Chapter C: Note on the Religious Situation in Scotland, as It 550 (3)

The correspondence of the Princess Elizabeth and Descartes extends
over the years 1643 to 1649. Comte Foucher de Careil, after publishing
his _Descartes et la Princesse Palatine_ in 1862, was enabled to
supplement the letters of Descartes by those of the Princess in a
second volume, published in 1879. A most interesting summary is
furnished by V. de Swarte’s attractive _Descartes Directeur Spirituel:
Correspondance avec la Princesse Palatine et la Reine Cristine de
Suède_ (Paris, 1904).

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The second of the sisterhood, Louisa Hollandina, is stated by Sophia not to have been so beautiful in the days of the Hague and Rheenen as Elizabeth, but, as it seemed to the young critic, of a more pleasing disposition. ‘She applied herself entirely to painting, and her love of this art was so strong, that she made likenesses of people without having ever cast her eyes upon them.’ This master-passion possessed her to the last, although, perhaps, it was only when Honthorst touched up her pictures that they did full justice to his teaching. Some of her handiwork is to be found in the galleries containing portraits of her family; an Annunciation was painted by her at the age of seventy-three, and several other pictures from her hands were bestowed by her upon the parish churches in the vicinity of Maubuisson during the period of her rule there as an Abbess. In her younger days, as we learn from the observant Sophia, Louisa Hollandina, while intent upon painting the portraits of her friends and acquaintances, was too neglectful of her own personal appearance. On the other hand, it seems wholly unjust to infer from the ripple of unaffected gaiety which overspread the calm of her maturer years, that her nature was essentially frivolous. While her life, as we shall see, was one of piety and unselfishness, we may conclude her to have possessed in her youth what she preserved in her old age—much of her youngest sister’s intellectual alertness and vivacity, and perhaps also something of her humorous turn of mind, without attaining to the depth of thought, any more than she had passed through the intellectual training, that distinguished their elder, Elizabeth.

Of Sophia’s third sister, the Princess Henrietta Maria (so named after Charles I’s charming but ill-starred Queen), a portrait is drawn in the _Memoirs_ hardly less attractive than that which pictures her on canvas. But of the younger Henrietta Maria’s disposition and character nothing is recorded, except that she cared only for needlework and preserves, by which latter taste of her sister’s Sophia declares herself to have been the principal gainer. She must, however, have had her share of the delightful vivacity which marked her sisters Louisa Hollandina and Sophia—for the Queen of Bohemia was afterwards vividly reminded of her ways by the irresistible _espièglerie_ of the little Elizabeth Charlotte. Largely through the match-making activity and Protestant sympathies of her sister Elizabeth, a marriage was, in 1651, brought about between Henrietta Maria and Prince Sigismund, a younger son of Prince George I of Transylvania, who had died in 1648, after carrying his throne and country safe through eighteen years of peril, first as the ally of Sweden and France, and then under Turkish pressure in friendly relations with Austria. But she died a few months after her outlandish marriage, and was soon followed to the grave by her husband, who did not live to witness the troubles which in the end overwhelmed his brother, the reigning Prince George II.

Such were the brothers and sisters who were the objects of Sophia’s unstinted affection in the youthful years of which she has drawn so pleasant a picture and which to her were beyond all doubt the happiest of her life. Nor has she refrained from drawing her own portrait as a young girl, with light-brown hair naturally falling into curls, of gay and unembarrassed manners, of a well-shaped but not very tall figure, and with the bearing of a princess. Like most of her family, and especially like her favourite brother Charles Lewis, whom their mother the Queen had been wont to call her ‘little black baby,’ she had the complexion of a _brunette_. Even more than by their royal mien and handsome features, these Palatines were distinguished among other men and women by the _vis vivida_ with which they were hereditarily endowed. Although, however, to their mother display was second nature, and although during her residence in the United Provinces she was in the long run most fortunate in the bounty, interested or other, of her hosts, yet the time came when she could not keep more than the ghost of a Court, and as a matter of fact frequently found herself in sore straits. In 1645 one of her sons describes her Court as worried by rats and mice, but most of all by creditors. And Sophia, who was still young enough to find even financial difficulties good fun, writes that her mother’s banquets were more sumptuous than Cleopatra’s, since in order to provide them she had sacrificed not only pearls but diamonds. Yet even the poorest of royal exiles are rarely left without hangers-on, moved by the remembrance of past kindness or by the expectation of favours to come; and such Court followers as ‘Tom Killigrew,’[38] ‘the elder,’ as he is usually called, and the ‘reverent Dick Harding,’ of whom she often makes humorous mention in her letters, appear to have clung to the Queen’s skirts till the end of her exile was at hand. But she and her family had other friends, or at least one other friend, Lord Craven, whose attachment and devotion were of the sort that gives rather than takes, so much so that one can hardly imagine how but for him she would have tided over her troubles. Of little body, but with a soul full of generosity, he had gone forth in 1631 to serve under the Swedish deliverer; and very soon he had begun to identify himself with the cause of Elizabeth, and to lay at her feet what he had saved of the great fortune bequeathed to him by his father, the Lord Mayor of London.[39] It has been seen how his sword had been drawn and his treasure spent in the futile raid upon the Palatinate; and now he was back at the Hague paying the homage of his service to the unfortunate Queen. But Lord Craven, though at the time little more than forty years of age and destined to outlive by some thirty-five the loved Queen of whom an unauthenticated tradition persists in asserting him to have finally become the clandestine husband, seemed to Sophia’s disrespectful young eyes merely a kind old gentleman with a purse full of money, and with a quantity of little trinkets to bestow upon the young folk. She appears not to have thought him quite so brilliant a member of society as it was his wish to be, although among other things which she heard him say purely for the sake of effect was the assertion that, when he chose, it was in his power to think of nothing at all. Perhaps she shrewdly suspected the _vieux milord_, as she calls him, of a tender sentiment for her mother; perhaps she could not help looking down upon him as, with all his munificence, a new man; for the Palatines were as proud as they were poor.

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Footnote 38:

‘Tom Killigrew is here, who makes a rare relation of the Queen of
Sweden.’ (Elizabeth to Sir Edward Nicholas, in Evelyn’s _Diary and
Correspondence_, Vol. iv. p. 216.) Not long afterwards, in January,
1655, moved perhaps by the remembrance of the sport made by him of
Christina, she makes a humble suit on his behalf to her royal nephew.
As late as 1705 Sophia (then Electress Dowager) is found speaking with
scant respect of this ancient and faithful, but somewhat volatile,
Cornish family, the remembrance of whom still survives at Falmouth.
‘Tom Killigrew’s’ son Robert was anxious to commend himself to the
favour of the Electress; but she left it to her ‘posterity’ to attend
to his claims. (_Briefe an Hannoverische Diplomaten_, p. 195.)

Footnote 39:

The Earl of Craven took his title from the deanery of that name in
Yorkshire, of which his father (Sir William Craven) was a native. See
D. Whitaker, _History and Antiquities of the Deanery of Craven_, 3rd
edn., by A. W. Mount, Leeds and London, 1878.

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Of their pride—or at least of that of some of the members of the family—a lurid illustration is to be found in an episode of the year 1646 which, tragical in its results, went far towards creating a permanent breach between the Queen of Bohemia and some of her children. Colonel de L’Épinay, formerly a favourite of the Duke of Orleans, had brought with him from France to the Hague the reputation of an _homme à bonnes fortunes_ or lady-killer, something in the style of the Königsmarck to be mentioned on a later page of this biography. He had gained a footing at the Queen of Bohemia’s Court, where probably no very rigorous rules were observed as to affairs of gallantry; and here rumour was once more busy with his supposed triumphs. The Queen of Bohemia herself was said—it does not appear on what authority, but the laws of evidence are not much studied in schools for scandal—to have looked on him with favour. Her daughter Louisa Hollandina was, so far as we know, only connected with de L’Épinay through the malicious pen of Madame de Longueville, who, on her return from a visit to Holland, declared that, after casting eyes on the Princess, she no longer thought that anyone would envy him his crown of martyrdom. In any case, the pride of Prince Philip, who may have known something in France about the earlier adventures of this squire of dames, had taken umbrage at his actual or rumoured proceedings at the Hague. A quarrel ensued between the Prince and de L’Épinay; of which the end was that one evening in June, Prince Philip, returning home late with a single companion, was assaulted by two Frenchmen, and that, while defending himself against them, he recognised de L’Épinay as one of his assailants, and called out his name. De L’Épinay took to flight; but meeting him on the following day in the market-place, Philip rushed upon him and engaged him in a hand-to-hand struggle. In this de L’Épinay lost his life. The deed, possibly for more reasons than one, roused the anger of the Queen of Bohemia against her son Philip; he fled from Holland, and, though Charles Lewis pleaded for him with his mother, she never seems to have been reconciled to him. He was one of the most luckless of the brotherhood. On his leaving Paris, his eldest brother had sought to obtain employment for him under the English Parliament; but the attempt, doubtless made with the view of strengthening Charles Lewis’ own interest in that quarter, proved futile, and the unfortunate Philip was left to his own devices. In 1649, we find him in the company of Charles Lewis (who seems to have had a special kindness for him), on the occasion of the entry of the Elector into the capital town of his diminished patrimony. Philip met with his death in the battle of Rethel in 1650, fighting among the French royalists against Turenne and the Spaniards. On the occasion of the killing of de L’Épinay the Princess Elizabeth appears to have taken her brother Philip’s side; indeed, according to one version of the matter, it was she who had instigated him to commit the fatal deed. In any case, she in 1646 absented herself from her mother’s Court and the Low Countries for more than a year; and, though she seems afterwards to have returned thither for a time and certainly to have been again on good terms with the Queen, her life was henceforth generally led apart from her mother. No deeper sympathy can at any time have existed between them. Princess Louisa Hollandina remained at her mother’s Court for eleven years after the de L’Épinay affair, leading, it is stated, an exemplary life, and gradually falling more and more under the dominion of religious ideas very far removed from the sphere of those which came home to her sister Elizabeth.

Not very long after Sophia’s introduction to her mother’s Court a succession of English visitors were attracted to it, whom the troubles that had broken out on this side of the sea had driven across.[40] In 1642 came Queen Henrietta Maria, to ask assistance from the States-General for King Charles I, and bringing with her the Princess Royal, Mary, the youthful wife of the heir of the House of Orange, upon whom was afterwards to be thrust so important a part in the affairs of her adopted country. By discovering in Sophia a slight resemblance to her own daughter, Madame, Henrietta Maria gratified the authoress of the _Memoirs_ so sincerely as to induce her to revise her first criticism of the little Queen of England’s charms. More direct compliments were before long paid to Sophia by some of the English lords and gentlemen; and, as time went on, the English residents at the Hague began to speculate very eagerly upon her chances of securing the hand of no less a personage than her cousin the Prince of Wales, who at the time of his father’s confinement in the Isle of Wight (which she spells _Weit_) was about to seek a refuge in Holland. But this scheme, or rumour of a scheme, was strongly resented by the Princess of Orange (Amalia von Solms), whose soaring ambition was intent upon gaining the valuable but not very easily negotiable prize for one of her own daughters. While to Mary, the future Princess of Orange, the Queen of Bohemia’s heart seems to have opened with a warmth of feeling which she was not in the habit of manifesting towards her own daughters, a very different sentiment had come to animate her towards Prince Frederick Henry’s consort. Upon the favour of her former dependant, who aspired to be in everything but name a Queen, Elizabeth now herself in a sense depended. We cannot, therefore, place implicit trust in the account of the intrigue the _Memoirs_ state to have been set on foot by Amalia. If the back-stairs information received by Sophia was correct, the Princess of Orange sought to ruin her young kinswoman’s reputation by causing an unmarried son of her own to compromise her by his advances. Though this trick fell through, yet, when the Prince of Wales had reached the Hague in 1648, it soon became evident to the Queen of Bohemia and her daughter that there would not and could not for the present be on his part any question of marriage.

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Footnote 40:

One of the members of the Queen of Bohemia’s Court in Holland was
James Harrington, the author of _Oceana_, a relative of her former
guardian, Lord Harington. He had just left Oxford, and afterwards took
service under Lord Craven.

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Charles remained in Holland after to him, in his turn, a barren royal title had accrued. When the terrible news of the execution of King Charles I arrived in Holland, it came home with the utmost poignancy to his sister and her family. The younger Elizabeth in particular was almost overwhelmed, physically and mentally, by the catastrophe; and for once the philosophical reflexions of Descartes, which certainly fell short of the occasion, afforded her little or no comfort. The time had of course long passed when any service could be rendered to the Palatine family by the King to whose good offices it had of old looked forward so hopefully; and, in this very year 1648, after two years of weary negotiations, which had almost taken the heart out of the efforts of Charles Lewis and his agents, the Peace of Westphalia had at last restored to him part of his patrimony, with the dignity of Elector. The Lower Palatinate with the fair town of Heidelberg was his once more; but the Upper remained with Bavaria, whose Duke retained the first temporal Electorate, while to the Elector Palatine fell only a newly created eighth. Alike for the Palatine House, and for the Electorate recovered by it, the conditions of the Peace were full of disappointment and humiliation; but the worst, at all events, had not happened, when there was some danger of its happening; and Descartes could impress upon his friend and pupil the expediency of her brother’s accepting the half-loaf which Fate had bestowed upon him.

In the meantime, the thoughts of Sophia—and perhaps not hers alone in the family—were still turned chiefly in a different direction. When the most enterprising of the followers of ‘King Charles II,’ the gallant Montrose, early in 1650 started for Scotland with a royal commission, he had, Sophia tells us, resolved on demanding from the King, should the enterprise prove successful, the hand of her sister Louisa Hollandina. Sophia’s own chances of securing her royal cousin’s hand still formed a subject of speculation; and, on his return from France in 1650, the Princess of Orange still thought it worth while to influence the Presbyterian leaders among the King’s suite (Hamilton and Lauderdale) against Sophia, on the ground that she was a bad Presbyterian and in the habit of accompanying his Majesty to Common Prayer. Sophia was with her mother at Breda, when Charles agreed to take the Covenant. This, she writes, was not the only weakness she observed in him. From the first he had shown her pleasant cousinly attentions; but of a sudden, at the instigation of certain of his followers who had designs upon Lord Craven’s purse and took this roundabout way of seeking to open its strings, these attentions developed rather alarmingly. After some extravagant compliments to her charms, which he pronounced superior to those of ‘Mistress Berlo’ (a misspelt _alias_ of Lucy Waters), he informed Sophia that he hoped to see her in England. But, with the same circumspection in dangerous situations which she displayed in later years, she preserved her name free from taint on the occasion of this trying adventure. She had, as she says, wit enough to perceive that this was not the way in which the marriages of great princes are made, more especially as at Breda she noticed that ‘the King,’ who had previously sought opportunities of conversing with her, avoided them in the presence of the Scottish Commissioners. Thus she in her turn sagaciously contrived to keep out of his way; and this first brief vision of an English throne, which had probably excited those around her more than it had moved herself, came to an end. ‘King Charles II’ passed out of the horizon of Sophia’s hopes and calculations; and, when afterwards he returned to Holland, his prospects were much darker, and she was no longer resident at her mother’s court.

It could hardly be but that this episode, although it had touched neither her honour nor her heart, should have made Sophia all the more ready to quit her mother’s court, in which of late years new troubles had begun to add themselves to old sorrows, and which was now no longer the centre of the life of the Palatine family. In 1650 she was evidently rather tired and out of harmony with a sphere of existence in which at the outset she had taken so much pleasure; and this not so much for any special reason as because it was gradually borne in upon her that ‘her joy could not endure there.’ Thus it was settled between her and two ladies in her particular confidence, whom she calls the Ladies Carray (Carr?) and Withypol (the latter is mentioned under the name of ‘fraw Wittepole’ as residing in Heidelberg Castle in 1658), and the good Lord Craven, that she should try a change of scene and life by starting in their company to pay a visit to her brother, the restored Elector Palatine, at Heidelberg. At first her mother the Queen objected, still clinging to the fancy of a match between her youngest daughter and the head of the House of Stewart. At last, however, she acquiesced on being assured that this consummation would not be prevented by the proposed journey; and so, borrowing a vessel from the friendly States of Holland, Sophia, who was now in her twentieth year, and whose travels had hitherto not extended beyond an occasional jaunt to Leyden, Delft, or Rheenen, in the summer of 1650 set forth on her voyage up the Rhine towards Heidelberg and the unknown.

II

EARLY WOMANHOOD AND MARRIAGE
(HEIDELBERG, 1650-1658)

A home, to which Elizabeth of Bohemia was fated never to return, was opened to her daughter Sophia. For eight years—from 1650 to 1658—she was the guest of her beloved brother Charles Lewis in that part of the Palatinate which had been at last restored to the family in his person. To these congenial surroundings she easily acclimatised herself; nor did she ever afterwards forget how, before her destiny at last bore her away from Heidelberg and its familiar neighbourhood, the interests of her maiden life had long centred in the affairs of her brother, in his troubles both public and private, and in his children, for whom her large heart never ceased to cherish a peculiar tenderness, even after the welfare of her own numerous family had become the chief anxiety of her existence. She was not at first aware that her departure from Holland had been against her mother’s wish—a fact which she discreetly passes over in her _Memoirs_.[41] After telling of her leisurely journey along the route formerly followed by her parents on their wedding journey home, she graphically describes the forlorn poverty which stared her in the face, when she first entered her brother’s shrunken dominions. He and his Electress met her at Mannheim and took her on with them to Heidelberg, where the castle still lay in ruins, and they had to lodge in the town.

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Footnote 41:

Charles Lewis wrote to his mother in much trouble on the subject, only
eliciting the reply that ‘as for Sophia’s journey, I will never keep
anie that has a minde to leave me, for I shall never care for anie
bodies companie that does not care for mine.’ _Letters_, &c., ed. A.
Wendland, p. 9.

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In truth, the Lower Palatinate had barely begun to recover from the tribulations which it had undergone both in the earlier and in the later periods of the Thirty Years’ War; and the population was literally the merest fragment of what it had been before the outbreak of the conflict—one-fiftieth part of it, according to a calculation which it seems almost impossible to accept. Moreover, Charles Lewis only gradually recovered possession even of the moiety of his patrimony allotted to him, nor was it till 1652 that the last Spaniard quitted the land. It is all the more to the honour of this Prince, and in a measure atones for the grievous aberrations of his private life, that after his restoration he should have held his head high in the Electoral College, to which, as his father’s son, he had been so grudgingly readmitted; and still more, that during the whole of his rule—which lasted till 1680—he should have spared neither thought nor effort for the welfare of his sorely tried subjects.

It was not his fault that, while engaged in these beneficent labours, he had again and again to turn the pruning-hook back into a sword.[42] In 1666, he maintained a brave heart through his weary campaigning against French and Lorrainers, although he met with little luck under arms and suffered severely in health. Five years later, he sacrificed the happiness of his daughter Elizabeth Charlotte by yielding to the French demand for her hand, and went near to sacrificing his honour by allowing her, against her own wish or disposition, to be converted to the Church of Rome. When, in 1674, the first of the wars between the Empire and France broke out, Charles Lewis may have indulged in some passing dreams of an Austrasian kingdom under French supremacy; as a matter of fact, he found that neither the Orleans marriage nor his exertions to remain neutral protected his unhappy lands from invasion and its attendant horrors. Things went better when, in 1675, he had thrown in his lot with the Empire; for there can have been no truth in the rumours which made themselves heard in the city of gossip, Venice, that his father’s son was aiming at the Bohemian Crown. The troubles of the Palatinate recommenced when, in 1679-80, the French added to pretended reprisals the monstrous mockery of the so-called _réunions_; but of these Charles Lewis only survived to see the beginnings, and he was spared the bitterness of witnessing the devastation of his beloved Palatinate in the so-called Orleans War, of which his own daughter’s supposed claims were, to her unspeakable anguish, made the pretext. For the rest, the Elector Charles Lewis was a genuine son of the Palatinate, to which he devoted so much care and labour; he loved its good things, including the Bacharach wine, whose praises he sang in homely dithyrambs, and the wealth of choice fruit, mindful of which he denounced the sour pears and bullet grapes outside his own promised land. Like his daughter after him, he was nowhere so happy as in the midst of it, and his very diction is coloured with a proverbial phraseology of native Palatinate growth. As late as 1665, he is found declaring that if ten years more of life were granted him, and no war or pestilence came in the way, he would, _en despit de l’envie_, turn Mannheim into a second Rome. Nor were his thoughts only set upon material things; whether justly or not, he was regarded as one of the most learned princes of his age; he was consistently anxious to revive the prosperity of the University of Heidelberg, and had nearly crowned his efforts on its behalf by securing Spinoza as one of its teachers. The education of his own children was to him a subject of anxious and minute care.[43] In his youth, the evil times on which Charles Lewis had fallen had (it is not uncharitable to assume) taught him to dissimulate; but in his later years he had retained little of the Puritan associations of his earlier manhood except a love of the Bible and a hatred of Rome, and of priests and priestcraft in general. He was, in short, a most liberal-minded and tolerant Prince, who found satisfaction in the _Imitatio Christi_ as well as in the New Testament, who would gladly have made his Palatinate a refuge for persecuted adherents of any religious creed, and whose dedication, not long before his death, of a church (at Mannheim) to _Sancta Concordia_ was far from being an empty pretence. He had, moreover, inherited his mother’s taste for poetry, and during his sojourn in England had acquired considerable familiarity with its literature, and its drama in particular. In a way it brings Sophia herself nearer to us that her favourite brother freely quoted Shakespeare, that a version by him of Ben Jonson’s _Sejanus_ was acted at Heidelberg, and that he was so sturdy a critic as to pronounce the Spanish drama superior to the French, but the English best of all.

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Footnote 42:

The celebrated _Wildfangsstreit_, which was carried on by Charles
Lewis in the years 1665 and 1666, is passed by in the text, where few
readers would probably care to find it discussed. This strange dispute
turned on the rights of the Electors Palatine over bastards and aliens
(_Wilden_) in their own and _adjoining_ territories, and troubles
which had thence arisen between Charles Lewis and his neighbours, in
which the Great Elector of Brandenburg was involved through his
alliance of May, 1661, with the Elector Palatine. The Great Elector’s
efforts brought about a settlement on the whole favourable to his
ally. (See _Urkunden und Aktenstücke zur Gesch. d. Grossen Kurfürsten
Friedrich Wilhelm von Brandenburg_, Vol. xi. (_Polit. Verhandl._ Vol.
vii.). Ed. F. Hirsch, Berlin, 1887).

Footnote 43:

He drew up elaborate instructions for the tutors and governesses of
the Electoral Prince Charles and Princess Elizabeth Charlotte. One of
the former was Ezechiel Spanheim, who had accompanied his father, a
rigid Calvinist, when the latter had been summoned to Leyden by
Elizabeth and the States-General. Ezechiel was himself called from
Geneva in 1656 to Heidelberg, where he afterwards passed from theology
to diplomacy. It was in the Brandenburg service, which he had entered
in 1680, that he was accredited to the English Court, of which he
wrote an _Account_ (1706). He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

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But, heavy as were the burdens laid upon the head of the Palatine House after Charles Lewis’ partial restoration, the troubles that came nearest home to him, and that in the end infected the whole atmosphere of his court, were of his own making. He cannot be held accountable for the financial difficulties which obliged him to discourage his mother’s desire to return to the Palatinate; and, even before the troubles in question broke out, more general considerations may have rendered him the reverse of eager for her presence. His policy was to bury the past, which she in a sense typified; and he may have feared her extravagant ways, and thus preferred to lighten her expenditure by inviting his sisters Elizabeth and Sophia to his capital. His offer of some rooms in the _Ottheinrichsbau_ of Heidelberg Castle, which he could not afford to furnish, failed to attract, and the hope which she had cherished, that she might end her days in her own good dowry town of Frankenthal, it was not in his power to fulfil. Meanwhile, the compensation for the temporary occupation of the place by the Spaniards, which had been promised in the Nürnberg settlement of 1651, supplementary to the Peace of Westphalia, remained unpaid by the Emperor. Charles Lewis, who had in the first instance to think of his Electorate and its defences, was without resources enabling him to respond to his mother’s requirements; and the recriminations which followed on her part left the situation unaltered. Even before mother and son had been at odds on this subject, there was a dispute between them as to various heirlooms at the Hague and at Rheenen, which she refused to give up to him as he demanded. In short, their correspondence had reached a most painful stage, and it is pitiful to read the description of the sore straits to which she found herself reduced, just when the cloud seemed to be at last lifting from the fortunes of their House. She was, she wrote, entirely dependent upon the monthly allowance of the States-General; it amounted only to a thousand florins, and was not made for more than a single year, and she had only accepted it as a _pis aller_ when she found it out of the question that her claims on payments from England should be made part of the Anglo-Dutch treaty concluded in 1654. As a matter of fact, her case was a very hard one; for her creditors had never been so pressing as now, when there seemed a chance of payment; the very heirs of the faithful Ludwig Camerarius demanded the redemption of a favourite jewel which she had pawned to them; all her children were in debt like herself, from the high-minded Elizabeth to the volatile Edward; and it is touching to find her entreating a loan of a thousand pounds for the purpose, because the jewel ‘was my brother Prince Henry’s.’ At an earlier date, Charles Lewis had suggested to an agent that it would be desirable for her to approach Cromwell as to the relief of her creditors, but was told in reply that she would certainly never do this, ‘but only break into passion against those that should give such advice.’ So matters went on till other reasons came to a head which made the Elector undesirous of receiving her at his Court; and his seeming ingratitude infused another drop of bitterness in her cup.

The quarrel between Charles Lewis and his brother Rupert, which became mixed up with the cardinal trouble of the elder brother’s later years, and caused great sorrow to their mother, had its origin in the financial difficulties which beset them all. In 1653, the Elector had settled a modest allowance on his brother Edward, and in 1654 he made a similar arrangement with Rupert, who on his arrival in Paris had entered into negotiations on the subject through the Palatine envoy, Pawel von Rammingen. Rupert was to be allowed 2,500 dollars _per annum_, to rise after five years to 4,000, while the Emperor agreed to pay him a substantial sum under the Nürnberg settlement. But Rupert could not sit down contented with this compact, and, quite in the spirit still prevailing in many of the princely Houses of Germany, demanded a share of the Palatinate territory as his younger brother’s portion. Charles Lewis at first dallied with the proposal, which, however, could not be to his mind, more especially as he had no wish for introducing into his Electorate the permanent influence of so martial and combative a spirit as his brother’s. Rupert, however, insisted on his demand, and in 1656, after refusing to receive any further payments of his allowance, asked for an immediate interview. The Elector having declined to receive him at Heidelberg, but offered to meet him at Neustadt, and in the meantime to increase his allowance, the fiery Prince repaired uninvited to the capital, and, having been refused admittance to the castle by the colonel in command, swore an angry oath that he would never return to the Palatinate, and passed on to Mainz. Here he proceeded to lay his grievances before the Arch-Chancellor of the Empire, and then offered his sword to the Emperor. But, though he seems to have actually entered into the Imperial service, he found its atmosphere uncongenial, and, when in 1661 he made another attempt to obtain a high command (in the Turkish War) and at the same time to obtain payment of the sums promised him under the Nürnberg settlement, he was unsuccessful. This failure he ascribed to the intrigues of his brother the Elector, and he now settled down after a fashion in England, whither he had betaken himself on the Restoration. Though it was not till later that the brothers were again on good terms, the dispute between them was settled in 1670, when the arrangement of 1654 was put into force again, Rupert’s allowance being, however, raised from 4,000 to 6,000 dollars, the balance of the Nürnberg compensation paid over, and the Rheenen property being given up to him—an old notion of his mother’s, which he had formerly rejected.[44]

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Footnote 44:

In 1655 she writes to Charles Lewis that she had sent him all that she
could spare in the house there, and entreats him at the same time to
dismiss the concierge, ‘for he is the veriest beast in the world and
knave besides.’ See _Letters_, &c., ed. A. Wendland, p. 67.—I have
revised my account of the dispute between Charles Lewis and Rupert
with the aid of K. Hauck, _Karl Ludwig, Kurfürst von der Pfalz_, pp.
251 _sqq._

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At the time when Charles Lewis’ quarrel with Rupert broke out, the elder brother was in the midst of a difficulty which, unlike those just described, was essentially of his own making. Of this trouble Sophia’s quick wit had, already on arrival at Mannheim, and first meeting with her brother the Elector and his bride, detected the germs. She had perceived at once that all was not well between the pair. While her brother met her with his usual geniality of manner, the Electress, whose mien was _fort dolente_, said very little. When the party proceeded to Heidelberg, where Sophia had the satisfaction of seating herself in the best-appointed carriage on which she had cast eyes since her departure from the Hague, she found that her praise of this vehicle gave offence to her sister-in-law, to whom it had been presented as her wedding-coach, and in whose opinion it was vastly inferior to one presented to her sister for her marriage with the Prince of Tarento. This afflicting comparison was, however, only the first and slightest clause in her long litany of grievances.

Charlotte Elizabeth, daughter of Landgrave William V of Hesse-Cassel, and his wife, Amalia Elizabeth, seemed marked out by descent as a most fitting consort for the restored Elector Palatine. Her grandfather, Landgrave Maurice, had in his day been one of the foremost representatives of militant Calvinism, and at once the boldest and the most steadfast of all the Princes of the Union. Her mother, the Landgravine Amalia, deserves lasting remembrance as one of the most remarkable Princesses of her age, by whose exertions Hesse-Cassel was preserved from ruin in the Thirty Years’ War, and to whom more than to anyone German Calvinism owed the rights of parity at last secured to it in the Peace of Westphalia. But her married life with the Elector Charles Lewis, which began in February, 1650, proved a singularly unhappy one; nor can there be any pretence but that she was made to suffer grievous and intolerable wrong. It is at the same time undeniable that the aggravating elements in her character—to Sophia’s critical eye there seemed to be such even in her beauty—contributed to the beginning of the end. Sophia rapidly arrived at her own conclusions as to the intellectual capacity of her sister-in-law—what with her love of dress and her stories of Duke Frederick of Würtemberg-Neustadt, not to mention the Brunswick-Lüneburg Dukes, George William and Ernest Augustus, and several other admirers, to whom she had been forced by her mother to prefer her present jealous ‘old’ husband. In his turn, Charles Lewis, although he far too demonstratively adored his handsome wife, confessed that there were defects in her education, which he entreated his shrewd youngest sister to correct. Very soon, however, Sophia perceived that the comedy was taking a serious turn. The quarrel between the pair began with an outburst of jealousy on the part of the Elector, followed, in more violent fashion, by another from the Electress. Charles Lewis hereupon became violently estranged from his consort; and his aversion was deepened by a passion which he conceived for one of his wife’s maids-of-honour, Baroness Louisa von Degenfeld. Perhaps this more decorous Anne Boleyn was rendered all the more attractive in his eyes by her literary turn of mind, if we may judge from their initial correspondence under names borrowed from an Italian novel,[45] and from the liking which she afterwards showed for such classics as Lucian, Corneille, and Molière. For some years or so, however, the husband and wife rubbed on together, two children being born to them. The elder, born 1651, was Charles, afterwards Elector Palatine, the last of the Simmern line, who died less than five years after his father (1685); had he survived, he must of course have stood before Sophia in the English Succession. In most respects he had little character of his own, perhaps partly because he had been over-educated; but he was a devout Calvinist, and would probably have remained such had it been his fate to mount the throne to which, in earlier times, some of the English Parliamentary politicians may have thought of raising his father. The younger of the two children, born 1652, was Elizabeth Charlotte, the _Liselotte_ of her father’s affections and of those of her aunt Sophia, by whom she was partly brought up, and a darling of whose later years she became.

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Footnote 45:

This was quite in the style of the age, which loved the mystifications
of pseudonyms, and of ciphers without much concealment. Elizabeth
mentions that her daughter Sophia writes to her about Berenice’s
business (Sophia’s own), and that they are discussing it with
Tiribazus (Charles Lewis). _Letters_, &c., p. 91.

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For a time the Elector contrived to conceal his amour from his wife; but, in 1657, a letter addressed by Prince Rupert to the Elector’s mistress, by whose beauty and wit he seems to have been attracted on a previous visit, having fallen into the hands of the Electress, and the quarrel between the brothers having probably contributed to exacerbate matters, there was an end of the secret. Put on the track of her husband’s infidelity, the Electress ruthlessly ran him and his mistress to earth; and the result was a public scandal without an equal in the domestic annals of this anything but shamefaced age. The Elector having at last withdrawn from Heidelberg with Louisa von Degenfeld, whom he in the first instance settled with many precautions at Schwetzingen, there ensued a long and disgraceful series of proceedings which, to the unfortunate Electress, must have recalled a notorious episode of her native Hessian history in the days of Landgrave Philip the ‘Magnanimous.’ Salving his conscience as best he might with the obsequious assistance of his court divines, Charles Lewis, early in 1658, married Louisa von Degenfeld as his second wife. He had previously conferred upon her the ancient title of Raugravine Palatine, with a provision that a corresponding titulature was to be transmitted to their issue. From this abnormal union, which lasted till Louisa’s decease, twenty years afterwards, there sprang not less than fourteen children, of whom eight survived their mother. The marriage—if marriage it may be called[46]—supplied him with the felicities of a tranquil home, though for some time he had to keep watch over it with an anxious care, of which the humorous aspect escaped him, against the evil designs imputed by him to ‘X,’ his repudiated wife, and though her Hessian relations long endeavoured to assert her rights. Latterly the ‘second wife’ seems chiefly to have resided with her children at Frankenthal, where the proud Queen of Bohemia had hoped to find repose for her last years. The correspondence between Charles Lewis and Louisa shows him to have been entirely faithful to her, and to have passionately loved his children. But, though his fidelity to his chosen companion was unswerving, the relations between them were disturbed by occasional dissensions. On her death he put forth, together with an account of her Christian ending drawn up by the divine whom he had originally consulted as to his ‘second marriage’ (Hiskias Eleazar Heiland), an elaborate analytical statement of her virtues and shortcomings during their union, for which, with a conscientiousness showing that there was still a drop of Calvinistic blood in his veins, he had himself contributed the most important materials. For his children, the surviving Raugraves and Raugravines, he had intended to make ample provision, but had perplexed himself so much about its conditions, that his legitimate son and successor, the Elector Charles, declared all his father’s arrangements on the subject invalid. Several of the sons afterwards distinguished themselves in the field. Charles Maurice, who was till his death in 1702 a familiar figure at Hanover, and who is the Trimalchio of the banquet ‘after the manner of the ancients’ described in Leibniz’s correspondence with Sophia, drank away his remarkable intellectual powers. But the children of Louisa von Degenfeld were treated kindly by the Dowager Electress Charlotte, and Sophia took them one and all to her heart, more especially the two sisters Louisa and Amalia, ‘_les deux sibylles de Francfort_.’ Louisa was in later years at Hanover appointed Mistress of the Robes; and it is said that there was at one time some intention of entrusting her with a confidential mission to England in connexion with the Succession question.

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Footnote 46:

It is, Elizabeth plainly told her son, ‘both against God’s law and
man’s law.’ _Letters_, &c., p. 92.

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After the death, in 1677, of Louisa von Degenfeld, Charles Lewis, having in the first instance (with Sophia’s approval) taken to himself a mistress, was desirous of inducing the Electress to consent to a divorce, which would have enabled him by a ‘third’ marriage to seek to secure the Succession of his (the Simmern) line, resting as it did on the life of his legitimate son Charles only.[47] But Charlotte Elizabeth was not found ready to oblige her erratic husband thus far. Prince Rupert, with whom Charles Lewis had gradually come to be on better terms, had already, in 1675, declined to come to the rescue. The match-making Princess Elizabeth had in vain desired a match between her brother Rupert and her young kinswoman Princess Charlotte Sophia of Courland.[48] That young lady’s aunt, Landgravine Hedwig Sophia of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, opined that nothing would come of the match, especially as Prince Rupert was on the look-out ‘not only for beauty, but for means.’ As a matter of fact, the ardour of Rupert’s aspiring youth had by this time settled down into a sober though still singularly active maturity; moreover, he had formed a connexion so close that it has been suspected to have amounted to a secret marriage, with Francesca Bard, an Irish Roman Catholic lady of good birth, with whom and their child, called ‘Dodley’ (Dudley) by Sophia, the indulgent Palatine family were on friendly terms. But neither this boy nor, of course, Ruperta, Prince Rupert’s daughter by the actress Margaret Hughes, was ever formally acknowledged by him; and thus this brother, too, left no descendant who when the time came, might have forestalled the claims of Sophia and her progeny to the English Succession.

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Footnote 47:

The Queen of Bohemia was very anxious about her grandson, in whose
early days she had recorded with satisfaction that the little Prince
of Orange (William III) was a year older, but considerably smaller in
size.

Footnote 48:

She died at an advanced age as Abbess of Herford.

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Sophia’s own life at Heidelberg, though much clouded by her brother’s domestic troubles, of which more than enough has now been said, and towards which, in its initial stages, she appears to have borne herself with a discretion already habitual to her, was by no means without its agreeable aspects. It had at first been made uncomfortable by the ways of the Electress Charlotte, whose favourite amusements, field sports and the card-table, were not much to Sophia’s personal taste. Still, the life of the Palatine court, though an economy little dreamt of in former days now prevailed there, was not without diversions in which she took pleasure—among them those _Wirthschaften_, a fashionable amusement half-way between a fancy fair and a _bal costumé_, of which the Queen of Bohemia had shared the vogue in Holland. Mention has already been made of Charles Lewis’ familiarity with the literature of the English stage; and the English comedians whom he saw at Frankfort possibly also found their way to Heidelberg. But his sisters had more direct opportunities for keeping up their interest in England and things English, since Charles Lewis seems to have entertained a good many English gentlemen at his capital, where some of them settled down as they have done in later days. Among his English guests was the former Parliamentary General, Sir William Waller, though with the Restoration Charles Lewis became a good Royalist again, and contrived to put himself on good terms with Lord Chancellor Clarendon. We have already seen how Prince Rupert himself was an occasional visitor at Heidelberg, as was his younger brother Edward—though the latter proved so full of ‘_ralierie_’ that Charles Lewis refused to take him to visit the lady whom he wished to be regarded as his wedded wife. Before this, Princess Elizabeth had, in 1648 and again in 1651, arrived as a visitor at the Electoral Court—much changed, as on the latter occasion Sophia and Edward thought, both in outward appearance and in tone of mind, which Sophia expressly attributes to her recent sojourn at Berlin, at the Court of the pious Electress Louisa Henrietta. Perhaps, too, she was saddened by the death of Descartes (1650), and perhaps by a growing estrangement from her mother; in any case, her whole nature was more and more tending towards that contemplative life whose attractiveness for some minds seems so incomprehensible to others. Unfortunately, as Sophia confesses, she was weak enough to join her brother and sister-in-law in rebelling against a certain air of superiority which in their eyes Elizabeth seemed to assume. She warmly interested herself in the Elector’s efforts to give a new life to the University of Heidelberg, where she is said to have acquired a personal reputation by her exposition of the Cartesian philosophy. Sophia’s day for listening to the conversation of philosophers had hardly yet arrived, and she at no time aspired to place herself on what may be called the professorial level. There is no appearance of the two sisters having been permanently alienated from one another; but mutual sympathy could not otherwise than dwindle between one who was preparing to bid farewell to the world, and one who was intent upon establishing her position in it.

The real reason of Sophia’s quitting Holland had been her sense of the uncertainty of her own position there; yet, even had the prospect been wholly agreeable, she could not now look forward to a permanent residence at the strangely distracted Court of her eldest brother. As the solitude of a religious, or of a quasi-religious, life would not have been to her mind (though it was about this time that she sat for her portrait in the costume of a Vestal Virgin), a suitable marriage engagement had, in a word, become a necessity for her. So attractive and high-spirited a princess might fairly expect to find an acceptable husband without having, like her sister Henrietta Maria, to espouse a Transylvanian prince. Unluckily, in the latter part of 1651 or beginning of 1652, Sophia underwent an attack of small-pox, which, as she confesses, seriously impaired her beauty. But she had no mind to take whoever might be the first comer; and not long after her recovery she declined overtures made to her on behalf of the Portuguese Duke of Aveiro; ‘having had thoughts of marrying a King she could not stoop to a subject.’ In much the same mood she about this time broke off an innocent correspondence (on the subject of compositions for the guitar) into which she had entered with a prince with whom she had in her childhood made acquaintance in Holland, and who, when recently passing through Heidelberg on his way to Venice, had seemed to her more charming than ever. This prince, who ‘pleased everybody,’ was no other than her future husband, Duke Ernest Augustus of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Since, however, he was the youngest of four brothers and (as will be seen immediately) without any present prospect whatever of enjoying any territorial dominion of his own, he was clearly not _bon à marier_; and it was best to avoid a kind of gossip of which Sophia had only too vivid an experience.

There appears to have been some talk of other matches for Sophia, and above all of a design of marrying her to a more important personage than the disinherited King of England—the young King of the Romans, who, as such, during the last year of his life bore the designation of Ferdinand IV.[49] It is true that, in 1652, the Elector Charles Lewis had, on the occasion of his being received by the Emperor Ferdinand III within the unconscious walls of Prague, established excellent relations between the Imperial House and himself. But it is difficult to suppose that anything could have come of this scheme, which would have involved as a preliminary transaction the conversion of Sophia to the Church of Rome; and the statement that the young King of the Romans had fallen in love with Sophia, and intended to marry her, rests only on the authority of the Duchess of Orleans. Charles Lewis might, in the interests of the Palatinate, have assented to the match; but Sophia would assuredly have refused it with more determination than was afterwards shown by her niece when the Orleans marriage proposal was pressed upon her. The earlier project, however, came to a speedy end with the death of the young Roman King in 1654.

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Footnote 49:

A match between his grandfather, afterwards Emperor Ferdinand II, and
Sophia’s great-aunt on the mother’s side, Princess Hedwig of Denmark,
had been suggested in 1617.

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