Chapter C: Note on the Religious Situation in Scotland, as It 550 (2)

The _Mercure Français_ stated that he took part in the battle, and
lost his ribbon of the Garter on the occasion! (Charvériat, _Histoire
de la Guerre de Trente Ans_, Vol. i. p. 235, note.)

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From Prague Frederick and Elizabeth first made their way into Silesia, then still a dependency of Bohemia; but soon Frederick, though, owing to Wotton’s protest against the invasion of the Palatinate, the ban of the Empire did not descend on him till the following January, had to realise the position to which he was reduced. He sent on his wife before him, to seek shelter in the dominions of his brother-in-law, the Elector George William of Brandenburg. This Prince, a Calvinist and one of those who had advised the acceptance of the Bohemian Crown, was afraid at the same time of the Swedes and of the Emperor, to whose policy he had not yet rallied; and in after days the great Elector’s sister, the brave Duchess Louisa Charlotte of Courland, recognising in the experiences of her own married life some analogy to those of her Aunt Elizabeth’s, recalled as memorable the impunity with which her father had afforded a passing refuge to his unfortunate relatives.[19] The intimacy between the two Calvinist Electoral Houses was to survive backslidings on the part of Brandenburg in the course of the great War, and was at a later date to be very notably renewed, in spite of the perennial jealousy between the two dynasties and governments, by the marriage of Elizabeth’s grand-daughter Sophia Charlotte with the future first Prussian King. But, in these early days, the welcome extended by the Elector George William to his fugitive kinsfolk was limited to the coldest courtesies. At Küstrin, where on Christmas Day, 1620, Elizabeth gave birth to her fifth child, the Prince Maurice to be known in later life as Rupert’s _fidus Achates_, the royal mother and her attendants are said to have hardly had enough to eat, and, when in January, 1621, they were joined by her husband from Breslau, he brought no good tidings with him. The Union was on the eve of dissolution; an offer of aid from the Sultan, so at least it was rumoured, had been refused by Frederick; and the vacillations of King James were more hopeless than ever. At Berlin, where the fugitives were received by Frederick’s sister, the Electress Elizabeth Charlotte, they were glad to leave behind them the infant Maurice in the faithful charge of his grandmother Louisa Juliana, who, with his elder brother and sister in her care, had taken her departure from Heidelberg even before the battle of Prague. Her own estates, together with those of her second son Lewis Philip, long remained sequestrated; though neither of them had taken any part in the Bohemian business. The boys were afterwards removed to Holland; but the young Princess Elizabeth continued under her grandmother’s care till her ninth year, chiefly at Krossen in Silesia. This early training and the closer connexion into which it brought her with the Brandenburg Electoral family, were to exercise a notable influence upon her character and upon her later personal history.

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Footnote 19:

See A. Seraphim, _Eine Schwester des grossen Kurfürsten_, &c.
(_Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Gesch. d. Hauses Hohenzollern II._).
Berlin, 1901.

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From Berlin her parents, luckless emigrants, had still been obliged to move on, Queen Elizabeth journeying to Wolfenbüttel, the residence of the elder branch of the House of Brunswick, Frederick roaming about the Lower Saxon Circle in quest of military or other aid. Finally, they entered the Netherlands together by way of the Rhine. Everywhere in the Low Countries they were warmly welcomed, not only as kinsfolk of the House of Orange, but also as fellow-martyrs of those Protestant refugees to whom, in the Elector Frederick III’s days, the Palatinate had accorded so hospitable a reception. On April 14th, 1621, they were received with the utmost cordiality by the great Stadholder, Maurice of Orange, in the midst of a large assemblage of princes, nobles, and foreign ambassadors; and soon the States-General of the United Provinces, and the States of Holland and Friesland in particular, gave substantial expression to the universal warmth of the public welcome.

But the arm of the young Dutch Republic, though strenuous, was not long enough to reach effectively into the heart of the Empire. In the previous autumn, Frederick Henry of Nassau, the Stadholder’s brother, had made a show of protecting the Palatinate with a couple of thousand men, among whom there was an English contingent; but the effort had come to nothing. Already in 1620 the greater part of the Lower Palatinate had been occupied by the Spaniards; and in 1621, after Frederick had been placed under the ban of the Empire and the execution of the sentence had been entrusted to the expectant Duke of Bavaria, the inhabitants of the Upper Palatinate were called upon to forswear their allegiance. Frederick’s cause was upheld only by the English volunteers under Sir Horace Vere and by Mansfeld’s mercenaries. The Union had dissolved itself in the spring, and after midsummer James, while still cherishing the hope of bringing to pass a friendly intervention by Spain, was attempting through his ambassador Digby to obtain favourable terms at Vienna. Before the year was out, Maximilian of Bavaria had, with the aid of Rome, obtained an imperial promise of the reversion of the forfeited Electorate; and the future, as well as the present, seemed wholly dark for the Electoral couple and their children. Near or far, no ally seemed prepared to strike a blow in their interests, except that already, in 1621, the Queen of Hearts—as she came to be called in the days when she exercised no other sovereignty[20]—had found a true knight neither anxious, like King James, about probabilities of failure, nor, like the great _condottiere_ Mansfeld, solely intent upon the main chance. This was Duke Christian of Brunswick, the administrator or (as an English letter of the time aptly calls him) the ‘temporal bishop’ of the see of Halberstadt.[21] There is no evidence of his having ever met, or so much as corresponded with, the Queen; but Sir Thomas Roe distinctly states that it was only for her sake that he had engaged in the war, and he made much the same confession himself to his mother; while the story of his having worn in his helmet a glove belonging to the Queen, which he had vowed to restore to her in reconquered Prague, can be traced back as far as 1646. After losing an arm, he rode forth in 1624 with a substitute made of iron. Though a poet’s son, he was as rough a campaigner as any of the captains of the age; and in 1625 a flagrant act of violence placed him under a cloud. In the following year a fever ended the excesses of his military career, his wild defiances of Spain and the League, and his romantic passion, which, as we know from a letter written by his sister, Sophia of Nassau-Dietz, pined almost to the last for some mark of recognition by its object.[22] Elizabeth’s power of attracting the sympathy of soldiers, which had been so conspicuously exhibited in the case of Christian of Halberstadt, and to which afterwards Lord Craven’s life-long devotion was to testify, was further exemplified by the goodwill shown to her in these times of distress by her martial kinsmen of the House of Orange. The readiness of the great captain Maurice of Nassau to further her interests so far as in him lay was shared by his younger brother, Prince Frederick Henry, who, in 1625, succeeded him in the stadholdership, and between whom and one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting, attached to her person since her Heidelberg days, Maurice a few weeks before his death arranged a marriage. But the new Princess of Orange proved to be as proud as the beautiful Countess Amalia von Solms had been poor; and, before long, her desire of furthering the interests of the House into which she had been admitted made her hostile to those of the family of her former mistress.

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Footnote 20:

The origin of the application of this title seems unknown. It had been
formerly connected in a peculiar fashion with Elizabeth’s august
godmother. (See the weird story in H. Clifford’s _Life of Jane
Dormer_, how not long before Queen Elizabeth’s death a playing-card,
the Queen of Hearts, with an iron nail knocked through the head, was
found at the bottom of her chair. Soon afterwards all hopes of her
recovery were abandoned.)

Footnote 21:

Halberstadt was one of those sees which had by special treaties with
the Chapters been made hereditary in particular Protestant princely
families. (Opel, _Niedersächs. Krieg_, Vol. i. p. 193.)

Footnote 22:

It must at the same time be allowed that the epithets applied to James
I by Christian after the breakdown of the scheme of 1623 could hardly
under any circumstances have been condoned by the King’s daughter.
(See Ritter, _Deutsche Geschichte_, &c., Vol. iii. p. 253.)

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The charm of Elizabeth’s beauty, and the stimulus of her high spirit, also inspired with a warm personal concern in her affairs, those of her father’s numerous diplomatists who were or became known to her. Sir Henry Wotton seems never to have seen her again after their ‘merry hour’ of meeting at Heidelberg; but he remained stedfast in his admiration for his ‘Royal Mistress,’ and among the intimate letters of the days of his retirement at Eton are those which he addressed to her, then a half-forgotten exile at the Hague. In his will he left to the Prince of Wales her picture, with an inscription[23] which reappears, with slight modifications, in two of his published pieces. Wotton’s successor at Venice, Sir Dudley Carleton (afterwards Viscount Dorchester), who had likewise been received by the Electoral pair at Heidelberg, and who was English ambassador at the Hague when the fugitives arrived there, cheerfully gave up his house for their use; besides judiciously exerting himself in their interest both in this and in his second embassy to the United Provinces. Lord Herbert of Cherbury was warmly thanked by Elizabeth for his exertions at Paris; and Lord Conway did his best for her cause with the Emperor at Prague. Lord Doncaster (afterwards Earl of Carlisle) had, during his futile mission before the Bohemian crisis, gained her goodwill in such a degree as to be honoured by her with the intimate nickname of ‘camel-face’; and it was through him that his eloquent chaplain Donne was privileged to ‘deliver mesages’ to the Queen when in sore straits. More to the purpose were the active services of Sir Thomas Roe, the ‘honest fatt Thom’ of her correspondence; but, although these had begun before this diplomatist’s return from Eastern Europe, he does not seem to have come into much personal contact with her before 1628.

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Footnote 23:

‘_Inter Fortunæ sortem, extra Imperium._’ (See L. Pearsall Smith,
_u.s._, Vol. i. p. 297, note.)

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Only a few brief indications can be given here of the general course of the exiled family’s fortunes during the quarter of a century which elapsed, before a definitive settlement of the Palatinate problem was at last reached in the Peace of Westphalia. Negotiations were at first carried on in Sweden, through Ludwig Camerarius, who from 1623 directed the diplomacy of the Palatine House, with the purpose of engaging King Gustavus Adolphus in offensive operations, in the course of which the latter intended that Frederick should appear in the Palatinate at the head of an army; but the perennial Danish jealousy of Sweden put a stop to the plan. About the same time (1623-4) the faithful Rusdorf sought, by negotiations in London, to obtain fair terms for his master at Vienna, Frederick signifying his willingness to allow his eldest son (Frederick Henry) to be educated at Vienna, with a view to his marriage with an Imperial Princess; but the overtures came to nothing, as did the specious offers of the disguised Capuchin della Rota. These latter proved, in truth, to be mere pretences on the part of Maximilian of Bavaria, who, in 1624, was received into the College of Electors in Frederick’s place. Towards the close of 1623, King James I, who earlier in the year had broken off negotiations with Mansfeld and Christian of Halberstadt and concluded a truce with the Infanta at Brussels, which Frederick was obliged to ratify, had at last been undeceived as to the intentions of Spain. He saw at last how during the Spanish marriage negotiations he had been tricked into the false hope that good terms would be obtained by Spanish mediation for the Palatines; and, during the last year of his reign, when war with Spain was becoming more and more imminent, a treaty promising an English army for the recovery of the Palatinate was concluded with Mansfeld, who was for the moment the lion of London, whither he was soon followed on a similar errand by Christian of Halberstadt. Thus, when in March, 1625, James I was succeeded on the English throne by Charles I, Elizabeth’s hopes rallied with pathetic buoyancy, and she cherished the hope that her brother’s approaching French marriage would further advance the interests of her family. There can be no doubt of Charles I’s intention to serve his sister and her children; and his wishes on this head were shared by Buckingham. The Duke is even said, when visiting the Palatine family at Leyden, not long before his assassination in January, 1629, to have had in his head a scheme—which, if fate had so willed it, might have had strange consequences for the British Succession—of a marriage between his daughter Lady Mary Villiers and Elizabeth’s eldest son, Prince Frederick Henry. But, as is well known, the history of Charles I’s foreign policy during the first part of his reign, in which the question of the recovery of the Palatinate could not possibly hold the central place as it had in his father’s, had, as Eliot summed it up in his scathing speech, been one of constant and utter failure. Afterwards, of course, the King was so hopelessly at issue with his Parliament, that all chance of effective intervention had come to an end. Mansfeld’s army at first remained inactive in the Low Countries, where it was not increased, except by fragments of the levies of Christian of Halberstadt, which a tempest had scattered at sea. Instead of reinforcing the mercenary troops, the English expedition which sailed under Lord Wimbledon in October, 1625, had orders for Cadiz. When, in 1625, Elizabeth’s uncle, Christian IV of Denmark, at last took the field as chief of the Lower Saxon Circle, the death of his namesake soon deprived him of his best commander; and, in 1626, Mansfeld, after being defeated by Wallenstein at Dessau, was ‘chased’ by him into Hungary, whence, after making over his army to Bethlen Gabor, he took his departure only to die. In August of the same year, Tilly entirely overcame Christian IV at Lutter, and the ‘Danish War’ was virtually at an end. Henceforth, no further intention was entertained either at Vienna or at Munich of granting any terms to Frederick, although, on Cardinal Khlesl’s principle of never either dropping negotiations or concluding them, conditions were still offered him. In return for the restoration of part of his paternal dominions, he was, while renouncing both the Bohemian Crown and the Electoral dignity, to pay the costs of the war, and to consent to bring up his children as Catholics; but the former condition he could not, and the latter he would not, accept. It is said that, at this very time (1627), the unhappy ex-Elector paid a secret visit to the Palatinate, whose fate seemed sealed for ever by the Austro-Bavarian treaty of the following year. The Spaniards held the left bank of the Rhine and the Bavarians the right; conversion was forced upon the inhabitants, who began to emigrate rather than submit to it; and, when, in June, 1630, Rusdorf presented a letter from his master at Ratisbon, where the Bavarian policy was conspicuously to the front, the Emperor had no answer to return except a demand of unconditional submission. Had the Palatine family yielded to this demand, and accepted the further condition of conversion to the Church of Rome, they might perhaps have been allowed some sort of domicile in the Empire. But they were of a different metal, and held out, though their prospects had never been gloomier; for, in the same year, peace was concluded between England and Spain, and whatever hopes had been placed upon King Charles’ anti-Spanish policy were thus brought to nought.

Yet, soon after these events—in July, 1630—Gustavus Adolphus landed on the Pomeranian coast, and in him the Palatine family hoped to find both an avenger and a deliverer. The Electress Dowager Louisa Juliana met him at Berlin, and after his great victory at Breitenfeld he approached the Palatinate. Before the end of 1631 most of it had been recaptured and re-Protestantised; and early in the following year Frederick was on his way to meet the conquering hero. Frederick’s Dutch hosts had furnished him forth with great liberality, and the number of state coaches with which he arrived at Frankfort, in February, 1632, had been increased to two score by Gustavus Adolphus himself, who treated him with great courtesy as King of Bohemia. But the future of the Palatinate was left undiscussed between the two Kings; nor was it till after Gustavus had continued his victorious progress through Bavaria, that he proposed a settlement. It showed unmistakably that the treatment of the Palatinate formed but a subsidiary part of his great design, and filled Frederick, who was looking for restoration to his patrimony, with alarm. For, besides other onerous conditions, there were imposed on him the admission of Swedish garrisons to some of his chief towns, the concession of the supreme military command to Gustavus, and the grant of equal rights to the Lutherans in the Calvinistic half of the Palatinate. Hard as these terms seemed to Frederick, amicable negotiations were still in progress between him and the great Swedish King, when the awful news arrived of the death of Gustavus on the field of Lützen. Frederick had a little before this fallen ill of a fever; but, as if driven by his doom, he once more began to wander from town to town, till, on November 29th, 1632, thirteen days after the death of Gustavus, he breathed his last at Mainz. The homeless wanderer’s heart was buried in the church at Oppenheim, in his own Palatinate; his corpse was hurriedly borne hither and thither—being carried off from Frankenthal by Bernhard of Weimar on his retreat in 1635, to preserve it from desecration—till it was at last composed in peace within the walls of Metz.[24]

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Footnote 24:

Elizabeth bore no love to the Swedish royal family, partly because of
these memories, partly perhaps because of the Danish blood in her.
(‘The States,’ she writes on one occasion, ‘are justly punished for
assisting the Queen of Sweden against my uncle’ (Christian IV). She
detested Gustavus’ daughter Christina. On the death of the Queen
Dowager Maria Eleonora, she writes: ‘Queen Mother is dead, which makes
her rap out with many an oth.’ (_Unpublished Letters of the Queen of
Bohemia to Sir Edward Nicholas_, _Antiq. Soc. Publ._ 1857 (xvi).)

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After Frederick’s death, the regency of the Palatinate was assumed by his brother Louis Philip, who was married to a Brandenburg Princess (Maria Eleonora); but though under his rule Heidelberg was recovered, and with the aid of foreign (especially Scottish) beneficence the prosperity of the Palatinate began to revive, the fatal day of Nördlingen (September 6th, 1634) undid all the work of the previous two years, and the sufferings of the Palatinate from both ‘friends’ and foes—from Swedes and Bavarians—began afresh. After the Peace of Prague, in 1635, the Swedes fell back upon the Main, and after Heidelberg had been once more occupied by the Imperialists, the Palatinate remained for some five years under the government of the Emperor, which banished all Calvinist and Lutheran preachers with their families and households, and in every way promoted the decay of University and schools. It cannot be said that the general condition of the population, whose sufferings were of the most heartrending description, and productive of that awful brutalisation which is so characteristic of the later period of the Thirty Years’ War, was much affected by changes in the occupation of the country.[25] The renewal of warfare in these parts, in 1640 and again in 1644, brought in the French and their German allies and the Bavarians to augment these troubles. It will be noted below how the dispossessed heir of the Palatinate bore himself in these evil years, and what he finally saved for his House out of so pitiful a wreck. The Bohemian Crown was, of course, a thing of the past, though to the end Elizabeth retained the royal title.[26]

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Footnote 25:

The project of despatching a Scottish army in 1639 to occupy the
Palatinate broke down because of a disagreement between Leslie and the
Covenanters.

Footnote 26:

It would seem as if after her husband’s death she had for a time
approved the style of ‘the King’s only sister.’ (See Wotton’s letter
_ap._ L. P. Smith, _u.s._, Vol. ii. p. 342.) When, on the marriage of
her daughter Princess Henrietta in 1651, her son Charles Lewis took
exception to the title ‘Queen of Bohemia,’ Elizabeth wrote to him
indignantly that ‘leauing it you doe me so much wrong as to the
memorie of your dead father, as if you disapproved his actions’; and
declared that whatever public instrument she might at any time have to
sign, she would never sign it without the royal style. _Letters_, &c.,
ed. by A. Wendland, p. 16.

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The birth at the Hague, on October 14th, 1630, of Sophia, the youngest of the children of Frederick and Elizabeth, had preceded the death of her father by very little more than two years. Her mother, it must be remembered, was then still in the full flower of her womanhood—in the thirty-fifth year of her age—an eager horsewoman and fond of the pleasures of the chase; and in mind she remained not less vigorous than in body, venting her wrath freely on both enemies and neutrals—on that ‘devil’ the Emperor and that ‘beast’ the Elector of Saxony, just as at a later date she had to search in the Book of _Revelation_ for analogues fitly expressing her sentiments concerning Oliver Cromwell. Yet private as well as public griefs had helped to sadden her heart as well as to sober her spirit even before the death of her husband, whose affection towards her had remained unchanged, showing itself in little expressions of care and tenderness such as abound in his letters almost to the day of his death. In 1624, they had lost an infant son, Lewis; and, in January, 1629, their first-born, Frederick Henry, a boy of fifteen, was (as already noted) drowned off Haarlem as he was travelling back in the common passengers’ boat with his father from Amsterdam, whither Frederick had gone to collect the share of the profits from a captured Spanish treasure-fleet assigned to him by Maurice of Nassau. The infant Princess Charlotte was laid in the grave by her brother’s side only three days before the christening of Sophia. But, as there survived five brothers (to whom a sixth, significantly named Gustavus, was added two years after Sophia’s birth), the statement may perhaps be credited with which her _Memoirs_ open, that her arrival in this world caused no excess of joy to her parents. She relates that her name—the name which narrowly missed marking the beginning of a new English dynasty, and which, in token of its popularity in this country, was bestowed upon his heroine by the author of one of the masterpieces of our literature—was drawn by lot out of several written for the purpose on slips of paper, because of the small choice of godmothers remaining in the case of so large a family. Sophia’s destinies were not encumbered by a second name like that which her sister Louisa Hollandina bore in honour of her godfathers; although the States of Friesland, who undertook the same responsibility for the infant Sophia, presented her with a pension of forty pounds for life and handsome supplementary gifts. So soon as it was possible to transport her, she was sent to Leyden by her mother, who preferred that her children should be brought up at a distance from herself, ‘since,’ says Sophia, ‘the sight of her monkeys and dogs was more pleasing to her than that of ourselves.’ At Leyden, therefore, Sophia spent her early childhood, chiefly in the company of her youngest brother Gustavus, who died nine years after his birth. Her graphic reminiscences of her tender years chiefly turn on the cumbrous etiquette (_tout à fait à l’allemande_) by which she was environed, and on the lessons in the Heidelberg Catechism (which she ‘knew by heart without understanding it’) imparted by her venerable governess, Frau von Pless, with the assistance of her two daughters, ladies of ‘awe-inspiring’ presence, whose age seemed to the child almost equal to her own. ‘Their ways were straight in the eyes of Heaven as before men.’ The good ex-Elector had been consistently careful as to providing sound Calvinistic instruction for his children, and Frau von Pless had been his own instructress in his infancy; but his English wife, at least during part of her residence in the Netherlands, continued to employ the services of a Church of England chaplain. In general, it is clear that at Leyden, and afterwards at the Hague, Sophia, while her wits quickly opened to the demands of life, passed, like the rest of her brothers and sisters, through a training which equipped them more or less efficiently for the struggle before them. In her case, it must also have helped to regulate the remarkable intellectual curiosity with which she was naturally endowed, and which, though it cannot be shown to have carried her to great heights or depths of study or thought, at least enabled her in later life to rise serene above the troubles and trials of the hour. The usual training of the Palatine Princes and Princesses, while including some mathematics, history, and law, appears to have been based in the main upon the study of languages, of which most of them came to have several at command. Their mother they always addressed in English, but among themselves they used French, as had been the custom of their father in his letters to his wife, and as continued to be the practice of Sophia’s son and grandson in domestic conversation, even when they had become British sovereigns.

On Prince Gustavus’ death, in 1641, Sophia, who was herself suffering from illness, quitted Leyden for the Hague, bidding farewell to her _bonnes vieilles_, whom she said she had loved from gratitude and habit, ‘for sympathy rarely exists between old age and youth’—a maxim to be flatly contradicted by the experience of her own later years. At the Hague, where, during the rule of Frederick Henry, his consort Amalia strained every nerve to prove the authority of the House of Orange equal to that of a royal dynasty, the Queen of Bohemia was beginning to find some of the conditions of her life oppressive, and, worst of all, the continuous pressure of debt unbearable. Already in her husband’s time, the generosity of Maurice had furnished them with a pleasant summer retreat at Rheenen, in the wooded country on the Rhine, not far below Arnhem, described by Evelyn as ‘a neate palace or country house, built after the Italian manner, as I remember.’[27] But Sophia, on first arriving at the Hague, found the change so delightful as to make her think that she was ‘enjoying the pleasures of Paradise.’ This early glamour must, however, have soon passed off; for, though blessed with good spirits even in her later years, Sophia was without that gift—sometimes enviable, sometimes dangerous—of seeing things rather as one wishes them to be than as they are, which her brother Charles Lewis described himself as having inherited from their mother. And it was this mother herself to the flaws in whose brilliant and in many respects noble personality Sophia seems to have been from the first unable to shut her eyes. It cannot have been only her love of horses and dogs, or her _penchant_ for what may be called the pleasures of the toilet which affected both Sophia and her eldest sister Elizabeth unsympathetically; there seems to have been in the Queen a vein of frivolity, inherited perhaps from her own mother, which estranged from her these and perhaps some other of her children, though they could not fail to recognise that her life was devoted to the interests of her family as a whole. It must, however, have been to his sister Elizabeth, and not to Sophia, that their brother Charles Lewis refers in expressing a hope that their mother may not find reason ‘to use her with the former coolness.’

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Footnote 27:

As to Rheenen, the best account appears to be contained in J.
Kretzschmar, _Mittheilungen zur Geschichte des Heidelberger
Schlosses_, pp. 96-132, which I have not seen. There seems at one time
to have been a notion of making it over to Prince Rupert; but it
afterwards became the property of Sophia, who says that it had cost
40,000 crowns to build (_Briefe an Hannov. Diplomaten_, p. 229). The
Electress Sophia, not being able to sell the property at its estimated
value, made it over to her son Ernest Augustus.

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Of her eldest brother, Charles Lewis himself, Sophia can have seen but little in the days of the family life at the Hague and Rheenen, although she afterwards grew warmly attached to him and came to regard him, as she says, in the light of a father rather than of an elder brother. He was a prince of remarkable intellectual gifts, which, till on his father’s death he by his mother’s wish took service under William II, Prince of Orange, he had cultivated to so much purpose at the University of Leyden, that he was afterwards credited with a share in the writings of Pufendorf, the chief glory of the restored University of Heidelberg. His disposition resembled his youngest sister’s in not a few points, as their correspondence shows. His nature, like hers, was at bottom both kindly and humorous, and, while both had a turn for sarcastic wit, there was, one must confess, a coarse fibre in both for which the habits and traditions of Palatinate life are not to be held altogether responsible. It must have been because of this natural wit, rather than because of the avarice born of necessity which Charles Lewis displayed in later passages of his career, that he was called _Timon_ by his brothers and sisters, to whom Shakespeare, with whose plays Charles Lewis was not unacquainted, is quite as likely as Lucian to have suggested the nickname. He was through life a friend of English literature, and, so late as 1674, John Philpot’s edition of Camden’s _Remains_ was dedicated to him. There is evidence of his having had other literary tastes—among the nicknames which he gave to his eldest son by Louisa von Degenfeld were those of ‘Pantagruel’ and ‘Lancelot du Lac.’ But his favourite book was the Bible (‘_meinliebotes Evangelium_’). At the same time he was, like his sister Sophia, free-spoken on all subjects; though, on occasion, as is not wonderful when his experiences are remembered, a pathos welled up in him which she, not so much from cynicism as from habitual self-control, steadily repressed.[28] Nor was he free-spoken only; he might be called a free-thinker but for that aforesaid love of the Bible which, together with a double share of his intellectual alertness, he bequeathed to his daughter Elizabeth Charlotte, Duchess of Orleans.

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Footnote 28:

See his extraordinary outburst of passionate woe on receiving the news
of the death of a daughter (in 1674) in _Briefe des Kurfürsten Karl
Ludwig an die Seinen_, pp. 234-5: ‘I do not know, why the Lord God
seeks to try me so—when I have but a few years more to live, and after
all did not create myself, and have no conscious desire of committing
any sin,’ &c.

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After his father’s death, Charles Lewis had been acknowledged as Elector Palatine by King Charles I and some of the German Protestant Princes; and his mother, though he was and always remained the darling of her heart, would have urged him to assume his place in the Palatinate, had not the battle of Nördlingen placed any such attempt out of the question. Charles Lewis and his brother Rupert were accordingly sent to England (1635). Here for two or three years they led a life of gaiety and dissipation; but they could hardly, in any case, have effected anything to the purpose, even had the young ‘Elector’ devised some more practical scheme than that of asking the hand of the young Queen Christina of Sweden. After their return to Holland, however, the two Princes were, in 1638, stirred to a more vigorous activity on their own account. They began badly by the loss of all their stores at Meppen in Frisia; but they, notwithstanding, resolved to make an armed attempt upon the Palatinate, of which the cost was defrayed by Lord Craven, who himself held a command in it. They were supported by a Swedish force under Major-General King (the Lord Eythin of Marston Moor); but, after siege had been laid to Lemgo, the gallant raid came to an unfortunate end at Vlotho on the Weser, both Rupert and Craven remaining behind in captivity. Hereupon, Charles Lewis, in 1639, once more set forth from Holland with the design of placing himself at the head of the army left without a leader by the death of Duke Bernhard of Weimar; but Cardinal Richelieu, whose schemes the success of the adventure would have thwarted, gave it an unexpected turn by causing Charles Lewis to be arrested and detaining him, for the most part in prison, during several months. In 1640, he used the freedom which he had regained for new efforts, first in Denmark, and then at the Diet of Ratisbon, upon whose walls Swedish guns were playing. Once more, there was much excitement in the ‘Palsgrave’s’ favour in both England and Scotland—it was in fact the last occasion on which King and Parliament might have united in a policy approved by the nation at large; and when, in 1642, the Emperor Ferdinand III propounded a settlement which would, on stringent terms, have restored a portion of the Palatinate, the English ambassador (Sir Thomas Roe) joined the agents of Charles Lewis in protesting against its inadequacy. The horrors of war were renewed in the exhausted Palatinate, and Charles Lewis once more betook himself to England (1644), where he presented a memorandum to Parliament, which allowed him £30 a day for his stay in London, but limited it in the first instance to a fortnight. Early in this year, Louisa Juliana had died, and it almost seemed as if the hopes of her descendants were to be buried with her; for, though a dim prospect of a general peace was opening, there seemed little hope that, in the conflict between the great Crowns, thought would be taken of the Palatinate. In England, the Civil War had been for nearly two years in progress; both Rupert and Maurice had, to their brother’s actual or pretended displeasure, taken service under the King; and it is hardly possible that, at such a time, Charles Lewis could have reckoned on obtaining military or pecuniary support for his schemes for the recovery of his patrimony. He has, accordingly, been supposed to have harboured deeper designs, and these have been connected with Sir Harry Vane’s proposal, rather earlier in the year, of dethroning King Charles I. But whether or not the idea of supplanting his uncle had entered into Charles Lewis’ mind—and Sophia’s mention in her _Memoirs_ of Vane’s previous visit to the Hague lends some colour to the conjecture (she calls him Vain and speaks of him and his large chin without seriousness)—it is certain that the Prince was well received by the Parliamentary leaders.[29] In return for his supposed goodwill to their cause, to which he is stated to have testified even by taking the Covenant and sitting in the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, he was granted an annual allowance of £8,000 and assigned the Deanery at Windsor as a residence, where he thought it most prudent for the time to give himself up to his scientific studies.[30]

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Footnote 29:

As to the possibility of an offer of the Crown to Charles Lewis by the
Parliamentary leaders, see W. Michael, _Englische Geschichte_, &c.,
Vol. i. p. 282.

Footnote 30:

It should be remembered that in this morigeration Charles Lewis had
the support, up to a certain point, of his mother, who in the days of
the Civil War blamed Queen Henrietta Maria for opposing the attempts
of Charles Lewis to bring about a reconciliation between his uncle and
the Parliament. Gradually, however, all that the King did seemed right
to his sister, and she blamed Charles Lewis for remaining on good
terms with the Parliament. See K. Hauck, _Elizabeth, Königin von
Böhmen_ (Heidelberg, 1905).

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The career of Prince Rupert, whose personal attractions had eclipsed those of his elder brother during their former joint visit to England, was widely to diverge from Charles Lewis’, now that they both found themselves once more in the land of their maternal ancestry. In those earlier days, Sir Thomas Roe had informed Elizabeth how the King took pleasure in the sprightliness of her second son, from whom, in her fondness for his senior, she had expected so little; and Charles Lewis himself reported to his mother his dismay that _Rupert le Diable_ was always in the company of Queen Henrietta Maria, her ladies, and the Papists. At the same time, Prince Rupert was understood to be engaged in discussing with his uncle the King wild schemes for the foundation of a colony in Madagascar. The Princes were recalled home; the Madagascar scheme collapsed; and Rupert’s Protestantism henceforth stood firm. It has been already seen how he was taken prisoner in the fight at Vlotho (1638). The offer of Lord Craven, who had paid £20,000 for his own ransom, to increase this sum, were he allowed to share Prince Rupert’s captivity, was refused, and the Prince was lodged in captivity at Linz under the care of Count Kufstein. He came forth from it, having resisted all attempts to lure him from his religious belief and into the Emperor’s service; neither, however, was he inclined to avail himself of the prospects of a wealthy Huguenot marriage held out to him in Paris. With his faithful brother Maurice, he hereupon betook himself to England, where they devoted themselves to the cause of the King in his struggle against Parliament, and became the very types and exemplars of the Cavaliers. Across the seas, in New England, the good old Puritan minister Nathaniel Ward, who had held Rupert in his arms as a child, ‘when, if I mistake not, he promised to be a good Prince,’ prayed that even now he might be turned into ‘a right Roundhead, a wise-hearted Palatine, a thankful man to the English,’ and that his soul might be saved, ‘notwithstanding all his God-damn-me’s.’ But the ordinary picture of Prince Rupert as general of the horse, impetuous even to foolhardiness, and as a passionate partisan who could not restrain his vehemence even in the presence of the King himself, conveys no complete view either of his services in the Civil War, or of his character. As to the former, neither the calamity of Marston Moor, for which he was not responsible, as he certainly was for that of Naseby, nor perhaps even the surrender of Bristol, should have been allowed to obscure their lustre. As to his character, he was not less humane than resolute, and self-reliance was combined in him with the nobler kind of self-respect. His intellectual curiosity was a genuine family characteristic, though it happened in him to take a peculiar turn towards applied science and the technicalities of art.[31] After the fall of Oxford, in 1646, the Princes Rupert and Maurice left England, the former to hold a command in France; but, in the year before the execution of King Charles, he once more came forward to serve the sinking cause of the English monarchy, and took charge of the royal fleet. Maurice was, of course, once more found by his side, and, after the King’s death, they engaged in those remote maritime adventures in the course of which the younger brother met his death. Rupert’s earlier naval—or buccaneering—career continued till 1653, when he returned to France, creating a considerable sensation by his entry into Paris ‘like an old Spanish _conquistador_, with Indians, apes and parrots.’[32]

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Footnote 31:

The honour of having discovered the art of engraving in mezzotint,
frequently claimed for Prince Rupert, seems due to a Hessian officer
named Ludwig von Siegen, who, meeting the Prince at Brussels about
1654, taught him the new process. See Cyril Davenport, _Mezzotints_
(‘The Connoisseur’s Library,’) pp. 52-65.

Footnote 32:

See K. Hauck, _Karl Ludwig, Kurfürst von der Pfalz_ (Leipzig, 1903),
p. 252.

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Sophia’s third brother Maurice was, as has been seen, an all but inseparable follower of his elder Rupert, whose equal he can have been neither in military genius nor in general intellectual ability and personal charm—‘he never,’ says Clarendon, who resented the pride of the Palatines, ‘sacrificed to the Graces, nor conversed amongst men of quality, but had most used the company of ordinary and inferior men, with whom he loved to be very familiar.’ Sophia writes to him as to one little interested in intrigues of State, and his preference through life seems to have been for the camp rather than the Court.[33] But, whatever other abatement should be made from the censures with which, like the brother of his heart, he was visited by both Puritan animosity and Royalist spite, he most certainly possessed in a rare degree the soldier’s cardinal virtue of fidelity. Thus we may fain hope that, in accordance with the most trustworthy account, his fate overtook him, whelmed beneath the deep gulf of the Atlantic, and that he was not, as a different tradition would have it, carried off by corsairs to Algiers, there to linger out a forgotten existence.

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Footnote 33:

His mother’s coolness towards him is curious. She communicated the
news of his disappearance to Charles Lewis without a word of sympathy,
and advised that, should he really be at Algiers, no ‘great inquierie’
should be made, lest his ransom should be fixed at a quite inordinate
height, or Cromwell should purchase him from the corsairs. _Letters_,
&c., ed. A. Wendland, p. 43.

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The sixth and seventh brothers, Edward and Philip, had been brought up in common; but in their later lives they were much divided. About 1637, they had, with their brother Maurice, been sent to school in Paris, whither, as has been seen, the Palatine family long looked for political succour; and here they remained after Maurice had taken his departure, with a view to beginning his military career. In 1645 the elder of the pair took a step which estranged him not only from his brother Philip, but from the whole of the Palatine family, and which, together with a similar proceeding at a later date on the part of Princess Louisa Hollandina, stands in direct contrast to the general tenour of the family history. Anne of Gonzaga, second daughter of the Duke Charles of Gonzaga-Nevers, afterwards Duke of Mantua, was already a celebrity in French society, when, her amour with Henry of Guise having come to an end which wounded her self-esteem, she in 1645 secretly gave her hand to the Prince Palatine Edward, and henceforth became the ‘_Princesse Palatine_,’ under which name she plays a conspicuous part in the literature of contemporary French memoirs. We have, however, no concern here with her share in public affairs at a rather later time, when (in 1650) she effected a union between the two branches of the Fronde and thus drove Mazarin into temporary exile, and when, after being herself persuaded by the Cardinal to ‘rally’ to Anne of Austria, she (in 1651-2) succeeded in bringing over to the same side the Duke of Bouillon and the great general Turenne.[34] Mazarin, when indicating the price (a great Court office) at which her support might be gained, described her as a _femme intéressée_; but, as M. Chéruel observes, it was not this aspect of her character which was in the mind of Bossuet when, in a funeral discourse, he dwelt on her great qualities of head and heart. In an age of confessional propaganda she was a great proselytiser in high places; and it was a signal instance of her activity in this direction, that she should have exacted Prince Edward’s conversion to the Church of Rome as the condition of her acceptance of his hand. For she thus secured to herself a claim for direct interference in the affairs of the Palatine House, which still possessed a certain importance and might again acquire a greater. Her foresight was justified; for, in course of time, there can be no doubt that she contrived to have a hand in the conversion of Princess Louisa Hollandina, as well as in yet another conversion, which made it possible for Charles Lewis’ daughter Elizabeth Charlotte to become the wife of Louis XIV’s brother, Philip Duke of Orleans. Although the new Princess Palatine had retained her share of the wealth of the Gonzaga, notwithstanding the efforts of her father to accumulate the whole for bestowal on his eldest daughter Marie, who in this same year 1645 became Queen of Poland, the agitation of Edward’s mother at the news of his change of religion was extreme, and was shared by most of her children. Charles Lewis besought his mother ‘with her blessings to lay her curse’ upon Prince Philip, who was about to quit Paris for the Netherlands, should he too ‘change the religion he had been bred in.’ As for Prince Edward, his fortunes were henceforth more or less severed from those of the family, though we find him, in 1651, at the Hague, as he passed the ambassadors of the English Commonwealth in the streets, calling them ‘rogues’ to their faces, and thus doing his best to embroil the United Provinces with the enemies of the House of Stewart.[35] With Edward’s daughter, Benedicta Henrietta, born in 1652, we shall meet again as the wife of John Frederick, Duke of Hanover, Sophia’s brother-in-law. In her the Palatine type, of which Sophia herself and her niece Elizabeth Charlotte were such striking examples, was well-nigh effaced; but it will not be overlooked that by descent she stood nearer to the English Succession than her father’s youngest sister.

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Footnote 34:

See A. Chéruel, _Le rôle politique de la Princesse Palatine pendant la
Fronde en 1651_. (_Séances de L’Acad. des Sc. Mor. et Pol._,
January-February, 1888.)

Footnote 35:

His mother seems to have been pleased with this outburst, and to have
testified to her gratification by presenting to Edward certain family
articles of value—more in number than was agreeable to Charles Lewis.
Edward, who certainly seems to have had in most things an eye to the
main chance, had a cynical vein in him, like some of his brothers and
sisters. When he came to Heidelberg in 1658, accompanied by a
facetious M. de Jambonneau, Charles Lewis writes to his ‘second’ wife:
‘He turns everything into a joke, so that I cannot bring him on with
me.’

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Of Prince Philip’s fateful conduct at the Hague immediately. While, before his return to her mother’s little Court, Sophia had necessarily seen little of him or of her brothers there or at Rheenen, she was, as a matter of course, much thrown into the society of her three sisters. At first, as she tells us, she was by no means troubled to find them handsomer and more accomplished than herself, and admired by everybody; and she was perfectly contented that her juvenile gaiety and _railleries_ should help to amuse them. ‘Even the Queen took pleasure in my fun’; for she was gratified to see the child tormented, so that her wits might be sharpened by the process of being put on her defence. It became the established practice for her to ‘rally’ any and everybody; the clever people were delighted by it, and the others were made afraid of her. Gradually, however, Sophia’s quick ears heard the ‘milords’ at her mother’s Court say to one another that, when she had finished growing, she would surpass all her sisters. And the remark inspired her with an affection for the whole English nation; ‘so greatly is one pleased, when young, to be thought good-looking.’

Elizabeth, the eldest of the Palatine Princesses, though by no means indifferent to the family interests, or without sympathy at any time of her life with the troubles either of her father’s or her mother’s House, was of an introspective turn of mind, grave and thoughtful, and little inclined by nature to the levity inborn in most of her brothers and sisters. Both as imbued with the Calvinism in which she had been so carefully nurtured by her grandmother amidst the congenial Brandenburg surroundings, and perhaps also because, though an accomplished linguist, she alone of the sisterhood had no occasion to learn to speak Dutch, she already as a girl fell into a way of leading much of her life to herself. At the same time, she was always interested in public affairs, and more especially in marriage projects, which in those times formed an important part in politics; and it is noticeable that she continued fond of match-making even after she had herself settled down to a single life. Among the suitors for her hand was the young King Wladislaw IV of Poland, a tolerant and liberal-minded Prince.[36] But the marriage fell through, because the Diet would not hear of their King marrying an ‘English’ Protestant; and Elizabeth, of whose noble character perfect veracity formed one of the noblest traits, refused in her turn to listen to a diplomatic suggestion that she should become a convert to Rome. In January, 1639, there was a notion of making a match between her and Bernhard of Weimar. We are not told that the Electoral Prince Frederick William of Brandenburg—afterwards known as the Great Elector—between whom and Princess Louisa Hollandina a marriage was at one time projected, had ever thought of asking the hand of her elder sister. But he may have met Elizabeth in 1638 at Königsberg, when, after the Peace of Prague, George William was induced by troubles in his Margravate to send his whole family into Prussia, whither some of their Palatine kinsfolk also came; and he was in these years much at Rheenen, where he cannot but have been attracted by the Princess Elizabeth, whose unflinching Protestant sentiment resembled his own, which formed a constant factor in his shifting system of policy. She was afterwards a visitor to Berlin, where, in 1646, Princess Louisa Henrietta of Orange, whose spirit was akin to hers, held her entry as Electress, and at Krossen, where the Dowager Electress (Frederick V’s sister) kept a Court of her own, and where Elizabeth is said to have specially interested herself in the instruction of the Elector Frederick William’s sister Hedwig Sophia, afterwards Landgravine of Hesse-Cassel. We shall see in what fashion the Great Elector ultimately succeeded in providing for the peace and comfort of his kinswoman. Before this time, owing chiefly to her friendship with Descartes, by which she is probably now chiefly remembered, Elizabeth’s mental horizon had unmistakably widened; and, though she retained to the last a sincere piety and (a trace or so of pride of birth apart) a touching modesty of spirit, her growing familiarity with broader philosophical principles gradually freed her from some of the narrowing influences of Calvinism. Descartes’ intimacy with the Princess Palatine, against whose family he had, curiously enough, in former days borne arms in Bohemia, was during her absence from the Hague maintained by an exchange of letters between them, of which the artless Sophia contrived the conveyance.[37] Although the relations between the great thinker and his matchless pupil were not in the least of a kind to suggest clandestine methods, Elizabeth was not, like Queen Christina, independent of control; and Sophia’s services in screening the correspondence from her mother’s unsympathetic notice, while they earned her the gratitude of the first philosopher with whom she was brought into personal relations, show that, notwithstanding her raillery and ridicule of her eldest sister’s moments of distraction, kindly feelings prevailed between them. Elizabeth’s refined beauty, though it was hardly in reference to this that her sisters nicknamed her _la Grecque_, is described by Sophia in her _Memoirs_ very vividly, but not without an admixture of spite.

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Footnote 36:

This was at the time (1636) when Charles I was very active in his
negotiations on behalf of the Palatine House, sending Lord Arundel on
a special mission to Vienna, projecting an alliance with the
States-General and France, and scheming the Polish match mentioned in
the text. Everything failed.

Footnote 37: