III

THE DUCHESS SOPHIA

(HANOVER, OSNABRÜCK, AND HANOVER, 1658-1688)

Ernest Augustus of Brunswick-Lüneburg was the youngest son of his House,

as Sophia was the youngest daughter of the Palatine family; nor was the

scion of the Guelfs, as such, unfitted to mate with one who could boast

an ancestry illustrious like hers. Previously to the marriage conferring

upon Sophia a right of partnership, of which time only could reveal the

significance, in the fortunes of the German branch of the Guelfs, more

than one great historic opportunity had occurred to that ancient House.

Five centuries had passed since Henry the Lion had held sway over

territories reaching from the shores of the German Ocean and the Baltic

to those of the Adriatic. He had been the husband of an English

princess—Matilda, daughter of King Henry II; nor was Sophia unmindful of

this ancestral connexion. We cannot follow here the repeated dynastic

changes, or the numberless partitions and transfers that succeeded each

other in the hereditary lands between Elbe and Weser, saved out of the

shipwreck of the great Guelfic dominion, and granted to Henry’s

grandson, Otto the Child, as an imperial fief under the designation of

the Duchy of Brunswick.

The severance declared by Otto’s eldest two sons, between the

territories of which Brunswick and Lüneburg were respectively the

original centres, was—the numerous shiftings of ownership between the

representatives of the Old, Middle, and New Brunswick and Lüneburg lines

notwithstanding—never undone, and continues in a sense to the present

day. Thus, it was only within the limits of each main division that it

proved possible in the course of time to assert those two principles

upon which, repugnant though they were to the traditions of Germanic

life, the political future of the princely Houses of the Empire

depended—namely, that of indivisibility of tenure, and, more tardily,

that of primogeniture. Nor was there any consistent endeavour to supply

the want of a single dominant authority in the Brunswick and Lüneburg

Houses (as they were generally called, their various subdivisions being

further distinguished for the most part according to the names of their

chief ‘residences’) by an identity, or at least by an agreement, of

policy. Thus the German Guelfs missed the great dynastic opportunity of

the Reformation, although the populations over which they ruled were at

one in their ready acceptance of Lutheranism, and although a series of

wealthy ecclesiastical foundations fell into the laps of the princes.

Duke Henry of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel opposed the Reformation with so

much vehemence as to be denounced by Luther in the character of

bugbear-in-chief of the supporters of the national movement. Still, with

their augmented territorial strength, the Guelfs might have played an

important part in the critical period which preceded the long-expected

outbreak of the great religious conflict, and perhaps, during its

earlier stages, might have done much to resist the inroads of the

Reaction. Instead of this, after the ‘evil Harry’s’ accomplished

grandson, Duke Henry Julius, had applied his ability as a statesman

wholly to the furtherance of the imperial interest, his timorous

successor, Frederick Ulric, had failed to avert from the Lower Saxon

Circle the fury of war, drawn down upon it by the passionate Protestant

partisanship of his brother, Christian of Halberstadt, the champion of

Elizabeth of Bohemia. A change of dynasty occurred at a highly critical

epoch of the Thirty Years’ War, when nearly all the Protestant estates

adhered to the compromise of the Peace of Prague (1634); and the ‘New’

House of Brunswick entered into possession at Wolfenbüttel in the person

of Duke Augustus, a cautious ruler and a man of kindly disposition and

of bookish tastes. At the Peace of Westphalia the rich see of Hildesheim

had to be given up by the elder (Brunswick) branch; and for a time

adversity seemed to have impressed upon it the expediency of uniting its

policy with that of the younger, which had issued forth in a more

advantageous position from the Great War. During this temporary accord

between the two branches, the ambitious Duke Rudolf Augustus of

Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel was assisted by his Brunswick-Lüneburg kinsmen in

the important achievement, which the resolute Dukes of the Middle House

of Brunswick had essayed in vain, of permanently subjecting to their

territorial authority the proud Hanseatic city of Brunswick. And, alike

in the war provoked by Louis XIV’s invasion of the United Provinces (in

1672), in the march against the Swedes which was crowned by the victory

of Fehrbellin (1675), and in the campaign against the Turks which ended

with the recapture of Neuhäusel (1685), the armed forces of the two

Guelfic lines fought side by side. But, while the New Lüneburg line was,

by consolidation, preparing its future greatness, the advancement of the

New Brunswick line, the repartitions of whose territories cannot occupy

us here, again came to a standstill. Duke Rudolf Augustus survived till

1704, a prince whose virtues were of the passive kind, and with whom his

ambitious younger brother, Antony Ulric, was associated in the

government from 1685 onwards. In order to ensure the Succession to the

offspring of his brother, the good Duke Rudolf Augustus, after the death

of his first wife, contracted a _mésalliance_ with the daughter of a

Brunswick barber-surgeon, who, as Madame Rudolfine, led a life of happy

obscurity by his side at Brunswick. His brother, Duke Antony Ulric, held

his Court at Wolfenbüttel, where he cherished the literary studies in

which he had engaged in the University of Helmstedt, and successfully

essayed his own powers as an author, both in the favourite contemporary

species of historical romances _de longue haleine_ and in psalmody. But

the mental activity of Antony Ulric, who in 1704 succeeded to sole ducal

authority at Brunswick, was far from being absorbed by his literary

pursuits; or rather, as we shall see, he contrived to make them

subservient to the influences of dynastic ambition. He kept a jealous

watch, now self-interested, now malevolent and revengeful, over the

advance of the Lüneburg dynasty, so nearly akin to his own. And, in

whatever measure the same jealousy may have been a factor in his own

ultimate conversion to the Church of Rome, it certainly contributed to

make him press on those splendid marriages of his grand-daughters with

Emperor and Tsarevich, whereby he sought to redeem his own political

insignificance.

Very different results attended the progress, in and after the latter

part of the Thirty Years’ War, of the New House of Lüneburg, as it was

called. Duke George was the sixth of seven brothers, of whom it fell in

turn to the eldest four to conduct the government of the Lüneburg-Celle

dominions. Here the principle of indivisibility had been established in

1592 and confirmed in 1610; but it did not apply to acquisitions by the

line accruing after that date. In order to maintain this principle

intact, all the brothers, with the exception of Duke George, remained

unmarried, and, by a singularly orderly disposition of fate, the second,

third, and fourth succeeded in due course, each on the demise of his

next elder brother. The fifth and seventh died before the arrival of

their respective turns, and thus it was to the progeny of Duke George

that the lands and their government descended. He was accounted one of

the most capable commanders of the latter part of the war, and an ardent

supporter of the Protestant cause, with whose great champion Gustavus

Adolphus he had been one of the earliest among the German Princes to

enter into an understanding. But he was so unwilling to imperil the

immediate interests of the dynasty, that, in 1634, he gave in his

adhesion to the Peace of Prague. In 1635 he assumed the government of

the principality of Calenberg, which, by the repartition made at that

date, was transferred to the Lüneburg line; and in the following year he

laid the foundations, in the fortified town of Hanover, of the castle

which was to be expanded, in after ages, into the palace of Electors and

Kings. He died in 1641; but his principality was preserved to his

dynasty in the settlement of the Peace of Westphalia, and they further

secured a ‘satisfaction,’ though by no means an adequate one, for the

losses or disappointments undergone by them, in the shape of the right

of appointing a prince of their family to the see of Osnabrück on every

alternate vacancy. Thus, with a territory whose resources seemed to have

been hopelessly exhausted by the devastations of the War and by the

exactions of both war and peace, whose social system had been

dislocated, and whose life had been in various respects demoralised, the

sons of Duke George of Lüneburg entered upon a period in the history of

their dynasty which was to conduct it from petty beginnings to

unforeseen greatness.

The family consisted of four brothers and three sisters, of which latter

two died in infancy. The surviving sister, Sophia Amalia, had in 1643

married the future King Frederick III of Denmark, and took a notable

part in the defence of Copenhagen against the Swedes (1658), as well as

in the few despotic excesses to be charged against the absolute rule

with which, at a time when the Danish power had been laid low, her

consort had been suddenly entrusted. The Duchess Sophia, who by her

marriage had become sister-in-law to Queen Sophia Amalia, met her at

Altona in 1671, and paid her a visit at her dower-palace at Nykjöping in

1680. Sophia saw this redoubtable sovereign on her amiable side, and

relates how, on the occasion of a _battue_ of hares, the Queen

encouraged her to fire the first shot that she, her mother’s degenerate

daughter, had ever discharged. Of the four brothers, the eldest, Duke

Christian Lewis, had in 1641 succeeded to his father’s principality of

Calenberg; but in 1648, when he assumed the government of the

Lüneburg-Celle dominions proper and took up his abode at Celle,

Calenberg, with its residential town of Hanover, passed to the second

brother, Duke George William. The third and fourth, Dukes John Frederick

and Ernest Augustus, in accordance with their father’s will, remained

without territorial possessions (the reversion of the Osnabrück

bishopric had not yet fallen in); and it was arranged that, in the first

instance, John Frederick should reside at the Court of Celle, and Ernest

Augustus at that of Hanover. The young Brunswick-Lüneburg Dukes were

left without paternal control in the very period in their lives when it

was most needed by them; for, at the time of his father’s death in 1641,

the eldest, Christian Lewis, was only nineteen, and the youngest, Ernest

Augustus, eleven years of age. The brothers had been brought into little

contact with the old-fashioned academical training, of which the

influence is recognisable in the Dukes of the elder branch; and

Christian Lewis, whose years of rule at Hanover left behind them the

memory of a prince of the Mohocks, was incapable of introducing the

refinements of the modern era at Celle. At the same time he, in this

larger sphere, did his duty, as he understood it, in both Church and

State; staunchly adhering to the Lutheranism of his line, asserting his

ducal authority against the recalcitrance of the good town of Lüneburg,

and providing himself with the beginnings of a standing army in defiance

of his Estates. His best friend and ally was the Great Elector of

Brandenburg, who afterwards married, as his second wife, Charles Lewis’

widow, the Dowager Duchess Dorothea. This princess, who by birth

belonged to the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Glucksburg, played an

important part in the last years of her second husband, and, according

to the irreverent expression of his descendant, Frederick the Great,

‘ruled the hero’; but her interference in the interest of her children

cannot be proved to have gone the length, or to have produced the

effects, frequently attributed to it.[64] The second brother, George

William, who was to occupy so prominent a place in the history of his

House and in that of the personal life of Sophia, was deficient neither

in courage nor in insight, and the constant habit of foreign travel

added the charm of agreeable manners to the attractiveness of an open

and amiable nature. But, after, in his youth, he had seen some service

under Frederick Henry of Orange, he had cast to the winds military

ambition and serious purpose of any kind, and, leaving his ministers, as

best they might, to carry on his government and manage his Estates, had

with his ‘flying Court’ (as Sophia calls it) frittered away his time in

a series of visits to Holland and, more especially, to Venice. During

the intervals which he spent at home in Hanover, he pursued the same

round of frivolous pleasures, intent upon nothing but ‘going a-hunting

and making love.’ Announcing a visit from him at Heidelberg to the

Elector Palatine Charles Lewis, Sophia bids her brother ‘retail the

wicked doings of his own youth in England for the entertainment of his

guest, but not touch on matters of State; for, though George William has

plenty of wit and judgment, he wastes them on his jests and trifling

amusements.’ As he grew older, he came to be extolled both as a ‘mighty

Nimrod’ and as a connoisseur in champagne; but he also, as will be seen,

subjected himself to influences which had the effect of refining his

personal tastes and habits, while his intimacy with King William III

could not but impart strength of purpose to his political action. But

the moral infirmity of the good easy man remained incurable, and proved

a source of sorrow to others besides Sophia.

-----

Footnote 64:

According to the Duchess of Orleans (Elizabeth Charlotte), the Duchess

Dorothea presented her, as a child, with two parrots, and the Duchess

Sophia ordered her to give in return her dog _Fidel_. ‘This was, to

the best of my belief, the only occasion in my life on which I ever

obeyed you reluctantly; for my little dog was very near to my heart.’

-----

The third of the brothers, John Frederick, like George William, matured

his mental powers by travel rather than by study. But this prince, whose

highest honour it is to have introduced Leibniz into the service of the

House of Guelf, was not wholly undeserving of the praise lavished on him

after death by the courtly philosopher in both German prose and Latin

verse.[65] John Frederick was at any rate possessed by an ardent

ambition, besides being determined to think out his own salvation.

During a visit to Rome, in the year of Jubilee, 1650, he was much

impressed by the arguments of Count Christopher von Rantzau, who, after

adopting the irenic ideals of the great Helmstedt theologian Calixtus,

had at Rome been brought over to Catholicism through the influence of

the eminent convert and convert-maker Holstenius. In February, 1651,

Duke John Frederick was himself at Assisi received into the Catholic

Church; but it was not till several months later that his conversion

became known. In December of the same year, at the very time when

commissioners sent by his elder brothers had arrived at Rome to dissuade

him from such a step, he made a public profession of his change of

faith. There is no reason for supposing that the wish for a Cardinal’s

hat was one of the motives that actually prompted his conversion, though

he certainly was in the course of his life a man of many

ambitions—including the High Mastership of the Germanic Order, and the

Polish Crown. The Cardinalate desired for, if not by, John Frederick,

was bestowed by Pope Innocent X upon a previous convert of Holstenius’,

Landgrave Frederick of Hesse-Darmstadt; and, after lengthy negotiations,

it was settled that Duke John Frederick’s _apanage_ should be increased

on condition of his not returning to Celle. But the good-natured George

William gave him quarters at Hanover, and even provided for his private

exercise of his religion in the Palace. This in turn alarmed the

Calenberg Estates; and further difficulties threatened when the convert,

well aware of the vantage-ground which he occupied by reason of these

very difficulties, showed himself disposed to marry. It was the fear

that, in this event, the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg would become a

Catholic House, which impelled George William, after he had made up his

mind to remain a bachelor himself, to hasten the marriage of Ernest

Augustus. The religious question thus, already at this point, directly

affected the determination of the future of the dynasty with whose

fortunes Sophia was about to associate her own; nor is it astonishing

that John Frederick should have bitterly resented the preferential

position conceded to Ernest Augustus, the youngest of the brotherhood.

-----

Footnote 65:

See _Leibnizens Geschichtl. Anpätze und Gedichte I._ (Vol. iv. of

Pertz’ collected edition).

-----

The future husband of Sophia had, as the youngest of the sons of his

mother, the Duchess Anna Eleonora, been kept near home in his boyhood.

He had even spent two years at the University of Marburg, where, in

accordance with servile academic usage, he had filled the office of

_Rector Magnificentissimus_, and he had afterwards been elected

_Coadjutor_ by the (Lutheran) Chapter of Magdeburg. This was a suitable

preparation for the succession to the ‘bishopric’ of Osnabrück, which,

in accordance with the provision of the Peace of Westphalia, was

reserved for Ernest Augustus on the occasion of the next vacancy in the

see. The conduct of this prince was, from the first, marked by a

circumspection which neglected no opportunity; he was on the best of

terms with both the eldest two of his brothers, and was devotedly

attached to the second, whose companion he was in a long series of

journeys and sojourns on the Lagoons.[66] Thus there established itself

between George William and Ernest Augustus a brotherly intimacy—a

_fratellanza_, to use an Italian term of almost technical

significance—which goes some way towards explaining how Sophia’s

marriage had been finally brought about. Ernest Augustus’ affection for

his favourite brother may be regarded as the most attractive feature in

his character; on the whole, his personality was a stronger though a

less pleasing one than that of George William. Like many of his

descendants, Sophia’s husband had an insatiable liking for ceremonial

and was a stickler for etiquette, albeit, in the early as well as in the

later years of his married life, his manners appear to have been

remarkably free from restraint in the privacy of domestic life.

Although Sophia’s marriage had not been exactly a love-match, in the

beginning, as she joyfully reported to her brother at Heidelberg, all

was roses at Hanover; her husband’s behaviour made her feel assured that

he would love her all the days of his life, and she idolised him so

sincerely as to think herself lost when deprived of his company. The two

good English ladies who had adhered to her since she left the Hague were

in all kindness dismissed from her service; one returning to Holland,

and the other being provided with a settlement on the spot; henceforth,

the life of Sophia’s husband was to be her own life. Unluckily, however,

this involved a constant intimate association with his brother George

William, of which she soon perceived the inconveniences, and which, but

for her sincerity and tact—for she was obliged to give proof of both

qualities—might have placed her in the falsest of positions. After she

had appeased her husband’s jealous suspicions, the two brothers joined

in pressing her to accompany them on one of their Italian journeys; but

she was quit for a trip to Holland in the company of her little niece

Elizabeth Charlotte, whom, as will be seen, her brother had assigned to

her care. After her return to Hanover she gave birth, on May 28th

(O.S.), 1660, to her first-born child, George Lewis, afterwards King

George I of Great Britain and Ireland. The following winter was spent by

her husband in Italy with his brother, according to his custom; but they

accompanied her down the Rhine from Heidelberg, where she had been

staying with her brother, to Rotterdam, where, as has been seen, she

bade a last farewell to her mother, the Queen of Bohemia, then on the

point of starting for England. The two Dukes and Sophia soon afterwards

returned to Hanover, in time for the birth, on October 2nd, 1661, of her

second son, Frederick Augustus. Two months afterwards, the see of

Osnabrück at last fell vacant by the death of the Catholic Bishop,

Cardinal Francis William von Wartenberg. The event (which had been

rumoured to have taken place already two years earlier) must have been

welcome to Sophia, as relieving her from a position by no means free

from difficulty, although in her letters she makes no reference to her

husband’s jealousy of his brother. After Ernest Augustus had held his

entry at Osnabrück as Bishop—a ceremony at which, as Sophia remarks, she

felt that her presence would be superfluous,—she joined him at the

castle of Iburg, which became her residence for many years. The little

Court moved about a good deal between Osnabrück and Iburg, besides

(after a time) occasionally staying at Celle and at Diepholz, the former

seat of the Counts and _Edelherren_ of Diepholz, whose line had become

extinct in 1585.

The change from Hanover was a delightful one for the Duchess Sophia;

for, apart from the fact that the Old-town of Hanover, within whose

walls lay the ducal castle, was a sombre and crowded enclosure very

unlike what was destined to become ultimately one of the most cheerful

and attractive of German capitals, she and her husband had resided there

in a position which, in spite of the excess of affection surrounding

them, remained one of dependence. They now for the first time tasted the

pleasures, on however small a scale, of sovereignty. She was, in German

fashion, ‘the Bishopess’; when she travelled in France, her _incognita_

designation was ‘Madame d’Osnabrück.’ As the old episcopal lodging at

Osnabrück was found inadequate to the ample requirements and luxurious

tastes of the new Bishop,[67] he at once set about buying land and house

property of all kinds with a view to the erection of a suitable

episcopal palace. The building of it seems to have been begun in 1665,

and seriously taken in hand from 1668; but it was not ready till early

in 1673, from which date Ernest Augustus and Sophia continuously resided

there for the last five or six years before their removal to Hanover.

The palace, which still stands (it was restored with quite unusual

success by the last King of Hanover), bears the name of Ernest Augustus

on its portal, with the Arcadian motto _Sola bona quæ honesta_. The

building erected by Ernest Augustus seems to have been intended for a

direct reminiscence of the Luxembourg, at a time when Versailles and the

Louvre were only in course of construction, and was, like its prototype,

surrounded by magnificent gardens, designed by the Bishop’s own

gardener, Martin Charbonnier, whom he had brought from Paris, and who

seems to have been a pupil of Lenôtre. The castle at Iburg was of a

similar type of architecture—heavy but not ineffective—and betrayed the

same lack of finish, due to the inadequacy of the expenditure upon

artistic work.[68] Meanwhile, on the breezy heights of Iburg, as is

shown by the evidence of her own letters and those of the incomparable

Palatine niece whom she carried thither from Hanover, Sophia spent the

happiest if not the most exciting years of her life. After all, she

writes in her favourite ironical vein, ‘One cannot live more than once.

Why vex one’s soul, if one can eat, drink and sleep, sleep, drink and

eat? All is vanity.... Tranquillity of the spirit is lovely, since from

it springs our bodily health. Those whom the Lord loves He blesses in

their sleep. We play at nine-pins, breed young ducks, amuse ourselves

with running at a ring or backgammon, talk every year of paying a visit

to Italy; and in the meantime things go quite as well as is to be

expected for a petty bishop, who is able to live in peace and, in case

of war, can depend upon the help of his brothers.’ In the summer an

annual visit was paid to the waters of Pyrmont, and gradually things

became more lively at home—in 1663, we find a company of French

musicians engaged for the pleasure of the Court. As a matter of fact,

Sophia, though she was very far from vegetating in either mental or

bodily inactivity, visited Italy but once, crossing the Alps for the

first time in April, 1664. Nor is there any better or more convincing

proof of her rare powers of observation and insight than that she should

have learnt so much—and not only as to the beauty of Italian gardens and

the charm of Italian manners—in the course of a sojourn extending over

little more than a twelve-month. While by no means irresponsive to the

aesthetic attractions of Rome and Florence, she was the last person to

give way to the religious influences in readiness to be exerted upon

her. Loretto annoyed her; and at Rome, with a spirit which Sir Henry

Wotton would have applauded, she refused an offering to the Blessed Mary

of Victory, to whom the Emperor Ferdinand II had dedicated his sceptre

in grateful remembrance of the battle of Prague. At Venice, amidst whose

gaieties and gallantries she found herself altogether ‘_depaisée_,’

though, nevertheless, by no means incapable of amusing herself, it was

brought home to her how largely religion was used as a cloak in a

society where the nuns made themselves agreeable to gentlemen and the

very churches were used for the purpose of assignations. Much in the

cynical tone which became habitual to Sophia and to her intimates is

attributable to experiences such as these, rather than to natural

irreverence. An attempt made at Rome to ‘save her soul’ by bringing her

over to Catholicism was so feeble that she had no difficulty in

repelling it; nor could anything have been better calculated to heighten

the repugnance with which such overtures inspired her than the want of

appreciation of the dignity of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg, which

she thought observable in the illustrious convert (almost a _bête-noire_

to some of the Palatines) Queen Christina of Sweden, as well as in Pope

Alexander VII.

-----

Footnote 66:

In 1686 was published at Venice a folio, with nine plates, by G. M.

Alberti, entitled _Giochi festivi e militari, danze, serenate,

machine, boscareccia artificiosa, regatta solemne, e posti alla

sodifattione ... dell’ Ernesto Aufsusto Duca di Brunswick e Luneburgo

in Venetia_.

Footnote 67:

We have it on the authority of the Duchess of Orleans, that, when

Ernest Augustus became Bishop of Osnabrück, he at once launched forth

into so large an increase of his household, as to create in the child

the impression that he had become the possessor of great wealth.

Footnote 68:

See A. Haupt, _Die bildende Kunst in Hannover zur Zeit der Kurfürstin

Sophie_, Appendix to H. Schmidt, _Die Kurfürstin Sophie von Hannover_.

Hanover, 1903.

-----

By none of the family was this indifference more keenly felt than by

Sophia’s brother-in-law, Duke John Frederick, who showed no sign of any

wish that his conversion should remain its own reward. Sophia was to

have reason for congratulating herself on her discretion in abstaining

from receiving an _incognito_ visit from him at Rome, before he left the

city. For hardly had her husband and she, in the early spring in 1665,

once more set foot in Germany on their homeward journey, when they

learnt that the eldest of the brothers, Duke Christian Lewis, had died,

and that John Frederick, having returned from Rome just in time, had

made forcible entry into Celle and Lüneburg, to which he contended that

George William, having once made his choice of Calenberg-Göttingen,

could no longer claim any right of succession. Inasmuch as the question

between George William and John Frederick, which the latter thus

proposed to settle by a _coup de main_, turned on the interpretation of

the will of their father, a bitter _Bruderstreit_ seemed to be

announcing itself; and John Frederick, in his usual sanguine way,

boasted his hopes of both Imperial and French support for his efforts as

a Catholic prince. On the other hand, the facile temper of George

William, who, moreover, at the time of his more ardent brother’s

incursion, was occupied with his own private affairs in Holland, might

have given John Frederick a chance, but for the exertions of Count

George Frederick of Waldeek, afterwards celebrated as the right hand of

William of Orange, and for the intervention of the Elector of

Brandenburg. Several Catholic Estates, such as the Elector of Mainz and

the Bishop of Münster, favoured John Frederick; on the other hand,

Sophia had solicited the diplomatic intervention of her brother, the

Elector Charles Lewis. After long and angry negotiations, in which the

Scandinavian Powers as well as France took part, John Frederick had to

rest satisfied with the addition of Grubenhagen to the territories

transferred to his sway from that of George William, who in his turn

entered into possession of the eldest brother’s portion of

Lüneburg-Celle. The energy of Ernest Augustus, which had been as

conspicuous in these transactions as had George William’s want of this

quality, was rewarded by the transfer to the Bishop of Osnabrück of the

Countship of Diepholz.

We are obliged to refrain from more than touching upon the remaining

course of John Frederick’s career, and the _régime_ now established by

him at Hanover—one of the most peculiar of the vicissitudes undergone by

that capital in the course of its many and changeful experiences.

Capuchin friars once more found a home at Hanover, which, in days of

old, had been a town full of churches and cloisters; a Vicar Apostolic

and Bishop of Morocco _in partibus_ resided there as the centre of a

propaganda fostered alike by Pope and Emperor.[69] The Jesuits at the

same time had a centre of activity at Hildesheim. But there was no

interference either with the rights of the Lutheran establishments, or

with the claims of free intellectual enquiry, as represented by those

whom John Frederick’s high-minded liberality drew to his Court, and,

above all, by his librarian, Leibniz. The political ambition of the

Duke, who cherished the design of securing a Ninth Electorate for the

House of Brunswick-Lüneburg a generation before it was actually

accomplished, ranged him on the side of France in the chief political

conflict of his times, and thus led him to stand in opposition, not only

to the interests of the Empire, but also to the policy, on which his

brothers finally determined, of resisting the action of Louis XIV. On

the other hand, it was John Frederick who set his younger brother the

example of a firm monarchical administration, and who took the

all-important step of providing this administration with the support of

a standing army (two-thirds of which he was, however, pledged by a

secret treaty to hand over as auxiliaries to France). But, before the

issues of the great European contest in which he was prepared to sustain

the part chosen by him finally declared themselves, he was overtaken by

death, on his last journey towards his beloved Italy, in 1679. Many

ambitions, as has been seen, had fretted his (far from pygmy) body. It

was natural that, estranged as he was from his brothers, he should have

hoped himself to become the founder of a dynasty; and it was equally

inevitable that his brother Ernest Augustus and his sister-in-law

Sophia, who were already intent upon guarding in every way the interests

of their own descendants, should have shown scant sympathy with his

matrimonial projects, which were, as a matter of course, directed to

securing the hand of a Catholic princess. Towards this end no aid could

be more effective, as none was more ready, than that of Sophia’s

sister-in-law, the ‘_Princesse Palatine_’ (Anne of Gonzaga), in whose

dexterous hold were successively gathered the threads of so many

marriage-schemes calculated to advance the interests of France, and

approving themselves to the Church of Rome. The _Princesse Palatine_

accordingly apprised John Frederick, whose ambition was at the time

occupied with thoughts of the next vacancy on the Polish throne, that an

alliance with one of her and Prince Edward’s daughters might ease the

way to such a goal:—‘_pour cela, il faut commencer avec le mariage_.’

The negotiations for the match were carried on by the busy French

diplomatic agent de Gourville, who, during these years and again at a

later date, was employed by the Government of Louis XIV in the task of

trying to win over the Brunswick Dukes to the interests of France, and

whose _Memoirs_ are thus a notable source of information concerning

their Courts and their policy.

-----

Footnote 69:

This was the vivacious Valerio Maccioni, one of the pleasant Catholic

ecclesiastics who were Sophia’s familiar associates and correspondents

in these kindly days. (Others were the Abbé (afterwards Count) Balati,

a Florentine nobleman who was afterwards of service to Ernest Augustus

as a diplomatist and to the ladies of his family in the matter of

_chiffons_ at Paris, and the Abbé Hortensio Mauro, Italian secretary,

and afterwards attached to the Court at Celle.) Maccioni, after acting

for some years as John Frederick’s ecclesiastical adviser and as papal

representative at Hanover, was episcopated in 1669, when about

thirty-eight years of age. He died at Hanover in 1676. Sophia was on

the easiest of terms with him, as is shown by the references, in her

letters to him, to the Holy Court at ‘Traive,’ and to a prophetess

with a magic mirror, whom she requested the Bishop to exorcise, should

he opine that the devil had a hand in her manifestations.

-----

The danger with which Sophia and her husband found themselves ‘_toujours

menassés_’ was realised, when, in 1667, John Frederick gave his hand to

the youngest of Edward’s daughters, Benedicta Henrica. But, though two

daughters were born to John Frederick (the elder of whom, Charlotte

Felicitas, afterwards became Duchess of Modena, while the second, as the

consort of Joseph I, attained to the dignity of Empress), his hopes were

not crowned by the birth of a son. Of the Duchess Benedicta, who, as a

Catholic, was excluded from the English Succession, to which, in her

later years, she had the first claim by birth among the surviving

descendants of the Queen of Bohemia, Sophia’s correspondence contains

occasional kindly mention; though there was little trace of the high

spirit of the Palatines in the gentle and sombre-featured widow of the

massive John Frederick. His own soaring ambition and imperious will

isolate his memory in the annals of his House, while the shadowy figure

of his consort has come to be all but forgotten in the history of the

English Succession.

It may be convenient to note in this place that, owing to the attack

made by ‘Münster’s prelate,’ as an ally of Charles II of England, upon

the United Provinces, the States-General had appealed for aid to George

William and Ernest Augustus, who duly arrived in their support. In

return, the Bishop of Münster threatened the city of Osnabrück, where

Sophia and her children accordingly had to take up their abode during

the winter 1665-6, under the protection of the Bishop’s troops, Iburg

being too exposed to be safe. It would have been a curious accident if

this Bishop’s war had ended in any mischance, by which the future

Heiress of Great Britain should have been taken prisoner by the ally of

its King. In June, 1666, Sophia was enabled to return to the ‘delightful

solitude’ of Iburg. The autumn and winter of 1666 she spent chiefly at

Osnabrück, while her husband and his brother were carrying on operations

against Sweden in defence of the city of Bremen.

At the time of the negotiations which ended in the establishment of Duke

George William at Celle, and of Duke John Frederick at Hanover, their

youngest brother, Ernest Augustus, and his faithful Duchess were much

exercised in spirit by the beginnings of another family trouble, of

which the course was to be more protracted and the consequences far more

enduring. For some time George William’s brother and sister-in-law had

been disquieted by the attentions paid by the amorous Duke to

Mademoiselle Eleonora d’Olbreuze, who, in 1665, when he first made her

acquaintance at the Hague, was lady-in-waiting to the Princess (Henry

Charles) of Taranto, by birth a Princess of Hesse-Cassel. The _animus_

of Sophia, which renders it necessary to treat with the utmost caution

any statement made by her or hers in the present connexion, is evident

from her earliest mention of the lady who was to be the object of her

long and bitter hatred, as ‘_une fille qui estoit à la princesse de

Tarente_.’ Mademoiselle d’Olbreuze sprang from an ancient Poitevin

family which belonged to the minor nobility of a province long full of

Huguenot sympathies, and which held a leading position in the oligarchy,

as it has been called, that charged itself with the religious and

intellectual interests of Protestantism in these regions.[70] That she

was exceptionally endowed with an ability including a great deal besides

tact, is abundantly clear not only from the success of her manœuvres for

raising herself, and afterwards her child, to such greatness as was

attainable by them, but also from her living to be chosen as the

spokeswoman of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg on a memorable occasion

in its history. Nor can there be any doubt but that her intellectual

influence was a refining one, while her personality must have possessed

a charm which is hardly suggested by such portraiture of her as remains.

Sophia, after having, apparently through Mademoiselle d’Olbreuze’s own

judicious prudence, been spared her company in Italy, had found herself

constrained, by her husband’s anxiety to please his brother, to bring

her over almost in state from Hertogenbosch to Iburg; and, though the

_Memoirs_ refer with scorn to the Frenchwoman’s real or pretended

conquests before that of George William, Sophia is obliged to confess

that she found the intruder both modest and pleasant of speech, and

altogether very amiable. Thus it is clear that she prepared with

consummate skill the first upward step on which so much depended, and

which she actually accomplished in November, 1665. On the solemn

occasion of the funeral of Duke Christian Lewis, the whole family,

including his widow, his brothers George William and Ernest Augustus,

and Sophia, met at Celle; and to this august conclave the new ‘Duke of

Celle,’ as he was now so usually called, made known what Sophia terms

his ‘anti-contract’ of marriage with Eleonora d’Olbreuze, and what, in

other words, was his recognition of her as his mistress _en titre_. In

this document, signed by his brother and sister-in-law, as well as by

his mistress and himself, George William repeated his promise to remain

unmarried, which he declared to have been dictated by his affection for

his brother, and by a desire to consult his interests and those of his

children. Mademoiselle d’Olbreuze, who had innocently begged that she

might henceforth bear the name of Madame de Celle, had instead to put up

with that of Madame de Harburg, by which, as Sophia rather savagely

adds, she continued to be known for the next ten years.

-----

Footnote 70:

This information I owe to Mr. H. H. Sturmer, author of _Some Poitevin

Protestants in London_ (London, 1896).

-----

Sophia and her husband seem at first to have regarded this revised

arrangement, which was substantially quite in accordance with German as

well as Italian precedents, as on the whole likely to ensure what to

them was naturally the main point, the continuance of George William’s

bachelorhood. In September, 1666, his mistress bore him a daughter, the

ill-fated Sophia Dorothea. From the same year onward, Ernest Augustus

and his wife’s own family rapidly increased, by the birth, in December,

of their third son, impartially christened Maximilian William after the

Catholic Elector of Cologne and the Protestant Elector of Brandenburg,

and the births of their daughter Sophia Charlotte, in 1668, and of their

sons Charles Philip, Christian, and Ernest Augustus, in 1669, 1671, and

1674 respectively. Sophia’s love for her children forms, perhaps because

of the perfectly natural expression which she gives to so natural an

affection, a most delightful feature of her personality. This love

enveloped alike the more and the less gifted, the successful and the

unlucky, the phlegmatic and mild-mannered, though ungainly ‘Brunswicker’

(her eldest son, George Lewis), and the fearless little spitfire of a

‘Palatine’ (her second son, Frederick Augustus)—as she described them in

their early days. We shall see how her tenderly loved only daughter’s

bright and enquiring spirit also commended her to her mother’s

intellectual sympathies; but her motherly heart flowed out towards all

her sons, and even the inexpansive nature of the eldest seems to have in

a measure warmed towards her. But she could only with difficulty

reconcile herself to a policy which made it necessary to sacrifice the

interests of his younger brothers to his, or rather to those of the

House as a whole; and even among these younger brothers themselves, it

would almost seem as if her anxiety, like a true mother’s, had been

deepest for those who most needed support. Thus we find her, when both

Frederick Augustus and Charles Philip were serving the Emperor in arms,

pitifully pointing out to Leibniz how the younger of the pair was not

‘_si chiche de ses sollicitations_’ nor ‘_si misanthrope_’ as his

brother, and succeeded better accordingly. Yet his prosperity, too, she

had at heart; nor could she suppress the thought that the sum spent on

the purchase of a regiment for him by his father was less than what the

latter had on occasion been known to lose at the basset-table.

In these earlier years, however, before the deeper anxieties of her

motherhood had yet come to Sophia, although the happiness of her life

was already beginning to centre in her children, it owed much to the

presence at Hanover and Iburg of the niece, who had become to all

intents and purposes her adopted child. From her fourth to her eleventh

year, Elizabeth Charlotte, the Elector Palatine’s only daughter by his

unhappy first marriage, was the constant companion of her aunt, to whom

this joyous period of intimacy sufficed to bind her heart and soul

during a long life of trials. It was in a happy moment that her father

resolved upon sending his child, in the company of her governess

(afterwards, as Frau von Harling, one of the most favoured recipients of

Elizabeth Charlotte’s flow of confidences), to what became the home of

her heart, and was, in after days, the perennial refuge of her thoughts.

As a child ‘Liselotte’—so she was familiarly called—was the very

incarnation of high spirits and natural gaiety, delighting in air and

movement like the leaves which the wind drives before its blast; hence

the sobriquet, untranslateable but conjuring up a world of fairies and

imps of mischief, by which she liked to speak of herself, even when

cribbed and confined amidst the royal splendours of Versailles.

_Rauschenblattenknechtchen_ never forgot either the homely comforts of

Hanover in meat and drink, or the airy freedom of the heights of Iburg;

and for its _châtelaine_, for her virtues and her wisdom, for her high

intellectual powers, and for the charm of her style, she conceived a

loving admiration, which long outlived its object, and which found

expression in many volumes of letters, brimful, from the first to the

last, of quick observation, animated comment, and a piquant or

pleasantly malicious wit, relieved here and there by touches of an

equally irresistible natural pathos. So early as 1663, Liselotte was, to

her unfeigned sorrow, summoned back to Heidelberg by her father, whom

her mother’s departure to Cassel had at last enabled to arrange his

family life after his own fashion. Sophia deeply regretted her niece’s

departure from Iburg, where, as she wrote, they had led a vagabond life

together; but, with her usual common-sense and self-control, she

declared it quite in order that the Infanta of the Palatinate should be

brought up at a Court like Heidelberg, rather than down in Westphalia,

where her kinsfolk had lived in simple _bourgeois_ condition and seen

few people. To her changed home Elizabeth Charlotte’s nature, readily

susceptible to kindness, without difficulty accommodated itself during

seven further happy years. The moral atmosphere in which they were spent

was that of a religious tolerance springing partly from kindliness of

disposition and partly from indifference; the epoch of religious strife

seemed over, and another at hand, of less fettered thought and

philosophic speculation. Into this new movement it was easy to enter

superficially, encouraged by the lofty aspirations for a reunion of

Christendom that occupied some of the foremost among contemporary

thinkers. From these influences, of whose effect upon the Elector

Palatine Charles Lewis and his favourite sister Sophia note has already

been taken, so receptive a mind as that of his Elizabeth Charlotte was

not likely to escape; and they undoubtedly help to account for the

process of the conversion which ominously preceded a marriage destined

to alter the whole course of her life. To the ‘_Princesse Palatine_’

(Anne of Gonzaga) and her allies no path seemed impracticable that led

to Rome; and, in the case of the niece, no such apparatus of argument

was required as had to be set in motion when the attempt was made at a

later date to work upon the mind of the Duchess Sophia and her husband

through the pertinacious fervour of Madame de Brinon and the swooping

condescension of the ‘Eagle of Meaux.’ For Elizabeth Charlotte was

constrained by the instinct of filial obedience, her father having

persuaded himself that the welfare of the Palatinate necessitated,

together with the sacrifice of his daughter’s happiness, the ignoring of

her conscience. That in this calculation he, as was indicated above,

terribly deceived himself, and that the bond thus knit proved the ruin

of the land which it was intended to benefit, only enhances and deepens

the cruel irony of the whole transaction. A marriage had been arranged

between Elizabeth Charlotte and Louis XIV’s brother, the Duke of Orleans

(whose first consort, Charles II’s sister Henrietta, had died in 1670,

in circumstances long regarded as suspicious); and, though no mention of

the subject of religion had been made in the contract, her conversion to

the Church of Rome was regarded as an indispensable preliminary step to

its execution, and it was necessary that this step should seem to have

been taken spontaneously. She was accordingly prepared for it by her

father’s secretary,[71] to the diversity of whose historical and

philosophical learning two volumes of _Chevreana_ survive to testify.

Hereupon she was taken to Strassburg, whither her aunt the Duchess

Sophia also found her way to meet her and her father, but where also

appeared the presiding genius of the whole business, the ‘_Princesse

Palatine_.’ After the sojourn at Strassburg—where aunt and niece

parted—Elizabeth Charlotte passed on to Metz, where she was received

into the Church of Rome, and thence into her new married life. The

religious comedy was completed by a letter from her to her father

entreating his pardon for her change of faith, and by his reply, the

really contemptible part of the process, making pretence of a virtuous

indignation. Whatever Elizabeth Charlotte’s feelings may have been at

the time, she afterwards made no secret of the matter to her aunt

Sophia, and frequently dwelt upon her aunt’s share in the transaction.

‘It was you,’ she says on one occasion, ‘who made me a Catholic’; and,

when Duke Antony Ulric had gone over to Rome, ‘Why,’ she asks, ‘should

you be so sorry, when you are such a fine convert-maker yourself?’[72]

But, though the constraint which had been put upon her never ceased to

rankle in her mind, and though her conversion was not consummated

without some rubs and some qualms, these feelings perhaps never went

very deep. Her real grief, which made her ‘cry all through the night

from Strassburg to Chalons,’ was at parting from her German home and its

associations, in which her whole heart was wrapped up; and of this

parting the enforced change of religious profession was merely an

incident. ‘ Between ourselves,’ she afterwards wrote to her aunt, out of

her gilded exile, ‘I was stuck here against my will; here I must live

and here I must die, whether I like it or not.’

-----

Footnote 71:

Urban Chevreau accomplished the task of ‘instructing’ Elizabeth

Charlotte in four weeks. It must have been about this time that the

same _savant_ induced her father to read a few pages of Spinoza, who

was thereupon invited to Heidelberg.

Footnote 72:

It should be noted that, at the time of Elizabeth Charlotte’s change

of confession, toleration still obtained in France. We have her own

assurance that, had the persecutions of the Huguenots at that date

already begun, she would have refused to be converted. In 1698, she

writes to her aunt Sophia: ‘At Court one never hears a word spoken on

behalf of those of the Reformed faith. If they had been persecuted in

this way twenty-six years since, when I was still at Heidelberg, you

would never have succeeded in persuading me to turn Catholic.’ Sophia

herself, when replying to a renewed attempt upon her Protestantism by

Mme. de Brinon, by the remark that she trusts in the goodness of God,

who cannot have created her to see her lost, adds that she cannot

reconcile herself to the persecution of the Protestants in France, who

crowd England, the Netherlands, and Germany as refugees.

-----

And so the genial daughter of the Palatinate, true of heart and sound in

body and mind, became the wife of a feeble and effeminate voluptuary,

devoid of all character or will of his own, and by him the mother of a

prince who, though neither incapable nor ill-meaning, typified the

decadence of that France which he was called to rule as Regent. But with

this long second stage of her life we cannot concern ourselves here.

About August, 1679, she had the pleasure of a visit from the Duchess

Sophia, who, as already noted, came to France at that time to see her

sister at Maubuisson. The aunt found her beloved niece stouter, but in

excellent spirits. On the invitation of the Duke of Orleans the Duchess

Sophia was present at Fontainebleau on the occasion of the wedding of

the Duke’s daughter by his first marriage to the King of Spain (Charles

II); and, though she kept up her _incognito_, King Louis XIV called upon

her, and charmed her by his conversation, which he magnanimously turned

to the success of the Hanoverian arms at the bridge of Conz, mentioned

below. For the rest, the sacrifice of which, for all her philosophy of

good humour, Elizabeth Charlotte was the conscious victim, was, as we

know, not only made in vain, but brought upon her father’s and her own

beloved Palatinate, in the shape of the so-called ‘Orleans War’

(1688-90), consequences which were the direct opposite of those intended

by him, and which caused her many days and nights of anguish. During the

half-century of her exile—for down to the day of her death, in 1722, she

never saw the Palatinate again—though she held her head high, with eyes

undazzled even by the closest propinquity to the sun, there was hardly

an experience of bitterness and disappointment which she was not fated

to undergo; and through all she had but one consolation, which was her

pen. She wrote because she loved her correspondents, but also because

she loved the relief of writing, and the opportunities thus afforded of

self-expansion and of free expression for the loves and hatreds of her

soul. That—in the days of Louis XIV—her letters would be opened, so as

to ascertain the working of her Protestant sympathies, and perhaps of

her interest in the English Succession question, troubled her not a

whit; if her insults to Madame de Maintenon—apparently quite unprovoked,

and certainly, in a large measure, baseless—were made known to their

object, this was so much gain to their author. Yet, after every

deduction has been made on account of the pride, the jealousy, the

personal and other prejudices, and the perennial impatience which

weariness of heart had made second nature to the kindly-hearted

Palatine, her picture of the Court of Louis XIV, in the latter half of

his reign, possesses a historical value which is only surpassed by its

general human interest.[73] It is, above all, in Elizabeth Charlotte’s

letters to Sophia, and in the references to _ma tante_ in those

addressed to her various other correspondents, that the pathetic side of

her humour asserts itself, together with the malicious; nor has the

whole literature of confidences any second example quite comparable to

this, either in volume or in the directness of its derivation from

nature’s self.

-----

Footnote 73:

In a series of articles in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, beginning

October 15th, 1906, entitled _Madame, Mère du Régent_, M. Arvé de

Barine takes great pains to show that in estimating the Duchess of

Orleans’ censure of the state of morals at the French Court we should

remember that she might have found a good deal to complain of nearer

her parental home.

-----

We return to Osnabrück and Iburg, whither Elizabeth Charlotte longed to

fly, tying herself to the end of a ribbon transmitted by her as a sample

of the fashions of Versailles. So long as the relations between Duke

George William and Madame de Harburg remained unchanged, Ernest Augustus

or his descendants were assured of the Succession in Celle and Lüneburg;

for it had been finally settled with John Frederick that the right of

further option, against which he had formerly protested, had now

determined. John Frederick’s marriage, in 1668, seemed to cut off from

Ernest Augustus and his line the prospect of succeeding in Hanover

likewise, until John Frederick, whose hopes of a son and heir had been

repeatedly disappointed, died in 1679 without having seen them

fulfilled. Thus, during these years, it was upon the Succession at Celle

that the ambition of Ernest Augustus and Sophia was concentrated; nor

had they for some time any reason to fear that their wishes would be

thwarted by George William. Indeed, his acceptance of the existing

situation seemed clear from his endeavours to secure, by means of a

series of treaty arrangements, a large private estate in land to his

children by Madame de Harburg. The early death of all of these, with the

sole exception of the eldest, Sophia Dorothea, born in September, 1666,

eventually made her a wealthy heiress; but some time passed before her

father abandoned all expectation of a son, and a disquieting rumour

reached Osnabrück that, if George William’s mistress were to present him

with the desired heir, it was his intention to marry her, his

‘anti-contract’ notwithstanding. As there had been precedents in plenty

for the promise,[74] so it might no doubt be possible to find others for

setting it aside. Already, Eleonora was tactfully asserting herself at

Celle, and her personality was becoming the dominant power in the ducal

Court. Some of her Poitevin relations held high office there; and,

though the fact that other Frenchmen of family entered the military

service both of George William and of his brother the Bishop was, at the

time, by no means an exceptional phenomenon, yet it added to the

significance of an influence which the policy of Louis XIV might just

then deem worth cultivating.[75] For the Brunswick Dukes were, from the

time of the Triple Alliance (1668) onwards, political personages of much

interest both to France and to her adversaries, and had, two years

earlier, even seemed to have some chance of subsidies from a Government

more in the habit of receiving than granting them—the Government of

Charles II. After John Frederick of Hanover had, as has been seen,

decided finally to throw in his lot with France, his brothers George

William and Ernest Augustus continued to be solicited by her diplomacy;

and it was with the palpable purpose of gaining over the former and more

important of the pair, that, in 1671, de Gourville was instructed to

question him by presenting a royal ordinance, naturalising his daughter

by Madame de Harburg in France as ‘_Demoiselle Sophia-Dorothée de

Brunswick et de Lunebourg_.’ But the bait was too minute.[76] Larger

issues were involved, and, though in 1671, apprehensive of the

consequences which a bolder policy might have for the safety of his

bishopric, Ernest Augustus actually entered into a treaty of neutrality

for two years with France, George William was by his far-sighted

Chancellor, Baron Lewis Justus von Schütz,[77] prevailed upon to stand

firm. When the invasion of the United Provinces of the Netherlands took

place in 1672, Duke George William ranged himself on the side of the

adversaries of the French invader, and very soon Ernest Augustus

followed suit. In 1674, George William, accompanied by Ernest Augustus,

was in command of the Brunswick-Lüneburg troops forming part of the

imperial army opposed to Marshal Turenne, the devastator of the

Palatinate, in Alsace; and, in the following year, the Bishop of

Osnabrück and his eldest son George Lewis achieved a brilliant military

success at the bridge of Conz, and followed it up by taking part in the

recovery of Treves. Before leaving Osnabrück for this campaign, Ernest

Augustus had handsomely raised his consort’s dowry to an annual income

of 16,000 dollars. ‘I hope,’ she wrote, ‘that I shall never need it, and

that the Parcæ will allow him to survive me.’ On this occasion he

returned wreathed in laurels. At Osnabrück an imposing triumphal arch

was erected by ‘the dancing-master Jemme,’ and all the princes and

princesses at the little Court joined in a dance given in his garden by

the same public-spirited professor. In 1675, they took part in the war

carried on by the Empire against Sweden, which they helped to oust for a

time from the duchies of Bremen and Verden. To allies so loyal and so

useful as the two Dukes, no reasonable favour could be refused by the

Emperor Leopold, who was manifestly unaware of the conflict between the

desires of the elder and the interests of the younger brother. (It is

interesting, as an illustration of the consistent dynastic policy of

Ernest Augustus, that, when in 1674, after some cautious hesitation, he

had concluded a ten years’ league with the Emperor, the United

Provinces, and Spain, he procured the insertion in the compact of a

clause binding the States-General to use their whole influence in the

peace negotiations in favour of his bishopric of Osnabrück being turned

into a secular principality.) In July, 1674, a patent issued from the

Vienna Chancery, granting to Madame de Harburg, for herself and her

children, the hereditary title of Countess of the Empire

(_Reichsgräfin_) of Wilhelmsburg—the designation of the landed property

between Hamburg and Harburg settled upon her and her descendants by her

protector. At the same time, the Empress Eleonora, a scion of the

Catholic Neuburg branch of the Palatine House, conferred upon her

namesake at Celle the Order of the Female Slaves of Virtue, hitherto

reserved for princesses. Soon afterwards, the right was secured to

Eleonora’s daughter Sophia Dorothea, in the event of her marrying a

prince, of bearing the arms of the House of Brunswick and of being

recognised as herself belonging to that House. The name of the prince

who was to secure the prize of the heiress’ hand while thus raising her

in advance of her mother, to the coveted rank, was no longer a secret:

it was Augustus Frederick, the youthful eldest son of Duke Antony Ulric

of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. Antony Ulric was at the time, though

co-regent with his elder brother, involved in debt and prepared to bring

about a rise in the prospects of his family, even by means of a

matrimonial connexion in other respects not a little dubious. For the

conclusion of this match Sophia Dorothea’s legitimation was

indispensable; but her aunt, the Duchess Sophia, indignantly relates

that a shorter and readier way of reaching this end was suggested to her

brother-in-law by his Chancellor Schütz. He advised the Duke to marry

Sophia Dorothea’s mother. Schütz was the most capable politician in his

master’s Court, and served him, as his son-in-law Bernstorff afterwards

served Ernest Augustus and his son, with equal fidelity and distinction.

There is no reason for attributing sordid motives to the advice which

this petty Wolsey gave to his easy despot—that he should take the course

on which his heart might not unnaturally be supposed to be set. For the

moment, the incomplete step of securing a patent of legitimacy for his

daughter was deemed sufficient; but, very soon, Eleonora, or Eleonora’s

ally, prompted by the restless Antony Ulric, again entered into

campaign. At first, a morganatic marriage, with renewed safeguards for

Ernest Augustus and his line, was suggested; then, a preliminary attempt

was made to place the lady on a level with her lord, by obtaining for

her the title of Princess. The Duchess Sophia was on the alert, and

cites at length a letter which she wrote to her brother-in-law in order

to avert the impending thunderbolt, and his bland reply assuring her

that it would prove absolutely harmless to her family. In April, 1676,

the marriage of George William and Eleonora, who still remained Countess

of Wilhelmsburg only, was celebrated at Celle; and nothing could, on the

face of it, be more reassuring than the treaty which followed in May,

and which, while guaranteeing the Succession in George William’s

dominions to his brother and his brother’s descendants, actually

provided that the oaths of allegiance taken by his subjects in future

should be sworn to his brother as well as to himself. It seemed to

Sophia that this procedure might opportunely have been set on foot when

George William’s wife was again expected to present him with a son.

Meanwhile Eleonora speedily achieved the remainder of her ascent; in

April, 1676, Sophia had to learn that the Frenchwoman—in her intimate

correspondence this designation would have been avoided as

colourless—was prayed for in church at Celle, as if she were the

reigning Duchess; and, soon afterwards, the final blow descended, when

it became known that the Emperor’s envoy had saluted her by the title of

Highness. Sophia expresses herself, with not undeserved contempt, as to

the excuse preferred by George William, that he could not help obliging

one whom others called his wife. From the silence which, in the

remaining pages of Sophia’s _Memoirs_, ensues on a topic which cannot

fail to have continued to exercise her patience, we infer that, though

it was very long before either she, or anyone who cared for her, had a

good word for the Duchess of Celle, the common-sense which no kind of

emotion ever extinguished in her induced her to abandon the struggle

against the inevitable. She consoled herself, as she told her favourite

niece, with the reflexion that, whatever title the intruder might

herself bear, no son of hers could ever be more than a Count of

Wilhelmsburg, and that George William might still be trusted, in the

event of a son being born to him, to keep his promise to his brother.

The Duchess of Orleans did her best to promulgate this faith to

unbelieving or indifferent listeners at Versailles; but it was not in

this way that Sophia’s half-pathetic trust in her _ci-devant_ lover was

destined to be put to the proof.[78]

-----

Footnote 74:

One of these was the case of the Elector Palatine, Frederick I, just a

century earlier (1472), who after, on his usurpation of his nephew’s

dominions, making a promise similar to George William’s, twenty years

afterwards married his mistress with his nephew’s consent. Another

instance is that of Henry of Dannenberg, who, notwithstanding a

supposed promise, married, greatly to the vexation of his brother

William the Younger, the founder of the New House of Lüneburg.

Footnote 75:

No doubt a less reputable class of French and Italian adventurers also

found their way to George William’s court, which in 1670 Sophia states

‘under the roos’ to be called ‘_le Royaume de la Canalle_,’ adding

that the nobility is held of no account there, and that cooks are

probably better paid than Ministers of State.

Footnote 76:

According to another view, this naturalisation of her daughter,

together with permission to herself to return to France in the event

of danger, had been sought by Eleonora herself, aware of the jealousy

with which she was regarded by most of her protector’s relatives.

Footnote 77:

The elder Schütz was sent to London in 1683, to congratulate Charles

II on his escape from the Ryehouse Plot. His reports from London are

preserved from 1689 to 1709, the year of his death; but his

interesting correspondence with Sophia (recently edited with other

letters from her and Queen Sophia Charlotte by Dr. R. Doebner) does

not, with the exception of a single letter, include any letters dated

before 1701.

Footnote 78:

It was a proud experience of the Duchess of Orleans (in 1717) to find

that Louis XIV had observed her dislike of _mésalliances_, and more

than one racy reference to a horrible occurrence of the kind might be

cited from her letters. The Celle marriage she could never have

forgiven, if only for her aunt’s sake. Yet _mésalliances_ were not

altogether unknown in the House of Brunswick (see above as to ‘Madame

Rudolfine’)—perhaps for the very reason that it was formerly one of

those ancient German princely Houses (i.e. Houses which had a seat and

vote in the Diet before 1582) which sought to maintain the principle

of _Ebenbürtigkeit_. It is only in the branch of the House which

attained to a royal throne that a wise policy (embodied in the Act of

1772) substituted for a rigid rule a provision which has sufficiently

protected the dignity of the royal family and the interests of the

Empire. It may be added that, according to Lord Dover, the

_mésalliance_ with Eleonora d’Olbreuze prevents the British royal

family from taking rank as what is called _chapitrale_ in Germany.

(See Horace Walpole’s _Letters_, ed. Cunningham, Vol. ii. p. 251,

note.) Concerning the _Ebenbürtigkeit_ principle as recognised in the

House of Hohenzollern, and the rights of the head of the House with

regard to the marriages of its members, see an article by E. Berner in

_Historische Zeitschrift_, 1884, 4, _Die Hausverfassung der

Hohenzollern_ (a review of H. Schulze, _Die Hausgesetze der reg.

Deutschen Fürstenhäuser_).

-----

The influence of the Duchess of Celle upon her husband’s mode of life,

and upon the tone of his Court, was altogether so excellent that we may

without much hesitation discredit her sister-in-law’s insinuations as to

the bringing-up of George William and Eleonora’s only surviving child,

the ill-fated Sophia Dorothea. The engagement which had actually been

concluded between her and the youthful Prince Augustus Frederick of

Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel came to a sudden end by his death in August,

1676, from wounds received at the siege of Philippsburg; and the attempt

of his father Duke Antony Ulric to secure the hand of the heiress for

one of his younger sons met with no ready acceptance. Other suitors

appeared or were spoken of: the young Hereditary Governor of Friesland,

Henry Casimir of Nassau-Dietz, who was recommended to George William by

his cousinhood with William III of Orange, and Prince George of Denmark,

for whom fate had in store the splendid, if not in all respects

enviable, position of consort to an English Queen. Curiously enough, the

hand of the Princess Anne had at this time been also thought to be

within reach of Ernest Augustus and Sophia’s eldest son George Lewis,

who paid a visit to England from December, 1680, to the following March.

But for him, too, a different destiny was reserved; nor, if the account

of a most sagacious observer and true friend is to be trusted, had this

particular honour ever been coveted either by the Prince himself or at

Hanover—for this among other reasons, that Princess Anne’s birth on the

mother’s side was from a very second-rate family. The Prince had,

accordingly, taken very little trouble in the matter; so that, when he

left England, it was thought that the marriage would never take

place—all of which things Queen Anne never forgot.[79] Before long a

project of dynastic ambition ripened, as we must conclude, in the minds

of the brothers at Celle and Osnabrück, which, if carried out, besides

serving the immediate end of replenishing the resources exhausted by the

extravagant life of Ernest Augustus, would go far towards ensuring the

ultimate union of all the dominions of the Brunswick-Lüneburg line. As

to the former purpose, it probably weighed heavily with Sophia’s

husband, whose expenditure on travel abroad and on pomp and ceremony at

home had long been excessive, and who had more recently added to his

self-indulgences the costly luxury of a mistress _en titre_, in the

person of Clara Elizabeth von Meysenbug, since 1673, by her marriage to

one of Ernest Augustus’ chief courtiers, Baroness von Platen.[80] It

would not be easy to show from Sophia’s letters how she was affected by

a _liaison_ which lasted during her husband’s lifetime; one quite

welcomes the late indication afforded by her remark, on the occasion of

the visit of the Tsar Peter the Great, in 1697, that in Russia all women

paint, and that this was why Countess Platen so much charmed the

Muscovites. Of her personal power over Ernest Augustus, and of certain

other features in her history and that of her family, something will

have to be said below; but it may be as well to point out that there is

no satisfactory evidence to show that she played the part ascribed to

her in the tragedy to be noticed below. This was not Ernest Augustus’

only infidelity, for about the same date we hear of a relation between

him and one ‘Esther,’ a _femme de chambre_ in the service of his

wife.[81] Sophia, from whom her husband’s affections were thus being

alienated, after she had borne him six children, seems at first to have

felt anything but satisfaction at the project of a marriage between her

eldest son, George Lewis, and his cousin, Sophia Dorothea; indeed, in a

letter of November, 1677, the Duchess of Orleans, as her aunt’s faithful

echo, profanely denounces the union of such a creature with so worthy a

young prince as a sin against the Holy Ghost. In 1679, Sophia describes

the pill as difficult to swallow, though adequately gilded, and adds

that, for her part, she would have preferred a daughter of John

Frederick of Hanover with a third of the gilding. But, three years

later, in 1682, the Duchess of Orleans treats the marriage as an

accomplished fact. ‘She will,’ she observes, ‘imitate the discretion of

her aunt;’ but ‘like the parrot of the Duke of Savoy, though she holds

her tongue, she thinks a great deal.’ A large amount of fiction, the

origin of which is traceable to the same tainted source—a ‘historical’

novel published, nearly a generation afterwards, by the ingenious but

far from disinterested Duke Antony Ulric[82]—has accumulated round the

supposed exertions of Sophia to induce her brother-in-law, despite the

reluctance of his wife, to approve the sacrifice of their daughter. All

we know is that, by 1681, the tone of Ernest Augustus and Sophia towards

Eleonora had entirely changed; and it is clear what had made both the

parents of the ‘worthy’ Prince George Lewis intent upon bringing the

matter to a conclusion. About this time, Ernest Augustus had conceived

the design of obtaining the Emperor’s consent to the postulation of one

of his sons as his successor in the bishopric of Osnabrück,

notwithstanding the express provision of the Peace of Westphalia that it

should be alternately held by a Catholic and a Lutheran. Sophia was

quite prepared to drive a coach and four through that settlement, and

let the Catholics afterwards appoint two bishops in succession if they

chose. But this would have been a merely temporary gain for the House.

At the close of the year 1679, as has been seen, John Frederick of

Hanover had died without leaving a son; and to Ernest Augustus, on

succeeding to his principality, the prospect of an enduring greatness

for himself and his dynasty at last clearly opened. If the cordial

relations between his surviving brother and himself could be maintained,

the actual union in his hands, or in those of his descendants, of the

entire territories of the Brunswick-Lüneburg House, was now merely a

matter of time; and on the possession of so extensive and solid a

dominion his dynastic ambition would be warranted in basing ulterior

designs. Already personages of the greatest political consequence in

Europe began to interest themselves in the fortunes of the House of

Hanover, and in the immediate scheme of a marriage promising results of

so high an importance. Hardly had Ernest Augustus and Sophia held their

entry at Hanover, when, by the express advice of William of Orange, they

at once recognised the ducal title of Eleonora. In the same year the

august counsel of Louis XIV, still hopeful of conciliating the goodwill

of the Brunswick-Lüneburg Dukes, was bestowed in favour of the match,

through his minister at Celle, the Marquis d’Arcy, to whom the Duchess

Eleonora spoke with gratification of the civilities of her

sister-in-law. The Estates of Celle-Lüneburg, on the one hand, and those

of Calenberg (Hanover), on the other, with a docility surprising after

their former insistence on continued separation, declared that, if the

marriage was actually concluded, they would consent to the establishment

of the principle of primogeniture; and a law establishing this

principle, the very coping-stone of Ernest Augustus’ dynastic policy,

received the Imperial sanction in 1683, though it was only promulgated

in the Brunswick-Lüneburg dominions, as part of the will of Ernest

Augustus, on his death fifteen years afterwards. This provision was to

entail upon Sophia even more personal unhappiness than the marriage of

her eldest son itself; but a renunciation of her own wishes had by this

time become a law of her life.

-----

Footnote 79:

See Ezechiel Spanheim’s _Account of the English Court_, printed by Dr.

R. Doebner in _English Historical Review_, Vol. ii. 1887, pp. 757

_sqq._ Spanheim’s statement as to the scruples felt at Hanover is

exactly borne out by an observation of Sophia, _à propos_ of the

proposed match between her son George Lewis and the Princess Sophia

Dorothea, that the example of the Prince of Orange (William III)

‘renders the notion more endurable.’ In other words, the House of

Hanover thought a marriage with a daughter of Anne Hyde a sort of

_mésalliance_. (See _Briefwechsel d. Herzogin Sophie mit d. Kurfürsten

Karl Ludwig_, p. 387.)

Footnote 80:

The Meysenbug family makes its first appearance as residing at the

Court of Osnabrück during Ernest Augustus’ episcopate.

Footnote 81:

An earlier _faiblesse_ (1668) of Ernest Augustus for a French lady,

Susanne de la Manoelinière, had been treated by his wife with great

discretion and success.

Footnote 82:

Vol. vi. of _The Roman Octavia_, a romance in the then fashionable

style of the _Grand Cyrus_.

-----

In September, 1682, the Duchess Sophia informed her ubiquitous

correspondent, the Abbé Balati, that henceforth Hanover and Celle would

reckon as a single State—a result so advantageous as to warrant defiance

of the German genealogical scruple about being equally grand on both

sides of the tree. Prince George Lewis had made up his mind, and his

mother trusted that he had done so under a good constellation.[83] On

November the 21st following, the wedding of George Lewis and Sophia

Dorothea took place at Celle, and was celebrated by Leibniz (such are

the vicissitudes of Court life) in indifferent French verse. Nothing is

known as to the early married life of a husband and wife who were no

better, though perhaps not much worse, assorted than most couples united

under similar conditions. Sophia Dorothea’s was an indolent and

emotional nature; the habits of George Lewis were active; he was fond of

the camp and the chase; and his bearing was characterised by a reserve

which afterwards became stolidity. But, in these years, he was much

absent from home, continuing his military career in the Imperial

service, taking an honourable part in the historic achievement of the

rescue of Vienna by Sobiesky, in 1683, and distinguishing himself two

years later at the capture of Neuhäusel in the Hungarian campaign of

Duke Charles of Lorraine against the Turks. Sophia Dorothea bore her

husband two children—George Augustus (afterwards King George II), in

1683, and Sophia Dorothea (afterwards Queen of Prussia and mother of

Frederick the Great), in 1685. Some letters of her mother-in-law, in

1684 and the following year, show that Eleonora’s daughter had not been

successful in conciliating permanently the sympathies of Sophia, whose

politeness towards the mother had not developed into any warm goodwill

towards the daughter; but the complaints against Sophia Dorothea are not

very serious, and rather suggest a spoilt child in the company of an

unsympathetic but by no means stony-hearted relative.

-----

Footnote 83:

‘_Il est à present_,’ she adds, ‘_avec sa maîtresse_.’ It is to be

feared that this should be translated literally.

-----

The _Memoirs_ of Sophia break off early in 1681, when, after a visit to

the Queen of Denmark in the latter part of the preceding year, she was

again left alone by her erratic husband, who had departed on one of his

pilgrimages across the Alps, although she was plunged into grief by the

news of the death of her beloved brother, the Elector Palatine. Her

eldest sister, the good Abbess of Herford, had, as we saw, died a few

months before their brother, and, in her solitary sorrow, Sophia wrote

that it would not be long before she followed them. When, therefore,

these _Memoirs_ are made to serve as a principal source for her

biography, the troubled circumstances of the time in which they were

actually written should be taken into account. She little knew how soon

a new epoch in her life was to begin, destined to impose upon her a

responsibility as great as it was unexpected. With however prudent a

self-restraint she might meet it, neither in her own eyes nor in those

of the numerous observers who henceforth watched every one of her

actions or movements, could it fail to add signally to her personal

importance. And although, according to modern notions, the Hanover of

the later seventeenth century might seem to differ but slightly, in its

capacity to become a theatre of political transactions of moment, from

the neighbouring city of Osnabrück, yet it should be remembered how

strenuously the deceased Duke John Frederick had exerted himself to make

his capital one of those secondary centres of political and general

intellectual life which, in this age, paid the homage of imitation to

Versailles. To him was owing the creation of a library which, if it

could not rival that for which Sophia’s paternal ancestors had found a

home at Heidelberg, was fostered by the care of Leibniz, whose services

were the noblest legacy left by his first Hanoverian patron, John

Frederick, to his successor, Ernest Augustus—a legacy of which the value

was to be so fully recognised by Sophia. In other respects, too—notably

in that of the attention now given at Hanover to the cultivation of the

dramatic and musical arts—court and town had been transformed under John

Frederick’s liberal _régime_; and an impulse had been given which his

younger brother sought, after his own fashion, to sustain. Leibniz, of

course, remained in his service, and was treated with a consideration

which he owed to his usefulness both as publicist and historiographer,

and which, thanks to the favour of Sophia, was never discontinued during

her husband’s reign. Relations with Italy and Italian musical art were

certain to be kept up under so constant a lover of Venice as Ernest

Augustus; an Italian opera was again established at Hanover under the

conduct of the distinguished Venetian composer, Agostino Steffani;[84]

and the Abbate Hortensio Mauro, who took up his residence at Hanover

about 1681, maintained at the Court of Ernest Augustus and Sophia a

lasting interest in the Italian language and in Italian art, while

himself becoming a trusted servant and friend of the Electoral family.

The Court of Ernest Augustus and France were from the first mainly

connected with his love of foreign luxury and elegance of all kinds. So

early as 1668, Baron Platen had secured for him a Parisian _maître

d’hôtel_; and, nearly every year, the Duke sent his _valet de chambre_

to Paris, there to consult a resident agent as to the requisites of

Sophia and her ladies. The Palace at Hanover was greatly ‘beautified,’

though a great deal more money was spent on decoration of one kind or

another than on architecture proper. It is reckoned that on the former

Ernest Augustus expended nearly 25,000 dollars at Hanover. Tapestry and

pictures were imported from Holland, and particular attention was given

to stucco-work, under the direction of an Italian _maestro_ named

Sartorio. In course of time, Sophia could summon French artists to

conduct the weaving of a great _Gobelin_ tapestry, which was carried out

in the _Reithaus_ at Hanover, and which represented scenes from the life

of Duke George of Brunswick-Lüneburg, the ancestor of the Hanoverian

dynasty, and from that of Sophia’s mother, the Queen of Bohemia. In

1695, the interior of the _Schlosskirche_ was completely gilded. With

the exception of the great _Rittersaal_, however, a very pompous and

heavy structure, nearly all the renovated palace buildings were

destroyed by fire in 1741. Ernest Augustus also built, in direct

connexion with the Palace, a new opera-house.[85] From the year 1684 we

have an account—_merum mel_—of a visit paid to Hanover (following on one

to Celle) by the celebrated French traveller Tavernier, whom Duke Ernest

Augustus came over (from Herrenhausen?) to welcome, together with

visitors so august as the Duchess Dowager of East Frisia and so

distinguished as the celebrated Brandenburg diplomatist and statesman,

Paul Fuchs. The old gentleman (Tavernier was then over eighty), who

mentions that the Duke spent Sunday morning at the ‘temple’ and the

afternoon at a performance of his company of French comedians, was

delighted both by the agreeable turn which the conversation took at

dinner—viz. the subject of his own travels in Persia and India—and by

the general urbanity and courteous liberality of his reception.[86]

There can be no doubt but that in these respects there were few

contemporary courts which outshone those of the Lüneburg Dukes. We shall

see how, as time went on, Sophia did what in her lay to maintain around

her a culture both higher and wider than would have specially commended

itself to the personal tastes of her husband, or of her eldest son.

-----

Footnote 84:

Steffani, after being employed in other diplomatic business by the

Hanoverian Court, was chosen to accompany the Princess Amalia,

daughter of the late Duke John Frederick, on her journey to Modena,

where she was married to the Roman King Joseph. Pope Innocent XI

hereupon created him Bishop of Spiga _in partibus_.

Footnote 85:

It was broken up in 1852. See A. Haupt, _u.s._, where the palace on

the property of Count Alten, which was at the time mortgaged to the

Platens, is said to be the one important specimen remaining of the

Italian architecture in the Hanover of the period. It was said to have

been built by Ernest Augustus for Countess Platen.

Footnote 86:

_Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Baron de l’Aubonne, Chambellan du Grand

Électeur. D’après des documents nouveaux et inédits, par Charles

Joret, Paris, 1881, pp. 342 sqq._

-----

For the present, everything at Hanover seemed shaping itself for the

benefit of the Hereditary Prince George Lewis, as the representative of

that principle of primogeniture which, in his father’s eyes, was of

paramount importance for the future of the Brunswick-Lüneburg line, but

which brought many tears into the eyes of his mother. The principle in

question was by no means a new one in the history of the House of

Brunswick. It already obtained in the elder branch, and in the younger

had been established for Lüneburg-Celle and for Calenberg-Göttingen

individually. Unless it were secured, the Brunswick-Lüneburgers could

never hope to hold a more than subordinate position among the Princes of

the Empire; no dream of a Ninth Electorate was worth dreaming; and any

calculation as to further possibilities would have been more baseless

than a fabric of the air. But, while this was understood by Ernest

Augustus, and doubtless also by his eldest son, it is not wonderful that

the next brother, Frederick Augustus, should have bitterly resented the

consequences which followed for himself, and that his mother Sophia

should have been full of sympathy with his trouble. After obtaining

legal advice, Prince Frederick Augustus communicated his grievance to

the willing ears of his kinsman, Duke Antony Ulric, at Wolfenbüttel;

and, in the same quarter, the Duchess Sophia was lamenting the quarrel

which had already taken place between her husband and their second son.

‘Poor Gussy’ (_Arm Gustchen_), she wrote in December, 1685, ‘is

altogether cast out; his father will no longer give him any maintenance.

I cry about it all night long; for one child is as dear to me as

another; I am the mother of them all, and I grieve most for those who

are unhappy.’ Finally, a protest on the part of Antony Ulric was

presented to Sophia at Herrenhausen, and forwarded by her to her

husband, who was, according to his wont, enjoying himself at Venice. The

pressure was applied in vain; and, though ultimately, through the good

offices of George William, an understanding was patched up between his

brother and the hot-tempered Antony Ulric, Prince Frederick Augustus was

left to his own devices. He followed the example of his elder brother by

taking service with the Emperor and fighting against the Turks; but he

was still intending to institute a suit at Vienna for the recovery of

his rights, when, in January, 1691, he fell in a skirmish at Chemetzvar,

near St. Giorgy, in Transylvania. After a heroic struggle, the fourth of

Sophia’s sons, Charles Philip, had likewise fallen in battle against the

Turks at Pristina, in Albania, almost exactly a year before Frederick

Augustus. Charles Philip seems to have been his mother’s favourite

boy—possibly because of a natural disfigurement (of the head) which had

from the first aroused her loving pity; and the tragic details of his

dying, covered with wounds, on the battlefield, went to her heart. She

fell seriously ill, and even a visit to Carlsbad in the spring of the

year failed completely to restore her to health. We may so far

anticipate the chronological sequence of events as to note that, after

the death of Frederick Augustus, the third brother, Maximilian William,

who had at first acknowledged the principle of primogeniture, entered

the lists against it. He was joined in his resistance by the fifth,

Christian, who was likewise in the Imperial service, and who afterwards

(in July, 1703), as Major-General in the Imperial army, met with his

death by being drowned in the Danube near Ehingen. When the news of his

death came, those around his mother feared for her health—as she could

not find the relief of tears. In Maximilian’s quarrel, his mother’s

sympathies were again on his side, though, to judge from passages in the

correspondence of Sophia Dorothea, he was of a more or less flighty

disposition; and, when his father had not unnaturally declined to pay

him his appanage, she attempted to obtain some pecuniary support for him

at the Danish or at the English Court. Like his brother, he took the

officious Antony Ulric into his confidence, and communications were

opened with Danckelmann, the powerful Minister of the Elector of

Brandenburg, who, with the distinct purpose of thwarting the designed

consolidation of the Celle-Hanover dominions, kept up the tension

existing between his and the Hanoverian court, and that notwithstanding

the marriage, in 1684, of the daughter of Ernest Augustus, Sophia

Charlotte to the Electoral Prince—from 1688, Elector Frederick III of

Brandenburg. A plot was now hatched, of which the precise object

remained in some measure obscure, but as to whose progress the

quick-witted Sophia Charlotte contrived to send sufficient information

to her father. On December 5th, 1691, Prince Maximilian William was

arrested at Hanover, together with the chief agents of his design; and

one of these, the Master of the Hunt (_Oberjägermeister_), von Moltke,

with whom Danckelmann had been in communication, had shortly afterwards

to pay the penalty of death for the high treason laid to his charge.

Prince Maximilian himself was allowed to depart unharmed, after

renouncing all claims to the Succession, except in the case of his elder

brother’s dying without leaving a son. Although he did not keep his oath

very scrupulously, he refrained from any open violation of it during the

lifetime of his father, expending his energy in the military service of

Venice and of the Emperor. He commanded the first line of cavalry at

Blenheim, and survived till 1726, having missed the reversion of the see

of Osnabrück by a late conversion to the Church of Rome.[87] Earlier

rumours of a change of faith on his part had sorely vexed his mother, to

the unconcealed amusement of her niece, the Duchess of Orleans; but his

letters to Sophia, and the references to him in hers to Leibniz, give a

pleasing impression of his frank and open nature, although, impulsive as

he was, he seems to have been deficient in filial piety as in other

qualities showing moral depth.[88]

-----

Footnote 87:

Already, as a child of six, Maximilian (who seems to have been the

survivor of a pair of twins) had displayed an unusual piety, and kept

a prayer-book in his bed for matutinal use.

Footnote 88:

The Duchess of Orleans, who had been informed that a complaint had

been preferred to the Emperor by Maximilian, as to a sum of money

demanded by him from his mother, the Electress Sophia, not having been

sent to him by her, who had loved him so well, exclaims: ‘This is

abominable; this Prince can never meet with any good fortune either in

this world or in the next, after having done this abominable thing,

which I can never forgive him.’

-----

Sophia’s youngest son, Ernest Augustus, destined when the time came

(1715) to succeed to the see of Osnabrück, formerly held by his father,

and also to be created Duke of York and Albany, was still in his boyhood

at the critical stage which we have now reached in the history of his

House. His birth in 1674, which for a time endangered her life, had

elicited from his mother the confession that she already had boys

enough; and, inasmuch as there was some difficulty in finding a

godfather for him as the latest-born of so large a family, his eldest

brother George Lewis was called upon to undertake the responsibilities

of the office. The special bond thus established between the two

brothers held out firmly so long as their lives endured; indeed, the

Duchess of Orleans regrets that, instead of waiting upon his mother, the

Prince followed about his elder brother ‘like a spaniel’ (1707). While

it is impossible not to respect the loyal devotion of the younger of the

pair, the affectionate return made to it on the part of the elder,

‘serious’ as he always was in manner, should not be overlooked by those

who desire to form a fair estimate of the character of George I. Ernest

Augustus’ childhood was spent under his mother’s eye; and, in 1687, the

good Duchess of Orleans undertook to introduce his elder brother

Christian and himself at the French Court, where, for the better part of

two years, the two Princes, and Ernest Augustus in particular, by his

charming manners and quickness, did credit to their descent. In 1689,

they started on the indispensable Italian tour; and, in 1693, Prince

Ernest Augustus received the baptism of fire equally necessary to this

masculine brood in the battle of Neerwinden (Landen), where three sons

of the Duchess Sophia—George Lewis, Christian, and Ernest Augustus—were

engaged. In August, 1714, the Duchess of Orleans makes a very curious

remark concerning him, which suggests that there was a notion at the

time of passing over the Electoral Prince (afterwards George II) in the

English Succession.[89] The correspondence of Ernest Augustus, which

covers the years 1703 to 1726, reveals a simple and soldier-like

character, thoroughly loyal and singularly modest. His elder brother,

King George I, actually died in his arms at Osnabrück, and Ernest

Augustus, as Sir Henry Wotton might have written, ‘liked it not, and

died,’ little more than a year later (August 14th, 1728).

-----

Footnote 89:

‘I do not know whether it is true, but it is said here’ [at

Versailles] ‘that the English are ready to have the Elector of

Brunswick for their King, but that they will make it a condition, that

the Electoral Prince shall never succeed him on the throne. Duke

Maximilian I do not know, but, between ourselves, I would rather it

were Duke Ernest Augustus than the Electoral Prince; for my cousin,

Duke Ernest Augustus, has a good ancestry on both sides and is of

wholly German descent, whereas the Electoral Prince has some very bad

ancestors, and is described to me as so mad that I have often heartily

pitied his wife; of Duke Ernest Augustus I have never heard anything

but praise, and I have therefore a hearty regard for him.’

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Of Sophia Charlotte, her parents’ only daughter, the ‘_Figuelotte_’ of a

delightful babyhood, and during life the darling and in many respects

the semblance of her mother, it will be more convenient to speak in our

next chapter. Her youth had been happier than Sophia’s, from whom she

had inherited, together with her black hair, to which her blue eyes

offered a charming contrast, a rare healthiness of mind, as well as,

seemingly, of body, inexhaustible high spirits, and a rapidity of

apprehension which made her in her early girlhood a linguist such as her

mother and her mother’s brothers and sisters had been in their

generation. In 1679, she accompanied her mother on a visit to the French

Court, where her natural charms, and above all the brightness of her

intelligence, made so pleasing an impression that it was at the time

thought likely that she might return thither as the bride of one of the

Princes of the House of France. But at Hanover she soon seemed intent

upon very different interests; and she had become the pupil of Leibniz

before her destiny called her to give her hand to the widowed Electoral

Prince Frederick of Brandenburg (September, 1684). ‘It is fortunate,’

wrote her mother, ‘that she does not care for externals.’ The parting

went very near to the heart of the Duchess Sophia, who was now, more

than ever, left alone to support the dynastic endeavours and suffer from

the domestic troubles of the House of Hanover, while meeting the

responsibilities of her own title to the English Succession.