Chapter C: Note on the Religious Situation in Scotland, as It 550 (1)

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.

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The 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 and 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 to 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.’

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Footnote 10:

The theatrical company (formerly the Lord Admiral’s) which had been
under the patronage of the Prince of Wales, sought and, on January
4th, obtained that of the Palsgrave, the Fortune continuing to be
their playhouse. After 1625, they appear to have ceased to be under
the Elector’s ‘patronage.’ (_Henslowe’s Diary_, ed. Greg, Part ii. pp.
98-9.)

Footnote 11:

Part of a stanza in a song in _The Lords’ Masque_, accompanying a
dance of stars, may be quoted, if only to suggest the contemporary
pronunciation of the King’s name:

‘So bravely crown it [the night] with your beams,
That it may live in fame
As long as Rhenus or the Thames
Are known by either name.’

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

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Footnote 12:

Alexander Chapman, Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, D.D.
1610, and Archdeacon of Stow and Prebendary of Lincoln in the same
year. In 1618 he was appointed Prebendary of Canterbury, where, on his
death in 1629, ‘an elegant Monument of blue and white Marble, with a
demy Effigie of him thereon, was erected to his memory by his
Brother.’ See R. Masters’ _History of C.C.C._, pp. 264-5. He was
possibly the donor of the speaking likeness of Elizabeth which hangs
in the Master’s Lodge at Corpus.

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

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Footnote 13:

‘My Lady,’ he argued, ‘was not to be considered only as the daughter
of a King, like the daughters of France, but did carry in her person
the possibility of succession to three Crowns.’

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

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

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Footnote 14:

See M. Ritter, _Deutsche Geschichte in der Zeit d. dreissigjähr.
Krieges_, Vol. ii. p. 201.

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

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Footnote 15:

‘Then County Palatine, and now a King.’ (_Tamburlaine_, Part II, Act
i, Sc. i. l. 103.)

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Frederick’s mother, Louisa Juliana, though a woman cast in no ignoble mould, is said to have burst into tears and fallen ill on hearing of her son’s election to the Bohemian throne. On the other hand, it has again and again been asserted, or at least represented as highly probable, that it was the urgent representations of the Electress Elizabeth which determined her consort to cast the die; and everybody has heard the anecdote of her taunting him with the avowal that she would rather partake of sour-krout with a King, than of a joint of roast meat with an Elector. Elizabeth is unlikely either to have forgotten herself so far, or to have sought for any analogy between her own position and that of the Bohemian Princess who shortly after Wyclif’s death had mounted the English throne. Moreover, we have the statement of her grand-daughter, the free-spoken Duchess of Orleans, that at the time of the Bohemian offer the Electress knew nothing at all about the matter, her thoughts being in those days entirely absorbed by plays, masquerades, and the reading of romances. No doubt the Duchess, though deeply attached to her father’s house, is not to be absolutely trusted in her statements as to all the members of her father’s family; but her account of the condition of Elizabeth’s mind at the time when she was first brought face to face with the chief problem of her life, harmonises with all we know as to its previous current. After all, however, the point is not very material. Even before her husband had actually decided to become a King, she stood forth every inch a Queen; nor was it with a light heart, or in a spirit inflated with vanity or ambition, that at the last she left the decision in his hands. She was, in her own words, prepared to bow to the will of God, and, if need were, to suffer what He should see fit to ordain. Of her worldly goods she at the same time declared herself ready to make any reasonable sacrifice, by pledging her jewels, or whatever else of value she possessed. Early in October (1619) the last bridge had been burnt.

From this time forward, Elizabeth’s troubles came thick upon her; and indeed, but for a very imperfect return of prosperity towards the close of her life, they may be said never to have ceased again on earth. When, with Frederick, she quitted the Palatinate for Bohemia towards the end of October, they left behind them at Heidelberg, in the care of the Electress Dowager Louisa Juliana, their two children Charles Lewis and Elizabeth; but, though the former was long his mother’s favourite, it was hardly in her way to be deeply affected by a separation from her babes. The part which the new King and Queen were called upon to play during the twelve-month of their residence at Prague was from the outset the reverse of easy. The self-conscious and stiff-necked Bohemian Estates had not the least intention of being ruled in fact as well as in name by the sovereign of their making; while part at least of the population was steeped in ignorance like the peasants who welcomed his entry with shouts of ‘Vivat rex _Ferdinandus_!’[16] In Frederick’s mistake of importing and maintaining among Utraquist (i.e. Lutheran) surroundings, a rigid and aggressive Calvinism, incarnate in the iconoclastic Scultetus, Elizabeth probably had no share; for, as is worth remembering in connexion with the rather complicated religious history of her children, she never became a Calvinist herself or displayed any liking for Calvinistic ways. She did her best to gain popularity for herself and her consort, checking the insolence provoked among her courtiers by the uncouth manners and customs of her new subjects, and delighting all and sundry by pleasant English ‘hand-shakes.’ Now and then, offence was given by such innovations as the holding of Court balls on great Church holidays, and by the fashions of the attire worn on these occasions by the Queen and her ladies; and more serious umbrage was taken at the King’s conclusion of an alliance with the Calvinist Transylvanian, and at the project of another with the Sultan himself. Finally, there was the eternal difficulty as to ways and means, alike in Silesia (where the royal pair had been received with great rejoicing) and in Bohemia itself. Among all these agitations Elizabeth’s spirits from time to time flagged, both before and after the birth of her third son; for the changeful story of Prince Rupert’s life began at Prague in December, 1619.

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Footnote 16:

The entry of Frederick into Prague, and his handsome reception by the
three Estates ‘after the manner of our ancient Kings,’ was witnessed
by Jacob Böhme.

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Within less than a year from this date the brief glories of her Bohemian royalty had ‘turned to coal.’ In July King James, while sending Sir Edward Conway and Sir Richard Weston to Prague, ordered Sir Henry Wotton to repair to Vienna, where, if the King of Bohemia consented, he was to propose the settlement of the difficulty by means of an Imperial Diet; while to all Princes visited by him on the way he was to protest his master’s abstinence from any participation in the election to the Bohemian Crown. The choice of Wotton for this singularly futile mission was in itself extraordinarily infelicitous; very naturally, however, his task impressed itself at once upon the chosen ambassador’s vivid imagination. For it was on the eve of his departure for Vienna that Wotton, ‘being in Greenwitche Parke, made a sonnet to the Queen of Bohemia,’ of which he sent copies to Lady Wotton and Lord Zouche, and as to which Wotton’s latest biographer remarks, with perfect truth, that ‘such is the magic of art, these verses have done more than anything else, perhaps, to make both’ Ambassador and Queen ‘remembered.’[17] Neither the Prague nor the Vienna mission had any effect whatever; indeed, before Conway and Weston’s reply reached Wotton, all was over. Early in September the Leaguers under Maximilian of Bavaria, the head of the rival Wittelsbach line, had joined their forces against him, while Spinola’s Spaniards were approaching the Palatinate. Soon the enemies of the new Bohemian monarchy had closed in upon it. The battle of the White Hill was waged and lost in an hour (November 8th); and, though Frederick can hardly be blamed for the actual loss of the battle, in his accidental absence from which there was nothing disgraceful,[18] he had entirely failed to take precautions for the event of such a catastrophe, and lacked the self-confidence which alone could have made possible further resistance on the spot. Thus, though he did not at first quite understand the full significance of his overthrow, Bohemia had passed for ever out of the weak hands of the Winter—or Twelfth Night—King. When, on the evening of the rout, the long stream of vehicles, headed by Queen Elizabeth’s coach, ebbed out of Prague, bearing with it whatsoever was portable of the Protestant interest, no hopes remained except such as were wholly illusory. But Elizabeth intended that, even though Bohemia was lost and the Palatinate, which, as Louisa Juliana had formerly lamented, had ‘gone into Bohemia,’ might prove to be lost with it, the drama so swiftly played out should have no ignoble epilogue. She had resolved—in her own words—‘not to desert her husband, and, if he was to perish, to perish by his side.’ Fate dealt with her after no such sudden fashion; but she was true to the spirit of her vow.

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Footnote 17:

See L. Pearsall Smith, _Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton_, Vol. i.
p. 171.

Footnote 18: