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THE
ELECTRESS SOPHIA
AND THE
HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION
THE
ELECTRESS SOPHIA
AND THE
HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION
BY
ADOLPHUS WILLIAM WARD
LITT.D., HON. LL.D., F.B.A., MASTER OF PETERHOUSE
SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
1909
All rights reserved
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
----------
First published with numerous illustrations by Messrs. Goupil & Co. in October 1903
_Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged, cr. 8vo.
published by Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co.
in October 1909_
PREFACE
TO
SECOND EDITION
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.
In 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 share 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; but 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 Mistress 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 expert 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 of 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. von Malortie, and illustrated by him with much additional matter, have been of occasional use.
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Footnote 1:
The reader may like to be referred to certain contributions to the biography of the Queen of Bohemia, besides Häusser and Söltl’s well-known Elizabeth Stuart; viz. J. O. Opel, Elizabeth Stuart von der Pfalz (Histor. Zeitschrift, Vol. xxiii.); K. Hauck, Elizabeth, Königin von Böhmen, Kurfürstin von der Pfalz, in ihren letzten Lebensjahren (Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte der Pfalz I); A. Wendland, Hannoverische Erinnerungen an die Winterkönigin (, Jahrg. 1903). The last named contains some notes on portraits.
-----
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 masterly 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 also 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 information 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 Cartulary 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 the 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 the 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 Combe 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 (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.
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Footnote 2:
I may perhaps take this opportunity of observing that the many portraits of the Queen of Bohemia which I have seen at Combe Abbey, at Herrenhausen, in the National Portrait Gallery, in Corpus Christi College Lodge, Cambridge, and elsewhere, do not all agree in details of feature, or, of course, of costume, though in most of them the Queen wears one of those mighty farthingales which her father (poor man!) in vain attempted to moderate. In most of her portraits her eyes are dark, in one at least they are slate-grey. In a contemporary account of her wedding special mention is made of the long flow of her amber-coloured hair, which descended to her waist; and I notice that Miss Wendland speaks of her children as ‘fair’ (blond) ‘like their beautiful mother.’ But of her appearance in later life we have a different account from the trustworthy hand of the Duchess of Orleans, who says that she remembered her grandmother as if she had been in her presence on the day of writing, and who notes her black hair, long face, and powerful nose. Elizabeth Charlotte adds that there was a great likeness between the Queen and her eldest son, of whom, as of her second, she was in his early days fond of speaking to the King, his father, as her ‘petit black babie.’ Altogether there can be no doubt that she was one of the ‘dark ladies’ to whom Shakespeare and others have attributed so peculiar a fascination, and for whom Goethe had so marked a preference. The other feature noted by the Duchess of Orleans was inherited by all of Elizabeth’s children whose portraits are accessible—notably by Prince Rupert and the Princesses Elizabeth and Sophia and her family, including numerous Honthorsts and some works ascribed, I suppose traditionally, to Louisa Hollandina’s active brush. More than a quarter of a century has passed since I had the privilege of paying a visit to Combe Abbey; but the memory of it has never left me.
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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 one 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.
A. W. WARD.
PETERHOUSE LODGE, CAMBRIDGE.
April, 1909.
CONTENTS
CHAP PAGE
PREFACE v
INTRODUCTORY 1
I. DESCENT AND PARENTAGE; CHILDHOOD AND GIRLHOOD 11
II. EARLY WOMANHOOD AND MARRIAGE 87
III. THE DUCHESS SOPHIA 143
IV. THE ELECTORAL HOUSE OF HANOVER 209
V. THE HEIRESS OF GREAT BRITAIN 327
APPENDICES
A. GENEALOGICAL TABLES 445
B. CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN PRINCESS SOPHIA DOROTHEA AND COUNT 447 KÖNIGSMARCK. FROM THE BERLIN SECRET ARCHIVES OF STATE. WITH INTRODUCTORY NOTE AND TRANSLATION
C. NOTE ON THE RELIGIOUS SITUATION IN SCOTLAND, AS IT 550 AFFECTED THE HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION. BY R. S. RAIT
INDEX 553
Corrigenda.
Page 21, line 7 from bottom: for Henry Frederick read Frederick Henry.
” 71 ” 15: for his read her.
” 97 ” 10: for Tarento read Taranto.
” 141, note, line 12: for Scroope Emmanuel read Emmanuel Scroope.
” 151, line 15: for Charles read Christian.
” 164, note, line 4 from bottom: for Court read Coat.
” 195, line 23: for 1685 read 1687.
” 224 ” 7 et al: for Cressett read Cresset.
” 224 ” 6 from bottom: for 1696 read 1694.
” 292 ” 4 from bottom: for his read this.
” 333 ” 11: dele better.
” 371 ” 8 from bottom: for 1694 read 1704.
” 371, note, line 2 from bottom: for 1902 read 1702.
” 392 ” ” 4 from bottom: after Howes read (or Hughes).
” 393, line 5: after clause read as.
THE
ELECTRESS SOPHIA
AND THE
HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION
INTRODUCTORY
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 of 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 Protestantism, 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 so 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 Stewart 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 possible 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 Palatine 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 of 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 and 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 remained 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 up 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, 1714, her eldest son, the Elector George Lewis of Hanover, was proclaimed King George I of Great Britain and Ireland.
I
DESCENT AND PARENTAGE; CHILDHOOD AND GIRLHOOD
(LEYDEN, THE HAGUE, AND RHEENEN, 1630-1650)
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 flight 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] King 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 a 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.
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Footnote 3:
Lord and Lady Harington, as will be seen, accompanied Elizabeth after her marriage to Heidelberg. From them Combe Abbey descended to their daughter Lucia, Countess of Bedford, Drayton’s ‘sweet nymph of Ankor’ (on whose banks the Abbey is situated) and earlier ‘Idea,’ and the recipient of other poetic tributes from Ben Jonson and Donne. (See Courthope’s History of English Poetry, Vol. iii. pp. 29 sqq.) It was her prodigal tastes which made it necessary to sell Combe Abbey, which was finally purchased by the Earl of Craven. (See the notes to Combe Abbey, a historical tale of the reign of James I, by Selina Bunbury (Dublin, 1843)—the first work of the authoress, written in an ardently Protestant spirit. In this novel are cited the stanzas, ‘This is a joye, This is true pleasure,’ said to have been composed by the Princess Elizabeth in her childhood.)
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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 Stewart 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 home 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 Rupert 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 had 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 and 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 and 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.
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Footnote 4:
In the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries respectively, two Palatine Electors, Frederick II and Frederick III, aspired to the German Kingship.
Footnote 5:
See Häusser, Geschichte der Rhein-Pfalz, Vol. ii. pp. 243-4.
Footnote 6:
A memoir of her was published in 1645 by the scholar and diplomatist Ezechiel Spanheim, of whom Sophia frequently makes respectful mention in her correspondence with her brother Charles Lewis.
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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 attainment 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.
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Footnote 7:
See Gindely, Geschichte des dreissigjähr. Krieges, Vol. i. p. 186, and note. It may perhaps be added, by way of a curiosum, that at this time there survived in England the lineal descendant of a declared heir to the Bohemian Crown in the person of Humphrey Tyndall, Dean of Ely, who died in 1614 and whose brass still remains in Ely Cathedral. See Bentham’s History and Antiquities of the Conventual and Cathedral Church of Ely.
Footnote 8:
On his visit to England in 1612 Frederick was accompanied by Count Henry of Nassau (who in 1625 became Henry Frederick Prince of Orange). His companion duly fell in love with a daughter of the Duke of Northumberland. (Letters of George Lord Carew.)
Footnote 9:
A Count Palatine Frederick (Frederick II of the old line) had visited England early in the sixteenth century; but he had come in the service of the House of Habsburg.