II

EARLY WOMANHOOD AND MARRIAGE

(HEIDELBERG, 1650-1658)

A home, to which Elizabeth of Bohemia was fated never to return, was

opened to her daughter Sophia. For eight years—from 1650 to 1658—she was

the guest of her beloved brother Charles Lewis in that part of the

Palatinate which had been at last restored to the family in his person.

To these congenial surroundings she easily acclimatised herself; nor did

she ever afterwards forget how, before her destiny at last bore her away

from Heidelberg and its familiar neighbourhood, the interests of her

maiden life had long centred in the affairs of her brother, in his

troubles both public and private, and in his children, for whom her

large heart never ceased to cherish a peculiar tenderness, even after

the welfare of her own numerous family had become the chief anxiety of

her existence. She was not at first aware that her departure from

Holland had been against her mother’s wish—a fact which she discreetly

passes over in her _Memoirs_.[41] After telling of her leisurely journey

along the route formerly followed by her parents on their wedding

journey home, she graphically describes the forlorn poverty which stared

her in the face, when she first entered her brother’s shrunken

dominions. He and his Electress met her at Mannheim and took her on with

them to Heidelberg, where the castle still lay in ruins, and they had to

lodge in the town.

-----

Footnote 41:

Charles Lewis wrote to his mother in much trouble on the subject, only

eliciting the reply that ‘as for Sophia’s journey, I will never keep

anie that has a minde to leave me, for I shall never care for anie

bodies companie that does not care for mine.’ _Letters_, &c., ed. A.

Wendland, p. 9.

-----

In truth, the Lower Palatinate had barely begun to recover from the

tribulations which it had undergone both in the earlier and in the later

periods of the Thirty Years’ War; and the population was literally the

merest fragment of what it had been before the outbreak of the

conflict—one-fiftieth part of it, according to a calculation which it

seems almost impossible to accept. Moreover, Charles Lewis only

gradually recovered possession even of the moiety of his patrimony

allotted to him, nor was it till 1652 that the last Spaniard quitted the

land. It is all the more to the honour of this Prince, and in a measure

atones for the grievous aberrations of his private life, that after his

restoration he should have held his head high in the Electoral College,

to which, as his father’s son, he had been so grudgingly readmitted; and

still more, that during the whole of his rule—which lasted till 1680—he

should have spared neither thought nor effort for the welfare of his

sorely tried subjects.

It was not his fault that, while engaged in these beneficent labours, he

had again and again to turn the pruning-hook back into a sword.[42] In

1666, he maintained a brave heart through his weary campaigning against

French and Lorrainers, although he met with little luck under arms and

suffered severely in health. Five years later, he sacrificed the

happiness of his daughter Elizabeth Charlotte by yielding to the French

demand for her hand, and went near to sacrificing his honour by allowing

her, against her own wish or disposition, to be converted to the Church

of Rome. When, in 1674, the first of the wars between the Empire and

France broke out, Charles Lewis may have indulged in some passing dreams

of an Austrasian kingdom under French supremacy; as a matter of fact, he

found that neither the Orleans marriage nor his exertions to remain

neutral protected his unhappy lands from invasion and its attendant

horrors. Things went better when, in 1675, he had thrown in his lot with

the Empire; for there can have been no truth in the rumours which made

themselves heard in the city of gossip, Venice, that his father’s son

was aiming at the Bohemian Crown. The troubles of the Palatinate

recommenced when, in 1679-80, the French added to pretended reprisals

the monstrous mockery of the so-called _réunions_; but of these Charles

Lewis only survived to see the beginnings, and he was spared the

bitterness of witnessing the devastation of his beloved Palatinate in

the so-called Orleans War, of which his own daughter’s supposed claims

were, to her unspeakable anguish, made the pretext. For the rest, the

Elector Charles Lewis was a genuine son of the Palatinate, to which he

devoted so much care and labour; he loved its good things, including the

Bacharach wine, whose praises he sang in homely dithyrambs, and the

wealth of choice fruit, mindful of which he denounced the sour pears and

bullet grapes outside his own promised land. Like his daughter after

him, he was nowhere so happy as in the midst of it, and his very diction

is coloured with a proverbial phraseology of native Palatinate growth.

As late as 1665, he is found declaring that if ten years more of life

were granted him, and no war or pestilence came in the way, he would,

_en despit de l’envie_, turn Mannheim into a second Rome. Nor were his

thoughts only set upon material things; whether justly or not, he was

regarded as one of the most learned princes of his age; he was

consistently anxious to revive the prosperity of the University of

Heidelberg, and had nearly crowned his efforts on its behalf by securing

Spinoza as one of its teachers. The education of his own children was to

him a subject of anxious and minute care.[43] In his youth, the evil

times on which Charles Lewis had fallen had (it is not uncharitable to

assume) taught him to dissimulate; but in his later years he had

retained little of the Puritan associations of his earlier manhood

except a love of the Bible and a hatred of Rome, and of priests and

priestcraft in general. He was, in short, a most liberal-minded and

tolerant Prince, who found satisfaction in the _Imitatio Christi_ as

well as in the New Testament, who would gladly have made his Palatinate

a refuge for persecuted adherents of any religious creed, and whose

dedication, not long before his death, of a church (at Mannheim) to

_Sancta Concordia_ was far from being an empty pretence. He had,

moreover, inherited his mother’s taste for poetry, and during his

sojourn in England had acquired considerable familiarity with its

literature, and its drama in particular. In a way it brings Sophia

herself nearer to us that her favourite brother freely quoted

Shakespeare, that a version by him of Ben Jonson’s _Sejanus_ was acted

at Heidelberg, and that he was so sturdy a critic as to pronounce the

Spanish drama superior to the French, but the English best of all.

-----

Footnote 42:

The celebrated _Wildfangsstreit_, which was carried on by Charles

Lewis in the years 1665 and 1666, is passed by in the text, where few

readers would probably care to find it discussed. This strange dispute

turned on the rights of the Electors Palatine over bastards and aliens

(_Wilden_) in their own and _adjoining_ territories, and troubles

which had thence arisen between Charles Lewis and his neighbours, in

which the Great Elector of Brandenburg was involved through his

alliance of May, 1661, with the Elector Palatine. The Great Elector’s

efforts brought about a settlement on the whole favourable to his

ally. (See _Urkunden und Aktenstücke zur Gesch. d. Grossen Kurfürsten

Friedrich Wilhelm von Brandenburg_, Vol. xi. (_Polit. Verhandl._ Vol.

vii.). Ed. F. Hirsch, Berlin, 1887).

Footnote 43:

He drew up elaborate instructions for the tutors and governesses of

the Electoral Prince Charles and Princess Elizabeth Charlotte. One of

the former was Ezechiel Spanheim, who had accompanied his father, a

rigid Calvinist, when the latter had been summoned to Leyden by

Elizabeth and the States-General. Ezechiel was himself called from

Geneva in 1656 to Heidelberg, where he afterwards passed from theology

to diplomacy. It was in the Brandenburg service, which he had entered

in 1680, that he was accredited to the English Court, of which he

wrote an _Account_ (1706). He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

-----

But, heavy as were the burdens laid upon the head of the Palatine House

after Charles Lewis’ partial restoration, the troubles that came nearest

home to him, and that in the end infected the whole atmosphere of his

court, were of his own making. He cannot be held accountable for the

financial difficulties which obliged him to discourage his mother’s

desire to return to the Palatinate; and, even before the troubles in

question broke out, more general considerations may have rendered him

the reverse of eager for her presence. His policy was to bury the past,

which she in a sense typified; and he may have feared her extravagant

ways, and thus preferred to lighten her expenditure by inviting his

sisters Elizabeth and Sophia to his capital. His offer of some rooms in

the _Ottheinrichsbau_ of Heidelberg Castle, which he could not afford to

furnish, failed to attract, and the hope which she had cherished, that

she might end her days in her own good dowry town of Frankenthal, it was

not in his power to fulfil. Meanwhile, the compensation for the

temporary occupation of the place by the Spaniards, which had been

promised in the Nürnberg settlement of 1651, supplementary to the Peace

of Westphalia, remained unpaid by the Emperor. Charles Lewis, who had in

the first instance to think of his Electorate and its defences, was

without resources enabling him to respond to his mother’s requirements;

and the recriminations which followed on her part left the situation

unaltered. Even before mother and son had been at odds on this subject,

there was a dispute between them as to various heirlooms at the Hague

and at Rheenen, which she refused to give up to him as he demanded. In

short, their correspondence had reached a most painful stage, and it is

pitiful to read the description of the sore straits to which she found

herself reduced, just when the cloud seemed to be at last lifting from

the fortunes of their House. She was, she wrote, entirely dependent upon

the monthly allowance of the States-General; it amounted only to a

thousand florins, and was not made for more than a single year, and she

had only accepted it as a _pis aller_ when she found it out of the

question that her claims on payments from England should be made part of

the Anglo-Dutch treaty concluded in 1654. As a matter of fact, her case

was a very hard one; for her creditors had never been so pressing as

now, when there seemed a chance of payment; the very heirs of the

faithful Ludwig Camerarius demanded the redemption of a favourite jewel

which she had pawned to them; all her children were in debt like

herself, from the high-minded Elizabeth to the volatile Edward; and it

is touching to find her entreating a loan of a thousand pounds for the

purpose, because the jewel ‘was my brother Prince Henry’s.’ At an

earlier date, Charles Lewis had suggested to an agent that it would be

desirable for her to approach Cromwell as to the relief of her

creditors, but was told in reply that she would certainly never do this,

‘but only break into passion against those that should give such

advice.’ So matters went on till other reasons came to a head which made

the Elector undesirous of receiving her at his Court; and his seeming

ingratitude infused another drop of bitterness in her cup.

The quarrel between Charles Lewis and his brother Rupert, which became

mixed up with the cardinal trouble of the elder brother’s later years,

and caused great sorrow to their mother, had its origin in the financial

difficulties which beset them all. In 1653, the Elector had settled a

modest allowance on his brother Edward, and in 1654 he made a similar

arrangement with Rupert, who on his arrival in Paris had entered into

negotiations on the subject through the Palatine envoy, Pawel von

Rammingen. Rupert was to be allowed 2,500 dollars _per annum_, to rise

after five years to 4,000, while the Emperor agreed to pay him a

substantial sum under the Nürnberg settlement. But Rupert could not sit

down contented with this compact, and, quite in the spirit still

prevailing in many of the princely Houses of Germany, demanded a share

of the Palatinate territory as his younger brother’s portion. Charles

Lewis at first dallied with the proposal, which, however, could not be

to his mind, more especially as he had no wish for introducing into his

Electorate the permanent influence of so martial and combative a spirit

as his brother’s. Rupert, however, insisted on his demand, and in 1656,

after refusing to receive any further payments of his allowance, asked

for an immediate interview. The Elector having declined to receive him

at Heidelberg, but offered to meet him at Neustadt, and in the meantime

to increase his allowance, the fiery Prince repaired uninvited to the

capital, and, having been refused admittance to the castle by the

colonel in command, swore an angry oath that he would never return to

the Palatinate, and passed on to Mainz. Here he proceeded to lay his

grievances before the Arch-Chancellor of the Empire, and then offered

his sword to the Emperor. But, though he seems to have actually entered

into the Imperial service, he found its atmosphere uncongenial, and,

when in 1661 he made another attempt to obtain a high command (in the

Turkish War) and at the same time to obtain payment of the sums promised

him under the Nürnberg settlement, he was unsuccessful. This failure he

ascribed to the intrigues of his brother the Elector, and he now settled

down after a fashion in England, whither he had betaken himself on the

Restoration. Though it was not till later that the brothers were again

on good terms, the dispute between them was settled in 1670, when the

arrangement of 1654 was put into force again, Rupert’s allowance being,

however, raised from 4,000 to 6,000 dollars, the balance of the Nürnberg

compensation paid over, and the Rheenen property being given up to

him—an old notion of his mother’s, which he had formerly rejected.[44]

-----

Footnote 44:

In 1655 she writes to Charles Lewis that she had sent him all that she

could spare in the house there, and entreats him at the same time to

dismiss the concierge, ‘for he is the veriest beast in the world and

knave besides.’ See _Letters_, &c., ed. A. Wendland, p. 67.—I have

revised my account of the dispute between Charles Lewis and Rupert

with the aid of K. Hauck, _Karl Ludwig, Kurfürst von der Pfalz_, pp.

251 _sqq._

-----

At the time when Charles Lewis’ quarrel with Rupert broke out, the elder

brother was in the midst of a difficulty which, unlike those just

described, was essentially of his own making. Of this trouble Sophia’s

quick wit had, already on arrival at Mannheim, and first meeting with

her brother the Elector and his bride, detected the germs. She had

perceived at once that all was not well between the pair. While her

brother met her with his usual geniality of manner, the Electress, whose

mien was _fort dolente_, said very little. When the party proceeded to

Heidelberg, where Sophia had the satisfaction of seating herself in the

best-appointed carriage on which she had cast eyes since her departure

from the Hague, she found that her praise of this vehicle gave offence

to her sister-in-law, to whom it had been presented as her

wedding-coach, and in whose opinion it was vastly inferior to one

presented to her sister for her marriage with the Prince of Tarento.

This afflicting comparison was, however, only the first and slightest

clause in her long litany of grievances.

Charlotte Elizabeth, daughter of Landgrave William V of Hesse-Cassel,

and his wife, Amalia Elizabeth, seemed marked out by descent as a most

fitting consort for the restored Elector Palatine. Her grandfather,

Landgrave Maurice, had in his day been one of the foremost

representatives of militant Calvinism, and at once the boldest and the

most steadfast of all the Princes of the Union. Her mother, the

Landgravine Amalia, deserves lasting remembrance as one of the most

remarkable Princesses of her age, by whose exertions Hesse-Cassel was

preserved from ruin in the Thirty Years’ War, and to whom more than to

anyone German Calvinism owed the rights of parity at last secured to it

in the Peace of Westphalia. But her married life with the Elector

Charles Lewis, which began in February, 1650, proved a singularly

unhappy one; nor can there be any pretence but that she was made to

suffer grievous and intolerable wrong. It is at the same time undeniable

that the aggravating elements in her character—to Sophia’s critical eye

there seemed to be such even in her beauty—contributed to the beginning

of the end. Sophia rapidly arrived at her own conclusions as to the

intellectual capacity of her sister-in-law—what with her love of dress

and her stories of Duke Frederick of Würtemberg-Neustadt, not to mention

the Brunswick-Lüneburg Dukes, George William and Ernest Augustus, and

several other admirers, to whom she had been forced by her mother to

prefer her present jealous ‘old’ husband. In his turn, Charles Lewis,

although he far too demonstratively adored his handsome wife, confessed

that there were defects in her education, which he entreated his shrewd

youngest sister to correct. Very soon, however, Sophia perceived that

the comedy was taking a serious turn. The quarrel between the pair began

with an outburst of jealousy on the part of the Elector, followed, in

more violent fashion, by another from the Electress. Charles Lewis

hereupon became violently estranged from his consort; and his aversion

was deepened by a passion which he conceived for one of his wife’s

maids-of-honour, Baroness Louisa von Degenfeld. Perhaps this more

decorous Anne Boleyn was rendered all the more attractive in his eyes by

her literary turn of mind, if we may judge from their initial

correspondence under names borrowed from an Italian novel,[45] and from

the liking which she afterwards showed for such classics as Lucian,

Corneille, and Molière. For some years or so, however, the husband and

wife rubbed on together, two children being born to them. The elder,

born 1651, was Charles, afterwards Elector Palatine, the last of the

Simmern line, who died less than five years after his father (1685); had

he survived, he must of course have stood before Sophia in the English

Succession. In most respects he had little character of his own, perhaps

partly because he had been over-educated; but he was a devout Calvinist,

and would probably have remained such had it been his fate to mount the

throne to which, in earlier times, some of the English Parliamentary

politicians may have thought of raising his father. The younger of the

two children, born 1652, was Elizabeth Charlotte, the _Liselotte_ of her

father’s affections and of those of her aunt Sophia, by whom she was

partly brought up, and a darling of whose later years she became.

-----

Footnote 45:

This was quite in the style of the age, which loved the mystifications

of pseudonyms, and of ciphers without much concealment. Elizabeth

mentions that her daughter Sophia writes to her about Berenice’s

business (Sophia’s own), and that they are discussing it with

Tiribazus (Charles Lewis). _Letters_, &c., p. 91.

-----

For a time the Elector contrived to conceal his amour from his wife;

but, in 1657, a letter addressed by Prince Rupert to the Elector’s

mistress, by whose beauty and wit he seems to have been attracted on a

previous visit, having fallen into the hands of the Electress, and the

quarrel between the brothers having probably contributed to exacerbate

matters, there was an end of the secret. Put on the track of her

husband’s infidelity, the Electress ruthlessly ran him and his mistress

to earth; and the result was a public scandal without an equal in the

domestic annals of this anything but shamefaced age. The Elector having

at last withdrawn from Heidelberg with Louisa von Degenfeld, whom he in

the first instance settled with many precautions at Schwetzingen, there

ensued a long and disgraceful series of proceedings which, to the

unfortunate Electress, must have recalled a notorious episode of her

native Hessian history in the days of Landgrave Philip the

‘Magnanimous.’ Salving his conscience as best he might with the

obsequious assistance of his court divines, Charles Lewis, early in

1658, married Louisa von Degenfeld as his second wife. He had previously

conferred upon her the ancient title of Raugravine Palatine, with a

provision that a corresponding titulature was to be transmitted to their

issue. From this abnormal union, which lasted till Louisa’s decease,

twenty years afterwards, there sprang not less than fourteen children,

of whom eight survived their mother. The marriage—if marriage it may be

called[46]—supplied him with the felicities of a tranquil home, though

for some time he had to keep watch over it with an anxious care, of

which the humorous aspect escaped him, against the evil designs imputed

by him to ‘X,’ his repudiated wife, and though her Hessian relations

long endeavoured to assert her rights. Latterly the ‘second wife’ seems

chiefly to have resided with her children at Frankenthal, where the

proud Queen of Bohemia had hoped to find repose for her last years. The

correspondence between Charles Lewis and Louisa shows him to have been

entirely faithful to her, and to have passionately loved his children.

But, though his fidelity to his chosen companion was unswerving, the

relations between them were disturbed by occasional dissensions. On her

death he put forth, together with an account of her Christian ending

drawn up by the divine whom he had originally consulted as to his

‘second marriage’ (Hiskias Eleazar Heiland), an elaborate analytical

statement of her virtues and shortcomings during their union, for which,

with a conscientiousness showing that there was still a drop of

Calvinistic blood in his veins, he had himself contributed the most

important materials. For his children, the surviving Raugraves and

Raugravines, he had intended to make ample provision, but had perplexed

himself so much about its conditions, that his legitimate son and

successor, the Elector Charles, declared all his father’s arrangements

on the subject invalid. Several of the sons afterwards distinguished

themselves in the field. Charles Maurice, who was till his death in 1702

a familiar figure at Hanover, and who is the Trimalchio of the banquet

‘after the manner of the ancients’ described in Leibniz’s correspondence

with Sophia, drank away his remarkable intellectual powers. But the

children of Louisa von Degenfeld were treated kindly by the Dowager

Electress Charlotte, and Sophia took them one and all to her heart, more

especially the two sisters Louisa and Amalia, ‘_les deux sibylles de

Francfort_.’ Louisa was in later years at Hanover appointed Mistress of

the Robes; and it is said that there was at one time some intention of

entrusting her with a confidential mission to England in connexion with

the Succession question.

-----

Footnote 46:

It is, Elizabeth plainly told her son, ‘both against God’s law and

man’s law.’ _Letters_, &c., p. 92.

-----

After the death, in 1677, of Louisa von Degenfeld, Charles Lewis, having

in the first instance (with Sophia’s approval) taken to himself a

mistress, was desirous of inducing the Electress to consent to a

divorce, which would have enabled him by a ‘third’ marriage to seek to

secure the Succession of his (the Simmern) line, resting as it did on

the life of his legitimate son Charles only.[47] But Charlotte Elizabeth

was not found ready to oblige her erratic husband thus far. Prince

Rupert, with whom Charles Lewis had gradually come to be on better

terms, had already, in 1675, declined to come to the rescue. The

match-making Princess Elizabeth had in vain desired a match between her

brother Rupert and her young kinswoman Princess Charlotte Sophia of

Courland.[48] That young lady’s aunt, Landgravine Hedwig Sophia of

Mecklenburg-Schwerin, opined that nothing would come of the match,

especially as Prince Rupert was on the look-out ‘not only for beauty,

but for means.’ As a matter of fact, the ardour of Rupert’s aspiring

youth had by this time settled down into a sober though still singularly

active maturity; moreover, he had formed a connexion so close that it

has been suspected to have amounted to a secret marriage, with Francesca

Bard, an Irish Roman Catholic lady of good birth, with whom and their

child, called ‘Dodley’ (Dudley) by Sophia, the indulgent Palatine family

were on friendly terms. But neither this boy nor, of course, Ruperta,

Prince Rupert’s daughter by the actress Margaret Hughes, was ever

formally acknowledged by him; and thus this brother, too, left no

descendant who when the time came, might have forestalled the claims of

Sophia and her progeny to the English Succession.

-----

Footnote 47:

The Queen of Bohemia was very anxious about her grandson, in whose

early days she had recorded with satisfaction that the little Prince

of Orange (William III) was a year older, but considerably smaller in

size.

Footnote 48:

She died at an advanced age as Abbess of Herford.

-----

Sophia’s own life at Heidelberg, though much clouded by her brother’s

domestic troubles, of which more than enough has now been said, and

towards which, in its initial stages, she appears to have borne herself

with a discretion already habitual to her, was by no means without its

agreeable aspects. It had at first been made uncomfortable by the ways

of the Electress Charlotte, whose favourite amusements, field sports and

the card-table, were not much to Sophia’s personal taste. Still, the

life of the Palatine court, though an economy little dreamt of in former

days now prevailed there, was not without diversions in which she took

pleasure—among them those _Wirthschaften_, a fashionable amusement

half-way between a fancy fair and a _bal costumé_, of which the Queen of

Bohemia had shared the vogue in Holland. Mention has already been made

of Charles Lewis’ familiarity with the literature of the English stage;

and the English comedians whom he saw at Frankfort possibly also found

their way to Heidelberg. But his sisters had more direct opportunities

for keeping up their interest in England and things English, since

Charles Lewis seems to have entertained a good many English gentlemen at

his capital, where some of them settled down as they have done in later

days. Among his English guests was the former Parliamentary General, Sir

William Waller, though with the Restoration Charles Lewis became a good

Royalist again, and contrived to put himself on good terms with Lord

Chancellor Clarendon. We have already seen how Prince Rupert himself was

an occasional visitor at Heidelberg, as was his younger brother

Edward—though the latter proved so full of ‘_ralierie_’ that Charles

Lewis refused to take him to visit the lady whom he wished to be

regarded as his wedded wife. Before this, Princess Elizabeth had, in

1648 and again in 1651, arrived as a visitor at the Electoral Court—much

changed, as on the latter occasion Sophia and Edward thought, both in

outward appearance and in tone of mind, which Sophia expressly

attributes to her recent sojourn at Berlin, at the Court of the pious

Electress Louisa Henrietta. Perhaps, too, she was saddened by the death

of Descartes (1650), and perhaps by a growing estrangement from her

mother; in any case, her whole nature was more and more tending towards

that contemplative life whose attractiveness for some minds seems so

incomprehensible to others. Unfortunately, as Sophia confesses, she was

weak enough to join her brother and sister-in-law in rebelling against a

certain air of superiority which in their eyes Elizabeth seemed to

assume. She warmly interested herself in the Elector’s efforts to give a

new life to the University of Heidelberg, where she is said to have

acquired a personal reputation by her exposition of the Cartesian

philosophy. Sophia’s day for listening to the conversation of

philosophers had hardly yet arrived, and she at no time aspired to place

herself on what may be called the professorial level. There is no

appearance of the two sisters having been permanently alienated from one

another; but mutual sympathy could not otherwise than dwindle between

one who was preparing to bid farewell to the world, and one who was

intent upon establishing her position in it.

The real reason of Sophia’s quitting Holland had been her sense of the

uncertainty of her own position there; yet, even had the prospect been

wholly agreeable, she could not now look forward to a permanent

residence at the strangely distracted Court of her eldest brother. As

the solitude of a religious, or of a quasi-religious, life would not

have been to her mind (though it was about this time that she sat for

her portrait in the costume of a Vestal Virgin), a suitable marriage

engagement had, in a word, become a necessity for her. So attractive and

high-spirited a princess might fairly expect to find an acceptable

husband without having, like her sister Henrietta Maria, to espouse a

Transylvanian prince. Unluckily, in the latter part of 1651 or beginning

of 1652, Sophia underwent an attack of small-pox, which, as she

confesses, seriously impaired her beauty. But she had no mind to take

whoever might be the first comer; and not long after her recovery she

declined overtures made to her on behalf of the Portuguese Duke of

Aveiro; ‘having had thoughts of marrying a King she could not stoop to a

subject.’ In much the same mood she about this time broke off an

innocent correspondence (on the subject of compositions for the guitar)

into which she had entered with a prince with whom she had in her

childhood made acquaintance in Holland, and who, when recently passing

through Heidelberg on his way to Venice, had seemed to her more charming

than ever. This prince, who ‘pleased everybody,’ was no other than her

future husband, Duke Ernest Augustus of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Since,

however, he was the youngest of four brothers and (as will be seen

immediately) without any present prospect whatever of enjoying any

territorial dominion of his own, he was clearly not _bon à marier_; and

it was best to avoid a kind of gossip of which Sophia had only too vivid

an experience.

There appears to have been some talk of other matches for Sophia, and

above all of a design of marrying her to a more important personage than

the disinherited King of England—the young King of the Romans, who, as

such, during the last year of his life bore the designation of Ferdinand

IV.[49] It is true that, in 1652, the Elector Charles Lewis had, on the

occasion of his being received by the Emperor Ferdinand III within the

unconscious walls of Prague, established excellent relations between the

Imperial House and himself. But it is difficult to suppose that anything

could have come of this scheme, which would have involved as a

preliminary transaction the conversion of Sophia to the Church of Rome;

and the statement that the young King of the Romans had fallen in love

with Sophia, and intended to marry her, rests only on the authority of

the Duchess of Orleans. Charles Lewis might, in the interests of the

Palatinate, have assented to the match; but Sophia would assuredly have

refused it with more determination than was afterwards shown by her

niece when the Orleans marriage proposal was pressed upon her. The

earlier project, however, came to a speedy end with the death of the

young Roman King in 1654.

-----

Footnote 49:

A match between his grandfather, afterwards Emperor Ferdinand II, and

Sophia’s great-aunt on the mother’s side, Princess Hedwig of Denmark,

had been suggested in 1617.

-----

Thus the first suitor proper of Sophia during her stay at her brother’s

Court was Prince Adolphus John, brother of the newly crowned King of

Sweden, Charles X Gustavus, and like him a scion of the Zweibrücken line

of the Palatine House. Though he had no prospects of the throne, he was,

as his subsequent conduct at a critical moment after his great brother’s

death showed, an ambitious prince, and his suit was favoured by the

Electress Charlotte, who would have been pleased to be rid of her

sister-in-law. But Sophia looked very coolly on the negotiations that

ensued; for she had conceived an aversion to this suitor, which she

declares could only have been conquered by a virtuous effort. He was a

widower, and was said to have ill-treated his first wife. Fortunately

for Sophia, the difficulty of marrying a princess who had been trained

as a Calvinist into a rigidly Lutheran land, stood in the way of the

proposal; and, though the match was announced with much satisfaction to

Secretary Nicholas by the Queen of Bohemia for the information of King

Charles II, the negotiations were still incomplete, and the King of

Sweden’s approval of his brother’s offer in doubt, when the likelihood

of another proposal intervened. The House of Brunswick-Lüneburg, this

time in the person of George William, the second of the brothers between

whom its territorial inheritance was divided, now appeared upon the

scene. It will be more convenient to review at a rather later point the

general position and prospects of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg at the

time when Sophia definitively threw in her lot with its destinies, and

when the first step was thus taken towards its acquiring an interest in

the question of the English Succession. At the time of his visit to

Heidelberg, in 1656, George William, afterwards the ruler of the

Lüneburg-Celle portion of the paternal inheritance, held the

Calenberg-Göttingen portion, and resided at Hanover. He had recently

been urged to marry by his Estates, who were anxious to avert any

likelihood of blending the several divisions of the family inheritance;

and, though he had always felt the strongest repugnance to any such

step, much preferring to a married life the Venetian pleasures of

bachelorhood, he now thought of giving way to the Estates, if they would

in return vote an increase in his revenue. George William and his

brother Ernest Augustus were united by an intimacy and affection as

close as that which in the next generation tied the namesake of the

latter to his eldest brother George Lewis (George I); and there is every

probability that it was the report of Ernest Augustus after his earlier

visit which induced George William to make preliminary enquiries through

an agent, George Christopher von Hammerstein, who was much in the

confidence of the dynasty. Hereupon he paid a visit to Heidelberg in

person, but accompanied by his favourite youngest brother. George

William’s attentions to Sophia were well received; and though (for the

painful reasons to be indicated below) she could never have been brought

to confess it in her _Memoirs_, her heart seems to have been really

touched; and it may be added that, through all the vicissitudes which

ensued, she retained a kindly feeling towards him. As for the present,

she allows that when at last he requested her permission to ask her hand

from her brother, she failed to answer like a heroine in romance, ‘for I

did not hesitate to say Yes.’ Probably what attracted her in George

William, whose political principles must at the time have been a matter

of indifference to her, while she could not, like King William III in

later days, have much sympathised with his love of hunting and of a good

glass of wine, was the comparative refinement of manners which

distinguished both him and his younger brothers among the German princes

of the day. Though two of the Brunswick-Lüneburg Dukes afterwards came

to be known as resolute opponents of the political designs of France,

yet George William and Ernest Augustus, as well as their brother John

Frederick, belonged to the new school of German princes, who loved the

society and cultivated the fashion and manners of Frenchmen, and who

with more or less of success sought to model their Courts on Versailles.

This fact should not be overlooked; for patriotic Englishmen (especially

when in Opposition) afterwards made a constant point of deriding the

unrefined Teutonism of the Hanoverian Court. At the same time, George

William’s frequent visits to Italy, and especially to Venice, cost a

great deal of money to the Estates of his principality; and they were

accordingly anxious that he should arrive at a settlement, while he,

with a view to the bargain proving to his advantage, kept the engagement

to which the Elector Palatine had assented as secret as possible. Of a

sudden there came from Venice, whither the brothers had proceeded after

their visit to Heidelberg, the unexpected and mortifying news that

George William, who had been leading a loose life at Venice, had found

it necessary to break off his engagement. Sophia, though ‘too proud to

be touched,’ thus found herself placed in a most cruel position. Who can

say what in these circumstances might have been the result of an offer

made to her on behalf of Ranuccio II, Duke of Parma (dependent, of

course, upon her previous conversion), had not her Hanoverian suitor

shown himself most anxious to do what in him lay to remedy the wrong

which he had inflicted on her? He now proposed that his youngest brother

Ernest Augustus should marry her in his stead, taking over with her the

principalities at present held by George William, and in return only

promising to pay to the latter a comfortable pension. But to this

arrangement the third of the four brothers, John Frederick, a prince of

much ambition as well as obstinacy of character, very naturally objected

as unfair to his own interests, and a serious illness which had befallen

Ernest Augustus further delayed proceedings. Thus it was not till 1658

that the transaction was actually carried out, though on lines somewhat

different from those first contemplated. Sophia’s hand was transferred

from Duke George William to Duke Ernest Augustus, the former undertaking

to remain unmarried during the lifetime of his brother and his consort,

and in that of any male heirs whom they might leave behind them. This

renunciation, for which there were several precedents in the annals of

the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg and doubtless in that of other German

princely houses also,[50] is set forth at length in the original German

in Sophia’s _Memoirs_, though even she could not when copying it out be

aware of the full significance which it possessed for the future of the

family. She knew, however, that of her husband’s three brothers the

eldest was childless and the third still unmarried, while the second had

renounced the prospect of lawful issue. The possibilities of future

importance which her marriage now open to her husband and herself were,

therefore, wholly due to the arrangement by which this marriage was

accompanied. The renunciation of George William contained in it the germ

of the greatness which awaited the line founded in his stead by his

brother; while the consequences of the fact that his promise was half

broken, half kept, clouded the initial stage of that greatness with the

shame of a terrible family catastrophe. Sophia dwells on the weakness

and inconstancy of George William in yielding to the demands of his

councillors that he should reduce the handsome yearly allowance promised

by him to his brother; unhappily, as she hints, the same defects were to

be exhibited by him in matters of far greater gravity.

-----

Footnote 50:

According to Spittler, not less than six of the uncles of George

William (brothers of Duke George) promised to remain unmarried.

-----

Sophia’s engagement to Ernest Augustus was for a time kept secret from

her mother; but she seems to have borne the pair no malice, and to have

sent her blessing in due course, with congratulatory letters from King

Charles, in English to the bride, and in Latin to the bridegroom.[51]

-----

Footnote 51:

_Letters_, &c., ed. A. Wendland, p. 100.

-----

The Elector Charles Lewis, however, who acted in the place of a father

to his sister, found the expenses of her marriage weigh heavily upon his

reduced finances. ‘Besides her due,’ he wrote to the Queen, his mother,

by way of excusing himself for being ‘uncapable of what her Majesty was

pleased to require of him,’ ‘I am bound to an extraordinary, more

especially for the friendship she always shewed me, and because nobody

else hath done anything for her.’ Sophia tells us that on Ernest

Augustus’ arrival for the wedding she found him lovable, because she had

made up her mind to love him; and something of this resolute spirit of

attachment may, in the face of many provocations to the contrary, be

said to have characterised her relations to him throughout their married

life. According to Leibniz, the wedding took place towards the end of

September, 1658; but, according to a contemporary authority cited by

Sophia’s biographer, Feder, the date was October 17th of that year. She

describes the wedding solemnities, which, if not so magnificent or

appealing so persuasively to the imagination as those of her mother on

the banks of the Thames, showed the Palatine House to be equal to itself

in the maintenance of a stately etiquette. A few days afterwards he

posted back to Hanover, and she soon followed, attended by an ample

escort which he had provided for her. The indispensable Hammerstein

conducted the journey, on which her brother, the Elector, accompanied

her as far as Weinheim. She held her entry into Hanover on November

19th, being received by the whole family, her mother-in-law, the Duchess

Anna Eleonora (widow of Duke George), at its head. On her wedding-day

Sophia had, like her niece Charlotte Elizabeth on her subsequent

marriage with the Duke of Orleans, renounced any future claims to the

Succession in the Palatinate, unconscious of the remoter claims which

she was to owe indirectly to her Palatine, as well as directly to her

English, blood. But, though she dearly loved her brother, and shed a few

tears on parting from him, they would, as she declares, have flowed more

abundantly had her heart not been with her husband, and, as we may add,

had not her hopes rested on the future which she went forth to meet by

his side.

While to Sophia, at an age of life neither late nor very early—for she

was near concluding her twenty-eighth year—married life thus opened with

its duties, cares, and consolations, it was otherwise with the two

sisters of whom she has told us most, and whose life was likewise to be

prolonged beyond the period of early womanhood. (Her third sister,

Henrietta Maria, had died already in 1661.) Both of them, by a singular

dispensation of fate, at a time not far removed from that of her

marriage, embraced a religious life, though in two different communions;

each was to end her days as the abbess of a conventual establishment,

revered and beloved in no ordinary measure by those around her. Since

Sophia’s marriage, though it cannot be said to have estranged her from

either of these sisters, concentrated her interests upon spheres of

activity from which theirs were in the main or altogether removed, the

present may be the most appropriate place for recalling the twofold

picture of their later lives, whose tranquillity contrasts so strangely

with the agitations with which hers was necessarily filled.

The Princess Elizabeth, whom we have seen more or less absorbed in her

own high thoughts and ennobling pursuits while still a resident at her

mother’s Court in Holland, and again actively interested in the learned

studies for which the rule of her brother, the Elector, had once more

provided a home at Heidelberg, remained behind in the Palatinate for

some three or four years after Sophia’s marriage. They cannot have been

happy years, for the scandal of the Elector’s second union was now at

its height, and the Electress, on whose side, whatever Charlotte’s

faults of temper, her sister-in-law’s high sense of moral rectitude

could not fail to range her, still held out, perhaps chiefly for the

sake of the Electoral children.[52] When, in 1662, the Electress, her

own efforts and those of her kinsfolk having proved vain, at last left

Heidelberg for Cassel, Elizabeth followed her thither. In the preceding

year her attached cousin, the Elector Frederick William, had named her

Coadjutress of the Abbess of Herford, and her ultimate destiny was thus

assured. The six years (or the greater part of them) which intervened

before she succeeded the Countess Palatine Elizabeth Louisa as Abbess of

the Westphalian convent were peacefully spent by her at Cassel, in the

society of the Landgravine Hedwig Sophia, a daughter of her aunt, the

Electress of Brandenburg, and herself a lady of strong religious feeling

and, as her administration of her dower-estate of Schmalkalden showed, a

determined Calvinist. Elizabeth’s own Calvinism, it is interesting to

note, had, already before she settled for the remainder of her days at

Herford, assumed a peculiar hue. She seems about this time to have been

much impressed by the Dutch divine, Johannes Cocceius, professor at

Leyden, whose personal acquaintance she had made on a visit to her aunt

at Krossen. Cocceius, who played an important part in the religious

movement known as Pietism, in so far as it affected the Reformed or

Calvinistic Church, recalls to us other eminent religious teachers in

whom the evangelical and the latitudinarian have been blended. The gist

of this teaching was a direct appeal to Scripture and a deprecation of

any insistence on the _formulæ_ of dogma. Elizabeth, whose mind had

expanded, and whose religious conceptions had deepened under influences

very different from the rigid Calvinism of an earlier type, welcomed the

simple and profound enthusiasm of Cocceius and of the so-called

‘Lodensteyners,’ whom the endeavour to bring home religion to the

individual mind and conscience had all but led into secession or

sectarianism. Thus it came to pass that, after Princess Elizabeth had,

in 1667, become Abbess of Herford in her own right, her rule was

signalised by her sympathetic relations with sectarian movements.

-----

Footnote 52:

In 1660 and the following year there is a good deal of talk and solemn

banter between Dr. Worthington and his correspondent S. Hartlib as to

the expected arrival in England of the Princess Elizabeth with her

mother. Dr. (Henry) More is repeatedly referred to as specially

interested in the hoped-for event. On May 28th, 1661, however, Hartlib

reports a profane piece of gossip: ‘I hear a secret of the Princess

Elizabeth that Lord Craven is like to marry her. I wish she were in

England, that she might marry Dr. More’s Cartesian notions, which

would beget a noble offspring of many excellent and fruitful truths.’

(See _Diary and Correspondence of Dr. Worthington_, edited by J. R.

Crossley for the Chetham Society, Vols. i. and ii.; and cf. Crossley’s

note on the Princess in Vol. i. _s. d._ October 15, 1660. The Princess

Elizabeth never came to England.

-----

In the middle of the seventeenth century the prosperous Westphalian

Hanse town of Herford which had always been Lutheran, had lost its

position as a free imperial city, and had been finally annexed by the

Elector of Brandenburg, as representing the former Protectors of the

Abbey. This foundation had been Lutheranised rather less than a century

before; but since the time of the Thirty Years’ War the Abbess might be

either a Lutheran or a Calvinist, and the Brandenburg influence of

course favoured the second alternative. Though she had lost her

sovereign rights, she was still regarded as an Estate of the Empire, and

as such represented at the Diet; she had a Court of her own, with

regular (even hereditary) officers, and a limited jurisdiction; and with

her and her Chapter was connected a foundation, which indeed outlasted

them, for the education of young ladies of family. The position was thus

one of considerable traditional dignity and actual influence; and

nothing of either was lost in the tenure of Elizabeth, a true princess

as well as a genuine student. She was at the same time well aware that,

as a matter of fact, the authority of the Abbess of Herford was

dependent upon the stronger arm of the Elector of Brandenburg—in her

case a dependence ungrateful neither to the protector nor to the

protected.

Thus, when in 1670 she was asked to extend the hospitable shelter of

Herford to Jean Labadie and his following of women and men, which from

some fifty gradually rose to seven or eight times that number, her first

step was to assure herself of the consent of the Great Elector. With

him, as with her, religious tolerance was a constant principle; nor is

there any reason for assuming that the goodwill shown by her towards

both Labadists and Quakers had any other root than Christian humility,

wherein for such as she lies the beginning of wisdom It is of course

easy to trace the more immediate influences by which she was drawn to

the founder of the now half-forgotten sect of Labadists. He had begun

his career as a Jesuit, and, after seeking to set up a new congregation

within the Church of Rome, had become a convert to Calvinism, and in

this new sphere tried the experiment over again with a freer hand, and

with greater success. At Geneva he was assisted in his endeavours by the

brother of Anna Maria von Schurmann, whose learning had made her the

‘wonder of her age,’ but whose thoughts were now set on other things.

Soon afterwards, she permanently associated herself with Labadie’s

attempt to realise without delay his scheme of the true Church. After

ministering to a small Walloon congregation at Middelburg in Zeeland, he

was duly excommunicated; whereupon he carried on his work at Amsterdam,

in a small community with peculiar institutions, as a declared

schismatic. It was from the tyranny of the Amsterdam mob that, at her

friend Anna Maria von Schurmann’s request, the Abbess of Herford

summoned, them to take refuge in the ‘liberties’ of her abbey. Very

soon, notwithstanding the Elector’s approval of her reception of the

fugitives, the Lutheran burghers of Herford raised a loud clamour

against the practices of the strangers, and then tried to starve them

out, till a commission of enquiry, appointed by the Elector, arrived in

the town. During the respite thus obtained another visitor, attracted by

motives of curiosity, arrived at Herford in the person of the Abbess’

sister Sophia. She brought with her no faith in supernatural gifts and a

mocking tongue; and the account of her visit admirably illustrates the

innate difference between the two sisters. The report of the commission

was on the whole favourable to the liberties of the strangers; and,

after Elizabeth had with much spirit refused to obey a mandate of the

Imperial Aulic Tribunal at Speyer ordering their removal, and had

journeyed in person to Berlin to bring about a decisive intervention on

the part of the Elector, the question was solved in 1672 by the

imminence of the French invasion of the Low Countries. This danger

obliged Labadie and the majority of his followers to fly t`o Holstein,

while the rest remained behind under the protection of the Abbess. Thus

closed a noteworthy episode, in the course of which a high-minded and

enlightened princess had, on behalf of a band of sectaries with whom her

own sympathy can hardly have been other than imperfect, successfully

upheld the cause of tolerance against both official and civic

bigotry.[53]

-----

Footnote 53:

The Labadists seem to have ultimately taken refuge in Maryland, where

the sect was gradually absorbed and is now almost forgotten. (See

Bartlett B. James, _The Labadist Colony in Maryland_, John Hopkins

Press, 1899.)

-----

The last of the Labadists had not yet left Herford, when Elizabeth began

to hold intercourse with a sect of greater significance than theirs in

modern religious history—the English Quakers, or, as we find her brother

Charles Lewis disguising their name, ‘quaquors.’[54] Three years later,

in 1667, she received two visits from William Penn and Robert Barclay

during their missionary journey in Holland and Germany, including the

Palatinate. From Penn’s account of these interviews, and the letters

exchanged between him and the Abbess, it is clear that the latter, who

was on both occasions attended by her intimate friend, Countess Anna

Maria van Hoorn, a canoness of the Abbey, was deeply moved by Penn’s

appeals to her heart and conscience. But it is equally clear that the

humility which bade her listen prevented her from accepting the

conclusion that she, too, was divinely called to teach. Her mind was

equipped; her soul alert; but she still waited. Five years later, when

she had passed away from the religion of doubts and difficulties, Penn

inserted in a new edition of his treatise, _No Cross no Crown_, among

the testimonies to the significance of _Serious Dying as well as

Living_, the following reminiscence of ‘the late Princess Elizabeth of

the Rhine’:—

She chose a single life, as freest of care, and best suited to the

study and meditation she always inclined to; and the chiefest

diversion she took, next the air, was in some such plain and

housewifely entertainment as knitting, &c. She had a small territory,

which she has governed so well, that she shewed herself fit for a

greater. She would constantly, every Last-day in the week, sit in

judgment, and hear and determine cases herself; where her patience,

justice, and mercy were admirable; frequently remitting her

forfeitures, where the party was poor, or otherwise meritorious. And,

which was excellent, she would temper her discourse with Religion, and

strongly draw concerned parties to submission and agreement;

exercising not so much the vigour of her power, as the power of her

persuasion. Her meekness and humility appeared to me extraordinary.

She never considered the quality, but the merits of the people she

entertained.... Thus, though she kept no sumptuous table in her own

Court, she spread the tables of the poor in their solitary cells....

Abstemious in herself, and in apparent void of all vain ornaments.

I must say her mind had a noble prospect. Her eye was to a better and

more lasting inheritance than can be found below, which made her often

to despise the greatness of Courts, and the learning of the Schools,

of which she was an extraordinary judge.

-----

Footnote 54:

The passage (in _Schreiben das Kurfürsten Carl Ludwig_, &c. must be

quoted: ‘To-day we have had in our presence an English _quaquor_ or

trembler; I repeatedly silenced him, for his mind works very slowly

indeed; he never takes off his hat and always calls me “thou”; but he

loses his temper if he is contradicted.’

-----

Then he gives instances, very simply put, of her way of deprecating too

narrow an interpretation of the duty of paying respect to our betters;

of her distrust of her power to walk in the straight way she had chosen;

of her humility towards the humblest; and he concludes:

I cannot forget her Last Words, when I took leave of her, ‘Let me

desire you to remember me, though I live at this distance, and that

you should never see me more—I thank you for this good time; and know

and be assured, though my condition subject me to divers temptations,

yet my soul hath strong desires after the best things.’

In view of this record of the eternal longings with which this beautiful

soul was filled at the last, it seems vain to make any reference to the

earthly cares which still from time to time occupied her, in connexion

no doubt chiefly with the family history, or even to the intellectual

occupations which continued to engage her interest to the last. She was

a diligent collector of books and manuscripts, and the last great

writers with whom she corresponded were Leibniz and Malebranche, the

mystical and Christian follower of her former teacher, Descartes.

Shortly before her death, Elizabeth sent for her sister Sophia to pay

her a long visit, and received her, Sophia relates in her _Memoirs_,

with a joyfulness as if an angel from Heaven had descended to heal her.

She then notes that the Abbess had been surrounded by people whose

melancholy notions of a religious life had made hers a martyrdom. Wasted

away in body, she was, however, calm in spirit and prepared for death,

though full of sympathy with her sister and with the troubles which

might await Sophia out in the turbulent world. Elizabeth died in peace

at Herford Abbey in February, 1680; a letter addressed by her to her

sister Louisa Hollandina, Abbess of Maubuisson, shows that more than

three months before she was already making herself ready for death.[55]

-----

Footnote 55:

I must take leave to insert here the inscription on her tomb in the

Abbey Church, Herford, kindly copied for me by Miss A. D. Greenwood,

who mentions that the name of the Princess Palatine is commemorated in

that of the Elizabethstrasse, a curly old street near the Minster:

D. O. M.

H. S. E.

Serenissima Princeps et Antistita Herfordiensis

ELISABETH

Electoribus Palatinis et Magnæ Britaniæ Regibus orta

Regii prorsus animi Virgo

Invicta in rebus gerendis prudentia ac dexteritate

Admirabili eruditione atque doctrinâ

Supra sexus et ævi conditionem celeberrima

Regum studiis Principum amicitiis

Doctorum vivorum Literis ac monumentis

Omnium Christianorum gentium linguis ac plausibus

Sed maxime propriâ virtute

Sui nominis immortalitatem adepta.

Nata anno 1618, die 26 Decembris

Denata anno 1680, die 8 Februarii

Vixit annos 61 mensem 1 et dies 16

Rexit annos 12 menses 10 et dies 2.

-----

Not much is known as to the life of the Princess Louisa Hollandina

herself during the years which followed on the occurrence of the de

L’Épinay scandal, and which she quietly spent at her mother’s Court in

Holland. Nothing seems to have been bruited abroad concerning her except

that she was leading an exemplary life, and that she was very intimate

with a lady whose name is given as Madame d’Oxsordre, and had frequent

conversations with her on the subject of ‘the bases of the Protestant

religion.’ In other words, a propagandist influence was steadily at work

upon her, and in the end she made up her mind to become a convert to

Rome. Conversions to Roman Catholicism were common during the whole of

this period, and there can be little doubt but that in this particular

transaction her brother Edward and his wife, the Princess Palatine Anne

(of Gonzaga), had an important share. In December, 1657, Louisa

Hollandina, who had reason enough to fear the maternal wrath should her

intention become known, secretly left the Hague at night-time in the

habiliments of a maid-servant, and made her way to Antwerp, where, in

January, 1658, she abjured Protestantism for the Church of Rome. Her

change of confession was not the result of any sudden resolution, but it

could not fail to incense as well as grieve her mother, whose wrath,

however, fell upon Princess Maria Elizabeth of Hohenzollern-Hechingen,

hitherto an intimate of her court. Whether or not a letter from this

lady to Princess Louisa Hollandina had finally determined her flight,

further letters from the same hand, which appear to have been

accompanied, or preceded, by the whisperings of verbal scandal,

reflected in no measured terms on the Palatine _ménage_. Elizabeth

hereupon insisted on the expulsion of the slanderer from her place of

residence, Bergen-op-Zoom, pending further enquiry. The ‘Princess of

Zollern’ hereupon entered into a series of further charges, culminating

in the suggestion that Louisa had been obliged to fly in order to

conceal her shame. The Queen behaved with prudence as well as dignity,

counselling her son the Elector to contradict this calumny, but to do so

quietly and civilly, without demanding proofs as if he had any doubts on

the subject. In December, 1658, or thereabouts, Louisa Hollandina

addressed a not undignified letter to her mother, in which she announced

her admission into the Church of Rome, which the occasion of the

Christmas Communion had made necessary to her conscience, and begged her

mother’s pardon for the trouble thus caused to her. About the same time

the Princess made her way to Havre, having ascertained that she would be

received with open arms by the French Court, which had formerly remained

deaf to her mother’s solicitations for support. Immediately after

Louisa’s arrival on French soil, she was welcomed by her brother, the

Prince Palatine Edward, and conducted by him to the Abbey of Maubuisson,

near the river Oise, and almost immediately facing Pontoise, the ancient

capital of the Vexin. Edward’s own daughters, Maria Anne and Benedicta,

were being educated here, each receiving at the same time a handsome

pension out of the Abbey funds. This ancient Benedictine nunnery

(originally planted in a wooded part of the country infested by

brigands; whence the name _le buisson maudit_) dated from the middle of

the thirteenth century, and the favour accorded to it by Queen Blanche,

who was buried in the convent after assuming its habit on her deathbed,

attracted to it the frequent presence of her son, St. Louis. His example

was followed by other sovereigns of France, and the later history of the

Abbey is full of interest. But here it must suffice to say that, in the

second half of the sixteenth century, the prevalent decay of conventual

life in France particularly affected Maubuisson, which had so long been

connected with the Court, and lay so near to Paris, and that this

corruption became complete under the reckless _régime_ of Angélique

d’Estrées, the sister of Henry IV’s Fair Gabrielle, who was herself

buried with one of her infants in the Abbey. After her death Henry IV

came there no more; but this period of worldly misrule was not ended,

till in the next reign Mère Angélique came from Port Royal to reform

Maubuisson under the supervision of St. François de Sales, and after a

hard struggle effected her purpose. Once more there was a terrible

backsliding; but better times returned in 1627 with the choice as Abbess

of the worthy Mère des Anges (Marie Suireau) who was really a nominee of

Mère Angélique’s, and who brought with her a fresh infusion of religious

zeal from Port Royal. Her twenty-three years of conscientious

administration once more restored the convent to a well-ordered and

pious life. On her return to Port Royal, the worthy abbess of Lieu Dieu

became Abbess of Maubuisson, where in the course of her short rule she

received Louis XIV; and after her Louisa Hollandina’s immediate

predecessor, Catharine d’Orléans, an illegitimate daughter of the Duke

de Longueville, against whom nothing remains on record except a series

of unfortunate ‘architectural improvements’ in the Abbey church. But

these changes have long been obliterated, together with the church

itself, which, after at the Revolution the Abbey had been taken over by

the nation and sold, was in 1790 blown up by powder. At the present

moment the traces of this notable historic monument are described as

hardly discernible.

There can be little doubt that, probably owing to the efforts of Louisa

Hollandina’s powerful sister-in-law, the French ‘_Princesse Palatine_,’

it had been from the first determined to provide for this interesting

princely convert at Maubuisson. No sooner had her foot touched the soil

of France than the royal favour of Louis XIV, whose magnanimous

hospitality never did things by halves, shone upon her. After her first

visit to Maubuisson she was taken to see her aunt, Queen Henrietta

Maria, who was at the time residing with the Visitandines at Paris, and

who, after vain attempts to convert her sons Charles and James to the

Church of Rome, was engaged in a project for obtaining the hand of the

young French King for her daughter Henrietta, brought up as a Roman

Catholic. Hereupon, Louisa was received at Court, and assigned a liberal

pension by the King; and thus she was enabled, on terms befitting her

position, to form a definite connexion with the Maubuisson convent.

After a noviciate of eighteen months, she took the vows on September

19th, 1660, in the presence of a distinguished assembly, before whom the

Bishop of Amiens preached ‘divinely.’ Happily for her peace of mind, the

kindness shown her by the French Court had impressed itself upon her

mother, for whose forgiveness Queen Henrietta Maria persistently sued.

In October, 1659, Elizabeth informed her son Charles Lewis that this

intercession had prevailed with her, and that, in obedience to the King

and Queen’s commands, she had forgiven ‘Louyse,’ and prayed God also to

forgive her, ‘which is all my letter in a few lines.’[56] But Louisa

Hollandina was the only one of her mother’s surviving children left

without mention in her will.

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Footnote 56:

See _Letters_, &c., ed. A. Wendland, p. 118. These letters at last

throw a full light on this episode of the Palatine family history.

-----

The long evening—if it should be so called—of Louisa Hollandina’s life,

which lasted till 1709, was a peaceful one; but it would be unjust to

her, more especially in view of some misconceptions which have arisen on

the subject, not to say a word as to the spirit in which she both

entered upon this period of her existence, and to which she throughout

remained true. Just before she took the vows, she is said to have been

warned by one of the Maubuisson sisters, who belonged to a reactionary

clique in the convent, desirous of obtaining a mitigation of the severer

rule introduced from Port Royal, not to engage herself to observe any

standard of discipline in excess of the proposed reduction, for which it

was probably hoped to secure the requisite sanction with the aid of an

Abbess in so much favour at Court. But she refused point-blank, and,

during the few years which she spent at the convent as a simple

religious, would not consent to be relieved from any one of the duties

incumbent on her. When, in August, 1664, she was, on the death of the

Abbess, named as her successor, her first act after accepting the office

was to sell part of the silver plate which had been presented to her by

the Queen of France in order to defray part of the debt pressing upon

the convent. She abolished the practice of former abbesses of keeping up

a retinue and footmen of her own, saying that she had abandoned the

world on purpose to see no more Courts; and her niece, the Duchess of

Orleans, in her humorous manner, describes her as going about the

convent and garden all alone and with her skirts tucked up, and giving

her orders in an authoritative tone that nobody ventured to disobey. She

even—no insignificant sacrifice for a Palatine—ceased to use the arms of

her House. This simplicity was partly natural to her, for even before

her retirement it had been noted how careless she was as to matters of

dress and outward appearance. Partly it was due to a resolute humility

of spirit, and a determination to avoid any assumption of superiority on

her own part over the sisters of the convent, to which Saint-Simon bears

express testimony. She would not seat herself on the throne hitherto

occupied by the Abbess in the convent church, and as a fitter object of

reverence placed a statue of the Virgin there. On the other hand, she

opposed a steadfast resistance to the tendency manifested by some of the

nuns towards a relaxation of the conventual discipline; she observed the

entire seven months’ fast imposed by the Cistercian rule, until at last

she became as thin as a lath; according to the account of her niece she

never ate flesh except when ill, and slept on a mattress as hard as

stone, with no other furniture in her chamber but a straw-chair; and she

rose every midnight for prayer. Beneath her dress she wore an

undergarment of hair-cloth. She was careful to obey the rule which,

except in special circumstances, prohibited the religious of Maubuisson

from leaving the convent, and absented herself from it only thrice in

the forty-nine years of her residence. According to the Duchess of

Orleans, who spoke on this subject with sympathetic insight, the good

Abbess’ tongue was her temptation; and she always chose a deaf sister to

live with her in her chamber, so as not to be seduced into conversation.

On the charitable activity of the good Abbess there is less necessity

for dwelling, since it accorded with the habits that were natural to

her, as well as with her Palatine warmth of heart. In her indefatigable

activity she resembled her brother Charles Lewis, to whom in her later

years she bore so striking an outward likeness. Idleness of any kind was

impossible to her; ‘never,’ writes a contemporary, ‘was she without some

virtuous and religious occupation; either she was plying her brush or

her needle, or reading or praying.’ To her love of painting, an art

which she is said to have practised from her eighth year to past her

eightieth, reference has already been made. Though it would not appear

that her artistic powers increased in her later years, she utilised them

for the decoration not only of the Abbey, but of several churches of the

neighbourhood, and even found time to paint pictures for other

recipients. Sacred subjects seem to have chiefly occupied her in these

days; to the _Cour des Comptes_ at Paris, which had rendered an

efficient service to her Abbey, she presented an elaborate pictorial

allegory of Justice.[57] During her administration the structural

accommodation of the Abbey was considerably enlarged, and, in the centre

of it, a handsome fountain was for the first time erected.

-----

Footnote 57:

In 1871, this picture was consumed in the flames.

-----

Beneath all the other qualities of Louisa Hollandina and, one is tempted

to say, at the root of them, lay that cheerfulness of soul which is a

blessing to all who are brought into contact with its happy possessor.

The Duchess of Orleans, who had all her aunt’s vivacity of mind, but

little of her tranquillity of spirit, refers again and again to the

delightfulness of her periodical visits to the dear old lady; and we may

well believe that in their intercourse the seasoning of _malice_ (in the

French sense of the word) was not wanting. But Saint-Simon, an observer

not less keen, though the satirical vein in him took a different turn,

informs us that the Abbess of Maubuisson was adored by all the sisters

of the convent, of which she had made herself the very life and soul,

because of her charity, her sweetness, and her loving-kindness. From a

character so pure—or perhaps it should be said so purified—the shafts of

ill report glance off harmlessly; nor is it impossible that they had

their origin in traditions with which the Palatine Princess had no

concern, and which her rule as Abbess ought to have been allowed to

extinguish. While she held sway at Maubuisson, it became a chosen place

as a religious retreat by ladies of rank; among these was Madame de

Brisson, _l’âme de Saint-Cyr_, as Madame de Sévigné calls her, soon

after her dismissal from that seminary. In 1679, the good Abbess had the

pleasure of a visit from the Duchess Sophia, who was delighted with the

happy regularity of her sister’s life, ‘which would suit me quite well,

had I no husband and children.’ The Duchess of Orleans herself, though

she would hardly have come in the character of a penitent, in one of the

crises of her life at the French Court begged the King to allow her to

finish her days at Maubuisson.

Some two years before her death, Louisa Hollandina, who had hitherto

only been subject to the _migraine_—for the statement that she had died

in 1704 to save herself the trouble of periodically reminding the

States-General of the annuity granted to her at her baptism was only a

friendly jest—had a paralytic stroke, and the remainder of her life was

full of suffering. She took it all easily, saying that people would not

desire life so much if they knew to what it amounted near the end. She

died in February, 1709, eighty-six years of age; the good Princess,

wrote her heart-broken niece to Louisa Hollandina’s sister Sophia, ‘is

now where she long was wished to be’; Sophia herself, in her very direct

way, observed that, as there was so little besides life left in her

sister, there was the less to deplore in her loss. She was buried by the

nuns, who had loved her dearly and nursed her tenderly, in her

abbey-church at Maubuisson, as her sister Elizabeth had been buried in

hers at Herford twenty-nine years earlier; and both the Catholic and the

Protestant Abbess deserve each, in her own way, to be remembered among

the good women in whom their age, with all its shortcomings, was so

rich.

And here we must take leave of the Palatinate family, except in so far

as Sophia herself and those younger members of it with whom in her

married life she came into personal contact are concerned. Late in 1659,

Queen Elizabeth had the pleasure of a visit from Sophia at the Hague,

having had to solicit from Charles Lewis ‘a little money in

extraordinaire’ for the purposes of the meeting. They seem to have been

happy together, and the Queen wrote that she would be ill-natured had

she failed to show ‘kindness to Sophie, because she shows so much love

to me,’ The real success of the visit was, however, Sophia’s little

Palatine niece Liselotte, of whom more hereafter, who captured her

grandmother’s heart, although ‘you know I care not much for

children.’[58] Sophia remained in Holland till March, 1660, when her

mother was so much hindered by people coming in to tell the English news

about Monck that she could hardly find time for writing.[59] Mother and

daughter, however, met again in the following year; and Sophia’s last

farewell to ‘_cette bonne princesse_,’ her mother, took place on board

the vessel on which, in May, 1661, Queen Elizabeth was about to sail

from Rotterdam for England. For the high-souled royal exile was not, at

the last, denied an honourable refuge in her native land, though she

arrived there without the special invitation which she had been led to

expect, and an attempt was even made to delay her on the way. What could

surpass in pathos the picture of her arriving in London in the darkness,

with hardly a friend but the faithful Earl of Craven to guide her home

from the riverside? At Craven House she resided till she moved to the

house in Leicester Fields successively occupied by her great namesake’s

two favourites, the Earls of Leicester and Essex. She had no intention,

as she told Prince Rupert, of playing the poor relation. The King, her

nephew, showed much cordiality to her as well as to her sons; but his

courtesies were for the most part inexpensive, and she confessed that he

owed her nothing, though the Parliament owed her much.[60] He promised,

accordingly, to see if her debts could not be paid by Parliament, and it

actually granted her certain sums, which she applied as fast as they

came in to the redemption of her jewels, though she still had to appeal

to Charles Lewis for assistance in the process. A series of unpleasant

demands and counter-demands ensued between the King and the Elector,

each calling upon the other to pay to the Queen the outstanding moneys

lawfully due to her. In the end, King Charles II granted her a pension

of a thousand pounds a month, of which she did not live to enjoy the

first year’s total, and offered her a residence (Exeter House), into

which she had not time to move.[61]

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Footnote 58:

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

Footnote 59:

_Ib._, p. 136. It was about this time that Elizabeth was also enjoying

the company of the young Baron von Selz, an illegitimate son of her

son Charles Lewis from his London days. She was warmly interested in

him, and in 1660 induced King Charles II to take the youth to London

in the suite of Henry Duke of Gloucester. But Selz died in London,

much to Elizabeth’s grief, before his friend the Duke. (Hauck,

_Elizabeth_, p. 53.)

Footnote 60:

On another occasion she writes with generous frankness: ‘The King is

not bounde to doe for me but what he pleases, for being maried out of

the house he might justly pretend not to be bound to give me anything,

but he is kinder than many nephews would be, his income besides is not

settled as you believe it is.’ (_Letters_, &c., p. 207).

Footnote 61:

She told her son that she would have to order ‘states,’ chairs,

stools, and carpets all new for Exeter House, as ‘that beast, your

Castelin,’ had allowed what ‘stuff’ there was at Rheenen to go to

ruin. (_Ib._, p. 211.)

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The Queen of Bohemia, as she called herself to the last, was seen at

times in public—at the theatres and elsewhere—with the court; and much

attention was shown to her by her son Prince Rupert, who (as has been

seen) had returned to England a few months after the King. Pepys, whose

mention of Rupert’s return is the first notice of this Prince in the

_Diary_, observes that he was ‘welcome to nobody.’ Perhaps the diarist

had a presentiment of the friction which, sooner or later, could hardly

fail to occur between a budding official like himself and a man of the

sword with a popular reputation, whom he appears to have throughout

regarded as passionate and self-willed. But Prince Rupert was well

received in England both by the Royal Family and by the public at large,

though it proved before long that he, like others who had served the

throne in the days of stress, was out of touch with the younger

generation of courtiers and politicians. He had not found congenial

employment abroad; but his readiness for active work had not yet passed.

The proposed expedition under his command to the Guinea Coast was

abandoned (1664), partly because of an illness which had befallen him;

but he was placed at the head of one of the squadrons in the First Dutch

War, and in the Second superseded the Roman Catholic Duke of York as

commander-in-chief of the English fleet. The breakdown of his plan of

action by his want of success in the last battle of this war (1673) was

attributed by him to the misconduct of the French and the intrigues of

the friends of the Duke of York; and thus it rather heightened than hurt

his popularity. For a time he seemed to be cultivating relations of

intimacy with Shaftesbury and the Opposition; but he never harboured any

disloyal intentions, though his sympathy with the Protestant feeling in

the country is of a piece with the traditions of his family and with the

whole of his own career. He now withdrew more and more into a retirement

which suited both his scientific pursuits and his growing aversion from

the hopeless frivolity and viciousness of the Court. Although he still

continued to take an occasional part in public affairs, his time was

chiefly spent among his chemical apparatus and his pictures and

curiosities in the Round Tower at Windsor Castle, of which he had been

named Constable in 1668. He died in 1682, and was buried in Westminster

Abbey, the faithful Lord Craven acting as chief mourner on the occasion.

His mother, to whom he had been a good son to the last, had long before

this passed to her rest. Her correspondence with her son Charles Lewis

had in the last period of her life assumed a more painful tone than

ever, turning as it did upon a past that could not be set right,

whatever might happen in the future. In the contention as to whose fault

it had been that she had not temporarily taken up her residence at

Heidelberg he seems to have been more in the right than she; and it is

satisfactory to observe that, though in the very last letter preserved

from her hand, while she expresses a hope that his anger will be now

over, she begs that he will add to what he is paying to her of the

jointure which is her due, his last letter to her, and the draft of one

dated in the month of her death, end on a dutiful and even affectionate

note.[62] After her death, Charles Lewis, as her eldest—he had once been

her favourite—son, made a claim for her jewels as heirlooms; and once

more a bitter dispute ensued between the brothers.[63] The proposal that

her eldest daughter should cross the water to see her had met with no

response. Of Sophia’s seeming content with her lot the Queen had,

shortly before coming to England, heard with pleasure; but she could not

shut her eyes to the changes that fate brings; ‘for it is easier said

then done to care for nothing.’ Still, wherever she might find herself,

the lonely woman kept a stout heart and an unclouded front; though,

whether at Whitehall or at Combe Abbey (if she visited it again), she

must have seemed to herself like a _revenante_—a ghost of the past come

back. She died, at Leicester House, on February 13th, 1662—a few hours

before the dawn of what, had her husband still been by her side, would

have been her golden wedding day; and, on a night as full of storms as

her life had been, she was buried in the Abbey where so many of her

descendants were to be crowned with a crown less rapidly evanescent than

hers.

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Footnote 62:

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

Footnote 63:

The Queen’s last will and testament shows that she declared Charles

Lewis her heir, but left special legacies to Rupert—jewels, plate, and

furniture, with the papers of which the _Original Royal Letters_,

published by Sir George Bromley in 1787, passed into the hands of his

lineal ancestress Ruperta, daughter of Prince Rupert and wife of

Scroope Emmanuel Howe. To Edward the Queen left a large diamond; to

Elizabeth emerald ear-rings; and to Sophia the string of pearls which

her mother had ordinarily worn. Probably the medallion with the lock

of King Charles I’s hair, which was found on her breast after her

death, was buried with her. Many years later, when the death of the

Abbess of Herford was apprehended, Sophia wrote to Charles Lewis that

he would not find so much reason for discontent on this occasion as on

that of their mother’s death—‘for she seems to bear no malice against

you.’ It is distressing that Sophia’s want of sympathy towards her

mother, which may have been explicable enough in earlier days, should

have lasted beyond the grave.

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