(LEYDEN, THE HAGUE, AND RHEENEN, 1630-1650)
Sophia, the youngest daughter and the youngest but one of the thirteen
children of Frederick, sometime Elector Palatine and King of Bohemia,
and of his wife Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of King James I of
England, was born at the Hague on October 14th, 1640 (N.S.). She was
thus, by only a few months, the junior of her first cousin Charles,
afterwards King Charles II, whose ‘star’ was so long to remain under a
cloud in the period of her youth, and who was himself in those dubious
days to play a transient part in her personal history; while the date of
her birth was preceded, at a not much longer interval, by that of the
landing of Gustavus Adolphus in Pomerania, the turning-point of the
Thirty Years’ War, although not, as her family had hoped, also that of
their fortunes. Her baptismal name of Sophia she doubtless owed to the
remembrance of her mother’s youngest sister, buried in Westminster Abbey
in 1607, the ephemeral flight of whose earthly existence strangely
contrasts with the long life in store for the younger Sophia.
It was by her marriage to Frederick V, Elector Palatine, on St.
Valentine’s Day, 1613, that James I’s only surviving daughter Elizabeth
was first brought into contact with the political problems that were
agitating Europe. The bridegroom, it is true, was only a boy of sixteen,
who would not till August, 1614, be entitled to assume the government of
his paternal inheritance. Elizabeth was only a year older than he, and
her previous life had been marked by but one personal experience of
general interest. As early as 1603 she was consigned to the care of Lord
and Lady Harington, and with them she soon took up her residence at
Combe Abbey, near Coventry, in Warwickshire—the lordly castellated
mansion which, whether or not she re-visited its moated solitude towards
the close of her life, still remains as it were consecrated to her royal
memory.[3] King James, in the early years of his English reign, had good
reason for dreading the designs of some of his Roman Catholic subjects,
and Elizabeth’s mother, Queen Anne, the sister of Christian IV of
Denmark, had not yet given way to the influences which (as is now
ascertained beyond all doubt) afterwards caused her to become a secret
convert to the Church of Rome. The sound Protestantism, of the
Puritanising type, but probably intermingled on both sides with strains
of literary sentiment, that had marked out Lord and Lady Harington for
this charge, was unmistakably the primary source of those feelings of
attachment to the Reformed religion from which in times both fierce and
fickle Elizabeth never swerved a hair’s breadth. In her childhood the
country round Combe Abbey was full of more or less open adherents of the
Church of Rome; and by some of these a conspiracy was hatched, which was
to co-operate with, and supplement, the Gunpowder Plot. On the day at
last fixed for the demonstration in chief at Westminster, the
eight-year-old Princess at Combe Abbey was to be seized by a body of
gentlemen who had agreed to assemble for the purpose on the pretext of a
meet of hounds, and so soon as the throne became vacant she was to be
proclaimed Queen, professing herself at the same time a member of the
unreformed Church. But _non tali auxilio_ was this future ancestress of
our sovereigns herself to ascend a throne. Combe Abbey was warned, the
moat was drawn up, and the towers were manned, and the Princess was
conveyed in safety to the loyal town of Coventry, where the townsmen
armed in her defence. As fate would have it, John Digby, the young
Warwickshire gentleman who bore to King James I the tidings of his
daughter’s peril and preservation, was afterwards to be the most
prominent agent of the royal policy which, with admirable intentions,
only served to thwart the English nation’s hope of helping to restore,
at least in part, the fortunes of Elizabeth and her children.
-----
Footnote 3:
Lord and Lady Harington, as will be seen, accompanied Elizabeth after
her marriage to Heidelberg. From them Combe Abbey descended to their
daughter Lucia, Countess of Bedford, Drayton’s ‘sweet nymph of Ankor’
(on whose banks the Abbey is situated) and earlier ‘Idea,’ and the
recipient of other poetic tributes from Ben Jonson and Donne. (See
Courthope’s _History of English Poetry_, Vol. iii. pp. 29 _sqq._) It
was her prodigal tastes which made it necessary to sell Combe Abbey,
which was finally purchased by the Earl of Craven. (See the notes to
_Combe Abbey_, a historical tale of the reign of James I, by Selina
Bunbury (Dublin, 1843)—the first work of the authoress, written in an
ardently Protestant spirit. In this novel are cited the stanzas, ‘This
is a joye, This is true pleasure,’ said to have been composed by the
Princess Elizabeth in her childhood.)
-----
The political significance of the marriage, which in 1613 brought the
Princess Palatine Elizabeth’s girlhood to a close, was perfectly patent
alike to James I’s subjects and to those Powers which more or less
benevolently interested themselves in his foreign policy. In 1612, when
the marriage was arranged, that policy had not yet fully revealed its
visionary purpose and its shifty methods; while at home his quarrels
with his Parliaments had scarcely more than begun. Three years earlier
the affairs of Europe had, with the death of Henry IV of France, assumed
a wholly new aspect, and it had become evident that the struggle between
the House of Habsburg and its adversaries, in which James I had long
hoped to play the august part of a pacificator, must take place under
quite new conditions. This aspiration, together with a pride of descent
natural to a Stewart and a Scot, had led him to scheme marriages for his
children with half the chief reigning houses in Europe, including those
of France, Spain, and Sweden (whose youthful King, Gustavus II Adolphus,
was, however, soon put aside as unequal to a match with a daughter of
the House of Stewart). But when, in 1610, friendly relations, soon to be
sealed by a double marriage, had set in between the French and Spanish
Courts, James I was not slow in perceiving how this turn of affairs must
affect the political prospects of his own kingdom. On the outbreak of
the European conflict which was expected on all sides, it would go hard
with the Protestant interest, unless it contrived to consolidate itself
into an alliance capable of confronting the great Catholic Powers. When,
in March, 1611, the Count of Cartignano arrived in England as a special
ambassador from Duke Charles Emmanuel of Savoy to negotiate a double
marriage between the Houses of Savoy and England, James, though he
refused to enter into this scheme, seemed willing to approve of the
marriage of his daughter to the Prince of Piedmont. In November,
Cartignano reappeared with fresh instructions, and at the audience in
which he asked Elizabeth’s hand for the Prince Sir Henry Wotton, who had
had a hand in the negotiations, was present. But the King had
practically already decided how to dispose of his daughter’s hand, and
the Savoyard returned home in dudgeon. The step which was now taken by
James I, and by means of which a Protestant Succession was ultimately to
be secured to the English throne, was in full accordance with the
identification of England with militant Protestantism, which had been
accomplished as a matter of fact rather than of deliberate purpose in
the great age of Queen Elizabeth. After, in March, 1612, concluding an
alliance with the Union of German Protestant Princes, of which the
Palatine House had from the first assumed the leadership, James, to the
delight of the large majority of his subjects, resolved upon the
marriage of his only surviving daughter to the young ‘Palsgrave,’ as he
was called in England, Frederick V.
The line of the Electors Palatine boasted a high antiquity and dignity;
and though it would take us too far to account for the claims maintained
by them to the first place among the temporal Electors, the familiar
fact may be recalled that early in the fourteenth century the Elector
Rupert III, of the older Electoral line of the Wittelsbach House to
which the Simmern line had since succeeded, had worthily held the high
dignity of German King.[4] It is after him that Elizabeth is supposed to
have named her third son, whose name of Prince Rupert is so familiar to
our ears; but she may also have been aware that an earlier English
Princess who had become Electress Palatine—Blanche, daughter of King
Henry IV and wife of the Elector Palatine Louis II—had named her son
Rupert, and that during his short life he bore the cognomen ‘England.’
Though portions of the Palatine territory had from time to time been
split off in accordance with the German tendency to subdivision which no
systematic effort was made to repress till after the times of the Thirty
Years’ War, the electorate about the time of the opening of that war
extended far on both banks of the Rhine, being on one side contiguous
with the kingdom of Bohemia. If not equal in size to any of the other
temporal electorates, it was not far inferior to Saxony, and hardly at
all to Brandenburg, in territorial importance, being largely composed of
districts peerless among the German lands in beauty and
productivity—amidst whose orchards and vineyards throve a busy and
light-hearted population. The religious sympathies of the electorate
were in so far divided, that the Upper Palatinate (on the left bank of
the Rhine) adhered to Lutheranism, while the inhabitants of the Lower or
Rhenish were, like the dynasty, Calvinists. The electoral residence was
Heidelberg, whose castle and its treasures were reckoned among the
wonders of the Western world. To its graceful earlier buildings, the
florid taste of the Elector Frederick IV had added the splendid but
pretentious structure, in the artificial style of the latest Renascence,
of which a characteristic remnant is the inner side, decorated,
something after the manner of Alnwick, with statues of defunct
Palsgraves. The outside commands the wondrous view over the valley of
the Neckar, to which nothing but the genius of a Turner could have
imparted an additional charm. The choicest possession of the castle was
the electoral Library, the finest collection of books in Germany and far
beyond, thrown open with rare liberality to the use of all qualified
comers. And the pride of both court and town was the University, now
again, as it had been under the single-minded rule of the Elector
Frederick III, the foremost Calvinist seminary of higher learning in
Europe.
But though the Electoral Palatine House honoured learning, and, as both
the bringing-up of Frederick V and that bestowed by him on his own
children showed, set a high value upon a many-sided intellectual as well
as upon a careful religious and moral education, its interests had in
the early years of the seventeenth century become engrossed by public
affairs, and it had acquired a political importance out of proportion to
its territorial power. Partly by force of circumstances and because of
the situation of the Palatinate, on the confines of France and on the
water-way to the Netherlands, but still more by their own zeal and
ambition, its Princes and certain of their statesmen stood in the front
of that active party in the Empire which might be termed the advanced,
or militant, Protestant Opposition. This party, among whose other
members Landgrave Maurice of Hesse and Count Christian of Anhalt are
pre-eminent, derived its impulse entirely from Calvinist sources.
Palatine blood had been shed and treasure spent under the Elector
Frederick III and the Administrator John Casimir on behalf of the Revolt
of the Netherlands and the cause of the French Huguenots; and under his
successor, Frederick IV, these designs had taken a wider range. He was a
man of great intellectual force; and, more especially in connexion with
the later history of his dynasty, it is interesting to note that in the
later years of his life he was much occupied with the scheme of a union,
on a broad basis, between all Protestant confessions.[5] But the young
Elector Frederick V had probably been more especially influenced by the
pure Calvinism of his mother the Electress Dowager Louisa Juliana, the
daughter of William the Silent and of Charlotte de Montpensier, who had
taken refuge at the Palatine Court for the sake of the Religion. Louisa
Juliana, though at the crisis of the Palatine fortunes her judgment was
not obscured by her sympathies, was one of those women the fervour of
whose religious convictions communicates itself as a legacy of faith and
love to the minds of their descendants for generation upon
generation.[6] Maurice of Hesse-Cassel also had a Nassau Juliana to
wife, so that the three Houses at the head of the Calvinistic movement
were closely linked together by intermarriage. In his father’s lifetime,
the young Frederick had been placed at the Court of the Calvinist Henry
Duke of Bouillon, whose second wife was likewise a daughter of the great
William of Orange, and to Sedan he afterwards returned, with fit
diplomatic and theological counsellors by his side, for a second sojourn
till the year before his marriage. To these multiplied influences the
Princess Elizabeth’s husband may in part have owed the fortitude of
spirit which, although not naturally a man of strong character, he
exhibited under a long and heavy pressure of trouble; while to the
liberality of his education may fairly be ascribed something of the
refined and lovable gentleness which he preserved to the last.
-----
Footnote 4:
In the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries respectively, two
Palatine Electors, Frederick II and Frederick III, aspired to the
German Kingship.
Footnote 5:
See Häusser, _Geschichte der Rhein-Pfalz_, Vol. ii. pp. 243-4.
Footnote 6:
A memoir of her was published in 1645 by the scholar and diplomatist
Ezechiel Spanheim, of whom Sophia frequently makes respectful mention
in her correspondence with her brother Charles Lewis.
-----
Under the Elector Frederick IV, the first head of the Union, vast
designs had been set on foot against the Catholicising policy of the
House of Habsburg, and for a dismemberment of its dominions. In 1612,
the hopes of the Palatine House and its counsellors were already
directed towards the attainment of the Bohemian Crown; moreover, as the
Spanish ambassador, Don Alonso de Velasca, informed the Spanish Council
early in 1613, James I was then of opinion that in a few years Frederick
V would be King of Bohemia. Thus, the expectation of the Bohemian Crown
unmistakably contributed to bring about the marriage which determined
the course of Elizabeth’s life.[7] To the English public, of course,
‘the Palsgrave’ was a handsome and courtly Prince, the nephew of Maurice
of Orange, heroic father’s heroic son,[8] and in their eyes his union
with the Princess Elizabeth promised to connect the royal family not
only with the great Protestant Houses already mentioned, but with the
Protestant interest at large.[9] As a matter of fact, English royalty
was thus to become connected with the dynasties of Brandenburg, Sweden,
and Transylvania.
-----
Footnote 7:
See Gindely, _Geschichte des dreissigjähr. Krieges_, Vol. i. p. 186,
and note. It may perhaps be added, by way of a _curiosum_, that at
this time there survived in England the lineal descendant of a
declared heir to the Bohemian Crown in the person of Humphrey Tyndall,
Dean of Ely, who died in 1614 and whose brass still remains in Ely
Cathedral. See Bentham’s _History and Antiquities of the Conventual
and Cathedral Church of Ely_.
Footnote 8:
On his visit to England in 1612 Frederick was accompanied by Count
Henry of Nassau (who in 1625 became Henry Frederick Prince of Orange).
His companion duly fell in love with a daughter of the Duke of
Northumberland. (_Letters of George Lord Carew._)
Footnote 9:
A Count Palatine Frederick (Frederick II of the old line) had visited
England early in the sixteenth century; but he had come in the service
of the House of Habsburg.
-----
The young Elector Frederick V had hardly presented himself at the
English Court, when a deep shadow passed over the sunny prospect
seemingly opening before Elizabeth, and she and her possible descendants
were suddenly brought nearer to a Succession undreamt of by her for
them. In November, 1612, Henry Prince of Wales, whose heart was entirely
with his sister’s in her Protestant preferences as in other matters,
died suddenly of typhoid fever, though, in accordance with the evil
fashion of the age, credulous or clamorous Protestants, perhaps not
quite inexcusably, attributed his death to poison. At the Court of James
and Anne, or in its vicinity, for which the Princess had since 1608
exchanged the retirement of Combe Abbey, she had continued to carry on
her studies, which were specially directed to the French and Italian
tongues and to the art of music, while the general guidance of Lord and
Lady Harington still continued to sustain the serious impulses that
contended with the frivolous in her receptive and responsive nature. As
a matter of course, the brother and sister, who dearly loved one
another, were companions in the elaborate entertainments that absorbed
so large a share of their royal parents’ attention, and in the
field-sports by which the masques and tilts were diversified, and in
which Elizabeth long retained an eager interest. There is some evidence
that she also shared the higher aspirations discernible in the
many-sided and ambitious activity of the brother who was taken so
suddenly from her side.[10] But youth and the exigencies of her position
exercised their effacing powers; and thus, within little more than three
months, the brother’s funeral was followed by the sister’s wedding.
Indeed, while the echoes of both events are loud in the literature of
the time, the same poetic voices occasionally attune themselves in turn
to condolence and to congratulation. But, though the show was great that
carnival week, and though besides so much of the powder as would go off
for the fireworks, plenty of incense was burnt on the occasion by
Chapman, Beaumont, Thomas Heywood, Campion,[11] Francis Bacon, Taylor
the Water-poet, and the rest, an undertone of doubt or apprehension was
audible among the rejoicings. The bride laughed too much at the wedding,
and her father yawned too soon in the course of the ensuing festivities,
which he finally felt obliged to cut short in fear of the bill and of
the House of Commons. And most ill-omened of all was the fact that among
the representatives of foreign Powers bidden to the solemnity the
Spanish ambassador remained away. Count Gondomar ‘was, or would be,
sick.’
-----
Footnote 10:
The theatrical company (formerly the Lord Admiral’s) which had been
under the patronage of the Prince of Wales, sought and, on January
4th, obtained that of the Palsgrave, the Fortune continuing to be
their playhouse. After 1625, they appear to have ceased to be under
the Elector’s ‘patronage.’ (_Henslowe’s Diary_, ed. Greg, Part ii. pp.
98-9.)
Footnote 11:
Part of a stanza in a song in _The Lords’ Masque_, accompanying a
dance of stars, may be quoted, if only to suggest the contemporary
pronunciation of the King’s name:
‘So bravely crown it [the night] with your beams,
That it may live in fame
As long as Rhenus or the Thames
Are known by either name.’
-----
It was not till after Easter that the young Electress and her husband
were allowed to take their departure from London, nor till the beginning
of June that, after a semi-royal progress from Holland up the Rhine,
they at last set foot in Heidelberg. The greater part of the Electress’
English suite, which included Francis Quarles and Nicolas Ferrar, soon
afterwards left her—Lord Harington, by a pathetic fate, dying on the way
at Worms, so that his wife returned home a widow. Elizabeth’s life in
her new home was for many a day much what it had latterly been in her
old—a round of Court festivities, banquets, and hunting-expeditions. Nor
does she, after the protracted honeymoon was over, seem to have ceased
to be preoccupied with the trivialities of her daily life. We may
discount the report of a divine who visited her husband’s Court, that
‘she is not often heard to speak of God ... she is fond of grandeur and
the precedence of rank.’ And we may excuse her for not allowing the
ascendancy of the Court-preacher, Abraham Scultetus, to dominate her
thoughts and conduct, in spite of the potent authority exercised by this
divine, afterwards one of the most vigorous of the anti-Remonstrants at
Dort (where he had the satisfaction of seeing that Heidelberg Catechism,
which Sophia was so ruefully to remember as the religious _pabulum_ of
her youth, adopted as the symbol of the Dutch Church). At Heidelberg she
had her own English Chaplain.[12] For the rest, it seems to have been
the use of her horse and gun which, on the occasion of the death of her
firstborn child, assuaged the first sharp sorrow of her married life.
While the high state kept by King James’ daughter—with her army of
ladies-in-waiting, chamberlains, chaplains, and the rest—could not fail
to heighten the splendour and swell the outlay of the Palatine Court,
her influence must have helped to soften and refine its tone, though in
neither respect was the ground unprepared. It may safely be ascribed to
Elizabeth and to her bringing-up that the place of German was taken by
French as the Court tongue at Heidelberg. Her husband, whose favourite
extravagance was that of building, was much engaged at this time in
perfecting the Castle gardens in the most approved French style, and in
adding a new ‘English wing’ to the Electoral residence itself. On
January 1st, 1617, she gave birth to her eldest son, and half the
Protestant Powers of Europe were represented round the baptismal font.
The fortunes of the family had sunk low, when, fifteen years later, this
Prince—Henry Frederick—was, in his unhappy father’s sight, drowned off
Haarlem. On December 22nd, 1617, another son was born to the Electoral
couple, Charles Lewis, afterwards Elector Palatine; and on December
26th, 1618, followed the birth of their eldest daughter, Elizabeth.
-----
Footnote 12:
Alexander Chapman, Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, D.D.
1610, and Archdeacon of Stow and Prebendary of Lincoln in the same
year. In 1618 he was appointed Prebendary of Canterbury, where, on his
death in 1629, ‘an elegant Monument of blue and white Marble, with a
demy Effigie of him thereon, was erected to his memory by his
Brother.’ See R. Masters’ _History of C.C.C._, pp. 264-5. He was
possibly the donor of the speaking likeness of Elizabeth which hangs
in the Master’s Lodge at Corpus.
-----
There were, however, certain drawbacks to the perfect contentment of
Elizabeth in the ‘merry’ Heidelberg days, which readily revealed
themselves to the eye of the sympathising observer. Even at a distance
she dwelt as it were in the shadow of the paternal throne; and the pride
of her father, to which her own seems to have very readily responded,
obliged her to assert extravagant claims in matters of precedence. As to
these pretensions full information is furnished by the communicative pen
of Sir Henry Wotton, who in April, 1616, when on his way to Turin and
Venice, spent six days in the Electoral Court at Heidelberg. He had some
public business of moment to transact with the Elector, to whom he
submitted a plan for a league with Savoy, which Frederick approved and
promised to lay before the Princes of the Union. But it was his chief
duty to give some account to the King of the Court of Heidelberg, and of
the treatment there extended to the King’s daughter in those matters
which her father had so much at heart. Sir Henry Wotton, whose deep
admiration for Elizabeth, expressed in undying verse, has indissolubly
linked his name with her own, addressed himself to his task with even
more than his usual diligence. He describes the Electoral Court as one
‘of great sobriety,’ and very well attended. The Elector he found ‘_par
boutades_ merry, but for the most part cogitative, or, as they here call
it, melancolique; his chiefest object was money, and his principal
delight architecture.’ The Electress, although already at that time ‘the
mother of one of the sweetest children,’ still retained ‘her former
virginal verdure in her complexion and features.’ Very manifestly,
though the ambassador approaches the subject with many courtly
involutions, things had not at first, and did not even now, run quite
smoothly between the Elector and his consort. At first, some trouble was
caused by the ‘emulation’ of servants—in other words, rubs between the
English and the German members of the Court; and now there remained the
cardinal difficulty about ‘placing her Highness.’ The claim which James
I had set up before his daughter’s departure from England, and which
Frederick had then promised to allow, that she should have precedence in
her husband’s and other non-royal Courts, had proved one which Frederick
found it impossible in practice to reconcile with self-respect; and
Wotton hardly bettered the situation by trying to prove too much.[13]
The problem was ultimately settled in no very satisfactory fashion; the
Electoral pair decided to pay no further visits to other Courts; and
Louisa Juliana, the Electress Dowager, whom Elizabeth had expected to
give her the _pas_, withdrew for some time from her son’s Court.
-----
Footnote 13:
‘My Lady,’ he argued, ‘was not to be considered only as the daughter
of a King, like the daughters of France, but did carry in her person
the possibility of succession to three Crowns.’
-----
Wotton had judiciously recommended the Elector to state his case to the
King through a nobleman particularly valued by the Electress—Hans
Meinhard von Schönberg (Schombergh), Marshal of the Palatinate.
Schönberg had, in March, 1615, married Anne Sutton, daughter of Lord
Dudley, a favourite lady-in-waiting of Elizabeth, with whom she had
remained after Lady Harington’s departure; but she had been taken from
him by death in the following December. Schönberg’s advice, the
Electress informed Wotton, had been of the utmost value to her, ‘though
by divers provocations and offences, of the greatest part for her sake,
he had been moved and had himself resolved to be gone.’ (He was now
serving as a colonel under Maurice of Nassau.) She also spoke with
gratitude of the attentions of Frau von Pless (who had been her
husband’s governess), though she desiderated the company of another
English lady of Anne Sutton’s age. With the services of the English
secretary, Albertus Morton (Wotton’s nephew), whom her father had sent
to her, Elizabeth was well content.
We must conclude from this report that the English-born Electress had to
bear at Heidelberg some of the unpopularity incurred by her countrymen
who, in search of amusement or employment, swelled her Court without
being attached to it; and that she had also to suffer from the
consequences of a self-consciousness fostered by her father. It is
further clear that, in one way or another, she came at this early period
of her career to be oppressed by a burden of debt which it was not easy,
with or without good advice, to shake off. Perhaps these features of her
life as Electress Palatine should be called to mind, before the
customary version of her conduct at the crisis of her consort’s
destinies and her own is unhesitatingly followed. In 1619, the great
opportunity for which the Palatine diplomatists had been so long
scheming arrived at last. It has been seen that the idea of the Bohemian
Crown had been present to them for some time; probably, the first
suggestion of it arose in the course of the negotiations carried on by
the Palatine Government in 1605-7, the chief advocate of the notion
being Lösenius, while it was actively supported by Christian of
Anhalt.[14] But, though the chance of carrying it into execution was now
before the Palatines, it found them and their allies, great and small,
unprepared. They had not succeeded in turning to account the strong
feeling which prevailed in many quarters against the choice as Emperor
of the Archduke Ferdinand of Styria, the destined head of the House of
Austria, and the formally acknowledged successor to the Bohemian and
Hungarian thrones. They had dallied with idle thoughts of the King of
France and the Duke of Lorraine, and had then concentrated their efforts
upon the paradoxical device of securing as a candidate the head of the
Catholic branch of the House of Wittelsbach, Duke Maximilian of Bavaria,
who was also the head of the Catholic League. But Maximilian, though by
the tradition of his House jealous of Habsburg, better knew his own mind
and his own interests. Thus, when (in March, 1619) the Emperor Matthias
passed away, the Elector Palatine wasted the little time remaining in
protests; and, when the day of election arrived (August 28), after some
empty words accepted the predetermined vote in favour of Ferdinand of
Styria. The pupil of the Jesuits was seated on the Imperial throne; but,
on the very evening when this defeat of the Palatine policy was
proclaimed at Frankfort, the news arrived that it had scored a victory
at Prague. Here, only a year previously (1618), the troubles between the
government and the Utraquists had come to an outbreak, and on the
Hradschin had been perpetrated the _defenestration_ (ejection through
the window) of certain Ministers of the Crown, which it is usual to
regard as the opening of the Thirty Years’ War. Quite unable to
establish his authority in Bohemia, Ferdinand had been actually menaced
in his palace at Vienna by the Utraquist chiefs, with an army at their
back. And now it was announced that, after deposing Ferdinand, the
Bohemian Estates had elected Frederick V Elector Palatine King of
Bohemia in his stead.
-----
Footnote 14:
See M. Ritter, _Deutsche Geschichte in der Zeit d. dreissigjähr.
Krieges_, Vol. ii. p. 201.
-----
‘Thou hast it now.’ After a few diplomatic operations by Achatius von
Dohna, the Elector Palatine had only to stretch his hand from Amberg
across the Bohemian frontier, and a great historic throne was his,[15]
with its large territorial dependencies, and with a second electoral
vote ensuring the majority in the College to the Protestant interest. He
was Calvinist enough in his habits of mind to be able afterwards to
declare conscientiously that, in accepting this Crown, he obeyed an
inner voice, which he thought spoke the will of God. And, certainly,
there was no pressure of advice to urge him in this direction. His
Council, setting forth the _pros_ and _cons_ in the argumentative
fashion of the day, could only find six reasons in favour of acceptance
to balance fourteen against; and the gist of their opinion was after all
that everything depended on the support the Elector would receive in a
forward policy. But at most of the friendly Courts opinion was found to
be adverse; and while Maurice of Orange and others eagerly advised
acceptance, Maximilian of Bavaria with honourable candour raised a clear
voice of warning. As for Frederick’s father-in-law King James, he was
not at present prepared to depart from his masterly attitude of
declining to pronounce against acceptance, while desiring not to be
supposed to have advised in favour of it. Whether or not a strong
protest from James before Frederick’s formal acceptance of the Crown
might have arrested that final step, no such protest was made.
-----
Footnote 15:
‘Then County Palatine, and now a King.’ (_Tamburlaine_, Part II, Act
i, Sc. i. l. 103.)
-----
Frederick’s mother, Louisa Juliana, though a woman cast in no ignoble
mould, is said to have burst into tears and fallen ill on hearing of her
son’s election to the Bohemian throne. On the other hand, it has again
and again been asserted, or at least represented as highly probable,
that it was the urgent representations of the Electress Elizabeth which
determined her consort to cast the die; and everybody has heard the
anecdote of her taunting him with the avowal that she would rather
partake of sour-krout with a King, than of a joint of roast meat with an
Elector. Elizabeth is unlikely either to have forgotten herself so far,
or to have sought for any analogy between her own position and that of
the Bohemian Princess who shortly after Wyclif’s death had mounted the
English throne. Moreover, we have the statement of her grand-daughter,
the free-spoken Duchess of Orleans, that at the time of the Bohemian
offer the Electress knew nothing at all about the matter, her thoughts
being in those days entirely absorbed by plays, masquerades, and the
reading of romances. No doubt the Duchess, though deeply attached to her
father’s house, is not to be absolutely trusted in her statements as to
all the members of her father’s family; but her account of the condition
of Elizabeth’s mind at the time when she was first brought face to face
with the chief problem of her life, harmonises with all we know as to
its previous current. After all, however, the point is not very
material. Even before her husband had actually decided to become a King,
she stood forth every inch a Queen; nor was it with a light heart, or in
a spirit inflated with vanity or ambition, that at the last she left the
decision in his hands. She was, in her own words, prepared to bow to the
will of God, and, if need were, to suffer what He should see fit to
ordain. Of her worldly goods she at the same time declared herself ready
to make any reasonable sacrifice, by pledging her jewels, or whatever
else of value she possessed. Early in October (1619) the last bridge had
been burnt.
From this time forward, Elizabeth’s troubles came thick upon her; and
indeed, but for a very imperfect return of prosperity towards the close
of her life, they may be said never to have ceased again on earth. When,
with Frederick, she quitted the Palatinate for Bohemia towards the end
of October, they left behind them at Heidelberg, in the care of the
Electress Dowager Louisa Juliana, their two children Charles Lewis and
Elizabeth; but, though the former was long his mother’s favourite, it
was hardly in her way to be deeply affected by a separation from her
babes. The part which the new King and Queen were called upon to play
during the twelve-month of their residence at Prague was from the outset
the reverse of easy. The self-conscious and stiff-necked Bohemian
Estates had not the least intention of being ruled in fact as well as in
name by the sovereign of their making; while part at least of the
population was steeped in ignorance like the peasants who welcomed his
entry with shouts of ‘Vivat rex _Ferdinandus_!’[16] In Frederick’s
mistake of importing and maintaining among Utraquist (i.e. Lutheran)
surroundings, a rigid and aggressive Calvinism, incarnate in the
iconoclastic Scultetus, Elizabeth probably had no share; for, as is
worth remembering in connexion with the rather complicated religious
history of her children, she never became a Calvinist herself or
displayed any liking for Calvinistic ways. She did her best to gain
popularity for herself and her consort, checking the insolence provoked
among her courtiers by the uncouth manners and customs of her new
subjects, and delighting all and sundry by pleasant English
‘hand-shakes.’ Now and then, offence was given by such innovations as
the holding of Court balls on great Church holidays, and by the fashions
of the attire worn on these occasions by the Queen and her ladies; and
more serious umbrage was taken at the King’s conclusion of an alliance
with the Calvinist Transylvanian, and at the project of another with the
Sultan himself. Finally, there was the eternal difficulty as to ways and
means, alike in Silesia (where the royal pair had been received with
great rejoicing) and in Bohemia itself. Among all these agitations
Elizabeth’s spirits from time to time flagged, both before and after the
birth of her third son; for the changeful story of Prince Rupert’s life
began at Prague in December, 1619.
-----
Footnote 16:
The entry of Frederick into Prague, and his handsome reception by the
three Estates ‘after the manner of our ancient Kings,’ was witnessed
by Jacob Böhme.
-----
Within less than a year from this date the brief glories of her Bohemian
royalty had ‘turned to coal.’ In July King James, while sending Sir
Edward Conway and Sir Richard Weston to Prague, ordered Sir Henry Wotton
to repair to Vienna, where, if the King of Bohemia consented, he was to
propose the settlement of the difficulty by means of an Imperial Diet;
while to all Princes visited by him on the way he was to protest his
master’s abstinence from any participation in the election to the
Bohemian Crown. The choice of Wotton for this singularly futile mission
was in itself extraordinarily infelicitous; very naturally, however, his
task impressed itself at once upon the chosen ambassador’s vivid
imagination. For it was on the eve of his departure for Vienna that
Wotton, ‘being in Greenwitche Parke, made a sonnet to the Queen of
Bohemia,’ of which he sent copies to Lady Wotton and Lord Zouche, and as
to which Wotton’s latest biographer remarks, with perfect truth, that
‘such is the magic of art, these verses have done more than anything
else, perhaps, to make both’ Ambassador and Queen ‘remembered.’[17]
Neither the Prague nor the Vienna mission had any effect whatever;
indeed, before Conway and Weston’s reply reached Wotton, all was over.
Early in September the Leaguers under Maximilian of Bavaria, the head of
the rival Wittelsbach line, had joined their forces against him, while
Spinola’s Spaniards were approaching the Palatinate. Soon the enemies of
the new Bohemian monarchy had closed in upon it. The battle of the White
Hill was waged and lost in an hour (November 8th); and, though Frederick
can hardly be blamed for the actual loss of the battle, in his
accidental absence from which there was nothing disgraceful,[18] he had
entirely failed to take precautions for the event of such a catastrophe,
and lacked the self-confidence which alone could have made possible
further resistance on the spot. Thus, though he did not at first quite
understand the full significance of his overthrow, Bohemia had passed
for ever out of the weak hands of the Winter—or Twelfth Night—King.
When, on the evening of the rout, the long stream of vehicles, headed by
Queen Elizabeth’s coach, ebbed out of Prague, bearing with it whatsoever
was portable of the Protestant interest, no hopes remained except such
as were wholly illusory. But Elizabeth intended that, even though
Bohemia was lost and the Palatinate, which, as Louisa Juliana had
formerly lamented, had ‘gone into Bohemia,’ might prove to be lost with
it, the drama so swiftly played out should have no ignoble epilogue. She
had resolved—in her own words—‘not to desert her husband, and, if he was
to perish, to perish by his side.’ Fate dealt with her after no such
sudden fashion; but she was true to the spirit of her vow.
-----
Footnote 17:
See L. Pearsall Smith, _Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton_, Vol. i.
p. 171.
Footnote 18:
The _Mercure Français_ stated that he took part in the battle, and
lost his ribbon of the Garter on the occasion! (Charvériat, _Histoire
de la Guerre de Trente Ans_, Vol. i. p. 235, note.)
-----
From Prague Frederick and Elizabeth first made their way into Silesia,
then still a dependency of Bohemia; but soon Frederick, though, owing to
Wotton’s protest against the invasion of the Palatinate, the ban of the
Empire did not descend on him till the following January, had to realise
the position to which he was reduced. He sent on his wife before him, to
seek shelter in the dominions of his brother-in-law, the Elector George
William of Brandenburg. This Prince, a Calvinist and one of those who
had advised the acceptance of the Bohemian Crown, was afraid at the same
time of the Swedes and of the Emperor, to whose policy he had not yet
rallied; and in after days the great Elector’s sister, the brave Duchess
Louisa Charlotte of Courland, recognising in the experiences of her own
married life some analogy to those of her Aunt Elizabeth’s, recalled as
memorable the impunity with which her father had afforded a passing
refuge to his unfortunate relatives.[19] The intimacy between the two
Calvinist Electoral Houses was to survive backslidings on the part of
Brandenburg in the course of the great War, and was at a later date to
be very notably renewed, in spite of the perennial jealousy between the
two dynasties and governments, by the marriage of Elizabeth’s
grand-daughter Sophia Charlotte with the future first Prussian King.
But, in these early days, the welcome extended by the Elector George
William to his fugitive kinsfolk was limited to the coldest courtesies.
At Küstrin, where on Christmas Day, 1620, Elizabeth gave birth to her
fifth child, the Prince Maurice to be known in later life as Rupert’s
_fidus Achates_, the royal mother and her attendants are said to have
hardly had enough to eat, and, when in January, 1621, they were joined
by her husband from Breslau, he brought no good tidings with him. The
Union was on the eve of dissolution; an offer of aid from the Sultan, so
at least it was rumoured, had been refused by Frederick; and the
vacillations of King James were more hopeless than ever. At Berlin,
where the fugitives were received by Frederick’s sister, the Electress
Elizabeth Charlotte, they were glad to leave behind them the infant
Maurice in the faithful charge of his grandmother Louisa Juliana, who,
with his elder brother and sister in her care, had taken her departure
from Heidelberg even before the battle of Prague. Her own estates,
together with those of her second son Lewis Philip, long remained
sequestrated; though neither of them had taken any part in the Bohemian
business. The boys were afterwards removed to Holland; but the young
Princess Elizabeth continued under her grandmother’s care till her ninth
year, chiefly at Krossen in Silesia. This early training and the closer
connexion into which it brought her with the Brandenburg Electoral
family, were to exercise a notable influence upon her character and upon
her later personal history.
-----
Footnote 19:
See A. Seraphim, _Eine Schwester des grossen Kurfürsten_, &c.
(_Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Gesch. d. Hauses Hohenzollern II._).
Berlin, 1901.
-----
From Berlin her parents, luckless emigrants, had still been obliged to
move on, Queen Elizabeth journeying to Wolfenbüttel, the residence of
the elder branch of the House of Brunswick, Frederick roaming about the
Lower Saxon Circle in quest of military or other aid. Finally, they
entered the Netherlands together by way of the Rhine. Everywhere in the
Low Countries they were warmly welcomed, not only as kinsfolk of the
House of Orange, but also as fellow-martyrs of those Protestant refugees
to whom, in the Elector Frederick III’s days, the Palatinate had
accorded so hospitable a reception. On April 14th, 1621, they were
received with the utmost cordiality by the great Stadholder, Maurice of
Orange, in the midst of a large assemblage of princes, nobles, and
foreign ambassadors; and soon the States-General of the United
Provinces, and the States of Holland and Friesland in particular, gave
substantial expression to the universal warmth of the public welcome.
But the arm of the young Dutch Republic, though strenuous, was not long
enough to reach effectively into the heart of the Empire. In the
previous autumn, Frederick Henry of Nassau, the Stadholder’s brother,
had made a show of protecting the Palatinate with a couple of thousand
men, among whom there was an English contingent; but the effort had come
to nothing. Already in 1620 the greater part of the Lower Palatinate had
been occupied by the Spaniards; and in 1621, after Frederick had been
placed under the ban of the Empire and the execution of the sentence had
been entrusted to the expectant Duke of Bavaria, the inhabitants of the
Upper Palatinate were called upon to forswear their allegiance.
Frederick’s cause was upheld only by the English volunteers under Sir
Horace Vere and by Mansfeld’s mercenaries. The Union had dissolved
itself in the spring, and after midsummer James, while still cherishing
the hope of bringing to pass a friendly intervention by Spain, was
attempting through his ambassador Digby to obtain favourable terms at
Vienna. Before the year was out, Maximilian of Bavaria had, with the aid
of Rome, obtained an imperial promise of the reversion of the forfeited
Electorate; and the future, as well as the present, seemed wholly dark
for the Electoral couple and their children. Near or far, no ally seemed
prepared to strike a blow in their interests, except that already, in
1621, the Queen of Hearts—as she came to be called in the days when she
exercised no other sovereignty[20]—had found a true knight neither
anxious, like King James, about probabilities of failure, nor, like the
great _condottiere_ Mansfeld, solely intent upon the main chance. This
was Duke Christian of Brunswick, the administrator or (as an English
letter of the time aptly calls him) the ‘temporal bishop’ of the see of
Halberstadt.[21] There is no evidence of his having ever met, or so much
as corresponded with, the Queen; but Sir Thomas Roe distinctly states
that it was only for her sake that he had engaged in the war, and he
made much the same confession himself to his mother; while the story of
his having worn in his helmet a glove belonging to the Queen, which he
had vowed to restore to her in reconquered Prague, can be traced back as
far as 1646. After losing an arm, he rode forth in 1624 with a
substitute made of iron. Though a poet’s son, he was as rough a
campaigner as any of the captains of the age; and in 1625 a flagrant act
of violence placed him under a cloud. In the following year a fever
ended the excesses of his military career, his wild defiances of Spain
and the League, and his romantic passion, which, as we know from a
letter written by his sister, Sophia of Nassau-Dietz, pined almost to
the last for some mark of recognition by its object.[22] Elizabeth’s
power of attracting the sympathy of soldiers, which had been so
conspicuously exhibited in the case of Christian of Halberstadt, and to
which afterwards Lord Craven’s life-long devotion was to testify, was
further exemplified by the goodwill shown to her in these times of
distress by her martial kinsmen of the House of Orange. The readiness of
the great captain Maurice of Nassau to further her interests so far as
in him lay was shared by his younger brother, Prince Frederick Henry,
who, in 1625, succeeded him in the stadholdership, and between whom and
one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting, attached to her person since her
Heidelberg days, Maurice a few weeks before his death arranged a
marriage. But the new Princess of Orange proved to be as proud as the
beautiful Countess Amalia von Solms had been poor; and, before long, her
desire of furthering the interests of the House into which she had been
admitted made her hostile to those of the family of her former mistress.
-----
Footnote 20:
The origin of the application of this title seems unknown. It had been
formerly connected in a peculiar fashion with Elizabeth’s august
godmother. (See the weird story in H. Clifford’s _Life of Jane
Dormer_, how not long before Queen Elizabeth’s death a playing-card,
the Queen of Hearts, with an iron nail knocked through the head, was
found at the bottom of her chair. Soon afterwards all hopes of her
recovery were abandoned.)
Footnote 21:
Halberstadt was one of those sees which had by special treaties with
the Chapters been made hereditary in particular Protestant princely
families. (Opel, _Niedersächs. Krieg_, Vol. i. p. 193.)
Footnote 22:
It must at the same time be allowed that the epithets applied to James
I by Christian after the breakdown of the scheme of 1623 could hardly
under any circumstances have been condoned by the King’s daughter.
(See Ritter, _Deutsche Geschichte_, &c., Vol. iii. p. 253.)
-----
The charm of Elizabeth’s beauty, and the stimulus of her high spirit,
also inspired with a warm personal concern in her affairs, those of her
father’s numerous diplomatists who were or became known to her. Sir
Henry Wotton seems never to have seen her again after their ‘merry hour’
of meeting at Heidelberg; but he remained stedfast in his admiration for
his ‘Royal Mistress,’ and among the intimate letters of the days of his
retirement at Eton are those which he addressed to her, then a
half-forgotten exile at the Hague. In his will he left to the Prince of
Wales her picture, with an inscription[23] which reappears, with slight
modifications, in two of his published pieces. Wotton’s successor at
Venice, Sir Dudley Carleton (afterwards Viscount Dorchester), who had
likewise been received by the Electoral pair at Heidelberg, and who was
English ambassador at the Hague when the fugitives arrived there,
cheerfully gave up his house for their use; besides judiciously exerting
himself in their interest both in this and in his second embassy to the
United Provinces. Lord Herbert of Cherbury was warmly thanked by
Elizabeth for his exertions at Paris; and Lord Conway did his best for
her cause with the Emperor at Prague. Lord Doncaster (afterwards Earl of
Carlisle) had, during his futile mission before the Bohemian crisis,
gained her goodwill in such a degree as to be honoured by her with the
intimate nickname of ‘camel-face’; and it was through him that his
eloquent chaplain Donne was privileged to ‘deliver mesages’ to the Queen
when in sore straits. More to the purpose were the active services of
Sir Thomas Roe, the ‘honest fatt Thom’ of her correspondence; but,
although these had begun before this diplomatist’s return from Eastern
Europe, he does not seem to have come into much personal contact with
her before 1628.
-----
Footnote 23:
‘_Inter Fortunæ sortem, extra Imperium._’ (See L. Pearsall Smith,
_u.s._, Vol. i. p. 297, note.)
-----
Only a few brief indications can be given here of the general course of
the exiled family’s fortunes during the quarter of a century which
elapsed, before a definitive settlement of the Palatinate problem was at
last reached in the Peace of Westphalia. Negotiations were at first
carried on in Sweden, through Ludwig Camerarius, who from 1623 directed
the diplomacy of the Palatine House, with the purpose of engaging King
Gustavus Adolphus in offensive operations, in the course of which the
latter intended that Frederick should appear in the Palatinate at the
head of an army; but the perennial Danish jealousy of Sweden put a stop
to the plan. About the same time (1623-4) the faithful Rusdorf sought,
by negotiations in London, to obtain fair terms for his master at
Vienna, Frederick signifying his willingness to allow his eldest son
(Frederick Henry) to be educated at Vienna, with a view to his marriage
with an Imperial Princess; but the overtures came to nothing, as did the
specious offers of the disguised Capuchin della Rota. These latter
proved, in truth, to be mere pretences on the part of Maximilian of
Bavaria, who, in 1624, was received into the College of Electors in
Frederick’s place. Towards the close of 1623, King James I, who earlier
in the year had broken off negotiations with Mansfeld and Christian of
Halberstadt and concluded a truce with the Infanta at Brussels, which
Frederick was obliged to ratify, had at last been undeceived as to the
intentions of Spain. He saw at last how during the Spanish marriage
negotiations he had been tricked into the false hope that good terms
would be obtained by Spanish mediation for the Palatines; and, during
the last year of his reign, when war with Spain was becoming more and
more imminent, a treaty promising an English army for the recovery of
the Palatinate was concluded with Mansfeld, who was for the moment the
lion of London, whither he was soon followed on a similar errand by
Christian of Halberstadt. Thus, when in March, 1625, James I was
succeeded on the English throne by Charles I, Elizabeth’s hopes rallied
with pathetic buoyancy, and she cherished the hope that her brother’s
approaching French marriage would further advance the interests of her
family. There can be no doubt of Charles I’s intention to serve his
sister and her children; and his wishes on this head were shared by
Buckingham. The Duke is even said, when visiting the Palatine family at
Leyden, not long before his assassination in January, 1629, to have had
in his head a scheme—which, if fate had so willed it, might have had
strange consequences for the British Succession—of a marriage between
his daughter Lady Mary Villiers and Elizabeth’s eldest son, Prince
Frederick Henry. But, as is well known, the history of Charles I’s
foreign policy during the first part of his reign, in which the question
of the recovery of the Palatinate could not possibly hold the central
place as it had in his father’s, had, as Eliot summed it up in his
scathing speech, been one of constant and utter failure. Afterwards, of
course, the King was so hopelessly at issue with his Parliament, that
all chance of effective intervention had come to an end. Mansfeld’s army
at first remained inactive in the Low Countries, where it was not
increased, except by fragments of the levies of Christian of
Halberstadt, which a tempest had scattered at sea. Instead of
reinforcing the mercenary troops, the English expedition which sailed
under Lord Wimbledon in October, 1625, had orders for Cadiz. When, in
1625, Elizabeth’s uncle, Christian IV of Denmark, at last took the field
as chief of the Lower Saxon Circle, the death of his namesake soon
deprived him of his best commander; and, in 1626, Mansfeld, after being
defeated by Wallenstein at Dessau, was ‘chased’ by him into Hungary,
whence, after making over his army to Bethlen Gabor, he took his
departure only to die. In August of the same year, Tilly entirely
overcame Christian IV at Lutter, and the ‘Danish War’ was virtually at
an end. Henceforth, no further intention was entertained either at
Vienna or at Munich of granting any terms to Frederick, although, on
Cardinal Khlesl’s principle of never either dropping negotiations or
concluding them, conditions were still offered him. In return for the
restoration of part of his paternal dominions, he was, while renouncing
both the Bohemian Crown and the Electoral dignity, to pay the costs of
the war, and to consent to bring up his children as Catholics; but the
former condition he could not, and the latter he would not, accept. It
is said that, at this very time (1627), the unhappy ex-Elector paid a
secret visit to the Palatinate, whose fate seemed sealed for ever by the
Austro-Bavarian treaty of the following year. The Spaniards held the
left bank of the Rhine and the Bavarians the right; conversion was
forced upon the inhabitants, who began to emigrate rather than submit to
it; and, when, in June, 1630, Rusdorf presented a letter from his master
at Ratisbon, where the Bavarian policy was conspicuously to the front,
the Emperor had no answer to return except a demand of unconditional
submission. Had the Palatine family yielded to this demand, and accepted
the further condition of conversion to the Church of Rome, they might
perhaps have been allowed some sort of domicile in the Empire. But they
were of a different metal, and held out, though their prospects had
never been gloomier; for, in the same year, peace was concluded between
England and Spain, and whatever hopes had been placed upon King Charles’
anti-Spanish policy were thus brought to nought.
Yet, soon after these events—in July, 1630—Gustavus Adolphus landed on
the Pomeranian coast, and in him the Palatine family hoped to find both
an avenger and a deliverer. The Electress Dowager Louisa Juliana met him
at Berlin, and after his great victory at Breitenfeld he approached the
Palatinate. Before the end of 1631 most of it had been recaptured and
re-Protestantised; and early in the following year Frederick was on his
way to meet the conquering hero. Frederick’s Dutch hosts had furnished
him forth with great liberality, and the number of state coaches with
which he arrived at Frankfort, in February, 1632, had been increased to
two score by Gustavus Adolphus himself, who treated him with great
courtesy as King of Bohemia. But the future of the Palatinate was left
undiscussed between the two Kings; nor was it till after Gustavus had
continued his victorious progress through Bavaria, that he proposed a
settlement. It showed unmistakably that the treatment of the Palatinate
formed but a subsidiary part of his great design, and filled Frederick,
who was looking for restoration to his patrimony, with alarm. For,
besides other onerous conditions, there were imposed on him the
admission of Swedish garrisons to some of his chief towns, the
concession of the supreme military command to Gustavus, and the grant of
equal rights to the Lutherans in the Calvinistic half of the Palatinate.
Hard as these terms seemed to Frederick, amicable negotiations were
still in progress between him and the great Swedish King, when the awful
news arrived of the death of Gustavus on the field of Lützen. Frederick
had a little before this fallen ill of a fever; but, as if driven by his
doom, he once more began to wander from town to town, till, on November
29th, 1632, thirteen days after the death of Gustavus, he breathed his
last at Mainz. The homeless wanderer’s heart was buried in the church at
Oppenheim, in his own Palatinate; his corpse was hurriedly borne hither
and thither—being carried off from Frankenthal by Bernhard of Weimar on
his retreat in 1635, to preserve it from desecration—till it was at last
composed in peace within the walls of Metz.[24]
-----
Footnote 24:
Elizabeth bore no love to the Swedish royal family, partly because of
these memories, partly perhaps because of the Danish blood in her.
(‘The States,’ she writes on one occasion, ‘are justly punished for
assisting the Queen of Sweden against my uncle’ (Christian IV). She
detested Gustavus’ daughter Christina. On the death of the Queen
Dowager Maria Eleonora, she writes: ‘Queen Mother is dead, which makes
her rap out with many an oth.’ (_Unpublished Letters of the Queen of
Bohemia to Sir Edward Nicholas_, _Antiq. Soc. Publ._ 1857 (xvi).)
-----
After Frederick’s death, the regency of the Palatinate was assumed by
his brother Louis Philip, who was married to a Brandenburg Princess
(Maria Eleonora); but though under his rule Heidelberg was recovered,
and with the aid of foreign (especially Scottish) beneficence the
prosperity of the Palatinate began to revive, the fatal day of
Nördlingen (September 6th, 1634) undid all the work of the previous two
years, and the sufferings of the Palatinate from both ‘friends’ and
foes—from Swedes and Bavarians—began afresh. After the Peace of Prague,
in 1635, the Swedes fell back upon the Main, and after Heidelberg had
been once more occupied by the Imperialists, the Palatinate remained for
some five years under the government of the Emperor, which banished all
Calvinist and Lutheran preachers with their families and households, and
in every way promoted the decay of University and schools. It cannot be
said that the general condition of the population, whose sufferings were
of the most heartrending description, and productive of that awful
brutalisation which is so characteristic of the later period of the
Thirty Years’ War, was much affected by changes in the occupation of the
country.[25] The renewal of warfare in these parts, in 1640 and again in
1644, brought in the French and their German allies and the Bavarians to
augment these troubles. It will be noted below how the dispossessed heir
of the Palatinate bore himself in these evil years, and what he finally
saved for his House out of so pitiful a wreck. The Bohemian Crown was,
of course, a thing of the past, though to the end Elizabeth retained the
royal title.[26]
-----
Footnote 25:
The project of despatching a Scottish army in 1639 to occupy the
Palatinate broke down because of a disagreement between Leslie and the
Covenanters.
Footnote 26:
It would seem as if after her husband’s death she had for a time
approved the style of ‘the King’s only sister.’ (See Wotton’s letter
_ap._ L. P. Smith, _u.s._, Vol. ii. p. 342.) When, on the marriage of
her daughter Princess Henrietta in 1651, her son Charles Lewis took
exception to the title ‘Queen of Bohemia,’ Elizabeth wrote to him
indignantly that ‘leauing it you doe me so much wrong as to the
memorie of your dead father, as if you disapproved his actions’; and
declared that whatever public instrument she might at any time have to
sign, she would never sign it without the royal style. _Letters_, &c.,
ed. by A. Wendland, p. 16.
-----
The birth at the Hague, on October 14th, 1630, of Sophia, the youngest
of the children of Frederick and Elizabeth, had preceded the death of
her father by very little more than two years. Her mother, it must be
remembered, was then still in the full flower of her womanhood—in the
thirty-fifth year of her age—an eager horsewoman and fond of the
pleasures of the chase; and in mind she remained not less vigorous than
in body, venting her wrath freely on both enemies and neutrals—on that
‘devil’ the Emperor and that ‘beast’ the Elector of Saxony, just as at a
later date she had to search in the Book of _Revelation_ for analogues
fitly expressing her sentiments concerning Oliver Cromwell. Yet private
as well as public griefs had helped to sadden her heart as well as to
sober her spirit even before the death of her husband, whose affection
towards her had remained unchanged, showing itself in little expressions
of care and tenderness such as abound in his letters almost to the day
of his death. In 1624, they had lost an infant son, Lewis; and, in
January, 1629, their first-born, Frederick Henry, a boy of fifteen, was
(as already noted) drowned off Haarlem as he was travelling back in the
common passengers’ boat with his father from Amsterdam, whither
Frederick had gone to collect the share of the profits from a captured
Spanish treasure-fleet assigned to him by Maurice of Nassau. The infant
Princess Charlotte was laid in the grave by her brother’s side only
three days before the christening of Sophia. But, as there survived five
brothers (to whom a sixth, significantly named Gustavus, was added two
years after Sophia’s birth), the statement may perhaps be credited with
which her _Memoirs_ open, that her arrival in this world caused no
excess of joy to her parents. She relates that her name—the name which
narrowly missed marking the beginning of a new English dynasty, and
which, in token of its popularity in this country, was bestowed upon his
heroine by the author of one of the masterpieces of our literature—was
drawn by lot out of several written for the purpose on slips of paper,
because of the small choice of godmothers remaining in the case of so
large a family. Sophia’s destinies were not encumbered by a second name
like that which her sister Louisa Hollandina bore in honour of her
godfathers; although the States of Friesland, who undertook the same
responsibility for the infant Sophia, presented her with a pension of
forty pounds for life and handsome supplementary gifts. So soon as it
was possible to transport her, she was sent to Leyden by her mother, who
preferred that her children should be brought up at a distance from
herself, ‘since,’ says Sophia, ‘the sight of her monkeys and dogs was
more pleasing to her than that of ourselves.’ At Leyden, therefore,
Sophia spent her early childhood, chiefly in the company of her youngest
brother Gustavus, who died nine years after his birth. Her graphic
reminiscences of her tender years chiefly turn on the cumbrous etiquette
(_tout à fait à l’allemande_) by which she was environed, and on the
lessons in the Heidelberg Catechism (which she ‘knew by heart without
understanding it’) imparted by her venerable governess, Frau von Pless,
with the assistance of her two daughters, ladies of ‘awe-inspiring’
presence, whose age seemed to the child almost equal to her own. ‘Their
ways were straight in the eyes of Heaven as before men.’ The good
ex-Elector had been consistently careful as to providing sound
Calvinistic instruction for his children, and Frau von Pless had been
his own instructress in his infancy; but his English wife, at least
during part of her residence in the Netherlands, continued to employ the
services of a Church of England chaplain. In general, it is clear that
at Leyden, and afterwards at the Hague, Sophia, while her wits quickly
opened to the demands of life, passed, like the rest of her brothers and
sisters, through a training which equipped them more or less efficiently
for the struggle before them. In her case, it must also have helped to
regulate the remarkable intellectual curiosity with which she was
naturally endowed, and which, though it cannot be shown to have carried
her to great heights or depths of study or thought, at least enabled her
in later life to rise serene above the troubles and trials of the hour.
The usual training of the Palatine Princes and Princesses, while
including some mathematics, history, and law, appears to have been based
in the main upon the study of languages, of which most of them came to
have several at command. Their mother they always addressed in English,
but among themselves they used French, as had been the custom of their
father in his letters to his wife, and as continued to be the practice
of Sophia’s son and grandson in domestic conversation, even when they
had become British sovereigns.
On Prince Gustavus’ death, in 1641, Sophia, who was herself suffering
from illness, quitted Leyden for the Hague, bidding farewell to her
_bonnes vieilles_, whom she said she had loved from gratitude and habit,
‘for sympathy rarely exists between old age and youth’—a maxim to be
flatly contradicted by the experience of her own later years. At the
Hague, where, during the rule of Frederick Henry, his consort Amalia
strained every nerve to prove the authority of the House of Orange equal
to that of a royal dynasty, the Queen of Bohemia was beginning to find
some of the conditions of her life oppressive, and, worst of all, the
continuous pressure of debt unbearable. Already in her husband’s time,
the generosity of Maurice had furnished them with a pleasant summer
retreat at Rheenen, in the wooded country on the Rhine, not far below
Arnhem, described by Evelyn as ‘a neate palace or country house, built
after the Italian manner, as I remember.’[27] But Sophia, on first
arriving at the Hague, found the change so delightful as to make her
think that she was ‘enjoying the pleasures of Paradise.’ This early
glamour must, however, have soon passed off; for, though blessed with
good spirits even in her later years, Sophia was without that
gift—sometimes enviable, sometimes dangerous—of seeing things rather as
one wishes them to be than as they are, which her brother Charles Lewis
described himself as having inherited from their mother. And it was this
mother herself to the flaws in whose brilliant and in many respects
noble personality Sophia seems to have been from the first unable to
shut her eyes. It cannot have been only her love of horses and dogs, or
her _penchant_ for what may be called the pleasures of the toilet which
affected both Sophia and her eldest sister Elizabeth unsympathetically;
there seems to have been in the Queen a vein of frivolity, inherited
perhaps from her own mother, which estranged from her these and perhaps
some other of her children, though they could not fail to recognise that
her life was devoted to the interests of her family as a whole. It must,
however, have been to his sister Elizabeth, and not to Sophia, that
their brother Charles Lewis refers in expressing a hope that their
mother may not find reason ‘to use her with the former coolness.’
-----
Footnote 27:
As to Rheenen, the best account appears to be contained in J.
Kretzschmar, _Mittheilungen zur Geschichte des Heidelberger
Schlosses_, pp. 96-132, which I have not seen. There seems at one time
to have been a notion of making it over to Prince Rupert; but it
afterwards became the property of Sophia, who says that it had cost
40,000 crowns to build (_Briefe an Hannov. Diplomaten_, p. 229). The
Electress Sophia, not being able to sell the property at its estimated
value, made it over to her son Ernest Augustus.
-----
Of her eldest brother, Charles Lewis himself, Sophia can have seen but
little in the days of the family life at the Hague and Rheenen, although
she afterwards grew warmly attached to him and came to regard him, as
she says, in the light of a father rather than of an elder brother. He
was a prince of remarkable intellectual gifts, which, till on his
father’s death he by his mother’s wish took service under William II,
Prince of Orange, he had cultivated to so much purpose at the University
of Leyden, that he was afterwards credited with a share in the writings
of Pufendorf, the chief glory of the restored University of Heidelberg.
His disposition resembled his youngest sister’s in not a few points, as
their correspondence shows. His nature, like hers, was at bottom both
kindly and humorous, and, while both had a turn for sarcastic wit, there
was, one must confess, a coarse fibre in both for which the habits and
traditions of Palatinate life are not to be held altogether responsible.
It must have been because of this natural wit, rather than because of
the avarice born of necessity which Charles Lewis displayed in later
passages of his career, that he was called _Timon_ by his brothers and
sisters, to whom Shakespeare, with whose plays Charles Lewis was not
unacquainted, is quite as likely as Lucian to have suggested the
nickname. He was through life a friend of English literature, and, so
late as 1674, John Philpot’s edition of Camden’s _Remains_ was dedicated
to him. There is evidence of his having had other literary tastes—among
the nicknames which he gave to his eldest son by Louisa von Degenfeld
were those of ‘Pantagruel’ and ‘Lancelot du Lac.’ But his favourite book
was the Bible (‘_meinliebotes Evangelium_’). At the same time he was,
like his sister Sophia, free-spoken on all subjects; though, on
occasion, as is not wonderful when his experiences are remembered, a
pathos welled up in him which she, not so much from cynicism as from
habitual self-control, steadily repressed.[28] Nor was he free-spoken
only; he might be called a free-thinker but for that aforesaid love of
the Bible which, together with a double share of his intellectual
alertness, he bequeathed to his daughter Elizabeth Charlotte, Duchess of
Orleans.
-----
Footnote 28:
See his extraordinary outburst of passionate woe on receiving the news
of the death of a daughter (in 1674) in _Briefe des Kurfürsten Karl
Ludwig an die Seinen_, pp. 234-5: ‘I do not know, why the Lord God
seeks to try me so—when I have but a few years more to live, and after
all did not create myself, and have no conscious desire of committing
any sin,’ &c.
-----
After his father’s death, Charles Lewis had been acknowledged as Elector
Palatine by King Charles I and some of the German Protestant Princes;
and his mother, though he was and always remained the darling of her
heart, would have urged him to assume his place in the Palatinate, had
not the battle of Nördlingen placed any such attempt out of the
question. Charles Lewis and his brother Rupert were accordingly sent to
England (1635). Here for two or three years they led a life of gaiety
and dissipation; but they could hardly, in any case, have effected
anything to the purpose, even had the young ‘Elector’ devised some more
practical scheme than that of asking the hand of the young Queen
Christina of Sweden. After their return to Holland, however, the two
Princes were, in 1638, stirred to a more vigorous activity on their own
account. They began badly by the loss of all their stores at Meppen in
Frisia; but they, notwithstanding, resolved to make an armed attempt
upon the Palatinate, of which the cost was defrayed by Lord Craven, who
himself held a command in it. They were supported by a Swedish force
under Major-General King (the Lord Eythin of Marston Moor); but, after
siege had been laid to Lemgo, the gallant raid came to an unfortunate
end at Vlotho on the Weser, both Rupert and Craven remaining behind in
captivity. Hereupon, Charles Lewis, in 1639, once more set forth from
Holland with the design of placing himself at the head of the army left
without a leader by the death of Duke Bernhard of Weimar; but Cardinal
Richelieu, whose schemes the success of the adventure would have
thwarted, gave it an unexpected turn by causing Charles Lewis to be
arrested and detaining him, for the most part in prison, during several
months. In 1640, he used the freedom which he had regained for new
efforts, first in Denmark, and then at the Diet of Ratisbon, upon whose
walls Swedish guns were playing. Once more, there was much excitement in
the ‘Palsgrave’s’ favour in both England and Scotland—it was in fact the
last occasion on which King and Parliament might have united in a policy
approved by the nation at large; and when, in 1642, the Emperor
Ferdinand III propounded a settlement which would, on stringent terms,
have restored a portion of the Palatinate, the English ambassador (Sir
Thomas Roe) joined the agents of Charles Lewis in protesting against its
inadequacy. The horrors of war were renewed in the exhausted Palatinate,
and Charles Lewis once more betook himself to England (1644), where he
presented a memorandum to Parliament, which allowed him £30 a day for
his stay in London, but limited it in the first instance to a fortnight.
Early in this year, Louisa Juliana had died, and it almost seemed as if
the hopes of her descendants were to be buried with her; for, though a
dim prospect of a general peace was opening, there seemed little hope
that, in the conflict between the great Crowns, thought would be taken
of the Palatinate. In England, the Civil War had been for nearly two
years in progress; both Rupert and Maurice had, to their brother’s
actual or pretended displeasure, taken service under the King; and it is
hardly possible that, at such a time, Charles Lewis could have reckoned
on obtaining military or pecuniary support for his schemes for the
recovery of his patrimony. He has, accordingly, been supposed to have
harboured deeper designs, and these have been connected with Sir Harry
Vane’s proposal, rather earlier in the year, of dethroning King Charles
I. But whether or not the idea of supplanting his uncle had entered into
Charles Lewis’ mind—and Sophia’s mention in her _Memoirs_ of Vane’s
previous visit to the Hague lends some colour to the conjecture (she
calls him Vain and speaks of him and his large chin without
seriousness)—it is certain that the Prince was well received by the
Parliamentary leaders.[29] In return for his supposed goodwill to their
cause, to which he is stated to have testified even by taking the
Covenant and sitting in the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, he was
granted an annual allowance of £8,000 and assigned the Deanery at
Windsor as a residence, where he thought it most prudent for the time to
give himself up to his scientific studies.[30]
-----
Footnote 29:
As to the possibility of an offer of the Crown to Charles Lewis by the
Parliamentary leaders, see W. Michael, _Englische Geschichte_, &c.,
Vol. i. p. 282.
Footnote 30:
It should be remembered that in this morigeration Charles Lewis had
the support, up to a certain point, of his mother, who in the days of
the Civil War blamed Queen Henrietta Maria for opposing the attempts
of Charles Lewis to bring about a reconciliation between his uncle and
the Parliament. Gradually, however, all that the King did seemed right
to his sister, and she blamed Charles Lewis for remaining on good
terms with the Parliament. See K. Hauck, _Elizabeth, Königin von
Böhmen_ (Heidelberg, 1905).
-----
The career of Prince Rupert, whose personal attractions had eclipsed
those of his elder brother during their former joint visit to England,
was widely to diverge from Charles Lewis’, now that they both found
themselves once more in the land of their maternal ancestry. In those
earlier days, Sir Thomas Roe had informed Elizabeth how the King took
pleasure in the sprightliness of her second son, from whom, in her
fondness for his senior, she had expected so little; and Charles Lewis
himself reported to his mother his dismay that _Rupert le Diable_ was
always in the company of Queen Henrietta Maria, her ladies, and the
Papists. At the same time, Prince Rupert was understood to be engaged in
discussing with his uncle the King wild schemes for the foundation of a
colony in Madagascar. The Princes were recalled home; the Madagascar
scheme collapsed; and Rupert’s Protestantism henceforth stood firm. It
has been already seen how he was taken prisoner in the fight at Vlotho
(1638). The offer of Lord Craven, who had paid £20,000 for his own
ransom, to increase this sum, were he allowed to share Prince Rupert’s
captivity, was refused, and the Prince was lodged in captivity at Linz
under the care of Count Kufstein. He came forth from it, having resisted
all attempts to lure him from his religious belief and into the
Emperor’s service; neither, however, was he inclined to avail himself of
the prospects of a wealthy Huguenot marriage held out to him in Paris.
With his faithful brother Maurice, he hereupon betook himself to
England, where they devoted themselves to the cause of the King in his
struggle against Parliament, and became the very types and exemplars of
the Cavaliers. Across the seas, in New England, the good old Puritan
minister Nathaniel Ward, who had held Rupert in his arms as a child,
‘when, if I mistake not, he promised to be a good Prince,’ prayed that
even now he might be turned into ‘a right Roundhead, a wise-hearted
Palatine, a thankful man to the English,’ and that his soul might be
saved, ‘notwithstanding all his God-damn-me’s.’ But the ordinary picture
of Prince Rupert as general of the horse, impetuous even to
foolhardiness, and as a passionate partisan who could not restrain his
vehemence even in the presence of the King himself, conveys no complete
view either of his services in the Civil War, or of his character. As to
the former, neither the calamity of Marston Moor, for which he was not
responsible, as he certainly was for that of Naseby, nor perhaps even
the surrender of Bristol, should have been allowed to obscure their
lustre. As to his character, he was not less humane than resolute, and
self-reliance was combined in him with the nobler kind of self-respect.
His intellectual curiosity was a genuine family characteristic, though
it happened in him to take a peculiar turn towards applied science and
the technicalities of art.[31] After the fall of Oxford, in 1646, the
Princes Rupert and Maurice left England, the former to hold a command in
France; but, in the year before the execution of King Charles, he once
more came forward to serve the sinking cause of the English monarchy,
and took charge of the royal fleet. Maurice was, of course, once more
found by his side, and, after the King’s death, they engaged in those
remote maritime adventures in the course of which the younger brother
met his death. Rupert’s earlier naval—or buccaneering—career continued
till 1653, when he returned to France, creating a considerable sensation
by his entry into Paris ‘like an old Spanish _conquistador_, with
Indians, apes and parrots.’[32]
-----
Footnote 31:
The honour of having discovered the art of engraving in mezzotint,
frequently claimed for Prince Rupert, seems due to a Hessian officer
named Ludwig von Siegen, who, meeting the Prince at Brussels about
1654, taught him the new process. See Cyril Davenport, _Mezzotints_
(‘The Connoisseur’s Library,’) pp. 52-65.
Footnote 32:
See K. Hauck, _Karl Ludwig, Kurfürst von der Pfalz_ (Leipzig, 1903),
p. 252.
-----
Sophia’s third brother Maurice was, as has been seen, an all but
inseparable follower of his elder Rupert, whose equal he can have been
neither in military genius nor in general intellectual ability and
personal charm—‘he never,’ says Clarendon, who resented the pride of the
Palatines, ‘sacrificed to the Graces, nor conversed amongst men of
quality, but had most used the company of ordinary and inferior men,
with whom he loved to be very familiar.’ Sophia writes to him as to one
little interested in intrigues of State, and his preference through life
seems to have been for the camp rather than the Court.[33] But, whatever
other abatement should be made from the censures with which, like the
brother of his heart, he was visited by both Puritan animosity and
Royalist spite, he most certainly possessed in a rare degree the
soldier’s cardinal virtue of fidelity. Thus we may fain hope that, in
accordance with the most trustworthy account, his fate overtook him,
whelmed beneath the deep gulf of the Atlantic, and that he was not, as a
different tradition would have it, carried off by corsairs to Algiers,
there to linger out a forgotten existence.
-----
Footnote 33:
His mother’s coolness towards him is curious. She communicated the
news of his disappearance to Charles Lewis without a word of sympathy,
and advised that, should he really be at Algiers, no ‘great inquierie’
should be made, lest his ransom should be fixed at a quite inordinate
height, or Cromwell should purchase him from the corsairs. _Letters_,
&c., ed. A. Wendland, p. 43.
-----
The sixth and seventh brothers, Edward and Philip, had been brought up
in common; but in their later lives they were much divided. About 1637,
they had, with their brother Maurice, been sent to school in Paris,
whither, as has been seen, the Palatine family long looked for political
succour; and here they remained after Maurice had taken his departure,
with a view to beginning his military career. In 1645 the elder of the
pair took a step which estranged him not only from his brother Philip,
but from the whole of the Palatine family, and which, together with a
similar proceeding at a later date on the part of Princess Louisa
Hollandina, stands in direct contrast to the general tenour of the
family history. Anne of Gonzaga, second daughter of the Duke Charles of
Gonzaga-Nevers, afterwards Duke of Mantua, was already a celebrity in
French society, when, her amour with Henry of Guise having come to an
end which wounded her self-esteem, she in 1645 secretly gave her hand to
the Prince Palatine Edward, and henceforth became the ‘_Princesse
Palatine_,’ under which name she plays a conspicuous part in the
literature of contemporary French memoirs. We have, however, no concern
here with her share in public affairs at a rather later time, when (in
1650) she effected a union between the two branches of the Fronde and
thus drove Mazarin into temporary exile, and when, after being herself
persuaded by the Cardinal to ‘rally’ to Anne of Austria, she (in 1651-2)
succeeded in bringing over to the same side the Duke of Bouillon and the
great general Turenne.[34] Mazarin, when indicating the price (a great
Court office) at which her support might be gained, described her as a
_femme intéressée_; but, as M. Chéruel observes, it was not this aspect
of her character which was in the mind of Bossuet when, in a funeral
discourse, he dwelt on her great qualities of head and heart. In an age
of confessional propaganda she was a great proselytiser in high places;
and it was a signal instance of her activity in this direction, that she
should have exacted Prince Edward’s conversion to the Church of Rome as
the condition of her acceptance of his hand. For she thus secured to
herself a claim for direct interference in the affairs of the Palatine
House, which still possessed a certain importance and might again
acquire a greater. Her foresight was justified; for, in course of time,
there can be no doubt that she contrived to have a hand in the
conversion of Princess Louisa Hollandina, as well as in yet another
conversion, which made it possible for Charles Lewis’ daughter Elizabeth
Charlotte to become the wife of Louis XIV’s brother, Philip Duke of
Orleans. Although the new Princess Palatine had retained her share of
the wealth of the Gonzaga, notwithstanding the efforts of her father to
accumulate the whole for bestowal on his eldest daughter Marie, who in
this same year 1645 became Queen of Poland, the agitation of Edward’s
mother at the news of his change of religion was extreme, and was shared
by most of her children. Charles Lewis besought his mother ‘with her
blessings to lay her curse’ upon Prince Philip, who was about to quit
Paris for the Netherlands, should he too ‘change the religion he had
been bred in.’ As for Prince Edward, his fortunes were henceforth more
or less severed from those of the family, though we find him, in 1651,
at the Hague, as he passed the ambassadors of the English Commonwealth
in the streets, calling them ‘rogues’ to their faces, and thus doing his
best to embroil the United Provinces with the enemies of the House of
Stewart.[35] With Edward’s daughter, Benedicta Henrietta, born in 1652,
we shall meet again as the wife of John Frederick, Duke of Hanover,
Sophia’s brother-in-law. In her the Palatine type, of which Sophia
herself and her niece Elizabeth Charlotte were such striking examples,
was well-nigh effaced; but it will not be overlooked that by descent she
stood nearer to the English Succession than her father’s youngest
sister.
-----
Footnote 34:
See A. Chéruel, _Le rôle politique de la Princesse Palatine pendant la
Fronde en 1651_. (_Séances de L’Acad. des Sc. Mor. et Pol._,
January-February, 1888.)
Footnote 35:
His mother seems to have been pleased with this outburst, and to have
testified to her gratification by presenting to Edward certain family
articles of value—more in number than was agreeable to Charles Lewis.
Edward, who certainly seems to have had in most things an eye to the
main chance, had a cynical vein in him, like some of his brothers and
sisters. When he came to Heidelberg in 1658, accompanied by a
facetious M. de Jambonneau, Charles Lewis writes to his ‘second’ wife:
‘He turns everything into a joke, so that I cannot bring him on with
me.’
-----
Of Prince Philip’s fateful conduct at the Hague immediately. While,
before his return to her mother’s little Court, Sophia had necessarily
seen little of him or of her brothers there or at Rheenen, she was, as a
matter of course, much thrown into the society of her three sisters. At
first, as she tells us, she was by no means troubled to find them
handsomer and more accomplished than herself, and admired by everybody;
and she was perfectly contented that her juvenile gaiety and
_railleries_ should help to amuse them. ‘Even the Queen took pleasure in
my fun’; for she was gratified to see the child tormented, so that her
wits might be sharpened by the process of being put on her defence. It
became the established practice for her to ‘rally’ any and everybody;
the clever people were delighted by it, and the others were made afraid
of her. Gradually, however, Sophia’s quick ears heard the ‘milords’ at
her mother’s Court say to one another that, when she had finished
growing, she would surpass all her sisters. And the remark inspired her
with an affection for the whole English nation; ‘so greatly is one
pleased, when young, to be thought good-looking.’
Elizabeth, the eldest of the Palatine Princesses, though by no means
indifferent to the family interests, or without sympathy at any time of
her life with the troubles either of her father’s or her mother’s House,
was of an introspective turn of mind, grave and thoughtful, and little
inclined by nature to the levity inborn in most of her brothers and
sisters. Both as imbued with the Calvinism in which she had been so
carefully nurtured by her grandmother amidst the congenial Brandenburg
surroundings, and perhaps also because, though an accomplished linguist,
she alone of the sisterhood had no occasion to learn to speak Dutch, she
already as a girl fell into a way of leading much of her life to
herself. At the same time, she was always interested in public affairs,
and more especially in marriage projects, which in those times formed an
important part in politics; and it is noticeable that she continued fond
of match-making even after she had herself settled down to a single
life. Among the suitors for her hand was the young King Wladislaw IV of
Poland, a tolerant and liberal-minded Prince.[36] But the marriage fell
through, because the Diet would not hear of their King marrying an
‘English’ Protestant; and Elizabeth, of whose noble character perfect
veracity formed one of the noblest traits, refused in her turn to listen
to a diplomatic suggestion that she should become a convert to Rome. In
January, 1639, there was a notion of making a match between her and
Bernhard of Weimar. We are not told that the Electoral Prince Frederick
William of Brandenburg—afterwards known as the Great Elector—between
whom and Princess Louisa Hollandina a marriage was at one time
projected, had ever thought of asking the hand of her elder sister. But
he may have met Elizabeth in 1638 at Königsberg, when, after the Peace
of Prague, George William was induced by troubles in his Margravate to
send his whole family into Prussia, whither some of their Palatine
kinsfolk also came; and he was in these years much at Rheenen, where he
cannot but have been attracted by the Princess Elizabeth, whose
unflinching Protestant sentiment resembled his own, which formed a
constant factor in his shifting system of policy. She was afterwards a
visitor to Berlin, where, in 1646, Princess Louisa Henrietta of Orange,
whose spirit was akin to hers, held her entry as Electress, and at
Krossen, where the Dowager Electress (Frederick V’s sister) kept a Court
of her own, and where Elizabeth is said to have specially interested
herself in the instruction of the Elector Frederick William’s sister
Hedwig Sophia, afterwards Landgravine of Hesse-Cassel. We shall see in
what fashion the Great Elector ultimately succeeded in providing for the
peace and comfort of his kinswoman. Before this time, owing chiefly to
her friendship with Descartes, by which she is probably now chiefly
remembered, Elizabeth’s mental horizon had unmistakably widened; and,
though she retained to the last a sincere piety and (a trace or so of
pride of birth apart) a touching modesty of spirit, her growing
familiarity with broader philosophical principles gradually freed her
from some of the narrowing influences of Calvinism. Descartes’ intimacy
with the Princess Palatine, against whose family he had, curiously
enough, in former days borne arms in Bohemia, was during her absence
from the Hague maintained by an exchange of letters between them, of
which the artless Sophia contrived the conveyance.[37] Although the
relations between the great thinker and his matchless pupil were not in
the least of a kind to suggest clandestine methods, Elizabeth was not,
like Queen Christina, independent of control; and Sophia’s services in
screening the correspondence from her mother’s unsympathetic notice,
while they earned her the gratitude of the first philosopher with whom
she was brought into personal relations, show that, notwithstanding her
raillery and ridicule of her eldest sister’s moments of distraction,
kindly feelings prevailed between them. Elizabeth’s refined beauty,
though it was hardly in reference to this that her sisters nicknamed her
_la Grecque_, is described by Sophia in her _Memoirs_ very vividly, but
not without an admixture of spite.
-----
Footnote 36:
This was at the time (1636) when Charles I was very active in his
negotiations on behalf of the Palatine House, sending Lord Arundel on
a special mission to Vienna, projecting an alliance with the
States-General and France, and scheming the Polish match mentioned in
the text. Everything failed.
Footnote 37:
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).
-----
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.
-----
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.
-----
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.
-----
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.
-----
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.