In the burial-vault of the Guelfs, at Hanover, stands a coffin enclosing
the remains of the Electress Sophia, and bearing the inscription: _Magnæ
Britanniæ Hæres_. These words sum up her story as that of a great hope,
long cherished but never fulfilled. Yet a biography of this Princess,
who died, though herself uncrowned, the ‘mother of our Kings to be,’
will, if truthful, be found to treat a nobler theme than a personal
ambition born of chance upon chance, vexed by prolonged delays, and
doomed to final disappointment. The Electress Sophia was in herself
worthy to be the source of a dynasty whose last and most august member
left to her successor a throne far securer than that which was mounted
by Sophia’s eldest son. But the nation, of whose institutions a limited
monarchy has long formed an integral part, also owes a debt to the very
fact of the accession of the House of Hanover, and therefore to the
insight and self-control exhibited by that House, and conspicuously by
the Electress Sophia, during the entire preceding period of uncertainty.
At a highly critical date in the course of those years, when the
Electress and her family were most anxious to avoid any rash or false
step on their own part, she told a correspondent that, at the English
Court, it was held indispensable to pretend to wish for the succession
of the Electoral line—_because of the people_. Although there were, in
those days, Jacobites enough and to spare in London and other parts of
the kingdom, and although the stolidity of our first Hanoverian King,
and the self-conceit of his successor, retarded the growth of personal
sympathy between monarch and subjects, yet the perception, in both
dynasty and nation, of a definite community of interests formed a
sufficient beginning for the growth of a close mutual attachment. To
this the Electress Sophia contributed, it is not too much to say, both
by the circumstances of her birth and by the conduct of her life. She
was the daughter of a Stewart Princess, on whose Protestant marriage the
nation had set its hopes, and whom it had seen condemned, because of her
husband’s youthful venture in the cause of militant Protestantism, to
long years of exile and privation. In her own conduct Sophia displayed a
prudence, a dignity, and a sincerity, which have rarely, under
conditions so trying, been so consistently combined. The legend, indeed,
of her having often declared that she would die content if those other
words, ‘Sophia, Queen of Great Britain,’ could be inscribed on her tomb,
is irreconcileable with the whole tenor of her known private thoughts,
as well as of her public acts. She was far from indifferent to the
greatness that might be in store for her, or to the necessity, in the
interests of her House, of constant vigilance, promptitude, and tact.
But she deemed it enough to be found, at no stage of her career, either
unequal to her present fortunes or unready for those responsibilities of
a greater future which cast their shadow before them. Thus it is largely
due to her, and, as it is but just to acknowledge, with her and after
her, to the next heir to her expectations, that, so far as the House of
Hanover is concerned, the history of its succession to the British
throne may be reviewed without the feelings of humiliation too often
aroused by narratives of disputed inheritances. At the same time, the
essential significance of that history would, in any case, have to be
sought deeper than in the vicissitudes of personal ambitions or the
machinations of families or factions. The Hanoverian Succession was, in
fact, only another name for the Protestant Succession in flesh and
blood, and, as such, represented the principal gain which most
Englishmen and Scotchmen were intent upon bringing home out of the long
struggle against the Stewart monarchy. Not that the disputes and efforts
connected with the Hanoverian Succession throughout, or, at times,
mainly addressed themselves to the religious issue; but it would be
futile to ignore, or to seek to obscure, the origin and basis of the
great political transaction in which the Electress Sophia was called
upon to play so prominent a part. She was fitted to play it, alike by
the circumstances of her descent and marriage, and by the qualities of
her character and intellect, and above all by a perfect self-control,
joined to a freedom of spirit in which, during the efforts and trials of
her life, she found encouragement and consolation.
From the relation in which the Electress Sophia stood to the question of
the British Succession, that loomed so large on the political horizon
during her later years, the story of her life derives its paramount
interest. Even on the experiences of her earlier years, whose memories
carry us back to the time of the Thirty Years’ War and of the great
Civil Conflict in this island, it is impossible to dwell without
thinking of the great destiny reserved for her line, and of the many
helps and hindrances which were to facilitate or to impede its
accomplishment. But in the semi-obscurity of her youth, as under the
gaze of inquisitive eyes to which her maturity was exposed, she remains
true to herself; and few biographical records could prove more
fascinating than one covering her fourscore years, were it but possible
to depict her from first to last in the same life-like colours in which
she has portrayed herself in her _Memoirs_, and in which she reappears
on almost every page of her correspondence. Unfortunately, it is
difficult to convey by extracts, and impossible to preserve in
translation, the constant alertness of thought, and refreshing vivacity
of expression, frequently touched by real humour, and, at all times,
free from any tinge of affectation, which are not less characteristic of
her letters than they must have been of her conversation. As for her
autobiography, it breaks off as early as 1681, and thus fails to cover
that longer half of her life in which she was to become a figure of
importance in European affairs. For it was the ‘abdication’ by flight of
King James II and the subsequent passing of the Bill of Rights which
brought about and established the restriction of the English Succession
to Protestants, and which first placed Sophia and her line, though not
as yet by name, in direct relation to that Succession as a question of
practical politics.
It is accordingly proposed, in the following pages, to speak, in the
first instance, of Sophia’s descent and parentage; of her mother, who,
while remaining, even throughout the woful sequel of her Bohemian
Queenship, conscious of her position as a Stewart Princess, never
faltered in her adherence to the Protestantism for whose sake her
husband had cast a long blight upon the fortunes of the Palatine House;
and of her brothers and sisters, Princes and Princesses of that House,
not one of whom, in spite of their many distinctions and qualities,
brilliant or solid, succeeded altogether in rising above the depression
which had fastened upon the family, as Sophia herself rose in the eyes
both of her contemporaries and of posterity. The task will thus become
easier of describing, in turn, the three stages of that part of her life
which preceded the acquisition by her and her House of a definite
expectation of the succession to the British throne. During her
childhood and girlhood she was virtually confined to the refugee Court
of her parents, afterwards that of her widowed mother, in the
Netherlands. She next passed some years at Heidelberg, in the land of
her forefathers, then restored in part to the Palatine rule. The earlier
years of her married life, divided between Osnabrück and Hanover,
introduced her to new personal relations and to new political interests;
but, though these at times conflicted with each other, she learnt how to
identify herself more and more with the dynastic policy of the House, to
the fortunes of whose future head she had united her own. A second
period of her life may be said to open when the question of the British
Succession unexpectedly comes into the foreground of European political
life; and in this period, again, two stages are very clearly
distinguishable. The earlier of these extends from the passing of the
Bill of Rights (1689), with its strict limitation of the Crown to
Protestants, up to the Act of Settlement (1701). Within these years the
House of Hanover, while actually or in prospect consolidating the
various territorial interests of the Brunswick-Lüneburg line, firmly
established its position as an electorate in the Empire, and began to be
taken into account by the ambition of France, the chronic disturber of
the peace of Europe. Incidentally, the skilful management and the stern
resolution by which this advance of the House was effected, led to
unhappy consequences; and no narration of its history in this period can
pass by the catastrophe of one of Sophia’s sons, or pretend to ignore
the tragic story of her daughter-in-law, Sophia Dorothea. In the second
stage of this period we recognise, in the Electress Sophia, a personage
of importance in the great theatre of general European history, but
calmly standing back herself from the glare of the footlights. By the
Act of Settlement the Succession was settled upon her and the heirs of
her body, being Protestants. She thus obtained a Parliamentary title for
herself and for her descendants.
Before this point is reached in our narrative, it will have shown how
largely fortune had contributed to the genesis of this title. Of James
I’s two sons, the elder, Henry, had died in the early flower of his
youth. Charles I left three sons, of whom the third, another Henry, also
died young and unmarried. Since Charles II left no lawful issue, the
Crown fell to James II, and, having been transferred from him to his
son-in-law, William of Orange, and to his elder Protestant daughter,
Mary, passed in turn to his second Protestant daughter, Anne. Mary had
left no issue, and her widowed husband, on whose issue by another wife
the Crown had been eventually settled, should Anne die childless,
declined to marry again. Of Anne’s numerous progeny, none survived their
infancy except the Duke of Gloucester, and he died in 1700. Nor could
there be any question of the conversion to Protestantism of any child of
James II by his second, Catholic, wife except the Prince afterwards
known as the Old Pretender; for all the others died in their infancy,
with the exception of Marie Louise, who survived into her twelfth year.
The chance passed away of finding a Protestant successor to the Crown
among the grandchildren of Charles I’s youngest daughter, Henrietta,
Duchess of Orleans, in the House of Savoy and it was therefore necessary
to turn to the offspring of James I’s only daughter, Elizabeth, the
Protestant consort of a Protestant prince. But of the sons born from
this union who survived to maturity, the eldest, Charles Lewis, died in
1680; his only legitimate son, Charles, died without issue in 1685; his
only daughter, Elizabeth Charlotte, became a Catholic on her marriage to
the Duke of Orleans. Of the others who remained Protestants, Rupert
persistently refused to marry, and died in 1682; Maurice and Philip,
both of them homeless wanderers, had perished in 1654 and 1650
respectively. Edward, alone among the younger brothers, married and
became the father of a family; but he had been carried away from the
traditions of his House by the wave of Catholic propaganda, of which
this biography will repeatedly have to take note; and his three
daughters all became the wives of Catholic husbands. Of Sophia’s elder
sisters, one, Louisa Hollandina, fell under the same religious
influence, and became the Abbess of a Catholic convent; another, the
eldest of the sisterhood, who came to hold the same position in a
Protestantised foundation, likewise elected to remain the votaress of an
unmarried life; a third, Henrietta Maria, died in 1652, soon after she
had been wedded to a Transylvanian prince. No other personage possessed
a claim of birth equal to Sophia’s, yet even of pretensions palpably
inferior to her own on this score, fortune, which seemed in this
question always on her side, disposed in her favour.
The Electress Sophia’s later years were chiefly spent in the
tranquillity of Herrenhausen, more especially after she had become a
widow in 1698; and here she held intellectual intercourse with Leibniz,
her own and her daughter’s friend, and with other fit companions of her
solitude, while keeping up her voluminous correspondence with her
favourites of heart and mind, among them her inimitable niece, the
Duchess of Orleans. She lived to see the territorial power of the House
of Hanover fully established at home, and its foreign policy completely
merged into that of the Grand Alliance against France; and there
remained now nothing but the consummation of the British Succession.
This she was not destined to see accomplished in her own person; but
less than two months after her death, on June 8th, 1714, her eldest son,
the Elector George Lewis of Hanover, was proclaimed King George I of
Great Britain and Ireland.
I