Chapter XVI: Appendix: C

Brief sketches of the rulers in England, Germany, and the Palatinate from 1682 to 1770, the period of the great exodus of German Palatines to Pennsylvania.

KINGS OF ENGLAND. 1660-1820.

CHARLES II.: King of England, was born May 29, 1630, and died Feb. 6, 1685; lived four years after he made his grant of Pennsylvania to William Penn. He was son of Charles I. who was tried for treason, and executed at Whitehall in January 1649. Charles was not a good king. Dr. Brewer, one of his biographers, says of him, that he was a good-natured, shrewd, and witty; but indolent, selfish, and insincere. His profligacy was scandalous, and his extravagance frightful. The duke of Buckingham, one of his favorite companions, wrote a mock epitaph for him after his death, which was as follows:

Here lies our mutton-eating king,
Whose word no man relies on;
He never said a foolish thing,
And never did a wise one.

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JAMES II.--Charles II. was succeeded by his brother James II., a zealous Roman Catholic. His right to the throne was disputed by the duke of Monmouth, but the latter was taken prisoner and beheaded. James suspended the statutes which had been passed against the Catholics, which angered the Protestants, who invited his son-in-law William of Orange to become their king. The prince of Orange accepted the invitation; came to England in November 1688. James raised an army against him, but was defeated near the river Boyne in Ireland July 1, 1690, after which he fled to France where he died in exile.

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WILLIAM AND MARY.--James was followed by his daughter, and her husband who reigned jointly as William III. and Mary II. from 1689 until December 27, 1694, when Mary died, after which William reigned alone until his death which occurred in 1702.

One of his biographers describes William as a man of middle stature, slender, delicate, subject to asthma. He was plain in manners, reserved, cold, and inflexible. His judgment was sound, his courage intrepid, his penetration most acute, and the greatest general of his age.

We have seen in these pages, how he made war against Louis XIV., the French king, in order to succor the persecuted Palatines. England made great progress under his rule, and William and Mary will always be remembered as among the best of English sovereigns.

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ANNE.--After the death of William III., Anne, the second daughter of James II., came to the throne of England. She was born February 6, 1665, and died August 1, 1714, after a reign of 12 years. She has been described by one of her biographers, as having been of good natural capacity; but not well educated; her temper was mild; her manners coarse; her disposition affectionate, and her charity unbounded. This last virtue agrees with the statement that many Palatines came to America, and to Pennsylvania as the result of her benefactions.

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GEORGE I.--After Anne’s death in 1714 George I., elector of Hanover, and duke of Brunswick, was crowned king of England. He was in the line of succession to the British throne, by reason of being a great-grandson of James I. He was also a cousin of Queen Anne. He was born March 28, 1660, reigned from 1714 until he died June 12, 1727. He has been described as having been of middle size, his countenance and expression, and his whole appearance undignified. He was sensible and industrious; plain and simple in his mode of life after the manner of the Germans; and grave, and heartless. He had no love for England when he came to the throne, and never acquired any. He was profoundly ignorant of the English language, and of England’s laws and its history. It is said of him that he never learned to speak the English language with any degree of accuracy.

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GEORGE II.: son of the former, succeeded to the throne in 1727, and reigned until 1760, a period of a little more than 33 years. He was born at Hanover, Nov. 10, 1683; and died Oct. 1760. His predelictions for Germany were quite as strong as those of his father. In personal appearance, he was low in stature, carried himself very erect; had prominent eyes; a high nose, and receding forehead. He was reserved and cautious in his manner, violent, and obstinate, covetous and mean. He was a soldier and had no other accomplishment.

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GEORGE III., who followed George II. to the British throne, was a grand-son of the latter, having been born June 4, 1738. He was a son of Frederick Louis, prince of Wales. He reigned from 1760, until Jan. 29, 1820, when he died.

Americans have a better knowledge of George III. than any of his immediate predecessors, because he was on the British throne during the Revolutionary War. As all the grievances of the American colonies were charged against his account, the American youths have learned to know him in history as a wicked tyrant, although the real tyrants were his ministers, against whom the greater indignation should at all times have been directed. The British ministry had much more to do with shaping the British policy, with regard to the American colonies both before, and during the war than the king had. George III. suffered much on account of the infirmities of his mind. It gave way five times during his reign viz: in 1764, 1788, 1801, 1804, and the last time in 1810, after which the full vigor of his mind was never restored.

It is said of him, that when in full possession of his faculties, that he was a man of great courage, and steadiness of purpose; was temperate, faithful and conscientious; religious, moral, and benevolent; but bigoted and obstinate. His court was a model of decorum, and his domestic life irreproachable.

GERMAN EMPERORS.

LEOPOLD I., was born June 9, 1640; died May 5, 1705. He was emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, from 1658 until 1705. The empire was also called the German-Roman Empire. The name “Holy Roman Empire,” is the result of the theoretical pretensions, that the German emperors, were the representatives of the ancient Roman emperors, who asserted authority over all the nations of Western and Central Europe. The empire comprised all the German-speaking people, but so far as any exercise of imperial power was concerned, it was more the outward show and trappings of an empire, than one exercising and maintaining its authority as such.

All the European nations during the centuries of the first German empire were incessantly at war with each other, and the German government was feeble in asserting its imperial authority, while certain of the German states were continually at war, with one nation or another, other of the German states, were fighting among themselves. To meet all the exigencies of war which were constantly rising Leopold was wholly unfitted. He was a weak and incompetent prince, and many of the ravages of the French armies in the Palatinate during the last half of the seventeenth century, were largely the result of his incapacity. He was neither soldier, nor statesman, and chaos ran riot in Germany during his long and miserable reign.

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JOSEPH I., Leopold’s son, succeeded to the throne of the empire after the death of his father. He was born July 26, 1678; crowned emperor of Germany in 1705, and reigned until his death, which occurred April 17, 1711. He was involved in the war of the Spanish succession.

That war also involved France, during the reign of Louis XIV. The latter grew tired of the war, and offered to relinquish his claims and end it. As an inducement for Germany to make peace, Louis offered the emperor to restore Alsatia and Strasburg which had been taken from Germany several years before. This offer Joseph rejected, and it is a remarkable fact that Germany was not able to recover Alsatia and Strasburg for 160 years thereafter; not until it was returned to its ancient owners as spoil of the Franco-German war in 1871, although Louis offered to return it as a condition of peace in 1710. The emperor Joseph was no improvement on his father as a ruler.

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KARL VI., the pretender to the throne of Spain, and second son of Leopold I., became emperor of Germany after the death of Joseph I., in 1711. Karl was elected to the imperial throne, as all German emperors were in those days. He issued a decree about 1714, known as the “Pragmatic Sanction,” establishing the succession to the throne of the German empire for his dynasty.

Karl was born Oct 1, 1685; died Oct. 20, 1740. He reigned 29 years, during which time there were the usual happenings of war, diplomatic intrigue, without any exhibition of statesmanship, or the least progress in advancing Germany to the rank of even a second-rate nation. Up to this period Germany as a nation can scarcely be said to have a history as such, and at no time could the German empire lay claim to the exercise of authority over all the states which were theoretically under its sway.

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MARIA THERESA. With her coming to the throne the real history of Germany may be said to begin. She came to the throne after the death of her father, Karl VI. by virtue of the pragmatic sanction. She was born May 13, 1717; died Nov. 29, 1780. With her reign began a vigorous administration of the affairs of the empire. It has been said of her that: “Since the death of Maximilian II. in 1576, Austria had no male ruler so prudent, just and energetic as this woman.” Five years after her coming to the throne her husband Francis I. died, when his eldest son succeeded to the title as “Emperor,” but he was only emperor in name, so long as the empress lived, for she kept the conduct of affairs in her own hands.

Bayard Taylor, in his “History of Germany,” says of her: “Maria Theresa, like all the Hapsburgs, after Ferdinand I., had grown up under the influence of the Jesuits, and her ideas of justice were limited by her religious bigotry. In other respects she was wise and liberal; she effected a complete reorganization of the government, establishing special departments of justice, industry and commerce; she thought to develop the resources of the country; abolish torture, introduced a new criminal code,--in short, she neglected scarcely any important interests of the people, except their education and their religious freedom. Nevertheless she was always jealous of the presumptions of Rome, and prevented as far as she was able, the immediate dependence of the Catholic clergy upon the Pope.”

Maria Theresa was an empress of great ability, and during her reign, the German states made great progress in many of the useful arts, and industries. Her usefulness came to an end with her death in 1780, and the first German empire ceased to exist in 1806, when Francis II. abdicated as its last emperor.

PALATINE ELECTORS.

PHILIP WILHELM.--This prince who was born in 1651, became the elector of the Palatinate in 1685, and continued to rule for three years when he died. During his short reign the Palatinate was comparatively free from the ravages of contending armies. The rapacity of Louis XIV. gave the poor Palatines a brief respite; but their misery was not long postponed, for the French king made war again upon them immediately upon the accession of Philip Wilhelm’s successor.

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JOHN WILHELM.--With the death of the former prince, his eldest son, John Wilhelm became the ruling prince Palatine. He was born in 1658, and came to the electorate in 1688, and continued, until his death in 1716. It was during his reign, that the beautiful Palatinate was made a desert, by the armies of Louis XIV., in his efforts to usurp the electorate for his sister-in-law, the duchess of Orleans. He was a weak prince, and resided away from his dominion for a great part of the time of the French occupation of the Palatinate. He established himself at Düsseldorf, from whence he feebly directed the operations against the French hordes who were engaged in devastating the Rhine provinces.

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CHARLES PHILIP.--This prince was a brother of the former, and became elector in 1717. He was born in 1661, and his reign ended with his death in 1742. Louis XIV. died two years before the reign of Charles Philip began, so the latter was spared the ordeal of defending the Palatinate, against the ravages of the French soldiers, although his dominion continued to be overrun by the soldiers of other European nations at war with each other. Charles Philip was a fair sort of a prince, and tried to restore the Palatinate to some of its ancient splendor, and made some progress in that direction. He restored the castle of Heidelberg in a great measure, and built the beautiful castle at Mannheim, and lived there during a part of his reign.

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CHARLES THEODORE.--This prince belonged to a collateral branch of the line of Palatine electors, and was born in 1724; came to the electorate in 1742, and continued his rule until 1799, when he died. He was a noble prince, highly educated, and devoted to the fine arts. Numerous monuments of his reign remain around Heidelberg, and the beautiful bridge over the Neckar is one of them, which is pointed out to the tourists by the citizens of Heidelberg with great pride at the present day.

In 1777, Charles Theodore inherited the throne of Bavaria, and then removed his court to Munich. He continued however in the electorate of the Palatinate until his death, when he was succeeded by Maximilian Joseph, who continued in the electorate only two years, when it became extinct, by virtue of the terms of the treaty of Luneville, which was dictated by Napoleon; whereby France received all of the Palatinate, on the west bank of the Rhine, and Baden received the greater part of it, situated on the east side. That part of the Palatinate on the west bank of the Rhine taken by France was ceded back to Germany, after the downfall of Napoleon in 1815. Maximilian Joseph was the last ruling Palatine elector. He came to the electorate in 1799, and in 1802 to 1803 he transferred his rights to the newly established electoral House of Baden. In 1806 he became King of Bavaria.

There were other princes in the direct line of descent of the Palatine electors who kept up the title for a number of years after the electorate was abolished, but none ever reigned, and the line is now extinct.