Chapter D: O. M (1)

H. S. E.
Serenissima Princeps et Antistita Herfordiensis
ELISABETH
Electoribus Palatinis et Magnæ Britaniæ Regibus orta
Regii prorsus animi Virgo
Invicta in rebus gerendis prudentia ac dexteritate
Admirabili eruditione atque doctrinâ
Supra sexus et ævi conditionem celeberrima
Regum studiis Principum amicitiis
Doctorum vivorum Literis ac monumentis
Omnium Christianorum gentium linguis ac plausibus
Sed maxime propriâ virtute
Sui nominis immortalitatem adepta.
Nata anno 1618, die 26 Decembris
Denata anno 1680, die 8 Februarii
Vixit annos 61 mensem 1 et dies 16
Rexit annos 12 menses 10 et dies 2.

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Not much is known as to the life of the Princess Louisa Hollandina herself during the years which followed on the occurrence of the de L’Épinay scandal, and which she quietly spent at her mother’s Court in Holland. Nothing seems to have been bruited abroad concerning her except that she was leading an exemplary life, and that she was very intimate with a lady whose name is given as Madame d’Oxsordre, and had frequent conversations with her on the subject of ‘the bases of the Protestant religion.’ In other words, a propagandist influence was steadily at work upon her, and in the end she made up her mind to become a convert to Rome. Conversions to Roman Catholicism were common during the whole of this period, and there can be little doubt but that in this particular transaction her brother Edward and his wife, the Princess Palatine Anne (of Gonzaga), had an important share. In December, 1657, Louisa Hollandina, who had reason enough to fear the maternal wrath should her intention become known, secretly left the Hague at night-time in the habiliments of a maid-servant, and made her way to Antwerp, where, in January, 1658, she abjured Protestantism for the Church of Rome. Her change of confession was not the result of any sudden resolution, but it could not fail to incense as well as grieve her mother, whose wrath, however, fell upon Princess Maria Elizabeth of Hohenzollern-Hechingen, hitherto an intimate of her court. Whether or not a letter from this lady to Princess Louisa Hollandina had finally determined her flight, further letters from the same hand, which appear to have been accompanied, or preceded, by the whisperings of verbal scandal, reflected in no measured terms on the Palatine _ménage_. Elizabeth hereupon insisted on the expulsion of the slanderer from her place of residence, Bergen-op-Zoom, pending further enquiry. The ‘Princess of Zollern’ hereupon entered into a series of further charges, culminating in the suggestion that Louisa had been obliged to fly in order to conceal her shame. The Queen behaved with prudence as well as dignity, counselling her son the Elector to contradict this calumny, but to do so quietly and civilly, without demanding proofs as if he had any doubts on the subject. In December, 1658, or thereabouts, Louisa Hollandina addressed a not undignified letter to her mother, in which she announced her admission into the Church of Rome, which the occasion of the Christmas Communion had made necessary to her conscience, and begged her mother’s pardon for the trouble thus caused to her. About the same time the Princess made her way to Havre, having ascertained that she would be received with open arms by the French Court, which had formerly remained deaf to her mother’s solicitations for support. Immediately after Louisa’s arrival on French soil, she was welcomed by her brother, the Prince Palatine Edward, and conducted by him to the Abbey of Maubuisson, near the river Oise, and almost immediately facing Pontoise, the ancient capital of the Vexin. Edward’s own daughters, Maria Anne and Benedicta, were being educated here, each receiving at the same time a handsome pension out of the Abbey funds. This ancient Benedictine nunnery (originally planted in a wooded part of the country infested by brigands; whence the name _le buisson maudit_) dated from the middle of the thirteenth century, and the favour accorded to it by Queen Blanche, who was buried in the convent after assuming its habit on her deathbed, attracted to it the frequent presence of her son, St. Louis. His example was followed by other sovereigns of France, and the later history of the Abbey is full of interest. But here it must suffice to say that, in the second half of the sixteenth century, the prevalent decay of conventual life in France particularly affected Maubuisson, which had so long been connected with the Court, and lay so near to Paris, and that this corruption became complete under the reckless _régime_ of Angélique d’Estrées, the sister of Henry IV’s Fair Gabrielle, who was herself buried with one of her infants in the Abbey. After her death Henry IV came there no more; but this period of worldly misrule was not ended, till in the next reign Mère Angélique came from Port Royal to reform Maubuisson under the supervision of St. François de Sales, and after a hard struggle effected her purpose. Once more there was a terrible backsliding; but better times returned in 1627 with the choice as Abbess of the worthy Mère des Anges (Marie Suireau) who was really a nominee of Mère Angélique’s, and who brought with her a fresh infusion of religious zeal from Port Royal. Her twenty-three years of conscientious administration once more restored the convent to a well-ordered and pious life. On her return to Port Royal, the worthy abbess of Lieu Dieu became Abbess of Maubuisson, where in the course of her short rule she received Louis XIV; and after her Louisa Hollandina’s immediate predecessor, Catharine d’Orléans, an illegitimate daughter of the Duke de Longueville, against whom nothing remains on record except a series of unfortunate ‘architectural improvements’ in the Abbey church. But these changes have long been obliterated, together with the church itself, which, after at the Revolution the Abbey had been taken over by the nation and sold, was in 1790 blown up by powder. At the present moment the traces of this notable historic monument are described as hardly discernible.

There can be little doubt that, probably owing to the efforts of Louisa Hollandina’s powerful sister-in-law, the French ‘_Princesse Palatine_,’ it had been from the first determined to provide for this interesting princely convert at Maubuisson. No sooner had her foot touched the soil of France than the royal favour of Louis XIV, whose magnanimous hospitality never did things by halves, shone upon her. After her first visit to Maubuisson she was taken to see her aunt, Queen Henrietta Maria, who was at the time residing with the Visitandines at Paris, and who, after vain attempts to convert her sons Charles and James to the Church of Rome, was engaged in a project for obtaining the hand of the young French King for her daughter Henrietta, brought up as a Roman Catholic. Hereupon, Louisa was received at Court, and assigned a liberal pension by the King; and thus she was enabled, on terms befitting her position, to form a definite connexion with the Maubuisson convent. After a noviciate of eighteen months, she took the vows on September 19th, 1660, in the presence of a distinguished assembly, before whom the Bishop of Amiens preached ‘divinely.’ Happily for her peace of mind, the kindness shown her by the French Court had impressed itself upon her mother, for whose forgiveness Queen Henrietta Maria persistently sued. In October, 1659, Elizabeth informed her son Charles Lewis that this intercession had prevailed with her, and that, in obedience to the King and Queen’s commands, she had forgiven ‘Louyse,’ and prayed God also to forgive her, ‘which is all my letter in a few lines.’[56] But Louisa Hollandina was the only one of her mother’s surviving children left without mention in her will.

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Footnote 56:

See _Letters_, &c., ed. A. Wendland, p. 118. These letters at last
throw a full light on this episode of the Palatine family history.

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The long evening—if it should be so called—of Louisa Hollandina’s life, which lasted till 1709, was a peaceful one; but it would be unjust to her, more especially in view of some misconceptions which have arisen on the subject, not to say a word as to the spirit in which she both entered upon this period of her existence, and to which she throughout remained true. Just before she took the vows, she is said to have been warned by one of the Maubuisson sisters, who belonged to a reactionary clique in the convent, desirous of obtaining a mitigation of the severer rule introduced from Port Royal, not to engage herself to observe any standard of discipline in excess of the proposed reduction, for which it was probably hoped to secure the requisite sanction with the aid of an Abbess in so much favour at Court. But she refused point-blank, and, during the few years which she spent at the convent as a simple religious, would not consent to be relieved from any one of the duties incumbent on her. When, in August, 1664, she was, on the death of the Abbess, named as her successor, her first act after accepting the office was to sell part of the silver plate which had been presented to her by the Queen of France in order to defray part of the debt pressing upon the convent. She abolished the practice of former abbesses of keeping up a retinue and footmen of her own, saying that she had abandoned the world on purpose to see no more Courts; and her niece, the Duchess of Orleans, in her humorous manner, describes her as going about the convent and garden all alone and with her skirts tucked up, and giving her orders in an authoritative tone that nobody ventured to disobey. She even—no insignificant sacrifice for a Palatine—ceased to use the arms of her House. This simplicity was partly natural to her, for even before her retirement it had been noted how careless she was as to matters of dress and outward appearance. Partly it was due to a resolute humility of spirit, and a determination to avoid any assumption of superiority on her own part over the sisters of the convent, to which Saint-Simon bears express testimony. She would not seat herself on the throne hitherto occupied by the Abbess in the convent church, and as a fitter object of reverence placed a statue of the Virgin there. On the other hand, she opposed a steadfast resistance to the tendency manifested by some of the nuns towards a relaxation of the conventual discipline; she observed the entire seven months’ fast imposed by the Cistercian rule, until at last she became as thin as a lath; according to the account of her niece she never ate flesh except when ill, and slept on a mattress as hard as stone, with no other furniture in her chamber but a straw-chair; and she rose every midnight for prayer. Beneath her dress she wore an undergarment of hair-cloth. She was careful to obey the rule which, except in special circumstances, prohibited the religious of Maubuisson from leaving the convent, and absented herself from it only thrice in the forty-nine years of her residence. According to the Duchess of Orleans, who spoke on this subject with sympathetic insight, the good Abbess’ tongue was her temptation; and she always chose a deaf sister to live with her in her chamber, so as not to be seduced into conversation.

On the charitable activity of the good Abbess there is less necessity for dwelling, since it accorded with the habits that were natural to her, as well as with her Palatine warmth of heart. In her indefatigable activity she resembled her brother Charles Lewis, to whom in her later years she bore so striking an outward likeness. Idleness of any kind was impossible to her; ‘never,’ writes a contemporary, ‘was she without some virtuous and religious occupation; either she was plying her brush or her needle, or reading or praying.’ To her love of painting, an art which she is said to have practised from her eighth year to past her eightieth, reference has already been made. Though it would not appear that her artistic powers increased in her later years, she utilised them for the decoration not only of the Abbey, but of several churches of the neighbourhood, and even found time to paint pictures for other recipients. Sacred subjects seem to have chiefly occupied her in these days; to the _Cour des Comptes_ at Paris, which had rendered an efficient service to her Abbey, she presented an elaborate pictorial allegory of Justice.[57] During her administration the structural accommodation of the Abbey was considerably enlarged, and, in the centre of it, a handsome fountain was for the first time erected.

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Footnote 57:

In 1871, this picture was consumed in the flames.

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Beneath all the other qualities of Louisa Hollandina and, one is tempted to say, at the root of them, lay that cheerfulness of soul which is a blessing to all who are brought into contact with its happy possessor. The Duchess of Orleans, who had all her aunt’s vivacity of mind, but little of her tranquillity of spirit, refers again and again to the delightfulness of her periodical visits to the dear old lady; and we may well believe that in their intercourse the seasoning of _malice_ (in the French sense of the word) was not wanting. But Saint-Simon, an observer not less keen, though the satirical vein in him took a different turn, informs us that the Abbess of Maubuisson was adored by all the sisters of the convent, of which she had made herself the very life and soul, because of her charity, her sweetness, and her loving-kindness. From a character so pure—or perhaps it should be said so purified—the shafts of ill report glance off harmlessly; nor is it impossible that they had their origin in traditions with which the Palatine Princess had no concern, and which her rule as Abbess ought to have been allowed to extinguish. While she held sway at Maubuisson, it became a chosen place as a religious retreat by ladies of rank; among these was Madame de Brisson, _l’âme de Saint-Cyr_, as Madame de Sévigné calls her, soon after her dismissal from that seminary. In 1679, the good Abbess had the pleasure of a visit from the Duchess Sophia, who was delighted with the happy regularity of her sister’s life, ‘which would suit me quite well, had I no husband and children.’ The Duchess of Orleans herself, though she would hardly have come in the character of a penitent, in one of the crises of her life at the French Court begged the King to allow her to finish her days at Maubuisson.

Some two years before her death, Louisa Hollandina, who had hitherto only been subject to the _migraine_—for the statement that she had died in 1704 to save herself the trouble of periodically reminding the States-General of the annuity granted to her at her baptism was only a friendly jest—had a paralytic stroke, and the remainder of her life was full of suffering. She took it all easily, saying that people would not desire life so much if they knew to what it amounted near the end. She died in February, 1709, eighty-six years of age; the good Princess, wrote her heart-broken niece to Louisa Hollandina’s sister Sophia, ‘is now where she long was wished to be’; Sophia herself, in her very direct way, observed that, as there was so little besides life left in her sister, there was the less to deplore in her loss. She was buried by the nuns, who had loved her dearly and nursed her tenderly, in her abbey-church at Maubuisson, as her sister Elizabeth had been buried in hers at Herford twenty-nine years earlier; and both the Catholic and the Protestant Abbess deserve each, in her own way, to be remembered among the good women in whom their age, with all its shortcomings, was so rich.

And here we must take leave of the Palatinate family, except in so far as Sophia herself and those younger members of it with whom in her married life she came into personal contact are concerned. Late in 1659, Queen Elizabeth had the pleasure of a visit from Sophia at the Hague, having had to solicit from Charles Lewis ‘a little money in extraordinaire’ for the purposes of the meeting. They seem to have been happy together, and the Queen wrote that she would be ill-natured had she failed to show ‘kindness to Sophie, because she shows so much love to me,’ The real success of the visit was, however, Sophia’s little Palatine niece Liselotte, of whom more hereafter, who captured her grandmother’s heart, although ‘you know I care not much for children.’[58] Sophia remained in Holland till March, 1660, when her mother was so much hindered by people coming in to tell the English news about Monck that she could hardly find time for writing.[59] Mother and daughter, however, met again in the following year; and Sophia’s last farewell to ‘_cette bonne princesse_,’ her mother, took place on board the vessel on which, in May, 1661, Queen Elizabeth was about to sail from Rotterdam for England. For the high-souled royal exile was not, at the last, denied an honourable refuge in her native land, though she arrived there without the special invitation which she had been led to expect, and an attempt was even made to delay her on the way. What could surpass in pathos the picture of her arriving in London in the darkness, with hardly a friend but the faithful Earl of Craven to guide her home from the riverside? At Craven House she resided till she moved to the house in Leicester Fields successively occupied by her great namesake’s two favourites, the Earls of Leicester and Essex. She had no intention, as she told Prince Rupert, of playing the poor relation. The King, her nephew, showed much cordiality to her as well as to her sons; but his courtesies were for the most part inexpensive, and she confessed that he owed her nothing, though the Parliament owed her much.[60] He promised, accordingly, to see if her debts could not be paid by Parliament, and it actually granted her certain sums, which she applied as fast as they came in to the redemption of her jewels, though she still had to appeal to Charles Lewis for assistance in the process. A series of unpleasant demands and counter-demands ensued between the King and the Elector, each calling upon the other to pay to the Queen the outstanding moneys lawfully due to her. In the end, King Charles II granted her a pension of a thousand pounds a month, of which she did not live to enjoy the first year’s total, and offered her a residence (Exeter House), into which she had not time to move.[61]

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Footnote 58:

_Letters_, &c., ed. A. Wendland, p. 122.

Footnote 59:

_Ib._, p. 136. It was about this time that Elizabeth was also enjoying
the company of the young Baron von Selz, an illegitimate son of her
son Charles Lewis from his London days. She was warmly interested in
him, and in 1660 induced King Charles II to take the youth to London
in the suite of Henry Duke of Gloucester. But Selz died in London,
much to Elizabeth’s grief, before his friend the Duke. (Hauck,
_Elizabeth_, p. 53.)

Footnote 60:

On another occasion she writes with generous frankness: ‘The King is
not bounde to doe for me but what he pleases, for being maried out of
the house he might justly pretend not to be bound to give me anything,
but he is kinder than many nephews would be, his income besides is not
settled as you believe it is.’ (_Letters_, &c., p. 207).

Footnote 61:

She told her son that she would have to order ‘states,’ chairs,
stools, and carpets all new for Exeter House, as ‘that beast, your
Castelin,’ had allowed what ‘stuff’ there was at Rheenen to go to
ruin. (_Ib._, p. 211.)

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The Queen of Bohemia, as she called herself to the last, was seen at times in public—at the theatres and elsewhere—with the court; and much attention was shown to her by her son Prince Rupert, who (as has been seen) had returned to England a few months after the King. Pepys, whose mention of Rupert’s return is the first notice of this Prince in the _Diary_, observes that he was ‘welcome to nobody.’ Perhaps the diarist had a presentiment of the friction which, sooner or later, could hardly fail to occur between a budding official like himself and a man of the sword with a popular reputation, whom he appears to have throughout regarded as passionate and self-willed. But Prince Rupert was well received in England both by the Royal Family and by the public at large, though it proved before long that he, like others who had served the throne in the days of stress, was out of touch with the younger generation of courtiers and politicians. He had not found congenial employment abroad; but his readiness for active work had not yet passed. The proposed expedition under his command to the Guinea Coast was abandoned (1664), partly because of an illness which had befallen him; but he was placed at the head of one of the squadrons in the First Dutch War, and in the Second superseded the Roman Catholic Duke of York as commander-in-chief of the English fleet. The breakdown of his plan of action by his want of success in the last battle of this war (1673) was attributed by him to the misconduct of the French and the intrigues of the friends of the Duke of York; and thus it rather heightened than hurt his popularity. For a time he seemed to be cultivating relations of intimacy with Shaftesbury and the Opposition; but he never harboured any disloyal intentions, though his sympathy with the Protestant feeling in the country is of a piece with the traditions of his family and with the whole of his own career. He now withdrew more and more into a retirement which suited both his scientific pursuits and his growing aversion from the hopeless frivolity and viciousness of the Court. Although he still continued to take an occasional part in public affairs, his time was chiefly spent among his chemical apparatus and his pictures and curiosities in the Round Tower at Windsor Castle, of which he had been named Constable in 1668. He died in 1682, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, the faithful Lord Craven acting as chief mourner on the occasion.

His mother, to whom he had been a good son to the last, had long before this passed to her rest. Her correspondence with her son Charles Lewis had in the last period of her life assumed a more painful tone than ever, turning as it did upon a past that could not be set right, whatever might happen in the future. In the contention as to whose fault it had been that she had not temporarily taken up her residence at Heidelberg he seems to have been more in the right than she; and it is satisfactory to observe that, though in the very last letter preserved from her hand, while she expresses a hope that his anger will be now over, she begs that he will add to what he is paying to her of the jointure which is her due, his last letter to her, and the draft of one dated in the month of her death, end on a dutiful and even affectionate note.[62] After her death, Charles Lewis, as her eldest—he had once been her favourite—son, made a claim for her jewels as heirlooms; and once more a bitter dispute ensued between the brothers.[63] The proposal that her eldest daughter should cross the water to see her had met with no response. Of Sophia’s seeming content with her lot the Queen had, shortly before coming to England, heard with pleasure; but she could not shut her eyes to the changes that fate brings; ‘for it is easier said then done to care for nothing.’ Still, wherever she might find herself, the lonely woman kept a stout heart and an unclouded front; though, whether at Whitehall or at Combe Abbey (if she visited it again), she must have seemed to herself like a _revenante_—a ghost of the past come back. She died, at Leicester House, on February 13th, 1662—a few hours before the dawn of what, had her husband still been by her side, would have been her golden wedding day; and, on a night as full of storms as her life had been, she was buried in the Abbey where so many of her descendants were to be crowned with a crown less rapidly evanescent than hers.

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Footnote 62:

_Letters_, &c., pp. 212-3.

Footnote 63:

The Queen’s last will and testament shows that she declared Charles
Lewis her heir, but left special legacies to Rupert—jewels, plate, and
furniture, with the papers of which the _Original Royal Letters_,
published by Sir George Bromley in 1787, passed into the hands of his
lineal ancestress Ruperta, daughter of Prince Rupert and wife of
Scroope Emmanuel Howe. To Edward the Queen left a large diamond; to
Elizabeth emerald ear-rings; and to Sophia the string of pearls which
her mother had ordinarily worn. Probably the medallion with the lock
of King Charles I’s hair, which was found on her breast after her
death, was buried with her. Many years later, when the death of the
Abbess of Herford was apprehended, Sophia wrote to Charles Lewis that
he would not find so much reason for discontent on this occasion as on
that of their mother’s death—‘for she seems to bear no malice against
you.’ It is distressing that Sophia’s want of sympathy towards her
mother, which may have been explicable enough in earlier days, should
have lasted beyond the grave.

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III

THE DUCHESS SOPHIA
(HANOVER, OSNABRÜCK, AND HANOVER, 1658-1688)

Ernest Augustus of Brunswick-Lüneburg was the youngest son of his House, as Sophia was the youngest daughter of the Palatine family; nor was the scion of the Guelfs, as such, unfitted to mate with one who could boast an ancestry illustrious like hers. Previously to the marriage conferring upon Sophia a right of partnership, of which time only could reveal the significance, in the fortunes of the German branch of the Guelfs, more than one great historic opportunity had occurred to that ancient House. Five centuries had passed since Henry the Lion had held sway over territories reaching from the shores of the German Ocean and the Baltic to those of the Adriatic. He had been the husband of an English princess—Matilda, daughter of King Henry II; nor was Sophia unmindful of this ancestral connexion. We cannot follow here the repeated dynastic changes, or the numberless partitions and transfers that succeeded each other in the hereditary lands between Elbe and Weser, saved out of the shipwreck of the great Guelfic dominion, and granted to Henry’s grandson, Otto the Child, as an imperial fief under the designation of the Duchy of Brunswick.

The severance declared by Otto’s eldest two sons, between the territories of which Brunswick and Lüneburg were respectively the original centres, was—the numerous shiftings of ownership between the representatives of the Old, Middle, and New Brunswick and Lüneburg lines notwithstanding—never undone, and continues in a sense to the present day. Thus, it was only within the limits of each main division that it proved possible in the course of time to assert those two principles upon which, repugnant though they were to the traditions of Germanic life, the political future of the princely Houses of the Empire depended—namely, that of indivisibility of tenure, and, more tardily, that of primogeniture. Nor was there any consistent endeavour to supply the want of a single dominant authority in the Brunswick and Lüneburg Houses (as they were generally called, their various subdivisions being further distinguished for the most part according to the names of their chief ‘residences’) by an identity, or at least by an agreement, of policy. Thus the German Guelfs missed the great dynastic opportunity of the Reformation, although the populations over which they ruled were at one in their ready acceptance of Lutheranism, and although a series of wealthy ecclesiastical foundations fell into the laps of the princes. Duke Henry of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel opposed the Reformation with so much vehemence as to be denounced by Luther in the character of bugbear-in-chief of the supporters of the national movement. Still, with their augmented territorial strength, the Guelfs might have played an important part in the critical period which preceded the long-expected outbreak of the great religious conflict, and perhaps, during its earlier stages, might have done much to resist the inroads of the Reaction. Instead of this, after the ‘evil Harry’s’ accomplished grandson, Duke Henry Julius, had applied his ability as a statesman wholly to the furtherance of the imperial interest, his timorous successor, Frederick Ulric, had failed to avert from the Lower Saxon Circle the fury of war, drawn down upon it by the passionate Protestant partisanship of his brother, Christian of Halberstadt, the champion of Elizabeth of Bohemia. A change of dynasty occurred at a highly critical epoch of the Thirty Years’ War, when nearly all the Protestant estates adhered to the compromise of the Peace of Prague (1634); and the ‘New’ House of Brunswick entered into possession at Wolfenbüttel in the person of Duke Augustus, a cautious ruler and a man of kindly disposition and of bookish tastes. At the Peace of Westphalia the rich see of Hildesheim had to be given up by the elder (Brunswick) branch; and for a time adversity seemed to have impressed upon it the expediency of uniting its policy with that of the younger, which had issued forth in a more advantageous position from the Great War. During this temporary accord between the two branches, the ambitious Duke Rudolf Augustus of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel was assisted by his Brunswick-Lüneburg kinsmen in the important achievement, which the resolute Dukes of the Middle House of Brunswick had essayed in vain, of permanently subjecting to their territorial authority the proud Hanseatic city of Brunswick. And, alike in the war provoked by Louis XIV’s invasion of the United Provinces (in 1672), in the march against the Swedes which was crowned by the victory of Fehrbellin (1675), and in the campaign against the Turks which ended with the recapture of Neuhäusel (1685), the armed forces of the two Guelfic lines fought side by side. But, while the New Lüneburg line was, by consolidation, preparing its future greatness, the advancement of the New Brunswick line, the repartitions of whose territories cannot occupy us here, again came to a standstill. Duke Rudolf Augustus survived till 1704, a prince whose virtues were of the passive kind, and with whom his ambitious younger brother, Antony Ulric, was associated in the government from 1685 onwards. In order to ensure the Succession to the offspring of his brother, the good Duke Rudolf Augustus, after the death of his first wife, contracted a _mésalliance_ with the daughter of a Brunswick barber-surgeon, who, as Madame Rudolfine, led a life of happy obscurity by his side at Brunswick. His brother, Duke Antony Ulric, held his Court at Wolfenbüttel, where he cherished the literary studies in which he had engaged in the University of Helmstedt, and successfully essayed his own powers as an author, both in the favourite contemporary species of historical romances _de longue haleine_ and in psalmody. But the mental activity of Antony Ulric, who in 1704 succeeded to sole ducal authority at Brunswick, was far from being absorbed by his literary pursuits; or rather, as we shall see, he contrived to make them subservient to the influences of dynastic ambition. He kept a jealous watch, now self-interested, now malevolent and revengeful, over the advance of the Lüneburg dynasty, so nearly akin to his own. And, in whatever measure the same jealousy may have been a factor in his own ultimate conversion to the Church of Rome, it certainly contributed to make him press on those splendid marriages of his grand-daughters with Emperor and Tsarevich, whereby he sought to redeem his own political insignificance.

Very different results attended the progress, in and after the latter part of the Thirty Years’ War, of the New House of Lüneburg, as it was called. Duke George was the sixth of seven brothers, of whom it fell in turn to the eldest four to conduct the government of the Lüneburg-Celle dominions. Here the principle of indivisibility had been established in 1592 and confirmed in 1610; but it did not apply to acquisitions by the line accruing after that date. In order to maintain this principle intact, all the brothers, with the exception of Duke George, remained unmarried, and, by a singularly orderly disposition of fate, the second, third, and fourth succeeded in due course, each on the demise of his next elder brother. The fifth and seventh died before the arrival of their respective turns, and thus it was to the progeny of Duke George that the lands and their government descended. He was accounted one of the most capable commanders of the latter part of the war, and an ardent supporter of the Protestant cause, with whose great champion Gustavus Adolphus he had been one of the earliest among the German Princes to enter into an understanding. But he was so unwilling to imperil the immediate interests of the dynasty, that, in 1634, he gave in his adhesion to the Peace of Prague. In 1635 he assumed the government of the principality of Calenberg, which, by the repartition made at that date, was transferred to the Lüneburg line; and in the following year he laid the foundations, in the fortified town of Hanover, of the castle which was to be expanded, in after ages, into the palace of Electors and Kings. He died in 1641; but his principality was preserved to his dynasty in the settlement of the Peace of Westphalia, and they further secured a ‘satisfaction,’ though by no means an adequate one, for the losses or disappointments undergone by them, in the shape of the right of appointing a prince of their family to the see of Osnabrück on every alternate vacancy. Thus, with a territory whose resources seemed to have been hopelessly exhausted by the devastations of the War and by the exactions of both war and peace, whose social system had been dislocated, and whose life had been in various respects demoralised, the sons of Duke George of Lüneburg entered upon a period in the history of their dynasty which was to conduct it from petty beginnings to unforeseen greatness.

The family consisted of four brothers and three sisters, of which latter two died in infancy. The surviving sister, Sophia Amalia, had in 1643 married the future King Frederick III of Denmark, and took a notable part in the defence of Copenhagen against the Swedes (1658), as well as in the few despotic excesses to be charged against the absolute rule with which, at a time when the Danish power had been laid low, her consort had been suddenly entrusted. The Duchess Sophia, who by her marriage had become sister-in-law to Queen Sophia Amalia, met her at Altona in 1671, and paid her a visit at her dower-palace at Nykjöping in 1680. Sophia saw this redoubtable sovereign on her amiable side, and relates how, on the occasion of a _battue_ of hares, the Queen encouraged her to fire the first shot that she, her mother’s degenerate daughter, had ever discharged. Of the four brothers, the eldest, Duke Christian Lewis, had in 1641 succeeded to his father’s principality of Calenberg; but in 1648, when he assumed the government of the Lüneburg-Celle dominions proper and took up his abode at Celle, Calenberg, with its residential town of Hanover, passed to the second brother, Duke George William. The third and fourth, Dukes John Frederick and Ernest Augustus, in accordance with their father’s will, remained without territorial possessions (the reversion of the Osnabrück bishopric had not yet fallen in); and it was arranged that, in the first instance, John Frederick should reside at the Court of Celle, and Ernest Augustus at that of Hanover. The young Brunswick-Lüneburg Dukes were left without paternal control in the very period in their lives when it was most needed by them; for, at the time of his father’s death in 1641, the eldest, Christian Lewis, was only nineteen, and the youngest, Ernest Augustus, eleven years of age. The brothers had been brought into little contact with the old-fashioned academical training, of which the influence is recognisable in the Dukes of the elder branch; and Christian Lewis, whose years of rule at Hanover left behind them the memory of a prince of the Mohocks, was incapable of introducing the refinements of the modern era at Celle. At the same time he, in this larger sphere, did his duty, as he understood it, in both Church and State; staunchly adhering to the Lutheranism of his line, asserting his ducal authority against the recalcitrance of the good town of Lüneburg, and providing himself with the beginnings of a standing army in defiance of his Estates. His best friend and ally was the Great Elector of Brandenburg, who afterwards married, as his second wife, Charles Lewis’ widow, the Dowager Duchess Dorothea. This princess, who by birth belonged to the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Glucksburg, played an important part in the last years of her second husband, and, according to the irreverent expression of his descendant, Frederick the Great, ‘ruled the hero’; but her interference in the interest of her children cannot be proved to have gone the length, or to have produced the effects, frequently attributed to it.[64] The second brother, George William, who was to occupy so prominent a place in the history of his House and in that of the personal life of Sophia, was deficient neither in courage nor in insight, and the constant habit of foreign travel added the charm of agreeable manners to the attractiveness of an open and amiable nature. But, after, in his youth, he had seen some service under Frederick Henry of Orange, he had cast to the winds military ambition and serious purpose of any kind, and, leaving his ministers, as best they might, to carry on his government and manage his Estates, had with his ‘flying Court’ (as Sophia calls it) frittered away his time in a series of visits to Holland and, more especially, to Venice. During the intervals which he spent at home in Hanover, he pursued the same round of frivolous pleasures, intent upon nothing but ‘going a-hunting and making love.’ Announcing a visit from him at Heidelberg to the Elector Palatine Charles Lewis, Sophia bids her brother ‘retail the wicked doings of his own youth in England for the entertainment of his guest, but not touch on matters of State; for, though George William has plenty of wit and judgment, he wastes them on his jests and trifling amusements.’ As he grew older, he came to be extolled both as a ‘mighty Nimrod’ and as a connoisseur in champagne; but he also, as will be seen, subjected himself to influences which had the effect of refining his personal tastes and habits, while his intimacy with King William III could not but impart strength of purpose to his political action. But the moral infirmity of the good easy man remained incurable, and proved a source of sorrow to others besides Sophia.

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Footnote 64:

According to the Duchess of Orleans (Elizabeth Charlotte), the Duchess
Dorothea presented her, as a child, with two parrots, and the Duchess
Sophia ordered her to give in return her dog _Fidel_. ‘This was, to
the best of my belief, the only occasion in my life on which I ever
obeyed you reluctantly; for my little dog was very near to my heart.’

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The third of the brothers, John Frederick, like George William, matured his mental powers by travel rather than by study. But this prince, whose highest honour it is to have introduced Leibniz into the service of the House of Guelf, was not wholly undeserving of the praise lavished on him after death by the courtly philosopher in both German prose and Latin verse.[65] John Frederick was at any rate possessed by an ardent ambition, besides being determined to think out his own salvation. During a visit to Rome, in the year of Jubilee, 1650, he was much impressed by the arguments of Count Christopher von Rantzau, who, after adopting the irenic ideals of the great Helmstedt theologian Calixtus, had at Rome been brought over to Catholicism through the influence of the eminent convert and convert-maker Holstenius. In February, 1651, Duke John Frederick was himself at Assisi received into the Catholic Church; but it was not till several months later that his conversion became known. In December of the same year, at the very time when commissioners sent by his elder brothers had arrived at Rome to dissuade him from such a step, he made a public profession of his change of faith. There is no reason for supposing that the wish for a Cardinal’s hat was one of the motives that actually prompted his conversion, though he certainly was in the course of his life a man of many ambitions—including the High Mastership of the Germanic Order, and the Polish Crown. The Cardinalate desired for, if not by, John Frederick, was bestowed by Pope Innocent X upon a previous convert of Holstenius’, Landgrave Frederick of Hesse-Darmstadt; and, after lengthy negotiations, it was settled that Duke John Frederick’s _apanage_ should be increased on condition of his not returning to Celle. But the good-natured George William gave him quarters at Hanover, and even provided for his private exercise of his religion in the Palace. This in turn alarmed the Calenberg Estates; and further difficulties threatened when the convert, well aware of the vantage-ground which he occupied by reason of these very difficulties, showed himself disposed to marry. It was the fear that, in this event, the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg would become a Catholic House, which impelled George William, after he had made up his mind to remain a bachelor himself, to hasten the marriage of Ernest Augustus. The religious question thus, already at this point, directly affected the determination of the future of the dynasty with whose fortunes Sophia was about to associate her own; nor is it astonishing that John Frederick should have bitterly resented the preferential position conceded to Ernest Augustus, the youngest of the brotherhood.

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Footnote 65:

See _Leibnizens Geschichtl. Anpätze und Gedichte I._ (Vol. iv. of
Pertz’ collected edition).

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The future husband of Sophia had, as the youngest of the sons of his mother, the Duchess Anna Eleonora, been kept near home in his boyhood. He had even spent two years at the University of Marburg, where, in accordance with servile academic usage, he had filled the office of _Rector Magnificentissimus_, and he had afterwards been elected _Coadjutor_ by the (Lutheran) Chapter of Magdeburg. This was a suitable preparation for the succession to the ‘bishopric’ of Osnabrück, which, in accordance with the provision of the Peace of Westphalia, was reserved for Ernest Augustus on the occasion of the next vacancy in the see. The conduct of this prince was, from the first, marked by a circumspection which neglected no opportunity; he was on the best of terms with both the eldest two of his brothers, and was devotedly attached to the second, whose companion he was in a long series of journeys and sojourns on the Lagoons.[66] Thus there established itself between George William and Ernest Augustus a brotherly intimacy—a _fratellanza_, to use an Italian term of almost technical significance—which goes some way towards explaining how Sophia’s marriage had been finally brought about. Ernest Augustus’ affection for his favourite brother may be regarded as the most attractive feature in his character; on the whole, his personality was a stronger though a less pleasing one than that of George William. Like many of his descendants, Sophia’s husband had an insatiable liking for ceremonial and was a stickler for etiquette, albeit, in the early as well as in the later years of his married life, his manners appear to have been remarkably free from restraint in the privacy of domestic life.

Although Sophia’s marriage had not been exactly a love-match, in the beginning, as she joyfully reported to her brother at Heidelberg, all was roses at Hanover; her husband’s behaviour made her feel assured that he would love her all the days of his life, and she idolised him so sincerely as to think herself lost when deprived of his company. The two good English ladies who had adhered to her since she left the Hague were in all kindness dismissed from her service; one returning to Holland, and the other being provided with a settlement on the spot; henceforth, the life of Sophia’s husband was to be her own life. Unluckily, however, this involved a constant intimate association with his brother George William, of which she soon perceived the inconveniences, and which, but for her sincerity and tact—for she was obliged to give proof of both qualities—might have placed her in the falsest of positions. After she had appeased her husband’s jealous suspicions, the two brothers joined in pressing her to accompany them on one of their Italian journeys; but she was quit for a trip to Holland in the company of her little niece Elizabeth Charlotte, whom, as will be seen, her brother had assigned to her care. After her return to Hanover she gave birth, on May 28th (O.S.), 1660, to her first-born child, George Lewis, afterwards King George I of Great Britain and Ireland. The following winter was spent by her husband in Italy with his brother, according to his custom; but they accompanied her down the Rhine from Heidelberg, where she had been staying with her brother, to Rotterdam, where, as has been seen, she bade a last farewell to her mother, the Queen of Bohemia, then on the point of starting for England. The two Dukes and Sophia soon afterwards returned to Hanover, in time for the birth, on October 2nd, 1661, of her second son, Frederick Augustus. Two months afterwards, the see of Osnabrück at last fell vacant by the death of the Catholic Bishop, Cardinal Francis William von Wartenberg. The event (which had been rumoured to have taken place already two years earlier) must have been welcome to Sophia, as relieving her from a position by no means free from difficulty, although in her letters she makes no reference to her husband’s jealousy of his brother. After Ernest Augustus had held his entry at Osnabrück as Bishop—a ceremony at which, as Sophia remarks, she felt that her presence would be superfluous,—she joined him at the castle of Iburg, which became her residence for many years. The little Court moved about a good deal between Osnabrück and Iburg, besides (after a time) occasionally staying at Celle and at Diepholz, the former seat of the Counts and _Edelherren_ of Diepholz, whose line had become extinct in 1585.

The change from Hanover was a delightful one for the Duchess Sophia; for, apart from the fact that the Old-town of Hanover, within whose walls lay the ducal castle, was a sombre and crowded enclosure very unlike what was destined to become ultimately one of the most cheerful and attractive of German capitals, she and her husband had resided there in a position which, in spite of the excess of affection surrounding them, remained one of dependence. They now for the first time tasted the pleasures, on however small a scale, of sovereignty. She was, in German fashion, ‘the Bishopess’; when she travelled in France, her _incognita_ designation was ‘Madame d’Osnabrück.’ As the old episcopal lodging at Osnabrück was found inadequate to the ample requirements and luxurious tastes of the new Bishop,[67] he at once set about buying land and house property of all kinds with a view to the erection of a suitable episcopal palace. The building of it seems to have been begun in 1665, and seriously taken in hand from 1668; but it was not ready till early in 1673, from which date Ernest Augustus and Sophia continuously resided there for the last five or six years before their removal to Hanover. The palace, which still stands (it was restored with quite unusual success by the last King of Hanover), bears the name of Ernest Augustus on its portal, with the Arcadian motto _Sola bona quæ honesta_. The building erected by Ernest Augustus seems to have been intended for a direct reminiscence of the Luxembourg, at a time when Versailles and the Louvre were only in course of construction, and was, like its prototype, surrounded by magnificent gardens, designed by the Bishop’s own gardener, Martin Charbonnier, whom he had brought from Paris, and who seems to have been a pupil of Lenôtre. The castle at Iburg was of a similar type of architecture—heavy but not ineffective—and betrayed the same lack of finish, due to the inadequacy of the expenditure upon artistic work.[68] Meanwhile, on the breezy heights of Iburg, as is shown by the evidence of her own letters and those of the incomparable Palatine niece whom she carried thither from Hanover, Sophia spent the happiest if not the most exciting years of her life. After all, she writes in her favourite ironical vein, ‘One cannot live more than once. Why vex one’s soul, if one can eat, drink and sleep, sleep, drink and eat? All is vanity.... Tranquillity of the spirit is lovely, since from it springs our bodily health. Those whom the Lord loves He blesses in their sleep. We play at nine-pins, breed young ducks, amuse ourselves with running at a ring or backgammon, talk every year of paying a visit to Italy; and in the meantime things go quite as well as is to be expected for a petty bishop, who is able to live in peace and, in case of war, can depend upon the help of his brothers.’ In the summer an annual visit was paid to the waters of Pyrmont, and gradually things became more lively at home—in 1663, we find a company of French musicians engaged for the pleasure of the Court. As a matter of fact, Sophia, though she was very far from vegetating in either mental or bodily inactivity, visited Italy but once, crossing the Alps for the first time in April, 1664. Nor is there any better or more convincing proof of her rare powers of observation and insight than that she should have learnt so much—and not only as to the beauty of Italian gardens and the charm of Italian manners—in the course of a sojourn extending over little more than a twelve-month. While by no means irresponsive to the aesthetic attractions of Rome and Florence, she was the last person to give way to the religious influences in readiness to be exerted upon her. Loretto annoyed her; and at Rome, with a spirit which Sir Henry Wotton would have applauded, she refused an offering to the Blessed Mary of Victory, to whom the Emperor Ferdinand II had dedicated his sceptre in grateful remembrance of the battle of Prague. At Venice, amidst whose gaieties and gallantries she found herself altogether ‘_depaisée_,’ though, nevertheless, by no means incapable of amusing herself, it was brought home to her how largely religion was used as a cloak in a society where the nuns made themselves agreeable to gentlemen and the very churches were used for the purpose of assignations. Much in the cynical tone which became habitual to Sophia and to her intimates is attributable to experiences such as these, rather than to natural irreverence. An attempt made at Rome to ‘save her soul’ by bringing her over to Catholicism was so feeble that she had no difficulty in repelling it; nor could anything have been better calculated to heighten the repugnance with which such overtures inspired her than the want of appreciation of the dignity of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg, which she thought observable in the illustrious convert (almost a _bête-noire_ to some of the Palatines) Queen Christina of Sweden, as well as in Pope Alexander VII.

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Footnote 66:

In 1686 was published at Venice a folio, with nine plates, by G. M.
Alberti, entitled _Giochi festivi e militari, danze, serenate,
machine, boscareccia artificiosa, regatta solemne, e posti alla
sodifattione ... dell’ Ernesto Aufsusto Duca di Brunswick e Luneburgo
in Venetia_.

Footnote 67:

We have it on the authority of the Duchess of Orleans, that, when
Ernest Augustus became Bishop of Osnabrück, he at once launched forth
into so large an increase of his household, as to create in the child
the impression that he had become the possessor of great wealth.

Footnote 68:

See A. Haupt, _Die bildende Kunst in Hannover zur Zeit der Kurfürstin
Sophie_, Appendix to H. Schmidt, _Die Kurfürstin Sophie von Hannover_.
Hanover, 1903.

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