting her forfeitures, where the party was poor, or otherwise meritorious. And, which was excellent, she would temper her discourse with Religion, and strongly draw concerned parties to submission and agreement; exercising not so much the vigour of her power, as the power of her persuasion. Her meekness and humility appeared to me extraordinary. She never considered the quality, but the merits of the people she entertained.... Thus, though she kept no sumptuous table in her own Court, she spread the tables of the poor in their solitary cells.... Abstemious in herself, and in apparent void of all vain ornaments.
I must say her mind had a noble prospect. Her eye was to a better and more lasting inheritance than can be found below, which made her often to despise the greatness of Courts, and the learning of the Schools, of which she was an extraordinary judge.
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Footnote 54:
The passage (in _Schreiben das Kurfürsten Carl Ludwig_, &c. must be quoted: ‘To-day we have had in our presence an English _quaquor_ or trembler; I repeatedly silenced him, for his mind works very slowly indeed; he never takes off his hat and always calls me “thou”; but he loses his temper if he is contradicted.’
-----
Then he gives instances, very simply put, of her way of deprecating too narrow an interpretation of the duty of paying respect to our betters; of her distrust of her power to walk in the straight way she had chosen; of her humility towards the humblest; and he concludes:
I cannot forget her Last Words, when I took leave of her, ‘Let me desire you to remember me, though I live at this distance, and that you should never see me more—I thank you for this good time; and know and be assured, though my condition subject me to divers temptations, yet my soul hath strong desires after the best things.’
In view of this record of the eternal longings with which this beautiful soul was filled at the last, it seems vain to make any reference to the earthly cares which still from time to time occupied her, in connexion no doubt chiefly with the family history, or even to the intellectual occupations which continued to engage her interest to the last. She was a diligent collector of books and manuscripts, and the last great writers with whom she corresponded were Leibniz and Malebranche, the mystical and Christian follower of her former teacher, Descartes. Shortly before her death, Elizabeth sent for her sister Sophia to pay her a long visit, and received her, Sophia relates in her _Memoirs_, with a joyfulness as if an angel from Heaven had descended to heal her. She then notes that the Abbess had been surrounded by people whose melancholy notions of a religious life had made hers a martyrdom. Wasted away in body, she was, however, calm in spirit and prepared for death, though full of sympathy with her sister and with the troubles which might await Sophia out in the turbulent world. Elizabeth died in peace at Herford Abbey in February, 1680; a letter addressed by her to her sister Louisa Hollandina, Abbess of Maubuisson, shows that more than three months before she was already making herself ready for death.[55]
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Footnote 55:
I must take leave to insert here the inscription on her tomb in the Abbey Church, Herford, kindly copied for me by Miss A. D. Greenwood, who mentions that the name of the Princess Palatine is commemorated in that of the Elizabethstrasse, a curly old street near the Minster:
D. O. M. H. S. E. Serenissima Princeps et Antistita Herfordiensis ELISABETH Electoribus Palatinis et Magnæ Britaniæ Regibus orta Regii prorsus animi Virgo Invicta in rebus gerendis prudentia ac dexteritate Admirabili eruditione atque doctrinâ Supra sexus et ævi conditionem celeberrima Regum studiis Principum amicitiis Doctorum vivorum Literis ac monumentis Omnium Christianorum gentium linguis ac plausibus Sed maxime propriâ virtute Sui nominis immortalitatem adepta. Nata anno 1618, die 26 Decembris Denata anno 1680, die 8 Februarii Vixit annos 61 mensem 1 et dies 16 Rexit annos 12 menses 10 et dies 2.
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Not much is known as to the life of the Princess Louisa Hollandina herself during the years which followed on the occurrence of the de L’Épinay scandal, and which she quietly spent at her mother’s Court in Holland. Nothing seems to have been bruited abroad concerning her except that she was leading an exemplary life, and that she was very intimate with a lady whose name is given as Madame d’Oxsordre, and had frequent conversations with her on the subject of ‘the bases of the Protestant religion.’ In other words, a propagandist influence was steadily at work upon her, and in the end she made up her mind to become a convert to Rome. Conversions to Roman Catholicism were common during the whole of this period, and there can be little doubt but that in this particular transaction her brother Edward and his wife, the Princess Palatine Anne (of Gonzaga), had an important share. In December, 1657, Louisa Hollandina, who had reason enough to fear the maternal wrath should her intention become known, secretly left the Hague at night-time in the habiliments of a maid-servant, and made her way to Antwerp, where, in January, 1658, she abjured Protestantism for the Church of Rome. Her change of confession was not the result of any sudden resolution, but it could not fail to incense as well as grieve her mother, whose wrath, however, fell upon Princess Maria Elizabeth of Hohenzollern-Hechingen, hitherto an intimate of her court. Whether or not a letter from this lady to Princess Louisa Hollandina had finally determined her flight, further letters from the same hand, which appear to have been accompanied, or preceded, by the whisperings of verbal scandal, reflected in no measured terms on the Palatine _ménage_. Elizabeth hereupon insisted on the expulsion of the slanderer from her place of residence, Bergen-op-Zoom, pending further enquiry. The ‘Princess of Zollern’ hereupon entered into a series of further charges, culminating in the suggestion that Louisa had been obliged to fly in order to conceal her shame. The Queen behaved with prudence as well as dignity, counselling her son the Elector to contradict this calumny, but to do so quietly and civilly, without demanding proofs as if he had any doubts on the subject. In December, 1658, or thereabouts, Louisa Hollandina addressed a not undignified letter to her mother, in which she announced her admission into the Church of Rome, which the occasion of the Christmas Communion had made necessary to her conscience, and begged her mother’s pardon for the trouble thus caused to her. About the same time the Princess made her way to Havre, having ascertained that she would be received with open arms by the French Court, which had formerly remained deaf to her mother’s solicitations for support. Immediately after Louisa’s arrival on French soil, she was welcomed by her brother, the Prince Palatine Edward, and conducted by him to the Abbey of Maubuisson, near the river Oise, and almost immediately facing Pontoise, the ancient capital of the Vexin. Edward’s own daughters, Maria Anne and Benedicta, were being educated here, each receiving at the same time a handsome pension out of the Abbey funds. This ancient Benedictine nunnery (originally planted in a wooded part of the country infested by brigands; whence the name _le buisson maudit_) dated from the middle of the thirteenth century, and the favour accorded to it by Queen Blanche, who was buried in the convent after assuming its habit on her deathbed, attracted to it the frequent presence of her son, St. Louis. His example was followed by other sovereigns of France, and the later history of the Abbey is full of interest. But here it must suffice to say that, in the second half of the sixteenth century, the prevalent decay of conventual life in France particularly affected Maubuisson, which had so long been connected with the Court, and lay so near to Paris, and that this corruption became complete under the reckless _régime_ of Angélique d’Estrées, the sister of Henry IV’s Fair Gabrielle, who was herself buried with one of her infants in the Abbey. After her death Henry IV came there no more; but this period of worldly misrule was not ended, till in the next reign Mère Angélique came from Port Royal to reform Maubuisson under the supervision of St. François de Sales, and after a hard struggle effected her purpose. Once more there was a terrible backsliding; but better times returned in 1627 with the choice as Abbess of the worthy Mère des Anges (Marie Suireau) who was really a nominee of Mère Angélique’s, and who brought with her a fresh infusion of religious zeal from Port Royal. Her twenty-three years of conscientious administration once more restored the convent to a well-ordered and pious life. On her return to Port Royal, the worthy abbess of Lieu Dieu became Abbess of Maubuisson, where in the course of her short rule she received Louis XIV; and after her Louisa Hollandina’s immediate predecessor, Catharine d’Orléans, an illegitimate daughter of the Duke de Longueville, against whom nothing remains on record except a series of unfortunate ‘architectural improvements’ in the Abbey church. But these changes have long been obliterated, together with the church itself, which, after at the Revolution the Abbey had been taken over by the nation and sold, was in 1790 blown up by powder. At the present moment the traces of this notable historic monument are described as hardly discernible.
There can be little doubt that, probably owing to the efforts of Louisa Hollandina’s powerful sister-in-law, the French ‘_Princesse Palatine_,’ it had been from the first determined to provide for this interesting princely convert at Maubuisson. No sooner had her foot touched the soil of France than the royal favour of Louis XIV, whose magnanimous hospitality never did things by halves, shone upon her. After her first visit to Maubuisson she was taken to see her aunt, Queen Henrietta Maria, who was at the time residing with the Visitandines at Paris, and who, after vain attempts to convert her sons Charles and James to the Church of Rome, was engaged in a project for obtaining the hand of the young French King for her daughter Henrietta, brought up as a Roman Catholic. Hereupon, Louisa was received at Court, and assigned a liberal pension by the King; and thus she was enabled, on terms befitting her position, to form a definite connexion with the Maubuisson convent. After a noviciate of eighteen months, she took the vows on September 19th, 1660, in the presence of a distinguished assembly, before whom the Bishop of Amiens preached ‘divinely.’ Happily for her peace of mind, the kindness shown her by the French Court had impressed itself upon her mother, for whose forgiveness Queen Henrietta Maria persistently sued. In October, 1659, Elizabeth informed her son Charles Lewis that this intercession had prevailed with her, and that, in obedience to the King and Queen’s commands, she had forgiven ‘Louyse,’ and prayed God also to forgive her, ‘which is all my letter in a few lines.’[56] But Louisa Hollandina was the only one of her mother’s surviving children left without mention in her will.
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Footnote 56:
See _Letters_, &c., ed. A. Wendland, p. 118. These letters at last throw a full light on this episode of the Palatine family history.
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The long evening—if it should be so called—of Louisa Hollandina’s life, which lasted till 1709, was a peaceful one; but it would be unjust to her, more especially in view of some misconceptions which have arisen on the subject, not to say a word as to the spirit in which she both entered upon this period of her existence, and to which she throughout remained true. Just before she took the vows, she is said to have been warned by one of the Maubuisson sisters, who belonged to a reactionary clique in the convent, desirous of obtaining a mitigation of the severer rule introduced from Port Royal, not to engage herself to observe any standard of discipline in excess of the proposed reduction, for which it was probably hoped to secure the requisite sanction with the aid of an Abbess in so much favour at Court. But she refused point-blank, and, during the few years which she spent at the convent as a simple religious, would not consent to be relieved from any one of the duties incumbent on her. When, in August, 1664, she was, on the death of the Abbess, named as her successor, her first act after accepting the office was to sell part of the silver plate which had been presented to her by the Queen of France in order to defray part of the debt pressing upon the convent. She abolished the practice of former abbesses of keeping up a retinue and footmen of her own, saying that she had abandoned the world on purpose to see no more Courts; and her niece, the Duchess of Orleans, in her humorous manner, describes her as going about the convent and garden all alone and with her skirts tucked up, and giving her orders in an authoritative tone that nobody ventured to disobey. She even—no insignificant sacrifice for a Palatine—ceased to use the arms of her House. This simplicity was partly natural to her, for even before her retirement it had been noted how careless she was as to matters of dress and outward appearance. Partly it was due to a resolute humility of spirit, and a determination to avoid any assumption of superiority on her own part over the sisters of the convent, to which Saint-Simon bears express testimony. She would not seat herself on the throne hitherto occupied by the Abbess in the convent church, and as a fitter object of reverence placed a statue of the Virgin there. On the other hand, she opposed a steadfast resistance to the tendency manifested by some of the nuns towards a relaxation of the conventual discipline; she observed the entire seven months’ fast imposed by the Cistercian rule, until at last she became as thin as a lath; according to the account of her niece she never ate flesh except when ill, and slept on a mattress as hard as stone, with no other furniture in her chamber but a straw-chair; and she rose every midnight for prayer. Beneath her dress she wore an undergarment of hair-cloth. She was careful to obey the rule which, except in special circumstances, prohibited the religious of Maubuisson from leaving the convent, and absented herself from it only thrice in the forty-nine years of her residence. According to the Duchess of Orleans, who spoke on this subject with sympathetic insight, the good Abbess’ tongue was her temptation; and she always chose a deaf sister to live with her in her chamber, so as not to be seduced into conversation.
On the charitable activity of the good Abbess there is less necessity for dwelling, since it accorded with the habits that were natural to her, as well as with her Palatine warmth of heart. In her indefatigable
## activity she resembled her brother Charles Lewis, to whom in her later
years she bore so striking an outward likeness. Idleness of any kind was impossible to her; ‘never,’ writes a contemporary, ‘was she without some virtuous and religious occupation; either she was plying her brush or her needle, or reading or praying.’ To her love of painting, an art which she is said to have practised from her eighth year to past her eightieth, reference has already been made. Though it would not appear that her artistic powers increased in her later years, she utilised them for the decoration not only of the Abbey, but of several churches of the neighbourhood, and even found time to paint pictures for other recipients. Sacred subjects seem to have chiefly occupied her in these days; to the _Cour des Comptes_ at Paris, which had rendered an efficient service to her Abbey, she presented an elaborate pictorial allegory of Justice.[57] During her administration the structural accommodation of the Abbey was considerably enlarged, and, in the centre of it, a handsome fountain was for the first time erected.
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Footnote 57:
In 1871, this picture was consumed in the flames.
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Beneath all the other qualities of Louisa Hollandina and, one is tempted to say, at the root of them, lay that cheerfulness of soul which is a blessing to all who are brought into contact with its happy possessor. The Duchess of Orleans, who had all her aunt’s vivacity of mind, but little of her tranquillity of spirit, refers again and again to the delightfulness of her periodical visits to the dear old lady; and we may well believe that in their intercourse the seasoning of _malice_ (in the French sense of the word) was not wanting. But Saint-Simon, an observer not less keen, though the satirical vein in him took a different turn, informs us that the Abbess of Maubuisson was adored by all the sisters of the convent, of which she had made herself the very life and soul, because of her charity, her sweetness, and her loving-kindness. From a character so pure—or perhaps it should be said so purified—the shafts of ill report glance off harmlessly; nor is it impossible that they had their origin in traditions with which the Palatine Princess had no concern, and which her rule as Abbess ought to have been allowed to extinguish. While she held sway at Maubuisson, it became a chosen place as a religious retreat by ladies of rank; among these was Madame de Brisson, _l’âme de Saint-Cyr_, as Madame de Sévigné calls her, soon after her dismissal from that seminary. In 1679, the good Abbess had the pleasure of a visit from the Duchess Sophia, who was delighted with the happy regularity of her sister’s life, ‘which would suit me quite well, had I no husband and children.’ The Duchess of Orleans herself, though she would hardly have come in the character of a penitent, in one of the crises of her life at the French Court begged the King to allow her to finish her days at Maubuisson.
Some two years before her death, Louisa Hollandina, who had hitherto only been subject to the _migraine_—for the statement that she had died in 1704 to save herself the trouble of periodically reminding the States-General of the annuity granted to her at her baptism was only a friendly jest—had a paralytic stroke, and the remainder of her life was full of suffering. She took it all easily, saying that people would not desire life so much if they knew to what it amounted near the end. She died in February, 1709, eighty-six years of age; the good Princess, wrote her heart-broken niece to Louisa Hollandina’s sister Sophia, ‘is now where she long was wished to be’; Sophia herself, in her very direct way, observed that, as there was so little besides life left in her sister, there was the less to deplore in her loss. She was buried by the nuns, who had loved her dearly and nursed her tenderly, in her abbey-church at Maubuisson, as her sister Elizabeth had been buried in hers at Herford twenty-nine years earlier; and both the Catholic and the Protestant Abbess deserve each, in her own way, to be remembered among the good women in whom their age, with all its shortcomings, was so rich.
And here we must take leave of the Palatinate family, except in so far as Sophia herself and those younger members of it with whom in her married life she came into personal contact are concerned. Late in 1659, Queen Elizabeth had the pleasure of a visit from Sophia at the Hague, having had to solicit from Charles Lewis ‘a little money in extraordinaire’ for the purposes of the meeting. They seem to have been happy together, and the Queen wrote that she would be ill-natured had she failed to show ‘kindness to Sophie, because she shows so much love to me,’ The real success of the visit was, however, Sophia’s little Palatine niece Liselotte, of whom more hereafter, who captured her grandmother’s heart, although ‘you know I care not much for children.’[58] Sophia remained in Holland till March, 1660, when her mother was so much hindered by people coming in to tell the English news about Monck that she could hardly find time for writing.[59] Mother and daughter, however, met again in the following year; and Sophia’s last farewell to ‘_cette bonne princesse_,’ her mother, took place on board the vessel on which, in May, 1661, Queen Elizabeth was about to sail from Rotterdam for England. For the high-souled royal exile was not, at the last, denied an honourable refuge in her native land, though she arrived there without the special invitation which she had been led to expect, and an attempt was even made to delay her on the way. What could surpass in pathos the picture of her arriving in London in the darkness, with hardly a friend but the faithful Earl of Craven to guide her home from the riverside? At Craven House she resided till she moved to the house in Leicester Fields successively occupied by her great namesake’s two favourites, the Earls of Leicester and Essex. She had no intention, as she told Prince Rupert, of playing the poor relation. The King, her nephew, showed much cordiality to her as well as to her sons; but his courtesies were for the most part inexpensive, and she confessed that he owed her nothing, though the Parliament owed her much.[60] He promised, accordingly, to see if her debts could not be paid by Parliament, and it actually granted her certain sums, which she applied as fast as they came in to the redemption of her jewels, though she still had to appeal to Charles Lewis for assistance in the process. A series of unpleasant demands and counter-demands ensued between the King and the Elector, each calling upon the other to pay to the Queen the outstanding moneys lawfully due to her. In the end, King Charles II granted her a pension of a thousand pounds a month, of which she did not live to enjoy the first year’s total, and offered her a residence (Exeter House), into which she had not time to move.[61]
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Footnote 58:
_Letters_, &c., ed. A. Wendland, p. 122.
Footnote 59:
_Ib._, p. 136. It was about this time that Elizabeth was also enjoying the company of the young Baron von Selz, an illegitimate son of her son Charles Lewis from his London days. She was warmly interested in him, and in 1660 induced King Charles II to take the youth to London in the suite of Henry Duke of Gloucester. But Selz died in London, much to Elizabeth’s grief, before his friend the Duke. (Hauck, _Elizabeth_, p. 53.)
Footnote 60:
On another occasion she writes with generous frankness: ‘The King is not bounde to doe for me but what he pleases, for being maried out of the house he might justly pretend not to be bound to give me anything, but he is kinder than many nephews would be, his income besides is not settled as you believe it is.’ (_Letters_, &c., p. 207).
Footnote 61:
She told her son that she would have to order ‘states,’ chairs, stools, and carpets all new for Exeter House, as ‘that beast, your Castelin,’ had allowed what ‘stuff’ there was at Rheenen to go to ruin. (_Ib._, p. 211.)
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The Queen of Bohemia, as she called herself to the last, was seen at times in public—at the theatres and elsewhere—with the court; and much attention was shown to her by her son Prince Rupert, who (as has been seen) had returned to England a few months after the King. Pepys, whose mention of Rupert’s return is the first notice of this Prince in the _Diary_, observes that he was ‘welcome to nobody.’ Perhaps the diarist had a presentiment of the friction which, sooner or later, could hardly fail to occur between a budding official like himself and a man of the sword with a popular reputation, whom he appears to have throughout regarded as passionate and self-willed. But Prince Rupert was well received in England both by the Royal Family and by the public at large, though it proved before long that he, like others who had served the throne in the days of stress, was out of touch with the younger generation of courtiers and politicians. He had not found congenial employment abroad; but his readiness for active work had not yet passed. The proposed expedition under his command to the Guinea Coast was abandoned (1664), partly because of an illness which had befallen him; but he was placed at the head of one of the squadrons in the First Dutch War, and in the Second superseded the Roman Catholic Duke of York as commander-in-chief of the English fleet. The breakdown of his plan of
## action by his want of success in the last battle of this war (1673) was
attributed by him to the misconduct of the French and the intrigues of the friends of the Duke of York; and thus it rather heightened than hurt his popularity. For a time he seemed to be cultivating relations of intimacy with Shaftesbury and the Opposition; but he never harboured any disloyal intentions, though his sympathy with the Protestant feeling in the country is of a piece with the traditions of his family and with the whole of his own career. He now withdrew more and more into a retirement which suited both his scientific pursuits and his growing aversion from the hopeless frivolity and viciousness of the Court. Although he still continued to take an occasional part in public affairs, his time was chiefly spent among his chemical apparatus and his pictures and curiosities in the Round Tower at Windsor Castle, of which he had been named Constable in 1668. He died in 1682, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, the faithful Lord Craven acting as chief mourner on the occasion.
His mother, to whom he had been a good son to the last, had long before this passed to her rest. Her correspondence with her son Charles Lewis had in the last period of her life assumed a more painful tone than ever, turning as it did upon a past that could not be set right, whatever might happen in the future. In the contention as to whose fault it had been that she had not temporarily taken up her residence at Heidelberg he seems to have been more in the right than she; and it is satisfactory to observe that, though in the very last letter preserved from her hand, while she expresses a hope that his anger will be now over, she begs that he will add to what he is paying to her of the jointure which is her due, his last letter to her, and the draft of one dated in the month of her death, end on a dutiful and even affectionate note.[62] After her death, Charles Lewis, as her eldest—he had once been her favourite—son, made a claim for her jewels as heirlooms; and once more a bitter dispute ensued between the brothers.[63] The proposal that her eldest daughter should cross the water to see her had met with no response. Of Sophia’s seeming content with her lot the Queen had, shortly before coming to England, heard with pleasure; but she could not shut her eyes to the changes that fate brings; ‘for it is easier said then done to care for nothing.’ Still, wherever she might find herself, the lonely woman kept a stout heart and an unclouded front; though, whether at Whitehall or at Combe Abbey (if she visited it again), she must have seemed to herself like a _revenante_—a ghost of the past come back. She died, at Leicester House, on February 13th, 1662—a few hours before the dawn of what, had her husband still been by her side, would have been her golden wedding day; and, on a night as full of storms as her life had been, she was buried in the Abbey where so many of her descendants were to be crowned with a crown less rapidly evanescent than hers.
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Footnote 62:
_Letters_, &c., pp. 212-3.
Footnote 63:
The Queen’s last will and testament shows that she declared Charles Lewis her heir, but left special legacies to Rupert—jewels, plate, and furniture, with the papers of which the _Original Royal Letters_, published by Sir George Bromley in 1787, passed into the hands of his lineal ancestress Ruperta, daughter of Prince Rupert and wife of Scroope Emmanuel Howe. To Edward the Queen left a large diamond; to Elizabeth emerald ear-rings; and to Sophia the string of pearls which her mother had ordinarily worn. Probably the medallion with the lock of King Charles I’s hair, which was found on her breast after her death, was buried with her. Many years later, when the death of the Abbess of Herford was apprehended, Sophia wrote to Charles Lewis that he would not find so much reason for discontent on this occasion as on that of their mother’s death—‘for she seems to bear no malice against you.’ It is distressing that Sophia’s want of sympathy towards her mother, which may have been explicable enough in earlier days, should have lasted beyond the grave.
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III
THE DUCHESS SOPHIA (HANOVER, OSNABRÜCK, AND HANOVER, 1658-1688)
Ernest Augustus of Brunswick-Lüneburg was the youngest son of his House, as Sophia was the youngest daughter of the Palatine family; nor was the scion of the Guelfs, as such, unfitted to mate with one who could boast an ancestry illustrious like hers. Previously to the marriage conferring upon Sophia a right of partnership, of which time only could reveal the significance, in the fortunes of the German branch of the Guelfs, more than one great historic opportunity had occurred to that ancient House. Five centuries had passed since Henry the Lion had held sway over territories reaching from the shores of the German Ocean and the Baltic to those of the Adriatic. He had been the husband of an English princess—Matilda, daughter of King Henry II; nor was Sophia unmindful of this ancestral connexion. We cannot follow here the repeated dynastic changes, or the numberless partitions and transfers that succeeded each other in the hereditary lands between Elbe and Weser, saved out of the shipwreck of the great Guelfic dominion, and granted to Henry’s grandson, Otto the Child, as an imperial fief under the designation of the Duchy of Brunswick.
The severance declared by Otto’s eldest two sons, between the territories of which Brunswick and Lüneburg were respectively the original centres, was—the numerous shiftings of ownership between the representatives of the Old, Middle, and New Brunswick and Lüneburg lines notwithstanding—never undone, and continues in a sense to the present day. Thus, it was only within the limits of each main division that it proved possible in the course of time to assert those two principles upon which, repugnant though they were to the traditions of Germanic life, the political future of the princely Houses of the Empire depended—namely, that of indivisibility of tenure, and, more tardily, that of primogeniture. Nor was there any consistent endeavour to supply the want of a single dominant authority in the Brunswick and Lüneburg Houses (as they were generally called, their various subdivisions being further distinguished for the most part according to the names of their chief ‘residences’) by an identity, or at least by an agreement, of policy. Thus the German Guelfs missed the great dynastic opportunity of the Reformation, although the populations over which they ruled were at one in their ready acceptance of Lutheranism, and although a series of wealthy ecclesiastical foundations fell into the laps of the princes. Duke Henry of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel opposed the Reformation with so much vehemence as to be denounced by Luther in the character of bugbear-in-chief of the supporters of the national movement. Still, with their augmented territorial strength, the Guelfs might have played an important part in the critical period which preceded the long-expected outbreak of the great religious conflict, and perhaps, during its earlier stages, might have done much to resist the inroads of the Reaction. Instead of this, after the ‘evil Harry’s’ accomplished grandson, Duke Henry Julius, had applied his ability as a statesman wholly to the furtherance of the imperial interest, his timorous successor, Frederick Ulric, had failed to avert from the Lower Saxon Circle the fury of war, drawn down upon it by the passionate Protestant
## partisanship of his brother, Christian of Halberstadt, the champion of
Elizabeth of Bohemia. A change of dynasty occurred at a highly critical epoch of the Thirty Years’ War, when nearly all the Protestant estates adhered to the compromise of the Peace of Prague (1634); and the ‘New’ House of Brunswick entered into possession at Wolfenbüttel in the person of Duke Augustus, a cautious ruler and a man of kindly disposition and of bookish tastes. At the Peace of Westphalia the rich see of Hildesheim had to be given up by the elder (Brunswick) branch; and for a time adversity seemed to have impressed upon it the expediency of uniting its policy with that of the younger, which had issued forth in a more advantageous position from the Great War. During this temporary accord between the two branches, the ambitious Duke Rudolf Augustus of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel was assisted by his Brunswick-Lüneburg kinsmen in the important achievement, which the resolute Dukes of the Middle House of Brunswick had essayed in vain, of permanently subjecting to their territorial authority the proud Hanseatic city of Brunswick. And, alike in the war provoked by Louis XIV’s invasion of the United Provinces (in 1672), in the march against the Swedes which was crowned by the victory of Fehrbellin (1675), and in the campaign against the Turks which ended with the recapture of Neuhäusel (1685), the armed forces of the two Guelfic lines fought side by side. But, while the New Lüneburg line was, by consolidation, preparing its future greatness, the advancement of the New Brunswick line, the repartitions of whose territories cannot occupy us here, again came to a standstill. Duke Rudolf Augustus survived till 1704, a prince whose virtues were of the passive kind, and with whom his ambitious younger brother, Antony Ulric, was associated in the government from 1685 onwards. In order to ensure the Succession to the offspring of his brother, the good Duke Rudolf Augustus, after the death of his first wife, contracted a _mésalliance_ with the daughter of a Brunswick barber-surgeon, who, as Madame Rudolfine, led a life of happy obscurity by his side at Brunswick. His brother, Duke Antony Ulric, held his Court at Wolfenbüttel, where he cherished the literary studies in which he had engaged in the University of Helmstedt, and successfully essayed his own powers as an author, both in the favourite contemporary species of historical romances _de longue haleine_ and in psalmody. But the mental activity of Antony Ulric, who in 1704 succeeded to sole ducal authority at Brunswick, was far from being absorbed by his literary pursuits; or rather, as we shall see, he contrived to make them subservient to the influences of dynastic ambition. He kept a jealous watch, now self-interested, now malevolent and revengeful, over the advance of the Lüneburg dynasty, so nearly akin to his own. And, in whatever measure the same jealousy may have been a factor in his own ultimate conversion to the Church of Rome, it certainly contributed to make him press on those splendid marriages of his grand-daughters with Emperor and Tsarevich, whereby he sought to redeem his own political insignificance.
Very different results attended the progress, in and after the latter part of the Thirty Years’ War, of the New House of Lüneburg, as it was called. Duke George was the sixth of seven brothers, of whom it fell in turn to the eldest four to conduct the government of the Lüneburg-Celle dominions. Here the principle of indivisibility had been established in 1592 and confirmed in 1610; but it did not apply to acquisitions by the line accruing after that date. In order to maintain this principle intact, all the brothers, with the exception of Duke George, remained unmarried, and, by a singularly orderly disposition of fate, the second, third, and fourth succeeded in due course, each on the demise of his next elder brother. The fifth and seventh died before the arrival of their respective turns, and thus it was to the progeny of Duke George that the lands and their government descended. He was accounted one of the most capable commanders of the latter part of the war, and an ardent supporter of the Protestant cause, with whose great champion Gustavus Adolphus he had been one of the earliest among the German Princes to enter into an understanding. But he was so unwilling to imperil the immediate interests of the dynasty, that, in 1634, he gave in his adhesion to the Peace of Prague. In 1635 he assumed the government of the principality of Calenberg, which, by the repartition made at that date, was transferred to the Lüneburg line; and in the following year he laid the foundations, in the fortified town of Hanover, of the castle which was to be expanded, in after ages, into the palace of Electors and Kings. He died in 1641; but his principality was preserved to his dynasty in the settlement of the Peace of Westphalia, and they further secured a ‘satisfaction,’ though by no means an adequate one, for the losses or disappointments undergone by them, in the shape of the right of appointing a prince of their family to the see of Osnabrück on every alternate vacancy. Thus, with a territory whose resources seemed to have been hopelessly exhausted by the devastations of the War and by the exactions of both war and peace, whose social system had been dislocated, and whose life had been in various respects demoralised, the sons of Duke George of Lüneburg entered upon a period in the history of their dynasty which was to conduct it from petty beginnings to unforeseen greatness.
The family consisted of four brothers and three sisters, of which latter two died in infancy. The surviving sister, Sophia Amalia, had in 1643 married the future King Frederick III of Denmark, and took a notable
## part in the defence of Copenhagen against the Swedes (1658), as well as
in the few despotic excesses to be charged against the absolute rule with which, at a time when the Danish power had been laid low, her consort had been suddenly entrusted. The Duchess Sophia, who by her marriage had become sister-in-law to Queen Sophia Amalia, met her at Altona in 1671, and paid her a visit at her dower-palace at Nykjöping in 1680. Sophia saw this redoubtable sovereign on her amiable side, and relates how, on the occasion of a _battue_ of hares, the Queen encouraged her to fire the first shot that she, her mother’s degenerate daughter, had ever discharged. Of the four brothers, the eldest, Duke Christian Lewis, had in 1641 succeeded to his father’s principality of Calenberg; but in 1648, when he assumed the government of the Lüneburg-Celle dominions proper and took up his abode at Celle, Calenberg, with its residential town of Hanover, passed to the second brother, Duke George William. The third and fourth, Dukes John Frederick and Ernest Augustus, in accordance with their father’s will, remained without territorial possessions (the reversion of the Osnabrück bishopric had not yet fallen in); and it was arranged that, in the first instance, John Frederick should reside at the Court of Celle, and Ernest Augustus at that of Hanover. The young Brunswick-Lüneburg Dukes were left without paternal control in the very period in their lives when it was most needed by them; for, at the time of his father’s death in 1641, the eldest, Christian Lewis, was only nineteen, and the youngest, Ernest Augustus, eleven years of age. The brothers had been brought into little contact with the old-fashioned academical training, of which the influence is recognisable in the Dukes of the elder branch; and Christian Lewis, whose years of rule at Hanover left behind them the memory of a prince of the Mohocks, was incapable of introducing the refinements of the modern era at Celle. At the same time he, in this larger sphere, did his duty, as he understood it, in both Church and State; staunchly adhering to the Lutheranism of his line, asserting his ducal authority against the recalcitrance of the good town of Lüneburg, and providing himself with the beginnings of a standing army in defiance of his Estates. His best friend and ally was the Great Elector of Brandenburg, who afterwards married, as his second wife, Charles Lewis’ widow, the Dowager Duchess Dorothea. This princess, who by birth belonged to the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Glucksburg, played an important part in the last years of her second husband, and, according to the irreverent expression of his descendant, Frederick the Great, ‘ruled the hero’; but her interference in the interest of her children cannot be proved to have gone the length, or to have produced the effects, frequently attributed to it.[64] The second brother, George William, who was to occupy so prominent a place in the history of his House and in that of the personal life of Sophia, was deficient neither in courage nor in insight, and the constant habit of foreign travel added the charm of agreeable manners to the attractiveness of an open and amiable nature. But, after, in his youth, he had seen some service under Frederick Henry of Orange, he had cast to the winds military ambition and serious purpose of any kind, and, leaving his ministers, as best they might, to carry on his government and manage his Estates, had with his ‘flying Court’ (as Sophia calls it) frittered away his time in a series of visits to Holland and, more especially, to Venice. During the intervals which he spent at home in Hanover, he pursued the same round of frivolous pleasures, intent upon nothing but ‘going a-hunting and making love.’ Announcing a visit from him at Heidelberg to the Elector Palatine Charles Lewis, Sophia bids her brother ‘retail the wicked doings of his own youth in England for the entertainment of his guest, but not touch on matters of State; for, though George William has plenty of wit and judgment, he wastes them on his jests and trifling amusements.’ As he grew older, he came to be extolled both as a ‘mighty Nimrod’ and as a connoisseur in champagne; but he also, as will be seen, subjected himself to influences which had the effect of refining his personal tastes and habits, while his intimacy with King William III could not but impart strength of purpose to his political action. But the moral infirmity of the good easy man remained incurable, and proved a source of sorrow to others besides Sophia.
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Footnote 64:
According to the Duchess of Orleans (Elizabeth Charlotte), the Duchess Dorothea presented her, as a child, with two parrots, and the Duchess Sophia ordered her to give in return her dog _Fidel_. ‘This was, to the best of my belief, the only occasion in my life on which I ever obeyed you reluctantly; for my little dog was very near to my heart.’
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The third of the brothers, John Frederick, like George William, matured his mental powers by travel rather than by study. But this prince, whose highest honour it is to have introduced Leibniz into the service of the House of Guelf, was not wholly undeserving of the praise lavished on him after death by the courtly philosopher in both German prose and Latin verse.[65] John Frederick was at any rate possessed by an ardent ambition, besides being determined to think out his own salvation. During a visit to Rome, in the year of Jubilee, 1650, he was much impressed by the arguments of Count Christopher von Rantzau, who, after adopting the irenic ideals of the great Helmstedt theologian Calixtus, had at Rome been brought over to Catholicism through the influence of the eminent convert and convert-maker Holstenius. In February, 1651, Duke John Frederick was himself at Assisi received into the Catholic Church; but it was not till several months later that his conversion became known. In December of the same year, at the very time when commissioners sent by his elder brothers had arrived at Rome to dissuade him from such a step, he made a public profession of his change of faith. There is no reason for supposing that the wish for a Cardinal’s hat was one of the motives that actually prompted his conversion, though he certainly was in the course of his life a man of many ambitions—including the High Mastership of the Germanic Order, and the Polish Crown. The Cardinalate desired for, if not by, John Frederick, was bestowed by Pope Innocent X upon a previous convert of Holstenius’, Landgrave Frederick of Hesse-Darmstadt; and, after lengthy negotiations, it was settled that Duke John Frederick’s _apanage_ should be increased on condition of his not returning to Celle. But the good-natured George William gave him quarters at Hanover, and even provided for his private exercise of his religion in the Palace. This in turn alarmed the Calenberg Estates; and further difficulties threatened when the convert, well aware of the vantage-ground which he occupied by reason of these very difficulties, showed himself disposed to marry. It was the fear that, in this event, the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg would become a Catholic House, which impelled George William, after he had made up his mind to remain a bachelor himself, to hasten the marriage of Ernest Augustus. The religious question thus, already at this point, directly affected the determination of the future of the dynasty with whose fortunes Sophia was about to associate her own; nor is it astonishing that John Frederick should have bitterly resented the preferential position conceded to Ernest Augustus, the youngest of the brotherhood.
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Footnote 65:
See _Leibnizens Geschichtl. Anpätze und Gedichte I._ (Vol. iv. of Pertz’ collected edition).
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The future husband of Sophia had, as the youngest of the sons of his mother, the Duchess Anna Eleonora, been kept near home in his boyhood. He had even spent two years at the University of Marburg, where, in accordance with servile academic usage, he had filled the office of _Rector Magnificentissimus_, and he had afterwards been elected _Coadjutor_ by the (Lutheran) Chapter of Magdeburg. This was a suitable preparation for the succession to the ‘bishopric’ of Osnabrück, which, in accordance with the provision of the Peace of Westphalia, was reserved for Ernest Augustus on the occasion of the next vacancy in the see. The conduct of this prince was, from the first, marked by a circumspection which neglected no opportunity; he was on the best of terms with both the eldest two of his brothers, and was devotedly attached to the second, whose companion he was in a long series of journeys and sojourns on the Lagoons.[66] Thus there established itself between George William and Ernest Augustus a brotherly intimacy—a _fratellanza_, to use an Italian term of almost technical significance—which goes some way towards explaining how Sophia’s marriage had been finally brought about. Ernest Augustus’ affection for his favourite brother may be regarded as the most attractive feature in his character; on the whole, his personality was a stronger though a less pleasing one than that of George William. Like many of his descendants, Sophia’s husband had an insatiable liking for ceremonial and was a stickler for etiquette, albeit, in the early as well as in the later years of his married life, his manners appear to have been remarkably free from restraint in the privacy of domestic life.
Although Sophia’s marriage had not been exactly a love-match, in the beginning, as she joyfully reported to her brother at Heidelberg, all was roses at Hanover; her husband’s behaviour made her feel assured that he would love her all the days of his life, and she idolised him so sincerely as to think herself lost when deprived of his company. The two good English ladies who had adhered to her since she left the Hague were in all kindness dismissed from her service; one returning to Holland, and the other being provided with a settlement on the spot; henceforth, the life of Sophia’s husband was to be her own life. Unluckily, however, this involved a constant intimate association with his brother George William, of which she soon perceived the inconveniences, and which, but for her sincerity and tact—for she was obliged to give proof of both qualities—might have placed her in the falsest of positions. After she had appeased her husband’s jealous suspicions, the two brothers joined in pressing her to accompany them on one of their Italian journeys; but she was quit for a trip to Holland in the company of her little niece Elizabeth Charlotte, whom, as will be seen, her brother had assigned to her care. After her return to Hanover she gave birth, on May 28th (O.S.), 1660, to her first-born child, George Lewis, afterwards King George I of Great Britain and Ireland. The following winter was spent by her husband in Italy with his brother, according to his custom; but they accompanied her down the Rhine from Heidelberg, where she had been staying with her brother, to Rotterdam, where, as has been seen, she bade a last farewell to her mother, the Queen of Bohemia, then on the point of starting for England. The two Dukes and Sophia soon afterwards returned to Hanover, in time for the birth, on October 2nd, 1661, of her second son, Frederick Augustus. Two months afterwards, the see of Osnabrück at last fell vacant by the death of the Catholic Bishop, Cardinal Francis William von Wartenberg. The event (which had been rumoured to have taken place already two years earlier) must have been welcome to Sophia, as relieving her from a position by no means free from difficulty, although in her letters she makes no reference to her husband’s jealousy of his brother. After Ernest Augustus had held his entry at Osnabrück as Bishop—a ceremony at which, as Sophia remarks, she felt that her presence would be superfluous,—she joined him at the castle of Iburg, which became her residence for many years. The little Court moved about a good deal between Osnabrück and Iburg, besides (after a time) occasionally staying at Celle and at Diepholz, the former seat of the Counts and _Edelherren_ of Diepholz, whose line had become extinct in 1585.
The change from Hanover was a delightful one for the Duchess Sophia; for, apart from the fact that the Old-town of Hanover, within whose walls lay the ducal castle, was a sombre and crowded enclosure very unlike what was destined to become ultimately one of the most cheerful and attractive of German capitals, she and her husband had resided there in a position which, in spite of the excess of affection surrounding them, remained one of dependence. They now for the first time tasted the pleasures, on however small a scale, of sovereignty. She was, in German fashion, ‘the Bishopess’; when she travelled in France, her _incognita_ designation was ‘Madame d’Osnabrück.’ As the old episcopal lodging at Osnabrück was found inadequate to the ample requirements and luxurious tastes of the new Bishop,[67] he at once set about buying land and house property of all kinds with a view to the erection of a suitable episcopal palace. The building of it seems to have been begun in 1665, and seriously taken in hand from 1668; but it was not ready till early in 1673, from which date Ernest Augustus and Sophia continuously resided there for the last five or six years before their removal to Hanover. The palace, which still stands (it was restored with quite unusual success by the last King of Hanover), bears the name of Ernest Augustus on its portal, with the Arcadian motto _Sola bona quæ honesta_. The building erected by Ernest Augustus seems to have been intended for a direct reminiscence of the Luxembourg, at a time when Versailles and the Louvre were only in course of construction, and was, like its prototype, surrounded by magnificent gardens, designed by the Bishop’s own gardener, Martin Charbonnier, whom he had brought from Paris, and who seems to have been a pupil of Lenôtre. The castle at Iburg was of a similar type of architecture—heavy but not ineffective—and betrayed the same lack of finish, due to the inadequacy of the expenditure upon artistic work.[68] Meanwhile, on the breezy heights of Iburg, as is shown by the evidence of her own letters and those of the incomparable Palatine niece whom she carried thither from Hanover, Sophia spent the happiest if not the most exciting years of her life. After all, she writes in her favourite ironical vein, ‘One cannot live more than once. Why vex one’s soul, if one can eat, drink and sleep, sleep, drink and eat? All is vanity.... Tranquillity of the spirit is lovely, since from it springs our bodily health. Those whom the Lord loves He blesses in their sleep. We play at nine-pins, breed young ducks, amuse ourselves with running at a ring or backgammon, talk every year of paying a visit to Italy; and in the meantime things go quite as well as is to be expected for a petty bishop, who is able to live in peace and, in case of war, can depend upon the help of his brothers.’ In the summer an annual visit was paid to the waters of Pyrmont, and gradually things became more lively at home—in 1663, we find a company of French musicians engaged for the pleasure of the Court. As a matter of fact, Sophia, though she was very far from vegetating in either mental or bodily inactivity, visited Italy but once, crossing the Alps for the first time in April, 1664. Nor is there any better or more convincing proof of her rare powers of observation and insight than that she should have learnt so much—and not only as to the beauty of Italian gardens and the charm of Italian manners—in the course of a sojourn extending over little more than a twelve-month. While by no means irresponsive to the aesthetic attractions of Rome and Florence, she was the last person to give way to the religious influences in readiness to be exerted upon her. Loretto annoyed her; and at Rome, with a spirit which Sir Henry Wotton would have applauded, she refused an offering to the Blessed Mary of Victory, to whom the Emperor Ferdinand II had dedicated his sceptre in grateful remembrance of the battle of Prague. At Venice, amidst whose gaieties and gallantries she found herself altogether ‘_depaisée_,’ though, nevertheless, by no means incapable of amusing herself, it was brought home to her how largely religion was used as a cloak in a society where the nuns made themselves agreeable to gentlemen and the very churches were used for the purpose of assignations. Much in the cynical tone which became habitual to Sophia and to her intimates is attributable to experiences such as these, rather than to natural irreverence. An attempt made at Rome to ‘save her soul’ by bringing her over to Catholicism was so feeble that she had no difficulty in repelling it; nor could anything have been better calculated to heighten the repugnance with which such overtures inspired her than the want of appreciation of the dignity of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg, which she thought observable in the illustrious convert (almost a _bête-noire_ to some of the Palatines) Queen Christina of Sweden, as well as in Pope Alexander VII.
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Footnote 66:
In 1686 was published at Venice a folio, with nine plates, by G. M. Alberti, entitled _Giochi festivi e militari, danze, serenate, machine, boscareccia artificiosa, regatta solemne, e posti alla sodifattione ... dell’ Ernesto Aufsusto Duca di Brunswick e Luneburgo in Venetia_.
Footnote 67:
We have it on the authority of the Duchess of Orleans, that, when Ernest Augustus became Bishop of Osnabrück, he at once launched forth into so large an increase of his household, as to create in the child the impression that he had become the possessor of great wealth.
Footnote 68:
See A. Haupt, _Die bildende Kunst in Hannover zur Zeit der Kurfürstin Sophie_, Appendix to H. Schmidt, _Die Kurfürstin Sophie von Hannover_. Hanover, 1903.
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By none of the family was this indifference more keenly felt than by Sophia’s brother-in-law, Duke John Frederick, who showed no sign of any wish that his conversion should remain its own reward. Sophia was to have reason for congratulating herself on her discretion in abstaining from receiving an _incognito_ visit from him at Rome, before he left the city. For hardly had her husband and she, in the early spring in 1665, once more set foot in Germany on their homeward journey, when they learnt that the eldest of the brothers, Duke Christian Lewis, had died, and that John Frederick, having returned from Rome just in time, had made forcible entry into Celle and Lüneburg, to which he contended that George William, having once made his choice of Calenberg-Göttingen, could no longer claim any right of succession. Inasmuch as the question between George William and John Frederick, which the latter thus proposed to settle by a _coup de main_, turned on the interpretation of the will of their father, a bitter _Bruderstreit_ seemed to be announcing itself; and John Frederick, in his usual sanguine way, boasted his hopes of both Imperial and French support for his efforts as a Catholic prince. On the other hand, the facile temper of George William, who, moreover, at the time of his more ardent brother’s incursion, was occupied with his own private affairs in Holland, might have given John Frederick a chance, but for the exertions of Count George Frederick of Waldeek, afterwards celebrated as the right hand of William of Orange, and for the intervention of the Elector of Brandenburg. Several Catholic Estates, such as the Elector of Mainz and the Bishop of Münster, favoured John Frederick; on the other hand, Sophia had solicited the diplomatic intervention of her brother, the Elector Charles Lewis. After long and angry negotiations, in which the Scandinavian Powers as well as France took part, John Frederick had to rest satisfied with the addition of Grubenhagen to the territories transferred to his sway from that of George William, who in his turn entered into possession of the eldest brother’s portion of Lüneburg-Celle. The energy of Ernest Augustus, which had been as conspicuous in these transactions as had George William’s want of this quality, was rewarded by the transfer to the Bishop of Osnabrück of the Countship of Diepholz.
We are obliged to refrain from more than touching upon the remaining course of John Frederick’s career, and the _régime_ now established by him at Hanover—one of the most peculiar of the vicissitudes undergone by that capital in the course of its many and changeful experiences. Capuchin friars once more found a home at Hanover, which, in days of old, had been a town full of churches and cloisters; a Vicar Apostolic and Bishop of Morocco _in partibus_ resided there as the centre of a propaganda fostered alike by Pope and Emperor.[69] The Jesuits at the same time had a centre of activity at Hildesheim. But there was no interference either with the rights of the Lutheran establishments, or with the claims of free intellectual enquiry, as represented by those whom John Frederick’s high-minded liberality drew to his Court, and, above all, by his librarian, Leibniz. The political ambition of the Duke, who cherished the design of securing a Ninth Electorate for the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg a generation before it was actually accomplished, ranged him on the side of France in the chief political conflict of his times, and thus led him to stand in opposition, not only to the interests of the Empire, but also to the policy, on which his brothers finally determined, of resisting the action of Louis XIV. On the other hand, it was John Frederick who set his younger brother the example of a firm monarchical administration, and who took the all-important step of providing this administration with the support of a standing army (two-thirds of which he was, however, pledged by a secret treaty to hand over as auxiliaries to France). But, before the issues of the great European contest in which he was prepared to sustain the part chosen by him finally declared themselves, he was overtaken by death, on his last journey towards his beloved Italy, in 1679. Many ambitions, as has been seen, had fretted his (far from pygmy) body. It was natural that, estranged as he was from his brothers, he should have hoped himself to become the founder of a dynasty; and it was equally inevitable that his brother Ernest Augustus and his sister-in-law Sophia, who were already intent upon guarding in every way the interests of their own descendants, should have shown scant sympathy with his matrimonial projects, which were, as a matter of course, directed to securing the hand of a Catholic princess. Towards this end no aid could be more effective, as none was more ready, than that of Sophia’s sister-in-law, the ‘_Princesse Palatine_’ (Anne of Gonzaga), in whose dexterous hold were successively gathered the threads of so many marriage-schemes calculated to advance the interests of France, and approving themselves to the Church of Rome. The _Princesse Palatine_ accordingly apprised John Frederick, whose ambition was at the time occupied with thoughts of the next vacancy on the Polish throne, that an alliance with one of her and Prince Edward’s daughters might ease the way to such a goal:—‘_pour cela, il faut commencer avec le mariage_.’ The negotiations for the match were carried on by the busy French diplomatic agent de Gourville, who, during these years and again at a later date, was employed by the Government of Louis XIV in the task of trying to win over the Brunswick Dukes to the interests of France, and whose _Memoirs_ are thus a notable source of information concerning their Courts and their policy.
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Footnote 69:
This was the vivacious Valerio Maccioni, one of the pleasant Catholic ecclesiastics who were Sophia’s familiar associates and correspondents in these kindly days. (Others were the Abbé (afterwards Count) Balati, a Florentine nobleman who was afterwards of service to Ernest Augustus as a diplomatist and to the ladies of his family in the matter of _chiffons_ at Paris, and the Abbé Hortensio Mauro, Italian secretary, and afterwards attached to the Court at Celle.) Maccioni, after acting for some years as John Frederick’s ecclesiastical adviser and as papal representative at Hanover, was episcopated in 1669, when about thirty-eight years of age. He died at Hanover in 1676. Sophia was on the easiest of terms with him, as is shown by the references, in her letters to him, to the Holy Court at ‘Traive,’ and to a prophetess with a magic mirror, whom she requested the Bishop to exorcise, should he opine that the devil had a hand in her manifestations.
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The danger with which Sophia and her husband found themselves ‘_toujours menassés_’ was realised, when, in 1667, John Frederick gave his hand to the youngest of Edward’s daughters, Benedicta Henrica. But, though two daughters were born to John Frederick (the elder of whom, Charlotte Felicitas, afterwards became Duchess of Modena, while the second, as the consort of Joseph I, attained to the dignity of Empress), his hopes were not crowned by the birth of a son. Of the Duchess Benedicta, who, as a Catholic, was excluded from the English Succession, to which, in her later years, she had the first claim by birth among the surviving descendants of the Queen of Bohemia, Sophia’s correspondence contains occasional kindly mention; though there was little trace of the high spirit of the Palatines in the gentle and sombre-featured widow of the massive John Frederick. His own soaring ambition and imperious will isolate his memory in the annals of his House, while the shadowy figure of his consort has come to be all but forgotten in the history of the English Succession.
It may be convenient to note in this place that, owing to the attack made by ‘Münster’s prelate,’ as an ally of Charles II of England, upon the United Provinces, the States-General had appealed for aid to George William and Ernest Augustus, who duly arrived in their support. In return, the Bishop of Münster threatened the city of Osnabrück, where Sophia and her children accordingly had to take up their abode during the winter 1665-6, under the protection of the Bishop’s troops, Iburg being too exposed to be safe. It would have been a curious accident if this Bishop’s war had ended in any mischance, by which the future Heiress of Great Britain should have been taken prisoner by the ally of its King. In June, 1666, Sophia was enabled to return to the ‘delightful solitude’ of Iburg. The autumn and winter of 1666 she spent chiefly at Osnabrück, while her husband and his brother were carrying on operations against Sweden in defence of the city of Bremen.
At the time of the negotiations which ended in the establishment of Duke George William at Celle, and of Duke John Frederick at Hanover, their youngest brother, Ernest Augustus, and his faithful Duchess were much exercised in spirit by the beginnings of another family trouble, of which the course was to be more protracted and the consequences far more enduring. For some time George William’s brother and sister-in-law had been disquieted by the attentions paid by the amorous Duke to Mademoiselle Eleonora d’Olbreuze, who, in 1665, when he first made her acquaintance at the Hague, was lady-in-waiting to the Princess (Henry Charles) of Taranto, by birth a Princess of Hesse-Cassel. The _animus_ of Sophia, which renders it necessary to treat with the utmost caution any statement made by her or hers in the present connexion, is evident from her earliest mention of the lady who was to be the object of her long and bitter hatred, as ‘_une fille qui estoit à la princesse de Tarente_.’ Mademoiselle d’Olbreuze sprang from an ancient Poitevin family which belonged to the minor nobility of a province long full of Huguenot sympathies, and which held a leading position in the oligarchy, as it has been called, that charged itself with the religious and intellectual interests of Protestantism in these regions.[70] That she was exceptionally endowed with an ability including a great deal besides tact, is abundantly clear not only from the success of her manœuvres for raising herself, and afterwards her child, to such greatness as was attainable by them, but also from her living to be chosen as the spokeswoman of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg on a memorable occasion in its history. Nor can there be any doubt but that her intellectual influence was a refining one, while her personality must have possessed a charm which is hardly suggested by such portraiture of her as remains. Sophia, after having, apparently through Mademoiselle d’Olbreuze’s own judicious prudence, been spared her company in Italy, had found herself constrained, by her husband’s anxiety to please his brother, to bring her over almost in state from Hertogenbosch to Iburg; and, though the _Memoirs_ refer with scorn to the Frenchwoman’s real or pretended conquests before that of George William, Sophia is obliged to confess that she found the intruder both modest and pleasant of speech, and altogether very amiable. Thus it is clear that she prepared with consummate skill the first upward step on which so much depended, and which she actually accomplished in November, 1665. On the solemn occasion of the funeral of Duke Christian Lewis, the whole family, including his widow, his brothers George William and Ernest Augustus, and Sophia, met at Celle; and to this august conclave the new ‘Duke of Celle,’ as he was now so usually called, made known what Sophia terms his ‘anti-contract’ of marriage with Eleonora d’Olbreuze, and what, in other words, was his recognition of her as his mistress _en titre_. In this document, signed by his brother and sister-in-law, as well as by his mistress and himself, George William repeated his promise to remain unmarried, which he declared to have been dictated by his affection for his brother, and by a desire to consult his interests and those of his children. Mademoiselle d’Olbreuze, who had innocently begged that she might henceforth bear the name of Madame de Celle, had instead to put up with that of Madame de Harburg, by which, as Sophia rather savagely adds, she continued to be known for the next ten years.
-----
Footnote 70:
This information I owe to Mr. H. H. Sturmer, author of _Some Poitevin Protestants in London_ (London, 1896).
-----
Sophia and her husband seem at first to have regarded this revised arrangement, which was substantially quite in accordance with German as well as Italian precedents, as on the whole likely to ensure what to them was naturally the main point, the continuance of George William’s bachelorhood. In September, 1666, his mistress bore him a daughter, the ill-fated Sophia Dorothea. From the same year onward, Ernest Augustus and his wife’s own family rapidly increased, by the birth, in December, of their third son, impartially christened Maximilian William after the Catholic Elector of Cologne and the Protestant Elector of Brandenburg, and the births of their daughter Sophia Charlotte, in 1668, and of their sons Charles Philip, Christian, and Ernest Augustus, in 1669, 1671, and 1674 respectively. Sophia’s love for her children forms, perhaps because of the perfectly natural expression which she gives to so natural an affection, a most delightful feature of her personality. This love enveloped alike the more and the less gifted, the successful and the unlucky, the phlegmatic and mild-mannered, though ungainly ‘Brunswicker’ (her eldest son, George Lewis), and the fearless little spitfire of a ‘Palatine’ (her second son, Frederick Augustus)—as she described them in their early days. We shall see how her tenderly loved only daughter’s bright and enquiring spirit also commended her to her mother’s intellectual sympathies; but her motherly heart flowed out towards all her sons, and even the inexpansive nature of the eldest seems to have in a measure warmed towards her. But she could only with difficulty reconcile herself to a policy which made it necessary to sacrifice the interests of his younger brothers to his, or rather to those of the House as a whole; and even among these younger brothers themselves, it would almost seem as if her anxiety, like a true mother’s, had been deepest for those who most needed support. Thus we find her, when both Frederick Augustus and Charles Philip were serving the Emperor in arms, pitifully pointing out to Leibniz how the younger of the pair was not ‘_si chiche de ses sollicitations_’ nor ‘_si misanthrope_’ as his brother, and succeeded better accordingly. Yet his prosperity, too, she had at heart; nor could she suppress the thought that the sum spent on the purchase of a regiment for him by his father was less than what the latter had on occasion been known to lose at the basset-table.
In these earlier years, however, before the deeper anxieties of her motherhood had yet come to Sophia, although the happiness of her life was already beginning to centre in her children, it owed much to the presence at Hanover and Iburg of the niece, who had become to all intents and purposes her adopted child. From her fourth to her eleventh year, Elizabeth Charlotte, the Elector Palatine’s only daughter by his unhappy first marriage, was the constant companion of her aunt, to whom this joyous period of intimacy sufficed to bind her heart and soul during a long life of trials. It was in a happy moment that her father resolved upon sending his child, in the company of her governess (afterwards, as Frau von Harling, one of the most favoured recipients of Elizabeth Charlotte’s flow of confidences), to what became the home of her heart, and was, in after days, the perennial refuge of her thoughts. As a child ‘Liselotte’—so she was familiarly called—was the very incarnation of high spirits and natural gaiety, delighting in air and movement like the leaves which the wind drives before its blast; hence the sobriquet, untranslateable but conjuring up a world of fairies and imps of mischief, by which she liked to speak of herself, even when cribbed and confined amidst the royal splendours of Versailles. _Rauschenblattenknechtchen_ never forgot either the homely comforts of Hanover in meat and drink, or the airy freedom of the heights of Iburg; and for its _châtelaine_, for her virtues and her wisdom, for her high intellectual powers, and for the charm of her style, she conceived a loving admiration, which long outlived its object, and which found expression in many volumes of letters, brimful, from the first to the last, of quick observation, animated comment, and a piquant or pleasantly malicious wit, relieved here and there by touches of an equally irresistible natural pathos. So early as 1663, Liselotte was, to her unfeigned sorrow, summoned back to Heidelberg by her father, whom her mother’s departure to Cassel had at last enabled to arrange his family life after his own fashion. Sophia deeply regretted her niece’s departure from Iburg, where, as she wrote, they had led a vagabond life together; but, with her usual common-sense and self-control, she declared it quite in order that the Infanta of the Palatinate should be brought up at a Court like Heidelberg, rather than down in Westphalia, where her kinsfolk had lived in simple _bourgeois_ condition and seen few people. To her changed home Elizabeth Charlotte’s nature, readily susceptible to kindness, without difficulty accommodated itself during seven further happy years. The moral atmosphere in which they were spent was that of a religious tolerance springing partly from kindliness of disposition and partly from indifference; the epoch of religious strife seemed over, and another at hand, of less fettered thought and philosophic speculation. Into this new movement it was easy to enter superficially, encouraged by the lofty aspirations for a reunion of Christendom that occupied some of the foremost among contemporary thinkers. From these influences, of whose effect upon the Elector Palatine Charles Lewis and his favourite sister Sophia note has already been taken, so receptive a mind as that of his Elizabeth Charlotte was not likely to escape; and they undoubtedly help to account for the process of the conversion which ominously preceded a marriage destined to alter the whole course of her life. To the ‘_Princesse Palatine_’ (Anne of Gonzaga) and her allies no path seemed impracticable that led to Rome; and, in the case of the niece, no such apparatus of argument was required as had to be set in motion when the attempt was made at a later date to work upon the mind of the Duchess Sophia and her husband through the pertinacious fervour of Madame de Brinon and the swooping condescension of the ‘Eagle of Meaux.’ For Elizabeth Charlotte was constrained by the instinct of filial obedience, her father having persuaded himself that the welfare of the Palatinate necessitated, together with the sacrifice of his daughter’s happiness, the ignoring of her conscience. That in this calculation he, as was indicated above, terribly deceived himself, and that the bond thus knit proved the ruin of the land which it was intended to benefit, only enhances and deepens the cruel irony of the whole transaction. A marriage had been arranged between Elizabeth Charlotte and Louis XIV’s brother, the Duke of Orleans (whose first consort, Charles II’s sister Henrietta, had died in 1670, in circumstances long regarded as suspicious); and, though no mention of the subject of religion had been made in the contract, her conversion to the Church of Rome was regarded as an indispensable preliminary step to its execution, and it was necessary that this step should seem to have been taken spontaneously. She was accordingly prepared for it by her father’s secretary,[71] to the diversity of whose historical and philosophical learning two volumes of _Chevreana_ survive to testify. Hereupon she was taken to Strassburg, whither her aunt the Duchess Sophia also found her way to meet her and her father, but where also appeared the presiding genius of the whole business, the ‘_Princesse Palatine_.’ After the sojourn at Strassburg—where aunt and niece parted—Elizabeth Charlotte passed on to Metz, where she was received into the Church of Rome, and thence into her new married life. The religious comedy was completed by a letter from her to her father entreating his pardon for her change of faith, and by his reply, the really contemptible part of the process, making pretence of a virtuous indignation. Whatever Elizabeth Charlotte’s feelings may have been at the time, she afterwards made no secret of the matter to her aunt Sophia, and frequently dwelt upon her aunt’s share in the transaction. ‘It was you,’ she says on one occasion, ‘who made me a Catholic’; and, when Duke Antony Ulric had gone over to Rome, ‘Why,’ she asks, ‘should you be so sorry, when you are such a fine convert-maker yourself?’[72] But, though the constraint which had been put upon her never ceased to rankle in her mind, and though her conversion was not consummated without some rubs and some qualms, these feelings perhaps never went very deep. Her real grief, which made her ‘cry all through the night from Strassburg to Chalons,’ was at parting from her German home and its associations, in which her whole heart was wrapped up; and of this
## parting the enforced change of religious profession was merely an
incident. ‘ Between ourselves,’ she afterwards wrote to her aunt, out of her gilded exile, ‘I was stuck here against my will; here I must live and here I must die, whether I like it or not.’
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Footnote 71:
Urban Chevreau accomplished the task of ‘instructing’ Elizabeth Charlotte in four weeks. It must have been about this time that the same _savant_ induced her father to read a few pages of Spinoza, who was thereupon invited to Heidelberg.
Footnote 72:
It should be noted that, at the time of Elizabeth Charlotte’s change of confession, toleration still obtained in France. We have her own assurance that, had the persecutions of the Huguenots at that date already begun, she would have refused to be converted. In 1698, she writes to her aunt Sophia: ‘At Court one never hears a word spoken on behalf of those of the Reformed faith. If they had been persecuted in this way twenty-six years since, when I was still at Heidelberg, you would never have succeeded in persuading me to turn Catholic.’ Sophia herself, when replying to a renewed attempt upon her Protestantism by Mme. de Brinon, by the remark that she trusts in the goodness of God, who cannot have created her to see her lost, adds that she cannot reconcile herself to the persecution of the Protestants in France, who crowd England, the Netherlands, and Germany as refugees.
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And so the genial daughter of the Palatinate, true of heart and sound in body and mind, became the wife of a feeble and effeminate voluptuary, devoid of all character or will of his own, and by him the mother of a prince who, though neither incapable nor ill-meaning, typified the decadence of that France which he was called to rule as Regent. But with this long second stage of her life we cannot concern ourselves here. About August, 1679, she had the pleasure of a visit from the Duchess Sophia, who, as already noted, came to France at that time to see her sister at Maubuisson. The aunt found her beloved niece stouter, but in excellent spirits. On the invitation of the Duke of Orleans the Duchess Sophia was present at Fontainebleau on the occasion of the wedding of the Duke’s daughter by his first marriage to the King of Spain (Charles II); and, though she kept up her _incognito_, King Louis XIV called upon her, and charmed her by his conversation, which he magnanimously turned to the success of the Hanoverian arms at the bridge of Conz, mentioned below. For the rest, the sacrifice of which, for all her philosophy of good humour, Elizabeth Charlotte was the conscious victim, was, as we know, not only made in vain, but brought upon her father’s and her own beloved Palatinate, in the shape of the so-called ‘Orleans War’ (1688-90), consequences which were the direct opposite of those intended by him, and which caused her many days and nights of anguish. During the half-century of her exile—for down to the day of her death, in 1722, she never saw the Palatinate again—though she held her head high, with eyes undazzled even by the closest propinquity to the sun, there was hardly an experience of bitterness and disappointment which she was not fated to undergo; and through all she had but one consolation, which was her pen. She wrote because she loved her correspondents, but also because she loved the relief of writing, and the opportunities thus afforded of self-expansion and of free expression for the loves and hatreds of her soul. That—in the days of Louis XIV—her letters would be opened, so as to ascertain the working of her Protestant sympathies, and perhaps of her interest in the English Succession question, troubled her not a whit; if her insults to Madame de Maintenon—apparently quite unprovoked, and certainly, in a large measure, baseless—were made known to their object, this was so much gain to their author. Yet, after every deduction has been made on account of the pride, the jealousy, the personal and other prejudices, and the perennial impatience which weariness of heart had made second nature to the kindly-hearted Palatine, her picture of the Court of Louis XIV, in the latter half of his reign, possesses a historical value which is only surpassed by its general human interest.[73] It is, above all, in Elizabeth Charlotte’s letters to Sophia, and in the references to _ma tante_ in those addressed to her various other correspondents, that the pathetic side of her humour asserts itself, together with the malicious; nor has the whole literature of confidences any second example quite comparable to this, either in volume or in the directness of its derivation from nature’s self.
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Footnote 73:
In a series of articles in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, beginning October 15th, 1906, entitled _Madame, Mère du Régent_, M. Arvé de Barine takes great pains to show that in estimating the Duchess of Orleans’ censure of the state of morals at the French Court we should remember that she might have found a good deal to complain of nearer her parental home.
-----
We return to Osnabrück and Iburg, whither Elizabeth Charlotte longed to fly, tying herself to the end of a ribbon transmitted by her as a sample of the fashions of Versailles. So long as the relations between Duke George William and Madame de Harburg remained unchanged, Ernest Augustus or his descendants were assured of the Succession in Celle and Lüneburg; for it had been finally settled with John Frederick that the right of further option, against which he had formerly protested, had now determined. John Frederick’s marriage, in 1668, seemed to cut off from Ernest Augustus and his line the prospect of succeeding in Hanover likewise, until John Frederick, whose hopes of a son and heir had been repeatedly disappointed, died in 1679 without having seen them fulfilled. Thus, during these years, it was upon the Succession at Celle that the ambition of Ernest Augustus and Sophia was concentrated; nor had they for some time any reason to fear that their wishes would be thwarted by George William. Indeed, his acceptance of the existing situation seemed clear from his endeavours to secure, by means of a series of treaty arrangements, a large private estate in land to his children by Madame de Harburg. The early death of all of these, with the sole exception of the eldest, Sophia Dorothea, born in September, 1666, eventually made her a wealthy heiress; but some time passed before her father abandoned all expectation of a son, and a disquieting rumour reached Osnabrück that, if George William’s mistress were to present him with the desired heir, it was his intention to marry her, his ‘anti-contract’ notwithstanding. As there had been precedents in plenty for the promise,[74] so it might no doubt be possible to find others for setting it aside. Already, Eleonora was tactfully asserting herself at Celle, and her personality was becoming the dominant power in the ducal Court. Some of her Poitevin relations held high office there; and, though the fact that other Frenchmen of family entered the military service both of George William and of his brother the Bishop was, at the time, by no means an exceptional phenomenon, yet it added to the significance of an influence which the policy of Louis XIV might just then deem worth cultivating.[75] For the Brunswick Dukes were, from the time of the Triple Alliance (1668) onwards, political personages of much interest both to France and to her adversaries, and had, two years earlier, even seemed to have some chance of subsidies from a Government more in the habit of receiving than granting them—the Government of Charles II. After John Frederick of Hanover had, as has been seen, decided finally to throw in his lot with France, his brothers George William and Ernest Augustus continued to be solicited by her diplomacy; and it was with the palpable purpose of gaining over the former and more important of the pair, that, in 1671, de Gourville was instructed to question him by presenting a royal ordinance, naturalising his daughter by Madame de Harburg in France as ‘_Demoiselle Sophia-Dorothée de Brunswick et de Lunebourg_.’ But the bait was too minute.[76] Larger issues were involved, and, though in 1671, apprehensive of the consequences which a bolder policy might have for the safety of his bishopric, Ernest Augustus actually entered into a treaty of neutrality for two years with France, George William was by his far-sighted Chancellor, Baron Lewis Justus von Schütz,[77] prevailed upon to stand firm. When the invasion of the United Provinces of the Netherlands took place in 1672, Duke George William ranged himself on the side of the adversaries of the French invader, and very soon Ernest Augustus followed suit. In 1674, George William, accompanied by Ernest Augustus, was in command of the Brunswick-Lüneburg troops forming part of the imperial army opposed to Marshal Turenne, the devastator of the Palatinate, in Alsace; and, in the following year, the Bishop of Osnabrück and his eldest son George Lewis achieved a brilliant military success at the bridge of Conz, and followed it up by taking part in the recovery of Treves. Before leaving Osnabrück for this campaign, Ernest Augustus had handsomely raised his consort’s dowry to an annual income of 16,000 dollars. ‘I hope,’ she wrote, ‘that I shall never need it, and that the Parcæ will allow him to survive me.’ On this occasion he returned wreathed in laurels. At Osnabrück an imposing triumphal arch was erected by ‘the dancing-master Jemme,’ and all the princes and princesses at the little Court joined in a dance given in his garden by the same public-spirited professor. In 1675, they took part in the war carried on by the Empire against Sweden, which they helped to oust for a time from the duchies of Bremen and Verden. To allies so loyal and so useful as the two Dukes, no reasonable favour could be refused by the Emperor Leopold, who was manifestly unaware of the conflict between the desires of the elder and the interests of the younger brother. (It is interesting, as an illustration of the consistent dynastic policy of Ernest Augustus, that, when in 1674, after some cautious hesitation, he had concluded a ten years’ league with the Emperor, the United Provinces, and Spain, he procured the insertion in the compact of a clause binding the States-General to use their whole influence in the peace negotiations in favour of his bishopric of Osnabrück being turned into a secular principality.) In July, 1674, a patent issued from the Vienna Chancery, granting to Madame de Harburg, for herself and her children, the hereditary title of Countess of the Empire (_Reichsgräfin_) of Wilhelmsburg—the designation of the landed property between Hamburg and Harburg settled upon her and her descendants by her protector. At the same time, the Empress Eleonora, a scion of the Catholic Neuburg branch of the Palatine House, conferred upon her namesake at Celle the Order of the Female Slaves of Virtue, hitherto reserved for princesses. Soon afterwards, the right was secured to Eleonora’s daughter Sophia Dorothea, in the event of her marrying a prince, of bearing the arms of the House of Brunswick and of being recognised as herself belonging to that House. The name of the prince who was to secure the prize of the heiress’ hand while thus raising her in advance of her mother, to the coveted rank, was no longer a secret: it was Augustus Frederick, the youthful eldest son of Duke Antony Ulric of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. Antony Ulric was at the time, though co-regent with his elder brother, involved in debt and prepared to bring about a rise in the prospects of his family, even by means of a matrimonial connexion in other respects not a little dubious. For the conclusion of this match Sophia Dorothea’s legitimation was indispensable; but her aunt, the Duchess Sophia, indignantly relates that a shorter and readier way of reaching this end was suggested to her brother-in-law by his Chancellor Schütz. He advised the Duke to marry Sophia Dorothea’s mother. Schütz was the most capable politician in his master’s Court, and served him, as his son-in-law Bernstorff afterwards served Ernest Augustus and his son, with equal fidelity and distinction. There is no reason for attributing sordid motives to the advice which this petty Wolsey gave to his easy despot—that he should take the course on which his heart might not unnaturally be supposed to be set. For the moment, the incomplete step of securing a patent of legitimacy for his daughter was deemed sufficient; but, very soon, Eleonora, or Eleonora’s ally, prompted by the restless Antony Ulric, again entered into campaign. At first, a morganatic marriage, with renewed safeguards for Ernest Augustus and his line, was suggested; then, a preliminary attempt was made to place the lady on a level with her lord, by obtaining for her the title of Princess. The Duchess Sophia was on the alert, and cites at length a letter which she wrote to her brother-in-law in order to avert the impending thunderbolt, and his bland reply assuring her that it would prove absolutely harmless to her family. In April, 1676, the marriage of George William and Eleonora, who still remained Countess of Wilhelmsburg only, was celebrated at Celle; and nothing could, on the face of it, be more reassuring than the treaty which followed in May, and which, while guaranteeing the Succession in George William’s dominions to his brother and his brother’s descendants, actually provided that the oaths of allegiance taken by his subjects in future should be sworn to his brother as well as to himself. It seemed to Sophia that this procedure might opportunely have been set on foot when George William’s wife was again expected to present him with a son. Meanwhile Eleonora speedily achieved the remainder of her ascent; in April, 1676, Sophia had to learn that the Frenchwoman—in her intimate correspondence this designation would have been avoided as colourless—was prayed for in church at Celle, as if she were the reigning Duchess; and, soon afterwards, the final blow descended, when it became known that the Emperor’s envoy had saluted her by the title of Highness. Sophia expresses herself, with not undeserved contempt, as to the excuse preferred by George William, that he could not help obliging one whom others called his wife. From the silence which, in the remaining pages of Sophia’s _Memoirs_, ensues on a topic which cannot fail to have continued to exercise her patience, we infer that, though it was very long before either she, or anyone who cared for her, had a good word for the Duchess of Celle, the common-sense which no kind of emotion ever extinguished in her induced her to abandon the struggle against the inevitable. She consoled herself, as she told her favourite niece, with the reflexion that, whatever title the intruder might herself bear, no son of hers could ever be more than a Count of Wilhelmsburg, and that George William might still be trusted, in the event of a son being born to him, to keep his promise to his brother. The Duchess of Orleans did her best to promulgate this faith to unbelieving or indifferent listeners at Versailles; but it was not in this way that Sophia’s half-pathetic trust in her _ci-devant_ lover was destined to be put to the proof.[78]
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Footnote 74:
One of these was the case of the Elector Palatine, Frederick I, just a century earlier (1472), who after, on his usurpation of his nephew’s dominions, making a promise similar to George William’s, twenty years afterwards married his mistress with his nephew’s consent. Another instance is that of Henry of Dannenberg, who, notwithstanding a supposed promise, married, greatly to the vexation of his brother William the Younger, the founder of the New House of Lüneburg.
Footnote 75:
No doubt a less reputable class of French and Italian adventurers also found their way to George William’s court, which in 1670 Sophia states ‘under the roos’ to be called ‘_le Royaume de la Canalle_,’ adding that the nobility is held of no account there, and that cooks are probably better paid than Ministers of State.
Footnote 76:
According to another view, this naturalisation of her daughter, together with permission to herself to return to France in the event of danger, had been sought by Eleonora herself, aware of the jealousy with which she was regarded by most of her protector’s relatives.
Footnote 77:
The elder Schütz was sent to London in 1683, to congratulate Charles II on his escape from the Ryehouse Plot. His reports from London are preserved from 1689 to 1709, the year of his death; but his interesting correspondence with Sophia (recently edited with other letters from her and Queen Sophia Charlotte by Dr. R. Doebner) does not, with the exception of a single letter, include any letters dated before 1701.
Footnote 78:
It was a proud experience of the Duchess of Orleans (in 1717) to find that Louis XIV had observed her dislike of _mésalliances_, and more than one racy reference to a horrible occurrence of the kind might be cited from her letters. The Celle marriage she could never have forgiven, if only for her aunt’s sake. Yet _mésalliances_ were not altogether unknown in the House of Brunswick (see above as to ‘Madame Rudolfine’)—perhaps for the very reason that it was formerly one of those ancient German princely Houses (i.e. Houses which had a seat and vote in the Diet before 1582) which sought to maintain the principle of _Ebenbürtigkeit_. It is only in the branch of the House which attained to a royal throne that a wise policy (embodied in the Act of 1772) substituted for a rigid rule a provision which has sufficiently protected the dignity of the royal family and the interests of the Empire. It may be added that, according to Lord Dover, the _mésalliance_ with Eleonora d’Olbreuze prevents the British royal family from taking rank as what is called _chapitrale_ in Germany. (See Horace Walpole’s _Letters_, ed. Cunningham, Vol. ii. p. 251, note.) Concerning the _Ebenbürtigkeit_ principle as recognised in the House of Hohenzollern, and the rights of the head of the House with regard to the marriages of its members, see an article by E. Berner in _Historische Zeitschrift_, 1884, 4, _Die Hausverfassung der Hohenzollern_ (a review of H. Schulze, _Die Hausgesetze der reg. Deutschen Fürstenhäuser_).
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The influence of the Duchess of Celle upon her husband’s mode of life, and upon the tone of his Court, was altogether so excellent that we may without much hesitation discredit her sister-in-law’s insinuations as to the bringing-up of George William and Eleonora’s only surviving child, the ill-fated Sophia Dorothea. The engagement which had actually been concluded between her and the youthful Prince Augustus Frederick of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel came to a sudden end by his death in August, 1676, from wounds received at the siege of Philippsburg; and the attempt of his father Duke Antony Ulric to secure the hand of the heiress for one of his younger sons met with no ready acceptance. Other suitors appeared or were spoken of: the young Hereditary Governor of Friesland, Henry Casimir of Nassau-Dietz, who was recommended to George William by his cousinhood with William III of Orange, and Prince George of Denmark, for whom fate had in store the splendid, if not in all respects enviable, position of consort to an English Queen. Curiously enough, the hand of the Princess Anne had at this time been also thought to be within reach of Ernest Augustus and Sophia’s eldest son George Lewis, who paid a visit to England from December, 1680, to the following March. But for him, too, a different destiny was reserved; nor, if the account of a most sagacious observer and true friend is to be trusted, had this
## particular honour ever been coveted either by the Prince himself or at
Hanover—for this among other reasons, that Princess Anne’s birth on the mother’s side was from a very second-rate family. The Prince had, accordingly, taken very little trouble in the matter; so that, when he left England, it was thought that the marriage would never take place—all of which things Queen Anne never forgot.[79] Before long a project of dynastic ambition ripened, as we must conclude, in the minds of the brothers at Celle and Osnabrück, which, if carried out, besides serving the immediate end of replenishing the resources exhausted by the extravagant life of Ernest Augustus, would go far towards ensuring the ultimate union of all the dominions of the Brunswick-Lüneburg line. As to the former purpose, it probably weighed heavily with Sophia’s husband, whose expenditure on travel abroad and on pomp and ceremony at home had long been excessive, and who had more recently added to his self-indulgences the costly luxury of a mistress _en titre_, in the person of Clara Elizabeth von Meysenbug, since 1673, by her marriage to one of Ernest Augustus’ chief courtiers, Baroness von Platen.[80] It would not be easy to show from Sophia’s letters how she was affected by a _liaison_ which lasted during her husband’s lifetime; one quite welcomes the late indication afforded by her remark, on the occasion of the visit of the Tsar Peter the Great, in 1697, that in Russia all women paint, and that this was why Countess Platen so much charmed the Muscovites. Of her personal power over Ernest Augustus, and of certain other features in her history and that of her family, something will have to be said below; but it may be as well to point out that there is no satisfactory evidence to show that she played the part ascribed to her in the tragedy to be noticed below. This was not Ernest Augustus’ only infidelity, for about the same date we hear of a relation between him and one ‘Esther,’ a _femme de chambre_ in the service of his wife.[81] Sophia, from whom her husband’s affections were thus being alienated, after she had borne him six children, seems at first to have felt anything but satisfaction at the project of a marriage between her eldest son, George Lewis, and his cousin, Sophia Dorothea; indeed, in a letter of November, 1677, the Duchess of Orleans, as her aunt’s faithful echo, profanely denounces the union of such a creature with so worthy a young prince as a sin against the Holy Ghost. In 1679, Sophia describes the pill as difficult to swallow, though adequately gilded, and adds that, for her part, she would have preferred a daughter of John Frederick of Hanover with a third of the gilding. But, three years later, in 1682, the Duchess of Orleans treats the marriage as an accomplished fact. ‘She will,’ she observes, ‘imitate the discretion of her aunt;’ but ‘like the parrot of the Duke of Savoy, though she holds her tongue, she thinks a great deal.’ A large amount of fiction, the origin of which is traceable to the same tainted source—a ‘historical’ novel published, nearly a generation afterwards, by the ingenious but far from disinterested Duke Antony Ulric[82]—has accumulated round the supposed exertions of Sophia to induce her brother-in-law, despite the reluctance of his wife, to approve the sacrifice of their daughter. All we know is that, by 1681, the tone of Ernest Augustus and Sophia towards Eleonora had entirely changed; and it is clear what had made both the parents of the ‘worthy’ Prince George Lewis intent upon bringing the matter to a conclusion. About this time, Ernest Augustus had conceived the design of obtaining the Emperor’s consent to the postulation of one of his sons as his successor in the bishopric of Osnabrück, notwithstanding the express provision of the Peace of Westphalia that it should be alternately held by a Catholic and a Lutheran. Sophia was quite prepared to drive a coach and four through that settlement, and let the Catholics afterwards appoint two bishops in succession if they chose. But this would have been a merely temporary gain for the House. At the close of the year 1679, as has been seen, John Frederick of Hanover had died without leaving a son; and to Ernest Augustus, on succeeding to his principality, the prospect of an enduring greatness for himself and his dynasty at last clearly opened. If the cordial relations between his surviving brother and himself could be maintained, the actual union in his hands, or in those of his descendants, of the entire territories of the Brunswick-Lüneburg House, was now merely a matter of time; and on the possession of so extensive and solid a dominion his dynastic ambition would be warranted in basing ulterior designs. Already personages of the greatest political consequence in Europe began to interest themselves in the fortunes of the House of Hanover, and in the immediate scheme of a marriage promising results of so high an importance. Hardly had Ernest Augustus and Sophia held their entry at Hanover, when, by the express advice of William of Orange, they at once recognised the ducal title of Eleonora. In the same year the august counsel of Louis XIV, still hopeful of conciliating the goodwill of the Brunswick-Lüneburg Dukes, was bestowed in favour of the match, through his minister at Celle, the Marquis d’Arcy, to whom the Duchess Eleonora spoke with gratification of the civilities of her sister-in-law. The Estates of Celle-Lüneburg, on the one hand, and those of Calenberg (Hanover), on the other, with a docility surprising after their former insistence on continued separation, declared that, if the marriage was actually concluded, they would consent to the establishment of the principle of primogeniture; and a law establishing this principle, the very coping-stone of Ernest Augustus’ dynastic policy, received the Imperial sanction in 1683, though it was only promulgated in the Brunswick-Lüneburg dominions, as part of the will of Ernest Augustus, on his death fifteen years afterwards. This provision was to entail upon Sophia even more personal unhappiness than the marriage of her eldest son itself; but a renunciation of her own wishes had by this time become a law of her life.
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Footnote 79:
See Ezechiel Spanheim’s _Account of the English Court_, printed by Dr. R. Doebner in _English Historical Review_, Vol. ii. 1887, pp. 757 _sqq._ Spanheim’s statement as to the scruples felt at Hanover is exactly borne out by an observation of Sophia, _à propos_ of the proposed match between her son George Lewis and the Princess Sophia Dorothea, that the example of the Prince of Orange (William III) ‘renders the notion more endurable.’ In other words, the House of Hanover thought a marriage with a daughter of Anne Hyde a sort of _mésalliance_. (See _Briefwechsel d. Herzogin Sophie mit d. Kurfürsten Karl Ludwig_, p. 387.)
Footnote 80:
The Meysenbug family makes its first appearance as residing at the Court of Osnabrück during Ernest Augustus’ episcopate.
Footnote 81:
An earlier _faiblesse_ (1668) of Ernest Augustus for a French lady, Susanne de la Manoelinière, had been treated by his wife with great discretion and success.
Footnote 82:
Vol. vi. of _The Roman Octavia_, a romance in the then fashionable style of the _Grand Cyrus_.
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In September, 1682, the Duchess Sophia informed her ubiquitous correspondent, the Abbé Balati, that henceforth Hanover and Celle would reckon as a single State—a result so advantageous as to warrant defiance of the German genealogical scruple about being equally grand on both sides of the tree. Prince George Lewis had made up his mind, and his mother trusted that he had done so under a good constellation.[83] On November the 21st following, the wedding of George Lewis and Sophia Dorothea took place at Celle, and was celebrated by Leibniz (such are the vicissitudes of Court life) in indifferent French verse. Nothing is known as to the early married life of a husband and wife who were no better, though perhaps not much worse, assorted than most couples united under similar conditions. Sophia Dorothea’s was an indolent and emotional nature; the habits of George Lewis were active; he was fond of the camp and the chase; and his bearing was characterised by a reserve which afterwards became stolidity. But, in these years, he was much absent from home, continuing his military career in the Imperial service, taking an honourable part in the historic achievement of the rescue of Vienna by Sobiesky, in 1683, and distinguishing himself two years later at the capture of Neuhäusel in the Hungarian campaign of Duke Charles of Lorraine against the Turks. Sophia Dorothea bore her husband two children—George Augustus (afterwards King George II), in 1683, and Sophia Dorothea (afterwards Queen of Prussia and mother of Frederick the Great), in 1685. Some letters of her mother-in-law, in 1684 and the following year, show that Eleonora’s daughter had not been successful in conciliating permanently the sympathies of Sophia, whose politeness towards the mother had not developed into any warm goodwill towards the daughter; but the complaints against Sophia Dorothea are not very serious, and rather suggest a spoilt child in the company of an unsympathetic but by no means stony-hearted relative.
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Footnote 83:
‘_Il est à present_,’ she adds, ‘_avec sa maîtresse_.’ It is to be feared that this should be translated literally.
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The _Memoirs_ of Sophia break off early in 1681, when, after a visit to the Queen of Denmark in the latter part of the preceding year, she was again left alone by her erratic husband, who had departed on one of his pilgrimages across the Alps, although she was plunged into grief by the news of the death of her beloved brother, the Elector Palatine. Her eldest sister, the good Abbess of Herford, had, as we saw, died a few months before their brother, and, in her solitary sorrow, Sophia wrote that it would not be long before she followed them. When, therefore, these _Memoirs_ are made to serve as a principal source for her biography, the troubled circumstances of the time in which they were actually written should be taken into account. She little knew how soon a new epoch in her life was to begin, destined to impose upon her a responsibility as great as it was unexpected. With however prudent a self-restraint she might meet it, neither in her own eyes nor in those of the numerous observers who henceforth watched every one of her
## actions or movements, could it fail to add signally to her personal
importance. And although, according to modern notions, the Hanover of the later seventeenth century might seem to differ but slightly, in its capacity to become a theatre of political transactions of moment, from the neighbouring city of Osnabrück, yet it should be remembered how strenuously the deceased Duke John Frederick had exerted himself to make his capital one of those secondary centres of political and general intellectual life which, in this age, paid the homage of imitation to Versailles. To him was owing the creation of a library which, if it could not rival that for which Sophia’s paternal ancestors had found a home at Heidelberg, was fostered by the care of Leibniz, whose services were the noblest legacy left by his first Hanoverian patron, John Frederick, to his successor, Ernest Augustus—a legacy of which the value was to be so fully recognised by Sophia. In other respects, too—notably in that of the attention now given at Hanover to the cultivation of the dramatic and musical arts—court and town had been transformed under John Frederick’s liberal _régime_; and an impulse had been given which his younger brother sought, after his own fashion, to sustain. Leibniz, of course, remained in his service, and was treated with a consideration which he owed to his usefulness both as publicist and historiographer, and which, thanks to the favour of Sophia, was never discontinued during her husband’s reign. Relations with Italy and Italian musical art were certain to be kept up under so constant a lover of Venice as Ernest Augustus; an Italian opera was again established at Hanover under the conduct of the distinguished Venetian composer, Agostino Steffani;[84] and the Abbate Hortensio Mauro, who took up his residence at Hanover about 1681, maintained at the Court of Ernest Augustus and Sophia a lasting interest in the Italian language and in Italian art, while himself becoming a trusted servant and friend of the Electoral family. The Court of Ernest Augustus and France were from the first mainly connected with his love of foreign luxury and elegance of all kinds. So early as 1668, Baron Platen had secured for him a Parisian _maître d’hôtel_; and, nearly every year, the Duke sent his _valet de chambre_ to Paris, there to consult a resident agent as to the requisites of Sophia and her ladies. The Palace at Hanover was greatly ‘beautified,’ though a great deal more money was spent on decoration of one kind or another than on architecture proper. It is reckoned that on the former Ernest Augustus expended nearly 25,000 dollars at Hanover. Tapestry and pictures were imported from Holland, and particular attention was given to stucco-work, under the direction of an Italian _maestro_ named Sartorio. In course of time, Sophia could summon French artists to conduct the weaving of a great _Gobelin_ tapestry, which was carried out in the _Reithaus_ at Hanover, and which represented scenes from the life of Duke George of Brunswick-Lüneburg, the ancestor of the Hanoverian dynasty, and from that of Sophia’s mother, the Queen of Bohemia. In 1695, the interior of the _Schlosskirche_ was completely gilded. With the exception of the great _Rittersaal_, however, a very pompous and heavy structure, nearly all the renovated palace buildings were destroyed by fire in 1741. Ernest Augustus also built, in direct connexion with the Palace, a new opera-house.[85] From the year 1684 we have an account—_merum mel_—of a visit paid to Hanover (following on one to Celle) by the celebrated French traveller Tavernier, whom Duke Ernest Augustus came over (from Herrenhausen?) to welcome, together with visitors so august as the Duchess Dowager of East Frisia and so distinguished as the celebrated Brandenburg diplomatist and statesman, Paul Fuchs. The old gentleman (Tavernier was then over eighty), who mentions that the Duke spent Sunday morning at the ‘temple’ and the afternoon at a performance of his company of French comedians, was delighted both by the agreeable turn which the conversation took at dinner—viz. the subject of his own travels in Persia and India—and by the general urbanity and courteous liberality of his reception.[86] There can be no doubt but that in these respects there were few contemporary courts which outshone those of the Lüneburg Dukes. We shall see how, as time went on, Sophia did what in her lay to maintain around her a culture both higher and wider than would have specially commended itself to the personal tastes of her husband, or of her eldest son.
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Footnote 84:
Steffani, after being employed in other diplomatic business by the Hanoverian Court, was chosen to accompany the Princess Amalia, daughter of the late Duke John Frederick, on her journey to Modena, where she was married to the Roman King Joseph. Pope Innocent XI hereupon created him Bishop of Spiga _in partibus_.
Footnote 85:
It was broken up in 1852. See A. Haupt, _u.s._, where the palace on the property of Count Alten, which was at the time mortgaged to the Platens, is said to be the one important specimen remaining of the Italian architecture in the Hanover of the period. It was said to have been built by Ernest Augustus for Countess Platen.
Footnote 86:
_Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Baron de l’Aubonne, Chambellan du Grand Électeur. D’après des documents nouveaux et inédits, par Charles Joret, Paris, 1881, pp. 342 sqq._
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For the present, everything at Hanover seemed shaping itself for the benefit of the Hereditary Prince George Lewis, as the representative of that principle of primogeniture which, in his father’s eyes, was of paramount importance for the future of the Brunswick-Lüneburg line, but which brought many tears into the eyes of his mother. The principle in question was by no means a new one in the history of the House of Brunswick. It already obtained in the elder branch, and in the younger had been established for Lüneburg-Celle and for Calenberg-Göttingen individually. Unless it were secured, the Brunswick-Lüneburgers could never hope to hold a more than subordinate position among the Princes of the Empire; no dream of a Ninth Electorate was worth dreaming; and any calculation as to further possibilities would have been more baseless than a fabric of the air. But, while this was understood by Ernest Augustus, and doubtless also by his eldest son, it is not wonderful that the next brother, Frederick Augustus, should have bitterly resented the consequences which followed for himself, and that his mother Sophia should have been full of sympathy with his trouble. After obtaining legal advice, Prince Frederick Augustus communicated his grievance to the willing ears of his kinsman, Duke Antony Ulric, at Wolfenbüttel; and, in the same quarter, the Duchess Sophia was lamenting the quarrel which had already taken place between her husband and their second son. ‘Poor Gussy’ (_Arm Gustchen_), she wrote in December, 1685, ‘is altogether cast out; his father will no longer give him any maintenance. I cry about it all night long; for one child is as dear to me as another; I am the mother of them all, and I grieve most for those who are unhappy.’ Finally, a protest on the part of Antony Ulric was presented to Sophia at Herrenhausen, and forwarded by her to her husband, who was, according to his wont, enjoying himself at Venice. The pressure was applied in vain; and, though ultimately, through the good offices of George William, an understanding was patched up between his brother and the hot-tempered Antony Ulric, Prince Frederick Augustus was left to his own devices. He followed the example of his elder brother by taking service with the Emperor and fighting against the Turks; but he was still intending to institute a suit at Vienna for the recovery of his rights, when, in January, 1691, he fell in a skirmish at Chemetzvar, near St. Giorgy, in Transylvania. After a heroic struggle, the fourth of Sophia’s sons, Charles Philip, had likewise fallen in battle against the Turks at Pristina, in Albania, almost exactly a year before Frederick Augustus. Charles Philip seems to have been his mother’s favourite boy—possibly because of a natural disfigurement (of the head) which had from the first aroused her loving pity; and the tragic details of his dying, covered with wounds, on the battlefield, went to her heart. She fell seriously ill, and even a visit to Carlsbad in the spring of the year failed completely to restore her to health. We may so far anticipate the chronological sequence of events as to note that, after the death of Frederick Augustus, the third brother, Maximilian William, who had at first acknowledged the principle of primogeniture, entered the lists against it. He was joined in his resistance by the fifth, Christian, who was likewise in the Imperial service, and who afterwards (in July, 1703), as Major-General in the Imperial army, met with his death by being drowned in the Danube near Ehingen. When the news of his death came, those around his mother feared for her health—as she could not find the relief of tears. In Maximilian’s quarrel, his mother’s sympathies were again on his side, though, to judge from passages in the correspondence of Sophia Dorothea, he was of a more or less flighty disposition; and, when his father had not unnaturally declined to pay him his appanage, she attempted to obtain some pecuniary support for him at the Danish or at the English Court. Like his brother, he took the officious Antony Ulric into his confidence, and communications were opened with Danckelmann, the powerful Minister of the Elector of Brandenburg, who, with the distinct purpose of thwarting the designed consolidation of the Celle-Hanover dominions, kept up the tension existing between his and the Hanoverian court, and that notwithstanding the marriage, in 1684, of the daughter of Ernest Augustus, Sophia Charlotte to the Electoral Prince—from 1688, Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg. A plot was now hatched, of which the precise object remained in some measure obscure, but as to whose progress the quick-witted Sophia Charlotte contrived to send sufficient information to her father. On December 5th, 1691, Prince Maximilian William was arrested at Hanover, together with the chief agents of his design; and one of these, the Master of the Hunt (_Oberjägermeister_), von Moltke, with whom Danckelmann had been in communication, had shortly afterwards to pay the penalty of death for the high treason laid to his charge. Prince Maximilian himself was allowed to depart unharmed, after renouncing all claims to the Succession, except in the case of his elder brother’s dying without leaving a son. Although he did not keep his oath very scrupulously, he refrained from any open violation of it during the lifetime of his father, expending his energy in the military service of Venice and of the Emperor. He commanded the first line of cavalry at Blenheim, and survived till 1726, having missed the reversion of the see of Osnabrück by a late conversion to the Church of Rome.[87] Earlier rumours of a change of faith on his part had sorely vexed his mother, to the unconcealed amusement of her niece, the Duchess of Orleans; but his letters to Sophia, and the references to him in hers to Leibniz, give a pleasing impression of his frank and open nature, although, impulsive as he was, he seems to have been deficient in filial piety as in other qualities showing moral depth.[88]
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Footnote 87:
Already, as a child of six, Maximilian (who seems to have been the survivor of a pair of twins) had displayed an unusual piety, and kept a prayer-book in his bed for matutinal use.
Footnote 88:
The Duchess of Orleans, who had been informed that a complaint had been preferred to the Emperor by Maximilian, as to a sum of money demanded by him from his mother, the Electress Sophia, not having been sent to him by her, who had loved him so well, exclaims: ‘This is abominable; this Prince can never meet with any good fortune either in this world or in the next, after having done this abominable thing, which I can never forgive him.’
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Sophia’s youngest son, Ernest Augustus, destined when the time came (1715) to succeed to the see of Osnabrück, formerly held by his father, and also to be created Duke of York and Albany, was still in his boyhood at the critical stage which we have now reached in the history of his House. His birth in 1674, which for a time endangered her life, had elicited from his mother the confession that she already had boys enough; and, inasmuch as there was some difficulty in finding a godfather for him as the latest-born of so large a family, his eldest brother George Lewis was called upon to undertake the responsibilities of the office. The special bond thus established between the two brothers held out firmly so long as their lives endured; indeed, the Duchess of Orleans regrets that, instead of waiting upon his mother, the Prince followed about his elder brother ‘like a spaniel’ (1707). While it is impossible not to respect the loyal devotion of the younger of the pair, the affectionate return made to it on the part of the elder, ‘serious’ as he always was in manner, should not be overlooked by those who desire to form a fair estimate of the character of George I. Ernest Augustus’ childhood was spent under his mother’s eye; and, in 1687, the good Duchess of Orleans undertook to introduce his elder brother Christian and himself at the French Court, where, for the better part of two years, the two Princes, and Ernest Augustus in particular, by his charming manners and quickness, did credit to their descent. In 1689, they started on the indispensable Italian tour; and, in 1693, Prince Ernest Augustus received the baptism of fire equally necessary to this masculine brood in the battle of Neerwinden (Landen), where three sons of the Duchess Sophia—George Lewis, Christian, and Ernest Augustus—were engaged. In August, 1714, the Duchess of Orleans makes a very curious remark concerning him, which suggests that there was a notion at the time of passing over the Electoral Prince (afterwards George II) in the English Succession.[89] The correspondence of Ernest Augustus, which covers the years 1703 to 1726, reveals a simple and soldier-like character, thoroughly loyal and singularly modest. His elder brother, King George I, actually died in his arms at Osnabrück, and Ernest Augustus, as Sir Henry Wotton might have written, ‘liked it not, and died,’ little more than a year later (August 14th, 1728).
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Footnote 89:
‘I do not know whether it is true, but it is said here’ [at Versailles] ‘that the English are ready to have the Elector of Brunswick for their King, but that they will make it a condition, that the Electoral Prince shall never succeed him on the throne. Duke Maximilian I do not know, but, between ourselves, I would rather it were Duke Ernest Augustus than the Electoral Prince; for my cousin, Duke Ernest Augustus, has a good ancestry on both sides and is of wholly German descent, whereas the Electoral Prince has some very bad ancestors, and is described to me as so mad that I have often heartily pitied his wife; of Duke Ernest Augustus I have never heard anything but praise, and I have therefore a hearty regard for him.’
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Of Sophia Charlotte, her parents’ only daughter, the ‘_Figuelotte_’ of a delightful babyhood, and during life the darling and in many respects the semblance of her mother, it will be more convenient to speak in our next chapter. Her youth had been happier than Sophia’s, from whom she had inherited, together with her black hair, to which her blue eyes offered a charming contrast, a rare healthiness of mind, as well as, seemingly, of body, inexhaustible high spirits, and a rapidity of apprehension which made her in her early girlhood a linguist such as her mother and her mother’s brothers and sisters had been in their generation. In 1679, she accompanied her mother on a visit to the French Court, where her natural charms, and above all the brightness of her intelligence, made so pleasing an impression that it was at the time thought likely that she might return thither as the bride of one of the Princes of the House of France. But at Hanover she soon seemed intent upon very different interests; and she had become the pupil of Leibniz before her destiny called her to give her hand to the widowed Electoral Prince Frederick of Brandenburg (September, 1684). ‘It is fortunate,’ wrote her mother, ‘that she does not care for externals.’ The parting went very near to the heart of the Duchess Sophia, who was now, more than ever, left alone to support the dynastic endeavours and suffer from the domestic troubles of the House of Hanover, while meeting the responsibilities of her own title to the English Succession.
IV
THE ELECTORAL HOUSE OF HANOVER (HANOVER AND HERRENHAUSEN, 1688-1701)
None of the varied experiences through which Sophia had passed during a life of nearly sixty years, had either made her forget her English descent, or led her to regard English interests as alien to her own. During the reign of Charles II her personal recollections of his years of vagrancy could not but render her discreetly indisposed to keep up by letter any direct intercourse with her royal cousin; but she was not the less desirous of remaining in touch with the progress of events in her mother’s first and final home. After her brother Rupert had at last settled down in England, she expressed a wish that he should be made a peer, and thus be enabled to attend in Parliament and keep her informed of the course of public business. She was naturally much interested in the marriage, in 1677, of William Prince of Orange to the Duke of York’s elder daughter, the Princess Mary; and, in 1680, she had the satisfaction of welcoming to Hanover the Prince who had thus become closely connected with the English royal family, and of receiving his assurances of his anxiety to render some substantial service to her husband’s House. It has already been incidentally noted how, in 1681, her eldest son, George Lewis, had paid a visit to England, where he might, it was hoped, secure the hand of Mary’s younger sister, the Princess Anne. This scheme was favoured by the Prince of Orange, whose own marriage had remained childless, and who could not ignore the fact that the design for excluding his Roman Catholic father-in-law from the English Succession had already assumed definite shape. In 1685, after King Charles II had passed away, ‘unconcerned as became a good Christian’—or, in other words, after having received the last consolations of the Catholic faith—William expressed his conviction that Sophia would share both his sorrow for the late King’s death, and his joy at hearing of the unhindered accession of ‘_celluy d’apresent_.’ And King James II himself could assure her that he would always ‘continue the same good correspondence which she had with the late King his brother.’[90] James II, to judge from an extant series of letters to Sophia from his hand, proved as good as his word, and she answered him in the same spirit. A constant communication seems, moreover, to have been kept up between her and the English royal family, through the personal agency of the faithful Lord Craven, of whom in 1683 she writes as ‘at present my sole correspondent in England.’ James II had appointed him Lieutenant-General of the Forces, and he would have been quite ready, had it rested with him, to act a decisive part with his Coldstreams on the King’s behalf in the closing hours of his reign. Thus, when, in July, 1688, on the occasion of what ought to have been the happiest event of that reign—the birth of an heir to the throne—Sophia gave expression to her pleasure, the King wrote in return that he could have expected nothing less from her; ‘for beside our being so near related, you have always upon all occasion expresst a concerne for me of which you shall always find me very sensible.’ And, with the straightforwardness of character which was not less distinctive of her than was her intellectual _finesse_, she never, either by word or by deed, belied her goodwill to the unfortunate King, or allowed herself to be impressed by the _consensus_ between blatant prejudice and more or less wilful blindness that ‘doubted’ the genuineness of the Prince of Wales. She transmitted to the Emperor Leopold a letter in which King James had reproduced, for her benefit, the substance of the refutation of these calumnious doubts laid by him before his Privy Council; and, so late as 1704, she is found reproaching Leibniz for the courtier-like insinuations which he seems to have hazarded as to the Prince’s birth. Accordingly, at the time when the expedition of William of Orange was preparing, King James wrote to Sophia in a perfectly trustful tone; he had heard that, with the exception of her husband, all her Protestant neighbours had contributed to the armament; but, if the wind continued, he hoped nevertheless to be able to give a good account of it. As a matter of fact, Ernest Augustus maintained a neutral attitude so long as he could; and, so late as 1691, James II is again found applauding Sophia’s husband for declining to support the ‘vemper’ (William of Orange). Early in the next year, he continues to harp on the same string to her, while avowing his confidence in the continuance of her good wishes and requesting her to use no ceremony in writing to him. In 1693, Lord Dartmouth, whom Sophia received at Hanover with much distinction because of the kindness shown by his grandfather to her brothers Rupert and Maurice, was informed by her that she maintained a constant correspondence both with King James and with his daughter Queen Mary. On the death of Ernest Augustus, both King James and Queen Mary Beatrice warmly condoled with the widow, the former avowing his gratitude for all the marks of esteem and kindness which she had so frequently shown to him. It is interesting, too, to observe how Sophia, in conjunction with her second self, the Duchess of Orleans, used her best endeavours to make peace between King James and his eldest daughter, whose conduct towards him he pardonably misjudged, but in whose sincerity of soul a sure instinct led Sophia to place full trust. The two kinswomen had never met, when, in June, 1689, Queen Mary wrote to Sophia to complain of the harsh terms in which the Electress Sophia Charlotte of Brandenburg was reported to have spoken of her, and took occasion, with her usual candour, to dwell upon the conflict of feelings through which it was her duty to guide her conduct. An active correspondence ensued between the two women, who were truly worthy of one another, and who had, moreover, some experiences of wedlock in common; and from this it is clear that Queen Mary had, to her deep satisfaction, found in Sophia a friend ready to credit her with real filial affection for her father. In return she writes to the Duchess with a frankness declared by her to be indigenous to Holland, where she had herself so long lived and where Sophia had been born—each of them, as she says, having to bear her cross as best she could.
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Footnote 90:
It is interesting to find Queen Mary Beatrice thanking the Dowager Duchess Benedicta at Hanover for her congratulations on the same occasion, and referring to her constant interest in the royal family, and to the links between them.
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But, though Sophia was never willing to let political considerations warp her natural affections or suppress her natural sense of justice, she would hardly, like Mary, have gone so far as to say of herself that she was unfitted for politics. The interests of her family and of the Hanoverian dynasty were steadily kept in view by her, and it was these, rather than any personal motives or wishes of her own, which determined her conduct at the critical epoch of the Revolution. The events that cost James II his throne, as speedily became clear to her, opened a new political future for herself and her descendants. Before the sailing of William’s expedition, when engagements in his favour were being entered into by the new Elector (Frederick William) of Brandenburg, the Landgrave (Charles) of Hesse-Cassel and the Duke of Celle, Burnet, as he tells us, sent, from the Hague, a messenger to the Duchess Sophia at Hanover. This messenger, a French refugee named de Boncour, was instructed to inform her of the design of the Prince of Orange, and of the certainty that, should the expedition prove successful, it would result in the perpetual exclusion of Papists from the English throne. If she could persuade her husband Ernest Augustus to sever his interests definitively from those of France, there was little doubt but that, after the two daughters of King James and the Prince of Orange, from none of whom any issue was surviving, the Succession would be lodged in her person and posterity. Burnet, who asserts that, in making this communication, he acted entirely on his own responsibility, though his
## action afterwards gained him William’s approval, adds that the message
was warmly entertained by the Duchess Sophia, but that her husband let it pass by him. Ernest Augustus, not unnaturally, looked on the whole question with a self-control facilitated by the fact that, in any case, he could only benefit from the English Succession through his wife. Whatever may be the measure of truth in this story (which, curiously enough, is not to be found in Burnet’s _Original Memoirs_), it is extremely improbable that the Duchess Sophia should have allowed Burnet’s agent to ascertain her personal views concerning his suggestions. When the expedition was actually on its way, she wrote a letter to Leibniz from which nothing can be concluded as to her feelings in the matter, except that, as was but natural, she was very anxious to know what would come of it all, especially, as she writes in her customary half-ironical vein, ‘inasmuch as the words “for religion and liberty” are to be read on all the banners of the Prince of Orange.’ After the expedition had been carried to a successful issue, we find her addressing the same correspondent in much the same tone; and, though her letter of congratulation to William III is perfectly cordial and contains a remarkably _à propos_ reference to the Blatant Beast, she shows true dignity as a descendant of the Stewarts in avowing her sympathy for William’s dethroned predecessor. But with the new King’s reply, written from Hampton Court less than a fortnight after the Coronation, the relations of Sophia to himself, and to the throne occupied by him and his Queen, entered into a new stage, which may be called the business stage.
In this letter, King William, without any circumlocution, expresses his hope of finding good allies in the whole House of Lüneburg—that is to say, in Sophia’s husband, as well as in her brother-in-law, on whom he could already securely count. On the other hand, he points out that Sophia has a very real interest in the welfare of his three kingdoms, inasmuch as, to all appearance, one of her sons would some day reign over them. Although Sophia still wrote to Leibniz (then at Modena) in her habitual half-jesting tone as to the chances now opening to her, there can be no doubt that she is correctly stated to have at once taken
## action on King William’s hint, and to have requested several English
politicians known to her to support the project of naming her in the Succession. The attempt made in this year (1689) to carry the project in question through Parliament proves that the appeal had not been made in vain.
On May 8th, 1689, the Bill of Rights and Succession came up for its third reading in the House of Commons of the Convention Parliament. While otherwise conforming to the Declaration accepted by William and Mary earlier in the year, and containing a clause excluding Papists, it made no provision for the event of the death without issue of Queen Mary, the Princess Anne, and King William, upon whose issue the Succession was, in the above order of sequence, settled. Such an event was at the time far from improbable; should it actually occur, there was considerable obscurity as to where the Crown would devolve. Would, for instance, an infant child of Popish parents be excluded;[91] and—a far more momentous question—would the exclusion extend to a Popish prince who might have been converted to Protestantism in time to succeed? Godolphin, a statesman not unnaturally suspected, at this season, of facing both ways, but perhaps more benignantly towards the _régime_ under which he had risen so high than towards that in which his own place was still doubtful, proposed a rider guarding the rights of ‘any Protestant prince or princess’ as to his or her future hereditary succession to the Crown. The proviso, in which, to the mover’s virtuous indignation, more than one member suspected the influence of a foreign Power, was rejected; but it is notable that, in the course of the debate, Colonel Herbert stated that he had ‘seen a letter of a sister of Prince Rupert’s, wherein she was complaining of great hardship done to her children, that they were not regarded in the entail of the crown;’ he therefore moved that they should be mentioned in the Bill. The proposal, which may confidently be ascribed to the action of Sophia adverted to above, fell to the ground, the judicious opinion of Paul Foley prevailing, that it was inexpedient suddenly to introduce any further limitation of the Succession; but it had not been made wholly in vain. When the Bill of Rights and Succession reached the House of Lords, after, on the motion of the Bishop of Salisbury (Burnet), a clause had been added extending the exclusion of Papists from the Succession to princes or princesses married to Papists, the same useful henchman, in accordance with the directions of the King, proposed, as a further addition to the Bill, the naming, in the Succession, of the Duchess of Hanover and her posterity. This amendment having been adopted by the Lords without debate (which could hardly have been the case had the ground not been prepared there) was carried down to the Commons, who, in a debate held on June 19th, treated it in a very different spirit. One member (Sir John Lowther) dwelt on the inexpediency of attempting to settle the Succession a long time beforehand, instead of following the example of Queen Elizabeth, who ‘was a wise Princess’; ‘this Princess of Hanover,’ he pointed out, might turn Catholic before the time for her succession had arrived. In the end, the amendment was rejected without a division, and, a conference between the two Houses having proved fruitless, the Bill was lost for the Session. The birth, on July 27th, of Princess Anne’s son (afterwards Duke of Gloucester) took away from the proposed addition its immediate significance; but, whatever may have been the cause of the failure to give effect to the King’s wish, the fault certainly did not lie with the Duchess Sophia. There were ‘heats’ enough in the politics of the day, and in the relations between Lords and Commons in particular, to explain the incident; nor is it surprising that, when Parliament reassembled in the autumn, the Bill of Rights and Succession which was now passed contained no mention of the Duchess of Hanover or her descendants. Burnet, ubiquitously assisting at every stage of every transaction with which, as narrated by himself, he had any connexion at all, says that by King William’s wish he wrote to Sophia an account of the entire affair. We know, however, that Lord Craven was sent to Hanover to explain it or to soften any unpleasantness in the effect which it might produce; and, in a letter to Sophia, dated December 10th, 1689, William himself explained to her that, though she had not been designated in the Bill, she might rest satisfied with things as they stood. She was Heiress Presumptive, in the event of claims beyond those named in the Bill coming into consideration; and the suggestion of Burnet was quite superfluous, that ‘if any in the line before her should pretend to change, as it was not very likely to happen, so it would not be easily believed.’ Sophia’s answer to King William, in which she cordially thanks him for his exertions on her behalf, closes the entire episode. She trusts that the expectation of heirs implied in the Bill may prove correct; as for herself, her life will be at an end before the matter is decided. She was, at the time, close upon the sixtieth year of her life; and a son had just been born to Princess Anne, who very possibly might yet have other children that would survive her.
-----
Footnote 91:
Macaulay, who mentions this doubt, illustrates it by the supposed case of an infant prince of Savoy. (See below.)
-----
After this negative, but in no sense final, result had been reached, the Succession question remained in abeyance for something like eleven years. It accords neither with the circumstances of the situation nor with the character of Sophia, to represent her as during this long interval sleeplessly intent upon an issue so remote, so precarious, and so unlikely to prove, in the strictest sense, personal to herself. But, on the one hand, her and her family’s interest in the Succession question had once for all been brought directly home to her; and, on the other, she had had reason to appreciate the _bona fides_ and the genuine goodwill towards her own contingent claim exhibited by King William III. Already in 1689, primarily with a view to the restoration of amity between Denmark and Holstein-Gottorp, Sir William Dutton Colt was appointed Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Brunswick-Lüneburg Courts, being also accredited to Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and Hesse-Cassel; and in 1692 he was further formally instructed to treat for the entry of the Dukes of Celle and Hanover into the Grand Alliance.[92] He appears to have contrived to gain the good graces of the ducal families both at Hanover and at Celle, and in 1693 he reports that the Platens were jealous of his favour with the ‘Electrisse’;[93] for Sophia and Eleonora were godmothers to his daughter, and bestowed upon her their united names. The personal relations between Sophia and the King and Queen of England at the same time grew more and more cordial. William, though not as a rule inclined to sentiment, early in 1691 condoled with Sophia on the death, at the close of the previous year, of her son Frederick Augustus, for whom he had cherished ‘_une amitié toute particulière_’; and early in the following year Queen Mary delicately expressed her regret at Sophia’s fresh family troubles (the death of her son Charles Philip, and perhaps the catastrophe of his brother Maximilian). These kindly feelings combined with political motives to induce King William to contribute his good offices for bringing to a successful end, in the same year (1692), the endeavours to which, as we shall see immediately, the main political energy of the House of Hanover had long been devoted—for the attainment of the Electoral dignity. He had his reward when, as part of the bargain between Ernest Augustus and the Emperor Leopold, the House of Hanover definitively threw in its lot with the interests of the Empire and the cause of the Grand Alliance. On Sir William Colt’s death in the following year (1693), a new English Minister Plenipotentiary to the Courts of Celle and Hanover was appointed in the person of James Cressett,[94] who, though at first he represents the Courts to which he was accredited as having ‘gaped upon him like roaring lions’ (not feeling quite certain about the British Parliament’s earnestness in the War), soon contrived to place himself on a footing of intimacy there. Leibniz speedily fell into a correspondence with him about the lead produce of the Harz as compared with that of the English mines. But less academic matters also occupied the attention of the new envoy; for, in 1692, two treaties had been concluded between the Ducal Government and those of England and the United Provinces, according to which Hanover was to furnish a force of 7,000 men, and the two maritime Powers were to pay respectively 20,000 and 10,000 dollars a month for their support, besides defraying two-thirds of the cost of their rations and forage. In December, 1693, these subsidy treaties were discussed in the House of Commons, and though the ‘Duke of Hanover’ was praised as a loyal ally, objection was taken to the payment for bread and forage, on the ground that he might well pay a larger proportion, ‘now that he is Ninth Elector.’ In return, it was pointed out that, on the one hand, the Elector had to pay his quota to the Empire, and that, on the other, if these troops were not paid by England, they must be by France—a comment not altogether unwarranted by the changes of Hanoverian policy. Cressett remained the diplomatic representative of Great Britain at the Lüneburg Courts till 1703.[95]
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Footnote 92:
_Notes on the Diplomatic Relations between England and Germany_, ed. C. H. Firth: _List of Diplomatic Representatives and Agents, England and North Germany, 1689-1727_, contributed by J. F. Chance, Oxford, 1907.
Footnote 93:
As Colt died in 1693 (at Heilbronn), on a mission on which he was sent to treat with the Elector of Saxony, to bring him into the Grand Alliance, I cannot say what was the nature of the series of holograph letters from the Electress Sophia to Lady Colt, extending from 1681 (?) to 1714, reported in the _Times_ of April 14th, 1905, as sold by auction.
Footnote 94:
There seems good reason for believing that the foreign lady, named Louise-Marie, married by Cressett in 1704, about the close of his residence at the Court of Celle, was a kinswoman of the Duchess Eleonora. Cf., as to a survival of this connexion with the dynasty, H. Walpole’s _Memoirs of the Last Ten Years of the Reign of George II_ (1822), Vol. i. p. 79.
Footnote 95:
In 1700 he was also accredited to Berlin, where already in 1702 Queen Sophia Charlotte thought him a trifle _passé_.
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A time of trouble was imminent for the domestic peace of the House of Hanover, and Sophia, as was noted above, had not long before suffered a severe shock in both mind and body by the death of her son Charles Philip, soon followed by that of his brother Frederick Augustus. In the spring of 1694 she was again seriously ill. Cressett, while noting that ‘her credit is not good in affairs,’ says that he ‘should be heartily sorry to lose her, for she loves England.’ She recovered her strength at Wiesbaden, and we find the good Queen Mary returning fervent thanks for her cousin’s restoration to her usual health. She needed all her strength to carry her through the painful experiences awaiting the Electoral family—the tragedy of Sophia Dorothea, and, after this, the long illness and death of the Elector Ernest Augustus. Amidst such anxieties we may rest assured that, even had intrigue and manœuvring suited her disposition, she would have had little leisure for engaging in them. Her attitude during this period towards the Succession question, which few events on the great political theatre were of a nature to affect (for even Queen Mary’s death in 1696 made no material change in the situation), was one of quietude—no doubt a vigilant quietude. In 1694, Lord Lexington, a diplomatist whom William III had good reason for trusting, and who, together with a Dutch plenipotentiary, had mediated in the quarrel between Denmark and the Brunswick-Lüneburg Dukes concerning the Lauenburg Succession, passed through Hanover on his way to his post at Vienna. And, in the following year, we find Leibniz discussing with George Stepney, the brilliant English diplomatist who, in 1693, was suddenly summoned into prominent
## activity in several of the German Courts, the applicability of the
exclusion clause in the Bill of Rights to children, whether Protestants or Papists, born of papistical parents. William III has been said to have formed the plan of placing in the Succession the Prince expected to be born to Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy, by his Duchess Anna Maria, and of educating him for the purpose in England as a Protestant. The Duchess Anna Maria was a daughter of the Duchess Henrietta of Orleans, and thus a grand-daughter of King Charles I; so that on the ground of descent pure and simple she would have a claim to the English Succession before the children of the Queen of Bohemia. But there is no proof of any such design, or of any response to any suggestion of the kind on the part of the Duke of Savoy; and, at the most, the idea was quite transitory. If any hopes had been raised as to William’s intentions, Victor Amadeus effectively extinguished them by abandoning the Grand Alliance in 1696.[96] Of course, it by no means follows from the fact that Leibniz was, throughout, Sophia’s chief counsellor with regard to the Succession, either that she uniformly took his advice, or that she was always desirous of being privy to the efforts in furtherance of the claims of herself and her descendants, which, at times with _trop de zèle_, came from his indefatigable publicistic pen. But it remains at all events a curious coincidence that, soon after the House of Savoy had, as it were, fallen out of the running, William III’s interest in the House of Hanover—and perhaps in its claims concerning the Succession—should appear to have revived. We shall return to this date a little later; for the moment we must make some reference to matters which seemed of far more importance to the House of Hanover than the remote chances of the English Succession.
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Footnote 96:
In 1701, however, the Duchess Anna Maria protested against the Act of Settlement, which limited the Succession to Sophia and her issue, being Protestants. For an account of the reasons of Victor Amadeus’ original estrangement from France, and a searching analysis of his character, see a remarkable _Relation de la Cour de Savoie_, July 15th, 1692, in Appendix to G. de Léris, _La Princesse de Virrue_ [for a time the Duke’s mistress _et la Cour de Victor Amad. de Savoie_, Paris, 1881, pp. 238-9.]
-----
The House of Hanover, apart from the interest which it had shown in the military system of the Empire,[97] had a very direct share in causing the declaration of war against that Empire, by which, in September, 1688, at the very time when he was promising assistance to James II against the expedition of William of Orange, Louis XIV laid bare his own designs against the peace of Europe. According to the manifesto of the King of France, the successes of the Imperial arms in the east had obliged him to protect his western frontier by crossing it; and, a little before or after this declaration, his armies had entered the Netherlands, and had invaded the Palatinate to enforce the claims shamelessly put forward by him in the name of the innocent Duchess of Orleans. In the Imperial advance in Hungary, and in the simultaneous reconquest of the Morea on behalf of the Venetian Republic, Hanoverian troops had borne a most distinguished part. It was therefore not unfitting that the counter-manifesto, in which the glove hurled down by Louis XIV was taken up, should have been composed by Leibniz, whose publicistic pen was at the disposal of the House of Hanover. And among the German princes who, in the October of this eventful year, at the instigation of the new Elector of Brandenburg, Ernest Augustus of Hanover’s son-in-law, and through the exertions of his minister, Paul von Fuchs, met at Magdeburg to agree upon joint action against the assailant of the Empire, none was more prompt, either in promise or in
## action, than Ernest Augustus himself. While the Brandenburg troops
covered the Lower Rhine, the Hanoverian, Saxon, and Hessian secured the line of the Main, by the occupation of Frankfort (November, 1688). In May, 1689, the Grand Alliance was concluded, and though the Palatinate could not be preserved from devastation, Frankfort was once more saved, being occupied by a Hanoverian force of 8,000 men under Duke Ernest Augustus and his eldest son, George Lewis. Under the command of their Hereditary Prince, of whom there remains at least one letter written, in the course of the campaign, with an afflatus of humour proving that his heart was in active warfare, the Hanoverians forced Marshal Boufleurs to relinquish the investment of Coblenz, and materially contributed to the recovery of Mainz (September 1st, 1689). They were then transferred to the Low Countries, where a series of campaigns was to ensue, contemporaneous with the continuance of the conflict with the Turks. We have seen how the sacrifices made by the House of Hanover within a twelvemonth (January, 1690, to January, 1691) included the heroic death of Prince Charles Philip in Albania, and that of his brother Frederick Augustus, hardly more than a boy in years, in Transylvania. It neither was, nor could be expected to be, the intention of Ernest Augustus, that his House, which had served the Empire so well in both west and east, should have so served it without reward. And the recompense desired by him—one which, while conferring upon himself, as the head of the House of Hanover, the highest dignity to which, as an Estate of the Empire, he could, within its boundaries, lay claim, would at the same time reflect lustre upon the Brunswick-Lüneburg line, whose future he had come to regard as absorbed in that of its Hanoverian branch—could be no other than the creation of a Ninth, that is to say Hanoverian, Electorate.
-----
Footnote 97:
See as to F. C. von Platen’s mission on the subject in December, 1686, R. Fester, _Die Augsburger Allianz_, pp. 124 _sqq._, 167 _sqq._
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The desire or demand for this dignity was neither a sudden nor even a new one. It had been in the mind both of Duke John Frederick and of his librarian, Leibniz, though the latter, while giving utterance to it in his _Cæsarinus Fürstenerius_ (1677), had at the same time delivered himself of an elaborate protest against the preeminence in rights and dignity claimed by the Electors over the other Princes of the Empire. Such a protest was of course quite compatible with lending a willing ear to any suggestion of conferring the Electoral dignity upon a representative branch of the Brunswick-Lüneburg line itself. And suggestions of the kind were inevitable, if only from the obvious point of view that the Peace of Westphalia had left the number of Protestant Electors in a disproportion of three to five, as against their Catholic colleagues. The Great Elector of Brandenburg, in the varying combinations of whose policy a single-minded care for the Protestant interest was perhaps the most constant factor, had already during the peace negotiations at Nimeguen expressed his willingness to assist in bringing about the admission into the Electoral College of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg—probably at that time in the person of George William of Celle, as Ernest Augustus was still merely Bishop of Osnabrück. But the argument from the Protestant point of view became a much stronger one, when, in 1685, the death of the last Elector Palatine of the Simmern line (Sophia’s nephew Charles) transferred the Eighth Electorate to the Catholic (Neuburg) line. Nor should it be forgotten that, although the political jealousy between the Houses of Brandenburg and Brunswick-Lüneburg had never ceased to exist and to operate, and although the advantage of balancing the growing power and influence of the former, by adding to the _prestige_ of the latter, was very distinctly perceived at Vienna, the two Houses were since 1684 closely linked together by intermarriage. Sophia Charlotte, the new Electoral Princess (from 1688 Electress) of Brandenburg, was never mistress of the situation at Berlin, and, unlike her mother, gave to matters political only just so much attention as seemed absolutely necessary. On the other hand, Hanoverian interests could not but benefit from the presence at the Brandenburg Court of a princess whose personality was not one to be ignored, and who had in her mother a monitress to whom the constant affection between them always made her ready to listen. And the friend whom both mother and daughter trusted above all others as an adviser, had in 1685 begun to devote his powers of argument to the cause which, to the head of the House of Hanover, had become of paramount importance.
But a long siege was needed before the _Hofburg_ could be expected to yield. The services and sacrifices which the Empire owed to the House of Hanover were indisputable, and the solidity of its dynastic future must have seemed beyond cavil, after the Duke of Celle had confirmed his renunciation of any transmission of his dominions to a possible son of his own, and had married his only daughter to the Hereditary Prince of Hanover, where the law of primogeniture had been established. The meeting (1689-90) of a Diet at Augsburg for the election of a Roman King in the person of the future Emperor Joseph I, seemed a suitable opportunity for bringing forward the Hanoverian proposal of a Ninth Electorate through Ernest Augustus’ plenipotentiary, Count Platen. Yet, although it could not but be of great importance to the Emperor to make sure of the adherence of Hanover to the alliance against France, of which at this very Diet he impressed the necessity upon the Electors, the request of Ernest Augustus met with no acceptance either at Augsburg or in the course of the ensuing negotiations at Vienna. So soon as the Emperor appeared to favour Hanover’s desire for an Electoral hat, Bamberg, Salzburg, Würzburg, Hesse-Cassel, and Pfalz-Sulzbach were immediately on the alert to try for the Ninth Electorate on their own account; and this general eagerness conveniently supplied the Imperial Government with a new bait for gaining votes in the Council of Princes.[98] Moreover, the high-handed action of the Brunswick-Lüneburg brothers in the matter of the Lauenburg Succession (September, 1689) had exercised a retarding influence, by which so friendly a court as that of Brandenburg had been for a time affected. Even certain overtures made through his emissary by Ernest Augustus—we may venture to surmise without the privity of his wife—that, if such a concession would solve the difficulty, he might be found disposed to listen to suggestions as to his conversion to the Church of Rome, and his enumeration of the services which his House had rendered to that Church, proved in vain. Hanoverian diplomacy hereupon tried a different tack, and occupied itself with a scheme for bringing about a combination between Brandenburg, Saxony, and Hanover, which would put the requisite pressure upon the Emperor by standing neutral between him and France. The device, for which more than one historical precedent could have been found, produced its effect on this occasion also, after Saxony had been induced to fall in with it. According to the current account, the eminent Hanoverian minister, Count Otto von Grote (who like Leibniz had been introduced by Duke John Frederick into the Hanoverian service, in which he spent twenty-eight years, doing his duty to the State in the very spirit of Frederick the Great), forced the hand of the Emperor by exhibiting to him at Vienna the compact with Saxony which realised the menace of a Third Party in the European conflict. Even if this story is apocryphal, there can be no doubt that the neutrality project furnished a very powerful lever in the negotiations carried on at the Imperial Court by Grote in conjunction with the resident Hanoverian minister, President von Limbach. Their arguments were supported by representations on the part of Great Britain, the United Provinces, and Brandenburg; but they were still more effectively reinforced by the Emperor Leopold’s pressing requirements for his next campaign against the Turks. Thus, then, early in 1692, was concluded the Electoral Compact (_Kurtractat_), in which the Dukes of Hanover and Celle undertook to provide, in addition to subsidies, a force of 6,000 men in their own pay, to be employed in the first instance against the Turks, and afterwards against France, while a supplementary agreement bound both sides to perpetual amity and military assistance, and assured to the House of Austria the support of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg in future Imperial elections as well as in the matter of the coming Spanish Succession. Hereupon, on March 19th, 1692, the Imperial rescript conferring an Electoral hat upon the Duke of Hanover was placed in the hands of his representative at Vienna.
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Footnote 98:
Droysen, _Geschichte der Preussischen Politik_, Vol. iv.