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The long and eventful life of the Electress Sophia admits of being treated from various points of view, each of which possesses an interest of its own. A Stewart by descent and breeding, and naturally enough in a large measure by sentiment also, she likewise, by reason of her birth and through the traditions and experiences of her youth, had an immediate part in the declining fortunes of the Palatine House. The title acquired by her, for herself and her descendants, to the succession to the throne of her maternal ancestors, was a Parliamentary title; but it rested ultimately on the relation of herself and the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg to the political and religious conflicts—the struggle against France and the resistance to Rome—on whose issue the future of Europe, and that of England in particular, mainly depended. Personally, thanks to the unflagging vivacity and unfailing candour of her mind, fostered by an education carried on by her through life, she became one of the foremost feminine representatives of the intellectual liberalism of her age.

viIn the succeeding pages, the aspect of the Electress Sophia’s career to which prominence has been designedly given, is the part played by her, on her own behalf and on that of her descendants, in the history of the question of the British Succession. To this one aspect it has been necessary to subordinate the rest, without, it is hoped, unduly neglecting any one of them. It has not been easy to refrain from dwelling at some length on the story, often but never yet quite adequately told, of the Queen of Bohemia, with its alternations of light and shadow. And it would have been an interesting task to seek to put into shape all that we know as to the extraordinarily varied experiences, in Court and camp, and in the contiguous spheres of religious and intellectual activity, of Sophia’s brothers and sisters. But, with her marriage, there opens the period of her life at the close of which, as the ancestress and the source of the Hanoverian dynasty of British sovereigns, she stands forth by herself as an important historical figure; and it was her connexion with the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg that moulded her own future and rendered it propitious for the destinies of Great Britain. In the present narrative, there has accordingly been included an account of so much of the history of that House in the period preceding Sophia’s marriage as might suffice to indicate, not only its main dynastic purposes and principles of policy, but also the viishare which it had come to take in the general progress of European affairs. On this there follows a more special consideration of the attitude consistently maintained by the Hanoverian family, as the representative branch of the whole House, towards the question of the British Succession, which gradually became one of the chief questions of European politics at large. In these transactions the chief responsibility, on the Hanoverian side, necessarily devolved upon the Electress Sophia, though her eldest son pursued his own course, in general but not in invariable conformity with her own. And thus, both the House of Hanover and Sophia herself contributed directly to a result of high historical significance.

In describing the ambitions, the achievements, and the experiences, good or evil, of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg, in the period more immediately preceding its accession to the British throne, I have not thought it right to draw a veil over episodes which have often been intentionally slurred over or misrepresented. On one of these episodes, the most vexed and the most painful among them, fresh light, but not such as to disturb conclusions already to all intents and purposes established, is thrown, in an Appendix to the present volume, by a supplementary series of documents now (with two exceptions) for the first time made public. Such episodes a truthful narrator cannot pass by; viiibut they should not be allowed to affect his judgment on questions connected with his story which possess a far higher historical interest. In my opinion, the debt of the British nation to the House of Hanover, from the times of the Electress Sophia to those of Queen Victoria, is one to which no conscientious student of the history of the dynasty, in both the one and the other period, ought to refuse to bear witness.

The materials for a history of the Electress Sophia, in its connexion with the Hanoverian Succession, are so abundant that they could only be satisfactorily enumerated in an elaborate bibliography, for which room could hardly be found in the present volume. A succinct bibliography of the history of the Succession, so far as it enters into the general course of European history, will be found in Vols. v. and vi. of the Cambridge Modern History, in connexion with the chapter on Party Government under Queen Anne and the section on the Hanoverian Succession, by Mr. H. W. V. Temperley and by the author of the present work respectively. The materials in question may be summarised as follows. They consist primarily of Sophia’s own Memoirs (which, however, only reach the beginning of the year 1681) and of her voluminous correspondence, preserved in the State Archives at Hanover. Among her letters, the collections of those addressed to her mother, to the Elector Palatine Charles Lewis, to her nephews and nieces, the Raugraves and Raugravines, and to her ixMistress of the Robes, Frau von Harling, have been admirably edited by Dr. E. Bodemann, and that of her letters to her son-in-law, King Frederick I. of Prussia, by Professor E. Berner; and to these has recently been added a very interesting collection of her (and her daughter’s) letters to Hanoverian diplomats (more especially the younger Schütz and Bothmer). None of these collections, however, equals in general interest the correspondence of the Electress Sophia with Leibniz, published several years ago by the late Onno Klopp, the author of the monumental Fall of the House of Stuart. Besides her own letters, we have many from the hand of her mother, the Queen of Bohemia. So much of her correspondence as was in her hands at her death, went to her son Prince Rupert, and was published, in whole or in part, by Sir George Bromley, Bart., the great-grandson of Prince Rupert’s illegitimate daughter Ruperta, under the title of A Collection of Original Letters (1787). Some of her letters to Sir Edward Nicholas in 1654-5 were printed by Mr. J. Evans for the Society of Antiquaries, and another set appeared with the private correspondence of Charles I. and Sir Edward Nicholas appended to Wheatley’s edition of Bray’s Diary and Correspondence. Many of the Queen’s letters are, of course, to be found in the late Mrs. Everett Green’s Life of Elizabeth, a work which has long held its own and is on the point of being republished in a new edition, carefully revised by the xexpert hand of Mrs. Lomas, of the Record Office, and provided by her with an admirable Introduction. In this Mrs. Lomas refers to a very interesting set of Elizabeth’s letters, addressed by the Queen to her son, the Elector Charles Lewis, accompanied by a few drafts of his replies, which was a few years ago edited by Miss Anna Wendland for the Stuttgart Literary Society.^[1] The letters of Charles Lewis himself and his family have been edited by Dr. W. L. Holland for the Stuttgart Literary Society; and there is, in addition, the inimitable and endless series of letters by Charles Lewis’ daughter, Sophia’s beloved niece and second self, Elizabeth Charlotte Duchess of Orleans, among which mention need only be made of the selection of letters to her aunt, edited in two volumes by Dr. Bodemann. The letters addressed by Sophia’s youngest son, Prince Ernest Augustus (afterwards Bishop of Osnabrück and Duke of York), to his friend J. F. D. von Wendt, edited by Count Erich Kielmannsegg, together with the editor’s notes, throw much light on certain passages and personages xiof Hanoverian history; unfortunately, their continuous sequence breaks off in November, 1713. To these may be added the letters and memoranda of Ilten, Schulenburg and other Hanoverian politicians and courtiers, including Bernstorff’s correspondence and autobiographical fragment; the numerous contributions of Leibniz, in the historical section of Pertz’s edition of his Collected Works, to the politics and later history of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg; and Toland’s account of his visit to Hanover, told well if not too wisely. Of the despatches of our envoys and residents preserved in the Record Office and elsewhere, part only have been given to the world by J. M. Kemble and others; while a vast amount of matter of this kind, especially from the despatches of the Imperial envoys and residents in London, preserved in the Vienna Archives, is embedded in Onno Klopp’s magnum opus. A very useful guide to the personnel of the diplomatic representation of England and the North German Governments at the respective courts is furnished by the List of Diplomatic Representatives and Agents, England and North Germany, 1689-1727, contributed by Mr. J. F. Chance to Professor Firth’s Notes on the Diplomatic Relations of England and Germany. The Memoirs of de Gourville have not been lost sight of; and the records of the court of Hanover, selected for publication by the experienced hand of C. E. xiivon Malortie, and illustrated by him with much additional matter, have been of occasional use.

There seems no necessity for referring in this place to the secondary authorities to which, as a matter of course, I have made more or less frequent reference—from Spittler to Havemann and O. von Heinemann and to the late Professor Adolf Köcher’s standard History of Hanover and Brunswick, from 1648 to 1674, beyond which date the author unfortunately did not live to carry his invaluable work. Häusser’s History of the Rhenish Palatinate, a work which satisfied the requirements of its day, and is most readable into the bargain, has been in constant use. Among earlier biographical sketches of the Electress Sophia I may mention, besides J. G. H. Feder’s and W. Nöldeke’s monographs, Dr. E. Bodemann’s account of her in the Historische Taschenbuch for 1888; H. Forst’s article on Sophie Herzogin von Braunschweig Lüneburg, Frau von Osnabrück, 1661-1679, in the 1889 Jahrgang of the Mittheilungen of the Osnabrück Historical Society (kindly made accessible to me by Mr. S. Jaffé of Sandfort), in which, however, there is little as to her life at Osnabrück and Iburg, of which one would gladly know more, besides what is to be found in her correspondence; and R. Fester’s and H. Schmidt’s biographical essays, to the latter of which is appended a contribution by Professor A. Haupt on Art (plastic and pictorial) at Hanover in the times of the Electress Sophia. The xiiimasterly chapters in the late Kuno Fischer’s great book on Leibniz which deal with his political and religious activity, and with his relations to the Electress Sophia and her family, are certain to be consulted by serious students; nor will the late M. Foucher de Careil’s Leibniz et les deux Sophies be overlooked. Of Sophia’s brothers, Charles Lewis has found a careful as well as sympathetic biographer in Dr. K. Hauck, who has printed a large number of the Palatine family letters in the Neue Heidelberger Jahrbücher; and Miss Eva Scott has recently published a useful Life of Prince Rupert. The Princess Palatine Elizabeth would no doubt have preferred to live in her correspondence with her great friend Descartes, which will be found in Victor Cousin’s edition, and in Vols, iii., iv., and v. of the definitive edition of the philosopher’s works by C. Adam and P. Tannery. Several attempts have, however, been made to put the materials for the biography of this fair sage—and saint—into form. Among these are G. E. Guhrauer’s exhaustive essay in the Historische Taschenbuch for 1850 and 1851; the admirable monograph by Foucher de Careil, Descartes et la Princesse Palatine, and M. V. de Swarte’s Descartes Directeur Spirituel, which contains a commentary on his correspondence with both the Princess Elizabeth and Queen Christina. The reader should not fail to consult Miss E. S. Haldane’s Descartes, His Life and Times. I may xivalso mention M. J. Bertrand’s paper Une Amie de Descartes in the Revue des Deux Mondes, Vol. cii., and another contributed by the present writer to Owens College Historical Essays (1901). I have not seen an essay on the Princess by Dr. J. Witte in the Neue Heidelberger Jahrbücher (1901), which is described as very attractive. A biography of the Princess has quite recently been published by Miss Elizabeth Godfrey, under the title of A Sister of Prince Rupert. I am not aware of any attempt to put together in more than outline the curious life’s story of another member of the family—the Princess Louisa Hollandina; the source of most of what I have been able to add to details generally accessible on the subject is acknowledged below. I have, of course, used Guhrauer, Varnhagen, and the later memoir writers for various kinds of collateral information; and on the Succession question I have, besides the works mentioned above, consulted divers essays as to special points by A. Schaumann, O. Meinardus, Reinhold Pauli, and others. It has not been part of my design to trace the way in which the progress of the Succession question was affected by the course of English party history on the one hand, or on the other by the action of the exiled Stewarts, and of the Jacobite interest at home and abroad. But I have endeavoured to keep both influences in view, noticing any Parliamentary transactions of importance, and attempting to utilise such xvinformation as is afforded by the Reports of the Royal Historical MSS. Commission, including those on the Stuart Papers at Windsor, and on the Harley MSS. Among recent secondary works on the subject, I am greatly indebted to Dr. F. Salomon’s extremely valuable research relating to the history of the last four years of Queen Anne; I have also referred to Mr. W. Sichel’s Bolingbroke, Mr. E. S. Roscoe’s Oxford, and Mr. Percy M. Thornton’s useful Brunswick Succession. I may take this opportunity of noting the fairness of tone which characterises Mr. Lewis Melville’s now completed book, The First George in Hanover and England. Finally, I have sought to keep abreast of the learning which, I am glad to say, continues to stream into the exemplary Journal of the Historical Society for Lower Saxony. I have to thank Mr. John Murray and Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co., as well as the Editors of the Quarterly, Edinburgh, and English Historical Reviews, and of the Owens College Historical Essays, for allowing me to make use of various articles by me which have appeared in these quarters on subjects treated in this volume. For a remarkably full account of the Abbey of Maubuisson and of the connexion with it of the Princess Louise Hollandina, its twenty-sixth Abbess—many details of which I have reproduced—I am indebted to the excerpts made by M. L. Toyant from the History and xviCartulary of the Abbey, edited from original documents by MM. A. Dutilleux and J. Depoin for the Societé Historique du Vexin Français (1882). M. Toyant rendered me this service at the request of Mr. H. Tinson (late of Messrs. Goupil & Co.), without whose skilled assistance, most readily and courteously given, the first (illustrated) edition of the present work could not have been produced. In revising the last chapter of the present edition, I had the advantage of utilising some notes kindly made by Mr. J. F. Chance on the section entitled The Hanoverian Succession contributed by me to Vol. vi. of the Cambridge Modern History, which volume also contains a most valuable section by Mr. Chance on the earlier foreign policy of George I—a subject closely connected with that of his European policy before his accession to the English throne, which is discussed in the present volume. Mr. R. W. Goulding, Librarian to the Duke of Portland, was so kind as to communicate to me in 1903 extracts from three letters from the Electress Sophia to the Earl of Portland, dating from the years 1703-4, preserved, together with eight others, at Welbeck Abbey. Of these extracts I have in my last chapter taken the liberty of translating that which has reference to the death of King William III. I desire also to thank Miss A. D. Greenwood (who has just published a work, based on careful research, dealing with parts of xviithe subject treated in this volume), and Mr. A. T. Bartholomew, M.A., of Peterhouse, and the Cambridge University Library, for aid given in the preparation of one of the Appendices to the present edition.

In this Appendix will, as already indicated, be found, a series of letters between the Electoral Princess Sophia Dorothea and Count Philip Christopher in Königsmarck. This correspondence, which supplements the much longer series deposited in the University of Lund, is preserved in the Royal Secret Archives of State at Berlin, and is now (with the exception of two letters forming part of it) printed for the first time. I have to offer special thanks to the authorities of these Archives for allowing this correspondence to be transcribed for me. I request the eminent historian, Geh. Oberregierungsrath Dr. Koser, who holds the office of Director of the Archives, to accept the expression of my sincere obligations; and I desire very particularly to thank the Second Director, Geh. Archivrath Dr. Bailleu, to whose historical works I owe a debt which the present is not the occasion for recording at length, for his courtesy in arranging for the transcription of these letters and thereby facilitating the execution of my task. For the translation of the letters I am myself responsible, as well as for some elucidatory remarks concerning these documents. The Appendix on the Religious Situation in Scotland, as it affected xviiithe Hanoverian Succession, I owe to Mr. R. S. Rait, of New College, Oxford, whose command of Scottish history is well known.

The present edition of this book necessarily appears without the illustrations which adorned the first. In the Preface to that edition I expressed my own gratitude and that of my publishers (Messrs. Goupil & Co.) for services rendered in many quarters both at home and abroad, towards the collection and reproduction of the illustrations in question. More especially, I asked leave to offer the respectful thanks of publishers and author to the present Head of the House of Hanover, His Royal Highness the Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale, K.G.,who had, through Privy Councillor and Chamberlain von der Weise, kindly granted permission for the reproduction of a series of family portraits preserved at Herrenhausen and in the Fideicommiss. Gallery in the Provinzial-Museum at Hanover. I expressed at the same time our gratitude to the Right Hon. the Earl of Craven for allowing the reproduction of several of the pictures forming the unique collection at Combe Abbey, which contains so many of the portraits of the Queen of Bohemia.^[2] Next to the collection of Palatine portraits at xixCombe Abbey, the most interesting is that at Blair Castle, of the existence of which Miss Haldane, the translator of Descartes, was so good as to apprise me. His Grace the Duke of Athol, whom the Marchioness of Tullibardine had, at the instance of Miss Haldane, informed of my interest in the pictures, kindly wrote to me that there are at present in Blair Castle original portraits in panel by Gerard Honthorst of the Princess Palatine Elizabeth, Louisa Hollandina and Henrietta Maria xx(married to Prince Sigismund of Transylvania). These portraits, together with two of the Queen of Bohemia and Prince Rupert, likewise by Honthorst, and ‘head and shoulders’ portraits on panel, belonged to John, first Duke of Athol, who probably inherited them from his mother, daughter of James, seventh Earl of Derby. At the Duke’s death in 1724 he left the furniture of Huntingtower to his widow (who had been his second wife); and the last-named two pictures being there, were after her death removed to England by her eldest son, Lord John Murray, from whom they descended to W. H. G. Bagshawe, Esq., of Ford Hall, Chapel-in-the-Frith, Derbyshire; but the portraits of the three Princesses, being at Dunkeld, went to the Duke’s heir and successor. Mr. Bagshawe (who informs me that the portrait of the Queen is extremely like that of her in the National Portrait Gallery) in 1886 allowed copies of these two portraits to be made for the Duke of Athol, which are now with the three originals of the three Princesses at Blair Castle. I recollect seeing a charming portrait of at least one of the Palatine Princes at Ford Castle, Northumberland.

M. Toyant’s researches, communicated to me by Mr. Tinson, showed that, besides the portraits of the Princess Louise Hollandina at Combe Abbey, Hanover, and Herrenhausen (to which has to be added that at Blair Castle), there exists xxione at Wilton House, the Earl of Pembroke’s seat near Salisbury.

Of the Electress Sophia herself, one of the two portraits by Gerard Honthorst at Combe Abbey served as the frontispiece to the first edition of this book. The other, and a third of her and her daughter, Sophia Charlotte, said to be the work of the Princess Louisa Hollandina, were reproduced at later points in the volume; in which also appeared engravings of Engelhard’s statue of the Electress, in a sitting position, in the gardens at Herrenhausen, and of a gold medal in her honour designed by Lambelet, of which a plaster cast is in the British Museum. Other medals struck in her honour are depicted in Rehtmeier’s Hannöverische Chronik. On the occasion of the serious illness, in October, 1701, of an old and confidential friend, the Electress Sophia wrote that ‘if she was to have her medal made of her portrait, she ought to do it now; for, should Frau von Harling recover, she would not allow me to spend so much on ma vieille trogne.’ Personal vanity, or personal self-consciousness of any kind, was not among the shortcomings traceable in the character of the brave and high-minded Princess of whose life I have attempted to trace the unblemished record.

In the burial-vault of the Guelfs, at Hanover, stands a coffin enclosing the remains of the Electress Sophia, and bearing the inscription: Magnæ Britanniæ Hæres. These words sum up her story as that of a great hope, long cherished but never fulfilled. Yet a biography of this Princess, who died, though herself uncrowned, the ‘mother of our Kings to be,’ will, if truthful, be found to treat a nobler theme than a personal ambition born of chance upon chance, vexed by prolonged delays, and doomed to final disappointment. The Electress Sophia was in herself worthy to be the source of a dynasty whose last and most august member left to her successor a throne far securer than that which was mounted by Sophia’s eldest son. But the nation, of whose institutions a limited monarchy has long formed an integral part, also owes a debt to the very fact 2of the accession of the House of Hanover, and therefore to the insight and self-control exhibited by that House, and conspicuously by the Electress Sophia, during the entire preceding period of uncertainty. At a highly critical date in the course of those years, when the Electress and her family were most anxious to avoid any rash or false step on their own part, she told a correspondent that, at the English Court, it was held indispensable to pretend to wish for the succession of the Electoral line—because of the people. Although there were, in those days, Jacobites enough and to spare in London and other parts of the kingdom, and although the stolidity of our first Hanoverian King, and the self-conceit of his successor, retarded the growth of personal sympathy between monarch and subjects, yet the perception, in both dynasty and nation, of a definite community of interests formed a sufficient beginning for the growth of a close mutual attachment. To this the Electress Sophia contributed, it is not too much to say, both by the circumstances of her birth and by the conduct of her life. She was the daughter of a Stewart Princess, on whose Protestant marriage the nation had set its hopes, and whom it had seen condemned, because of her husband’s youthful venture in the cause of militant ProtestantismProtestantism, to long years of exile and privation. In her own conduct Sophia displayed a prudence, a dignity, and a sincerity, which have rarely, under conditions 3so trying, been so consistently combined. The legend, indeed, of her having often declared that she would die content if those other words, ‘Sophia, Queen of Great Britain,’ could be inscribed on her tomb, is irreconcileable with the whole tenor of her known private thoughts, as well as of her public acts. She was far from indifferent to the greatness that might be in store for her, or to the necessity, in the interests of her House, of constant vigilance, promptitude, and tact. But she deemed it enough to be found, at no stage of her career, either unequal to her present fortunes or unready for those responsibilities of a greater future which cast their shadow before them. Thus it is largely due to her, and, as it is but just to acknowledge, with her and after her, to the next heir to her expectations, that, so far as the House of Hanover is concerned, the history of its succession to the British throne may be reviewed without the feelings of humiliation too often aroused by narratives of disputed inheritances. At the same time, the essential significance of that history would, in any case, have to be sought deeper than in the vicissitudes of personal ambitions or the machinations of families or factions. The Hanoverian Succession was, in fact, only another name for the Protestant Succession in flesh and blood, and, as such, represented the principal gain which most Englishmen and Scotchmen were intent upon bringing home out of the long struggle against the 4Stewart monarchy. Not that the disputes and efforts connected with the Hanoverian Succession throughout, or, at times, mainly addressed themselves to the religious issue; but it would be futile to ignore, or to seek to obscure, the origin and basis of the great political transaction in which the Electress Sophia was called upon to play so prominent a part. She was fitted to play it, alike by the circumstances of her descent and marriage, and by the qualities of her character and intellect, and above all by a perfect self-control, joined to a freedom of spirit in which, during the efforts and trials of her life, she found encouragement and consolation.

From the relation in which the Electress Sophia stood to the question of the British Succession, that loomed so large on the political horizon during her later years, the story of her life derives its paramount interest. Even on the experiences of her earlier years, whose memories carry us back to the time of the Thirty Years’ War and of the great Civil Conflict in this island, it is impossible to dwell without thinking of the great destiny reserved for her line, and of the many helps and hindrances which were to facilitate or to impede its accomplishment. But in the semi-obscurity of her youth, as under the gaze of inquisitive eyes to which her maturity was exposed, she remains true to herself; and few biographical records could prove more fascinating than one covering her fourscore years, were it but 5possible to depict her from first to last in the same life-like colours in which she has portrayed herself in her Memoirs, and in which she reappears on almost every page of her correspondence. Unfortunately, it is difficult to convey by extracts, and impossible to preserve in translation, the constant alertness of thought, and refreshing vivacity of expression, frequently touched by real humour, and, at all times, free from any tinge of affectation, which are not less characteristic of her letters than they must have been of her conversation. As for her autobiography, it breaks off as early as 1681, and thus fails to cover that longer half of her life in which she was to become a figure of importance in European affairs. For it was the ‘abdication’ by flight of King James II and the subsequent passing of the Bill of Rights which brought about and established the restriction of the English Succession to Protestants, and which first placed Sophia and her line, though not as yet by name, in direct relation to that Succession as a question of practical politics.

It is accordingly proposed, in the following pages, to speak, in the first instance, of Sophia’s descent and parentage; of her mother, who, while remaining, even throughout the woful sequel of her Bohemian Queenship, conscious of her position as a Stewart Princess, never faltered in her adherence to the Protestantism for whose sake her husband had cast a long blight upon the fortunes of the 6Palatine House; and of her brothers and sisters, Princes and Princesses of that House, not one of whom, in spite of their many distinctions and qualities, brilliant or solid, succeeded altogether in rising above the depression which had fastened upon the family, as Sophia herself rose in the eyes both of her contemporaries and of posterity. The task will thus become easier of describing, in turn, the three stages of that part of her life which preceded the acquisition by her and her House of a definite expectation of the succession to the British throne. During her childhood and girlhood she was virtually confined to the refugee Court of her parents, afterwards that of her widowed mother, in the Netherlands. She next passed some years at Heidelberg, in the land of her forefathers, then restored in part to the Palatine rule. The earlier years of her married life, divided between Osnabrück and Hanover, introduced her to new personal relations and to new political interests; but, though these at times conflicted with each other, she learnt how to identify herself more and more with the dynastic policy of the House, to the fortunes of whose future head she had united her own. A second period of her life may be said to open when the question of the British Succession unexpectedly comes into the foreground of European political life; and in this period, again, two stages are very clearly distinguishable. The earlier of these extends from the passing 7of the Bill of Rights (1689), with its strict limitation of the Crown to Protestants, up to the Act of Settlement (1701). Within these years the House of Hanover, while actually or in prospect consolidating the various territorial interests of the Brunswick-Lüneburg line, firmly established its position as an electorate in the Empire, and began to be taken into account by the ambition of France, the chronic disturber of the peace of Europe. Incidentally, the skilful management and the stern resolution by which this advance of the House was effected, led to unhappy consequences; and no narration of its history in this period can pass by the catastrophe of one of Sophia’s sons, or pretend to ignore the tragic story of her daughter-in-law, Sophia Dorothea. In the second stage of this period we recognise, in the Electress Sophia, a personage of importance in the great theatre of general European history, but calmly standing back herself from the glare of the footlights. By the Act of Settlement the Succession was settled upon her and the heirs of her body, being Protestants. She thus obtained a Parliamentary title for herself and for her descendants.

Before this point is reached in our narrative, it will have shown how largely fortune had contributed to the genesis of this title. Of James I’s two sons, the elder, Henry, had died in the early flower of his youth. Charles I left three sons, of whom the third, another Henry, also died young 8and unmarried. Since Charles II left no lawful issue, the Crown fell to James II, and, having been transferred from him to his son-in-law, William of Orange, and to his elder Protestant daughter, Mary, passed in turn to his second Protestant daughter, Anne. Mary had left no issue, and her widowed husband, on whose issue by another wife the Crown had been eventually settled, should Anne die childless, declined to marry again. Of Anne’s numerous progeny, none survived their infancy except the Duke of Gloucester, and he died in 1700. Nor could there be any question of the conversion to Protestantism of any child of James II by his second, Catholic, wife except the Prince afterwards known as the Old Pretender; for all the others died in their infancy, with the exception of Marie Louise, who survived into her twelfth year. The chance passed away of finding a Protestant successor to the Crown among the grandchildren of Charles I’s youngest daughter, Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans, in the House of Savoy and it was therefore necessary to turn to the offspring of James I’s only daughter, Elizabeth, the Protestant consort of a Protestant prince. But of the sons born from this union who survived to maturity, the eldest, Charles Lewis, died in 1680; his only legitimate son, Charles, died without issue in 1685; his only daughter, Elizabeth Charlotte, became a Catholic on her marriage to the Duke of Orleans. Of the others who 9remained Protestants, Rupert persistently refused to marry, and died in 1682; Maurice and Philip, both of them homeless wanderers, had perished in 1654 and 1650 respectively. Edward, alone among the younger brothers, married and became the father of a family; but he had been carried away from the traditions of his House by the wave of Catholic propaganda, of which this biography will repeatedly have to take note; and his three daughters all became the wives of Catholic husbands. Of Sophia’s elder sisters, one, Louisa Hollandina, fell under the same religious influence, and became the Abbess of a Catholic convent; another, the eldest of the sisterhood, who came to hold the same position in a Protestantised foundation, likewise elected to remain the votaress of an unmarried life; a third, Henrietta Maria, died in 1652, soon after she had been wedded to a Transylvanian prince. No other personage possessed a claim of birth equal to Sophia’s, yet even of pretensions palpably inferior to her own on this score, fortune, which seemed in this question always on her side, disposed in her favour.

The Electress Sophia’s later years were chiefly spent in the tranquillity of Herrenhausen, more especially after she had become a widow in 1698; and here she held intellectual intercourse with Leibniz, her own and her daughter’s friend, and with other fit companions of her solitude, while keeping 10up her voluminous correspondence with her favourites of heart and mind, among them her inimitable niece, the Duchess of Orleans. She lived to see the territorial power of the House of Hanover fully established at home, and its foreign policy completely merged into that of the Grand Alliance against France; and there remained now nothing but the consummation of the British Succession. This she was not destined to see accomplished in her own person; but less than two months after her death, on June 8th, 17141714, her eldest son, the Elector George Lewis of Hanover, was proclaimed King George I of Great Britain and Ireland.

Sophia, the youngest daughter and the youngest but one of the thirteen children of Frederick, sometime Elector Palatine and King of Bohemia, and of his wife Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of King James I of England, was born at the Hague on October 14th, 1640 (N.S.). She was thus, by only a few months, the junior of her first cousin Charles, afterwards King Charles II, whose ‘star’ was so long to remain under a cloud in the period of her youth, and who was himself in those dubious days to play a transient part in her personal history; while the date of her birth was preceded, at a not much longer interval, by that of the landing of Gustavus Adolphus in Pomerania, the turning-point of the Thirty Years’ War, although not, as her family had hoped, also that of their fortunes. Her baptismal name of Sophia she doubtless owed to the remembrance of her mother’s youngest sister, buried in Westminster Abbey in 1607, the ephemeral 12flight of whose earthly existence strangely contrasts with the long life in store for the younger Sophia.

It was by her marriage to Frederick V, Elector Palatine, on St. Valentine’s Day, 1613, that James I’s only surviving daughter Elizabeth was first brought into contact with the political problems that were agitating Europe. The bridegroom, it is true, was only a boy of sixteen, who would not till August, 1614, be entitled to assume the government of his paternal inheritance. Elizabeth was only a year older than he, and her previous life had been marked by but one personal experience of general interest. As early as 1603 she was consigned to the care of Lord and Lady Harington, and with them she soon took up her residence at Combe Abbey, near Coventry, in Warwickshire—the lordly castellated mansion which, whether or not she re-visited its moated solitude towards the close of her life, still remains as it were consecrated to her royal memory.^[3] 13King James, in the early years of his English reign, had good reason for dreading the designs of some of his Roman Catholic subjects, and Elizabeth’s mother, Queen Anne, the sister of Christian IV of Denmark, had not yet given way to the influences which (as is now ascertained beyond all doubt) afterwards caused her to become a secret convert to the Church of Rome. The sound Protestantism, of the Puritanising type, but probably intermingled on both sides with strains of literary sentiment, that had marked out Lord and Lady Harington for this charge, was unmistakably the primary source of those feelings of attachment to the Reformed religion from which in times both fierce and fickle Elizabeth never swerved a hair’s breadth. In her childhood the country round Combe Abbey was full of more or less open adherents of the Church of Rome; and by some of these a conspiracy was hatched, which was to co-operate with, and supplement, the Gunpowder Plot. On the day at last fixed for the demonstration in chief at Westminster, the eight-year-old Princess at Combe Abbey was to be seized by a body of gentlemen who had agreed to assemble for the purpose on the pretext of a meet of hounds, and so soon as the throne became vacant she was to be proclaimed Queen, professing herself at the same time a member of the unreformed Church. But non tali auxilio was this future ancestress of our sovereigns herself to ascend 14a throne. Combe Abbey was warned, the moat was drawn up, and the towers were manned, and the Princess was conveyed in safety to the loyal town of Coventry, where the townsmen armed in her defence. As fate would have it, John Digby, the young Warwickshire gentleman who bore to King James I the tidings of his daughter’s peril and preservation, was afterwards to be the most prominent agent of the royal policy which, with admirable intentions, only served to thwart the English nation’s hope of helping to restore, at least in part, the fortunes of Elizabeth and her children.

The political significance of the marriage, which in 1613 brought the Princess Palatine Elizabeth’s girlhood to a close, was perfectly patent alike to James I’s subjects and to those Powers which more or less benevolently interested themselves in his foreign policy. In 1612, when the marriage was arranged, that policy had not yet fully revealed its visionary purpose and its shifty methods; while at home his quarrels with his Parliaments had scarcely more than begun. Three years earlier the affairs of Europe had, with the death of Henry IV of France, assumed a wholly new aspect, and it had become evident that the struggle between the House of Habsburg and its adversaries, in which James I had long hoped to play the august part of a pacificator, must take place under quite new conditions. This aspiration, together with a pride of descent natural to a 15Stewart and a Scot, had led him to scheme marriages for his children with half the chief reigning houses in Europe, including those of France, Spain, and Sweden (whose youthful King, Gustavus II Adolphus, was, however, soon put aside as unequal to a match with a daughter of the House of Stewart). But when, in 1610, friendly relations, soon to be sealed by a double marriage, had set in between the French and Spanish Courts, James I was not slow in perceiving how this turn of affairs must affect the political prospects of his own kingdom. On the outbreak of the European conflict which was expected on all sides, it would go hard with the Protestant interest, unless it contrived to consolidate itself into an alliance capable of confronting the great Catholic Powers. When, in March, 1611, the Count of Cartignano arrived in England as a special ambassador from Duke Charles Emmanuel of Savoy to negotiate a double marriage between the Houses of Savoy and England, James, though he refused to enter into this scheme, seemed willing to approve of the marriage of his daughter to the Prince of Piedmont. In November, Cartignano reappeared with fresh instructions, and at the audience in which he asked Elizabeth’s hand for the Prince Sir Henry Wotton, who had had a hand in the negotiations, was present. But the King had practically already decided how to dispose of his daughter’s hand, and the Savoyard returned 16home in dudgeon. The step which was now taken by James I, and by means of which a Protestant Succession was ultimately to be secured to the English throne, was in full accordance with the identification of England with militant Protestantism, which had been accomplished as a matter of fact rather than of deliberate purpose in the great age of Queen Elizabeth. After, in March, 1612, concluding an alliance with the Union of German Protestant Princes, of which the Palatine House had from the first assumed the leadership, James, to the delight of the large majority of his subjects, resolved upon the marriage of his only surviving daughter to the young ‘Palsgrave,’ as he was called in England, Frederick V.

The line of the Electors Palatine boasted a high antiquity and dignity; and though it would take us too far to account for the claims maintained by them to the first place among the temporal Electors, the familiar fact may be recalled that early in the fourteenth century the Elector Rupert III, of the older Electoral line of the Wittelsbach House to which the Simmern line had since succeeded, had worthily held the high dignity of German King.^[4] It is after him that Elizabeth is supposed to have named her third son, whose name of Prince 17Rupert is so familiar to our ears; but she may also have been aware that an earlier English Princess who had become Electress Palatine—Blanche, daughter of King Henry IV and wife of the Elector Palatine Louis II—had named her son Rupert, and that during his short life he bore the cognomen ‘England.’ Though portions of the Palatine territory had from time to time been split off in accordance with the German tendency to subdivision which no systematic effort was made to repress till after the times of the Thirty Years’ War, the electorate about the time of the opening of that war extended far on both banks of the Rhine, being on one side contiguous with the kingdom of Bohemia. If not equal in size to any of the other temporal electorates, it was not far inferior to Saxony, and hardly at all to Brandenburg, in territorial importance, being largely composed of districts peerless among the German lands in beauty and productivity—amidst whose orchards and vineyards throve a busy and light-hearted population. The religious sympathies of the electorate were in so far divided, that the Upper Palatinate (on the left bank of the Rhine) adhered to Lutheranism, while the inhabitants of the Lower or Rhenish were, like the dynasty, Calvinists. The electoral residence was Heidelberg, whose castle and its treasures were reckoned among the wonders of the Western world. To its graceful earlier buildings, the florid taste of the Elector Frederick IV 18had added the splendid but pretentious structure, in the artificial style of the latest Renascence, of which a characteristic remnant is the inner side, decorated, something after the manner of Alnwick, with statues of defunct Palsgraves. The outside commands the wondrous view over the valley of the Neckar, to which nothing but the genius of a Turner could have imparted an additional charm. The choicest possession of the castle was the electoral Library, the finest collection of books in Germany and far beyond, thrown open with rare liberality to the use of all qualified comers. And the pride of both court and town was the University, now again, as it had been under the single-minded rule of the Elector Frederick III, the foremost Calvinist seminary of higher learning in Europe.

But though the Electoral Palatine House honoured learning, and, as both the bringing-up of Frederick V and that bestowed by him on his own children showed, set a high value upon a many-sided intellectual as well as upon a careful religious and moral education, its interests had in the early years of the seventeenth century become engrossed by public affairs, and it had acquired a political importance out of proportion to its territorial power. Partly by force of circumstances and because of the situation of the Palatinate, on the confines of France and on the water-way to the Netherlands, but still more by their own zeal and ambition, its Princes 19and certain of their statesmen stood in the front of that active party in the Empire which might be termed the advanced, or militant, Protestant Opposition. This party, among whose other members Landgrave Maurice of Hesse and Count Christian of Anhalt are pre-eminent, derived its impulse entirely from Calvinist sources. Palatine blood had been shed and treasure spent under the Elector Frederick III and the Administrator John Casimir on behalf of the Revolt of the Netherlands and the cause of the French Huguenots; and under his successor, Frederick IV, these designs had taken a wider range. He was a man of great intellectual force; and, more especially in connexion with the later history of his dynasty, it is interesting to note that in the later years of his life he was much occupied with the scheme of a union, on a broad basis, between all Protestant confessions.^[5] But the young Elector Frederick V had probably been more especially influenced by the pure Calvinism of his mother the Electress Dowager Louisa Juliana, the daughter of William the Silent and of Charlotte de Montpensier, who had taken refuge at the Palatine Court for the sake of the Religion. Louisa Juliana, though at the crisis of the Palatine fortunes her judgment was not obscured by her sympathies, was one of those women the fervour of whose religious convictions communicates itself as a legacy of faith 20and love to the minds of their descendants for generation upon generation.^[6] Maurice of Hesse-Cassel also had a Nassau Juliana to wife, so that the three Houses at the head of the Calvinistic movement were closely linked together by intermarriage. In his father’s lifetime, the young Frederick had been placed at the Court of the Calvinist Henry Duke of Bouillon, whose second wife was likewise a daughter of the great William of Orange, and to Sedan he afterwards returned, with fit diplomatic and theological counsellors by his side, for a second sojourn till the year before his marriage. To these multiplied influences the Princess Elizabeth’s husband may in part have owed the fortitude of spirit which, although not naturally a man of strong character, he exhibited under a long and heavy pressure of trouble; while to the liberality of his education may fairly be ascribed something of the refined and lovable gentleness which he preserved to the last.

Under the Elector Frederick IV, the first head of the Union, vast designs had been set on foot against the Catholicising policy of the House of Habsburg, and for a dismemberment of its dominions. In 1612, the hopes of the Palatine House and its counsellors were already directed towards the 21attainment of the Bohemian Crown; moreover, as the Spanish ambassador, Don Alonso de Velasca, informed the Spanish Council early in 1613, James I was then of opinion that in a few years Frederick V would be King of Bohemia. Thus, the expectation of the Bohemian Crown unmistakably contributed to bring about the marriage which determined the course of Elizabeth’s life.^[7] To the English public, of course, ‘the Palsgrave’ was a handsome and courtly Prince, the nephew of Maurice of Orange, heroic father’s heroic son,^[8] and in their eyes his union with the Princess Elizabeth promised to connect the royal family not only with the great Protestant Houses already mentioned, but with the Protestant interest at large.^[9] As a matter of fact, English royalty was thus to become connected with the dynasties of Brandenburg, Sweden, and Transylvania.

22The young Elector Frederick V had hardly presented himself at the English Court, when a deep shadow passed over the sunny prospect seemingly opening before Elizabeth, and she and her possible descendants were suddenly brought nearer to a Succession undreamt of by her for them. In November, 1612, Henry Prince of Wales, whose heart was entirely with his sister’s in her Protestant preferences as in other matters, died suddenly of typhoid fever, though, in accordance with the evil fashion of the age, credulous or clamorous Protestants, perhaps not quite inexcusably, attributed his death to poison. At the Court of James and Anne, or in its vicinity, for which the Princess had since 1608 exchanged the retirement of Combe Abbey, she had continued to carry on her studies, which were specially directed to the French and Italian tongues and to the art of music, while the general guidance of Lord and Lady Harington still continued to sustain the serious impulses that contended with the frivolous in her receptive and responsive nature. As a matter of course, the brother and sister, who dearly loved one another, were companions in the elaborate entertainments that absorbed so large a share of their royal parents’ attention, and in the field-sports by which the masques and tilts were diversified, and in which Elizabeth long retained an eager interest. There is some evidence that she also shared the higher aspirations discernible in the many-sided 23and ambitious activity of the brother who was taken so suddenly from her side.^[10] But youth and the exigencies of her position exercised their effacing powers; and thus, within little more than three months, the brother’s funeral was followed by the sister’s wedding. Indeed, while the echoes of both events are loud in the literature of the time, the same poetic voices occasionally attune themselves in turn to condolence and to congratulation. But, though the show was great that carnival week, and though besides so much of the powder as would go off for the fireworks, plenty of incense was burnt on the occasion by Chapman, Beaumont, Thomas Heywood, Campion,^[11] Francis Bacon, Taylor the Water-poet, and the rest, an undertone of doubt or apprehension was audible among the rejoicings. The bride laughed too much at the wedding, and her father yawned too soon in the course of the ensuing festivities, which he finally felt obliged 24to cut short in fear of the bill and of the House of Commons. And most ill-omened of all was the fact that among the representatives of foreign Powers bidden to the solemnity the Spanish ambassador remained away. Count Gondomar ‘was, or would be, sick.’

It was not till after Easter that the young Electress and her husband were allowed to take their departure from London, nor till the beginning of June that, after a semi-royal progress from Holland up the Rhine, they at last set foot in Heidelberg. The greater part of the Electress’ English suite, which included Francis Quarles and Nicolas Ferrar, soon afterwards left her—Lord Harington, by a pathetic fate, dying on the way at Worms, so that his wife returned home a widow. Elizabeth’s life in her new home was for many a day much what it had latterly been in her old—a round of Court festivities, banquets, and hunting-expeditions. Nor does she, after the protracted honeymoon was over, seem to have ceased to be preoccupied with the trivialities of her daily life. We may discount the report of a divine who visited her husband’s Court, that ‘she is not often heard to speak of God ... she is fond of grandeur and the precedence of rank.’ And we may excuse her for not allowing the ascendancy of the Court-preacher, Abraham Scultetus, to dominate her thoughts and conduct, in spite of the potent authority exercised by this divine, afterwards 25one of the most vigorous of the anti-Remonstrants at Dort (where he had the satisfaction of seeing that Heidelberg Catechism, which Sophia was so ruefully to remember as the religious pabulum of her youth, adopted as the symbol of the Dutch Church). At Heidelberg she had her own English Chaplain.^[12] For the rest, it seems to have been the use of her horse and gun which, on the occasion of the death of her firstborn child, assuaged the first sharp sorrow of her married life. While the high state kept by King James’ daughter—with her army of ladies-in-waiting, chamberlains, chaplains, and the rest—could not fail to heighten the splendour and swell the outlay of the Palatine Court, her influence must have helped to soften and refine its tone, though in neither respect was the ground unprepared. It may safely be ascribed to Elizabeth and to her bringing-up that the place of German was taken by French as the Court tongue at Heidelberg. Her husband, whose favourite extravagance was that of building, was much engaged at this time in perfecting the Castle gardens in the most approved 26French style, and in adding a new ‘English wing’ to the Electoral residence itself. On January 1st, 1617, she gave birth to her eldest son, and half the Protestant Powers of Europe were represented round the baptismal font. The fortunes of the family had sunk low, when, fifteen years later, this Prince—Henry Frederick—was, in his unhappy father’s sight, drowned off Haarlem. On December 22nd, 1617, another son was born to the Electoral couple, Charles Lewis, afterwards Elector Palatine; and on December 26th, 1618, followed the birth of their eldest daughter, Elizabeth.

There were, however, certain drawbacks to the perfect contentment of Elizabeth in the ‘merry’ Heidelberg days, which readily revealed themselves to the eye of the sympathising observer. Even at a distance she dwelt as it were in the shadow of the paternal throne; and the pride of her father, to which her own seems to have very readily responded, obliged her to assert extravagant claims in matters of precedence. As to these pretensions full information is furnished by the communicative pen of Sir Henry Wotton, who in April, 1616, when on his way to Turin and Venice, spent six days in the Electoral Court at Heidelberg. He had some public business of moment to transact with the Elector, to whom he submitted a plan for a league with Savoy, which Frederick approved and promised to lay before the Princes of the Union. But it was his chief duty 27to give some account to the King of the Court of Heidelberg, and of the treatment there extended to the King’s daughter in those matters which her father had so much at heart. Sir Henry Wotton, whose deep admiration for Elizabeth, expressed in undying verse, has indissolubly linked his name with her own, addressed himself to his task with even more than his usual diligence. He describes the Electoral Court as one ‘of great sobriety,’ and very well attended. The Elector he found ‘par boutades merry, but for the most part cogitative, or, as they here call it, melancolique; his chiefest object was money, and his principal delight architecture.’ The Electress, although already at that time ‘the mother of one of the sweetest children,’ still retained ‘her former virginal verdure in her complexion and features.’ Very manifestly, though the ambassador approaches the subject with many courtly involutions, things had not at first, and did not even now, run quite smoothly between the Elector and his consort. At first, some trouble was caused by the ‘emulation’ of servants—in other words, rubs between the English and the German members of the Court; and now there remained the cardinal difficulty about ‘placing her Highness.’ The claim which James I had set up before his daughter’s departure from England, and which Frederick had then promised to allow, that she should have precedence in her husband’s and other 28non-royal Courts, had proved one which Frederick found it impossible in practice to reconcile with self-respect; and Wotton hardly bettered the situation by trying to prove too much.^[13] The problem was ultimately settled in no very satisfactory fashion; the Electoral pair decided to pay no further visits to other Courts; and Louisa Juliana, the Electress Dowager, whom Elizabeth had expected to give her the pas, withdrew for some time from her son’s Court.

Wotton had judiciously recommended the Elector to state his case to the King through a nobleman particularly valued by the Electress—Hans Meinhard von Schönberg (Schombergh), Marshal of the Palatinate. Schönberg had, in March, 1615, married Anne Sutton, daughter of Lord Dudley, a favourite lady-in-waiting of Elizabeth, with whom she had remained after Lady Harington’s departure; but she had been taken from him by death in the following December. Schönberg’s advice, the Electress informed Wotton, had been of the utmost value to her, ‘though by divers provocations and offences, of the greatest part for her sake, he had been moved and had himself resolved to be gone.’ (He was now serving as a colonel under Maurice of Nassau.) She also spoke with gratitude of the attentions of Frau von Pless 29(who had been her husband’s governess), though she desiderated the company of another English lady of Anne Sutton’s age. With the services of the English secretary, Albertus Morton (Wotton’s nephew), whom her father had sent to her, Elizabeth was well content.

We must conclude from this report that the English-born Electress had to bear at Heidelberg some of the unpopularity incurred by her countrymen who, in search of amusement or employment, swelled her Court without being attached to it; and that she had also to suffer from the consequences of a self-consciousness fostered by her father. It is further clear that, in one way or another, she came at this early period of her career to be oppressed by a burden of debt which it was not easy, with or without good advice, to shake off. Perhaps these features of her life as Electress Palatine should be called to mind, before the customary version of her conduct at the crisis of her consort’s destinies and her own is unhesitatingly followed. In 1619, the great opportunity for which the Palatine diplomatists had been so long scheming arrived at last. It has been seen that the idea of the Bohemian Crown had been present to them for some time; probably, the first suggestion of it arose in the course of the negotiations carried on by the Palatine Government in 1605-7, the chief advocate of the notion being Lösenius, while it was actively supported by Christian 30of Anhalt.^[14] But, though the chance of carrying it into execution was now before the Palatines, it found them and their allies, great and small, unprepared. They had not succeeded in turning to account the strong feeling which prevailed in many quarters against the choice as Emperor of the Archduke Ferdinand of Styria, the destined head of the House of Austria, and the formally acknowledged successor to the Bohemian and Hungarian thrones. They had dallied with idle thoughts of the King of France and the Duke of Lorraine, and had then concentrated their efforts upon the paradoxical device of securing as a candidate the head of the Catholic branch of the House of Wittelsbach, Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, who was also the head of the Catholic League. But Maximilian, though by the tradition of his House jealous of Habsburg, better knew his own mind and his own interests. Thus, when (in March, 1619) the Emperor Matthias passed away, the Elector Palatine wasted the little time remaining in protests; and, when the day of election arrived (August 28), after some empty words accepted the predetermined vote in favour of Ferdinand of Styria. The pupil of the Jesuits was seated on the Imperial throne; but, on the very evening when this defeat of the Palatine policy was proclaimed at Frankfort, the news arrived that 31it had scored a victory at Prague. Here, only a year previously (1618), the troubles between the government and the Utraquists had come to an outbreak, and on the Hradschin had been perpetrated the defenestration (ejection through the window) of certain Ministers of the Crown, which it is usual to regard as the opening of the Thirty Years’ War. Quite unable to establish his authority in Bohemia, Ferdinand had been actually menaced in his palace at Vienna by the Utraquist chiefs, with an army at their back. And now it was announced that, after deposing Ferdinand, the Bohemian Estates had elected Frederick V Elector Palatine King of Bohemia in his stead.

‘Thou hast it now.’ After a few diplomatic operations by Achatius von Dohna, the Elector Palatine had only to stretch his hand from Amberg across the Bohemian frontier, and a great historic throne was his,^[15] with its large territorial dependencies, and with a second electoral vote ensuring the majority in the College to the Protestant interest. He was Calvinist enough in his habits of mind to be able afterwards to declare conscientiously that, in accepting this Crown, he obeyed an inner voice, which he thought spoke the will of God. And, certainly, there was no pressure of advice to urge him in this direction. His Council, setting 32forth the pros and cons in the argumentative fashion of the day, could only find six reasons in favour of acceptance to balance fourteen against; and the gist of their opinion was after all that everything depended on the support the Elector would receive in a forward policy. But at most of the friendly Courts opinion was found to be adverse; and while Maurice of Orange and others eagerly advised acceptance, Maximilian of Bavaria with honourable candour raised a clear voice of warning. As for Frederick’s father-in-law King James, he was not at present prepared to depart from his masterly attitude of declining to pronounce against acceptance, while desiring not to be supposed to have advised in favour of it. Whether or not a strong protest from James before Frederick’s formal acceptance of the Crown might have arrested that final step, no such protest was made.

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 33meat 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. 34Early 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 35iconoclastic 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.

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, 36if 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, 37though 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.

From Prague Frederick and Elizabeth first made their way into Silesia, then still a dependency of Bohemia; but soon Frederick, though, owing 38to 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 39courtesies. 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.

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 41the 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, 42solely 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] 43Elizabeth’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.

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 44intimate 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 45into much personal contact with her before 1628.

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, 46which 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 47during 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 48concluding 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.

49Yet, 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 50these 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]

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 51the 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 52thing of the past, though to the end Elizabeth retained the royal title.^[26]

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 53in 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 54for 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 55to 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, 56his 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 57Sophia 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.’

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 58correspondence 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] 59Nor 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.

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 60by 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 61more 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 62leaders.^[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]

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 63same 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.’ 64But 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, 65they 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]

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 66and 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.

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 67Palatine,’ 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 68was 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] 69With 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.

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; 70the 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 71IV 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 herher 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, 72Princess 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 73thinker 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.

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 74handiwork 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 75that 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 76not 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 77he 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; 78and 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.

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 79in 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 80struggle. 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 81henceforth 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 82lords 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 83in 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.

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 84humiliation; 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 85open 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 86of 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.

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 88of 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.

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 89should 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 90from 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 91only 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 92an 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.

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 93own 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 94there 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 95dollars 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 96time 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]

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, 97whose 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 98be 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 99judge 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.

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 100beauty 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 101him 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 102invalid. 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.

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 103whom 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.

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 104which, 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 105occasional 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 106appearance 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 107this 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 108is 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.

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 109ill-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 110thought 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 111love 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, 112though ‘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 113in 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.

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 114sent her blessing in due course, with congratulatory letters from King Charles, in English to the bride, and in Latin to the bridegroom.^[51]

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 115afterwards 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, 116Henrietta 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 117Electoral 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 118about 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.

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 119foundation 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 120shown 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 121the 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]

122The 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, 123the following reminiscence of ‘the late Princess Elizabeth of the Rhine’:—

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 124she had chosen; of her humility towards the humblest; and he concludes:

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 125with 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]

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 126Court 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 127been 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 128own 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 129of 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, 130shone 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 131mother’s surviving children left without mention in her will.

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 132her 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. 133Beneath 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 134pictures 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.

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 135harmlessly; 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 136Louisa 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 137children.’^[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, 138showed 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]

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 139was 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 140York; 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 TowerTower 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 141observe 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 142that 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.

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 144each 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 145they 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 146the 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 147order 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 148and 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 149laid 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 150sister-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 151old-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 152his 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 153personal 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.

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 154of 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, 155already 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.

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 156between 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 157settlement 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 158of 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 159Bishopess’; 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. 160The 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 161of 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 162attempt 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.

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, 163turned 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.

164We 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 165Court, 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, 166should 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.

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 167Frederick (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 168any 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 169an 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, 170and 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.

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 171point, 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 172the 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 173his 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 174his 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 175Palatine’ (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 176prepared 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 177been 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.’

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 178France 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 179disappointment 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 180references 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.

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. 181Indeed, 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 182phenomenon, 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, 183apprehensive 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 184will 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 185by 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 186and 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 187seemed 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. 188The 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-devantci-devant lover was destined to be put to the proof.^[78]

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 189actually 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 190of 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 191indication 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 192a 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 193afterwards 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 194sister-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.

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 195Dorothea 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 196not very serious, and rather suggest a spoilt child in the company of an unsympathetic but by no means stony-hearted relative.

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 197of 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 198conduct 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 199Gobelin 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 200took 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.

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 201calculation 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 202Augustus 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 203in 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 204whom 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]

205Sophia’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 206undertook 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 207Osnabrück, and Ernest Augustus, as Sir Henry Wotton might have written, ‘liked it not, and died,’ little more than a year later (August 14th, 1728).

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.’ 208The 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.

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 210welcoming 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 211series 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 212King 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 213and 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.

214But, 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 215was 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 216a 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 217Succession 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 218of 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 219‘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 220they 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.

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 221contingent 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 222close 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 223quite 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]

224A 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 225Brunswick-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] 226Of 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.

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 227was 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, 228by 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 229highest 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.

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 230to 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 231whom 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, 232Bamberg, 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 233in 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 234future 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.

But, before this act of authority on the part of the Emperor could command the assent of the Estates of the Empire which he required in order to proceed to the investiture, much remained to be done at Vienna, where Grote was active in person during the latter half of the year; at Dresden, where Jobst von Ilten, another specially trusted servant of the Hanoverian dynasty, successfully exerted himself; and elsewhere. In the midst of these difficulties, the Duchess of Orleans wrote to her aunt that she was convinced as to the source of opposition being German Princes rather than France. As a matter of fact, not only the political but the religious interests were agitated with which the House of Hanover had been, or might hereafter be, in conflict; and Grote was informed that both the King of Denmark (Christian V) and the Pope (Innocent XII) were adverse to the desired investiture. The good offices of Brandenburg were, however, freely exerted in its favour, and the Elector Frederick III’s envoy at Ratisbon, von Metternich, was instructed to tranquillise the Catholic Electors by undertaking that, in the event of the dying-out 235of the Bavarian and Palatine lines, the establishment of a new Catholic Electorate should be promoted by Brandenburg, Saxony, and Hanover. Thus, by the middle of October, 1692, a majority of the Electors had been secured for the investiture, and it was possible to ignore the violent opposition of Duke Antony Ulric of Wolfenbüttel, who, as Elizabeth Charlotte had hinted, was irreconcilable on this subject, and was calling out troops as if the world were out of joint.^[99] On December 10th following, the investiture took place at Vienna, and Grote received the coveted Electoral hat for his master. Ernest Augustus and Sophia were at Berlin on a visit to their daughter when the good news reached them; a series of brilliant festivities ensued as a matter of course, since Frederick III was always glad of a reason for display; and, two days before Christmas, a defensive alliance for three years was concluded between the two Electors, to be followed a month later by an ‘everlasting league.’ This alliance, to whatever other results it might or might not lead, unmistakably signified the recognition of an important success gained for the ‘Evangelical’ 236cause in Germany. Brandenburg, which was so soon to merge in the Prussian Kingdom, and Hanover, whose heir was not long afterwards to mount the English throne, would, if they held together, suffice to defy any religious reaction in the Empire, and likewise be able to resist any attempt in any quarter at asserting a political domination.

Neither, however, had Grote’s labours as yet come to an end—though they were a few months afterwards cut short by his death—nor were the aspirations of the House of Hanover within the Empire satisfied by the Electoral investiture of December, 1692. Brandenburg, Saxony, and most of the other German courts recognised the new Elector; but the question of his introduction into the Electoral College, which implied his admission as Elector to his due share in the administration of the affairs of the Empire—the question quo modo—had still to be settled. The progress of its solution was delayed by a persistent opposition, of which the guiding spirit was once more Duke Antony Ulric of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, and which included the King of Denmark as Duke of Holstein, the Dukes of Mecklenburg, and a number of other princes, both temporal and spiritual, in the north and west of the Empire. In 1693, these formed an association which designated itself as that of the Princes ‘corresponding’ against a Ninth Electorate, 237thus, as was justly observed to the Emperor by the Elector of Brandenburg, who continued loyally to support the demand of his father-in-law, lowering the Imperial authority by ‘maintaining’ a resistance against a decision already announced by it. The Elector of Saxony, John George IV, had been likewise well disposed to the Hanoverian promotion; but, in 1694, he had been succeeded by his brother Frederick Augustus (Augustus the Strong, the lover of Aurora von Königsmarck), whom, as will be seen in a different connexion, private as well as public motives had estranged from the Hanoverian Court; and thus a fresh obstacle had been put in the way of the admission of Ernest Augustus into the College of Electors. The virulence of Antony Ulric’s jealous hatred, which, as we shall also see, was to find in the Königsmarck catastrophe of 1694 and its antecedents a most tempting opportunity for damaging the reputation of the Hanoverian family, suggested to him what the Hanoverian diplomatist Ilten termed a ‘projet d’alliance diabolique.’ Frederick Augustus was to be gained over to the association of ‘Corresponding’ Princes by a surrender to Saxony of the Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel claims to part of the Duchy of Lauenburg, and he was to cooperate with Denmark in dispossessing Hanover and Celle, who had occupied other parts of the duchy claimed by them. Ernest Augustus had to appeal to King William III to put a stop to 238manœuvres which threatened seriously to affect the general peace of Europe.

Although the machinations of Antony Ulric were thus frustrated, he succeeded in depriving his hitherto so fortunate kinsman, Ernest Augustus, of the satisfaction of attaining in person to the consummation of his chief dynastic ambition. Soon after the death of Ernest Augustus, in January, 1698, the insensate jealousy of Antony Ulric led him to make, with fresh assistance, an armed attack upon Hanover, which amounted to an act of hostility against the Empire, committed at a critical season in the affairs of Europe. The defeat of this attempt by the energetic action of the Elector George Lewis broke down the opposition of Antony Ulric in the matter of the Ninth Electorate (1702); and soon afterwards he acknowledged the Electoral dignity and the precedence of the Hanoverian Elector at the Diet (1703). Previously to these occurrences, the exertions of Frederick III of Brandenburg had succeeded in inducing the three Spiritual Electors to abandon their resistance to the new Protestant Electorate (1699); but the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession had thereupon caused further delays. Thus it was not till 1707 that the positive assent of all the Electors was secured, nor till September 7th, 1708, sixteen years after the investiture at Vienna, that the Hanoverian envoy, von Limbach, 239at last took his seat in the Electoral College at Ratisbon.

The marriage between Sophia Dorothea of Celle and her cousin George Lewis of Hanover, which was to end so disastrously, came as a matter of course to be represented as having been ill-omened at the outset. It is, however, impossible to trust either the account of the transactions that preceded this marriage, or that of the long train of events ending in its dissolution, to be found in a long series of versions of this pitiful story. In substance, if not in every detail, they all go back upon the parent romance compiled by Duke Antony Ulric, very probably with the aid of information furnished to him by the confidante of the unhappy heroine. An authority so signally untrustworthy is best ignored; though it would be idle to pretend that the copious stream, which has flowed through all sorts of channels from this turbid source, is likely to be wholly devoid of some admixture of truth.^[100] In 240point of fact, we cannot tell in what frame of mind Sophia Dorothea entered on her married life, or even what was her mother’s view of the match. Eleonora, beyond all doubt, tenderly loved her daughter; but Sophia Dorothea’s nature was light and frivolous, and there had not, so far as is known, been anything in her life to incline her to resistance. The views of the Duchess Sophia on the subject of her eldest son’s marriage it may seem easy to guess. But, though she had execrated the d’Olbreuze connexion in all its earlier stages, and though she seems at no time to have pretended to anything like affection for Eleonora’s daughter, we may take it for granted that, so soon as the marriage-project had been formally adopted as a matter of court and state policy, the Duchess completely acquiesced in it. And, indeed, no doubt could exist as to the advantages of the arrangement, whether from the point of view of the political future of the dynasty, or from that of the present resources of the House. The marriage-contract 241gave to the Hereditary Prince the free use of his wife’s income, though it secured her fortune—which was certain to be a very large one—to herself in the event of her husband’s decease preceding her own. It was only at a later date, when a dissolution of her marriage seemed desirable to Sophia Dorothea, that she complained of the terms of this settlement. The great wealth of the bride might well be held to cover whatever minor disabilities might result to the possible issue of the marriage from the imperfection of her own descent.

Nothing, it may be added, could be more improbable than that either George Lewis or his mother should have been at the pains of considering how far Sophia Dorothea’s character and disposition were suited to his own, or whether she would find any difficulty in accommodating herself to his way of life. The Duchess Sophia had learnt by long experience to bear with the open faithlessness of her husband, and with his frank neglect of herself, without forfeiting the influence which her intelligence had long assured to her over him and his affairs. How should she, with her shrewd apprehension of the ways of the world, have supposed that the same lesson would not be learnt by her new daughter-in-law? And it may at once be stated that there is no indication of George Lewis having during the early years of his married life kept up any relation that would have been unbearable 242to his young wife. If there was any truth in the rumour that he had been on terms of intimacy with Countess Platen’s younger sister, Frau von dem Bussche (née Marie von Meysenbug), the relation must have been broken off before his marriage, as indeed a further circumstantial piece of scandal asserted. She appears to have been a very pretty person, with plenty of admirers; and she is said to have set the fashion of ‘drinking tobacco’ among the ladies at Hanover.^[101] For the rest, although George I was at no time in his life in the habit of seeking personal praise, and in truth cannot be said to have received an overflowing measure of it either from contemporaries or from posterity, yet he was not without qualities sure to impress themselves on anyone brought into close contact with him. His unflinching courage and military capacity were generally known; and it may further be averred in his honour, that he was never found false to his word, and that he was unswervingly true to any attachment once formed by him. His manners may, in his younger days in particular, have had a smack of the camp, and they must at all times have given proof of the reserve which was part of his nature, and which bad and good fortune combined to harden into the stolidity of his later years. That he made no pretence to intellectual tastes (though he quarrelled with his illustrious 243historiographer’s unpunctuality in fulfilling his engagement to digest the ancient records of the House of Guelf) may have disappointed his mother, but could hardly perturb Sophia Dorothea, who came of no lettered stock. In general, she might well have been thought likely to suit her own fluid temperament to a character cast in a stronger and sterner mould. The portraits which remain of her show her to have been graceful and pleasing beyond the common, and this impression is confirmed by notices of her personality dating from the early years of her married life. Perhaps there may be perceptible in certain of her portraits (one of which reminded the ingenious Wraxall of Sterne’s Eliza) a sentimentality of the superficial kind; but nothing could be more cruelly unfair than to draw from these likenesses conclusions as to her levity of disposition. On the other hand, the Duchess Sophia may be thought a prejudiced witness, when, in 1684 and 1685, she is found expressing distrust of both the smiles and the tears of her daughter-in-law, and setting her down as an unsatisfactory example for Sophia Charlotte, the apple of her mother’s eye; in truth, however, the Duchess’ strictures cannot, in this instance, be said to be very serious. The bad maternal bringing up of Sophia Dorothea, on which the same censor’s faithful echo, the Duchess of Orleans, was afterwards fain to dwell as the original cause of the 244Princess’ misfortunes, has been waived aside as a mere invention of spite; yet it should not be forgotten that both Sophia and her niece were, in their girlhood, carefully and even rigidly educated, and that to this training the unfaltering rectitude that marked the conduct of both is, in no small measure, attributable. At the same time, it is equally obvious that the kindly guidance by which the most perfect system of moral discipline needs at times to be supplemented, or by which the absence of such discipline may be in part redeemed, was wanting to Sophia Dorothea at Hanover. While there can be no reason for gainsaying this, and while it must be allowed to have been natural enough that those who had hated the mother should have treated the misconduct of the daughter as what might have been expected almost as a matter of course, yet the attempt to throw upon the Electress Sophia the responsibility of the catastrophe which we are about to narrate may be at once denounced as inherently absurd. Whether or not George Lewis cruelly ill-treated his wife—and there is no trustworthy evidence to support any such supposition—the assumption is altogether unwarranted that either in his bearing towards her, or in any other important relation of his life, he allowed himself to be influenced by his mother.^[102] Least of all was he likely to be 245amenable to her counsel at a stage of his career when he must have known her to be at heart adverse to his interest in the matter, all-important to himself, of the institution of primogeniture. And as for Sophia herself, though elaborate efforts have been made to represent her as morally guilty of her daughter-in-law’s ruin, there is not a tittle of evidence to support a conjecture in itself utterly improbable. For her frankness and sincerity are never found belying themselves; and intrigue of all kinds, as both her public and her private conduct show, was wholly foreign to her nature. Moreover, though, as will be noted, no letters from her hand referring to the crisis in Sophia Dorothea’s affairs have been allowed to survive, the general tone of her correspondence during these eventful years is one of a serenity of mind unbroken, except by her grief for her losses as a mother.

At first, things seem to have gone well with Sophia Dorothea at Hanover. The Hereditary Prince (for he was, of course, not styled the Electoral Prince till 1682) continued the military career which best corresponded both to his aspirations and to his habits—serving during a series of campaigns in the Imperial army, and taking no part in the home government till, about 1694, his father’s health 246began to give way. Doubtless George Lewis’ long and repeated absences must have contributed to keep him estranged from the Princess, and, as already observed, there were at Hanover no members of the ducal family or court likely to aim at endearing themselves to her. The star of Countess Platen, mistress en titre, remained steadily in the ascendant, and her villa of Monplaisir, in the immediate neighbourhood of the capital, became the centre of its fashionable dissipations. Her sister, Frau von dem Bussche, was likewise still to the front (she took part in Ernest Augustus’ farewell expedition of pleasure to Italy, to be noticed immediately); but, whether or not she had formerly been a recipient of the Hereditary Prince’s favours, they do not appear to have continued to be bestowed upon her either under her present name, or when, after her husband’s death (at Landen), she bestowed her hand upon another gallant officer, General von Weyhe.^[103] When the exigencies of etiquette did not require her 247presence at the interminable court dinners and suppers, or at the operas in the new theatre, in which the heart of Ernest Augustus delighted, Sophia Dorothea may be concluded to have led a life as solitary as it was dull in her apartments in the Leine Palace at Hanover.^[104] The favourite companion of her long hours of idleness was her lady-in-waiting, Fräulein Eleonora von dem Knesebeck, who had come with her from Celle, and whose devotion, self-sacrificing though by no means blind, was to involve her in the consequences of her mistress’ aberrations.

In October, 1683, the Hereditary Princess gave birth to a son, who was named George Augustus, in honour of his father and grandfather respectively, and who was nearly half a century later to ascend the throne of Great Britain and Ireland as King George II. We may feel assured that an event so auspicious for the future of the dynasty, and so speedily fulfilling the hopes with which the marriage had been brought about, specially commended her to the favour of her father-in-law; and, that this favour continued, is shown by his consideration for her some two years afterwards. In 1684, Duke Ernest Augustus had undertaken his last journey to the beloved land of Italy, being accompanied on it 248by an oddly composed company consisting, among others, of Count Platen and Major-General von dem Bussche and their wives. During this visit the Duchess remained behind, professedly à son grand regret, and Prince George Lewis was, for part of the time, engaged in one of his Hungarian campaigns against the Turks. But his Princess, at the particular request of her father-in-law, joined the ducal party at Venice, arriving there just before the opening of the carnival of 1686. ‘I am delighted to hear,’ writes the Duchess Sophia from Hanover in January, ‘that my daughter-in-law and her following are in good condition.’ Sophia Dorothea then accompanied the Duke for the Holy Week to Rome, where their sojourn cost the cruel sum of twenty thousand dollars; but, though her husband had by this time finished his campaign, ceremonial difficulties (which one would have thought would have affected the father as much as the son) prevented him from coming to the papal city, and he amused himself with a trip to Florence and Naples on his own account. All these things are told without so much as a suggestion of untowardness; nor was it till long afterwards that a scandal, promptly credited by the Duchess of Orleans, declared Sophia Dorothea to have consoled herself for her husband’s absence by an amour carried on at Rome with a French marquis of the name of de Lassaye. But the story in question rests entirely 249on the braggadocio to which this squire of dames treated the Duchess, and on the still more doubtful evidence of certain compromising letters purporting to have been addressed by him to Sophia Dorothea when at Rome, and printed by him in his old age—as late as 1738. Thus the shame of this denunciation lies entirely with its cowardly author.

There seems, however, little doubt but that, after her return from Italy, Sophia Dorothea became further estranged from her husband. To this date would have to be assigned, were it otherwise worth noticing, the attraction said by the Duchess of Orleans to have been exercised by Sophia Dorothea upon the Raugrave Charles Lewis, one of the family of nephews and nieces ‘by the left hand’ to whom the Duchess Sophia extended so benevolent and almost maternal a protection. According to the same authority, it was to escape the wiles of the light-hearted Princess that the Raugrave took service against the Turks in the Morea, where he met with his death in 1688; but there was very probably more malice than truth in the story. In March, 1687, Sophia Dorothea gave birth to a second child, the daughter who was named after her, and who, as the wife of King Frederick William I of Prussia, was to become the mother of Frederick the Great and of his brother Augustus William, the direct ancestor of the subsequent Kings of Prussia and of the German Emperors of our own times. It 250cannot have been till after this event that George Lewis, who seems to have remained nearer home after his campaign in 1685, began to follow his father’s example and give publicity to his preference of other attractions to those of his wife. But much uncertainty exists as to the date at which this infidelity began, and as to the extent to which it was carried. It has been widely assumed, and is constantly repeated, that Countess Platen sought to maintain the family influence over the Hereditary Prince, after he had tired of her sister, through her daughter; but this assumption, which, because of its revolting character, was carefully kept alive and cherished by the detractors of George I and his dynasty, must be dismissed as baseless. This celebrated lady, who, like the Duchess Sophia’s own daughter, had been christened Sophia Charlotte, in 1701 became the wife of Baron von Kielmannsegg, a nobleman of honourable reputation, who had for some years been attached to the Hanoverian Court. Here the pair lived in unbroken union and enjoyed a distinguished position; their villa of Fantaisie on the avenue to Herrenhausen being regarded as a favourite resort of foreign visitors to Hanover. They afterwards followed King George I to England, where, after the resignation of the Duke of Somerset, the high household office of Master of the Horse was left vacant, in order that its duties might be performed by the 251Hanoverian Oberstallmeister, while his wife was created Countess of Leinster in the Irish and afterwards Countess of Darlington in the English peerage. Neither at Hanover nor in England had George I ever made any secret of the nature of the tie which he believed to exist between her and himself; he had consistently treated her as his half-sister, giving her at the Electoral Court precedence over the Raugraves and Raugravines, and, in the patent that conferred an Irish peerage upon her, causing her to be designated consanguinea nostra. So simple an explanation of the honour in which she continued to be held till her death in 1727 was of course insufficient for Jacobite spite, for anti-German prejudice, and for the love of scandal on its own account. On the other hand, the only personage whom, either before or after he mounted the English throne, George publicly recognised as mistress, was also the only lady at the Hanoverian Court who seems in the days of his married life to have exercised a strong fascination over him. Yet Melusina von der Schulenburg (afterwards Duchess of Kendal)^[105] appears at this time to have refrained from thrusting herself into notice; and this agrees with the indications of refinement which it is 252impossible to ignore in the portrait remaining of her in the period of her youth.

Thus, then, scarcely anything is ascertainable as to the beginnings and rise of the general sense of unhappiness which is known to have come over Sophia Dorothea during her life at Hanover, and to which—some time in 1692 or later—she gave naïve expression by the avowal, afterwards, with cruel ineptness, judicially quoted against her, that she would rather be a ‘marquise in France’ than Electoral Princess of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Yet fixed antipathies of this kind are commonly of gradual growth, and it would have been difficult for a nature like Sophia Dorothea’s, craving for impulse to meet impulse, and quite incapable of renunciation, to settle down into the dull acquiescence which, with so many women, has to do duty for contentment. The restraint of a monotonous existence and the petty rules of an elaborate etiquette, imposed upon her among surroundings in which there was so much to annoy her and so little to sustain her self-respect, must in any case have made her restive and unhappy. Least of all could she have felt any inclination to take an interest in the schemes of dynastic ambition to which she knew herself to have been sacrificed—perhaps against the wish of her best friend, her mother. The anecdote that it was attempted to implicate her in the plot hatched by Prince Maximilian—Moltke, 253who was to pay the penalty of the discovered design, being offered his release, if he would charge her with a guilty knowledge,—may be dismissed as fictitious. And it may be observed, by the way, that, while there is no authority for connecting Countess Platen with the supposed offer, it could not possibly have been promoted by the Duchess Sophia, whose sympathies were on the side of Maximilian’s revolt against the principle of primogeniture. Sophia Dorothea was, no doubt, on pleasant terms with her high-spirited but flighty brother-in-law Maximilian, who, indeed, unmistakably oppressed her with his attentions; but it is quite clear that, in no sense of the word, can there have been anything ‘serious’ between them. We do not know how Sophia Dorothea was affected by the rise in the family dignity which procured for her the title of Electoral Princess. But, in regard to a question of still greater importance for the future of the House, we have it on excellent authority that she took a line opposite to that adopted by her husband. Sir William Dutton Colt, who, as was seen, had entered upon his duties as English Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary at Hanover in 1689, while describing the Duchess Sophia as an incomparable person, full of charming wit, kindness, and civility, and speaking of the ‘Princess of Hanover’ (Sophia Dorothea), for whom and her infant son, he says, 254Duke Ernest Augustus showed great fondness, as beautiful, accomplished, and agreeable, notes (in 1691) that the Princess was distinctly anti-English in her sympathies. Her partiality for France might have found a sufficient explanation in her descent, and in the associations so long cherished by her mother at Celle; but Sir William Colt assigns another reason that cannot be overlooked. The eldest son (George Lewis), the envoy reported, was not in the least French in his inclinations; and the French party, discontented with this, paid all the court imaginable to the Princess—‘and I fear not without success, for she has no great fondness for the Prince.’

It is, therefore, clear that, by this time (1691), Sophia Dorothea’s feelings towards her husband had passed into a condition of more or less active antipathy. And there can no longer be any pretence of doubt that, whether or not the indifference of her husband towards herself had hardened into positive unkindness, and whether or not this unkindness (as there is absolutely nothing to prove) had shown itself in actual ill-treatment, Sophia Dorothea was already under the influence of a growing passion for another man. The story of the guilty loves of Sophia Dorothea and Königsmarck need not be related at length here, since large portions of their correspondence are generally accessible, at least in a translation from the French originals, while a supplementary part is for the first 255time (with the exception of two letters which have appeared elsewhere) printed in an Appendix to the present book. The evidence for the genuineness of this correspondence, in so far as the greater part of it is concerned, which covers 679 pages, and is now extant in the University Library at Lund, was practically irresistible as it stood, and is confirmed beyond the last shadow of doubt by the letters in the Royal Secret Archives of State at Berlin, which cover 65 pages, and which are seen at the first glance to belong to the same correspondence. They agree in the handwritings, and in the use of the same cipher, as well as in all the distinctive features of style; they refer to numerous details mentioned in the Lund letters; and to some of these certain of the Berlin documents stand in the relation of supplements or answers. It is said—but on no stated authority—that to these letters might be added others, of contents unknown, in the possession of the present head of the House of Hanover. No part of Count Königsmarck’s correspondence with the Princess Sophia Dorothea remains in the possession of the present representative of his family. As for the Lund documents, their history can be satisfactorily traced up to the direct descendants of Countess Lewenhaupt, the elder sister of Count Philip Christopher von Königsmarck. The younger sister, the famous Countess Aurora, as will be seen, actively intervened in the transactions that followed on its 256discovery, at a time when both the sisters were residing at Hamburg. It must be supposed that Aurora at some time transferred the letters from her custody into that of her elder sister; how they came into her own, must remain matter of conjecture, though it is a not unnatural supposition that they were entrusted to her by the recipients. On the other hand, the evidence of handwriting obtained by a comparison of these documents with others of incontestable genuineness, from the hands of Sophia Dorothea and Königsmarck respectively, is entirely satisfactory—though this part of the subject is complicated by the fact (for as such it may be set down) that the Princess possessed the art of writing in two different hands, while portions of her part of the love correspondence were dictated by her to her confidante. (Königsmarck wrote his own love-letters; but his official letters at Hanover are, except the signatures, probably in the handwriting of his private secretary.) But it is the internal evidence contained in the documents themselves, in face of which the refusal to accept them, though maintained by at least one historian of high eminence to whom this period of Brunswick-Lüneburg history and this particular episode were familiar as to no other among his contemporaries, must be said to have broken down. The internal evidence in the present case consists mainly of a number of coincidences of circumstance and date, such as it is 257impossible to ascribe either to chance or to design, that have been proved to exist between incidental statements in these letters and in contemporary documents of unimpeachable authenticity. The most important of these are the letters and contemporary despatches of Sir William Dutton Colt, the envoy to the Courts of Hanover and Celle mentioned above, now preserved in our Record Office, and extending over the period from July, 1689, to December, 1692. (To these have, at all events, to be added passages in the correspondence of the Electress Sophia, and isolated statements as to the campaign in the Netherlands and the battle of Steenkirke in particular, in a military list cited by Havemann, and in a contemporary account of the battle in the Theatrum Europæum.) The credit of placing this investigation on lines which could not but lead up to an irrefutable issue belongs to the late Mrs. Everett Green, for whom a careful second transcript had been made of the letters of which a first, incomplete, transcript had been presented to her by the late Count Albert von der Schulenburg-Klosterrode. The second, complete, copy, carefully digested and arranged, was placed by Mrs. Green in the British Museum, after she had, for prudential reasons, abandoned the idea of embodying it in a published work. This task was accomplished by the late Mr. W. H. Wilkins, in his own way, in a book afterwards republished in a new and revised 258edition; but he did not live to carry out his contingent design of some day ‘translating the whole correspondence at Lund, at Berlin, and at Gmünden, and arranging it in chronological order with the aid of first-hand documentary evidence drawn from other sources.’ The corroboration of the genuineness and authenticity of the Lund documents furnished by those now printed from the originals in the Berlin Archives is, as observed, complete, and all the more convincing, inasmuch as they must have been separated from the rest at a very early date. It is stated in the Register of the Archives of State at Berlin that they were found among the papers of Frederick the Great at Sans Souci after his death; and the superscription which they bear (‘Lettres d’Amour de la Duchesse D’allen au Comte Konigsmarc’) is in the King’s own handwriting. How they came into his possession must remain a matter of conjecture, which will be more appropriately discussed elsewhere. It should perhaps be added that the whole problem of the genuineness of this correspondence is of very secondary historical significance; but, apart from the human interest of the letters themselves, their whole story shows how difficult it is to find, and perhaps also how difficult it is to kill, the truth.^[106]

259Nothing indicates that Count Philip Christopher von Königsmarck, the ill-fated hero of the tragedy of Sophia Dorothea’s life, made his appearance at Hanover before the month of March, 1688, when his presence at a court fête is accidentally mentioned—just a twelvemonth after the birth of the second and last of George Lewis’ and Sophia Dorothea’s children. Königsmarck was a member of a Swedish family of high position and great wealth, which had derived lustre from the important services of Field-Marshal von Königsmarck in the latter 260part of the Thirty Years’ War, and which had, through him, acquired large estates in northern Germany. The branch of the family to which Philip Christopher belonged were citizens of the world; to set them down as adventurers argues an imperfect apprehension of the spirit of their age, and indeed of that of a great part of the following century also. Like the rest of them, Philip Christopher had seen many courts already in his youthful days; and nothing could be more probable than that he should have found his way to Celle, especially as he had a family connexion with France, such as would always have ensured him a welcome at the court of George William and Eleonora. He may thus very well have formed a boy and girl acquaintance with their daughter; but the statement said to have been afterwards made by him, that he had loved her from childhood, is insufficiently authenticated, and does not recur in any of his love-letters. He then accompanied his elder brother, Count Charles John, whose wanderings had been more widely varied than his own (and with whom he is confounded by Horace Walpole, in his careless way), on a visit to England. Here the elder brother was the principal figure in a cause célèbre, the trial of himself and others for the murder of the wealthy Thomas Thynne (‘Tom of Ten Thousand’), of which crime an elaborate representation may to this day be seen carved in relief on the victim’s 261tomb in Westminster Abbey.^[107] Fortunately for himself, Count von Königsmarck escaped the gallows, where the careers of his accomplices ended; but England was no longer an agreeable place of sojourn for the two brothers, and their travels recommenced. The elder died in the Morea in 1686; so that it was the younger who, in 1688, inherited the wealth of their uncle, on his death after a distinguished career as a commander in the service of the Venetian Republic. Thus, when Königsmarck, after visiting France and becoming acquainted with the Saxon Prince afterwards known as Augustus the Strong, King of Poland, in this same year, 1688, arrived at Hanover, he was not only a nobleman of much knowledge and experience of the world, but a personage of great wealth, and an extremely desirable acquisition for a court such as that of Hanover, where there were excellent opportunities for spending money as well as for encouraging its expenditure. On his side, Königsmarck, as the head of his migratory family, may have wished to further the settlement of his sisters; and the elder, about this time, married the Swedish Count Axel Lewenhaupt, who two years later passed into the service of the Duke of Celle. The younger, Aurora, had not as yet found at Dresden, where her brother was probably already well known, the sphere in which her 262beauty and wit, after liberally diffusing their radiance in many regions, were for a time established as supreme; at Hanover, so fixed a constellation as that of the Platen family was sure to regard this brilliant meteor with much displeasure. But Countess Platen could raise no objection to Ernest Augustus’ offer of a commission to Königsmarck; and this offer was certainly made and accepted. For he is soon found commanding a Hanoverian regiment, in frontier operations and in Flanders, and afterwards holding, in the same service, a colonelcy of dragoons.

So far we stand on solid ground; but, as to the beginnings of the intimacy between Sophia Dorothea and Königsmarck, and as to the incidents that occurred in the period before the commencement of the extant correspondence between them, we possess no trustworthy account whatever. There is no evidence even to show the authenticity of the story, which has been used with much effect in a recent poetic drama (very different in conception from that imagined by Schiller on the same theme),^[108] that Königsmarck accompanied Prince Charles Philip in the campaign in which the Duchess Sophia lost her favourite son, and that he shared the Prince’s dangers, though escaping his doom.

263At the time when the correspondence between Sophia Dorothea and Königsmarck opens—at the beginning of July, 1691—he must at any rate have been for some time back in Hanover; for he had started at the head of a regiment of foot in the ducal service on a march towards the Elbe, undertaken for the purpose of ensuring the safety of Hamburg. A few weeks later, he was himself sent to that city on a diplomatic mission for the conclusion of a treaty of alliance with Sweden,—a balancing operation on the part of Ernest Augustus, before he had made up his mind to join the Grand Alliance against France. That this charge, for which of course his Swedish descent rendered him particularly suitable, should have been given to Königsmarck, proves him to have been at this time in full favour at the Hanoverian court.

Inasmuch as, already in the earliest of his extant letters to Sophia Dorothea, Königsmarck describes himself as in extremis, though at the same time assuring her that his respect for her is as great as his love, we find the pair already on the brink of an abyss of passion, and understand why their correspondence was a clandestine one. Such, in fact, it was, from first to last, intended to be and to remain; and all the usual devices of secrecy at the command of the writers of these letters were adopted for the purpose. Of course they were all—or nearly all—written in French, the language ordinarily 264used at the Hanover as well as the Celle Court. The communications from Königsmarck, which may be said to form about two-thirds of the whole series of letters or portions of letters, are, when they bear any address at all, directed to Fräulein von dem Knesebeck, either by name or by some kind of designation under which she is evidently intended. Part of the Princess’ letters are written in a hand differing so much from that which wrote the remainder, and which a comparison with her undoubtedly genuine writing seems to identify as her own, that it may be assumed to be the hand of the confidante. In the actual composition of the letters, the writers had further agreed to guard themselves by the adoption of a twofold—or perhaps one should say threefold—system of cipher, which it needs no Œdipus to unriddle, at all events sufficiently for the purposes of detection.^[109] Under such flimsy safeguards, 265explicable in Sophia Dorothea’s case only by her youth and utter inexperience, and in Königsmarck’s by the habits of a roving life which had led him to cast himself recklessly into a whirlpool of excitement, the lovers gave full vent to their feelings of amorous and jealous passion. The voice of nature is audible in this correspondence, but it is singularly devoid of charm. Königsmarck’s tone, as could hardly but be expected, has a general tendency to coarseness, and is at times very gross, calling to mind Stepney’s description of the unfortunate man, after his catastrophe, as a loose fish whom he had long known and would always have avoided. No similar charge is to be brought against the letters of Sophia Dorothea, which are written in an easy and flowing style. But her letters, as well as Königsmarck’s, contain passages irreconcilable with any conclusion except one—that theirs was a guilty love. For the rest, there is no straining of style in the correspondence, and those who regarded it 266as fabricated might well describe it as a ‘clumsy’ forgery; for it omits to make certain points which a forger could hardly have missed. In the Lund letters, at all events, Königsmarck, except when calling up the image of the Electoral Prince George Lewis in his marital capacity, refers to him with good humour; and Sophia Dorothea gives quite a matter-of-fact account of a quarrel between her parents.

It would be unprofitable to attempt here to follow the course of this unhappy passion, of which many incidents have now been verified as to time and place, chiefly by means of the despatches of the English envoy, while the main event of its catastrophe is lost in impenetrable gloom. Königsmarck—who asserts that, had he proceeded from Hamburg to Sweden, he would have readily been admitted into the service of that monarchy, where, on account of his numerous connexions in many lands at many Courts, he might very possibly have come to play a conspicuous part—chose, instead, to return to Hanover, probably in consequence of the favourable reception accorded by the Princess to his still hesitating written advances. His letters now begin to assume a freer tone. Temporary separations inevitably ensued. He accompanies Duke Ernest Augustus to Wolfenbüttel, while she remains behind; she joins in a visit, in which he is not included, to her father at his hunting-seat at Epsdorff, or at Wienhausen; and he 267has to swear eternal fidelity in a letter signed in his blood, and to protest that he will go to the Morea (whither Ernest Augustus’ son Christian was at the time intent upon proceeding), in order to relieve her of his compromising presence. It seems to have been not long after this that Sophia Dorothea succumbed to her passion; and, early in 1692, fears were already pressing upon them of discovery—in the first instance through her mother; for Königsmarck had followed her to the Court of Celle. At last, in June, 1692, he was obliged to join the Hanoverian force under the command of Sophia Dorothea’s husband in Flanders; for Ernest Augustus, resolved on striking a bargain for the Ninth Electorate, had now openly become a member of the Grand Alliance. With the opening of the Flemish campaign (during which Königsmarck took part in the battle of Steenkirke) begins the series of the Princess’ letters, several of which are dated from Brockhausen, where Prince Maximilian had taken refuge with the Duke of Celle after his trouble at Hanover, while others are written from Wiesbaden, which later in the year she visited with her mother. Many of these letters contain details that admit of verification from Colt’s despatches. The intrigue between Sophia Dorothea and Königsmarck had now passed into a phase in which expressions of love, jealousy, and haunting apprehensions, breathlessly crowd upon one another; and, 268after the Princess had returned to Hanover, it almost seemed as if she must listen to the advice which he had sent to her from the Low Countries, and cut the knot of their difficulties by flying with him.

We here touch one of the obscurest passages in this pitiful story, and one which must here be dealt with quite briefly. It was quite impossible that Königsmarck’s devotion to the Princess before his departure to Flanders should have remained unnoticed at the Hanoverian court; and nothing could have been more appropriate than that her mother-in-law, the Duchess Sophia, who, without at all suspecting the worst, must have been seriously annoyed by what she had observed—unless we are to adopt the absurd supposition that she was pleased to see her daughter-in-law beginning to go wrong—should have lectured the Princess on her want of conduite. But Sophia Dorothea was aware that there was at court another and a less straightforward influence, which she suspected would be adverse to her—that of the Countess Platen. From what followed, there can be no doubt that the Countess had reasons for bearing Königsmarck a grudge; and it has been unhesitatingly assumed, in accordance with an unauthenticated tradition, that her motive was jealousy, and that he had formerly shared her favours. On the other hand, the Duchess of Orleans deliberately states that there is no apparentz of Countess Platen having sought to 269attract to herself so young a man, and that it is more likely that, as the Electress Sophia had been informed, the Countess cajoled Königsmarck in the hope of his marrying her daughter; ‘for he was a good match.’ This story also long found acceptance; but it does not very well suit either Königsmarck’s account of his later meeting with Countess Platen, or the jealousy of her which this account unmistakably excited in the Princess. In any case, when it occurred to Sophia Dorothea to consult the Electress Sophia Charlotte of Brandenburg on the situation—a step which at all events shows her to have been without fear of any underhand action on the part of her cousin or her mother-in-law—Sophia Charlotte counselled her to conciliate the Countess Platen; and this piece of advice was communicated by Sophia Dorothea to Königsmarck. On his return to Hanover, about November, he seems to have determined to contribute towards the appeasing of the powerful mistress; but, whether in sheer recklessness, or because he considered himself safe with the Countess, who would assuredly remain silent on the subject towards her august protector, he clearly overdid his part. After this escapade, a sort of desperate rage seems to have seized upon him, and the correspondence of the year 1692 concludes with a brutally sarcastic tirade launched against the new ‘Electoral Princess’ by her infuriated lover. It is, then, manifest that Sophia Dorothea had 270grounds for distrusting Countess Platen; but, how far the double insult offered to the Elector’s mistress by Königsmarck’s conduct is to be connected with the terrible events that followed, no evidence exists to show, and the part of evil genius assigned to the Countess in the tragedy has had to be written up with the aid of conjecture and fiction.

The last chapter of the correspondence, which extends from the early summer to the close of the year 1693 (or thereabouts), shows the fatal passion of the pair still aflame, but the clouds of danger thickening around them. In the absence of her husband during the year’s campaign in Flanders, the Electoral Princess continued to idle away her days with her parents-in-law at Luisburg, or with her own parents at Brockhausen, whither Königsmarck followed her. She took some comfort from the good humour of the Electress Sophia; though, foreseeing that, if she came to know the truth, she would show no pity, Königsmarck warned the Princess that her mother-in-law would, sooner or later, be her ruin. At Brockhausen, a nocturnal meeting between the lovers was not wholly unwatched, and the letters afterwards interchanged by them show increasing apprehension. Countess Platen herself vaguely warned the Princess as to the risk she was running—an act which it must be conceded at least admits of a kindly explanation. In her last extant letter, Sophia Dorothea utters 271what comes very near to a cry of hopeless despair. In the course of the month in which this letter was written (August, 1693) Königsmarck was obliged to absent himself from Court, in order to take part in a military movement intended to check a Danish coup de main upon the contested duchy of Lauenburg. When he returned to Hanover, fresh warnings reached him—from old Marshal von Podewils,^[110] under whom he had served, and from the youngest of the Hanoverian Princes, Ernest Augustus, whose devoted attachment to his brother, the Electoral Prince, appears not to have prevented this act of kindness. These warnings themselves, together with other indications, show that, although the actual character of the intrigue between Sophia Dorothea and Königsmarck may have remained unknown—unless indeed some letters had already fallen into the wrong hands—the liaison itself was, as is, after all, usual in such cases, more or less of an open secret, and that thus the pair were rushing headlong to their ruin. Quite at the end of the year, Königsmarck had once more to go away from Hanover; and, at this point, the Lund correspondence comes to an end with a letter from him evidently addressed to the confidante, and, through her, assuring Léonisse that, whatever might befall, he would not abandon her.

The cessation of the correspondence leaves us in 272some doubt as to the precise nature of the occurrences in Hanover in the earlier half of the year 1694, which was to see the end of this lamentable history. Königsmarck, who had returned to Hanover, quitted it again in April; and, without having resigned his Hanoverian commission, betook himself to the Court of the Elector Frederick Augustus of Saxony (Augustus the Strong) at Dresden. Here he undoubtedly behaved with an indiscretion beyond that habitual to him, and it is probable enough—though this again cannot be proved—that his vaunts included some reference to his successes with Countess Platen. However this may have been, Königsmarck, though he had not accepted a commission offered him in the Saxon army and still remained a Hanoverian officer, could hardly expect on his return to Hanover to carry on his amour as before. There had been indications of an uneasy feeling at Court, which explain themselves without the supposition that a combination was at work there to drive Sophia Dorothea to her ruin, and without the wholly gratuitous assumption that, in the front of that combination, stood the Electress Sophia. Attempts were afterwards said to have been made to provoke ill-will between the Electoral Prince and his wife through the agency of her lady-in-waiting, Fräulein von dem Knesebeck; and, though there is no reason for suspecting her of any interference of the kind, it is certain that, about 273the early part of June, Sophia Dorothea left the Electoral Court and repaired to her parents at Brockhausen. Once more, there is nothing to show that her departure had been caused by actual ill-treatment on the part of her husband. On her way home to Hanover, she refused to alight at Herrenhausen in order to pay her respects to the Elector and Electress; and, after ascertaining at Hanover that her husband was away at Berlin, she resolved once more to join her parents at Brockhausen. But they refused to receive her; and, on the fatal night of July 1st, 1694, she was still with her faithful lady-in-waiting in the Leineschloss at Hanover.

On the same night, Count Königsmarck left his house at Hanover, never to be seen again. That his intention was to enter the Leine Palace and the apartments of the Electoral Princess, there can be no doubt; but the actual purpose of their meeting, and the plan on which they then agreed or on which they had agreed before, remain unknown. They may have merely designed to contrive her escape with his help to Wolfenbüttel, where she might rely on a welcome from Duke Antony Ulric; or they may have intended to realise the dream to which their correspondence refers, and henceforth to belong wholly to one another. But, from Sophia Dorothea, no attempt was afterwards made to extract an avowal on this head; and the confidante, Eleonora von dem Knesebeck, persisted from first 274to last, both during her imprisonment and after she had effected her escape from it, in asserting the innocency of her mistress. Yet Fräulein von dem Knesebeck confessed to having known of a ‘plot,’ and to having been so full of uneasiness that tears and entreaties were needed to persuade her to remain in the Princess’ service.

Some days passed before the disappearance of Königsmarck attracted public notice. The first sign that there was something wrong appears to have been the intimation, noticed in a despatch of July 3rd from Cressett (Colt’s successor), that, while the Electoral Prince remained at Berlin, the Princess was sick at Hanover. As a matter of fact, both she and her confidante had been strictly confined to her apartments; whether any letters from Königsmarck had been discovered in her keeping, we do not know. But there is evidence that, already in May and June, hands had been laid on some of the correspondence between the lovers; and the knowledge of this had probably determined the Elector Ernest Augustus to proceed against his daughter-in-law. And it is certain that some of her letters were sent by the authorities at Hanover to her parents; for Leibniz positively asserts that, had not her letters been produced, they could not have thought her so guilty at Celle. These letters must have been found in Königsmarck’s residence; and we have no reason for doubting the statement that 275a thorough search was made in his cabinet, in the presence of officials only, although it is added that a packet of letters thought to be incriminating was sent by persons who had been in his confidence to Celle, where his sisters soon afterwards made their appearance. These latter, in all probability, formed the correspondence which ultimately found its way to Berlin.

Both the Elector Ernest Augustus and Sophia Dorothea’s father, the Duke of Celle, considering her guilt to be established, the question next arose as to the way in which her case should be treated. In the first instance she was taken to Ahlden, a magistrate’s house or ‘castle’—no one who has cast eyes on it could ever think of it as anything but a ‘moated grange’—situate in a lonely marshland corner of her father’s territory, at some twenty miles’ distance from Hanover. While she was detained here in strict custody, the mode of procedure against her was arranged. It was resolved, for the honour of the House—which, for good or ill, was the dominant motive in the whole of this melancholy business—to keep the name and person of Königsmarck out of the affair altogether, and to make the desertion of her husband by the Princess the ground of a suit of divorce before a specially constituted Consistorial tribunal. This course, which could hardly have succeeded but for the attitude maintained by her, was carried through with a completeness which must have surpassed the 276anticipations of the astute minds that had devised it. Throughout the enquiry, the Princess made no confession whatever of any act of infidelity, adhering to the instructions conveyed to her by her father’s ministers, Bernstorff and Bülow, who, in an interview at Ahlden, had informed her that ‘everything was discovered’—manifestly another reference to the evidence of part of her correspondence with Königsmarck. Accordingly, notwithstanding the representations of the honest counsel with whom she had been provided—and to whose dissatisfaction with the proceedings and desire to preserve the proofs of his not having been responsible for their result is due the private preservation, at least in part, of the documents of the divorce-suit—she refused to swerve from her declared resolution no longer to live with the Electoral Prince as her husband. After some attempts on the part of the Duke of Celle to mitigate the rigour of the expected result, which were successfully resisted on the part of the Hanoverian Government, the sentence of the Consistorial tribunal was pronounced on December 28th, 1694, and delivered to the Princess at Lauenau, whither she had been temporarily removed, on the last day of the year. It dissolved the marriage between her and the Electoral Prince, granting him, as the innocent party, permission to remarry, but withholding this from her as the guilty party. She at once accepted the sentence; 277a few days later her confessor informed her father that she acknowledged ‘sa faute,’ and the justice of the punishment inflicted upon her; and, in 1698, on the occasion of the death of the Elector Ernest Augustus, she wrote to her former husband and to his mother, the Electress Sophia, beseeching them to pardon her faults of the past, and entreating the favour of being allowed to see her children. This favour was never granted to her.

The Hanoverian court and Government had, as has been seen, persistently striven to dissociate the disappearance of Königsmarck from the disgrace of the Princess. In the first instance, this disappearance had been simply ignored, while a circular had been issued to foreign courts, drawn up in this sense, and attributing the alienation of the Princess from her husband to the machinations of Fräulein von dem Knesebeck, who was soon afterwards clapped into a dungeon at Scharzfels in the Harz, from which she did not make her escape till four years afterwards.^[111] As to the vanished Königsmarck, it had been easy to stifle the anxieties of the unhappy Sophia Dorothea, who, before she was effectually silenced, had written a letter expressive of her fear that he had fallen into the hands of a certain lady, and that his life might be in danger. There can hardly be any doubt 278but that this referred to Countess Platen, although it merely proves Sophia Dorothea to have been afraid of the consequences of the Countess’ anger. Nor could it be impossible to baffle the curiosity of the world at large—represented by no less august an enquirer than Louis XIV—in the assurance that the mystery would in due course be forgotten as a nine days’ wonder. But it proved a serious task to meet the pertinacious efforts of Königsmarck’s sister Aurora, who, adopting a rumour which for some time found an extraordinary amount of credit, insisted that her brother was still alive, and, while demanding that the truth should be revealed, pursued Countess Platen (with whom she had a quarrel of old standing) with special animosity. It is noteworthy that the Electress Sophia should be found taking the side of Countess Platen, who, she writes, is not accustomed to be spoken of in the terms applied to her by the Countess Orrore. Having been forbidden to show herself in Hanover, Königsmarck’s dauntless sister betook herself to Dresden, in order to secure the assistance of the Elector Frederick Augustus in her quest. It was on this occasion that she conquered that potentate altogether; and he espoused her cause so heartily as to send Colonel Bannier to Hanover, there to demand that Königsmarck, as an officer in the Saxon service, should be given up to him. As late as December, 1694, Bannier remained convinced that the Count 279was still alive, and detained as a prisoner somewhere in the Palace. Not until after some months had passed was the tempest raised by Aurora allayed, largely through the diplomatic skill of the Hanoverian minister at Dresden, Jobst von Ilten. But her passionate activity, and the widespread interest excited by so impenetrable a mystery, already in 1695 led to the publication of a narrative purporting to have been sent from Hamburg to the French minister at the Danish court, which the Duchess of Orleans characterised as impertinent and mendacious, and to which Leibniz was instructed to supply a corrective commentary. Meanwhile the Electoral Government had not only maintained an absolute silence as to the Königsmarck affair, but had resorted to the expedient of systematically destroying all evidence concerning it or in any way connected with it. This policy was carried through with extraordinary vigilance and consistency, as might be shown in various instances, of which some reach down to our own times. Above all, a systematic destruction took place of all the documents, whether public or private, at Hanover, in London—and even in Ahlden—which might have thrown light on the episode. Among the rest, the letters of the Electress Sophia bearing on it were destroyed. This was in accordance with the wish of the Duchess of Orleans, whose sagacity apprised her that there was something in the rumours which had reached 280her, although the excellent Frau von Harling had declared them to be all lies.^[112] It would, however, appear that, whether because of a desire on the part of the Duke of Celle that some evidence should be procured which would justify his assent to the severe treatment of his daughter,^[113] or because of the Electress’ own wish not to annihilate all proof, certain incriminating portions of the correspondence remained undestroyed; and these were perhaps the letters which are supposed to have been afterwards sent to Berlin, in order to remove the doubts of Sophia Dorothea’s daughter and namesake as to the misconduct of her mother, to whom she always behaved with kindness—and which, afterwards, certainly found their way into the hands of Frederick the Great and thence into the Secret Archives of State. So far as Königsmarck is concerned, the current story as to his death, and as to the horrible part played in it by the Countess Platen, still remains unauthenticated. Horace Walpole, the author of Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard III, was prepared to believe a story which he professed to have derived from George II, through Queen 281Caroline and Sir Robert Walpole, according to which, on the occasion of some repairs in the Leine Palace, the remains of Königsmarck were discovered under the floor of Sophia Dorothea’s dressing-room; and, of the assassins rumoured to have been hired by Countess Platen, one at least is said to have been enabled by his crime to found a family of much respectability at Hanover.

Sophia Dorothea herself was henceforth lost to the history of her House, and almost fell out of the remembrance of the world in which she might have played so prominent a part. She was now officially styled the Duchess of Ahlden, the village on the Aller over whose immediate district a certain petty jurisdiction was given to the prisoner, together with a few shadowy rights of honour. During a period of thirty-two years she lingered out here her life of durance—never being allowed to quit Ahlden, with the single exception, when a movement of Saxon-Polish troops seemed to render her place of detention unsafe, of a brief visit to Celle, where, however, her father declined to see her. Neither was she at any time permitted to go forth from her castle beyond a distance of six miles; and her carriage, closely attended by a guard of honour, had always to drive along the same road.^[114] She had the occasional consolation of a visit from her mother till 282the Duchess Eleonora’s death in 1722; for the mother’s love never waned, and her will contributed to make the prisoner nominally the possessor of great wealth. On the other hand, she was, as already noted, never allowed to see her children. She occupied herself much with works of charity and piety. She presented an organ and candelabra to the parish church where during part of her imprisonment she worshipped—and was extremely popular in the village, which she rebuilt at her own cost after a fire in 1715; and she gave much attention to the affairs in the neighbourhood, receiving formal visits, and bestowing great care upon her personal adornment. She never quite abandoned the hope of a change in her condition, until shortly before her death she discovered that her interests had been betrayed, and (it is said) most of her large accumulated capital made away with, by an agent (a certain von Bahr), in whom she had reposed confidence. The records of the poor woman’s life during the long years of her confinement do not change our notions of her character; but the story of her solitary woe needs no deepening.

George Lewis has met with nothing but blame for his share in the whole story of Sophia Dorothea’s misfortunes. Our age happily refuses to accept the view that what is unpardonable in a wife is venial in a husband; but such was not the opinion of George Lewis’ contemporaries. On returning to 283Hanover, he had found the relations between his wife and Königsmarck very much of an open secret at court; and, when proofs were in his hands, a divorce was the only course open to him, if the honour of his House was to be vindicated. There was afterwards a rumour, mentioned by Elizabeth Charlotte to her aunt, that he would take back his wife on his accession to the Electorship at his father’s death; and, in 1704, a report was again current at Paris, that the Duke of Marlborough hoped to effect a reconciliation between the Elector and his discarded consort. But, as a matter of fact, he never varied his attitude towards her of absolute and immutable estrangement; and least of all did he show any inclination to invite her to share the glories of the English throne, though it is probable that he might, by such a step, have diminished the prejudices to which he was exposed in his new kingdom.^[115] On the occurrence of her death on November 13th, 1726 (which, as is known, preceded 284his own by but a few months), he prohibited a general mourning in the Electorate, and she was buried without ceremony in the family vault at Celle, after her interment at Ahlden had proved impracticable. There can be no doubt that the bitter resentment with which her conduct had inspired him was, in a measure, continued in his feelings towards his son, the future King George II; but, though the accounts on this head are contradictory, it is at least doubtful whether Sophia Dorothea’s son ever exhibited any active sympathy for his unfortunate mother.^[116] Sophia Dorothea the younger, who, in 1706, married the Crown Prince of Prussia (afterwards King Frederick William I), kept up some communication with her mother, and, after she became Queen, took Eleonora von dem Knesebeck into her service, besides entering into a more frequent correspondence with the prisoner. But mother and daughter never met; and, finally, there seems to have been a marked difference of opinion between them as to the famous Double Marriage Project between the courts of Great Britain and Prussia.

That the unfortunate prisoner should have gained the active goodwill, which the fair young Princess had never conciliated, of her mother-in-law, 285the Electress Sophia, was hardly to be expected. Such advances as were made to her by the Duchess of Ahlden seem to have been coldly rejected; and the tone in which the Duchess of Orleans continues occasionally to speak of her ill-fated relative no doubt reflects, with tolerable accuracy, that adopted by her aunt in her non-extant letters. The Electress, as we now know, had verified the conclusion of Elizabeth Charlotte, that Sophia Dorothea’s case exemplified the proverb as to there being no smoke without fire; and, while we may regret that the charity which, in the matter of morals, the Electress Sophia readily showed to the shortcomings of the men of her family, was never extended by her to the daughter of Eleonora d’Olbreuze, there is in this rigour nothing unnatural or incompatible with the rules of life which she consistently observed. To argue, however, from this severity back to the unproved supposition of an active cooperation on the part of Sophia towards the ruin of her daughter-in-law, is palpably unjust. And it should always be borne in mind that the sympathy of posterity was secured to Sophia Dorothea by her misfortunes, not by her character, in which there is little or nothing to admire, while much in it may have justly repelled the sound and self-controlled nature of her mother-in-law; and that the Electress was more impressed by the Princess’ fall than by what might seem its legitimate consequences.

286There seems no reason for attributing to the painful experiences through which the House of Hanover had recently passed the decline which, about this time, set in in the health of the Elector Ernest Augustus. His illness (which Cressett thought in a large measure imaginary) has quite gratuitously been brought into connexion with Sophia Dorothea’s catastrophe, the suggestion being that the wife and the mistress of the Elector had conspired to avert the consequences which might ensue, in the event of his death and the accession of a new Electress. In June, 1697, the Electress Sophia informs the Raugravine Louisa that, though the other symptoms in the Elector’s condition are good, his nervous debility is great, and that it has been resolved to try the skill of a Dutch empiric, with whose ‘charlattaneri’ she characteristically expresses impatience. Towards the end of the year the course of his malady seemed to have been in a measure arrested; but the decay of his powers soon set in again with alarming rapidity. His life of constant self-indulgence ended very miserably; for some time loss of sight in one eye was feared, and after this he was all but deprived of the use of speech. The Electress Sophia faithfully nursed him to the last. Even in the days of his health she had bravely accustomed herself to his habits; and she afterwards humorously related that she had made a point, in the hour of domesticity, of filling his pipe 287with the tobacco which she loathed. In his last illness she, during many months, never left his side, except when he was asleep. The end came on January 24th, 1698; and a letter written by Sophia a few months later shows her still in a condition of deep and unaffected grief—hopeful only ‘que le bon Dieu me fera bientost rejoindre ce cher Électeur en l’autre monde,’ but consoled by the attentions of her children and her brother-in-law. Ernest Augustus had well played his part as a ruler, not only providing a sure basis for the progress of his dynasty to augmented power and influence, but also strengthening and consolidating the civil as well as the military administration of the Electorate established in his person. His extravagant expenditure on himself and on his court, though no doubt largely occasioned by habits of self-indulgence and a profligate temperament, seemed in consonance with what was probably a well-merited reputation for liberality of conduct and feeling towards those who served him well. Thus he proved, in his way, an apt imitator of the great French prototype whom he, not less than his brother John Frederick, kept before his eyes; and the style in which he lived and reigned suited the interest of the dynasty as well as his own tastes. At the same time, he knew how to combine with his magnificence and generosity a self-restraint that enabled him in his will to dispose of an unencumbered personal estate. To Sophia his death, in more respects than 288one, brought a considerable change. She had never ruled him, not even controlled him by her influence, as Eleonora of Celle long controlled her Duke, or as, in another generation, Sophia’s favourite Caroline of Ansbach was to control King George II. But the aid of her counsel had been of great value to Ernest Augustus, both in the ordinary business of government and in great questions of state policy; and much of the authority which thus accrued to her passed away with him. George Lewis was not of a disposition likely to induce him, from motives of piety, to show to his mother a deference beyond that of ordinary custom. On the other hand, the death of Sophia’s husband gave to her more of that freedom which no princess ever used less ostentatiously or more nobly; it made her, in certain respects, more distinctly the centre of the intellectual life of the Hanoverian Court than she had cared to be, or at all events to seem, in the lifetime of Ernest Augustus; it probably brought her closer to her daughter, and certainly allowed her a fuller enjoyment of the friendship of Leibniz.

No sooner had the reign of Ernest Augustus come to an end, than his sons Maximilian and Christian renewed their protest against the principle of primogeniture which he had so persistently maintained;^[117] and the sympathy with Maximilian 289displayed by his sister, the Electress Sophia Charlotte of Brandenburg, can hardly have failed to find a secret response in the maternal heart of the Electress Dowager Sophia herself. But, though there was some talk of her paying a visit at this season to Berlin, she had learnt to tutor her own wishes, and was well aware how much depended upon the maintenance of the good understanding between the two Electoral Governments, which was at the time endangered by certain territorial questions that may here be passed by. Thus George Lewis succeeded without let or hindrance to the whole of the paternal inheritance and expectancies; and, as was noted above, Hanover and Brandenburg were united by a close and ‘perpetual’ alliance at the very period when the dynastic ambition of the one seemed on the point of consummation, and that of the other was near achieving its absorbing object—the acquisition of a royal (Prussian) crown. That the Hanoverian court was filled with joy by the success of the operations which ended, early in 1701, with the coronation of the first Prussian King, Frederick I, would be an unnatural supposition. The event had, however, been rendered virtually inevitable by the accession, in 1697, of the Elector Frederick Augustus of Saxony to the Polish throne; and the Elector George Lewis was personally not so constituted as to be impelled, even by jealousy, to an eagerness to 290follow suit. As for the Dowager Electress Sophia, there was, to her, something more than compensation in the thought that a royal crown now surmounted the brow of her favourite child.

Sophia Charlotte, her parents’ only daughter, had grown up in a long and unbroken intimacy with her mother. With that mother, as already noted, she had in common a clear and penetrating intelligence, a charm of manner irresistible to anyone whom she chose to admit to familiar intercourse, and a self-possession against which scandal waged war in vain. She also had her mother’s intellectual curiosity and general love of knowledge; but she must have approached more nearly to her aunt Elizabeth in her power of entering into problems of philosophy, though it is only with a grain of salt that the assertion can be accepted as to the conferences between her and Leibniz having originated his Théodicée. On the other hand, what little remains from her hand in the way of familiar correspondence, can scarcely be said to be lit up with the natural humour that her mother and the Duchess of Orleans always had at command. Notwithstanding her power of delighting those admitted to her society by the sunny brightness of her manner, when she was so disposed, or when she was stimulated by intellectual interest, her nature seems from early years to have possessed the tranquillity which 291reason and resignation enabled her mother more gradually to acquire. Probably a certain physical indolence, or phlegma, may have contributed to this result; together with a calm determination to please herself—a luxury in which her mother had rarely or never enjoyed opportunities of indulging.

Already in her childhood, benefiting by the traditions in her mother’s family as to the necessity of a good education based on linguistic knowledge, she had exhibited signs of talent; while her character probably owed much to the training of Frau von Harling (who was also Elizabeth Charlotte’s governess), one of those teachers whose destiny it is to be loved for their administration of the rule of law by pupils who, under a less vigorous influence, would certainly be inclined to remain a law to themselves. In the eleventh year of her age, Sophia Charlotte, as we saw, accompanied her mother on a visit to the French Court, while her father was recruiting his health at Ems. It was a delightful visit—perhaps one of the happiest episodes of Sophia’s life—in the mixture which it offered of pleasant retrospect under the caresses of the faithful Duchess of Orleans, and of still earlier reminiscences in the genial company of the Abbess of Maubuisson, with a hopeful looking-forward to the future in store for her charming daughter. King Louis XIV himself was the perfection of magnificent courtesy, requesting his brother, the Duke of Orleans, not to 292whisper in Sophia’s presence, and taking magnanimous notice of her daughter. Sophia’s quick wit helped her through every difficulty, and enabled her to avoid any mistake—even that of accepting a tabouret when self-respect bade her take a fauteuil, or not sit at all. She knew how to meet both the stiffness of the French Queen (a Spanish princess) and the effusiveness of the Spanish Queen (a French princess); nor was her self-possession disturbed even by the splendour of Versailles, for which, as she justly observed, art had done more than nature. As for Sophia Charlotte, the impression created, both by her beauty and by the extent of her knowledge, was such as to suggest to Louis XIV the idea of a match between her and one of his princes. Nothing, however, came of the notion except, perhaps, an accentuation of the diplomatic activity of de Gourville at the Lüneburg courts. Sophia Charlotte’s quiet life continued; and, though there was some talk of a Bavarian suit for her hand, it gradually became known that her destiny was shaping itself nearer home. The establishment of relations of intimacy between the Courts of Brandenburg at Hanover had become a political necessity, and Sophia had recognised the expediency of promoting his object with the aid of her daughter’s hand. When, in 1683, the Electoral Prince Frederick of Brandenburg became a childless widower, these speculations at once 293assumed a practical aspect. The obstacles which had to be surmounted did not include a religious difficulty, inasmuch as the Reformed (Calvinist) faith, of which Sophia Charlotte made public profession shortly before her marriage, was a form of religion always favoured, though never actually professed, by her mother.^[118] There is no reason for crediting the story (which rests only on the gossip of Pöllnitz) that it had been thought unnecessary to anticipate Sophia Charlotte’s own choice of a form of Protestantism till it was known whom she was to marry. But, whatever the daughter’s religious profession, tolerance would always have formed part of her creed, as it did of her mother’s. The marriage was celebrated at Herrenhausen on September 28th, 1684.

From the first, Sophia Charlotte displayed that indifference to playing any part in politics which seemed so strange in her, considering the capacity which she indisputably possessed for exerting influence alike by her personal charms and by her 294intellectual powers. But, during the few remaining years of the Great Elector’s life, the Electoral Prince Frederick was under a cloud; and, in 1686, he had to withdraw with his consort to Halle. In 1688 he succeeded his father as Elector, and a few months later his consort presented him with an heir to his honours (the future King Frederick William I). She continued, however, to show little disposition to assert the authority and influence which had now accrued to her; and, though, during the ensuing decade, so eventful in the history of the relations between the Houses of Hanover and Brandenburg, she was always happy to exchange visits with her parents and to listen to the advice bestowed on her by her mother, she cannot be said to have taken much trouble to use, either directly or indirectly, the power which she can hardly have lacked aught but the will to exercise. It was not that she had to contend against any great strength of character in her husband, who, if humoured in a few things, could without much difficulty be ruled in the rest. But she did not care to stoop even to the level of his rather commonplace and formal nature, in order to conquer for herself an all-controlling influence in both public and private affairs. She preferred to create a sphere or circle of her own, into which only those were admitted who approved themselves to her, more especially by their intellectual gifts. Here 295simplicity, typified by black dress, was the rule. The colony of French refugees, which was in these years establishing itself at Berlin and Brandenburg, was largely represented in her intimate social circle. Sophia Charlotte appreciated those gifts of conversation, of which, in her age, Frenchmen and Frenchwomen possessed, if not the monopoly, at least a predominant share; and she seems herself to have become mistress of an art which is always more easily described than reproduced. She was fond of theatrical entertainments of many kinds, and probably gave more offence to the pietism prevailing around her by these, for the most part, innocuous tastes than by her philosophising tendencies. Toland amused her, and she was not, like her mother, obliged to respect British prejudices about his views or principles, though she was indignant to have been supposed to have gone so far as to ask a man without birth or official position to dine at her table. In general, she was, no doubt, very much sans gêne in her relations with persons whom she liked; but, though scandal was busy with these freedoms, she never compromised herself by indulging in them too far. The height of her personal influence seems to have been reached when, by 1696, the Elector Frederick III had fulfilled her heart’s desire by building for her a country residence in the village of Lützen on the pleasant declivities of the Spree. She had never 296been willing to sojourn in the castle of Copenick, where her predecessor, Frederick’s first wife, had pined away her days; and the ample gardens at Berlin, which he had presented to his Electress, she had, with intelligent philanthropy, mainly distributed in allotments among the townsfolk, with whom, for this reason, and perhaps also because of a sympathetic quickness of wit indigenous among the inhabitants of the growing capital, her reputation always stood high. Lützenburg, as the Italian villa, which gradually grew into a palace, was called, became Sophia Charlotte’s chosen abode, although the magnificence with which it was in course of time adorned, both inside and out, had not received its final touches before her death, when this famous royal residence was, in remembrance of her, rechristened Charlottenburg.

The death of Ernest Augustus, in 1698, as we saw, drew mother and daughter more closely together; and, in the same year, a very important ministerial change at Berlin, the circumstances of which to this day occupy the attention of historical students, greatly increased Sophia Charlotte’s opportunities of exercising a personal influence upon the government and policy of her husband. The fall of the hitherto omnipotent minister, Eberhard von Danckelmann, which was speedily followed by his incarceration, affords a most striking instance of the uncertainty of princely favour, and a cruel 297illustration of the recompense that may await great political services.^[119] Here it must suffice to say, that Sophia Charlotte had certainly been jealous of Danckelmann’s influence, and that his downfall was regarded by her mother and her friends, even more decidedly than by herself, as an epoch in her personal career. Leibniz wrote to her, with rather exasperating aplomb, surmising that, since she had now secured the entire confidence of the Elector her husband, she would recognise the necessity of taking advantage of the situation (ménager la conjoncture). As there was, he continued, an identity of interest between her and her mother, it was to be hoped that they would find consolation for the evils that had befallen them (the death of Ernest Augustus) in employing their gifts so as to bring about a complete union between Sophia Charlotte’s brother and her husband. (It may perhaps be noted that the sorrow afterwards shown by George Lewis on his sister’s death indicates the existence of a genuine affection between them.) Leibniz could not think of anyone likely to manage so effectively the requisite communications between the two Electresses as it would be within his own power to do; and he suggested that this purpose would be most easily accomplished if he were to be appointed 298to some supervising post connected with science and art at Berlin, and thus supplied with a ready reason for occasional visits to that capital. As a matter of fact, Sophia Charlotte used her best endeavours to induce Frederick III to call into life a (prospectively) Royal Society or Academy of Science, which, as the Elector was quick to perceive, would conspicuously add to the reputation of his court and to the glory of the monarchy of which he was ambitious to become the founder; and, after Leibniz had spent several months at Berlin, and conducted the deliberations on the subject, besides participating in the intellectual delights of ‘Lustenburg’ (Lützenburg), the Society of Sciences was, in July, 1700, actually called into life, with Leibniz as its perpetual president.^[120]

Danckelmann’s fall had, however, not put an end to Sophia Charlotte’s difficulties at her husband’s court. Some of these were of much the same sort as those from which her mother had suffered so much at Hanover, and from which the more sensitive nature of her grand-daughter Wilhelmina was afterwards 299to suffer at Baireuth. The Elector Frederick III’s new minister-in-chief, Kolbe von Wartenberg, had himself many attractive qualities; but his wife was of humble origin and undistinguished manners. It pleased the Elector, apparently only for the sake of the completeness of the thing, to confer on her the position of his mistress en titre. Sophia Charlotte’s pride long rebelled against receiving this lady at her private court. Another source of anxiety to Sophia Charlotte was the training of her son Frederick William, which, during part of his fourth year, she had entrusted to the veteran Frau von Harling at the court of her mother, the Electress Sophia. But the boy, both passionate and obstinate, could not agree with his cousin George Augustus, and had to be taken back to Berlin. As he grew up he seemed to care for nothing but soldiering, while he detested the ceremonial dear to his father’s heart, and more distinctive than ever of the Court of Berlin since the manœuvres for securing a royal Crown had assumed a definite shape, and this project had come to absorb the entire policy of the Brandenburg court and Government. Neither Sophia Charlotte’s nor her mother’s intelligence could fail to grasp the situation. The Electress of Brandenburg made up her mind that no personal grievance should interfere with the maintenance of a good understanding between her consort and herself, and received the Countess of 300Wartenberg at Lützenburg, although, oblivious of her guest’s imperfections of education, she welcomed her there with a few words of French. The Electress Dowager Sophia was willing to cooperate; and, partly with a view to procuring for the furtherance of the project the good offices of King William III and of the Elector Maximilian Emmanuel of Bavaria, Governor of the Austrian Netherlands, it was, in the spring of 1700, arranged that the two Electresses should, on the pretext of Sophia Charlotte’s health, repair to the baths of Aix-la-Chapelle, and thence visit Brussels and Holland. They accomplished this journey, on which Leibniz was by his own ill-health prevented from accompanying them, but in the course of which they, at the Hague, made the personal acquaintance of another philosopher of European reputation—‘l’illustre Bayle, honneur des beaux esprits.’ And, in October, 1700, they were received at the Loo, where (as we shall see immediately) other matters were also discussed between the Electress Dowager and King William, and where he promised Sophia Charlotte to acknowledge her husband as the first King in Prussia. The desire of Sophia Charlotte’s consort (rather than her own) was consummated by their coronation as King and Queen of Prussia at Königsberg on January 18th, 1701—the year which likewise proved her mother’s conference with her host at the Loo not to have been held in vain.

301To understand this result, it is necessary to go back a few years, and to recall the circumstances which, in 1696, had led to an earlier, but more transitory, visit on the part of the two Electresses to the Loo. The year 1696 was one of some importance in the history of the English Succession question. After the death of Queen Mary, on December 28th, 1694, some time had necessarily passed before even a conjecture could be formed as to the future intentions of King William, who was prostrated with grief. But he was only in his forty-fifth year, and his remarriage was therefore by no means an unlikely event. In the course of 1695, speculation was accordingly rife on the subject, and, taking time by the forelock, Louis XIV provided that any overtures made on William III’s behalf at Stockholm (for the hand of the Princess Hedwig Sophia) should meet with a cold reception. The hopes of the House of Savoy were once more aroused. The claims by descent of the Duchess Anna Maria, daughter of Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans, and grand-daughter of Charles I, and of her issue, were superior to those of the Electress Sophia and the House of Hanover; and, in the twofold event of another son being born to Anna Maria and Victor Amadeus II, and of the boy being brought over to England and there educated as a Protestant, he might acquire a Parliamentary title. William III was supposed to look favourably upon this scheme; 302and, though, already in the summer of 1695, there were rumours of Savoy having entered into secret negotiations with France, Victor Amadeus was one of the Princes who, about this time, ratified the renewal of the Grand Alliance. But, in the following year, after France had paid the price of the restoration of Pignerol, the Duke of Savoy went over to her side (thus executing a movement of which he carried out the exact converse in 1703, early in the great War), and thereby closed any prospect of his House inheriting the English throne.

Meanwhile, King William’s widowed state occupied the thoughts of the dynasty of whose close connexion with the House of Hanover we have just been treating. Immediately after the campaign of 1695 and the renewal of the Grand Alliance, the Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg had begun to sound King William, through the agency of his favourite, Keppel (soon afterwards created Earl of Albemarle), as to the royal intentions on the subject of a remarriage, with a view to directing the King’s attention to the Electoral Princess Louisa Dorothea, then fifteen years of age. In the following year, 1696, William had found himself the object of an unprecedented popularity in England, owing to the discovery of the Assassination Plot, at the time when James II was known to be preparing an invasion of these shores. The Jacobite interest, which was to have benefited by the most gracious 303proclamation ever drafted by the exiled King, experienced one of the most disheartening of its many rebuffs; and, instead of reconquering his kingdoms, James II informed the Abbot of La Trappe, that ‘all these attempts which seemed to be lost labour in the eyes of the world, were great advantages as he managed them in order to that great end which had now become his sole concern.’ Still, the ‘Prince of Orange’s’ weak condition of health prevented King James from regarding the chances of his restoration as at an end; and, in the event of his rival’s death, he was resolved to ‘return into England, though three men had not followed him.’^[121] In May, 1696, King William resumed the command of the army in the Low Countries, but no military operations of importance took place; and, in the course of the summer, the Elector Frederick III, with his family and court, took up their residence at Cleves, whither the Duke of Celle likewise found his way, and whence in August the Electress Sophia Charlotte, with her mother the Electress Sophia, paid an incognito visit to the Loo in the King’s absence. He was then invited to Cleves; but he preferred in the first instance to send two 304agents—an Englishman (Southwell) and a Dutchman (General Hompesch)—to report to him on the personality of the Princess Louisa Dorothea. Their reports were unfavourable, and, the King’s visit having been deferred on the plea of difficulties of ceremonial,^[122] no less a personage than Portland was sent by him to Cleves to make another report. Though this again proved deterrent, William resolved to trust to his own eyes, and, in September, paid a visit to Cleves, of which a full account remains in a letter from Stepney, then in the royal suite, to Sir William Trumbull. The Princess stood, during four hours, as a spectatress of the royal game at l’hombre, while the favourite, Keppel, was accommodated with a seat. But the visit led to no result; and, when it became known that the two Electresses had abandoned their proposed tour through Holland, it was understood that the marriage project was for the present at an end.

Whether or not because of his own unwillingness to contract a second marriage, as well as on account of the secession of the House of Savoy from the Grand Alliance, the attention of William III, 305in the latter part of 1696, turned more decisively than before to the Electress Sophia and the House of Hanover. He interested himself directly in the still unsettled question of the admission of the Elector of Hanover into the Electoral College. About the same time (October), when George William of Celle had returned home from a long visit to the Loo, whither he had proceeded from Cleves, Leibniz (who, it must be remembered, was in the service of the entire House of Brunswick-Lüneburg) put forth one of those feelers by which he is henceforth found from time to time endeavouring to test the sentiments of the Electress Sophia on the Succession question. Though on this occasion he approaches the subject most cautiously, it may be looked upon as significant that he prophesies for Sophia’s grandson a renewal of the historic achievement of William III. Nothing, however, could be more explicit than her reply refusing to act on his insinuation. Two months later, she wrote to her niece, the Raugravine Louisa, then on a visit to London, where she had met with scant courtesy on the part of the Princess Anne, that everything ‘Palatine’ seemed to have quite fallen into oblivion in England, nor did anybody there remember her (the Electress’) existence, inasmuch as there was no apparent intention of allowing the Crown to descend to her family.

During the period immediately ensuing, William 306III was necessarily occupied by the task of securing his own seat upon the English throne, rather than by that of determining its ulterior devolution. The success of the peace negotiations which opened at Ryswyk, in June, 1697, was rendered more than doubtful by the avoidance of any direct communication between the representatives of the King of France and of the King of England, whom Louis had as yet refused to recognise; and William III had accordingly taken the startling step of entering into a secret negotiation with France. Among the extraordinary rumours that hereupon spread as to the compromise contemplated by the two sovereigns, was one, wholly false, which contrived to make its way into ‘history.’ William, it was said, intended to purchase peace by promising to secure the Succession to the English Crown to the son and heir of James II. In the instrument of the peace, William was not actually recognised as King of England, Scotland, and Ireland by Louis XIV; but he was mentioned as such in the preamble, and secured in his possession of these kingdoms by a formula binding Louis XIV to refuse any direct or indirect assistance to William’s enemies. Indeed, this indirect recognition, and the check which it implied upon the original designs of Louis, constituted England’s chief gain by the peace. William’s motives for seeking, in the period next ensuing, to remain on good terms with Louis XIV, cannot 307be discussed here; but they help to account for a certain slackness on William’s part in his dealings with the Succession question, at a time when it was becoming of the highest importance for the future of his kingdoms.

In the autumn of 1698, however, shortly after the secret conclusion of the First Partition Treaty between Louis XIV and William III, the latter took up this question of a Succession which concerned him more nearly than that to the Spanish monarchy. He was in the habit of annually welcoming to the Loo, at this season, his old friend and fellow-sportsman, Duke George William of Celle; but on the present occasion they met in the hunting-castle of the Göbrde,^[123] near Lüneburg. The Elector George Lewis also put in an appearance there, as did his son, the Electoral Prince George Augustus, and his daughter, Sophia Dorothea the younger, then eleven years of age. Although Count Tallard, the French ambassador at the Court of St. James, was thoroughly puzzled as to the purpose of the King’s journey, it could be no secret to the members of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg. In September, the Princess Anne, who stood next in the Succession so long as King William remained childless, had given birth to another 308still-born infant; and her only surviving child, the Duke of Gloucester, was known to be in weak bodily health. Nor could any reliance be placed upon Princess Anne herself, who was in constant communication with St. Germains, and who, had her father but given his assent to her mounting the throne in due course, would have been glad enough afterwards to play it into the hands of her half-brother. King William must, therefore, manifestly have visited the Brunswick-Lüneburg territories with at least a predisposition towards placing the House of Hanover in a more satisfactory position, in regard to the Succession, than it held at present; but he had no reason for supposing that the members of that House were themselves eager to meet him half-way. Strangely enough, the personage who now came forward to urge upon him a decisive course, was the Duchess Eleonora of Celle—perhaps with a view to thus recovering some of the influence lost to her through her daughter’s catastrophe, perhaps in the hope of mitigating the effects of that catastrophe for the unhappy Sophia Dorothea herself, or simply from an inborn love of diplomatic action and a general desire to make things pleasant. Leibniz afterwards assumed to himself the credit of having given her the first hint of speaking to the King. This she did before he quitted the Göhrde, representing herself as obeying an inspiration from Hanover, 309and begging her royal guest—now that the House of Savoy was out of the question—to promote the placing of the Electress Sophia and her descendants in the Succession. When the King pointed out that the Duke of Gloucester, though in delicate health, might imitate him by growing up into manhood, Eleonora further suggested that her grand-daughter, Sophia Dorothea the younger, would be a suitable match for the Duke. George William of course agreed ex post facto to the step taken by his wife, but stipulated that it should be mentioned to his nephew, the Elector, who gave vent to his annoyance that the King should be led to suppose him to have sanctioned this manœuvre. But, when the King met the Electress Sophia at Celle, he referred to the question of establishing her and her descendants’ claim, and, as Leibniz expresses it, made considerable advances in this direction. Sophia, we may be sure, received these advances discreetly; but that she should have rejected them, or have met them with coldness, is a conjecture unwarranted by her conduct either before or after. Neither can she be shown to have viewed with displeasure the activity, restless though it undoubtedly was, of Leibniz, who about this time corresponded with London as frequently as possible and encouraged the efforts of a Hanoverian agent there. Had Sophia taken up an attitude of indifference, King William would hardly, in June, 1699, have informed her in writing that he 310had used his best endeavours to bring the business to a conclusion satisfactory to her, and that he felt assured of effecting his purpose within a very short space of time. It is, moreover, significant that the two branches of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg were acting in perfect harmony with one another; in May, Gargan, the Electress’ secretary, declares it impossible to listen without emotion to the conversations between the two illustrious ladies (Sophia and Eleonora), whom he describes as related to one another not less closely by blood than by friendship.

The reason why the Celle interview led to no immediate results in England lay, not in Sophia, but in the discordant relations between King William and his Parliament, caused mainly by his policy with regard to the Spanish Succession, into which of course the Electress and the House of Hanover had not been initiated. So late as July, 1700, she wonders what interest England and the United Provinces could have in seeking to cement the power of France. The unfriendliness of Parliament to the King had been heightened when, about a month earlier, the substance of the Second Partition Treaty had become known in this country; and, as matters now stood, there was little or no chance of the House of Commons in particular agreeing to any proposals concerning the Succession that should emanate from the King. In the midst 311of this trouble, less doubt than ever remained as to the decrease of his physical strength, at no time anything but precarious; so that, after Anne, the only hope for the Succession depended on the feeble vitality of the young Duke of Gloucester. Suddenly, on July 30th, 1700, the frail thread of his life was snapped, and the prospect had vanished of a successor who would have been generally acceptable, and, in all probability, have proved both an intelligent and a kindly ruler. In announcing the news to the Electress Sophia from Berlin, her vigilant monitor, Leibniz, promptly pointed out that it would now more than ever be time to think of the English Succession. But it so chanced that already, three days previously, she had written to him on the same subject from Hanover, exhibiting her usual perfect self-control. Though she took very coolly the news of the young Duke’s ‘decampment’—as she called his death, perhaps in cynical allusion to his innocent military tastes,—she by no means showed herself blind to the importance of the event. Were she younger, she told Leibniz, when informing him that, in October, 1700, the Duke of Celle was to visit King William at the Loo, she might fairly have looked forward to a Crown; as it was, had she the choice, she would rather see her years increase than her grandeur. But she well knew that persons in her station rarely have a choice, if they are resolved not to fall short of their sense of duty. She could hardly be aware 312of the fresh intrigues that were being carried on by the Princess Anne, or of the hopes, still entertained by certain of William’s most loyal English subjects, that he would marry again, perhaps this time choosing a Danish princess. But she could not have remained unaware that the thoughts of a wider circle of Englishmen were taking the direction of Hanover. Partly, however, under the influence of the regrets caused by the recent death of the young Duke of Gloucester, partly because of the wish to secure an heir to the throne young enough to be Anglicised and, more especially, Anglicanised before his advent to it, politicians, and Tory politicians in particular, were as yet intent rather upon the ultimate succession of the Electoral Prince than upon that of his father, the Elector, or that of his grandmother, the Dowager Electress.

At the meeting of King William with the Duke of Celle at the Loo, it was arranged that he should receive there the Electress Sophia and the Electress of Brandenburg, on the occasion of the visit to the baths of Aix-la-Chapelle on which the latter had persuaded her mother to accompany her. Burnet insists that now ‘the eyes of all the Protestants of the nation turned towards the Electress of Brunswick’; but the arrival in Holland, as his mother’s and grandmother’s visit drew to a close, of the young Electoral Prince of Brandenburg (afterwards King Frederick William I of Prussia) seems to 313have vividly suggested to William III the notion of placing the heir of the Hohenzollerns in the position left vacant by the Duke of Gloucester. This passing fancy may be regarded as the sequel of a not less transitory ambition which appears to have flitted through the mind of the Elector Frederick III, of taking advantage of the Princess Anne’s unpopularity to endeavour himself to find his way to the English throne. The idea of including the Electoral Prince of Brandenburg in the Succession could not of course be welcome to the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg; and we accordingly find Bothmer, who was in the Celle service as envoy at Paris and was soon to play an important part in the progress of the Succession question, complaining to Ilten (August 31st, 1700) that the Berlin Ministry were preparing for their young Prince the plurality of King of Prussia, Stadholder, and King of England. Count Platen afterwards stated that he had heard it suggested that the Calvinism of Berlin might suit King William better than the Lutheranism of Hanover. Nor is it at all unlikely that he recognised in the Electoral Prince the germ of administrative powers to which full justice has only very tardily been done.^[124] But, however this may 314have been—and perhaps something might be said as to the religious influence noticeable in this period of Hanoverian history—there is no proof that William III seriously thought of adopting the Electoral Prince of Brandenburg, or of introducing him in any other way into the English Succession. Moreover, even had this been on his part more than a passing wish, he of course possessed no right of nomination. No doubt, he would more speedily have dismissed the fancy, had he believed the House of Hanover to be very eagerly intent upon the prospect now opening before it. But, at all events it is neither proved nor probable, that at the Loo the Electress Sophia once more rejected the overtures of her host on the subject of the Succession. The question possesses so much significance, if we are desirous of forming a judgment as to the whole tenor of her conduct in this matter, that it must needs be dwelt upon at some length. What actually passed between her and the King on the occasion is unknown; and her behaviour can only be conjectured from the attitude which she maintained during a journey undertaken by her, it must be remembered, in the first instance at all events, in her daughter’s interest rather than in her own.

At Aix-la-Chapelle Sophia had received a remarkable letter from Stepney, written from 315London about the middle of September, in which he reviewed the entire situation. Remembering that in her veins ran the blood of the Stewarts, and that her personal reminiscences mounted back to the days of Oliver Cromwell, he excused himself from offering a decided opinion of his own as to the genuineness of ‘le Fils,’ but pointed out that there was no chance of his ever abandoning the religion of Rome, or escaping from the political leading-strings of France. On the other hand, he assured the Electress that the English were not Republicans at heart, and that among them there was nobody capable of playing Oliver’s part over again as ‘Captain-General.’ In response to his modest appeal for a reply (by means of which he no doubt hoped to be able to clear up the situation at head-quarters), Sophia wrote the letter, undated, in which, from Lord Hardwicke downwards, so many critics have found indications of her Jacobite tendencies. In this letter she declares that, were she thirty years younger, she would have sufficient confidence in her descent and in the religion professed by her, to believe in her being thought of in England. After her death, which in the natural course of things would precede the deaths of the King and his appointed successor, her sons would be regarded as strangers. Moreover, the eldest of them was far more accustomed to sovereign authority than was the poor Prince of Wales, who was so 316young and would be so glad to recover what his father had thrown away that they would be able to do with him what they liked. After referring to her hope of shortly seeing the King in Holland, whither she had been induced by her daughter to accompany her, she added that she was of course neither so philosophical nor so foolish as to dislike hearing a Crown talked of, or as to refuse full consideration to her correspondent’s extremely sensible and obliging remarks on the subject, though the number of factions apparently existing in England made it difficult to feel sure about anything.

Such is the substance of what is sometimes cited as the ‘Jacobite letter’ of the Electress Sophia. Clearly, it is nothing of the kind; but at most shows that, while primarily desirous of deferring all discussion till she should meet the King, she desired to apprise him, through a safe channel, that she was alive to the cons as well as the pros—the uncertainties as well as the opportunities—of the situation. Above all, she wished to show herself aware of the possibility of that situation being fundamentally changed by the conversion to Protestantism of the ‘Prince of Wales,’ as—assuredly without any arrière pensée—she naturally called the kinsman whose claim to this title she had never professed to doubt. Nor is any ‘Jacobitism’ on her aunt’s part proved by the Duchess of Orleans’ nearly contemporary graphic account of King 317James II’s tender sentiments towards the Electress, who, as he stammered, ‘m’a tou-toujours aimé.’

The visit to the Loo was succeeded by a brief meeting between the King and the two Electresses at the Hague, just before his departure for England. It was on this occasion that Sophia Charlotte was accompanied by her son Frederick William, for whom the King manifested a sudden personal fancy. Whether under its influence, or because he had resolved to respond to Sophia’s guarded attitude by maintaining a reserve of his own, or, as is most probable, because English opinion was in his judgment, as well as in hers, still unripe for action—certain passages in the Electress’ correspondence with the Raugravine Louisa, a few months later in date, show that William III had not arrived at any immediate decision as to naming the Electress and her descendants in the Succession, though he had held out to her the prospect of such a result being brought about. This implies that she had by no means refused to entertain such a proposal. In a word, the attitude of cautious expectancy maintained by her and her House, was confirmed by her brief personal intercourse with the actual occupant of the English throne.

Before the end of this year, 1700, all hesitation vanished from the policy of William III. His hopes of securing the peace of Europe by an international agreement based on the Second Partition 318Treaty were finally extinguished, when the death of Charles II of Spain, on November 1st, was followed by the acceptance of his will, bequeathing the whole of the Spanish monarchy to the Duke of Anjou, by that Prince’s grandfather, Louis XIV. In February, 1701, French troops surprised the Dutch garrisons in the Barrier fortresses; and the States General recognised King Philip of Spain. The question whether England would follow suit, or declare war, would have to be decided by the new Parliament, summoned for February, 1701, ‘in respect of matters of the highest importance’; which expression, as de Beyrie, the Hanoverian resident in London, informed the Electress, unmistakably applied to the choice of the Duke of Anjou, and to the English Succession. Stepney, or some other correspondent, had previously apprised her of the course which events might be expected to take in Parliament with regard to the Succession. The Whigs would press for a further limitation in the Protestant line, and, if necessary, for the exclusion of any child or pretended child of James II except the Princess Anne. An effort (proceeding from the Marlborough interest) in favour of the Princess Anne’s consort, Prince George of Denmark, would serve to lead Parliament to the direct Protestant line, beginning with the Electress Sophia, and going on to the Elector and the Electoral Prince. Early in the same month (November) the 319Electress, who was accompanied by Leibniz, conferred with her brother-in-law at Celle. The Elector George Lewis was not present; and the confidential memorandum on the rights of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg in respect of the English Succession drawn up immediately afterwards by Leibniz for the use of Cresset, then at Celle, contained a significant passage. The Succession, it was observed, could much more easily be secured by the House, while King William, Duke George William, and the Electress Sophia were still ‘pleins de vie.’ Soon afterwards, Sophia herself drafted a letter, which was approved by the Duke of Celle, asking the King’s advice as to the course of action to be pursued; and Leibniz, who thought this insufficient, was permitted to compose a supplementary letter to Stepney, for the information of Baron Schütz, who represented the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg at the Court of St. James.James.^[125] In this it was suggested that, while the Electress wished not to appear at present to be taking any active steps, a further limitation of the Act of Settlement might advantageously be promoted in England by means of private overtures and of pamphlets not 320purporting to emanate from Hanover. The Electress once more showed a judgment superior to that of Leibniz, who, in his zeal, offered, if called upon, to proceed to London in person, but whom, in May, 1701, Stepney informed that, in his opinion, the English nation was so well disposed towards the Hanoverian Succession that neither pamphlets nor men of talent were needed to push it.

In the meantime, Parliament, which sat from February to June, had nearly concluded its session. The Speech from the Throne had duly recommended the further limitation of the Succession in the Protestant line; and a proposal for carrying this recommendation into effect was, without loss of time, brought forward by the Whigs in the House of Commons (March 3rd). But, though the Tory majority in the House was not as a whole unfriendly to the Hanoverian claims, the opinion prevailed that it would be well to postpone the naming of any further successor, until certain additional securities had been obtained for the rights and liberties of the subjects of the Crown. It was generally understood that the Electress Sophia should be named; but some desired to name the Elector and the Electoral Prince likewise, in the expectation that the Electress Dowager and the Elector would waive their claims. On the other hand, it was felt that such an arrangement would involve a difference between the English and the 321Scottish limitation, which latter had, already in 1689, been made to include Sophia’s name; and this could not have been easily set right until the anti-English feeling excited in Scotland by the Darien Settlement affair should have had time to subside.

Thus, after the eight articles had been agreed upon which were to take effect from the beginning of the new limitation to the House of Hanover, and some of which were, as a matter of fact, dictated by jealousy of the rule of a foreign line, the name of the Electress Sophia was inserted without opposition; and by the Act for the further Limitation of the Crown, and better securing the Rights and Liberties of the Subjects—called in short the Act of Settlement—the Crown of England was, in default of issue of the Princess Anne or King William III, settled upon the Electress and her posterity, being Protestants. A protest, inspired by the Duke of Berwick acting under instructions from Louis XIV was, indeed, raised by the Duchess Anna Maria of Savoy, and communicated to both Houses of Parliament by the envoy of Duke Victor Amadeus II; but no notice was taken of it.^[126] On June 12th, 1701, the Act of Settlement received the royal assent, and, in his Speech from the Throne, King 322William, after thanking the two Houses for further securing the Protestant Succession, passed on to the subject of the Grand Alliance. The answer of the House of Commons was an Address promising to support the King in sustaining the alliances deemed necessary by him for upholding the liberty of Europe and the welfare of England, and for reducing the exorbitant power of France.

The Act of Settlement, which secured the Hanoverian Succession, accordingly at the same time imposed certain fresh restrictions of the prerogative, which had an important bearing upon the nature of the royal authority exercised by Sophia’s posterity. Furthermore, the Act, in which both the great English political parties concurred, secured the Hanoverian Succession at a time when the critical struggle was about to open between France and the renewed Grand Alliance; and thus, at the very moment when the House of Hanover acquired a Parliamentary title to the expectancy of the English throne, it was, again with the assent of both parties, identified with the adversaries of France in the great European conflict. Nor is it without significance that at this very time a Pope (Clement XI) had been seated in St. Peter’s Chair, who, in a far greater measure than his predecessor—for Innocent XII had on the whole disappointed the hopes of Louis XIV—served the interests of 323France. The letter addressed by Clement XI on his election in November, 1700, to James II, had, in its ‘beautiful terms of paternal tenderness,’ drawn tears ‘more from the heart than from the eyes’ of the exiled King.

Throughout these transactions, the conduct of the Electress Sophia had been uniformly judicious—observing a wise mean between the adoption, as a matter of course, of the advice readily given to her by Leibniz, and an absolute impassiveness like that maintained by her eldest son. It seems unwarranted to regard her as having energetically defended her rights up to the time when policy and the condition of affairs in England imposed upon her a certain reserve, and having at the last enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing both King and Parliament sue for her acceptance of their offer. On the other hand, her conduct is misunderstood when she is supposed to have resisted so long as possible the unwelcome necessity of securing the inheritance of a throne to which she believed her kinsman, the Prince of Wales, to have had a just claim. She had frankly accepted the situation, and done her best to promote a solution in the interests of her dynasty, without going further than would have been either seemly or judicious. Her letter written on June 22nd, 1701, to Burnet (who describes himself as in more or less continuous correspondence with her from the death of the Duke of Gloucester 324onwards) exactly expresses her point of view. Though sensible of his affection to her in the matter of the Succession, which excluded all Catholic heirs, ‘who had always caused so many disorders in England,’ she felt herself ‘unfortunately too old ever to be useful to the nation.’ Yet she wished that ‘those who were to come after her might render themselves worthy of the honour awaiting them.’

On August 14th, 1701, the Earl of Macclesfield arrived in Hanover, in order formally to notify to the Electress Sophia the passing of the Act of Settlement, of which, kneeling before her, he presented her with a splendidly illuminated copy, still preserved in the Hanover Archives. Macclesfield appears to have been chosen for the office at his own request, as the son of a cavalier closely associated with Prince Rupert and a visitor at the Hague in Queen Elizabeth’s days, and therefore likely to be persona gratissima to the Electress^[127]—though his own antecedents rather associated him with the Mohocks. He was accompanied by three other Whig Lords, Say and Sele, Mohun (Macclesfield’s intimate, who is stated to have taken care to be on his best behaviour) and Tunbridge. In their suite was the ingenious Toland, with his enquiring 325eyes wide open, and in his pocket, according to Luttrell, a ‘treatise lately wrote in relation to the Succession, intituled Anglia Libera, or The Limitation and Succession of the Crown explained and asserted,’ for presentation to the Electress. With them were also ‘Mr. King the herald,’ who brought the Garter for the Elector, and Dr. Sandys, the ambassador’s chaplain, who read the common prayers of the Church of England before the Electress in her ante-chamber. ‘She made the Responses, and performed the Ceremonys as punctually as if she had been us’d to it all her life.’ These and other details may be read in Toland’s Account of the Courts of Prussia and Hanover, which he published after his return. He was particularly anxious to recount the honours which he had received at Hanover and Herrenhausen, including that of conversing with the Electress, who, on one occasion, had told him that ‘she was afraid the Nation had already repented their Choice of an old Woman, but that she hop’d none of her Posterity wou’d give them any Reason to grow weary of their Dominion’—much the same words as those which she had used to Burnet.

We need not dwell upon the solemnities at Hanover and Celle, whither the special embassy proceeded in due course, nor upon the lavish munificence bestowed upon the ambassador,^[128] nor 326upon the medals distributed in honour of the event, among which none was more remarkable than that which exhibited the portrait of the English Matilda, the consort of Henry the Lion, and, on the reverse, that of the Electress Sophia, ‘Angliae princeps ad successionem nominata.’ But it may be worth our while in our next chapter to return to Toland, and to his account of the Court of Hanover, as giving an interesting, though no doubt rather rose-coloured, picture of the Electress and her surroundings, at a point of time which may be described as the climax of her fortunes.

Great Britain was never to see the face of its heiress, and the widowhood of the Electress Sophia was almost entirely spent in the tranquillity of Herrenhausen. More than any other place associated with her name, this palace and its still delightful gardens, in the midst of which her statue now stands, recall her regal personality. The building of the palace that was so long her home, and the laying-out of the gardens where Leibniz was so frequent a companion of her long daily walks, were begun by Duke John Frederick as early as the year 1665, when the old hunting-box of Lauenstädt was transferred hither. Herrenhausen Palace seems to have been reconstructed, under the superintendence of Sartorio, in imitation of the new palace at Osnabrück, of which, as has been seen, the younger brother, Ernest Augustus, had more or less borrowed the design from the Luxembourg at Paris. Ernest Augustus and Sophia elaborated John Frederick’s 328beginnings, considerably enlarging the gardens, which were designed by the elder Charbonnier, and carried out by him and his son, in 1697, though it was not till 1705 that the Elector George Lewis caused them to be completed in their present form, which suggests Dutch influences. Thus a pleasing mixture of styles and associations is presented by the solid clipped hedges, some of which in the garden theatre serve as side-scenes and conceal dressing-rooms (these are attributed specially to Quirini), by the prim summer-houses and the wilderness, by the grottoes and the cascades with their stalactites and shells, and by the profusion of statuary in gilt lead among the hedges and in cool marble by the artificial water. It was in these gardens that, during her married life, when she was already accustomed to solitude, Sophia consoled herself with the company of the nightingales, and here that, in 1700, she is found amusing herself with her ducks and swans, and with the new lodgings erected by her for their convenience. She had a genuine fondness for innocent open-air delights; at Lützenburg she speaks of her promenades with her daughter as affording her the greatest delight, while her sons disported themselves at the opera and at comedies played by ‘noble’ comedians; and on the gravelled paths of her Herrenhausen gardens she indulged her love of walking almost literally to the moment of her death. No fine day was allowed to pass without 329an hour or two—or even more—of her favourite pastime; and her persistency tired out all her attendants, except, as Toland elegantly puts it, when they had the honour of enjoying her conversation.^[129]

Among the buildings at Herrenhausen, where Sophia spent the greater part of her life from 1698 to 1714, the Orangery, one of the largest of its kind in Europe, ought specially to attract the visitor, since a portion of it was the residence, modest in dimensions, but decorated in a florid Italian style, of the Electress Dowager. It had been erected in 1692; its great hall was painted by Tommaso Giusti and stuccoed by Dossa Grana. The Electress’ rooms are small and narrow, but overloaded with decorations, and not in the most perfect taste, with the exception of the fine portal into the little garden.^[130] There seems no reason for crediting her with an artistic taste transcending that of most of her contemporaries, or sufficiently formed to maintain the Dutch preferences of her younger days against the more debased French and Italian, but more especially Italian, modes favoured by her husband and his brother.^[131] Clever with her hands 330as in every other way, she understood the use of the brush^[132] as well as of the embroidery needle;^[133] but neither artistic industry nor art, although as a descendant of the Stewarts she had doubtless inherited some love of both, was a sphere in which she sought to shine. Her husband consistently treated art as a mere handmaid to luxurious self-indulgence; thus, while he devoted nearly 25,000 dollars to the furnishing and adornment of his new opera-house, he wasted an even larger sum in the expenditure of a single carnival season.

Sophia had never shown much sympathy with what may be called the Venetian tastes of her husband; and, after her youth had ebbed away, had more and more come to live an intellectual life of her own. Perhaps, before recalling the political incidents of her last thirteen years in connexion with the question which invested them with an European significance, we may pause for a moment to summarise our impressions as to the most important 331features of her mind and character, as they present themselves to us more especially in these final years. The tragic part of her life was now over; but, as has been well said by the finest of the modern critics of her career, Professor Kuno Fischer, she had herself never played the part of a tragedy queen. Even a panegyric like that pronounced upon her by the old Hanoverian historian Spittler—by no means an undiscerning flatterer—seems too highly strung. He speaks of the ‘Teutschgründliche überfürstliche Aufklärung’—as who should say, the enlightenment above the ordinary enlightenment of princes, and one in its depth and thoroughness possible only to the Germanic mind—that rendered her deserving of the friendship of Leibniz. Beyond a doubt, Sophia was distinguished by an intellectual curiosity that was still uncommon, though much less so than is often supposed, among the women of her age. This curiosity her linguistic attainments (she was, as has been seen, from her youth up mistress of half a dozen languages) had long enabled her freely to satisfy. To the excellent system of education under which she had been trained she owed her acquaintance with various elements of theology, philosophy, and history. This knowledge she had improved in the course of a long life, abounding in (often involuntary) intervals of leisure, and bringing with it not a few special opportunities of learned intercourse. She had spent 332some years at Heidelberg, once more a fountainhead of learning; and, already at Osnabrück, she had been ambitious of converting that modest episcopal city into a centre of philosophical speculation, holding colloquies there with Francis Mercurius von Helmont, the interesting son of the great physicist.^[134] At a later date she read at least one of Spinoza’s works, towards which she seems to have been drawn by ideas of moral philosophy in which some resemblance to his has been thought traceable.^[135] Yet it may be doubted whether either here or afterwards at Hanover and Herrenhausen she was ever a profound student, or even so much as an ardent reader of books. She was fond of reading memoirs—such as those of Pierre Chanut, French ambassador at the Court of Christian of Sweden, or the celebrated autobiography of Marshal de Bassompierre. She had, also, a penchant for novels, preferring to the fashionable long-winded romances of her youth works enlivened by a humour congenial to her own. She asked Leibniz 333to draw up for her a list of all the novels she had read; for she had come to an end with Don Quixote and Don Guzman d’Alfarache, of which she preferred the former. Of German romances, it is almost equally to her credit that she mentions Simplicissimus, while avoiding the stagnant fashionable bombast of her age.^[136] A still more striking testimony to her critical insight may be found in the remark, which the admiring Duchess of Orleans states to have been confirmed by the Elector Palatine Charles Lewis, that nobody in the world better possessed Michel de Montaigne better than her aunt Sophia. Nor was she afraid of even more potent draughts; for, during her return journey from Italy, the Gargantua was read to her by Ezechiel Spanheim, divine and diplomatist. On the other hand, she does not appear to have greatly cared for historical reading on its own account; according to Leibniz, the reason why she took pleasure in Clarendon was ‘because she was acquainted with many persons mentioned by him.’ Yet she had no personal acquaintance with the Emperor Justinian, whom, as known to her from the Byzantine historian Procopius, she compares with Louis XIV. She certainly had a liking for moral theology and philosophy, which were, in general, more in the way 334of the ladies of the period than the historical sciences. She had read Boëtius, and was invited by Leibniz to read the Jesuit Friedrich von Spee, a leader in the crusade against that long-lived form of bigotry—the persecution of ‘witchcraft.’ Dogmatic theology had no charms for Sophia; and even the faithful Bishop Burnet’s book on a theme which ought to have interested her, namely, the Thirty-nine Articles, she put aside as ‘bon à feuilleter, mais non pas à lire,’ flippantly adding that the good binding of her copy would make it an ornament to her library. Philosophy, like religion, seems to have interested her primarily on the ethical side; the stoical maxims of Seneca and Epictetus had impressed her mind before it had opened itself to more comprehensive problems under the influence of Spinoza, whom, as we know, her favourite brother had sought to domesticate at Heidelberg, and afterwards, and, above all, under the influence of Leibniz. She can at no time have been very well seen in metaphysics, the study of which is held to contribute so largely to the formation of ideas on religion; she shared her eldest son’s somewhat crude notions on the origin of ideas, and would not—or could not—understand Leibniz’s argument about monads. Possibly, like many clever people of both sexes, she was rather too fond of startling her interlocutors; and the excellent Molanus respectfully shakes his reverend head at ‘Serenissima 335nostra, quæ a paradoxis sibi temperare nunquam potest.’ On the other hand, the diplomatist Thomas von Grote, another of her intimates, moved perhaps by a not unnatural jealousy, opined that the learned companions of her Herrenhausen walks would in the end take her a little out of her depth, though he had no fear that for her the consequences would be what they had been for Queen Christina of Sweden. As for the mathematical and physical sciences, she took that casual interest in them which, in the case of great personages, and of great ladies in particular, alternately makes the delight and the despair of savants; Leibniz distinctly states that works dealing in detail with such subjects are not among those which the Electress was fond of reading. When, in the last year of her life, the Czar Peter came to Hanover and talked mathematics to her, ‘she held her tongue.’

And yet, though neither a profound philosopher nor a phenomenally accomplished blue-stocking, Sophia was the very reverse of a commonplace personage. She was a woman of the world, but a very wise one. In age, as in youth, she sparkled with wit and intelligence, and in her both these gifts were interfused with that third and greatest gift of humour, which is a property of the soul as well as of the intellect.^[137] Of her conversation we 336can only judge from her letters, of which we fortunately possess a quite extraordinary quantity; but, if her speech was like her writing, its style must have been equally far ‘esloigné de l’aigreur,’—to borrow a phrase from Madame de Brinon, to whom she told not a few home truths. Her letters combine with the supreme charm of perfect naturalness a pungency in the choice of expressions superior, in the opinion of the Duchess of Orleans, to any minted by the academies; ‘for to write agreeably is better than to write correctly.’ Occasionally, her wit was singularly incisive, as when she called the same Madame de Brinon ‘une religieuse qui passe pour bel esprit,’ and her eloquence extraordinary ‘car elle parle toujours’; or when, Toland having more suo taken it upon himself in argument to whitewash the cannibals, she commended him for his prudence, in that, with all Christendom against him, he had provided himself with protectors. Not unfrequently, however, frankness and cynicism did 337duty for wit. Her jests spared neither Leibniz, nor the House of Hanover, nor ‘le bon lord Winchilsea,’ whom she found so heavy in hand, nor Queen Anne’s husband, Prince George of Denmark, of whom, when it was proposed to create him King Consort, she observed that he would be a King like Jove among the frogs—and perhaps popular for that very reason. She had, too, a good deal of fun as well as wit—as when, in acknowledging the courtesy of an unknown Mr. Smith in sending a descriptive account of England and the English (among whom she had ‘been brought up till she reached the age of twenty’), she says that he describes London and St Paul’s and the ‘pantquitinhouse’ as if she had never heard a word about them. De Gourville, whose qualities as a butt possibly remained a secret to his sublime self-consciousness, suspected her of a natural inclination to criticising any fellow-mortal brought into her presence, though he allowed that the person bantered by her was sure to be the first to laugh. She was a good hater, and could even hate at second hand, as in the instance of Madame de Maintenon, the bugbear of the Duchess of Orleans. But her aversions were, like all her feelings, kept in constant check by the dictates of reason as well as by her care for the interests of her family and House; and we have seen how even her sentiments towards Eleonora d’Olbreuze underwent a gradual mitigation which outsiders judged to be a complete 338change. It may, too, be doubted whether sarcasm was really natural to her, though her sense of humour always responded to the irony of things. She was alike open-minded and open-handed, and had nothing of the stinginess which sits so ill on high rank and position. Though towards the close of her life she was desirous that an income should be granted her by the British Crown and Parliament, it was only for political purposes that she desired this. She had quite money enough, she said, to keep up her German establishment. When she found that the distinguished services of the Brunswick-Lüneburg officers and men were left unnoticed in the Gazette, she was anxious to pay for a proper mention of them out of her own pocket. The geniality of her disposition shows itself in an affability which was the same to both great and small, and in her power to interest herself with the same readiness in the discourse of philosophers, the conversation of ministers of State, and the gossip of country ladies on domestic thoughts intent. It also showed itself in a hospitality which made everyone welcome at Hanover and Herrenhausen, and a tact which put all at their ease there; at no court in the world, wrote the Brandenburg statesman Paul von Fuchs, are les étrangers et les gastes treated better than at the Hanoverian. Though, during her later years, she lived chiefly in retirement at Herrenhausen, she by no means secluded herself, but received a large variety of visitors, both princely, 339personages and political and literary celebrities. Above all, it was always a delight to her to see Englishmen at her Court, as indeed it had been even before the passing of the Act of Settlement; and in welcoming them she carefully eschewed any and every distinction between parties—divided as these were in England with a severity unknown at the time to any other country. Occasionally, when the Elector was away on his campaigns, she took his place at Hanover in the reception of distinguished guests.^[138] Amiable to all, she reserved the treasures of her affection for those who were nearest to her—not only for the survivors of her own passionately loved brood, but for all the younger members of her family, in which she included the children of her favourite brother.^[139] The Duchess of Orleans comically avows her annoyance that everyone who 340has had the privilege of living with her aunt should be brought to entertain towards her the very sentiments of love and affection cherished by Elizabeth Charlotte herself. Yet she was quite impervious to flattery, and, when told by a diplomatist that the court of Versailles was full of her daughter’s praises, remarked that these were the usual talk to which an envoy was treated when there was nothing else to say to him. In her later years, Sophia seems never to have indulged herself either in outbursts of temper or in moods of discontent; although she allows that her vexation about the vagaries of her son Maximilian had proved to her that her philosophy was only skin deep.

Those, wrote Elizabeth Charlotte, who thought her aunt incapable of being of use in affairs of State, could have little knowledge of her intellectual powers. We have seen, however, that during her husband’s lifetime she had been allowed little direct interference in state concerns, though on several occasions Ernest Augustus had benefited both from listening to her advice and from utilising her personal influence. Her eldest son was not the kind of man to concede, like a sultan at Constantinople, a position of acknowledged control over his Government to his mother, the Electress Dowager. When unable to render to Leibniz a service solicited by him, she wrote rather bitterly that there were times when she found silence best. 341But, apart from the Succession question, towards which she, of course, occupied a distinct position of her own, a considerable sphere of political influence remained open to her in the last period of her life. More especially, she rendered excellent service by maintaining a good understanding with the court of Berlin, and by restoring it when the relations between the two courts had become strained, and her daughter proved unable to manage them. The influence which had been established over King Frederick I of Prussia by his ‘gnädigste Mama,’ she contrived, though she saw through him, to exercise even after her daughter’s death.

But even Sophia’s ‘nimbleness of mind,’ to use another expression of her favourite niece’s, was not so marked a characteristic of her as was the reasonableness which proceeded in nearly equal proportions from intellectual enlightenment and from a beneficent disposition towards humanity. She was, wrote Leibniz about 1701, ‘entirely on the side of reason; consequently, all measures calculated to make kings and peoples follow reason, will meet with her approval.’ A rationalist in the stricter sense of the term she can hardly be called; though her wholly unembarrassed way of expressing herself on any subject in heaven or earth at times resembles a want of reverence.^[140] She was irritated 342by Toland’s restless tongue; but, while thanking Burnet for putting her on her guard, indicated that she was too old for Toland to give her another twist (perhaps this may be a coarse translation of ‘pli’) in religion than that to which she had been long accustomed. For the rest, it was not, she said, her habit to ‘catechise’ English visitors. Anthony Collins’ plea for ‘Free-thinking’ struck her as both mischievous and ridiculously superfluous—‘more especially in England, where there was such a multitude of factions’; ‘Free thinquers,’ she observed, when complaining of his insolence in sending her the book, ‘are against all religions.’ All men, she allowed, might like to think as they choose so long as their conduct was honourable; but in a well-governed State all men ought not to be free to publish their opinions. Herein her conscientiousness as a German Princess no doubt counted for something. Thus, when she was asked to lend her aid towards inducing the East Frisian Government to proceed against the spreading eccentricities of the Pietists, she upheld the rights of authority. ‘Lutheran Princes,’ she declared, ‘are the Popes of our Church, and must be obeyed.’ For herself, she had a thoroughgoing dislike of anything ‘enthusiastic,’ and would not hear of shoemakers 343(like Jacob Behmen) becoming inspired prophets instead of sticking to their lasts.^[141] More than this: Kuno Fischer rightly says that ‘to her clear practical intellect the mysteries of religion remained obscure and alien’; and, when he asserts that she was at bottom a deist in her opinions, this is in so far true, that, while she avowed her belief in a personal Creator, she cannot be shown to have gone further in any declaration of her convictions. In 1709, Leibniz informed Toland that the Electress ‘was accustomed to quote and give particular praise to that passage of Scripture which demands whether it be consistent with reason that He that planted the ear should not hear, and He that formed the eye should not see?’ At the same time, her latitudinarianism was perfectly candid. She certainly (in 1702) encouraged the notion which had occurred to her son-in-law, the King of Prussia, of introducing the English Church liturgy into the Calvinistic services, telling him that he might then call himself Defender of the Faith. On the other hand, she had 344no sympathy with the views of what in one of her letters she calls ‘Heyschortz’ men;^[142] she laughed at an English clergyman who refused to set his foot in a Calvinist ‘temple,’ and she seriously blamed the early attempts of Queen Anne, as she interpreted them, to force the Presbyterians into conformity both in Scotland and in England. It was as a declared adherent of the Reformed or (as in England alone it was called) Calvinist confession, in which she had been brought up, that, as Toland notes, she built a ‘pretty church’ in the New Town of Hanover for the French Huguenot refugees, to which in his day King William III liberally contributed; and she seems to have at least intended to build a church for the German members of the same religious body. ‘You must know,’ she humorously wrote to Leibniz on this occasion, ‘that I am une dame fort zêlée.’ It was probably no mere commonplace of shortsighted criticism when, in 1700, about which time the idea of seeking to evangelise the heathen was first taking root in Germany, she pronounced it ‘a fine enterprise indeed’ to send out missionaries to India. ‘To me it seems,’ she remarked, ‘that the first thing ought to be to make good Christians at home in 345Germany, without going to so great a distance for the purpose of manufacturing them.’ In a word, she should be credited with genuine religious feeling; though demonstrativeness, whether on this or on any other subject, was altogether out of her way. And she hated religious factiousness, which she thought domesticated in England.^[143]

We have spoken of the Electress Sophia’s profession of the Reformed faith—a fact as to which, although it has been called into question, there cannot really be any doubt. As we saw, she was, according to her own account, in her childhood taught the Heidelberg Catechism; and, when she married the Lutheran Ernest Augustus, it was arranged that, though she was to take no Calvinist minister with her to Hanover, one should visit the town three or four times in each year, in order to administer the Sacrament to her. Toland explicitly states (as de Gourville, who in 1687 had a little scheme of his own for bringing over her husband and his family to Rome, had also stated at an earlier date) that the Electress was a Calvinist; but he adds, in illustration of the tolerance prevailing at the Court of Hanover, that ‘most of her women and other immediate servants were Lutherans, just as her son the Elector, though himself a Lutheran, 346had many Calvinists belonging to him; and both their Highnesses, to show a good example and their unfeigned charity in these lesser differences, do often go to church together.’^[144] Their only daughter married a Calvinist,^[145] and Sophia herself steadily adhered to the confession in which she was born, though her latitudinarian tendencies fell in easily enough with the tolerant principles prevailing in the Lutheran Church of Hanover, and represented by the head of its ecclesiastical administration, the worthy ‘Abbot’ Molanus.^[146] Nor is there any reason for 347supposing that, had she been actually summoned to ascend the English throne, she would, in the matter of religion, have failed to do what was expected of her. Early in 1713, she wrote to Leibniz that Molanus had so well explained to her his Lutheran creed, that there had been some talk of putting his exposition into print for publication in England. Clearly, it was not any question of this kind which would have interfered with her accession to the throne. She had sufficient confidence in herself to shrink from no step approved by both her reason and her conscience. Moreover, there are indications that she by no means regarded the Church of her mother and her brother’s native land with coldness; and, had Leibniz apprehended any objection on her part, he would hardly have proposed that the English establishment which he desired for the Electress should include an Anglican chapel. Indeed, in 1703, she is found expressing a wish that Queen Anne would carry her ecclesiastical zeal as far as Hanover, and contribute to the English church there; ‘in which event we would call it the English Church, and read the Book of Common Prayer in both tongues.’

The one change, however, to which she would at no time have consented,—not even, whatever de Gourville may have believed, when her husband was entertaining some such thought in connexion 348with his long effort for the Ninth Electorate^[147]—was conversion to the Church of Rome. In her old age, when Princess Caroline of Ansbach, for whom she cherished a particular affection, was systematically tempted to qualify herself by conversion to Rome for the hand of Archduke Charles, afterwards the Emperor Charles VI, there can be little doubt that the Princess was encouraged in her resistance by the Electress as well as by Leibniz.

Sophia was no stranger to one of the loftiest among the lofty conceptions which occupied the great mind of her friend and counsellor, Leibniz,—that which aimed at the reunion of Christendom. The correspondence on this topic between Leibniz and Bossuet, which took place in 1691-5, and after a pause was renewed in 1699, was brought about through the joint mediation of Sophia and her sister, the Abbess of Maubuisson. Mixed up in the transaction was Madame de Brinon, who found a refuge at Maubuisson after the sudden termination of her rule at Saint-Cyr. This good lady, whose ardent temperament was in glaring contrast with Bossuet’s 349imperturbable calm, made repeated attempts to bring the Electress of Hanover back into the fold, en attendant its enlargement by means of the Reunion. But Sophia was not at all flattered by these high-minded efforts. She trusted—so she told Madame de Brinon—in the goodness of God, who could not have created her in order that she should be lost; for the rest, she could not reconcile herself to the persecutions of the Protestants in France.^[148] But her aversion from Roman Catholicism went further than this. Although at times she spoke of such doctrines of the Church of Rome as the Intercession of Saints with nothing more than contemptuous indifference, she occasionally assumed an attitude of open hostility towards a creed which, as a child, she had been taught to hate. Of all religions, she told Lord Strafford, there was none that she abhorred so much as the Popish; for there was none so contrary to Christianity. Other passages to much the same effect might be cited. For the rest, in an undated letter to Madame de Brinon, Sophia, with her characteristic humour and perhaps her characteristic want of external reverence, so clearly explains her general religious position, that we may conclude our attempt to 350indicate it by extracting from this letter the following passage:—

Leibniz, whose name has already so often occurred in this chapter and in this volume, was consulted by the Electress Sophia in other matters besides religion, philosophy, and science. Both as enjoying her confidence and on his own account, he was a welcome guest at several courts, including the Imperial; and to the Houses of Hanover and Celle, in whose joint employment he stood as historiographer, he rendered invaluable service, not only in that capacity, but also as a publicist, on important occasions, demanding a comprehensive as well as effective treatment of the problems handled by him. But his direct influence upon the policy of the dynasty seems practically to have been limited to the question of the English Succession, which, as we have seen, had, up to the passing 351of the Act of Settlement, been regarded as more or less personal to the Electress, and which, after that date, continued to be largely, though by no means entirely, dealt with in the same way. Thus his position at the Electoral Court, where there is no sign of his having been consulted in matters of general politics by either Ernest Augustus or George Lewis, was perhaps occasionally misunderstood at the time, and has certainly been misunderstood since. He was never the Electress’ secretary, or even her quasi-official political adviser; he was only her trusted personal friend and servant, whose function in such matters was to suggest rather than to advise, and whose influence upon the conduct of affairs in which the Electress took an interest accordingly varied at different times. His exertions as to the English Succession, before 1701, have been already noticed. After the passing of the Act of Settlement, the Electress Dowager appointed, as her confidential agent to England, a diplomatic adventurer of the name of Falaiseau, who had come over to Hanover in Lord Macclesfield’s suite; and his reports seem, as a rule, to have passed through the hands of Leibniz. From 1702 onwards, as will be seen, the conduct of the relations of the House of Hanover began to fall largely into the hands of Bothmer; and, in 1705, on the union between Celle and Hanover, Bernstorff, and with him Robethon, passed out of the 352service of the late Duke George William into that of his nephew, the Elector. The more regular system of diplomatic representation at the Court of St. James of itself diminished the influence of Leibniz on these relations, more especially as Sophia never seems to have had much personal liking either for Bernstorff (perhaps because of his ineradicable ill-will against Brandenburg-Prussia, perhaps for other reasons) or for Robethon, who became invaluable to the Elector as his private secretary. The credentials of the Hanoverian envoys—the Schützes, Bothmer, and Grote^[149]—and residents at the Court of St. James—de Beyrie and Kreyenberg—were made out in the joint names of the Elector and the Electress Dowager, and all the official letters sent to England from this time forward in the name of either were drafted by Robethon. Thus, notwithstanding the active interest taken by Leibniz in a question the progress of which had owed much and continued to be indebted to his assiduity, its threads were no longer continuously in his hands. Whether this was a misfortune for its ultimate development and solution, need not be here discussed. From his 353earlier days onwards he had exhibited something of the defect habitual to politicians more exclusively academical than himself, who had a considerable experience of affairs—the defect of excess, which includes the mistake of not letting well alone. Not only, however, did the force of his genius enable him to find out the heart of every political problem to which he addressed himself, but the universality of his insight made clear to him its various aspects, and the energy of his mind supplied the impulse which converts design into action.^[150] Finally, his literary skill,^[151] added to his gifts of finding his material and disposing it according to the leading ideas with which he approached it, made him in the times in which his lot fell, as it made Gentz, an infinitely inferior personality, in another period of even deeper national humiliation, the foremost publicist of his age.^[152]

354That Leibniz, whose political services to the Electress and her dynasty were, in any case, highly important, should at the same time have become her chosen intimate and personal friend, forms one of his titles to the grateful remembrance of those who believe this pair to have been worthy of one another. From his conversation and correspondence, which, in her later years, became more and more of a necessity to Sophia, her active and receptive mind derived constant stimulus and refreshment; while his humane as well as lofty wisdom, at no time seeking to avoid contact with the actualities of life, but neither ever conceding to them a larger claim than was their due, helped to fortify her character against the risk of being mastered by the element of frivolity inborn in most of her mother’s children. Leibniz’ own activity at Hanover, from the time when (as far back as 1673) he had first entered into the service of Duke John Frederick, was remarkably varied. He held the offices of librarian, archivist, and historiographer; fostered, among other activities in the dominions of his patrons, the endeavours of technical science, as in the instance of the mining industry of the Harz; and organised both scientific and literary effort, in connexion with his onerous task as the historian of the Guelfs, with his work as a philologer and with the studies in mental and moral philosophy, which were, in 1710, crowned by the production of 355his Théodicée. His influence upon the foundation of academies as levers for the advancement of scientific research^[153] was by no means limited to Berlin, where success had attended on his labours in consequence of the sympathetic support of Sophia’s daughter. The hopes placed by him on the third of the illustrious ladies of the Hanoverian dynasty who felt themselves honoured by his intimacy, were, notwithstanding her loyal efforts at the outset, doomed to disappointment. The Electoral Princess (Caroline of Ansbach) had been solaced by his Théodicée in a season of great anxiety; but, when the political consummation to which Leibniz had so actively helped to prepare had been actually achieved, he had to remain behind in Germany; and she found herself unequal to the task either of impressing his claims upon her impassive father-in-law—or of reconciling his merits with those of Newton.

During the years of Sophia’s widowhood, to which we must here confine ourselves, Leibniz was drawn nearer to her, not only by intellectual and moral sympathy, but also by the discomforts to which she was subjected by the Elector’s coldness, and by that Prince’s habit of expecting all services to be absolved as per contract. Sophia was unable to 356secure the fulfilment of Leibniz’s wish for a sinecure like that by which his friend, ‘Abbot’ Molanus, was recompensed for his ecclesiastical services. But her friendship with Leibniz was not dependent upon favours given or received. Not only was the encouragement which he derived from his intimacy with her and from that which through her he enjoyed with Sophia Charlotte and Caroline, of high value to him in the labours and in the trials of his life; but in the Electress Sophia’s case, at all events, her nature was in many respects supplementary to his own. Their correspondence thus furnishes a memorial of a friendship alike sincere and productive; and their names will always remain inseparable from one another.

Sophia Charlotte, though her marriage had long since made it necessary for her to leave her mother’s side, and though the trials to which she had since been subjected had greatly added to that mother’s anxieties, and had often been mitigated by her tact and good-humour rather than by those of the Queen herself, remained Sophia’s truest joy, till taken away by death in 1705. Mother and daughter had kept up a continuous correspondence with one another, besides interchanging visits when possible; nor could the completeness of the confidence existing between them be better illustrated than by the treatment which, after Sophia Charlotte’s death, it was 357thought judicious to apply to the documents of their mutual affection. At the instigation of Leibniz, the extant letters of the Electress Sophia to her daughter were committed to the flames at Berlin, so that only a small remnant of the series, copied out by him for his own use, have been preserved. Inasmuch as neither have any letters from Sophia Charlotte to her mother come down to us, they may be surmised to have been similarly destroyed by way of precaution. Possibly, these proceedings may have been in part due to evidence contained in these letters as to efforts made, in the Hanoverian interest, at the Court of Berlin by Leibniz or others. The chief trouble of Sophia Charlotte’s married life—King Frederick I’s infatuation for the Countess von Wartenberg—had been particularly acute in the period just preceding the Queen’s death; and her last visit to her mother (in January, 1705) could only be carried out by her submitting to the condition that an invitation to Hanover should also be sent to her detested rival. During this visit Sophia Charlotte died, the victim of a painful and incurable disease that befell her when her intellectual abilities were at their full height. Her death, even more impressively than her life, proved the justice of her grandson Frederick the Great’s tribute to her strength of soul. The illness of the Queen had been concealed from her mother, who herself lay ill; and thus, as she wrote, 358heart-broken, to her widowed son-in-law, she lost her darling child without even setting eyes upon her.^[154]

Princess Wilhelmina Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach had, in her thirteenth year, been left an orphan by the death of her mother, who had been united to the Elector John George IV of Saxony as her second husband. In 1696, the child had been placed under the care of her guardians, afterwards the first King and Queen in Prussia. Thus Lützenburg became the home of Caroline’s childhood; and here she became familiar with the intellectual society which Sophia Charlotte loved to gather around her, and above all with Leibniz. The nature of their intercourse may be gathered from the letter, sublime in thought, which he wrote to her on the occasion of Sophia Charlotte’s death. Only a few months after this event—in September, 1705—Caroline, lovely in person and richly endowed in intellect, had illustrated the saying of the Electress Sophia, that ‘nowadays princesses are sacrificial victims.’ After a proper interval had been allowed to elapse upon the breakdown of the project of marrying Caroline to 359Archduke Charles, the Electoral Prince George Augustus, to whom the thoughts of his grandmother, the Electress, had been directed already during the attempts made in 1704 to induce Caroline to change her religion, paid a preliminary visit to Ansbach. The rumour which had arisen in 1702, that the Electoral Prince was to find a consort in Sweden and Queen Sophia Charlotte’s counter-suggestion of the Duchess Marie-Elizabeth of Holstein-Gottorp, had alike come to nothing. On September 2nd, 1705, the marriage between the Electoral Prince and Caroline of Ansbach was celebrated at Hanover. Here Caroline spent the following nine years of her life, beyond a doubt its happiest period; and, during the remainder of Sophia’s own existence, she in a large measure filled the place in her affections which her daughter Sophia Charlotte had so long occupied. The congeniality of their tastes and dispositions made her a delightful companion at Herrenhausen to her grandmother-in-law; and thus a kindly fortune granted to Sophia, who was so singularly capable of enjoying it, the truest joy of old age. The Electress repeatedly speaks of the happiness of the marriage; nor can there be any doubt as to the genuine affection on both sides which constituted that happiness. Early in 1707, the Electoral Princess gave birth to her eldest son (destined afterwards to disappoint an indulgent world as Frederick, Prince of Wales), 360upon whom, a year later, his great-grandmother is found bestowing an infantine equipment for a fancy ball; and three daughters were subsequently born to the young pair, before they accompanied King George I to England. The prospects of a permanent establishment of the Hanoverian dynasty upon the British throne were thus signally advanced by this marriage; and to these prospects and their initial realisation we must now finally turn. They filled Sophia’s last years with anxieties and uncertainties; yet, on the whole, life flowed more easily for her in this final period of her existence; although the joyousness of girlhood, which she so vividly recalls in her Memoirs, was a thing of the past, together with the experiences—some grotesque, some painful, some tragic—of her married days. The deep agitations of her life were at an end; and she might pace the Herrenhausen gardens without caring too deeply even for the chances of the English Succession.

Thus we may imagine this spirited and sensible lady, at any time in these last thirteen years of her long life, exemplifying the old saw of ‘mens sana in corpore sano.’ In the main, she enjoyed excellent health; and Leibniz’ description of the day of her arrival at Lützenburg is certainly astonishing for a lady of seventy-four. It included, in accordance with her usual habits, two hours of walking exercise. Erect and handsome, with her 361mother’s aquiline nose and abundant hair, she was, if not a Gloriana as imagined by poets, a princess worthy to mount a royal throne—or at least one who, if placed there, would of a certainty not lose the firmness of her footing by reason of such an elevation.

After, in 1701, a copy of the Act pledging King and Parliament to the new limitation of the Succession had been placed in the hands of the Electress Sophia, thirteen long years of expectancy awaited her, which might have made a less stout heart grow faint. Or, perhaps, it would be more correct to say that a nature less happily balanced, and uninured by experience, both inherited and personal, to the necessity of patience and resignation, might have fallen into mistake upon mistake, and have thus courted failure. Sophia, prudently choosing her own path, almost to the last did nothing to affront the approach of success. To suppose, however, that either her policy or that of her House was one of masterly inactivity, would be almost as contrary to fact as the converse assumption that, either before or after 1701, she was possessed by an absorbing desire to find herself seated on the English throne. The former supposition is confuted by the single circumstance that, by way of furnishing the necessary means in the event of a sudden crisis, a sum of not less than 300,000 362dollars was secretly provided by the Committee of the Calenberg Estates, and placed in the hands of the Hanoverian envoy in London—the secret of this expenditure being kept for not less than seventy years.^[155] The other assumption is simply irreconcilable with the whole tenor of Sophia’s life.

The festivities at Hanover and Celle, on the occasion of the transmission of the Act of Settlement, were hardly at an end, when King William III had a meeting at the Loo with his old friend Duke George William. The Duke was accompanied by his grandson, the Electoral Prince George Augustus, whom, according to Toland, the King received as a son. This Prince certainly seems in his youth to have displayed attractive qualities, which were afterwards driven into the background by his master quality, self-conceit; curiously enough, though he was a fair linguist, it had not been thought necessary to make him well acquainted with the English tongue. At this interview, the account of which shows how loyally the old Duke of Celle was working for the interests of the dynasty, King William promised to use his influence in order to obtain from Parliament an annual revenue for the Electress Sophia, and mentioned his intention of inviting her and the Electoral Prince to visit 363England in the coming spring. On his sounding his next heir, the Princess Anne, at all events as to the proposal of summoning the Electress, she is said to have pretended to be still in hopes of an heir. The Electress on her side seems to have trusted in the fulfilment of the King’s promise, not only during the remainder of his reign, but for a few months afterwards.

But no time was left to the King for carrying out his design. On September 6th, 1701, nine days after the conclusion of the Grand Alliance to which William III had set the seal on his visit to Holland, James II died; and, by recognising his son as King of England, Louis XIV once again, and more completely by his own act than ever, identified himself with the Stewart cause. His grandson, King Philip of Spain, followed his example; and Pope Clement XI publicly extolled the action of Louis XIV, as entitling him to the gratitude of posterity. In the final form of the instrument of the Grand Alliance—which William III was not to live to see actually concluded—a clause was inserted binding the contracting Powers not to conclude peace with France, until the King of England should have received satisfaction for the grave insult involved in the recognition of the ‘pretended Prince of Wales’ as King. In other words, the War of the Spanish Succession had become a War of the English Succession also; and, 364to whatever extent this fact might be overlooked during the course of the conflict, it was certain to become prominent again so soon as a settlement began to be seriously discussed. Inasmuch as the first public suggestion of such a clause had been made by a prominent Tory politician (Edward Seymour), it can hardly have been inspired from Hanover, though in a letter to the Electress, written as early as 1701, Leibniz had stated such a stipulation to be desirable.

In England, the recognition of the Pretender by Louis XIV had an immediate consequence in the Attainder and Abjuration Acts, passed in January, 1702, by William III’s sixth Parliament. The Act of Attainder had been criticised beforehand by the Electress Sophia, who, in October, 1701, told Leibniz that there was an intention of declaring the poor Prince of Wales a rebel, such as Monmouth had been declared to be before him, ‘though his personal merit deserved a better fate.’ Why should she have refused this modicum of sympathy to her kinsman, who, not more unfortunate in his fate than he was in his infatuation, was about this very time rejoicing that Pope Clement would manifestly ‘leave no stone unturned to show how much he favours us’? The Abjuration Act, which led to long and warm debates in both Houses, provided both for abjuring the ‘pretended Prince of Wales,’ and for swearing fidelity to the ‘rightful 365and lawful King’ and ‘his heirs according to the Act of Settlement.’ A motion in the Commons, carried by a single vote, made these engagements obligatory; the opposition in the Lords ended in nothing but a protest, the list of whose signatories, including the names of Craven and Jeffreys, as it were mirrors the story of the downfall of the Stewart monarchy in England.

On March 8th, 1702, King William III died, after a fortnight’s illness following on his fall from his horse. To Portland, the faithful friend for whom the King had asked, without being able to speak to him intelligibly, shortly before his death, the Electress Sophia, when the first shock of the blow had passed over, wrote in unaffected sorrow—

366By the death, on March 8th, 1702, of King William III and the accession of Queen Anne, the prospect which the Act of Settlement seemed to have once for all thrown open to the House of Hanover was again clouded over. Queen Anne, indeed, at once sent an assurance to the Electress through the Hanoverian resident, the elder Schütz, that her sentiments towards the House of Hanover were the same as those of her predecessor,^[157] and a few days afterwards repeated the message in writing. An Order in Council directed the Archbishop of Canterbury to insert the name of the Princess Sophia in the Book of Common Prayer; and, as was usual in such cases, this Order was in due course sent on to Dublin.^[158] It has been observed, nor is there great exception to be taken to the remark, that beyond the issue of this Order nothing was done by Queen Anne in the whole of the earlier period of her reign on behalf of the Hanoverian Succession. In other words, the proposals discussed at the Loo, which were to have resulted in the payment of an annuity to the Electress, and to her or the Electoral Prince residing in England, were not carried further. 367Interchanges of civility, however, took place; and the Earl of Winchelsea arrived at Hanover, in order to return the congratulations brought thence by Count Platen on the occasion of Queen Anne’s accession. But, though the special mission was flattering, Sophia’s wish, that the ambassador might bring with him some money which she might apply to the necessities of her sons Christian and Maximilian, remained unfulfilled. For the rest, she told the Raugravine Louisa that, for all the compliments which had passed, ‘time would show’ whether she was still wanted in England; and she continued to bear herself calmly, avoiding the appearance of excessive zeal that some of her partisans could not deny themselves. She had thought it a piece of impertinence, when, after his return to England, Toland had, early in this year, followed up his Anglia Libera by another publication provocatively entitled Reasons for addressing His Majesty to invite into England their Highnesses the Electress Dowager and the Electoral Prince of Hanover; which, soon after Queen Anne’s accession, was duly censured by the House of Lords. The Electress had reasons for disliking a championship which under King William would have been superfluous and was now inopportune. She could not consider Toland so ‘infâme’ as Cresset painted him; and she took care that in her presence he should not say a disrespectful word about Queen 368Anne. But, when, in 1702, Toland found it convenient again to quit England for Germany, he left the court of Hanover unvisited; nor does he seem to have reappeared there till 1707.

The Elector’s instincts as to the doubtfulness of Queen Anne’s real sentiments on the subject of the Hanoverian Succession were justified by what ensued. The hope of an immediate grant to the Heiress Presumptive out of the ample Civil List good Queen Anne frustrated by the highly popular step of making over to the Exchequer £100,000 towards lightening the burdens of the nation. The claims upon the national resources were many and urgent; and Parliament could perhaps hardly be expected to consider how much a subvention was needed by the Electress, more especially in view of the presents which, in accordance with the usage of the times, she as well as the Elector had to make to a succession of English special ambassadors. There can, however, be no doubt but that, already in this early part of Queen Anne’s reign, and even before the Toryism of her first Parliament had encouraged in her the tendency which her choice of ministers had implied, deliberate attempts had been made to influence unfavourably her attitude towards the Succession of the House of Hanover. Moreover, her nature was so peculiarly prone to strong personal attachments, and her gift of insight into the motives of men was so unmistakably accompanied 369by an absence of all real power of political judgment, that she could hardly but be dominated by a strong prepossession against the line so likely to succeed her on the throne of her ancestors. Yet, hitherto, neither the Electress Sophia nor any of the members of her House—and least of all her impassive eldest son, who at one time had been supposed to have a chance of the hand of the Princess Anne—had been on unfriendly terms with the new Queen; nor is there any reason for supposing her to have imparted to any of them a share in the wild scheme rumoured to have been set on foot for ousting her from the Succession. When, however, in May, 1702, the Whig Earl of Carlisle, the First Lord of the Treasury, carried in the House of Lords his demand for an enquiry into the scandalous rumour which asserted that King William had intended by a kind of posthumous coup d’état to raise the Electoral Prince to the throne, Queen Anne showed no desire for the vindication of her predecessor’s good faith towards herself, and pointedly dismissed Carlisle from office. Nor is it probable that, at this early stage, the Queen was much intent upon the interests of her half-brother, the Pretender. The favourite advisers by whom she was swayed—Marlborough and Godolphin—could have no wish to hurry her intervention on behalf of either of the two sides, with both of which they desired to stand well; and the Tory majority in the Commons, 370typified by the Speaker, Harley, were certainly not prepared to unsettle the Act of Settlement. The Act for the further Security of the Protestant Succession passed in December, 1702, which declared it high treason to seek to defeat the Succession to the Crown as now limited by law, or to set aside the next Succession, followed the precedent of a similar Act passed in the previous reign, and accordingly encountered no resistance. Thus Queen Anne was slow to take up any definite attitude towards the political problem which overshadowed the whole course of her reign; and she was consequently all the more unwilling, and remained so from first to last, to listen to any suggestion of carrying out William III’s promise and inviting the Electress Dowager and the Electoral Prince, or either of them, to England. The probability of this plan being brought forward, either as a practical proposal or by way of testing the sincerity of her own views on the subject, acted as a perennial irritant upon the Queen. Neither she nor her advisers are to be blamed for leaving without response the suggestion, pardonably enough made by Sophia, that the un-English title of ‘Hereditary Princess’ should be conferred upon her. Other signs were noticeable of the uncertainty prevailing at the Court of St. James. At Hanover and Herrenhausen, Cresset watched the Electress with a suspiciousness that could not escape her 371attention, though she commented on it with her usual insouciance; and Stepney even left off corresponding with her and her intimates, in order not to give offence nearer home. In conversing with the Englishmen and Scotchmen who attended the Court of Hanover, anxious to promote its fortunes or their own, the Electress naturally sought to emphasise her confidence in her august relative, the Queen. But in her intimate correspondence she was fain to strike a different key. She told the Raugravine Amalia that Queen Anne had no desire to be survived by her, although (quoting a Dutch proverb which she has made classical) she allowed that ‘creaking wagons go on for a long time,’ and suggested that the Queen’s real preference was for her brother.^[159] Matters continued very much in this stagnant and unsatisfactory condition during the first three years (or thereabouts) of Queen Anne’s reign. In March, 1694, Sophia writes with some bitterness, that Queen Anne ‘seems to have more friendship for the King of Prussia than for us, inasmuch as she speaks of the’ [Prussian] ‘and says nothing of the Brunswick troops, without whom the battle’ [of Blenheim] ‘could not have been won. This is a sample showing what is to be expected in that quarter.’ And she adds that the statement in 372the Gazette of the great presents sent by the Queen to Hanover is untrue, whoever caused it to be inserted.

It may, at this point, be noted that the violence of public feeling which about this time disturbed Scotland had very seriously endangered the prospects of the Succession of the House of Hanover in that kingdom. Here, it was universally believed that Queen Anne cherished the secret wish of securing the Succession to her brother; and no declarations to the contrary exercised the slightest effect upon the stubbornness of preconceived Scottish opinion. At the same time, a strong belief that she meditated a Prelatic as well as a Jacobite reaction, led to the anti-Episcopalian legislation of the last Scottish Parliament, which met in 1703.^[160] The Act of Security brought forward in this Parliament provided that the Estates of the Realm should meet within twelve days after the present Queen’s death, and should proceed to name a successor professing the Protestant religion. A proposal to insert the name of the Electress Sophia was rejected; but the ministers, besides frustrating an attempt at inserting 373a series of limitations calculated to take away the last vestige of authority from the Crown, also defeated a proposal to limit the Protestantism of the successor to ‘the true Protestant religion as by law established within this kingdom,’ which would have excluded the Lutheranism of the House of Hanover. On the other hand, the Government could not resist a clause, proposed by the Earl of Roxburghe, precluding Parliament from naming, as successor to the Crown of Scotland, the person who was successor to the Crown of England, unless conditions should have been previously settled securing the interests of Scotland against English or foreign interference. The Act of Security, with this clause inserted in it, passed by large majorities; but the Duke of Queensberry refused to give to it the royal assent. In 1704, however, the national and religious agitation remaining unalloyed, the Marquis of Tweeddale touched the Act with the royal sceptre: and a condition of things was thus legalised which might at any time put an end to the personal union of the two countries, or actually provoke war between them. But time often provides its own remedy; and, in January, 1707, the Act of Union became law, whose Second Article, limiting the Succession to Sophia and her heirs, had met with only a feeble opposition upholding the provisions of the Act of Security. When the Union was on the eve of actual accomplishment, the Electress Sophia 374expressed herself as well satisfied, adding that, though she had never supposed the Scottish lords against her, she thought it quite natural that conditions should be imposed—another illustration of the way in which she looked upon constitutional questions. In Ireland, the Succession had already in the previous year been regulated by a measure modelled upon the English Act of Settlement, but subjecting all officials and magistrates to a rigid Church of England test.

Even in this early period of Queen Anne’s reign, the Electress Sophia, though, according to her wont, she abstained from all restless manœuvring, was by no means without thought for the future. On June 4th, 1703, she signed three powers for Schütz, the envoy extraordinary in London, authorising him, in the event of the Queen’s death, to bring forward her lawful claim to the throne; and she kept up a correspondence with friends in England, both directly and through Leibniz. In November, 1703, she put it to Schütz that, if Marlborough resigned the command in the Low Countries, it would be right to appoint the Elector in his place; ‘for if it is wished that the Elector should have a good opinion of the English, they ought to do something towards making him entertain such an opinion and enabling him in any court to support those who were in his favour.’ As for Leibniz, though indefatigable and full of initiative as ever, he naturally 375enough occasionally fell short of the necessary familiarity with English persons and affairs. Thus, about this very time, the Electress had to comment on his approval of a scheme for marrying the Electoral Prince to one of Marlborough’s daughters, by reminding him that the Duke had no more daughters in the matrimonial market. Marlborough, however, gained the goodwill of the Elector, above all by commending the behaviour of the Hanoverian troops at Blenheim; and, on a visit to Hanover in December, 1704, while the laurels of his great victory were still green, he completely won over the Electress by the fascination of his manner. She declared that she had never seen anyone ‘plus aisé, plus civil, ny plus obligeant,’ and that he was as good a cavalier as he was a captain. The extraordinary civility shown to him on this occasion, when a special household was provided for him and other courtesies were multiplied,^[161] was not thrown away. His correspondence with the Electoral 376court—and with the Elector in particular, whose admiration for the military genius of the great commander was genuine—now became continuous.

The year 1705 marked an epoch in the history of the Succession question, as we saw that it did in the personal life of the Electress Sophia, who, during its course, lost not only her beloved daughter, but also her old admirer and constant friend, Duke George William of Celle. All the dominions of the Brunswick-Lüneburg line were now at last united under the single rule of the Elector George Lewis, and into his coffers flowed most of the great private wealth of his late uncle and father-in-law, which had materially contributed to the high consideration enjoyed by George William. About the same time the long-standing quarrel with the elder (Wolfenbüttel) branch of the House of Brunswick was brought to a close, and the House of Hanover stood stronger than ever before the world. No season could have been more opportune for taking up the question of the Succession with renewed earnestness. Its vigorous prosecution was further favoured by the circumstance that the late Duke of Celle’s prime minister, Baron Andreas Gottlieb von Bernstorff, now passed into the Hanoverian service, and, on the death of Count Platen in 1709, became prime minister at Hanover. He was already a statesman of proved ability, trained in the school of his father-in-law, Chancellor Schütz, whom he 377describes as one of the greatest and most capable ministers ever known to him. While he always kept his political ends clearly in view, Bernstorff’s political action was marked by ruthlessness that is apt to make a statesman of his type cordially hated where he is not eagerly followed; and his bitter jealousy of Brandenburg-Prussia in particular was unlikely to commend him to the goodwill of the Electress Sophia. Her faithful echo at Versailles allows us to make a guess as to the sentiments of the Electress concerning him; and they were afterwards reproduced by Queen Caroline, who, like Elizabeth Charlotte, was unwilling to differ in her opinion of men or measures from their venerated senior. Bernstorff’s activity in the last stage of Sophia Dorothea’s catastrophe proves that he had not been captivated by the influence which had so long been dominant at Celle; and the Duchess Eleonora doubtless held the same opinion of him as the other ladies. He devoted himself with indefatigable zeal to advancing the greatness of the Hanoverian dynasty; but he laboured in no narrow spirit and with no petty aims, as an adequate survey of his statesmanship in the earlier years of George I, should it ever be made, could not fail to show. With Bernstorff (to mention no other name) Jean de Robethon had passed from the service of Celle into that of Hanover—a perfect type of the sort of man and the sort of mind whose destiny it is to be a secretis of those whose grasp is 378on the wheel of State. After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes had driven him, like so many other capable Frenchmen, into the service of the foes of France, he had served his apprenticeship under no less a master than William III. During Queen Anne’s reign he became one of the most assiduous and useful instruments in the transactions connected with the Succession. For a time, he in Bothmer’s absence attended to affairs at the Hague; but he then returned to Hanover, where as confidential secretary he was of infinite service to both the Elector and the Electress, and played a political part not the less important because it was to a great extent played behind the scenes. Bernstorff trusted no man more implicitly than Robethon, who, in the end, was said to have acquired an unbounded influence over him; and by Robethon were drafted all, or virtually all, the despatches and letters sent to England by the Electoral family from the date of his entrance into their service to that of George I’s landing in England. All the more important of these documents likewise passed through the hands of Hans Caspar von Bothmer, whose services to the dynasty had likewise begun at Celle; whence he had been sent as envoy to Vienna, passing on, after he had acted as a plenipotentiary at Ryswick, to Paris. Unlike Bernstorff, and unlike Bernstorff’s master, Bothmer united political insight of a high order with remarkable diplomatic ability and tact; and, after he had, when 379the crisis came, shown perfect prudence in the supreme moment of success, he was perhaps the only one of the Hanoverians of the early Georgian period who attained to personal popularity in London. But this was later. On the accession of Queen Anne, it had been thought desirable that he should in the first instance take up a post of observation at the Hague, since the Queen was at present unlikely to welcome so prominent a Hanoverian diplomatist to her Court. Thus it was from the Hague that he actively helped to bring about the English legislative enactments, which we shall immediately notice, and which signally improved the prospects of the Hanoverian Succession. We shall see that, though his first and second stay as envoy in London were but short,^[162] he returned thither in time to direct the final stage in the transactions connected with the Succession, and to apply to this task a consummate skill and an equally conspicuous courage.

The ministerial arrangements made after the death of his uncle by the Elector George Lewis, who was at no time wont to delegate to others any part of what he had clearly recognised as his own bounden duty, might seem to imply that, from 1705 onwards, the conduct of the Succession 380question was more and more taken out of the hands of his mother. It is true that the Elector had, as the head of his dynasty, become more vigilant; but her interest in the question had remained the same. And, as a matter of fact, at no previous time had her name been bandied about between the political parties in England as it was now and during the remaining years of her life. To the close of the year 1705 belongs that strange episode in the party history of the reign, the attempt on the part of a section among the Tories to bring the Electress over to England.

Hitherto, she had wisely refrained—nor is there any indication that her eldest son and her grandson had done otherwise—from identifying the interests of her House with either of the two Parliamentary parties, both of which had had a part in the Act of Settlement. No doubt it was the Whigs who had most warmly supported the insertion of her name in that Act; the embassy which had brought it over to Hanover had been exclusively made up of Whigs; and, writing to Leibniz towards the close of 1701, Sophia, apparently with reference to the approaching English elections, excusably lets slip the phrase: ‘le parti des Whigs qui est le nostre.’ But, already in the following year, when annoyed by the officious importunities of Toland and that other grand fâcheux, Sir Peter Fraiser, she confided to her niece Elizabeth Charlotte her resolution not 381to mix herself up with the manœuvres of the Presbyterians and Whigs, which, as we have seen, were at that time agitating Scotland. ‘Besides,’ she observed, with a fastidiousness not inexplicable when the composition of Macclesfield’s embassy is remembered, ‘the Whigs that came to me here I found anything but charming.’ And, again in 1703, she ordered Baron Brauns not to answer one of Toland’s long diatribes against the Tories by more than a simple acknowledgment. There was no fear, she remarked, of their supporting the Pretender; no person of substance, in fact nobody but Catholics and adventurers set on making their fortunes, were on his side; for the rest, she found as many honest men among the Tories as elsewhere. She had, as a matter of fact, certain affinities with this party; while some of their opponents in the House of Commons offended her, as a true Stewart who remembered the excesses of the Commonwealth days, by comparing the Prince of Wales to Perkin Warbeck and branding him as a bastard—all in order to tickle the ears of le petit peuple. There could be no question, she told Leibniz in the same letter, as to the Prince’s claims interfering with her own; her right was based on her Protestantism; except for this, many others stood between the Crown and herself. While, then, she adhered to her determination to place herself in the hands of neither party, there was no reason 382why the Tories should not in their turn seek to make her listen to their charming. When, about the end of 1704, it had become known through Marlborough that the Electress would be pleased to receive a formal invitation to England, both parties seem to have risen to the occasion; but, while the Whigs returned to the notion of bringing over the Electoral Prince, some of the Tories became intent on the Electress herself being invited. Partly to ingratiate themselves with her, partly to spite Queen Anne, who preferred to their guidance that of the moderates of both sides under the leadership of Marlborough, Godolphin, and Harley, the malcontent Tories, led by Rochester and known as the ‘High-fliers,’ resolved on an attempt to take the game into their own hands. With Rochester she had been on friendly terms from the first; in June, 1702, she writes that he was among the first to vote for the Act of Settlement, and that she had always mentioned this to those who wished to set her against him.^[163] Towards the end of September, 1705, a correspondent informed Rochester of the cordial response returned by the Electress to certain overtures made on his behalf; he declared himself convinced that, whenever the Queen and Parliament called upon her, the Electress would, 383in the face of all difficulties, wait upon Her Majesty in England; and, more than this, she had told him, and those in attendance on her, that, so soon as the Parliament summoned her, she was ready to obey. (In a letter to Schütz of about the same date, Sophia, however, qualifies this consent by requiring a proviso that she should be supplied with means of living in England as became a Princess of Wales.) Though, Rochester’s correspondent added, the Elector was exceeding modest on the subject of some of his family coming to England, the Electress spoke as the Elector thought. Sophia was on friendly terms with other members of the Tory party besides Rochester. With Ormonde, for instance, she kept up a correspondence both in this and in the following year. But the task of moving an address to the Crown, in which it was proposed that the Heiress Presumptive should be invited to England, was committed to a quite recent convert to the ranks of the High-flyers, Lord Haversham. He displayed a proper zeal by hazarding the suggestion that it would be of the greatest advantage for the Electress to make the personal acquaintance of the Bench of Bishops. The comedy ended in the rejection of Haversham’s motion by a majority of Peers; but he returned to the fray in a pamphlet. In the Commons a letter advocating the proposal, hinting that it was approved by the Electress and censuring the Whigs 384for opposing it, was voted libellous. This much-vext letter was signed by Sir Rowland Gwynne, who was at the time residing at Hanover; but its real author was Leibniz. Towards the close of 1705, Marlborough made use of the opportunity of another visit paid by him to Hanover for explaining the situation to the Elector. Marlborough, who, while anxious both to please the Queen and to keep the game so far as possible in his own hands, was more and more identifying his own interests with the ascendancy of the Whigs, easily succeeded in making clear to the Elector, how it was not in his interest that his mother should at present proceed to England; and he was able to add effect to his arguments by exhibiting an official notice of the intention of the English Cabinet to introduce Naturalisation and Regency Bills in the interests of the Electoral House. The understanding between the Elector and Marlborough now became better than ever, while the Elector’s confidence in the Whigs steadily grew. It is impossible to say whether this was the time when Marlborough proffered at Hanover a loan of £20,000 in return for a blank commission signed by the Electress Sophia, which conferred on him the supreme command of the military and naval forces of the three kingdoms after the death of Queen Anne.

The High-fliers had thus merely played into the hands of the Whigs, who were in the majority 385in the new House of Commons that met in October, 1705. The Address to the Queen had warmly thanked her for her great care and endeavour to settle the Succession of the kingdom of Scotland in the House of Hanover; and soon afterwards the Bills were brought in which Marlborough had announced at Hanover. By the first of these, the Princess Sophia, Electress and Duchess Dowager of Hanover, and her issue were naturalised as English subjects; and it is strange that the legal status thus secured to her should have been so persistently ignored in English national biography.^[164] The second of these Bills, purporting to provide for the better security of the Queen’s person and Government, was introduced in the Lords with much eloquence by the ever-young Lord Wharton. This Bill made it high treason to assert in writing, and attached the penalties of a præmunire to the assertion by word of mouth, that the Queen was not a lawful Sovereign, or that the Sovereign in Parliament could not limit the descent of the Crown; and it further appointed seven great officers of State, and certain other persons, to 386administer the government of the realm in the event of the Queen’s demise and the absence from England of her lawful successor. The Bill met with no opposition in the Lords, though Rochester contrived to carry a limitation, supposed to safeguard the Act of Uniformity; but in the House of Commons it lay long on the table. The High-fliers, putting forward as their spokesman Sir Thomas Hanmer (who up to the last professed the deepest devotion to the interests of the Electress Sophia), were once more attempting to take the game out of the hands of the Whigs by proposing that the Electress should be brought over. Much use was made, as appears from a passage in Burnet’s inaccurate narrative, of a letter written in November by the Electress Sophia to the Archbishop of Canterbury, in which she had reiterated the position consistently maintained by her, that she was prepared to come to England, should both the Queen and Parliament desire it. This position was alike logical and appropriate; but the letter did not suit the Whigs, who were well aware that Queen Anne would never be brought to express such a desire. On the rejection of Hanmer’s motion the Electress informed Burnet with much dignity that, should it prove to be in the interests of State and religion, she remained ready to cross to England if invited, provided she were created Princess of Wales. But, at the same time, she expressed to 387Marlborough her conviction that her intentions had been so misrepresented to the Queen that her coming to England now would be superfluous. There is no reason for accepting Burnet’s statement that her letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury had been instigated by the Tories; but neither did she show any disposition towards encouraging the Whigs. In truth, though Sophia was not destined to mount a royal throne, and though what might be termed her monarchical apprenticeship had been served in a State that had but recently ceased to be petty and whose system of government was to all intents and purposes absolute, she displayed a higher capacity for constitutional rule than Queen Anne, who could only maintain a balance between factions by subjecting herself to their leaders in turn. It cannot be satisfactorily shown that the Electress definitely preferred the Tories, while the Elector favoured the Whigs. In fact, she remained on good terms with both the leading parties; although she did not turn a deaf ear even to overtures from so unsafe a politician as Buckingham, who, after taking a leading part in the attempt to bring her over to England, tried to engage her in a fresh intrigue to that end.^[165] The 388Regency Bill, as it was shortly called, in the end became law; and Parliament, which had further shown its goodwill to the House of Hanover by voting a modest subsidy for the payment of additional Hanoverian and Celle troops, was prorogued in March, 1706.

In the following May, Lord Halifax, who as Charles Montagu had been a leading Whig statesman already under William III and had quite recently been appointed one of the Commissioners for the Union with Scotland, was chosen, no doubt on account of his position and accomplishments rather than because of any personal attractiveness, to proceed to Hanover, there to present the Naturalisation and Regency Acts to the Electress Sophia, now the first subject of the English Crown.^[166] Halifax was also the bearer of a Garter for the Electoral Prince, on whom a few weeks later the Queen conferred the title of Duke of Cambridge. On his way Halifax had secured the inclusion of a guarantee of the established Succession in future treaties with the United Provinces. In his suite was Addison, 389now one of the Under-Secretaries of State; but the reticence of this celebrated personage seems to have disappointed the Electress.

From a later remark of Leibniz we gather that, on the occasion of Halifax’s embassy, the Electress made no secret of the view held by her and the Elector with reference to the Succession. It rested, she considered, on hereditary right; though, in the interests of the nation, certain persons possessed of claims prior to her own had been excluded. In other words, she acknowledged that Parliament had a right to exclude Catholics from the Succession, but declined to regard her title to the Crown as primarily a Parliamentary one. As a matter of fact, neither the Electress nor the Elector was much edified by the embassy of Halifax. He submitted to her a list of twenty-one persons, whom according to the Regency Act she was called upon to appoint as Lords Justices, in addition to the great officers of the Crown, for carrying on the government after Queen Anne’s death in the event of her own absence from England. Of these twenty-one names, as it afterwards appeared, she struck out seven, one of which was that of Halifax himself.^[167] As to the titles 390conferred upon the Electoral Prince (which, Sophia said, were so many that she had to write them down in her almanack lest she should forget them), the grant of an annual income to herself as Heiress Presumptive would have been more to the point; inasmuch as the titles were given to enable the Prince to take his seat in Parliament, from which Hanover was a long way off.

The elements of satisfaction contained in the Acts brought to Hanover by Halifax were not over-estimated by the Electress, to whom it must by this time have become clear that the real difficulty in placing the House of Hanover in its proper position towards the country with which it was to be inseparably connected, lay with Queen Anne herself. More especially after the publication of Sir Rowland Gwynne’s unfortunate letter, the Queen thought that explanations were due to her from the Electress, who in truth had none to give. Marlborough had been wise enough to abstain from delivering at Hanover a letter written by the Queen in this sense and entrusted by her to him, and, instead, had held conciliatory language, advising both Electress and Elector to declare themselves absolute strangers to the obnoxious manifesto. The advice was judicious; for, as Marlborough 391had predicted, the original proposal did not die out. In 1707, one Scott, an Englishman or Scotchman in the service of the Elector, entered, according to Marlborough with the cognisance of the Electress, into a negotiation with the High-fliers; but he was stopped by the Elector himself. In July of the same year, the Earl of Peterborough, when returning to England from Spain to give an account of his proceedings there, spent some days at Hanover and Herrenhausen, where he addressed a letter to the Elector and another to the Electress, in which he insisted on the necessity of the residence of a member of the Electoral House in England. Sophia handed the letter intended for herself to her son, who, in the plainest terms, expressed his determination to take no steps in this direction, unless with the approval of the Queen and her ministers. Meanwhile, though perfectly prudent in her own conduct, the Electress could not altogether conceal the annoyance caused to her by the cold and suspicious attitude maintained by Queen Anne towards everything connected with the Succession. Sophia complained repeatedly that from England came nothing but titles and compliments, and declared that she would not be made to pay for any more special ambassadors from the Court of St. James. (Her present of gold plate to Halifax had cost her some 30,000 florins.) For the conveyance of 392honours that cost nothing she was, she said, perfectly content with Mr. Howe.^[168] When Leibniz reported to her as to prospects of the Union between England and Scotland, which was actually achieved early in 1707, she rather sharply replied that she had no wish to discuss the affairs of either kingdom: ‘comme je n’en tire rien, je n’y suis point intéressée.’ She can, however, hardly have been so indifferent to the subject as she pretended to be; since a clause in the Act of Union definitively settled the Scottish Succession upon herself and her descendants. Nor can she have remained unaware that, as Queen Anne’s reign continued and the apprehensions excited by the growing intolerance of the Church of England more and more endangered the maintenance of the Union, Scottish Presbyterianism was, irrespective of this consideration, obliged to look to the Hanoverian Succession as the best guarantee of its own security.

We know for certain that the Electress was well informed as to the existence of a secret sympathy on Queen Anne’s part with the Pretender; since we have the explicit statement of the Duchess of 393Orleans that her aunt believed the Queen to be secretly desirous of the accession of her half-brother, and further believed ‘that she would some day bestow the Crown upon him.’ Nor can we regard the latter clause a mere phrase, when we remember the earlier communications in this sense between Anne and her exiled father. But it by no means follows from this that this solution was one desired by the Electress Sophia herself. According to a fairly well authenticated anecdote, a bundle of letters was, some time in the reign of George III, found in Kensington Palace, endorsed in William III’s own handwriting ‘Letters of the Electress Sophia to the Court of St. Germains’; and a plan which had been formed for publishing these letters was frustrated through their being destroyed by George III’s orders. But as to the contents of these letters there is no satisfactory evidence at all. Again, it is no doubt true, and of a piece with George I’s habitual method of dealing with inconvenient evidence, that, in 1714, he requested the Duchess of Orleans to destroy all the letters received by her from the Electress which contained any reference to the House of Stewart; and, though the Duchess of Orleans, who made no secret of her own sympathies, and whose portrait quite appropriately found a place in the Stewart family museum at Caillot, says that her aunt did not obey this wish, no such letters have been found, with a single exception. 394In this letter, dated March 21st, 1708, after mentioning that the ‘Prince of Wales’ was at Dunkirk (whence he afterwards started on his brief expedition to Scotland), the Electress Sophia indulges in the reflexion: ‘Who knows whether God will not elevate him who suffers so innocently?’ But though, in matters concerning the line from which she was descended, as well as with regard to her own immediate family, Sophia’s nature was very far from being untouched by sentiment, she never allowed herself to be subdued by it. In her tenderness of feeling towards the House of Stewart she set an example followed by the Hanoverian dynasty when in possession of the British throne—from George I downwards, of whose kindliness of feeling towards the exiled House instances might easily be cited.^[169]

Thus, in this period Sophia returned to Queen Anne coolness for coolness, and though at times she might almost have seemed to herself indifferent to her prospects and those of her posterity, while at other times she thought of herself as ‘a candidate for Sion’ rather than as the heiress to a throne, she was content to avoid any false step, and to leave unjeopardised a future which she could not control. 395As late as September, 1708, in mentioning the visit of Lord Hereford and two Whig M.P.s, she writes that she found them very warm for the Succession, and that she supposed they would always continue of the same mind, so long as it paid them; at present it did not seem to pay her, for she was not treated as its Princess of Wales. But, in the course of this year, the Whigs were fully established in power; and, when the death, in the autumn, of Prince George of Denmark, together with the subsequent refusal of Queen Anne to remarry, had removed the last possibility of issue from the reigning sovereign, the Hanoverian prospects of course grew brighter. The House stood well at this season in the eyes of Europe and of England. George Lewis’ envoy at Ratisbon in this very year at last gained admittance into the Electoral College; and in the previous year (1707) the Elector had assumed the command of the army of the Lower Rhine, though his unswerving loyalty to the cause of the Grand Alliance had met with an incomplete response of confidence on the part of its military leaders. Courtiers and others cultivating a consciousness of coming events began to recognise the necessity of turning their faces towards the rising sun. Mrs. Charles Howard, for instance, had the honour of being (with her husband) presented to the Electress Dowager, and of receiving particular notice, both from her and from the Electoral Princess—as one of whose bed-chamber women she was in later 396days to play so conspicuous a part at the British Court. But Queen Anne persisted in the attitude which she had assumed, and in the autumn of this year frankly told Lord Haversham that she could not tolerate the notion of the presence in this country of any successor, even were it to last no longer than a week.

When the approach of the great ministerial crisis of 1710 first announced itself by the dismissal of Sunderland, the Elector was moved to perhaps the most distinct expression of political opinion in British affairs to which he committed himself at any time before his accession to the throne. In a spirited remonstrance addressed by him to the Queen, he gave words to the hope that she would enter into no further changes in the present Ministry and Parliament. The Electress in the meantime remained mistress of herself; and George Lewis followed her example, when the crisis reached its height, and the wheel of fortune once more brought the Tories uppermost. Neither Sophia nor her confidential counsellor Leibniz looked with fear or even with disfavour upon the transactions which seemed to have put a new face on the entire scheme of British State policy. The leading spirit of the new combination was Robert Harley, who possessed many valuable political qualities, but who was above all a born intriguer. The moderation of his conduct was set off by his personal merits, among which, in a brilliant literary 397age, his genuine love of literature was by no means the least important.^[170] Leibniz, whose own political influence at Hanover had of late visibly declined, was much gratified by the marked civility shown to him by one of his London correspondents, Dr. Hutton, a follower of Harley.

Queen Anne herself lost no time in communicating to the House of Hanover her own view of the political changes which opened the concluding period of her reign. In the autumn of 1710, Earl Rivers (by whose appointment to the constableship of the Tower these changes had been heralded) made his appearance at Hanover. His personal reputation was far from immaculate; but he had been a successful general. At the time of his arrival at Hanover, Sunderland’s dismissal had been succeeded by no further ministerial changes. That Queen Anne should not have resented the protest against this step transmitted by the Elector through Bothmer at the Hague, indicates her hesitancy in the process. But, when a further series of ministerial changes had been accomplished in England, Rivers, who had made himself very acceptable at Hanover even to the Elector, began to develop the ulterior purpose of his mission. Unmistakably, it was intended to facilitate the overthrow of Marlborough, without which these changes would remain 398incomplete, by putting the Elector in his place as commander-in-chief in the war, which, as Rivers assured him, the new British Government intended to carry on with undiminished vigour. The ambassador was instructed to state that the Queen could no longer suffer the insolence of those whom she had raised to the highest pitch of power and authority. But, before Rivers reached the Electoral Court, Marlborough had already conveyed to George Lewis assurances of his fidelity to the Hanoverian Succession; and the House of Hanover was thus confirmed in the attitude of caution which it maintained in this very trying turn of affairs. There was no reason why Elector and Electress should remain deaf to the blandishments of the well-affected and reasonable Tories, whose theory of the Succession harmonised with Sophia’s own. But, at the same time, it would have been not less unwise to court the goodwill of the Queen and her new ministers by cutting communications with Marlborough and the Whigs, than it would have been to yield to the Whig proposal, communicated through Robethon, to base the claims of the House of Hanover on the principles of the Revolution of 1688. Leibniz was able to demonstrate the perfect consistency of the course pursued by the House he served; and the firmness and prudence with which the Elector resisted perhaps the single temptation which, in the whole course of these 399transactions, he personally found it hard to withstand—the offer of the supreme command in the war—deserves a fuller recognition than has usually been accorded to it.

The final period in the history of the Hanoverian Succession—though even during this period the question had, as will be seen, still to pass through a series of stages before it was solved—began with the transformation of the British Ministry into a Tory Government, and the overthrow of the Marlborough influence, which, with that of Godolphin, had so long cast its spell over Queen Anne. During the last month or two of 1710,^[171] Schütz having died in the previous August, Bothmer was performing the duties of envoy extraordinary in London, where he remained till the following March. The Electress was extremely desirous that he should, unlike Schütz and Kreyenberg, refrain from showing any inclination towards either of the political parties; here in Hanover, she assured him in January, 1711, ‘we do not know the meaning of the terms Whig and Tory, and decline to distinguish individuals under those names’; and she applauds him for having already, as she hears, managed to create a far more agreeable impression than that made by his predecessor. But this attempt on the part of the Electress to hold the balance between the two 400parties, and to make Bothmer do the same, could not be of long endurance. On April 17th, 1711, the Emperor Joseph I died; there could be no reasonable doubt as to the succession of his brother, the titular King Charles III of Spain, to the Imperial throne; and an irresistible impulse was given to the desire for peace, with which the new British Ministry was known to be in sympathy.

Henceforth, until the Peace had been actually concluded, the question of its conclusion dominated all others, and that of the Succession among the rest. It might suit the purposes of the Whigs, who were opposed to the Peace, to represent the desire of bringing it about as put forward with a view to covering Jacobite designs with regard to the Succession; as a matter of fact, the Tory leaders, though they might amuse Berwick—or others who were as ignorant of England as he was—with proposals about bringing over the Pretender to reside in England on his half-sister’s invitation, were very careful not to allow any premature Jacobite outbreak to interrupt the peace negotiations. When, in October, 1711, Bothmer returned to London as envoy extraordinary, the situation had, for better or for worse, cleared up; and it would have been impossible for the most skilful of diplomatists, with the strongest wish to carry out the conciliatory intentions cherished by the good Electress, to avoid an early collision with the Queen’s ministers, 401and, in consequence, to place in his own way an insuperable obstacle against securing her own goodwill. For the Elector was, heart and soul, in favour of the continuance of the war; and the immediate purpose of Bothmer’s present mission was to overthrow the peace policy to which the Queen’s ministers had made up their minds. He brought with him an elaborate memorandum from the Elector, dated November 28th, 1711, against the conclusion of peace with France; and in January, 1712, this memorandum was supported by a letter from the Elector asking for a hearing for his envoy. These documents were presented to the Queen on February 14th. As a matter of course, they were ascribed by the ministerialists to Whig influence, and represented as implying an attempt to bring about the continuance of Marlborough in the command. There was no warrant for either assumptionassumption; and it may be added that the Electress instructed Bothmer to express to Ormonde, as a tried friend of hers, the particular gratification with which she had heard of his appointment.

Violent altercations in Parliament ensued; and Bothmer clearly perceived that any attempt to renew at present the proposal of inviting over the Electress and the Electoral Prince, if not the Elector himself, could have no other effect than that of uniting with the Jacobite wing of the Tory party the followers of Harley, with whom it was a 402cardinal principle to ‘use the Queen with all duty and respect imaginable.’ On the representations of Bothmer, Somers, Sunderland, and Godolphin agreed not to move in the matter without the Elector’s assent; and this was sure not to be given, until an invitation should have been approved by Queen and Parliament. Thus a blunder was avoided which must have proved more disastrous to the prospects of the House of Hanover than that actually committed three years later.

Both in 1710 and 1711 the air was full of more or less unsubstantial schemes for bringing about, at what already seemed the eleventh hour, the succession of the Pretender; and rumours were rife as to the gradual transformation of the Ministry into a Jacobite Cabal. Though Leibniz was no doubt right in saying that the question of inviting to England, or (as the Electress so consistently repeated) of granting an income to, one or more members of the Electoral family, was the touchstone of the real intentions of the British Government, and though this may, as he asserts, have also been the opinion of the Elector, yet there was no question at Hanover of claiming any such concession. In April, 1711, the Electress declared herself wholly uncertain of what would happen even in the event of Queen Anne’s death—for ‘what Parliament does one day, it undoes the next.’ Thus, when, in the autumn of the same year, Lord Rivers made his 403second appearance at Hanover, the letter which he brought with him from Queen Anne, and his assurances of her care for the interests of the Electoral family, were received by Sophia with proper expressions of gratitude, whatever she might privately say as to the expense which this mission entailed upon the Hanoverian Court, with little prospect of return. There was, indeed, some talk of the Elector being offered the chief command in Flanders after Marlborough’s dismissal in December, 1711; but nothing came of the suggestion, and in January, 1712, the Electress is found expressing her satisfaction at the appointment of Ormonde, who had always been so friendly to her. But as to the main object of his mission Rivers completely failed; for George Lewis firmly declined to give his approval to the British overtures of peace to France, at the risk of deeply annoying the Queen and her ministers by thus falling in with the wishes of the Whigs. He took his stand on the principles of the Grand Alliance, from which he had never swerved; while his mother judiciously held the balance by refusing to accept the insinuations of her correspondent at the Hague, Lord Strafford, against the inclinations of her House and Bothmer towards the Whigs, and appealing with much dignity to her conviction that, beyond the devices of Whigs and Tories, the Protestant Succession could depend on the support of the nation. Meanwhile, the two parties were alike striving to 404apprise the Hanoverian Court of the direction in which to look for its friends. The anxiety of the Whigs to identify their party with the Electoral House is at the same time proved by the motion of the Duke of Devonshire to give precedence to the Duke of Cambridge over other Peers.^[172] The Ministry overtrumped this modest effort by a Bill giving precedence to the entire Electoral family, which was passed in two days (January, 1712), and which the minister’s kinsman, Thomas Harley, was in July specially sent over to present to the Electress. She took the announcement of this new visit very coolly, regretting the expense to which she was put by it, and observing that, if the British throne were for sale, France on behalf of its client could afford the purchase better than the House of Hanover, which had no intention of imitating the prodigality of Augustus II of Poland.^[173] Her instinct was correct, for Thomas Harley had instructions which, while pretending to put the blame on Bothmer, seriously reflected on the 405Elector’s opposition to the peace policy pursued by the British Government. In the course of the negotiations carried on at Paris in August, 1712, between Torcy and Bolingbroke, the latter on one occasion even went so far as to hint at the despatch of a British fleet into the Baltic, with a view not only to controlling the northern troubles, but also to frustrating possible designs on the part of the Dutch and of Hanover.^[174]

Meanwhile the Court of Hanover, while maintaining unchanged its attitude towards the general question of war or peace, had immediate interests of its own to watch besides such as might be involved in the question of the English Succession. The recognition of the Hanoverian Electorship, for instance, was demanded from France, pari passu with that of the Prussian Kingship. Early in the year, in the negotiations already in progress, Bothmer, whom Oxford and Bolingbroke persisted in treating as antagonistic to their Government,^[175] returned to his post at the Hague. In December, 1712, Baron Thomas von Grote, who belonged to a family of high distinction in the 406Hanoverian service, arrived in London, nominally with the special charge of returning thanks for the Act of Precedence. His instructions, drawn up by Robethon in the name of the Electress Sophia, illustrate the penultimate stage in the final period of the transactions concerning the Succession. He was to be polite to all, and not to consider himself debarred from taking counsel with the old friends of the House—in other words, with Marlborough and the Whig leaders—so long as this was done privately and secretly; and he was to avoid giving umbrage to the Queen’s ministers, and above all to the Queen herself. The Elector furnished him with a special commendatory letter to Oxford. He was to make friends with the clergy, and to reassure them by pointing out that the ecclesiastical system of the German Lutherans was to all intents and purposes an episcopal one. The everlasting delicate question as to the summoning of the Electress or another member of the Electoral family to England he was to treat as if this event might any day come to pass; and, at the same time, he was to press for a proposal to Parliament on the subject of an establishment—say at Somerset House. The Elector, while of opinion that such a proposal would furnish the best means of testing the sincerity of the Queen’s and her advisers’ intentions, declined to influence Parliamentary opinion by means of any expenditure of his own, though it 407would seem that he had previously not objected to Bothmer’s attempting to gain over some noble Lords against the Peace by similar inducements. But, though he still abstained from any intervention in British home affairs, his own instructions to Grote were less carefully balanced than those of the Electress, and left no doubt as to its being the leading Whigs on whom he reckoned as the true friends of the House of Hanover.

Both at Hanover and elsewhere, however, eager friends of the dynasty advocated a more expeditious procedure. In September, 1712, the indefatigable Leibniz submitted a scheme, concocted by busy brains in London, for including the demand for establishing the Electress in England among the conditions of the Peace of Utrecht. But, though both in her correspondence, and in conversation with Thomas Harley, she had given considerable attention to the scheme, she ultimately declared it impracticable. The unsatisfactory action of the English ministers in the matter of the Dutch guarantee of the Hanoverian Succession had once more rendered her diffident; she was, she said, so old that there was no reality in all her talk; were she younger, she added with a touch of her old spirit, the sovereignty of England should not pass by her.

The Peace of Utrecht, when actually concluded in the spring of 1713, was in many respects 408unsatisfactory to the Elector; and as an Estate of the Empire, he must have been well content to withhold his signature from it. But it contained a very explicit recognition of the Hanoverian Succession by France and the other signatory Powers; so that, in this respect at all events, Bothmer’s exertions had been entirely successful. Yet the tone prevailing at court and in ministerial circles in London very imperfectly agreed with this result; and in Hanover there was a growing disbelief in the sincerity of the sentiments entertained in these quarters. Grote found himself coolly received, and his attempts to obtain assurances baffled. Various suggestions offered by him were ignored; and in a lengthy despatch which he sent home in February (a few weeks before his death) he drew the darkest picture of the political situation which had as yet reached Hanover. He considered that, in spite of the generalities in which Oxford shrouded himself, he had gradually gone over to the Jacobites in order to please the Queen, while Bolingbroke he regarded as an open Jacobite on his own account. He thought that, as to the Pretender, there was reason for fearing the worst; he had heard that the Queen had expressed a wish to see her half-brother in England after the conclusion of the Peace, while the question of inviting over a member of the Electoral family had been indefinitely postponed. Part of this report sufficiently tallies with the information 409with which about this time the Pretender was being constantly supplied by his illegitimate half-brother, the Duke of Berwick. Though sanguine as to methods of action, Berwick never minimised the chances of the Hanoverian Succession; the first thing requisite, he wrote to James in November, 1712, was to checkmate Hanover; the rest could then be easily accomplished without mentioning the name of the legitimate claimant. Both Oxford and Bolingbroke, Berwick wrote in May, 1713, were heartily resolved to go forward; in July, he reported them to be rather less ardent; but these were mere fluctuations. From all this it is tolerably clear that Oxford, in trying to deceive others, deceived himself. Much of his political life had consisted in a successful endeavour to face both ways without laying himself open to the charge of double-dealing. He now persuaded himself that he was throwing dust in the eyes of the Elector and Electress and the friends of the Hanoverian Succession, while at the same time drawing as near to the Jacobite projects as safety permitted. He was, above all things, a Parliamentary statesman, and nothing but the decision of Parliament would determine his ultimate choice of sides; but, as the majority was at present constituted, while the great achievement of the Peace assured the advance of Tory ascendancy, and the Queen seemed less and less inclined to reconcile herself to the Succession of the House of 410Hanover, he looked to the triumph of the Jacobite cause as the event towards which his course would be most safely shaped. With Bolingbroke, the case was wholly different. Oxford was prepared to be in the end guided by the Parliamentary majority; Bolingbroke was prepared to educate it up to that end—only he used a more sportsmanlike phraseology. For himself, he made no secret whatever of his likes and dislikes; kept up a constant intercourse with Jacobites and Frenchmen; and at times, as Grote complained, did him the honour of treating him ‘de coquin ou de fou.’^[176]

Meanwhile, the Queen and the Lord Treasurer continued their banales expressions of friendship and goodwill at Hanover, where, on March 17th, 1713, the useful Thomas Harley presented a letter from the Queen, declaring her intention of treating the interests of the House of Hanover as her own. But neither this letter, nor the amicable phrases with which in April she opened Parliament after its adjournment, evoked any warm response at Hanover. Sophia, indeed, wrote to Strafford at the Hague, begging him to thank the Queen, and adding that, as she had no expectation of ever ascending the throne herself, she hoped that Her Majesty would entertain no aversion to her on that score. But, as she told Bothmer, she only paid back Strafford in the coin she received from England—words, 411not deeds; and, on the whole, Leibniz’s epigram not unaptly summed up the situation—

An attempt had been indeed made, or suggested, to utilise the Queen’s friendly expressions for a bold venture on the part of the House of Hanover; but it had been still-born. After Grote’s death in March, Kreyenberg had carried on the affairs of the Hanoverian Legation in London; and reports were also from time to time sent to Hanover by the Dutch resident in London, L’Hermitage. In one of these (dated May 9th, 1713)^[177] the very important proposal was made that the Electoral Prince should come over to England on his own account, inasmuch as the Queen would never send for him. The notion found the utmost favour with the Whig leaders, who knew how much depended on the issue of the approaching election, and who hoped that it might be influenced by so bold a step on the part of the Hanoverian family. But Bernstorff, who was in favour of the scheme and without whose persuasion there was no prospect at all of the Elector approving it, was ill at the time; and, when he recovered, the Elector was found to be entirely under the influence of advice against action. An attempt to bring about the repeal of the Union with Scotland was defeated, 412without the question of the Hanoverian Succession playing more than a subsidiary part in the dispute.

When, in the following July, Parliament, after approving a number of the Treaties which formed the Peace of Utrecht,^[178] was prorogued, on the eve of a General Election, the Queen’s Speech significantly omitted the usual announcement of her readiness to support the Protestant Succession. While the versatile intellect of Leibniz was still devising new schemes for bringing about the desired result, the Elector adhered more closely than ever to his original policy. In August, 1713, Baron von Schütz the younger (George William Helwig Sinold), the son of the former envoy of the Court of St. James and the grandson of the Celle Chancellor, arrived in London as envoy. The choice of this agent was at the time unfavourably criticised by some of the Whigs, who thought that a politician of greater experience should have been selected. Sophia would not commit herself to Bothmer on the question whether Schütz would be better liked than her correspondent had been in England; ‘at all events,’ she said, ‘nobody will be attracted by his appearance’ (il ne payera pas de mine). We shall have to enquire immediately whether, in the great diplomatic catastrophe which befell him, the 413younger Schütz was himself deserving of blame. He was instructed by the Elector in the sense of an absolute abstinence from interference in British affairs. Even as to the question of inviting a member of the Electoral family to England he was to take up a distinctly negative position; but, at the same time, he was to treat as indispensable measures the removal of the Pretender from Lorraine and a provision for the Electress as Heiress Presumptive of Great Britain. The envoy’s reports were far from encouraging, and his information as to the views and intentions of the Queen and her advisers again agrees with that transmitted by Berwick to the Pretender.

The tide of danger was unmistakably rising. Parliament was dissolved in August, 1713; and a proposal was on foot to bring to bear upon Queen Anne at the opening of the new Parliament the direct personal influence of the presence of her half-brother in England. In the attitude of Oxford and Bolingbroke no hopeful alteration occurred. In defiance of the manifest irritation of the Queen, the Elector coldly declared himself unsatisfied with the guarantees which he had so far received, and declined to sanction any expenditure on pamphlets or newspapers, or on more direct means of influencing elections or gaining over necessitous Peers. Yet, to the amusement of Sophia, whose sense of humour never deserted her, Hanover and Herrenhausen 414continued to attract not a few Englishmen desirous of being found in this vicinity at the critical moment. They were, however, she thought, reckoning without their host in hoping to strew palms before her on her entrance into London; she feared that she could not contrive to live as long as Queen Anne, so as to prove to them her gratitude. And yet, when in the last days of the year Queen Anne herself fell ill, and the agitation in England was raised to an unprecedented pitch, it seemed as if, notwithstanding what Sophia described as her ‘incurable malady of having passed her eighty-fourth year,’ her repeated prediction that she would never herself mount the British throne would after all be falsified. In November she had herself been ill, suffering so seriously from an affection (erysipelas) to which she was subject, that fears were entertained for her life. But she soon recovered sufficiently to write to the Duchess of Orleans, and with her usual spirit she insisted on following the Elector to the Göhrde.

The situation was now coming to be one of a very high tension. On the one hand, Strafford, who never ceased from trying to persuade the Electress that the Tories were her friends, and that there was not a Jacobite left in the party, assured her that what he had observed during the Queen’s illness had convinced him of the strength of popular opinion in England in favour of the Protestant 415Succession. And Steinghens, the Elector Palatine’s minister in London, who was on a footing of intimacy with Oxford, declared to his correspondent, General von der Schulenburg, that had Queen Anne died during her illness the Princess Sophia would have been proclaimed on the same day. Assurances of devotion poured in from every side; in February, Secretary Bromley laid himself at the Electress’ feet; and Archbishop Dawes entreated attention to his own humble endeavours and to the faithfulness and zeal of the whole body of the clergy. On the other hand, the demeanour and utterances of those in power were not growing more propitious as the new year came in. Cautious as Oxford was in his utterances, perhaps the most striking of all the self-revelations reported of him at this critical time was that which, in December, 1713, he made to the Abbé Gaultier, according to the statement of the latter to De Torcy: ‘So long as I live, England shall not be governed by a German.’ Except through Gaultier, however, Oxford was inaccessible on the subject, and though, in January, 1714, he was said to have sent a private messenger to the Pretender, in the following month Berwick heard that the Lord Treasurer’s intentions were still quite unknown, and suggested to James to make sure of the Queen and Bolingbroke by writing to them himself. Berwick’s scheme of the Pretender coming over to England in secret, so as to enable the Queen 416to declare in his favour at the opening of Parliament, was quite visionary; for Louis XIV was not inclined to make any move in his support, except by placing two men-of-war at Havre at his disposal; and the Tory leaders were wholly intent upon removing, in the first instance, the insuperable obstacle to any chance of the Pretender’s success by inducing him to come over—to the Church of England. As for Bolingbroke, who must have known that such a solution was not to be looked for, he seems to have been willing to depend on the double chance of something unexpected happening at the critical moment, and of the Hanoverian successor proving unable to maintain herself—or himself—on the throne even after mounting it. Thus, as the crisis drew nearer and nearer, the Tory leaders were becoming less and less prepared to meet it.^[179]

And so it came to pass that, when, in February, 1714, the new Parliament met, with a Tory majority in the Commons outnumbering their opponents by at least two to one, the Queen’s Speech could hardly have been more ambiguous in tone than it actually proved. She, like her ministers, had no wish for the House of Hanover, and saw no present chance for the Stewarts. While, therefore, discrediting all reports 417implying that the Protestant Succession, as settled in the House of Hanover, was in danger, the Speech also referred to the attempts ‘to weaken the Queen’s authority or to render the possession of the Crown uneasy to her’—obviously alluding to the design of bringing over a member of the Electoral family. While Bolingbroke may have been prepared to make use of this design so as to bring about a complete rupture between the Queen and the House of Hanover, Oxford could not but directly oppose a step which would have forced the hands of the Government, and removed the ultimate use of the situation out of his own wary hands. Yet nothing could have been more distinctly double-faced than his action in the early months of 1714. He dangled before Schütz the offer of a revision of the Regency Bill of 1705, which was to enable the court of Hanover to name the whole body of Regents, but which also might have furnished an opportunity for giving the quietus to the entire Bill. Not long afterwards, in March, he expressed his intention to bring in a Bill declaring the introduction of foreign troops into England an act of high treason. But ‘under which King,’ or under what Government, could the foreign troops whose arrival was thus to be prevented have been levied?^[180]

418Though the calculated untrustworthiness of Oxford, and the reckless speculativeness of Bolingbroke, had by this time become as much of an open secret as had the consuming desire of the Secretary of State to supplant the Lord Treasurer, there was even now no disposition on the part of the court of Hanover to commit itself by any rash act. There had never been any real divergence of policy between the Electress and her son, the Elector, though his consistency of conduct had perhaps been the more formally complete, and we cannot follow him, as we can the Electress, in his private comments on the angular points which from time to time presented themselves in the situation. Now, they were more than ever at one in their determination to abstain from precipitate action. Robethon’s memorandum of Reasons for not sending the Electoral Prince to England (January, 1714), whether or not the Elector’s dislike of his son had anything to do with the conclusions reached, reiterated the old objection of the Electress to a course which would appear to be dictated by a desire to gratify the Whigs by offending the Tories, instead of uniting the moderate men of both parties in support of the Succession. Sophia had, by this time, come to have so little faith in either of the English political parties that, as she told Strafford, she disliked the very names of Whig and Tory; and, as an octogenarian, she was inevitably indisposed to run any 419great personal risk or court any serious personal change. She gave Schulenburg to understand that she would never consent to proceed to England without the Elector. Yet neither she nor her son, who might be depended upon not to start for England a day too soon, affected indifference towards the Succession; and even on the question of sending the Electoral Prince to England, there were signs that, in deference to Bothmer’s advice, this course might after all be adopted, so soon as the Emperor should have concluded his peace with France.^[181] It is no doubt in this connexion that, in the very last letter to Leibniz preserved from the hand of the Electress Sophia—which bears the date of May 20th, 1714 (N.S.)—she refers to a step which, as we shall see, she had just taken, and which Queen Anne had chosen to regard as a provocation offered to herself.

We must go back for a moment to the previous month of April, in which the relations between Queen Anne and the House of Hanover seemed to have become rather easier. Had she and her advisers—Oxford in particular—gained some special insight into the fundamental weakness of the Jacobite position? Though the secret was open enough, one is almost inclined to some conclusion of the kind, in view of a communication from Berwick 420to James, dated April 11th, which describes the situation so lucidly that it seems worth while to extract from it the following passage (substituting real names for the transparent pseudonyms):—

Not long afterwards, Berwick had no better advice to give his royal kinsman, than that he should keep his own counsel as to the point on which he had made up his mind, and not allow his friends in England to think the desired consummation (his 421adoption of the Protestant faith) an event altogether out of the question. When the signs of the times seemed so unpromising to those who watched them with the most direct and personal interest, and when, as to the problem on which chances mainly turned, they could only advise a policy of temporising and dissimulation, Oxford may well have been more desirous than ever to safeguard his own future by seeking to maintain a good understanding with the other side. In this month of April, he is accordingly found tendering assurances not only of his own devotion, but also of Lady Masham’s, to the Hanoverian Succession, and declaring his conviction that the Queen was for it; though, as towards her, he again guarded himself by deprecating the establishment of a second Court in England. About the same time, his kinsman Thomas Harley again arrived at Hanover, with a letter from the Queen to the Electress, blandly enquiring whether there was anything which in her judgment would further secure the Succession of her House. Should she have no suggestion of further guarantees to offer, this would be taken as implying that the existing guarantees were regarded as sufficient. At the same time, the House of Hanover was warned against giving any encouragement, directly or indirectly, to a faction which was working for its own advantage only. Harley brought no message from the Queen inviting any member of the House 422to England; and the above-mentioned enquiry, as Bolingbroke’s comments on it to Strafford implied, suggested a defiance rather than an invitation. He was specifically instructed to offer her on the part of the Queen an annuity (pension) for herself; but this the Electress, with her usual quickness of insight, declined. The revenue desired by her was, she said, one that should be granted to her in due form as Heiress Presumptive by Queen and Parliament, in accordance with the precedent of the allowance made to Queen Anne herself, when Princess of Denmark in the preceding reign. Either before or after the Electress sent this reply—on May 7th—both she and the Elector attached their signatures to a formal answer to the enquiry brought by Thomas Harley. In this important memorandum they reiterated the view which had been expressed in Schütz’s instructions, that the Succession could not be held to be really assured unless an end were put to the danger of invasion by the Pretender by his being made to leave his present residence in Lorraine, and that it was desirable to secure a revenue to the Electress by Act of Parliament. They further declared it to be desirable that a member of the House of Hanover should be established in England, in order to watch over the important interests at issue. There can be no doubt but that the Electoral Prince was the member of the family whom the memorandum had 423in view. The document was signed and sealed by both the Elector and the Electress; and a covering letter from the former to the Queen thanked her in the most conciliatory tone for her continued care for the Protestant Succession. This memorandum, for which the Elector was directly responsible in conjunction with his mother, takes the bottom out of the supposition that he was at this time ready, if he could do so with honour, to relinquish his claims.

But before the memorandum was actually transmitted, a cold blast had suddenly blown athwart the relations between the House of Hanover and Queen Anne. In the ordinary course of things the Electoral Prince, as Duke of Cambridge, would have, like any other English Peer, received his writ of summons to attend the Queen in Parliament. Aware, however, of her sensitiveness on the subject of the presence of a member of the Hanoverian family in England, the Lord Chancellor (Lord Harcourt) had thought proper to delay indefinitely the issue of the writ. The demand for it had originally been suggested to Schütz by the Earl of Nottingham, who, though a High Church Tory, had long broken with the court; and, though an attempt to obtain the writ from the Lord Chancellor made at the instigation of the Whig Lord Cowper had failed, Schütz had naturally felt uneasy at its issue being delayed. When, in a letter to him, the 424Electress Sophia had given vent to her astonishment at the fact that the patent of the Duke of Cambridge had not been in due course followed by a writ, and had expressed her opinion that the Lord Chancellor would not object to Schütz’s ‘asking for it and the reason’ (of the delay), he had interpreted this expression of opinion as a command. The Whig leaders, including the Duke of Somerset, to whom Schütz had shown the Electress’ ‘order,’ had, according to his own account, been delighted with it, and had approved of his proposal to take action upon it. In the Electress’ letter to Leibniz of May 20th, already mentioned, she explicitly states, not, as Schütz puts it, that she had ‘ordered the writ,’ but that she had directed him to enquire from the Lord Chancellor whether the Electoral Prince ought not to receive it—which is not quite the same thing. But her letter to Schütz, on which the whole matter turns, cannot be said to be ambiguous, or to allow of any interpretation but that put upon it by him.^[182] Even if it be the case that the memoranda of Hoffmann, the 425Imperial resident at the Court of St. James’, imply that, so far as he knew, there was no intention at Hanover of actually demanding the writ till the meeting of the next Parliament, this would not make it necessary to place a forced interpretation upon the Electress’ letter, with which in any case the Elector had no concern, and which can hardly have referred to the next Parliament, when the present was little more than two months old. The Hanoverian court had been pressed both by Marlborough and by Prince Eugene (who never believed in a policy of masterly inaction) to do what it could to obtain a summons for the Electoral Prince, and the Electress is known to have had this matter at heart, while the Elector’s feelings towards his son made him from first to last averse to carrying it into execution.

Schütz, who, it must be remembered, was accredited from the Electress as well as from the Elector, had acted in accordance with his instructions; but he can hardly be acquitted of precipitancy, and of an excessive readiness to listen to the opinion of the Whig leaders before assuring himself of the approval of the Elector. In any case, the die had now been cast. Harcourt had replied that the writ was quite ready, but that it was not customary for Peers to demand their writ except when on the spot; he would, however, mention the subject to the Queen. The Cabinet, summoned 426to deal with the envoy’s demand, decided that the writ could not be refused, though, according to Gaultier’s information, Bolingbroke had supported the Queen’s opinion in favour of refusing it. On April 17th, it was handed to Schütz by the Lord Chancellor, or in accordance with his orders. Being requested to state by whom he had been directed to demand the writ, Schütz seems to have mentioned the name of the Electress; but this is not attested by evidence at first hand. Schütz was speedily informed by Oxford that he would do well not to show himself at Court, and was afterwards formally prohibited from appearing there; but, as a matter of course, there was no question whatever of breaking off diplomatic relations, these being carried on for the time by Kreyenberg. Presently—on April 22nd—the envoy took his departure. On his arrival at Hanover, the Elector made a point of declining to receive Schütz; censured him for having obeyed any orders but the Elector’s; and told Thomas Harley, who, before taking his departure from Hanover, waited on him, with his whole posse of Englishmen, that Schütz had never been instructed to demand the writ, and that he (the Elector) had never intended to send his son to England without the knowledge of the Queen. This formula may perhaps be reconcilable with the information given by Robethon to Lord Polwarth,^[183] according to which 427the Elector, though he knew nothing about the demand for the writ, would have sent the Electoral Prince to England in the end, had it not been for the Queen’s letter to be mentioned immediately, which ‘changed the entire system.’ There seems to have been a good deal of feeling at Hanover—a feeling shared both by the Whig leaders in England and by Bothmer at the Hague—that, the writ having been now secured, the Electoral Prince should be sent over. But this the Elector refused to do; and the success with which he had thus kept out of the whole of this transaction—the single wrong move made on the Hanoverian side in the whole course of the game—must be placed to the credit of his judgment, whatever course he may have intended to take at a later date. But how far both he and the Electress were from being intimidated by the displeasure of the Queen, is shown by the fact that at Thomas Harley’s farewell audience the Elector placed in his hands the outspoken memorandum signed by the Electress and himself on May 7th. As for Sophia, the tone of her letter to Leibniz containing a narrative of the entire transaction is perfectly cool; and in it she as usual expresses the belief that, in spite of her recent illness, Queen Anne will outlive her Heiress Presumptive, and cites the proverb, ‘krakende Wagens 428gân lang.’^[184] Her reply to Strafford’s letter entreating her to signify her disapproval of Schütz’s action is unfortunately lost, though its purport was said to have been the same as that of the Elector’s parting declaration to Thomas Harley. The situation seemed far less terrific at Hanover than it did in London, where the Queen’s wrath was visibly ablaze, so that the House of Commons deferred voting payment of the arrears due to the Hanoverian troops, and where it was believed that if the Electoral Prince were after all sent over an invitation to the Pretender would follow. Moreover (though this is a matter into which it is impossible to enter here), the opposite views taken by Oxford and Bolingbroke as to the final issue of the writ undoubtedly helped materially to hasten the fleeting triumph of the younger over the older minister.

From what has been said it will appear how greatly the facts of the case are exaggerated and distorted in the tradition attributing the death of the Electress Sophia, which took place at Herrenhausen on June 8th, 1714, to the agitation caused by the letter addressed to her by Queen Anne in connexion with the affair of the writ, and accompanied by two letters from the Queen on the same subject 429to the Elector and the Electoral Prince. Undeniably, the Queen’s letter to the Electress Sophia, though taking a less severe form of reprimand than the companion missive to the Electoral Prince, was both offensive and insolent; for Queen Anne, who (with the exception of the Prayer-book Order) had taken no step towards admitting the Electress and her descendants into the royal family, could not lay claim to any formal authority over them. That this view was widely taken of the letters may be gathered from the fact that Boyer (Swift’s ‘Whig dog’), who had been taken into custody on a warrant from Bolingbroke for publishing them, was, a few months after the accession of George I, discharged—so that their publication was evidently regarded as having proved serviceable towards that result. Nor was the effect of the letters likely to be mitigated by the honeyed protestations of Oxford, whose system of procedure the letters almost hopelessly traversed, in a communication to the Elector accompanying them. The sharp wit of the Electoral Princess Caroline suspected that it was not he, but Bolingbroke, who was their draughtsman; and there can be little or no doubt as to the correctness of this surmise. It cannot but have been shared by the old Electress, and must have contributed to make her stand firm against a blow contrived by an all but avowed adversary of the lawful claims of herself and her House.

430Yet there can be no doubt that at the time the death of the Electress Sophia was very generally connected with, if not directly attributed to, the advent of the Queen’s letters. The very straightforward account transmitted to Marlborough by Molyneux, who had been sent to Hanover by the Duke to counteract the effects of Thomas Harley’s mission, shows the Electress to have been much agitated on the evening of the day (Wednesday, June 6th) on which, about noon, the letters had been delivered to her at Herrenhausen. On the following day, though Molyneux was told she was not well, she ordered him to send copies of the letters to Marlborough;^[185] on Friday, June 8th, she seemed well, but was still occupied with the subject and ordering fresh copies of the letters; she dined with the Elector, and in the evening was, according to her habit, walking in the gardens, when rain suddenly fell. As she quickened her speed in order to find a shelter, she dropped down and rapidly passed away. The letters of the Countess of Bückeburg^[186] to the Electress’ niece and constant companion during the last fifteen years, the Raugravine Louisa, corroborates this account, and 431adds one or two significant touches. On the Wednesday the Electress said to the writer of the letter: ‘This affair will certainly make me ill—I shall never get over it’ (j’y succombrai). ‘But,’ she added, ‘I shall have this gracious letter printed, so that all the world may see that it will not have been by my fault, if my children lose the three Kingdoms.’ And, on the Friday, though to all appearance in her usual strength, she continued to talk of English affairs with the Electoral Princess. And, since the Electoral Princess Caroline herself informed Leibniz, on June 7th, that the Electress and the Electoral Prince intended to send the Queen’s letters to England, it may be concluded that this high-spirited but rather venturesome design still further excited the old lady. Although the outer world had continued to believe her to be as full of vigour as ever, she had of late begun to take some thought of her health—a notable sign, inasmuch as ordinarily she set no high value on medical advice, being of opinion that no doctor can predict anything with certainty except that a person who died in February will not be ill in March. Probably, she was aware of the tendency to apoplexy which, already thirteen years earlier, her faithful friend Leibniz had observed in her. On the whole, the natural conclusion appears to be that the agitation produced in her by the Queen’s letters, together with her own resolution not to sit still 432under the affront, contributed to the collapse of a frame enfeebled by advanced old age, but that this trouble was the occasion rather than the cause of her decease. For her epitaph seems to tell the truth when, in perfect agreement with the Countess of Bückeburg’s statement that ‘never was there seen a death more gentle or more happy,’ it describes the Electress’ death as having been not less peaceful than sudden. Her character lies almost open to us in her private letters, and, as she told Leibniz in April, 1713, she had made it a principle to keep her mind tranquil, and not to allow it to be affected by either public or private troubles. As to her death, she had written to him a little later, it would no doubt be a finer affair if, in accordance with his wishes, her remains were interred at Westminster; ‘but the truth is that my mind, which hitherto has managed to rule my body, at present suggests no such sad thoughts to me, and that the talk about the Succession annoys me.’ Read in the way in which so many of her letters ought to be read, as half-ironical, the words just quoted attest the self-control and self-possession that were on the whole the most noteworthy features in the character of this remarkable woman. But neither this passage, nor anything else that remains from her hand, contradicts the belief which is derived from a review of her entire career, that from first to last she 433proved herself equal to the responsibilities of her life, and that, had she been actually called to the throne, she would have been not less ready than worthy to reign as a Queen.

We possess a minute official account of the proceedings after the Electress Sophia’s death—of the sealing-up of her personal effects by the Elector’s orders; of the embalming of the corpse, the night-watch over it, and its transportation on the evening of the following day to Hanover.^[187] Unfortunately, the list of those who paid her the last honours at Herrenhausen does not include the names of the ladies and ‘cavaliers’ who had been in personal attendance upon her.^[188] Her remains were deposited in the chapel of the royal palace—the old church of the Minorites—at Hanover, with proper care and decorum, but, as is formally stated, ‘without ceremony,’ i.e. without any religious service. A record likewise exists of the Court-mourning ordered, and the black draping of the chapel and of the apartments of the late Electress and the members of the Electoral family at Herrenhausen. To make the formal announcement of his mother’s death and of his own assumption of her claims to the British Succession, the Elector George Lewis once more sent Bothmer to 434London, the real object of the choice being of course the intention that this most capable diplomatist should, while keeping on good terms with the Queen’s ministers, concert further action with the Whig leaders. On June 15th, the Elector signed certain powers for the event of the Queen’s death, which would have given to his envoy an authority superior to that of the Lords Justices; but, as theirs rested on an Act of Parliament, the special authority entrusted to Bothmer was really as futile as that which had in similar terms been previously conferred on the elder Schütz, Grote, and the younger Schütz in turn. Bothmer’s reports show that Bolingbroke was believed to be acting in the interest of the Pretender; and of the truth of this charge, after he had succeeded in ousting Oxford from office, the latter, who had himself continued to be suspected of Jacobitism, personally assured the Elector’s envoy. On the part of Queen Anne, the Earl of Clarendon, a Tory Peer of high connexion, but of marked incapacity,^[189] arrived at Hanover on July 7th to express to the Elector the Queen’s sympathy with his loss. Clarendon, who had been entrusted with an extraordinary mission to Hanover before the occurrence of the Electress’ death, also brought with him an answer to the Electoral memorandum 435of May 7th, drafted by Bolingbroke, which declined all the demands made in the memorandum. Clarendon was charged with some polite explanations; but the Elector had no intention of trusting either to these or to the chapter of accidents. With an alertness rarely shown by him before his mother’s death in regard to matters connected with the Succession, he promptly caused a fresh instrument of Regency comprising his own nominations of Lords Justices to be prepared: and from this revised list Marlborough was omitted—either because he was not in England, or in consequence of a knowledge on the part of the Elector of the double game which even now the Duke was playing. At Hanover things seemed to be taking their usual course; but the visit paid to the Elector early in August by his nephew, the new King Frederick William I of Prussia, was not without its significance. For George Lewis was already taking thought of the safety of his Electorate in the event of his being called to England, and welcomed the assurances of support received by him from the King of Prussia and other German Princes. They could not know, but they might well suspect, the secret offers of assistance which Louis XIV had made to Queen Anne through Bolingbroke, and which the latter had contingently accepted. It was a few days 436after the termination of the King of Prussia’s visit that the news arrived in Hanover of the death of Queen Anne on August 1st.

The events which had crowded on one another between the death of the Electress Sophia and that of Queen Anne belong, not to Sophia’s biography, but to that of the sovereign whose Heir Presumptive was now Sophia’s son. That this heir was a ruling foreign prince, whom no immediate descent or early associations connected with the House of Stewart, and whose own dealings (apart from his mother’s) with English politicians had been to all intents and purposes entirely with Whigs, could not but intensify the aversion from the Hanoverian Succession entertained not only by the Jacobites but also, though in a less degree, by those of the Tories whose political sentiments were in nearest touch with theirs. The bonds of party union had just been drawn closer among the Tories at large by the Schism Act, and the Church had been more decisively than before rallied to the Government. But even so, Oxford was still unable to make up his mind to risk everything by inviting or allowing the Pretender to appear on English ground. Hence, not quite a fortnight after the Electress Sophia’s death, the proclamation against the Pretender was issued, and, a fortnight later (July 9th), Parliament was prorogued to an early date in August.

437During the interval, it was manifest, the Queen must make up her mind between her two chief counsellors, of whom one still thought it possible to tack and tack about, while the other was still hoping for a wind so strong and straight that he might drift before it into the desired port. The Queen decided for Bolingbroke, and, on July 27th, Oxford was dismissed from office. Bolingbroke’s moment had come, but he was unequal to its call. Instead of bringing the Pretender to England, he thought that even now there remained time for him to weld the Tory party still more closely together, by means of his Church policy above all, and to form a Jacobite Ministry that would be in readiness at the critical moment, while in any case the Whigs must be prevented from bringing over the Elector or the Electoral Prince in the interval. Bolingbroke and those in his confidence were very hopeful in this their brief day of authority; but the Whigs were more than hopeful—they were prepared.^[190] The organisation set on foot by their leaders overspread the country, and the very symbol or token of action was agreed upon, while Marlborough was waiting at Ostend to resume the command of the army. And, throughout the great body of the middle classes in England—among the 438Nonconformists in particular—a ready expectancy awaited the accomplishment of the Protestant Succession.

At last, and with a most extraordinary rapidity in the sequence of its events, the end came. The malady to which Queen Anne was to succumb announced itself on July 27th. By July 30th the anxiety had become so grave that, at a meeting of the Cabinet and of a few Privy Councillors not forming part of it, presided over by Shrewsbury, orders were issued to close the ports, to hold twenty men-of-war in readiness, and to make the Lord Mayor responsible for the safety of the City of London. On the following day, the control of affairs finally passed out of Bolingbroke’s hands, when, after a meeting of the whole Privy Council, at which Bothmer and Kreyenberg were present, the Queen, in accordance with the Council’s recommendation, placed the Lord Treasurer’s staff in Shrewsbury’s hands. A courier was sent to Strafford at the Hague, to remind the authorities there of the guarantee to which they were bound by treaty; and the British troops were recalled from the Netherlands. Early in the morning of August 1st, the Queen lay dead. Everything was in readiness. Kreyenberg made his appearance with a box containing the commission of the Lords Justices; and of the eighteen names included in it thirteen were found to be those of Whigs. During the morning, Peers, 439Privy Councillors, and Members of the House of Commons flocked in to append their signatures to the proclamation notifying the death of Queen Anne and the accession of King George. It was read by the heralds at Charing Cross and Temple Bar, and within the City; and a few days later the King was again proclaimed there, as well as at Edinburgh and Dublin. The Houses of Parliament, which had assembled for formal business on the day of the Queen’s death, four days later voted loyal addresses to her successor.

Bothmer, who had controlled the entire process of these transactions,^[191] had promptly despatched his secretary, Goedeke, to carry to King George the great news of his accession. He arrived at Hanover on the morning of August 6th, just a day after Secretary Craggs, who brought, with other missives, a letter addressed to the Elector on the day before the Queen’s death, and informing him that everything was in readiness for his immediate journey to England so soon as that death should actually have taken place. On August 8th, the Earl of Dorset—a young Whig Lord, described, in his later days, by a severe critic as ‘a perfect English courtier’—arrived from England with his suite, to make the 440official announcement on behalf of the Lords Justices. Doubt has been thrown on the statement that Goedeke, having reached Hanover, communicated the news to Clarendon, who had returned from dining with the Elector and Baroness von Kielmannsegg at her villa, Fantaisie, and who at once bore the tidings to George I at Herrenhausen. In any case, the formal announcement to the new King was made by Dorset on August 9th, when he was received by George in the flower-garden of the Orangery at Herrenhausen. Inasmuch as, on that very day, the Earl of Berkeley assumed the command of the imposing naval squadron which, a little more than a week afterwards, anchored off the Dutch coast, there was no reason why the new King should delay his departure. Whether, however, because of his confidence in the circumspection of his English friends, or because of his attachment to his Electorate, George I was in no hurry. To be in no hurry may be accounted one of the minor virtues in a monarch. He left Herrenhausen on the morning of August 31st, bidding farewell to his and his mother’s favourite place of sojourn in words which, if the court chronicler is to be trusted, betray more of sentiment than he was in the habit of expressing, but at the same time show him to have had no intention of breaking with the traditions of the past. ‘Farewell, dear place, where I have spent so many enjoyable and tranquil hours. 441I leave you, but not for ever; for I hope to see you again from time to time.’

In the same spirit, George I’s departure was left unmarked by any solemnity or ceremonial whatever. He was accompanied on his journey by his son, with whom the death of the old Electress seems to have furnished him with an opportunity of placing himself for the time on seemlier terms. The Princess (Caroline of Ansbach) followed rather later, with her children.^[192] The King’s favourite brother, Prince Ernest Augustus, remained behind in Hanover, chiefly, no doubt, in order that he might fill the Elector’s place at the Privy Council there, and also for the purpose of taking care of his expectations at Osnabrück, which were realised a year later, when he succeeded to the bishopric formerly held by his father, his elder brother, Maximilian William, being, as a convert to Rome, left out in the cold. Six months later, the Bishop^[193] was created Duke of 442York. At the Hague, the royal party was joined by Baroness von Kielmannsegg; Melusina von der Schulenburg followed in due course. With the King were his prime minister, Bernstorff, and Baron von Schlitz-Görz, who was to succeed Bernstorff in the same capacity at Hanover, besides three Privy Councillors, of whom Robethon was one, and a small Chancery staff. The chief officers of the Hanoverian Court, and a fairly ample household, including ‘Mr. Mehmet and Mr. Mustapha,’ live remembrances of the King’s Turkish campaigns, raised the royal retinue to the moderate total of something less than one hundred persons.

Bolingbroke afterwards asserted that King George, though he had quitted Hanover in the apparent resolution of leaving the Tory Government in England unmolested, had during his stay in Holland, in consequence of earnest importunities on the part of the Allies, and particularly of Heinsius and some of the Whigs, come to a contrary decision. How far this assertion, and the belief that the impeachment of the Tory leaders was due more particularly to the inspiration of Bothmer, are correct, the present is not an occasion for enquiring; but enough has been said in the course 443of this narrative to indicate that George I was not easily led, or easily turned.

On September 16th, 1714, the new King of Great Britain sailed from Oranie Polder; on the 18th he landed at Greenwich; and two days later he held his entry into London. His Coronation took place at Westminster Abbey on October 18th. Few men who have laid claim to so dazzling and so elusive a prize as that which fell to his lot have maintained their claim with so calm a resolve and so consistent a self-restraint. Whether or not circumstances—such as an armed landing on the English coast by the Pretender, or merely his personal appearance on English soil—might have led to a counter-attempt on the part of the Heir Presumptive to assert his claim to the throne in person, who shall say? And who will lay it down whether in putting his right to the test, even at the risk of civil war, he would have done wrong? Such a step he had not been called upon to take; and his course of conduct had remained consistent throughout. Although he had little personal inclination for the change which his accession to the British throne involved, this should not detract from the tribute due to his conduct before that accession. As his claim descended to him from his mother, so he had inherited from her some, though not all, of the qualities which, in her, well became the Heiress of Great Britain. True to the friends of his House, and without fear 444of its enemies, he professed no feeling which he did not entertain, and shrank from no duty that was imposed upon him.

The princely sense of honour to which the Electress Sophia and her son were true in accepting the great responsibility to which they were called by the Act of Settlement was beyond a doubt their primary motive in meeting it. But, at the same time, they were alike fully conscious of the significance of the cause embodied in the Protestant Succession; nor was the triumph of that cause, to which Sophia looked forward with hardly a thought of self, merely or mainly the fulfilment of a great dynastic ambition.

I. Family of Frederick V, Elector Palatine.

Cf. Voigtel-Cohn’s Stammtafeln zur Gesch. d. deutschen Staaten u. d. Niederlande (1871), Tafel 51. Feder, pp. 3-4, has gratuitously shortened the lives of not less than three of the Palatine children.

The original French text of the Letters which the liberal courtesy of the authorities of the Royal Secret Archives of State at Berlin enables me to reproduce in this place is here printed as supplied by their copyist. The packet containing the Letters is inscribed in the handwriting of Frederick the Great in the words of the title here prefixed to them. The spelling of the words in the Letters, the way in which those words are run into one another, and the sequence of the Letters, have (except in one instance in which there had been an evident misplacement of manuscript) been left as they stand in the transcript. The words ciphered in numbers, whether in whole or letter by letter, have been deciphered—each deciphered word, whether proper or common, being distinguished by italics. The nicknames (or designations applied to particular persons by the writers of the letters, in accordance with a mutual understanding between them) are left as they stand; their equivalents, so far as known, being mentioned at the end of this introductory note.

An English translation is appended, in which an attempt has been made, besides assigning the Letters to 448their respective writers, to supply dates, where possible, to those which are undated, and to place them in their probable chronological sequence. This attempt is based in the main on a comparison of the Berlin with the Lund Letters. It could not be carried very far without establishing beyond all possibility of doubt the fact that the two series form an organic whole, and that each of them proves incontestably the genuineness of the other. A few brief notes have been added, identifying names of persons or places, where this could be done.

The original (French) letters are numbered consecutively (1-34); the English versions are arranged so far as possible chronologically, and numbered so as to correspond with the originals (F 1-F 34).

Nothing is actually known as to the way in which the Berlin Letters, whose number is less than one-tenth of that of the Letters preserved at Lund, came into the hands of King Frederick II of Prussia, the son of Sophia Dorothea’s daughter and namesake and of her consort King Frederick William I. It is proved by fragments of the proceedings for a divorce against the Electoral Princess that letters which had passed between the lovers had been seized already in the course of the two months (May and June, 1694) preceding the disappearance of Königsmarck, and had thus come to the knowledge of the Electoral Government. (One of the letters here printed shows how apprehensive the guilty pair had been of such an occurrence.)

In Cramer’s Memoirs of Countess Maria Aurora Königsmarck and the Königsmarck family (1837), a book which, notwithstanding the addition of a great deal of second-hand matter, is beyond a doubt largely based upon original documents, will be found an apparently 449authentic report of Auditeur Rüdiger (dated July 1, 1695). He states that after Königsmarck’s disappearance on July 1, 1694, a certain von Metsch (who was married to the sister of Eleonora von dem Knesebeck, and had served as intermediary at some stages of Königsmarck’s secret correspondence with the Princess) was frequently in the company of Königsmarck’s secretary, Hildebrandt. In reply to an enquiry from the latter, Metsch stated that on the Count’s journey to Dresden he had seen in his possession a packet of letters tied together with yellow ribbon in a little box, of which the Count took particular care. This packet, by Hildebrandt’s advice, Metsch now sent unopened by the hands of a servant to Celle. If this statement is correct, there is much probability in the conjecture that these were some of the letters which found their way to the sisters of Königsmarck, and ultimately into the library at Lund.

Two days later, again according to the statement of Rüdiger, who had it from Hildebrandt, the latter was ordered by an official personage (Secretary Zacharias) to open Königsmarck’s apartments for a thorough examination of them and of all the furniture. In the course of the examination of the Count’s bedroom (Cabinet) Rüdiger was called to summon a locksmith to open the writing-table; but during the actual opening of it he remained in an ante-room. After this the rooms were sealed up, and the flow of talk began.

Possibly this was the way in which the Hanoverian Government obtained possession of the letters which, in the opinion of Leibniz, brought home conviction of Sophia Dorothea’s guilt to her parents at Celle; though after the divorce the Elector Ernest Augustus refused either to allow the letters to be kept at Celle, or to have them burnt instanter. In any case, there 450would thus be no difficulty in accounting for the preservation of evidence which could afterwards be sent by the Hanoverian court to that of Berlin, in order to convince Sophia Dorothea’s daughter, who is said to have desired the liberation of the ‘Duchess of Ahlden’ from her imprisonment, of her unhappy mother’s guilt.^[194]

I subjoin so much of Count Schulenburg’s key to designations and numerical ciphers for names, as applies to the Berlin Letters; it is supplemented in their case by Dr. Geerds and myself:

The titles ‘Elector,’ ‘Electoral Prince,’ ‘Electoral Princess,’ could not have been formally used until after the date of the Electoral Investiture, December 19, 1692. (Cf. Königsmarck’s sarcastic letter ap. Wilkins, p. 258.^[195]) Before the Investiture the titles were ‘Duke,’ ‘Hereditary Prince,’ and ‘Hereditary Princess,’ and these designations have accordingly been adopted in the original and in the translated letters belonging, or held assignable, to earlier dates.

Wilkins (p. 218, note) thinks that La Marionette was ‘probably a Princess of Hesse.’ Her brother is said (by Sophia Dorothea) to be ‘with the army,’ and by Königsmarck to be ‘near’ Sophia Dorothea, also at Wiesbaden, and ‘in his own country.’ The only Princess of Hesse whom these indications would fit would be one of the three surviving elder sisters of Landgrave Ernest Lewis of Hesse-Darmstadt, who served under Margrave Lewis William of Baden. They were Magdalena Sibylla, Duchess Dowager of Würtemberg, Maria 452Elizabeth, Duchess of Saxe-Römhild, and Sophia Maria, Duchess of Saxe-Eisenberg.

The above list leaves unexplained the following numerical ciphers used in the Berlin Letters: 20, 110, 127, 131, 307, 308, 2000—seven in all, as against sixteen left unexplained by Dr. Geerds. Resort is now and then had in these Letters to the extraordinary notion (it can hardly be called a cipher) of disguising a word in a crowd of jllj’s or illy’s, thus:

The letter-key, with which a large proportion of the words in the Letters have been deciphered at Berlin, is as follows:

1

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

CORRESPONDENCE OF SOPHIA DOROTHEA
AND COUNT KÖNIGSMARCK

F 3
[From Königsmarck to Sophia Dorothea]

F 1
[From Sophia Dorothea to Königsmarck]

On Wednesday the Hereditary Princess appeared at table and spoke to 110, then to the Field-Ma[rshal].^[201] She arrived late. Prince Max received her and shook hands with her; she said very little to him. The Duke of Celle came into the room; Prince Max did not come in at all; the Duchess of Celle had gone to bring her in, and came back late for she did not find the Hereditary Princess. Supper was afterwards served. The Hereditary Princess, the Duchess of Celle, and the Duke of Celle, were together, quite by themselves. The Duchess of Celle took the Hereditary Princess to her rooms, and nobody entered them.

F 12

[From Königsmarck to Sophia Dorothea.]

The 3rd
     23rd^[202] [1692?]

My Mistresses are supposed to have prevented me from thinking of you? God, is it possible that you should 503believe this; and, even had I not written to you about everything (though this is letter No. 4) you ought never to have harboured such a thought. Is it possible that you should believe that I love anyone but yourself? No, I protest to you that after you I shall never love again. It will not be very difficult to keep my promise, for after one has adored you is it possible to think any other woman pretty? You wrong yourself by believing such a thing; and how could you draw a comparison between yourself and the others; and is it possible that after having loved a Goddess, one could bestow a look upon Mortals? No, in truth, I have too good taste for that, and I am not one of those people who wish to make themselves common. I adore you, charming brunette, and I shall die with this feeling. If you do not forget me, I swear to you that I shall love you all my life. I expect no more letters from you, because I intend to be soon in your company, and my sole occupation will then be to prove to you, that I love you to distraction, and that nothing is so dear to me as your person. Adieu!

F 18

[From Königsmarck to Sophia Dorothea]

I am very well pleased that you are for once satisfied with me; but it seems to me that this does not delight you, for you are always supplying me with matter for reproaching you; and thus you deprive me of the joy of being satisfied with you. You complain that your love interferes with your rest; I am willing to believe it, but this love does not touch your heart so deeply that you would cut off the slightest pleasures for its sake.sake. 504No, no; it is for me to complain: my passion not only troubles me, but brings me to despair. Oh, God! how I [hate] the places where I know the amusements are going on; I should much like to see you at the Gate of Brussels^[203] or of Ghent[?] without appearing there myself; rather than do this you would abandon me and ten other galans. You find your conduct correct; so do I; but I should be beyond despair if mine were not still more so. I am very well pleased that you have not fallen ill; it would have left me inconsolable. Although I am not satisfied with you, you were satisfied with my letter; this fills me with joy; you find there the unfeigned sentiments of my heart; I thank you very humbly that you promise me not to give your portrait to the person we know of. Why do you flatter me so much in your letters, when you think so little of keeping your promises to me? You assure me that nothing will be difficult for you, and that you will do everything to please me; this is very well said, but very ill kept. Alas! you say to me, let us trust that time will be able to make us happy; but know that time will make me the most unhappy of mankind. I have not the audacity to say to you what I already know; but, my dear, I believe that they will force me to leave you. I cannot finish this letter, what with trouble, sorrow, and anger. Adieu; do not, at all events, hate me; for, I swear by my God, I do not deserve it in [any] way on earth.

Although I had resolved to write to you to-morrow and to reply at length to the letters of the 13th^[205], 14th and 15th, which I received from you at the same time, I find myself deprived of this pleasure by the resolution which the King has taken to attack to-morrow the French army, which is two hours distance from us; the place is called Enghien. At any other time this news would have delighted me; but I confess to you at the present moment it troubles me. I am loved by you, the only object that I have found worth loving. I have not deceived myself in my belief that you possess all the fine qualities to be found in the world; but, my dear, I must risk my life, and perhaps never see you again. Hardly was I made aware that you were innocent, and that I falsely suspected you, when I am perhaps never to see you again. I have risked my life a hundred times, by way of folly or high spirits, and I knew myself sufficiently to be sure that death never terrified me. But, my divinity, that which makes me a coward is the fear of not seeing you again. Adieu then, amiable Doro, adieu; how much I am to be pitied—and yet I am fortunate, but I cannot take advantage of my good fortune. Do not, however, think that you have a coward admirer; no, my dear, since to battle I must go, I will behave there as is right, and, if I can, I hope to distinguish myself. 506But, my heart, permit me to make a request to you, namely, that, if my fate is so unkind to me as to leave me crippled by the loss of an arm, or a leg, do not forget me, and have a little pity for a poor fellow who has let it be his only pleasure to love you; no, my dear, do not forget him: he is a man who has been really and truly attached to you, and will remain so for the remainder of his life, although a cripple; my eyes which have been charmed by yours, will perhaps never see them any more. I cannot think of that, without shedding tears. Ah, how little advantage I have from being loved by you, and of how many torments you are the cause to me! It is striking twelve from the Hall^[206] clock tower; they are bringing in cannon-balls, powder, and matches; it is the prelude to the scene which we have to play to-morrow; I must betake myself to my duty; adieu, beloved child! Ah, how I am to be pitied!

F 22

[From Sophia Dorothea to Königsmarck]

I take so much pleasure in conversing with you that, so soon as I have a moment of liberty, I employ it to assure you of my affection. I wrote to you yesterday, but it seems to me that I did not sufficiently insist to you on the disquiet in which I am about what you tell me. It prevented me from sleeping all the night. I reviewed all my actions, and, the more I examine myself, the less I can guess what you can have against me. It is 507certain that you ought to be content with my conduct; it is ruled by my affection, and this is sufficient. I entreat you once more to let me know as soon as you are able what it can be. It will be very easy for me to justify myself, since I have never thought of anything but pleasing you, and I will with pleasure take all the most horrid oaths to you as to my innocence; but I urgently ask of you to inform me who are they that tell you such calumnies. No doubt they have their reasons for making a quarrel between us, and according to all appearances they will not stop there. Be persuaded, I entreat you, that I am incapable of doing anything that could displease you. My behaviour has shown you this up to the present time, and I will do even more in the same way in the future. I am in despair not to be able to make you perceive as much as I should like to do my affection for you. The opportunities are wanting to me, but not the will; and I shall not be happy until I have made the whole earth see that for me you take the place of the grandeurs and pleasures of the world and of all its charms. The only one which I desire is that of possessing your heart; I demand no other, and this one happiness will always make me indifferent to all others. I am convinced that if I were at Han[over], I should be told plenty of stories against you; but I trust you too much to listen easily to what I might be told. Do you act in the same way, and believe firmly that nothing is capable of making me change! I am in mortal trouble. They say that an engagement was fought a short time since, and I do not yet know the rights of it. I tremble lest you should expose yourself without need, and that some accident should have befallen you. Take care of yourself, I entreat you, if there remains in you any affection [for] me. What would become of me if I were to learn that you were wounded? I think I should die of it.

You make me [wish to] die when you pay me compliments. Since you do not reply to me on all the points of my letters, I have begged you not to write at all, and simply to let me know through Fräulein von dem Knesebeck the state of your health. I repeat it again here, and entreat you not to do it if it causes you the slightest fatigue. It is sufficient that you should write me two words, so that I may see that divine handwriting which is able to banish all the fears that I imagine to myself. The resolution which I must take, according to the opinion of all my friends, exposes me to the risk that, when I shall have taken my leave, I shall set all the world arguing about it; and perhaps I might be told through a third party that it is desired that I should retire. What will then become of me? Believe me that it is necessary to think of everything before taking a fixed resolution. The matter is of too great importance to me. The Duke of Hanover will find a thousand people like Königsmarck, but I trust that the Hereditary Princess will never find anyone who is so faithful and who loves her with more ardour than myself. My passion is so beyond bounds as to rise to madness. Alas! my dearest, you deserve [lovers] far better than Königsmarck. I am quite convinced that if they had given you an admirer according to your deserts, I should not have had the honour of being your Slave; but if some one with an extraordinary affection and an unequalled constancy was to have been your admirer, it is right and just that this should be myself; for I would dispute the place not with Mortals, but with the Gods themselves, 509and I defy them to create anyone to equal me. What an effect vows have when one is in the condition in which you are; never have I been more satisfied with you, never did I believe you more implicitly, than at present. You will, then, always love me, I may rest assured of it, for you swear to me that, so long as I shall love you, you will do the same. I shall love you all my life, and you vow the same thing to me; what more can I desire?—all my wishes are fulfilled, I am the happiest man in the world; recover your health, and I can be at the height of my bliss. I am not pleased to find that you prefer writing to me to taking your rest; I entreat you, think first of taking your rest, and then of your lover. How angry I am with your heart for its bad taste, to leave you in order to come to me; it does not know the difference; leave that to mine, one ought not to change for the worse, but for the better. Your account makes me tremble, and I fear lest the fever [and] the other accident tire you out so much that you will not be able to recover as quickly [as you ought]. I do not know, my heart tells me you are out of danger; I am no longer so much disquieted as I was at the beginning. I take that for a very good sign; at least I hope it is, and I ardently wish that it may be so; I hope that my prayers are granted, and that at the present moment you are better. The resolution that you have taken, to take what I had left you, is great; I avow to you that, if I had known it beforehand, it would have made me tremble; but, since everything has gone off well, I am at rest; and there is only the trouble of being the cause of so much more suffering on your part, and, if you found yourself still worse, I should be inconsolable. I am obliged to confess that the marks of your affection greatly surpass mine at present; nothing could be so touching as what you write to me ... of falling ill. I shall not find an 510opportunity of enabling you to see how great an affection I have for you. Is it possible that the Duke of Hanover is stupid enough to have refused you the appointment? I would rather put twenty field-marshals to death than once refuse such a favour to the Hereditary Princess. Although the Hereditary Prince does not return so soon and in response to the orders which it was made known had been sent, we are in any case already in the month of September, and the campaign will soon be at an end. Reflect on that! Adieu!

F 23

[From Sophia Dorothea to Königsmarck]

It was so late when I wrote to you that I could not reply to all that you told me. I reread your letter several times; it is a mixture of love and raillery which I find very pleasing; and it seems to me, whatever countenance you may assume, that my journey does not find favour with you. Yet you are altogether as wrong as possible; for, according to all appearances, I shall go away again from this place without having seen any reasonable person, and I desire it with all my heart. I do not think of going to Frankfort fair, and I shall not say a word to help to bring this about. It seems to me that this ought to convince you that I am not in quest of society, and that I am incapable of thinking of pleasures when I do not see you. I hope to leave this place in a fortnight. The Peda[gogue] has to-day taken this resolution. I return with her to join the Grondeur; and I shall proceed to Han[over] a little before the return of the Reformer. I cannot yet tell you anything positive about what concerns the Göhrde;^[208] I do not, however, 511think that I shall go there, for the season is too advanced for the Reformer to be able to be there, and I hope that, provided that nothing keeps you where you are,^[209] I shall soon be able to see you. I shall judge of your affection by your eagerness, but I entreat you to take your measures so well that I may see you in private on the first occasion. It would be impossible for me to bear seeing you in public, and my transport [of delight] would betray me. They say that the French could easily carry us off. This makes me wish very much to get away, for I should not at all like to be taken prisoner, and I wish to keep your conquest safe for you. I am delighted with your [present?],^[210] and I offer you all the thanks for it which you deserve. It took me by surprise and I did not expect it at all, which makes the thing all the more obliging. There is no sentinel in the world that you ought to fear, and the prisoner may reckon on the prison which will always be open to him and closed to all the rest of the world. As to this you may depend on me, and as to a love which will serve as a model; I wish to convince you of it, although you have some of it, and that I find no happiness or satisfaction except in loving you and in being loved. You seem to me so little certain of this truth that I am sensibly affected by it. Tell me what should be done so that you should be unable to doubt it any more; there is nothing that I 512would not joyfully do in order to make you see that for me you take the place of everything else, and that all my desires and my ambition are confined to pleasing you. If nothing but this is needed to render you happy, you are more so than any person in the world, for I do not desire to live but for you alone, and I renounce with pleasure the whole world, in order never to belong to anyone but yourself.

F 24

[From Sophia Dorothea to Königsmarck]

Instead of the extreme pleasure which all your letters afford to me, that which I received this evening has pierced my heart. One could not think of anything that could hurt one more than what you write to me. I shall not repeat it; I believe that you will remember it still very well, and I would give everything in the world to be able to forget it. By what passage of my life can I have deserved the opinion which you show you have of me? If I thought to have given cause for it, I should wish to be dead; but, the more I examine myself, the more I find myself far removed from such sentiments, and, thanks be to God, I feel my heart as noble as it ought to be. I wish to say nothing further to you on this subject; I might lose my temper, and I very much hate harshness. But, to reply to the four points on which you continue to harp. I am very much deceived if I did not tell you that Sparr has been at L.,^[211] and, if I did not do so, it was certainly because I forgot to do 513so and because I did not think that he was worth the trouble of my remembering him. I can swear to you all the oaths you please that there is no reason besides this; moreover, I did not say two words to him [about] the joy which you reproach me for having felt at finding Guldenleu^[212] here. I shall not reply to you on the subject, for it is a ridiculous notion, and nothing in the world could be so ill-imagined with regard to the Fair. I assure you that I did not say a word in order to go there; but as I am quite sincere I am prepared to confess to you that I was not vexed about it; and, as to my new lover, you are mad to disquiet yourself about him; for he is far away from here, and according to all appearances I shall not see him; and [neither] his sisters nor anybody in the world will ever make me take any step against the affection which so fills my heart. I have already told you that I am convinced that he is not coming to Han[over]; but, if this should happen, provided that I am better pleased with you than I am this evening, I shall treat [him] with absolute rudeness rather than allow his visits. I am very foolish to give a reasonable explanation in reply to all your fancies—[to] you who are so far from reasonable as to anything that concerns me, and who have driven me to despair by your fine letter. It is true that you mean afterwards to repair your fault; but this is not sufficient, and I am not well pleased, for I desire your esteem, and you do not show that you have any for me. The Confidante yesterday received [a letter] from the beloved Ketler,^[213] who writes to her by order of the Landgrave^[214] 514to offer his compliments to Leonisse, since you wish to call her by that name, and to assure her that he will do what is in his power to see her here or at the Fair. I do not, however, think that this is possible, because we take our departure to-morrow, and one will only be there for a single day. I shall not write to you till I shall have arrived, and I shall give you a sincere and faithful account of all. I shall say nothing affectionate to you this evening, for you do not deserve it; I am afraid that I shall not have the same strength of mind to-morrow, and that I shall have forgotten my anger, for I am furiously fond of you, and, although I do not tell you about it, I nevertheless feel that I love you with a passion of which there never was the like.

F 25

[From Sophia Dorothea to Königsmarck]

I have been here during the last two hours. The Peda[gogue] alighted at the house of the P[rincess] of Tarente,^[215] where I saw nothing but silly faces. From there we went to the Fair, where I saw nobody of quality. The Marionette is here, and her sister-in-law. I shall not see them till to-morrow, with which I am well pleased, for I shall be able to take a rest, of which I have great 515need, not having closed an eye all the night. I spent half of it in writing to you, and the other in worrying myself about the fine passage in your letter. I beg you very particularly not to give me any further such subjects of annoyance, for I am very touchy on the subject in question. Except that wicked passage which I cannot forget and which spoils all, your letter is charming, and nothing is more delightful than all that you say to me. Put this matter to rights, if you wish to be on good terms with me, for it goes very near to my heart. Mine is so full of you that, although I have reason to complain of you, I cannot bring myself not to mention to you that yesterday evening I had to make a terribly violent effort in order to keep silence to you about my affection. Never did one feel so much of it, and never did one less deserve reproaches than in my case. You are the most unjust of mankind to have the slightest mistrust as to what concerns me. I am too veritably yours that you should have anything to fear. All my actions should convince you of it, for it is certain that my passion for you exceeds all bounds. I entreat you to be fully convinced of this truth, and that there is nothing in the world which I would not do to make you see that I am more yours than my own. I hope that I shall not see either the Land[grave] or anybody, and I wish it with my whole heart. If you find anything which does not please you in what I wrote to you yesterday, lay all the blame on the vexation which you caused to me. It was enough to make me cry, and all the charms of your letter could not induce me to forgive the offending passage. Rest tranquil as to my behaviour. It shall be divine, I promise you for myself and for the Rival.

In the name of God, take care of yourself! My life is united to yours. A thousand desperate thoughts come into my mind, and I am crushed with grief; I should find it difficult to speak to you of anything else. I have plenty of leisure for nursing my trouble, and it is with a real joy that I find myself in this solitude. I forgot yesterday to return you my thanks for what you tell me about la Boule. Nothing could be so polite; I consent, on this condition, that she becomes my rival, for I confess to you that I love a triumph, and that it is very much to my taste. Adieu, nothing is capable of making me change. I was born for loving you; you are my sole passion; I never had one before I knew you, and I shall die loving you more than anyone has ever loved.

F 27

[From Sophia Dorothea to Königsmarck]

I ought to give you an account of my doings of yesterday. I was alone all day. Then arrived some one sent from the master of this place to pay his respects to the Peda[gogue]. He got into such difficulties in his speech that I could scarcely stop myself from laughing at it. He also made a speech to the Cœur Gauche, and then took his departure. Then there was a promenade on foot, and on our return there was supper, and I had a conversation with the Confidante. This is the only pleasure I have, for we always talk about you.

Although I wrote to you yesterday evening, I cannot stop myself from telling you that I have spent the worst night in the world; I dreamt of you, but I beheld you faithless to me. I dreamt as follows: It seemed to me that I had requested you not to see a certain great man, and that, notwithstanding your promise, you had appointed him to pay you a visit so as to say good-bye to him. I was informed of it, and, not being able to endure this faithlessness, I pretended to have a letter from Madame your mother to hand to you. I entered your room abruptly, and saw the most horrible sight in the world: that great gentleman held you in his arms, and, what is worse, you were alone in your room. You pretended a little to be annoyed with your Adonis, telling him that he was impertinent. In my turn, I wished to withdraw, but you called out to me. I was delighted with this, because it gave me a chance of whispering into your ear that you were the most ungrateful of all ladies, and that this would be the last time that I should speak to you. In fact, I went to find out M. de Pude [Podewils] in order to beg him to send me to Hungary,^[218] which he did. I beg your pardon for this criminal dream; but I should think myself very much more criminal if I did not let you know of it. Do not think that I am inventing; no, by my God, it is a true tale. For the love of all that is dearest to you, take care to restore my peace of mind, and free me from my 518fear. I am afraid that this dream may be some melancholy presage, and something that bodes no good. It would be unjust that a tender affection should be requited by infidelities; I hope it may not be so; for why should you wish to desert a heart that adores you, and that swears to be faithful to you? If such vows can attach you solely to me, I protest to you before God, that never will I be unfaithful to you, and that I will love you all my life with the same passion that I do [at present]. When I shall have the honour of amusing you with an account of yesterday’s debauch, you will laugh a good deal. The Baroness^[219] [sic] distinguished herself on the occasion, and the big Swedish beard[s] made the best effect in the world; she was so much ... that her natural colour began to appear beneath, which produced the most diverting spectacle in the world. She asked me why I did not amuse myself; I answered that I had come to pay my court to M. [Bielke]^[220] and not to amuse myself. In leaving me she called me a traitor; whereupon I replied that I was not one yet, but might very possibly become one. M. le Duc played at ombre yesterday evening with her. That is the very Devil! I will conclude by asking you to prepare yourself to rescue me from the disquietude in which I am, and to believe me inviolably attached to you and to all those who have a regard for you. I embrace you from my very heart, and I kiss your portrait a million times. Farewell!

Come here some Friday evening, and wait till the Elector^[221] comes here. If Prince Max cannot be got rid of, you can go back, and that will serve you as a pretext with the Duke of Celle and the Electoral Prince. Tell me if you agree with my notion; if you can do it, arrange so that I may see you, for, frankly, I cannot go on living in this way; for the love of me [and] of you arrange for me to see you and to embrace you, for without this satisfaction life is worth nothing to me.

F 30

[From Königsmarck to Sophia Dorothea]

The joy of finding the Ref[ormer] departed was broken by the trouble of finding you ill; I hope, however, that it will not be of consequence; for otherwise I shall not be able to sleep all night because of it. I hope to embrace you to-morrow evening; I await the ordinary signal; and the bad weather shall not prevent me from tasting the delight of your charming kisses; unless indeed you give me other orders. I hope for the contrary, and I trust that your eagerness will respond to mine. If you do not go out to-morrow, this will suffice to assure you that the moments will seem like centuries to me, and that the times during which I am away from you are those which I pass to no purpose whatever; and that I am ready to come to-morrow to the well-known place. I await the signal and am your very obedient servant.

One could not be better pleased with you than I am. Your obliging ways of yesterday, your very dear letter, in a word everything, charms me; I begin to revive, and yesterday is one of those days which I ought to mark in my book. In order to take full advantage of it, I beg that I may see you this evening; I shall await the signal with great impatience, for I die with desire to prove to you my joy—it is beyond all bounds, and cannot express itself. For the love of you, of myself, and of everything that is dear to you, continue in the same way; you will then be able to persuade me that I have nothing to fear, that I shall always be happy and contented—that is the pleasure of love, those are the charms of an attachment that is sincere and genuine. The avowal of the Grond[eur] further gives me much hope—seek to soften him, you will be able to do it if you try; but you must take pains about it, and choose your time well. Be withal convinced that, if Heaven destines me the joy of having you for my own, my ways will be quite different from what you have imagined to yourself, and I swear to you that I shall regulate them according to yours. Put faith in this avowal, for it is sincere, and springs from a soul without guile and without finesse; as the weather is fine, I hope to see you in the [falconry] [?].^[222] I hope to find you there loving and happy. Farewell till then; you will, I feel sure, say a little word to me, from which I can perceive that you grant my prayer.

Let [him] be at 8 o’clock in the evening near the door of the great hall, where the Pr[incess] is accustomed to play cards; he will be able to meet her there in safety, since nobody passes there, to-morrow being Sunday.

F 34

[From Königsmarck to Sophia Dorothea]

F 9
[From Königsmarck to Sophia Dorothea]

F 16
[From Königsmarck to Sophia Dorothea]

F 17
[From Königsmarck to Sophia Dorothea]

F 8
[From Königsmarck to Sophia Dorothea]

F 19

[From Königsmarck to Sophia Dorothea]

F 4

[From Königsmarck to Sophia Dorothea]

F 13

[From Königsmarck to Sophia Dorothea]

F 14

[From Königsmarck to Sophia Dorothea]

F 15
 
[From Königsmarck to Sophia Dorothea]

The Church of Scotland was, in the main, well affected to the Union and the consequences which it entailed as regards the Succession. But the friends of the House of Hanover had to guard against two distinct sources of weakness within the Establishment itself.

(I) Episcopacy in Scotland had never been more than a compromise, even in the districts where it had not been violently opposed. The best instance of this is Aberdeenshire, where protests against the government of Charles II are late in date and are confined to verbal expressions of sympathy with the persecuted Presbyterians. But the Records of the Exercise [Presbytery] of Alford (New Spalding Club, 1897), dealing with the period 1662-1688, show clearly enough that the episcopal function was ordination, and that the government and, in many respects, the public worship of the Church was Presbyterian. The effect of this was that, at the Revolution, Episcopal clergymen were permitted to remain in their parishes on condition of their taking the oath to William and Mary, although they were forbidden to take part in Presbyteries, Synods, or Assemblies. The tendency was for such men to conform to Presbytery, but they formed a distinct ‘left wing.’ They were most numerous in the north-east, and they were well represented in the Universities. Both the Universities of 551Aberdeen, for example, were Jacobite in sympathy. The result was that many ministers shared in, and urged their people to join, the ’15. They were deposed in 1716, and the Universities were ‘purged’ by the Commission of 1717.

(2) A section of the more robust Presbyterians in the Church sympathised with their brethren who had declined to accept the Revolution Settlement, and their feeling was accentuated by a gross breach of faith on the part of the British Parliament—the passing of the Patronage Act of 1712, which disturbed the Church for more than a century and a half. So strong was this tendency that, as late as 1745, the Provincial Synod of Moray considered it necessary to inform George II that ‘with pleasure we reflect that very few of the people who hold communion with us have joined those enemies of your Majesty’s crown and government.’ (Allardyce, Jacobite Papers.)

Episcopalian Jacobitism within the Church practically disappears in 1716, and the clergy, as represented in ecclesiastical and academic records, were devotedly loyal to George I and II, from that date.

Outside the Church we have a body who were not Dissenters in the English sense, for they approved of the constitution of the Church, but objected to the establishment of Episcopacy in England, and the toleration of Dissenters in Scotland. They were the men who had suffered most in the ‘killing time,’ and their only associations with the functions of government were connected with Grierson of Lagg and Bloody Mackenzie. They considered it possible that James Stewart might be turned from the error of his ways, and take the Covenant as Charles II had done. Their attitude, in fact, was precisely similar to that of their predecessors, who had crowned Charles II after fighting against Charles I. 552They declined to acknowledge the Revolution Settlement and the Union. They spoke of Queen Anne as ‘that wicked Jezabel the pretended Queen,’ and ‘the late woman.’ But even when they had little hope of the Pretender’s conversion, they protested against ‘the Prince of Hanover, who hath been bred and brought up in the Luthren religion, which is not only different from but even in many things contrar unto that purity in doctrine, reformation, and religion we in these nations had attained unto.’ (Protestation against the Union.)

The Episcopalians, the largest section of Protestant Dissenters, were, almost without exception, High Tories. They had suffered for refusing the oath to William and Mary, and had undergone some trifling inconveniences as the defeated and unpopular party. The rising of 1715 was, therefore, very largely supported by Episcopalians, who found themselves ranged along with extreme Presbyterians and Roman Catholics. The religious aspect of the ’15 and the ’45 has never been satisfactorily examined. Mr. Blaikie said, not long since, that the ‘45 was much more Presbyterian than is commonly imagined. I hope he will work out the subject.

• Act for the further Security of the Protestant Succession, 370
• Act of Precedence, 404, 406
• Act of Security (1704), 372-3
• Act of Settlement (1701), 7, 225 note, 321-2
• Act of Union (1707), 373, 392
• Addison, 388-9;
  • cited, 335 note
• Adolphus John, Prince, 108-9
• Alexander VII, Pope, 162
• Amalia, Landgravine of Hesse-Cassel, 97
• Amalia, Raugravine (niece of Sophia), 102, 371
• Amalia von Solms, Princess of Orange, 43, 56, 82
• Anna Eleonora, Duchess of Brunswick-Lüneburg, 115
• Anna Maria, Duchess of Savoy, 225 and note, 301, 321
• Anne, Queen (wife of James I), 13
• Anne, Queen of England, suggested marriage of, with George Lewis, 189;
  • Bill of Rights (1689) as affecting, 217;
  • birth of her son the Duke of Gloucester, 219;
  • political intrigue (1700), 312;
  • attitude towards Sophia and relations with her, 363, 366 and notes—9, 386-7, 390-1, 394, 396, 403, 404 note 173, 408, 410;
  • attitude towards Hanoverian Succession, 366, 368-9, 391, 396, 409, 412-13;
  • towards her half-brother James, 369, 372, 392-3, 408;
  • proposed visit of Sophia to England opposed by, 370, 386;
  • death of her husband, 395;
  • ministerial crisis (1710), 396-8;
  • relations with Augustus II, King of Poland, 404 note 173;
  • illness (1713), 414, 415;
  • speech at opening of Parliament (Feb. 1714), 416-17;
  • attack of erysipelas (Mar. 1714), 437 note;
  • letter to Sophia (Apr. 1714), 421-2;
  • attitude towards affair of delayed Parliamentary writ for Electoral Prince, 419, 426;
  • letters to Hanover on the subject, 428-31;
  • dismisses Oxford, 437;
  • last illness, 437;
  • appoints Shrewsbury Lord Treasurer, 438;
  • death, 436, 438;
  • political incapacity, 368-9, 387;
  • Toryism, 368;
  • otherwise mentioned, 8, 293 note, 305, 307-8, 344, 347, 365, 389 note
• Anne of Gonzaga (Princess Palatine), marriage and career of, 66-8;
  • schemes of, 126, 129, 166, 175, 176
• Antony Ulric, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, ambition and career of, 146-7;
  • conversion to Roman Catholicism, 176;
  • 554marriage scheme for his son, 185;
  • romance by, regarding Sophia Dorothea, 192 and note, 239 and note, 283 note;
  • opposition regarding Hanoverian Electorate, 235-8;
  • Mesopotamian Shepherdess by, 333 note; mentioned, 201, 203
• Arcy, Marquis de, 193
• Arundel, Lord, 71 note
• Assing, Rosemunde von, 343 note
• Attainder and Abjuration Acts (1702), 364-5
• Augustus, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, 145
• Augustus II, King of Poland, 404 and note 173
• Augustus the Strong. See Frederick Augustus, Elector of Saxony
• Augustus Frederick, Prince of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, 185, 189
• Austria, Bavarian treaty with (1628), 48
• Aveiro, Duke of, 106

• Bahr, von, 282
• Balati, Abbé, 164 note, 194
• Bannier, Colonel, 278
• Barclay, Robert, 122
• Bard. See Bellmont
• Bayle, 300
• Behmen, Jacob, 343
• Bellmont (Bellamont), Lady (Francesca Bard), 103, 375 note
• Benedicta Henrietta (niece of Sophia), 69, 128, 166, 167
• Berkeley, Earl of, 440
• Berner, E., cited, 188 note
• Bernhard of Weimar, Duke, 50, 60, 71
• Bernstorff, Baron Andreas Gottlieb von, relations of, with de Robethon, 378;
  • accompanies George Lewis to
• England, 442;
  • estimate of, 376-7;
  • otherwise mentioned, 185, 276, 351-2, 411
• Berwick, Duke of, 321, 400, 409, 413;
  • communication from, to Prince James quoted, 420
• Bill of Rights (1689), 5, 7, 216-20
• Blanche, Electress Palatine, 17
• Blanche, Queen, 128
• Bohemia:
  • Frederick V elected king of, 31;
    • deposed, 36-7
  • Heirship to, question as to, 21 and note 8, 29-31
• Böhme, Jacob, 34 note
• Bolingbroke, —, attitude of, towards Bothmer, 405 and note 175;
  • policy of, 410;
  • rivalry with Oxford, 418, 428, 434;
  • misses his opportunity, 437-8;
  • cited, 442;
  • otherwise mentioned, 408, 413, 415, 416, 422, 426, 429
• Boncour, de, 214
• Borkowski cited, 313 note
• Bossuet, 348
• Bothmer, Hans Caspar von, Hanoverian envoy extraordinary in London, 399, 400-2;
  • mission to England on Sophia’s death, 433-4;
  • activities on Queen Anne’s death, 439 and note;
  • estimate of, 378-9;
  • otherwise mentioned, 313, 351, 362 note, 397, 404, 412, 419, 427, 438
• Boufleurs, Marshal, 228
• Bouillon, Duke of, 67
• Boyer, 429
• Brandenburg:
  • Hanover, alliance with, 235-6, 289
  • Prussian kingdom, absorption into, 289
• Brauns, Baron, 381
• Brinon, Mme. de, 175, 177 note, 336;
  • efforts of, to convert Sophia to Roman Catholicism, 348-9
• 555Brisson, Mme. de, 135
• Bromley, Secretary, 415
• Brunswick, origin of Duchy of, 144
• Buckingham, Duke of (1629), 46
• Buckingham, — (1705), 387
• Bülow, Minister von, 276
• Bunbury, Selina, cited, 12 note
• Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, action of, on Bill of Rights, 218;
  • Sophia’s correspondence with, 342;
  • her estimate of book by, 334;
  • cited, 214-15, 323-4, 386-7;
  • quoted, 312
• Bussche, Frau von dem. See Weyhe, Mme. von
• Bussche, Major-General von dem, 248

• Calixtus (theologian), 153
• Camerarius, Ludwig, 45, 94
• Carleton, Sir D. (Viscount Dorchester), 44
• Carlisle, Earl of, 369
• Caroline Matilda (daughter of George III), 280 note 112
• Caroline of Ansbach. See Wilhelmina Caroline
• Carray (? Carr), Lady, 86
• Cartignano, Count of, 15-16
• Catharine d’Orléans, 129
• Celle, Duchess of. See Eleonora
• Celle, Duke of. See George William
• Chapman, Rev. Alexander, 25 note
• Charbonnier, 328
• Charles, Duke of Lorraine, 195
• Charles, Elector Palatine (nephew of Sophia), 8, 99, 101 and note, 230
• Charles, Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, 214
• Charles I, King of England, foreign policy of, 46-7;
  • internal policy, 372 note;
  • acknowledges Charles Lewis as Elector Palatine, 59;
  • efforts for Palatine House, 71 note;
  • execution of, 83
• Charles II, King of England, rumour of projected marriage of, with Sophía, 82-5;
  • relations with Sophía at the Hague, 84-5;
  • with his aunt Elizabeth, 137-8 and note 59;
  • with Sophia during his reign, 209;
  • death of, 210;
  • otherwise mentioned, 8, 11, 114, 137 note 59, 167, 183 note
• Charles II, King of Spain, 178, 317
• Charles III, King of Spain, 400
• Charles VI, Emperor, 348
• Charles X Gustavus, King of Sweden, 108
• Charles Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy, 15
• Charles Lewis, Elector Palatine (brother of Sophia), birth of, 26;
  • Sophia’s relations with, 57;
  • visit to England (1635), 59;
  • armed attempt on the Palatinate, 59-60;
  • imprisoned by Richelieu, 60;
  • renews attempt for the Palatinate, 60-1;
  • suggestion of assuming British Crown, 61-2 notes;
  • residence in England, 62;
  • relations with his brother Philip, 80;
  • position under Peace of Westphalia, 83;
  • efforts for his subjects, 88-9 and note;
  • relations with his mother, 93-4, 138, 140-1;
  • quarrel with Rupert, 94-6 and note;
  • marriage (1650), 97;
  • domestic difficulties, 96-102;
  • relations with Ferdinand III, 107;
  • Sophia’s wedding (1658), 114;
  • marriage of his daughter (1671), 89, 175;
  • death of, 8, 196;
  • characteristics of, 56-9;
  • love of his country, learning and liberal-mindedness of, 90-2;
  • 556cited, 333;
  • otherwise mentioned, 52 note, 68, 122, 133, 137 note 59, 138, 163
• Charles Lewis, Raugrave (nephew of Sophia), 249
• Charles Maurice (nephew of Sophia), 102
• Charles Philip, Prince (son of Sophia), 171, 202, 222, 224, 228
• Charlotte Elizabeth, Electress Palatine (sister-in-law of Sophia), conjugal difficulties and troubles of, 96-102, 116;
  • characteristics of, 98, 104;
  • attitude towards Sophia, 108
• Charlotte Felicitas, Duchess of Modena (grandniece of Sophia), 167
• Charlotte Sophia, Princess of Courland, 103 and note
• Chéruel, M., cited, 67
• Chevreau, Urban, 176 and note;
  • cited, 336
• Christian, Count of Anhalt, 19, 29-30
• Christian, Duke of Brunswick, 42 and note 22
• Christian, Prince (son of Sophia), birth of, 171;
  • at French Court (1687-9), 206;
  • attitude towards George Lewis’ accession, 288;
  • death of, 202-3, 339 note 139
• Christian of Halberstadt, 45-7, 145
• Christian IV, King of Denmark, 47
• Christian V, King of Denmark, 234, 236
• Christian Lewis, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, 150-1, 162, 170
• Christina, Queen of Sweden, 50 note, 59, 73, 77 note, 162, 335
• Clarendon, Earl of (Lord Cornbury), 434 and note, 440
• Clarendon, Lord Chancellor, 104;
  • quoted, 65
• Clement XI, Pope, 322-3, 363, 388 note
• Clifford, H., cited, 41 note
• Cocceius, Prof. Johannes, 118
• Collins, Anthony, 342
• Colt, Lady, Sophia’s correspondence with, 221 note 92, 428 note
• Colt, Sir William Dutton, 221 and notes, 222;
  • despatches of, cited, 257
• Combe Abbey, 12 and note–14
• Conway, Lord, 44
• Conway, Sir Edward, 35-6
• Cowper, Lord, 423
• Craggs, Secretary, 439
• Craven, Earl of, armed attack by, on the Palatinate, 59;
  • imprisonment and ransom, 60, 63;
  • devotion to Elizabeth of Bohemia, 77-8, 137;
  • correspondence with Sophia, 211;
  • mission to Hanover after passing of Bill of Rights, 219;
  • otherwise mentioned, 77 note 39, 81 note, 86, 117 note, 140, 365
• Cresset, James, envoy at Lüneburg Courts, 222-3;
  • marriage of, 222 note;
  • cited, 274, 280 note 113, 286, 288 note;
  • otherwise mentioned, 319, 367, 370-1, 375

• Danckelmann, Eberhard von, 203, 296-7
• Dartmouth, Lord, 212
• Dawes, Archbishop, 415
• Degenfeld, Louisa von, 58, 98-102
• Della Rota, 45
• Denmark:
  • Danish War (1625-6), 47
  • Jealousy of, towards Sweden, 45
  • Lauenburg Succession question, 224-5, 237, 271
• 557Descartes, correspondence of, with Elizabeth (sister of Sophia), 72-3 and note, 83-4;
  • death of, 105
• Devonshire, Duke of, 404
• Digby, John, 14, 41
• Doebner, Dr. R., cited, 183
• Dohna, Achatius von, 31
• Dohna, Alexander von, 313 note
• Doncaster, Lord (Earl of Carlisle), 44
• Donne, 44
• Dormer, Jane, 41 note
• Dorothea, Electress of Brandenburg, 151
• Dorset, Earl of, 439-40
• Dover, Lord, cited, 188 note
• Dudley (son of Prince Rupert), 103
• Dutton, Sir W. D., cited, 253-4

• Edward (brother of Sophia), conversion of, to Roman Catholicism, 9, 67;
  • at Heidelberg, 69 note, 105;
  • career of, 66-9 and note;
  • Charles Lewis’ allowance to, 94;
  • relations with Louisa Hollandina, 126-7;
  • Elizabeth’s bequest to, 141 note 63
• Eleonora d’Olbreuze (Mme. de Harburg, Countess of Wilhelmsburg), Duchess of Celle, connexion of, with George William, Duke of Celle, 168-71, 180-1, 184-6, 193;
  • styled Mme. de Harburg, 170;
  • jealousy against, 182 note 76;
  • created Countess of Wilhelmsburg, 184;
  • honoured by Empress Eleonora, 185;
  • marriage with Duke of Celle, 186;
  • subsequent honours, 187;
  • attitude towards her daughter, 240, 282;
  • Sophia’s attitude towards, 168, 170, 187, 192, 240, 310, 337;
  • urges William III to decided course anent Hanoverian Succession, 308-9;
  • relations with Sophia on the subject, 310;
  • death of, 282;
  • otherwise mentioned, 221, 288, 377
• Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia (mother of Sophia):
  • Career, chronological sequence of:
    • Childhood at Combe Abbey, 12;
    • Roman Catholic plot regarding, 13;
    • youth, 22;
    • marriage, 12, 14, 23;
    • life at Heidelberg, 24-9;
    • birth of two sons and eldest daughter, 26;
    • attitude towards Bohemian Kingship question, 32-3;
    • at Prague, 34-7;
    • birth of third son, Rupert, 35;
    • flight from Prague, 37;
    • in Silesia, 37;
    • in Brandenburg, 38-9;
    • birth of fifth child, Maurice, 39;
    • at Berlin, 39;
    • at Wolfenbüttel, 40;
    • in the Netherlands, 40;
    • exile of, 2, 5, 6, 44;
    • loss of infant son Lewis (1624), 53;
    • of eldest son (1629), 25, 53;
    • of infant daughter Charlotte (1630), 53;
    • attitude towards Swedish Royal Family, 50 note;
    • towards Charles I of England (1644), 62 note 30;
    • on departure of Louisa Hollandina (1658), 126-7;
    • visit to England (1661), 137-9;
    • death, 140, 142
  • Characteristics of:
    • Beauty, 43
    • Frivolity, 57
    • High spirit, 43
    • Self-consciousness, 29
    • Soldier-sympathy, power of attracting, 43
    • Vigour of mind and body, 52
  • Children, her own, attitude towards, 34, 54, 65 note 33, 68 note, 78, 80-1;
    • their attitude towards her, 56-7, 141 note;
    • 558attitude towards children in general, 136
  • Debts of, 29, 56, 76, 93-4, 138
  • Family of, fate of, 8-9
  • Letters of, quoted, 50 note, 52 note
  • Portrait of, in C.C.C., Cambs., 25 note
  • Pursuits and interests of, 24, 25, 33, 52, 54, 57
  • Titles of: Queen of Bohemia, 52 and note;
    • Queen of Hearts, 41 note;
    • the King’s only sister, 52 note
  • Will of, 131, 141 note 63
  • otherwise mentioned, 75, 86, 336 note
• Elizabeth, Princess (sister of Sophia), birth of, 26;
  • childhood, 34, 39;
  • career, 9, 70-1;
  • relations with her mother, 57, 80-1;
  • affected by King Charles’ execution, 83;
  • visits to Heidelberg, 92, 105;
  • with Electress Charlotte, 116-17;
  • at Cassel, 117;
  • Abbess of Herford, 118-25;
  • death of, 125, 196;
  • inscription on tomb of, 125 note;
  • characteristics of, 70-3;
  • match-making propensities of, 70, 103;
  • mentioned, 141 note 63
• Elizabeth Charlotte (aunt of Sophia), 39
• Elizabeth Charlotte, Duchess of Orleans (niece of Sophia), birth of, 99;
  • with her aunt (1656-63), 99, 172;
  • nature of upbringing of, 244;
  • visit to her grandmother, 136, 157;
  • trip to Holland with her aunt, 157;
  • recalled to Heidelberg (1663), 173-4;
  • conversion of, to Roman Catholicism, 8, 68, 89, 174-7;
  • marriage, 89, 174-7;
  • subsequent career of, 178-9;
  • on Maximilian William, 204 note 88;
  • on Ernest Augustus, 205, 206 note;
  • good offices for Christian and Ernest Augustus, 205-6;
  • attitude towards Sophia Dorothea, 248, 249;
  • Königsmarck affair, 279;
  • on George Augustus’ succession prospects, 206 and note, 441 note 192;
  • characteristics of, 59;
  • lifelong attitude towards Sophia, 151 note, 173, 377;
  • Stewart sympathies of, 393;
  • cited, 33, 108, 132-5, 159 note, 333, 393;
  • quoted, 151 note, 176, 332 note 134, 336;
  • Sophia’s correspondence with, 10, 414;
  • nature and value of her own correspondence, 179-80;
  • correspondence cited and quoted, 177, 188 note, 191, 192, 234, 244 note;
  • otherwise mentioned, 135, 213, 240 note, 243, 283, 337, 339-40, 380
• Elizabeth Louisa, Countess Palatine, Abbess of Herford, 117
• Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg (husband of Sophia):
  • Career, chronological sequence of:
    • First visit to Heidelberg, 107;
    • early acquaintance with Sophia, 107;
    • second visit to Heidelberg, 110;
    • George William’s arrangement in favour of, 112-13, 154-5, 181;
    • marriage with Sophia, 114;
    • intimacy with George William, 156;
    • jealousy of him, 157-8;
    • Bishop of Osnabrück, 158-9;
    • assists the United Provinces, 167;
    • operations against Sweden, 168;
    • conjugal infidelities of, 190-1 and note;
    • 559victory at Conz, 183;
    • attitude towards Sophia Dorothea, 247, 253-4;
    • at the defence of Frankfort (1689), 228;
    • proposal of, regarding conversion to Church of Rome, 232, 348;
    • Swedish treaty (1691), 263;
    • attainment of Electorate (1692), 222-3, 228-34;
    • investiture, 234-5;
    • last journey to Italy (1684), 247-8;
    • attitude towards the British Revolution, 212, 215;
    • adherence to Grand Alliance (1692), 267;
    • ill-health (1694), 245-6;
    • action in Königsmarck affair, 274-5;
    • Lauenburg claims (1694), 237;
    • last illness, 224, 286-7;
    • death, 212-13, 224, 238, 276, 287, 296
  • Dynastic policy of, 184, 193-4
  • Energy of, 163
  • Extravagance of, 198, 330
  • Estimate of, 156
  • Political attitude towards his wife, 241, 340
  • mentioned, 266
• Ernest Augustus, Prince (son of Sophia), birth of, 171, 205;
  • devotion to his eldest brother, 205, 271;
  • at French Court (1687-9), 206;
  • remains in Hanover (1714), 441;
  • succeeds to Bishopric of Osnabrück, 441 and note 193;
  • death of, 207;
  • estimate of, 206
• Ernest Lewis, Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, 240 note
• Estrées, Angélique d’, 128
• Eugene, Prince, 425
• Evelyn quoted, 56;
  • cited, 261 note

• Falaiseau, 351
• Feder cited, 114
• Ferdinand, Archduke of Styria, 30-31
• Ferdinand II, Emperor, 107 note, 161
• Ferdinand III, Emperor, 60, 107
• Ferdinand IV, King of the Romans, 107-8
• Ferrar, Nicolas, 24
• Fischer, Prof. Kuno, cited, 331;
  • quoted, 340
• Foley, Paul, 218
• Fraiser, Sir Peter, 380
• France:
  • Grand Alliance against. See Grand Alliance
  • Hanoverian Succession recognised by, 405, 408
  • Huguenot persecutions in, 177 note
  • Palatinate’s troubles from (Orleans War), 90, 178
  • Partition Treaty (First) with England (1698), 307
  • Partition Treaty (Second) with England, 310, 317-18
  • Peace with, proposal of (1711), 400-1, 403, 407;
    • accomplished, 409
  • Savoy’s adhesion to (1696), 302
• Frederick, Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, 154
• Frederick, Prince of Wales (great-grandson of Sophia), 359-60
• Frederick III, Elector of Brandenburg. See Frederick I, King of Prussia
• Frederick I, Elector Palatine, 181 note
• Frederick II, Elector Palatine, 16 note, 21 note 9
• Frederick III, Elector Palatine, 16 note, 18, 40
• Frederick IV, Elector Palatine, 17, 19
• Frederick V, Elector Palatine and King of Bohemia (father of Sophia), visit of, to England (1612), 21 and note 8, 22;
  • 560marriage, 12;
  • difficulties as to court precedence, 27-8;
  • approves league with Savoy, 26;
  • elected King of Bohemia, 31;
  • deposed, 36-7;
  • under ban of the Empire, 38, 41;
  • secret visit to Palatinate (1627), 48;
  • meets Gustavus Adolphus (1632), 49;
  • death of, 50;
  • characteristics of, 20, 37;
  • devotion to his wife, 52-3;
  • estimate of, by Wotton, 27
• Frederick I, King of Prussia (Frederick III, Elector of Brandenburg), marriage of, to Sophia Charlotte, 203, 207, 292;
  • succeeds his father as Elector, 294;
  • concerts measures against Louis XIV, 227;
  • efforts regarding Hanoverian Electorate, 234-5, 238;
  • leagues of alliance with Ernest Augustus, 235-6;
  • at Cleves (1696), 303;
  • intrigue with Countess von Wartenberg, 299, 357;
  • coronation (1701), 289, 300;
  • relations with George Lewis, 358 note;
  • otherwise mentioned, 302, 330 note 133, 341, 343
• Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, 258
• Frederick Augustus (Augustus the Strong), Elector of Saxony, King of Poland, 237, 261, 272, 278, 289
• Frederick Augustus, Prince (son of Sophia), birth of, 157;
  • jealousy of his elder brother, 201;
  • death of, 202, 221-2, 224, 228;
  • estimate of, 171, 172
• Frederick Henry, Prince (brother of Sophia), birth of, 26;
  • marriages projected for, 45, 46;
  • death of, 25, 26, 53
• Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange, 21 note 8, 40, 43, 55
• Frederick Ulric, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, 145
• Frederick William (the Great), Elector of Brandenburg, sentiments of, towards Sophia’s sister Elizabeth, 71, 72, 117;
  • efforts regarding Wildfangsstreit, 89 note;
  • marriage with Dowager Duchess Dorothea, 151;
  • attitude towards Hanoverian Court, 203;
  • favours William of Orange, 214;
  • on creation of ninth Electorate, 229-30;
  • opposes Duke John Frederick, 163
• Frederick William I, King of Prussia (grandson of Sophia), birth of, 294;
  • childhood, 299;
  • William III’s attitude towards (1700), 312-14, 317;
  • education, 313 note;
  • marriage with granddaughter of Sophia, 249, 284, 346 note 145;
  • relations with George Lewis, 435
• Fuchs, Paul von, 199, 227;
  • cited, 338

• Gabor, Bethlen, 47
• Gargan (secretary to Sophia) cited, 310
• Garnett, Dr. Richard, cited, 251 note
• Gaultier, Abbé, cited, 415, 426
• Geerds, Dr. Robert, cited, 259 note
• Gentz, 353
• George I, King of England. See George Lewis
• George II, King of England. See George Augustus
• George III, King of England, correspondence with Copenhagen destroyed by order of, 280 note 112;
  • letters of Sophia destroyed by order of, 393;
  • kindliness of, to Stewart family, 394 note
• George IV, King of England, 394 note
• George, Duke of Lüneburg, 148
• 561George, Prince of Denmark, 189, 318, 337;
  • death of, 395
• George Augustus, King George II of England (grandson of Sophia), birth of, 195, 247;
  • his father’s attitude towards, 284, 441;
  • at Göhrde, 307;
  • Queen Anne’s opposition to his visiting England, 370;
  • marriage of, 359;
  • relations with his wife, 288, 359;
  • receives the Garter, 388, 404 note 172;
  • created Duke of Cambridge, 388;
  • precedence for, 404;
  • suggestion of sending, over to England (1713), 418, 419, 422-3;
  • delay in transmission of Parliamentary writ for, 423-7;
  • Queen Anne’s letter to, 429, 431;
  • rumoured suggestion of passing over, in the English Succession, 206 and note, 441 note 192;
  • characteristics of, 362;
  • attitude towards his mother, 284 and note;
  • domestic language of, as British sovereign, 55;
  • otherwise mentioned, 280, 299, 312
• George Frederick of Waldeck, 163
• George Lewis, King George I of England (son of Sophia):
  • Career, chronological sequence of:
    • Birth, 157;
    • victory at Conz (1675), 183;
    • visit to England (1680-1), 189, 210;
    • proposed match with Sophia Dorothea, 190 note 79, 191-4;
    • the marriage, 194-5, 231, 239-41;
    • military exploits, 195;
    • at the defence of Frankfort, 228;
    • estrangement from his wife, 246, 249, 252-4;
    • campaigning against Turks, 248;
    • recreating at Florence and Naples, 248;
    • infidelity to his wife, 250;
    • relations with Melusina von der Schulenburg (Duchess of Kendal), 251 and note;
    • the Königsmarck affair, 282-4;
    • divorce, 276;
    • succeeds his father as Elector, 289;
    • repulses Antony Ulric’s attack on Hanover, 238;
    • meets William III at Göhrde (1698), 307;
    • receives the Garter, 325;
    • strong position of (1705), 376;
    • relations with Frederick I of Prussia, 358 note;
    • expresses his views on residence in England, 391;
    • commands army of the Lower Rhine (1707), 395;
    • envoy of, admitted to Electoral College (1708), 238, 395;
    • on dismissal of Sunderland, 396-7;
    • refuses to oust Marlborough in supreme command, 398-9;
    • against proposed peace with France, 401, 403, 407;
    • instructions to von Schütz the younger, 413;
    • reply to Queen Anne’s letter (May, 1714), 422-3, 427;
    • affair of the delayed writ, 426-7;
    • death of his mother, 433-4;
    • has fresh instrument of Regency prepared, 435;
    • in friendly relations with German princes, 435;
    • accession of, as King George I of England, 439;
    • proclamation as king, 10;
    • leaves Hanover, 440;
    • sails for England, 442;
    • coronation, 443;
    • death, 206-7
  • Characteristics of:
    • Courage and military capacity, 242
    • Cynicism, 283 note
    • 562Firmness and impassivity, 355, 443
    • Loyalty, 242
    • Reserve, 171, 242
    • Self-restraint, 443
    • Sincerity, 242, 444
    • Stolidity, 195, 242
  • Court of, as Elector, tone of, 339 note 138
  • Domestic language of, as British sovereign, 55
  • Herrenhausen gardens arranged to suit taste of, 328
  • Relations with:
    • Anne, Queen, 368, 369
    • Ernest Augustus (his youngest brother), 205, 271
    • Marlborough, Duke of, 375-6, 384, 398
    • Sophia (his mother), 171, 244 and note, 288, 340, 355
    • Sophia Charlotte (his sister), 297
  • Succession question, attitude towards, 309, 319, 323;
    • (1705), 379-80;
    • (1713-14), 412-13, 418-19, 423
  • otherwise mentioned, 110, 194 note, 352, 366 note 157, 389 note, 393, 402, 441 note 192
• George William, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg (later of Celle), visit of, to Heidelberg (1656), 109-10;
  • suitor for Sophia, 110;
  • breaks off his engagement, 111;
  • renunciation in favour of his younger brother, 112-13, 154-5, 181, 231;
  • his brother’s jealousy, 157-8;
  • difficulties made by John Frederick as to succession, 162-3;
  • assists the United Provinces, 167;
  • operations against Sweden, 168;
  • connexion with Eleonora d’Olbreuze, 168-71, 180-1, 185-6;
  • marriage with her, 186;
  • court of, 182 note 75;
  • favours William of Orange, 214;
  • the Königsmarck affair, 275-6, 280 and note 113, 281;
  • conference with William III at Göhrde, 307;
  • meeting with William III at the Loo (1700), 311, 312;
  • later interview with him (1701), 362;
  • death of, 376;
  • estimate of, 151-3;
  • otherwise mentioned, 150, 201, 303, 305, 309, 319, 366 note 157
• George William, Elector of Brandenburg, 38, 71
• Giusti, Tommaso, 329
• Gloucester, Duke of (son of Princess Anne), birth of, 219;
  • delicacy of, 308-9;
  • death of, 311
• Godolphin, Earl of, 217, 369, 382, 399, 402
• Goedeke, 439-40
• Göhrde, the, 307 and note
• Gondomar, Count, 24
• Gourville, de, 166, 182, 292;
  • cited, 337, 345
• Grana, Dossa, 329
• Grand Alliance:
  • Conclusion of, 228
  • Hanoverian adhesion to, 222, 267
  • Savoy’s adhesion to (1695), 302;
    • abandonment of (1696), 225, 302
  • Saxony’s adhesion to, solicited, 221 and note 93
• Green, Mrs. Everett, work of, cited, 257, 265 note
• Grote, Count Otto von, 233-6
• Grote, Baron Thomas von, mission of, to London (1712), 405-6, 408;
  • death of, 411;
  • cited, 335;
  • mentioned, 352
• Guelfs, German branch of, 143-5;
  • Leibniz’ History of, 243, 354
• 563Gustavus (brother of Sophia), 53-4
• Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, landing of, in Pomerania, 11, 49;
  • death of, 50;
  • mentioned, 45, 148
• Gustavus II Adolphus, King of Sweden, 15
• Gwynne, Sir Roland, 384, 390

• Halberstadt, 42 and note 21
• Halifax, Lord (Charles Montagu), 388 and note–9, 391, 404404 note 172
• Hamilton, Duke of, 84
• Hammerstein, George Christopher von, 110, 115
• Handel, 412 note
• Hanmer, Sir Thomas, 386
• Hanover, House of:
  • Alliance of, with Brandenburg and Saxony, 232-3
  • Electorate conferred on, 222-3, 228, 234;
    • investiture, 234-5;
    • introduction of envoy to Electoral College, 236-9, 395
  • Rise of, 7, 10
  • Strong position of (1705), 376
  • Succession of, to British Crown:
    • Significance of, to Britons, 3-4
    • Settlement of. See Act of Settlement
• Hanover, Leine Palace at, 247 note, 281
• Harburg, Mme. de. See Eleonora, Duchess of Celle
• Harcourt, Lord, 423-5
• Harding, Rev. Dick, 77
• Hardwicke, Lord, 315
• Harington, Lord and Lady, 12-13, 22, 24
• Harley, Robert. See Oxford
• Harley, Thomas, missions of, to Hanover, 404, 407, 410, 421-2, 426, 427
• Harling, Frau von, 173, 280, 291, 299
• Harrington, James, 81 note
• Hartlip, S., quoted, 117 note
• Haversham, Lord, 383
• Hedwig, Princess of Denmark, 107 note
• Hedwig Sophia, Landgravine of Hesse-Cassel, 72, 117
• Hedwig Sophia, Landgravine of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, 103
• Hedwig Sophia, Princess, 301
• Heidelberg Castle, 17-18
• Heidelberg Catechism, 25
• Heidelberg University, 18
• Heiland, Hiskias Eleazar, 101
• Helmont, Francis Mercurius von, 332 and note 134
• Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans (daughter of Charles I), 8, 175, 225
• Henrietta Maria, Princess (sister of Sophia), characteristics and career of, 74-5;
  • marriage of, 52 note, 106;
  • death of, 9, 116
• Henrietta Maria, Queen, 81, 130
• Henry, Count of Nassau. See Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange
• Henry, Duke of Bouillon, 20
• Henry, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, 145
• Henry, Prince (son of Charles I), 7-8
• Henry, Prince of Wales (son of James I), 7, 22
• Henry of Dannenberg, 181 note
• Henry the Lion, 143
• Henry Casimir of Nassau-Dietz, 189
• Henry Frederick, Prince (brother of Sophia), 26
• Henry Julius, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, 145
• Herbert, Colonel, quoted, 218
• 564Herbert of Cherbury, Lord, 44
• Hereford, Lord, 395
• Herford, 118-19
• Herrenhausen, 327-9
• Hervey, Lord, cited, 284 note
• Hoffmann, memoranda of, cited, 424-5
• Holstenius, 153-4
• Hompesch, General, 304
• Hoorn, Anna Maria van, 122
• Howard, Mrs. Charles, 395
• Howe, Brigadier-General Emmanuel Scroope, 141 note 63, 392 and note 168
• Hughes, Margaret, 103, 392 note 168
• Hutton, Dr., 397