IV

THE ELECTORAL HOUSE OF HANOVER

(HANOVER AND HERRENHAUSEN, 1688-1701)

None of the varied experiences through which Sophia had passed during a

life of nearly sixty years, had either made her forget her English

descent, or led her to regard English interests as alien to her own.

During the reign of Charles II her personal recollections of his years

of vagrancy could not but render her discreetly indisposed to keep up by

letter any direct intercourse with her royal cousin; but she was not the

less desirous of remaining in touch with the progress of events in her

mother’s first and final home. After her brother Rupert had at last

settled down in England, she expressed a wish that he should be made a

peer, and thus be enabled to attend in Parliament and keep her informed

of the course of public business. She was naturally much interested in

the marriage, in 1677, of William Prince of Orange to the Duke of York’s

elder daughter, the Princess Mary; and, in 1680, she had the

satisfaction of welcoming to Hanover the Prince who had thus become

closely connected with the English royal family, and of receiving his

assurances of his anxiety to render some substantial service to her

husband’s House. It has already been incidentally noted how, in 1681,

her eldest son, George Lewis, had paid a visit to England, where he

might, it was hoped, secure the hand of Mary’s younger sister, the

Princess Anne. This scheme was favoured by the Prince of Orange, whose

own marriage had remained childless, and who could not ignore the fact

that the design for excluding his Roman Catholic father-in-law from the

English Succession had already assumed definite shape. In 1685, after

King Charles II had passed away, ‘unconcerned as became a good

Christian’—or, in other words, after having received the last

consolations of the Catholic faith—William expressed his conviction that

Sophia would share both his sorrow for the late King’s death, and his

joy at hearing of the unhindered accession of ‘_celluy d’apresent_.’ And

King James II himself could assure her that he would always ‘continue

the same good correspondence which she had with the late King his

brother.’[90] James II, to judge from an extant series of letters to

Sophia from his hand, proved as good as his word, and she answered him

in the same spirit. A constant communication seems, moreover, to have

been kept up between her and the English royal family, through the

personal agency of the faithful Lord Craven, of whom in 1683 she writes

as ‘at present my sole correspondent in England.’ James II had appointed

him Lieutenant-General of the Forces, and he would have been quite

ready, had it rested with him, to act a decisive part with his

Coldstreams on the King’s behalf in the closing hours of his reign.

Thus, when, in July, 1688, on the occasion of what ought to have been

the happiest event of that reign—the birth of an heir to the

throne—Sophia gave expression to her pleasure, the King wrote in return

that he could have expected nothing less from her; ‘for beside our being

so near related, you have always upon all occasion expresst a concerne

for me of which you shall always find me very sensible.’ And, with the

straightforwardness of character which was not less distinctive of her

than was her intellectual _finesse_, she never, either by word or by

deed, belied her goodwill to the unfortunate King, or allowed herself to

be impressed by the _consensus_ between blatant prejudice and more or

less wilful blindness that ‘doubted’ the genuineness of the Prince of

Wales. She transmitted to the Emperor Leopold a letter in which King

James had reproduced, for her benefit, the substance of the refutation

of these calumnious doubts laid by him before his Privy Council; and, so

late as 1704, she is found reproaching Leibniz for the courtier-like

insinuations which he seems to have hazarded as to the Prince’s birth.

Accordingly, at the time when the expedition of William of Orange was

preparing, King James wrote to Sophia in a perfectly trustful tone; he

had heard that, with the exception of her husband, all her Protestant

neighbours had contributed to the armament; but, if the wind continued,

he hoped nevertheless to be able to give a good account of it. As a

matter of fact, Ernest Augustus maintained a neutral attitude so long as

he could; and, so late as 1691, James II is again found applauding

Sophia’s husband for declining to support the ‘vemper’ (William of

Orange). Early in the next year, he continues to harp on the same string

to her, while avowing his confidence in the continuance of her good

wishes and requesting her to use no ceremony in writing to him. In 1693,

Lord Dartmouth, whom Sophia received at Hanover with much distinction

because of the kindness shown by his grandfather to her brothers Rupert

and Maurice, was informed by her that she maintained a constant

correspondence both with King James and with his daughter Queen Mary. On

the death of Ernest Augustus, both King James and Queen Mary Beatrice

warmly condoled with the widow, the former avowing his gratitude for all

the marks of esteem and kindness which she had so frequently shown to

him. It is interesting, too, to observe how Sophia, in conjunction with

her second self, the Duchess of Orleans, used her best endeavours to

make peace between King James and his eldest daughter, whose conduct

towards him he pardonably misjudged, but in whose sincerity of soul a

sure instinct led Sophia to place full trust. The two kinswomen had

never met, when, in June, 1689, Queen Mary wrote to Sophia to complain

of the harsh terms in which the Electress Sophia Charlotte of

Brandenburg was reported to have spoken of her, and took occasion, with

her usual candour, to dwell upon the conflict of feelings through which

it was her duty to guide her conduct. An active correspondence ensued

between the two women, who were truly worthy of one another, and who

had, moreover, some experiences of wedlock in common; and from this it

is clear that Queen Mary had, to her deep satisfaction, found in Sophia

a friend ready to credit her with real filial affection for her father.

In return she writes to the Duchess with a frankness declared by her to

be indigenous to Holland, where she had herself so long lived and where

Sophia had been born—each of them, as she says, having to bear her cross

as best she could.

-----

Footnote 90:

It is interesting to find Queen Mary Beatrice thanking the Dowager

Duchess Benedicta at Hanover for her congratulations on the same

occasion, and referring to her constant interest in the royal family,

and to the links between them.

-----

But, though Sophia was never willing to let political considerations

warp her natural affections or suppress her natural sense of justice,

she would hardly, like Mary, have gone so far as to say of herself that

she was unfitted for politics. The interests of her family and of the

Hanoverian dynasty were steadily kept in view by her, and it was these,

rather than any personal motives or wishes of her own, which determined

her conduct at the critical epoch of the Revolution. The events that

cost James II his throne, as speedily became clear to her, opened a new

political future for herself and her descendants. Before the sailing of

William’s expedition, when engagements in his favour were being entered

into by the new Elector (Frederick William) of Brandenburg, the

Landgrave (Charles) of Hesse-Cassel and the Duke of Celle, Burnet, as he

tells us, sent, from the Hague, a messenger to the Duchess Sophia at

Hanover. This messenger, a French refugee named de Boncour, was

instructed to inform her of the design of the Prince of Orange, and of

the certainty that, should the expedition prove successful, it would

result in the perpetual exclusion of Papists from the English throne. If

she could persuade her husband Ernest Augustus to sever his interests

definitively from those of France, there was little doubt but that,

after the two daughters of King James and the Prince of Orange, from

none of whom any issue was surviving, the Succession would be lodged in

her person and posterity. Burnet, who asserts that, in making this

communication, he acted entirely on his own responsibility, though his

action afterwards gained him William’s approval, adds that the message

was warmly entertained by the Duchess Sophia, but that her husband let

it pass by him. Ernest Augustus, not unnaturally, looked on the whole

question with a self-control facilitated by the fact that, in any case,

he could only benefit from the English Succession through his wife.

Whatever may be the measure of truth in this story (which, curiously

enough, is not to be found in Burnet’s _Original Memoirs_), it is

extremely improbable that the Duchess Sophia should have allowed

Burnet’s agent to ascertain her personal views concerning his

suggestions. When the expedition was actually on its way, she wrote a

letter to Leibniz from which nothing can be concluded as to her feelings

in the matter, except that, as was but natural, she was very anxious to

know what would come of it all, especially, as she writes in her

customary half-ironical vein, ‘inasmuch as the words “for religion and

liberty” are to be read on all the banners of the Prince of Orange.’

After the expedition had been carried to a successful issue, we find her

addressing the same correspondent in much the same tone; and, though her

letter of congratulation to William III is perfectly cordial and

contains a remarkably _à propos_ reference to the Blatant Beast, she

shows true dignity as a descendant of the Stewarts in avowing her

sympathy for William’s dethroned predecessor. But with the new King’s

reply, written from Hampton Court less than a fortnight after the

Coronation, the relations of Sophia to himself, and to the throne

occupied by him and his Queen, entered into a new stage, which may be

called the business stage.

In this letter, King William, without any circumlocution, expresses his

hope of finding good allies in the whole House of Lüneburg—that is to

say, in Sophia’s husband, as well as in her brother-in-law, on whom he

could already securely count. On the other hand, he points out that

Sophia has a very real interest in the welfare of his three kingdoms,

inasmuch as, to all appearance, one of her sons would some day reign

over them. Although Sophia still wrote to Leibniz (then at Modena) in

her habitual half-jesting tone as to the chances now opening to her,

there can be no doubt that she is correctly stated to have at once taken

action on King William’s hint, and to have requested several English

politicians known to her to support the project of naming her in the

Succession. The attempt made in this year (1689) to carry the project in

question through Parliament proves that the appeal had not been made in

vain.

On May 8th, 1689, the Bill of Rights and Succession came up for its

third reading in the House of Commons of the Convention Parliament.

While otherwise conforming to the Declaration accepted by William and

Mary earlier in the year, and containing a clause excluding Papists, it

made no provision for the event of the death without issue of Queen

Mary, the Princess Anne, and King William, upon whose issue the

Succession was, in the above order of sequence, settled. Such an event

was at the time far from improbable; should it actually occur, there was

considerable obscurity as to where the Crown would devolve. Would, for

instance, an infant child of Popish parents be excluded;[91] and—a far

more momentous question—would the exclusion extend to a Popish prince

who might have been converted to Protestantism in time to succeed?

Godolphin, a statesman not unnaturally suspected, at this season, of

facing both ways, but perhaps more benignantly towards the _régime_

under which he had risen so high than towards that in which his own

place was still doubtful, proposed a rider guarding the rights of ‘any

Protestant prince or princess’ as to his or her future hereditary

succession to the Crown. The proviso, in which, to the mover’s virtuous

indignation, more than one member suspected the influence of a foreign

Power, was rejected; but it is notable that, in the course of the

debate, Colonel Herbert stated that he had ‘seen a letter of a sister of

Prince Rupert’s, wherein she was complaining of great hardship done to

her children, that they were not regarded in the entail of the crown;’

he therefore moved that they should be mentioned in the Bill. The

proposal, which may confidently be ascribed to the action of Sophia

adverted to above, fell to the ground, the judicious opinion of Paul

Foley prevailing, that it was inexpedient suddenly to introduce any

further limitation of the Succession; but it had not been made wholly in

vain. When the Bill of Rights and Succession reached the House of Lords,

after, on the motion of the Bishop of Salisbury (Burnet), a clause had

been added extending the exclusion of Papists from the Succession to

princes or princesses married to Papists, the same useful henchman, in

accordance with the directions of the King, proposed, as a further

addition to the Bill, the naming, in the Succession, of the Duchess of

Hanover and her posterity. This amendment having been adopted by the

Lords without debate (which could hardly have been the case had the

ground not been prepared there) was carried down to the Commons, who, in

a debate held on June 19th, treated it in a very different spirit. One

member (Sir John Lowther) dwelt on the inexpediency of attempting to

settle the Succession a long time beforehand, instead of following the

example of Queen Elizabeth, who ‘was a wise Princess’; ‘this Princess of

Hanover,’ he pointed out, might turn Catholic before the time for her

succession had arrived. In the end, the amendment was rejected without a

division, and, a conference between the two Houses having proved

fruitless, the Bill was lost for the Session. The birth, on July 27th,

of Princess Anne’s son (afterwards Duke of Gloucester) took away from

the proposed addition its immediate significance; but, whatever may have

been the cause of the failure to give effect to the King’s wish, the

fault certainly did not lie with the Duchess Sophia. There were ‘heats’

enough in the politics of the day, and in the relations between Lords

and Commons in particular, to explain the incident; nor is it surprising

that, when Parliament reassembled in the autumn, the Bill of Rights and

Succession which was now passed contained no mention of the Duchess of

Hanover or her descendants. Burnet, ubiquitously assisting at every

stage of every transaction with which, as narrated by himself, he had

any connexion at all, says that by King William’s wish he wrote to

Sophia an account of the entire affair. We know, however, that Lord

Craven was sent to Hanover to explain it or to soften any unpleasantness

in the effect which it might produce; and, in a letter to Sophia, dated

December 10th, 1689, William himself explained to her that, though she

had not been designated in the Bill, she might rest satisfied with

things as they stood. She was Heiress Presumptive, in the event of

claims beyond those named in the Bill coming into consideration; and the

suggestion of Burnet was quite superfluous, that ‘if any in the line

before her should pretend to change, as it was not very likely to

happen, so it would not be easily believed.’ Sophia’s answer to King

William, in which she cordially thanks him for his exertions on her

behalf, closes the entire episode. She trusts that the expectation of

heirs implied in the Bill may prove correct; as for herself, her life

will be at an end before the matter is decided. She was, at the time,

close upon the sixtieth year of her life; and a son had just been born

to Princess Anne, who very possibly might yet have other children that

would survive her.

-----

Footnote 91:

Macaulay, who mentions this doubt, illustrates it by the supposed case

of an infant prince of Savoy. (See below.)

-----

After this negative, but in no sense final, result had been

reached, the Succession question remained in abeyance for

something like eleven years. It accords neither with the

circumstances of the situation nor with the character of Sophia,

to represent her as during this long interval sleeplessly intent

upon an issue so remote, so precarious, and so unlikely to prove,

in the strictest sense, personal to herself. But, on the one hand,

her and her family’s interest in the Succession question had once

for all been brought directly home to her; and, on the other, she

had had reason to appreciate the _bona fides_ and the genuine

goodwill towards her own contingent claim exhibited by King

William III. Already in 1689, primarily with a view to the

restoration of amity between Denmark and Holstein-Gottorp, Sir

William Dutton Colt was appointed Envoy Extraordinary and Minister

Plenipotentiary to the Brunswick-Lüneburg Courts, being also

accredited to Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and Hesse-Cassel; and in 1692

he was further formally instructed to treat for the entry of the

Dukes of Celle and Hanover into the Grand Alliance.[92] He appears

to have contrived to gain the good graces of the ducal families

both at Hanover and at Celle, and in 1693 he reports that the

Platens were jealous of his favour with the ‘Electrisse’;[93] for

Sophia and Eleonora were godmothers to his daughter, and bestowed

upon her their united names. The personal relations between Sophia

and the King and Queen of England at the same time grew more and

more cordial. William, though not as a rule inclined to sentiment,

early in 1691 condoled with Sophia on the death, at the close of

the previous year, of her son Frederick Augustus, for whom he had

cherished ‘_une amitié toute particulière_’; and early in the

following year Queen Mary delicately expressed her regret at

Sophia’s fresh family troubles (the death of her son Charles

Philip, and perhaps the catastrophe of his brother Maximilian).

These kindly feelings combined with political motives to induce

King William to contribute his good offices for bringing to a

successful end, in the same year (1692), the endeavours to which,

as we shall see immediately, the main political energy of the

House of Hanover had long been devoted—for the attainment of the

Electoral dignity. He had his reward when, as part of the bargain

between Ernest Augustus and the Emperor Leopold, the House of

Hanover definitively threw in its lot with the interests of the

Empire and the cause of the Grand Alliance. On Sir William Colt’s

death in the following year (1693), a new English Minister

Plenipotentiary to the Courts of Celle and Hanover was appointed

in the person of James Cressett,[94] who, though at first he

represents the Courts to which he was accredited as having ‘gaped

upon him like roaring lions’ (not feeling quite certain about the

British Parliament’s earnestness in the War), soon contrived to

place himself on a footing of intimacy there. Leibniz speedily

fell into a correspondence with him about the lead produce of the

Harz as compared with that of the English mines. But less academic

matters also occupied the attention of the new envoy; for, in

1692, two treaties had been concluded between the Ducal Government

and those of England and the United Provinces, according to which

Hanover was to furnish a force of 7,000 men, and the two maritime

Powers were to pay respectively 20,000 and 10,000 dollars a month

for their support, besides defraying two-thirds of the cost of

their rations and forage. In December, 1693, these subsidy

treaties were discussed in the House of Commons, and though the

‘Duke of Hanover’ was praised as a loyal ally, objection was taken

to the payment for bread and forage, on the ground that he might

well pay a larger proportion, ‘now that he is Ninth Elector.’ In

return, it was pointed out that, on the one hand, the Elector had

to pay his quota to the Empire, and that, on the other, if these

troops were not paid by England, they must be by France—a comment

not altogether unwarranted by the changes of Hanoverian policy.

Cressett remained the diplomatic representative of Great Britain

at the Lüneburg Courts till 1703.[95]

-----

Footnote 92:

_Notes on the Diplomatic Relations between England and Germany_, ed.

C. H. Firth: _List of Diplomatic Representatives and Agents, England

and North Germany, 1689-1727_, contributed by J. F. Chance, Oxford,

1907.

Footnote 93:

As Colt died in 1693 (at Heilbronn), on a mission on which he was sent

to treat with the Elector of Saxony, to bring him into the Grand

Alliance, I cannot say what was the nature of the series of holograph

letters from the Electress Sophia to Lady Colt, extending from 1681

(?) to 1714, reported in the _Times_ of April 14th, 1905, as sold by

auction.

Footnote 94:

There seems good reason for believing that the foreign lady, named

Louise-Marie, married by Cressett in 1704, about the close of his

residence at the Court of Celle, was a kinswoman of the Duchess

Eleonora. Cf., as to a survival of this connexion with the dynasty, H.

Walpole’s _Memoirs of the Last Ten Years of the Reign of George II_

(1822), Vol. i. p. 79.

Footnote 95:

In 1700 he was also accredited to Berlin, where already in 1702 Queen

Sophia Charlotte thought him a trifle _passé_.

-----

A time of trouble was imminent for the domestic peace of the House of

Hanover, and Sophia, as was noted above, had not long before suffered a

severe shock in both mind and body by the death of her son Charles

Philip, soon followed by that of his brother Frederick Augustus. In the

spring of 1694 she was again seriously ill. Cressett, while noting that

‘her credit is not good in affairs,’ says that he ‘should be heartily

sorry to lose her, for she loves England.’ She recovered her strength at

Wiesbaden, and we find the good Queen Mary returning fervent thanks for

her cousin’s restoration to her usual health. She needed all her

strength to carry her through the painful experiences awaiting the

Electoral family—the tragedy of Sophia Dorothea, and, after this, the

long illness and death of the Elector Ernest Augustus. Amidst such

anxieties we may rest assured that, even had intrigue and manœuvring

suited her disposition, she would have had little leisure for engaging

in them. Her attitude during this period towards the Succession

question, which few events on the great political theatre were of a

nature to affect (for even Queen Mary’s death in 1696 made no material

change in the situation), was one of quietude—no doubt a vigilant

quietude. In 1694, Lord Lexington, a diplomatist whom William III had

good reason for trusting, and who, together with a Dutch

plenipotentiary, had mediated in the quarrel between Denmark and the

Brunswick-Lüneburg Dukes concerning the Lauenburg Succession, passed

through Hanover on his way to his post at Vienna. And, in the following

year, we find Leibniz discussing with George Stepney, the brilliant

English diplomatist who, in 1693, was suddenly summoned into prominent

activity in several of the German Courts, the applicability of the

exclusion clause in the Bill of Rights to children, whether Protestants

or Papists, born of papistical parents. William III has been said to

have formed the plan of placing in the Succession the Prince expected to

be born to Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy, by his Duchess Anna Maria,

and of educating him for the purpose in England as a Protestant. The

Duchess Anna Maria was a daughter of the Duchess Henrietta of Orleans,

and thus a grand-daughter of King Charles I; so that on the ground of

descent pure and simple she would have a claim to the English Succession

before the children of the Queen of Bohemia. But there is no proof of

any such design, or of any response to any suggestion of the kind on the

part of the Duke of Savoy; and, at the most, the idea was quite

transitory. If any hopes had been raised as to William’s intentions,

Victor Amadeus effectively extinguished them by abandoning the Grand

Alliance in 1696.[96] Of course, it by no means follows from the fact

that Leibniz was, throughout, Sophia’s chief counsellor with regard to

the Succession, either that she uniformly took his advice, or that she

was always desirous of being privy to the efforts in furtherance of the

claims of herself and her descendants, which, at times with _trop de

zèle_, came from his indefatigable publicistic pen. But it remains at

all events a curious coincidence that, soon after the House of Savoy

had, as it were, fallen out of the running, William III’s interest in

the House of Hanover—and perhaps in its claims concerning the

Succession—should appear to have revived. We shall return to this date a

little later; for the moment we must make some reference to matters

which seemed of far more importance to the House of Hanover than the

remote chances of the English Succession.

-----

Footnote 96:

In 1701, however, the Duchess Anna Maria protested against the Act of

Settlement, which limited the Succession to Sophia and her issue,

being Protestants. For an account of the reasons of Victor Amadeus’

original estrangement from France, and a searching analysis of his

character, see a remarkable _Relation de la Cour de Savoie_, July

15th, 1692, in Appendix to G. de Léris, _La Princesse de Virrue_ [for

a time the Duke’s mistress _et la Cour de Victor Amad. de Savoie_,

Paris, 1881, pp. 238-9.]

-----

The House of Hanover, apart from the interest which it had shown in the

military system of the Empire,[97] had a very direct share in causing

the declaration of war against that Empire, by which, in September,

1688, at the very time when he was promising assistance to James II

against the expedition of William of Orange, Louis XIV laid bare his own

designs against the peace of Europe. According to the manifesto of the

King of France, the successes of the Imperial arms in the east had

obliged him to protect his western frontier by crossing it; and, a

little before or after this declaration, his armies had entered the

Netherlands, and had invaded the Palatinate to enforce the claims

shamelessly put forward by him in the name of the innocent Duchess of

Orleans. In the Imperial advance in Hungary, and in the simultaneous

reconquest of the Morea on behalf of the Venetian Republic, Hanoverian

troops had borne a most distinguished part. It was therefore not

unfitting that the counter-manifesto, in which the glove hurled down by

Louis XIV was taken up, should have been composed by Leibniz, whose

publicistic pen was at the disposal of the House of Hanover. And among

the German princes who, in the October of this eventful year, at the

instigation of the new Elector of Brandenburg, Ernest Augustus of

Hanover’s son-in-law, and through the exertions of his minister, Paul

von Fuchs, met at Magdeburg to agree upon joint action against the

assailant of the Empire, none was more prompt, either in promise or in

action, than Ernest Augustus himself. While the Brandenburg troops

covered the Lower Rhine, the Hanoverian, Saxon, and Hessian secured the

line of the Main, by the occupation of Frankfort (November, 1688). In

May, 1689, the Grand Alliance was concluded, and though the Palatinate

could not be preserved from devastation, Frankfort was once more saved,

being occupied by a Hanoverian force of 8,000 men under Duke Ernest

Augustus and his eldest son, George Lewis. Under the command of their

Hereditary Prince, of whom there remains at least one letter written, in

the course of the campaign, with an afflatus of humour proving that his

heart was in active warfare, the Hanoverians forced Marshal Boufleurs to

relinquish the investment of Coblenz, and materially contributed to the

recovery of Mainz (September 1st, 1689). They were then transferred to

the Low Countries, where a series of campaigns was to ensue,

contemporaneous with the continuance of the conflict with the Turks. We

have seen how the sacrifices made by the House of Hanover within a

twelvemonth (January, 1690, to January, 1691) included the heroic death

of Prince Charles Philip in Albania, and that of his brother Frederick

Augustus, hardly more than a boy in years, in Transylvania. It neither

was, nor could be expected to be, the intention of Ernest Augustus, that

his House, which had served the Empire so well in both west and east,

should have so served it without reward. And the recompense desired by

him—one which, while conferring upon himself, as the head of the House

of Hanover, the highest dignity to which, as an Estate of the Empire, he

could, within its boundaries, lay claim, would at the same time reflect

lustre upon the Brunswick-Lüneburg line, whose future he had come to

regard as absorbed in that of its Hanoverian branch—could be no other

than the creation of a Ninth, that is to say Hanoverian, Electorate.

-----

Footnote 97:

See as to F. C. von Platen’s mission on the subject in December, 1686,

R. Fester, _Die Augsburger Allianz_, pp. 124 _sqq._, 167 _sqq._

-----

The desire or demand for this dignity was neither a sudden nor even a

new one. It had been in the mind both of Duke John Frederick and of his

librarian, Leibniz, though the latter, while giving utterance to it in

his _Cæsarinus Fürstenerius_ (1677), had at the same time delivered

himself of an elaborate protest against the preeminence in rights and

dignity claimed by the Electors over the other Princes of the Empire.

Such a protest was of course quite compatible with lending a willing ear

to any suggestion of conferring the Electoral dignity upon a

representative branch of the Brunswick-Lüneburg line itself. And

suggestions of the kind were inevitable, if only from the obvious point

of view that the Peace of Westphalia had left the number of Protestant

Electors in a disproportion of three to five, as against their Catholic

colleagues. The Great Elector of Brandenburg, in the varying

combinations of whose policy a single-minded care for the Protestant

interest was perhaps the most constant factor, had already during the

peace negotiations at Nimeguen expressed his willingness to assist in

bringing about the admission into the Electoral College of the House of

Brunswick-Lüneburg—probably at that time in the person of George William

of Celle, as Ernest Augustus was still merely Bishop of Osnabrück. But

the argument from the Protestant point of view became a much stronger

one, when, in 1685, the death of the last Elector Palatine of the

Simmern line (Sophia’s nephew Charles) transferred the Eighth Electorate

to the Catholic (Neuburg) line. Nor should it be forgotten that,

although the political jealousy between the Houses of Brandenburg and

Brunswick-Lüneburg had never ceased to exist and to operate, and

although the advantage of balancing the growing power and influence of

the former, by adding to the _prestige_ of the latter, was very

distinctly perceived at Vienna, the two Houses were since 1684 closely

linked together by intermarriage. Sophia Charlotte, the new Electoral

Princess (from 1688 Electress) of Brandenburg, was never mistress of the

situation at Berlin, and, unlike her mother, gave to matters political

only just so much attention as seemed absolutely necessary. On the other

hand, Hanoverian interests could not but benefit from the presence at

the Brandenburg Court of a princess whose personality was not one to be

ignored, and who had in her mother a monitress to whom the constant

affection between them always made her ready to listen. And the friend

whom both mother and daughter trusted above all others as an adviser,

had in 1685 begun to devote his powers of argument to the cause which,

to the head of the House of Hanover, had become of paramount importance.

But a long siege was needed before the _Hofburg_ could be expected to

yield. The services and sacrifices which the Empire owed to the House of

Hanover were indisputable, and the solidity of its dynastic future must

have seemed beyond cavil, after the Duke of Celle had confirmed his

renunciation of any transmission of his dominions to a possible son of

his own, and had married his only daughter to the Hereditary Prince of

Hanover, where the law of primogeniture had been established. The

meeting (1689-90) of a Diet at Augsburg for the election of a Roman King

in the person of the future Emperor Joseph I, seemed a suitable

opportunity for bringing forward the Hanoverian proposal of a Ninth

Electorate through Ernest Augustus’ plenipotentiary, Count Platen. Yet,

although it could not but be of great importance to the Emperor to make

sure of the adherence of Hanover to the alliance against France, of

which at this very Diet he impressed the necessity upon the Electors,

the request of Ernest Augustus met with no acceptance either at Augsburg

or in the course of the ensuing negotiations at Vienna. So soon as the

Emperor appeared to favour Hanover’s desire for an Electoral hat,

Bamberg, Salzburg, Würzburg, Hesse-Cassel, and Pfalz-Sulzbach were

immediately on the alert to try for the Ninth Electorate on their own

account; and this general eagerness conveniently supplied the Imperial

Government with a new bait for gaining votes in the Council of

Princes.[98] Moreover, the high-handed action of the Brunswick-Lüneburg

brothers in the matter of the Lauenburg Succession (September, 1689) had

exercised a retarding influence, by which so friendly a court as that of

Brandenburg had been for a time affected. Even certain overtures made

through his emissary by Ernest Augustus—we may venture to surmise

without the privity of his wife—that, if such a concession would solve

the difficulty, he might be found disposed to listen to suggestions as

to his conversion to the Church of Rome, and his enumeration of the

services which his House had rendered to that Church, proved in vain.

Hanoverian diplomacy hereupon tried a different tack, and occupied

itself with a scheme for bringing about a combination between

Brandenburg, Saxony, and Hanover, which would put the requisite pressure

upon the Emperor by standing neutral between him and France. The device,

for which more than one historical precedent could have been found,

produced its effect on this occasion also, after Saxony had been induced

to fall in with it. According to the current account, the eminent

Hanoverian minister, Count Otto von Grote (who like Leibniz had been

introduced by Duke John Frederick into the Hanoverian service, in which

he spent twenty-eight years, doing his duty to the State in the very

spirit of Frederick the Great), forced the hand of the Emperor by

exhibiting to him at Vienna the compact with Saxony which realised the

menace of a Third Party in the European conflict. Even if this story is

apocryphal, there can be no doubt that the neutrality project furnished

a very powerful lever in the negotiations carried on at the Imperial

Court by Grote in conjunction with the resident Hanoverian minister,

President von Limbach. Their arguments were supported by representations

on the part of Great Britain, the United Provinces, and Brandenburg; but

they were still more effectively reinforced by the Emperor Leopold’s

pressing requirements for his next campaign against the Turks. Thus,

then, early in 1692, was concluded the Electoral Compact (_Kurtractat_),

in which the Dukes of Hanover and Celle undertook to provide, in

addition to subsidies, a force of 6,000 men in their own pay, to be

employed in the first instance against the Turks, and afterwards against

France, while a supplementary agreement bound both sides to perpetual

amity and military assistance, and assured to the House of Austria the

support of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg in future Imperial elections

as well as in the matter of the coming Spanish Succession. Hereupon, on

March 19th, 1692, the Imperial rescript conferring an Electoral hat upon

the Duke of Hanover was placed in the hands of his representative at

Vienna.

-----

Footnote 98:

Droysen, _Geschichte der Preussischen Politik_, Vol. iv. Part i. p.

87.

-----

But, before this act of authority on the part of the Emperor could

command the assent of the Estates of the Empire which he required in

order to proceed to the investiture, much remained to be done at Vienna,

where Grote was active in person during the latter half of the year; at

Dresden, where Jobst von Ilten, another specially trusted servant of the

Hanoverian dynasty, successfully exerted himself; and elsewhere. In the

midst of these difficulties, the Duchess of Orleans wrote to her aunt

that she was convinced as to the source of opposition being German

Princes rather than France. As a matter of fact, not only the political

but the religious interests were agitated with which the House of

Hanover had been, or might hereafter be, in conflict; and Grote was

informed that both the King of Denmark (Christian V) and the Pope

(Innocent XII) were adverse to the desired investiture. The good offices

of Brandenburg were, however, freely exerted in its favour, and the

Elector Frederick III’s envoy at Ratisbon, von Metternich, was

instructed to tranquillise the Catholic Electors by undertaking that, in

the event of the dying-out of the Bavarian and Palatine lines, the

establishment of a new Catholic Electorate should be promoted by

Brandenburg, Saxony, and Hanover. Thus, by the middle of October, 1692,

a majority of the Electors had been secured for the investiture, and it

was possible to ignore the violent opposition of Duke Antony Ulric of

Wolfenbüttel, who, as Elizabeth Charlotte had hinted, was irreconcilable

on this subject, and was calling out troops as if the world were out of

joint.[99] On December 10th following, the investiture took place at

Vienna, and Grote received the coveted Electoral hat for his master.

Ernest Augustus and Sophia were at Berlin on a visit to their daughter

when the good news reached them; a series of brilliant festivities

ensued as a matter of course, since Frederick III was always glad of a

reason for display; and, two days before Christmas, a defensive alliance

for three years was concluded between the two Electors, to be followed a

month later by an ‘everlasting league.’ This alliance, to whatever other

results it might or might not lead, unmistakably signified the

recognition of an important success gained for the ‘Evangelical’ cause

in Germany. Brandenburg, which was so soon to merge in the Prussian

Kingdom, and Hanover, whose heir was not long afterwards to mount the

English throne, would, if they held together, suffice to defy any

religious reaction in the Empire, and likewise be able to resist any

attempt in any quarter at asserting a political domination.

-----

Footnote 99:

See as to his opposition Bodemann, _Anton Ulrich und seine

Correspondenz mit Leibniz_, in _Zeitschr. d. histor. Ver. für

Niedersachsen_, 1879. It was largely from ambitious motives that this

Duke entered so zealously into the great scheme for a reunion between

Catholics and Protestants. (See Clemens Schwarte, _Die neunte Kur und

Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel_, in _Münstersche Beiträge zur

Geschichtsforschung_, Neue Folge, Münster, 1905.)

-----

Neither, however, had Grote’s labours as yet come to an end—though they

were a few months afterwards cut short by his death—nor were the

aspirations of the House of Hanover within the Empire satisfied by the

Electoral investiture of December, 1692. Brandenburg, Saxony, and most

of the other German courts recognised the new Elector; but the question

of his introduction into the Electoral College, which implied his

admission as Elector to his due share in the administration of the

affairs of the Empire—the question _quo modo_—had still to be settled.

The progress of its solution was delayed by a persistent opposition, of

which the guiding spirit was once more Duke Antony Ulric of

Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, and which included the King of Denmark as Duke

of Holstein, the Dukes of Mecklenburg, and a number of other princes,

both temporal and spiritual, in the north and west of the Empire. In

1693, these formed an association which designated itself as that of the

Princes ‘corresponding’ against a Ninth Electorate, thus, as was justly

observed to the Emperor by the Elector of Brandenburg, who continued

loyally to support the demand of his father-in-law, lowering the

Imperial authority by ‘maintaining’ a resistance against a decision

already announced by it. The Elector of Saxony, John George IV, had been

likewise well disposed to the Hanoverian promotion; but, in 1694, he had

been succeeded by his brother Frederick Augustus (Augustus the Strong,

the lover of Aurora von Königsmarck), whom, as will be seen in a

different connexion, private as well as public motives had estranged

from the Hanoverian Court; and thus a fresh obstacle had been put in the

way of the admission of Ernest Augustus into the College of Electors.

The virulence of Antony Ulric’s jealous hatred, which, as we shall also

see, was to find in the Königsmarck catastrophe of 1694 and its

antecedents a most tempting opportunity for damaging the reputation of

the Hanoverian family, suggested to him what the Hanoverian diplomatist

Ilten termed a ‘_projet d’alliance diabolique_.’ Frederick Augustus was

to be gained over to the association of ‘Corresponding’ Princes by a

surrender to Saxony of the Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel claims to part of the

Duchy of Lauenburg, and he was to cooperate with Denmark in

dispossessing Hanover and Celle, who had occupied other parts of the

duchy claimed by them. Ernest Augustus had to appeal to King William III

to put a stop to manœuvres which threatened seriously to affect the

general peace of Europe.

Although the machinations of Antony Ulric were thus frustrated, he

succeeded in depriving his hitherto so fortunate kinsman, Ernest

Augustus, of the satisfaction of attaining in person to the consummation

of his chief dynastic ambition. Soon after the death of Ernest Augustus,

in January, 1698, the insensate jealousy of Antony Ulric led him to

make, with fresh assistance, an armed attack upon Hanover, which

amounted to an act of hostility against the Empire, committed at a

critical season in the affairs of Europe. The defeat of this attempt by

the energetic action of the Elector George Lewis broke down the

opposition of Antony Ulric in the matter of the Ninth Electorate (1702);

and soon afterwards he acknowledged the Electoral dignity and the

precedence of the Hanoverian Elector at the Diet (1703). Previously to

these occurrences, the exertions of Frederick III of Brandenburg had

succeeded in inducing the three Spiritual Electors to abandon their

resistance to the new Protestant Electorate (1699); but the outbreak of

the War of the Spanish Succession had thereupon caused further delays.

Thus it was not till 1707 that the positive assent of all the Electors

was secured, nor till September 7th, 1708, sixteen years after the

investiture at Vienna, that the Hanoverian envoy, von Limbach, at last

took his seat in the Electoral College at Ratisbon.

The marriage between Sophia Dorothea of Celle and her cousin George

Lewis of Hanover, which was to end so disastrously, came as a matter of

course to be represented as having been ill-omened at the outset. It is,

however, impossible to trust either the account of the transactions that

preceded this marriage, or that of the long train of events ending in

its dissolution, to be found in a long series of versions of this

pitiful story. In substance, if not in every detail, they all go back

upon the parent romance compiled by Duke Antony Ulric, very probably

with the aid of information furnished to him by the confidante of the

unhappy heroine. An authority so signally untrustworthy is best ignored;

though it would be idle to pretend that the copious stream, which has

flowed through all sorts of channels from this turbid source, is likely

to be wholly devoid of some admixture of truth.[100] In point of fact,

we cannot tell in what frame of mind Sophia Dorothea entered on her

married life, or even what was her mother’s view of the match. Eleonora,

beyond all doubt, tenderly loved her daughter; but Sophia Dorothea’s

nature was light and frivolous, and there had not, so far as is known,

been anything in her life to incline her to resistance. The views of the

Duchess Sophia on the subject of her eldest son’s marriage it may seem

easy to guess. But, though she had execrated the d’Olbreuze connexion in

all its earlier stages, and though she seems at no time to have

pretended to anything like affection for Eleonora’s daughter, we may

take it for granted that, so soon as the marriage-project had been

formally adopted as a matter of court and state policy, the Duchess

completely acquiesced in it. And, indeed, no doubt could exist as to the

advantages of the arrangement, whether from the point of view of the

political future of the dynasty, or from that of the present resources

of the House. The marriage-contract gave to the Hereditary Prince the

free use of his wife’s income, though it secured her fortune—which was

certain to be a very large one—to herself in the event of her husband’s

decease preceding her own. It was only at a later date, when a

dissolution of her marriage seemed desirable to Sophia Dorothea, that

she complained of the terms of this settlement. The great wealth of the

bride might well be held to cover whatever minor disabilities might

result to the possible issue of the marriage from the imperfection of

her own descent.

-----

Footnote 100:

The supplementary (sixth) volume of the _Roman Octavia_, which

contains the story of Sophia Dorothea under the title of the _History

of the Princess Solane_, was first published in 1707, when Sophia

Dorothea’s lady-in-waiting, Fräulein Eleonora von dem Knesebeck, who

had, from first to last, been in the secret of the Princess’ relations

with Count Königsmarck, either was or recently had been resident at

Wolfenbüttel under the protection of Duke Antony Ulric after her

escape from prison. In the revised edition of this ‘historical novel,’

published at Nürnberg in 1712 and dedicated to the ‘_Hochlöbliche

Nymfen-Gesellschaft an der Donau_, the name of _Solane_ was altered to

_Rhodogune_, and there were certain other changes. The derivation of

the traditional narrative from Duke Antony Ulric’s romance was

convincingly traced by the late Professor Adolf Köcher, who, though

disbelieving in the genuineness of the correspondence to be mentioned

immediately, succeeded in throwing a flood of light upon the entire

course of Sophia Dorothea’s story.—Writing, in 1709, about the amour

between the Landgrave Ernest Lewis of Hesse-Darmstadt and the

(married) Countess von Sintzendorf, the Duchess of Orleans observes

that, since the lady is quite ready to show the Prince’s letters, it

would be easy for Duke Antony Ulric to turn their affair into a

romance.

-----

Nothing, it may be added, could be more improbable than that either

George Lewis or his mother should have been at the pains of considering

how far Sophia Dorothea’s character and disposition were suited to his

own, or whether she would find any difficulty in accommodating herself

to his way of life. The Duchess Sophia had learnt by long experience to

bear with the open faithlessness of her husband, and with his frank

neglect of herself, without forfeiting the influence which her

intelligence had long assured to her over him and his affairs. How

should she, with her shrewd apprehension of the ways of the world, have

supposed that the same lesson would not be learnt by her new

daughter-in-law? And it may at once be stated that there is no

indication of George Lewis having during the early years of his married

life kept up any relation that would have been unbearable to his young

wife. If there was any truth in the rumour that he had been on terms of

intimacy with Countess Platen’s younger sister, Frau von dem Bussche

(_née_ Marie von Meysenbug), the relation must have been broken off

before his marriage, as indeed a further circumstantial piece of scandal

asserted. She appears to have been a very pretty person, with plenty of

admirers; and she is said to have set the fashion of ‘drinking tobacco’

among the ladies at Hanover.[101] For the rest, although George I was at

no time in his life in the habit of seeking personal praise, and in

truth cannot be said to have received an overflowing measure of it

either from contemporaries or from posterity, yet he was not without

qualities sure to impress themselves on anyone brought into close

contact with him. His unflinching courage and military capacity were

generally known; and it may further be averred in his honour, that he

was never found false to his word, and that he was unswervingly true to

any attachment once formed by him. His manners may, in his younger days

in particular, have had a smack of the camp, and they must at all times

have given proof of the reserve which was part of his nature, and which

bad and good fortune combined to harden into the stolidity of his later

years. That he made no pretence to intellectual tastes (though he

quarrelled with his illustrious historiographer’s unpunctuality in

fulfilling his engagement to digest the ancient records of the House of

Guelf) may have disappointed his mother, but could hardly perturb Sophia

Dorothea, who came of no lettered stock. In general, she might well have

been thought likely to suit her own fluid temperament to a character

cast in a stronger and sterner mould. The portraits which remain of her

show her to have been graceful and pleasing beyond the common, and this

impression is confirmed by notices of her personality dating from the

early years of her married life. Perhaps there may be perceptible in

certain of her portraits (one of which reminded the ingenious Wraxall of

Sterne’s Eliza) a sentimentality of the superficial kind; but nothing

could be more cruelly unfair than to draw from these likenesses

conclusions as to her levity of disposition. On the other hand, the

Duchess Sophia may be thought a prejudiced witness, when, in 1684 and

1685, she is found expressing distrust of both the smiles and the tears

of her daughter-in-law, and setting her down as an unsatisfactory

example for Sophia Charlotte, the apple of her mother’s eye; in truth,

however, the Duchess’ strictures cannot, in this instance, be said to be

very serious. The bad maternal bringing up of Sophia Dorothea, on which

the same censor’s faithful echo, the Duchess of Orleans, was afterwards

fain to dwell as the original cause of the Princess’ misfortunes, has

been waived aside as a mere invention of spite; yet it should not be

forgotten that both Sophia and her niece were, in their girlhood,

carefully and even rigidly educated, and that to this training the

unfaltering rectitude that marked the conduct of both is, in no small

measure, attributable. At the same time, it is equally obvious that the

kindly guidance by which the most perfect system of moral discipline

needs at times to be supplemented, or by which the absence of such

discipline may be in part redeemed, was wanting to Sophia Dorothea at

Hanover. While there can be no reason for gainsaying this, and while it

must be allowed to have been natural enough that those who had hated the

mother should have treated the misconduct of the daughter as what might

have been expected almost as a matter of course, yet the attempt to

throw upon the Electress Sophia the responsibility of the catastrophe

which we are about to narrate may be at once denounced as inherently

absurd. Whether or not George Lewis cruelly ill-treated his wife—and

there is no trustworthy evidence to support any such supposition—the

assumption is altogether unwarranted that either in his bearing towards

her, or in any other important relation of his life, he allowed himself

to be influenced by his mother.[102] Least of all was he likely to be

amenable to her counsel at a stage of his career when he must have known

her to be at heart adverse to his interest in the matter, all-important

to himself, of the institution of primogeniture. And as for Sophia

herself, though elaborate efforts have been made to represent her as

morally guilty of her daughter-in-law’s ruin, there is not a tittle of

evidence to support a conjecture in itself utterly improbable. For her

frankness and sincerity are never found belying themselves; and intrigue

of all kinds, as both her public and her private conduct show, was

wholly foreign to her nature. Moreover, though, as will be noted, no

letters from her hand referring to the crisis in Sophia Dorothea’s

affairs have been allowed to survive, the general tone of her

correspondence during these eventful years is one of a serenity of mind

unbroken, except by her grief for her losses as a mother.

-----

Footnote 101:

See _Briefe des Herzogs Ernst August_, &c., p. 33, note.

Footnote 102:

‘That the Elector is a dry and disagreeable gentleman,’ writes the

Duchess of Orleans in 1702, ‘I had opportunity enough to discern when

he was here ... but where he is entirely in the wrong, is in his way

of living with his mother, to whom he is in duty bound to show nothing

but respect.’

-----

At first, things seem to have gone well with Sophia Dorothea at Hanover.

The Hereditary Prince (for he was, of course, not styled the Electoral

Prince till 1682) continued the military career which best corresponded

both to his aspirations and to his habits—serving during a series of

campaigns in the Imperial army, and taking no part in the home

government till, about 1694, his father’s health began to give way.

Doubtless George Lewis’ long and repeated absences must have contributed

to keep him estranged from the Princess, and, as already observed, there

were at Hanover no members of the ducal family or court likely to aim at

endearing themselves to her. The star of Countess Platen, mistress _en

titre_, remained steadily in the ascendant, and her villa of Monplaisir,

in the immediate neighbourhood of the capital, became the centre of its

fashionable dissipations. Her sister, Frau von dem Bussche, was likewise

still to the front (she took part in Ernest Augustus’ farewell

expedition of pleasure to Italy, to be noticed immediately); but,

whether or not she had formerly been a recipient of the Hereditary

Prince’s favours, they do not appear to have continued to be bestowed

upon her either under her present name, or when, after her husband’s

death (at Landen), she bestowed her hand upon another gallant officer,

General von Weyhe.[103] When the exigencies of etiquette did not require

her presence at the interminable court dinners and suppers, or at the

operas in the new theatre, in which the heart of Ernest Augustus

delighted, Sophia Dorothea may be concluded to have led a life as

solitary as it was dull in her apartments in the Leine Palace at

Hanover.[104] The favourite companion of her long hours of idleness was

her lady-in-waiting, Fräulein Eleonora von dem Knesebeck, who had come

with her from Celle, and whose devotion, self-sacrificing though by no

means blind, was to involve her in the consequences of her mistress’

aberrations.

-----

Footnote 103:

He served with distinction under Marlborough in Flanders. The marriage

took place in 1696, two years after the Königsmarck catastrophe. Yet

the late Mr. Wilkins makes Countess Platen, ‘with a refinement of

cruelty,’ try to induce Sophia Dorothea to be present at the wedding.

This significant blunder, repeated in the second edition of _The Love

of an Uncrowned Queen_, is exposed by Mr. Lewis Melville, _The First

George_, Vol. i. pp. 52-6. A Fräulein von Weyhe was in Sophia

Dorothea’s service. The court of Hanover, after all, has much of the

aspect of a large family party. In 1701, Sophia mentions a tour to the

Harz made by the Elector in a company which included three ladies,

‘the Schoulenburg, Madame Wey, and Ernhausen, the Schoulenburg’s

sister.’

Footnote 104:

The Palace was enlarged about this time, and entirely ‘restored’ in

1831-41. In Sophia Dorothea’s days the bear at his chain and the lynx

in his cage were still to be seen near the guard-house at the outer

gate.

-----

In October, 1683, the Hereditary Princess gave birth to a son, who was

named George Augustus, in honour of his father and grandfather

respectively, and who was nearly half a century later to ascend the

throne of Great Britain and Ireland as King George II. We may feel

assured that an event so auspicious for the future of the dynasty, and

so speedily fulfilling the hopes with which the marriage had been

brought about, specially commended her to the favour of her

father-in-law; and, that this favour continued, is shown by his

consideration for her some two years afterwards. In 1684, Duke Ernest

Augustus had undertaken his last journey to the beloved land of Italy,

being accompanied on it by an oddly composed company consisting, among

others, of Count Platen and Major-General von dem Bussche and their

wives. During this visit the Duchess remained behind, professedly _à son

grand regret_, and Prince George Lewis was, for part of the time,

engaged in one of his Hungarian campaigns against the Turks. But his

Princess, at the particular request of her father-in-law, joined the

ducal party at Venice, arriving there just before the opening of the

carnival of 1686. ‘I am delighted to hear,’ writes the Duchess Sophia

from Hanover in January, ‘that my daughter-in-law and her following are

in good condition.’ Sophia Dorothea then accompanied the Duke for the

Holy Week to Rome, where their sojourn cost the cruel sum of twenty

thousand dollars; but, though her husband had by this time finished his

campaign, ceremonial difficulties (which one would have thought would

have affected the father as much as the son) prevented him from coming

to the papal city, and he amused himself with a trip to Florence and

Naples on his own account. All these things are told without so much as

a suggestion of untowardness; nor was it till long afterwards that a

scandal, promptly credited by the Duchess of Orleans, declared Sophia

Dorothea to have consoled herself for her husband’s absence by an amour

carried on at Rome with a French marquis of the name of de Lassaye. But

the story in question rests entirely on the braggadocio to which this

squire of dames treated the Duchess, and on the still more doubtful

evidence of certain compromising letters purporting to have been

addressed by him to Sophia Dorothea when at Rome, and printed by him in

his old age—as late as 1738. Thus the shame of this denunciation lies

entirely with its cowardly author.

There seems, however, little doubt but that, after her return from

Italy, Sophia Dorothea became further estranged from her husband. To

this date would have to be assigned, were it otherwise worth noticing,

the attraction said by the Duchess of Orleans to have been exercised by

Sophia Dorothea upon the Raugrave Charles Lewis, one of the family of

nephews and nieces ‘by the left hand’ to whom the Duchess Sophia

extended so benevolent and almost maternal a protection. According to

the same authority, it was to escape the wiles of the light-hearted

Princess that the Raugrave took service against the Turks in the Morea,

where he met with his death in 1688; but there was very probably more

malice than truth in the story. In March, 1687, Sophia Dorothea gave

birth to a second child, the daughter who was named after her, and who,

as the wife of King Frederick William I of Prussia, was to become the

mother of Frederick the Great and of his brother Augustus William, the

direct ancestor of the subsequent Kings of Prussia and of the German

Emperors of our own times. It cannot have been till after this event

that George Lewis, who seems to have remained nearer home after his

campaign in 1685, began to follow his father’s example and give

publicity to his preference of other attractions to those of his wife.

But much uncertainty exists as to the date at which this infidelity

began, and as to the extent to which it was carried. It has been widely

assumed, and is constantly repeated, that Countess Platen sought to

maintain the family influence over the Hereditary Prince, after he had

tired of her sister, through her daughter; but this assumption, which,

because of its revolting character, was carefully kept alive and

cherished by the detractors of George I and his dynasty, must be

dismissed as baseless. This celebrated lady, who, like the Duchess

Sophia’s own daughter, had been christened Sophia Charlotte, in 1701

became the wife of Baron von Kielmannsegg, a nobleman of honourable

reputation, who had for some years been attached to the Hanoverian

Court. Here the pair lived in unbroken union and enjoyed a distinguished

position; their villa of _Fantaisie_ on the avenue to Herrenhausen being

regarded as a favourite resort of foreign visitors to Hanover. They

afterwards followed King George I to England, where, after the

resignation of the Duke of Somerset, the high household office of Master

of the Horse was left vacant, in order that its duties might be

performed by the Hanoverian _Oberstallmeister_, while his wife was

created Countess of Leinster in the Irish and afterwards Countess of

Darlington in the English peerage. Neither at Hanover nor in England had

George I ever made any secret of the nature of the tie which he believed

to exist between her and himself; he had consistently treated her as his

half-sister, giving her at the Electoral Court precedence over the

Raugraves and Raugravines, and, in the patent that conferred an Irish

peerage upon her, causing her to be designated _consanguinea nostra_. So

simple an explanation of the honour in which she continued to be held

till her death in 1727 was of course insufficient for Jacobite spite,

for anti-German prejudice, and for the love of scandal on its own

account. On the other hand, the only personage whom, either before or

after he mounted the English throne, George publicly recognised as

mistress, was also the only lady at the Hanoverian Court who seems in

the days of his married life to have exercised a strong fascination over

him. Yet Melusina von der Schulenburg (afterwards Duchess of

Kendal)[105] appears at this time to have refrained from thrusting

herself into notice; and this agrees with the indications of refinement

which it is impossible to ignore in the portrait remaining of her in the

period of her youth.

-----

Footnote 105:

Of the persistently repeated story of King George I’s morganatic

marriage to the Duchess of Kendal there appears to be no proof. The

late Dr. Richard Garnett, who could hardly have failed to come across

whatever evidence on the subject existed, assured me that he knew of

none.

-----

Thus, then, scarcely anything is ascertainable as to the beginnings and

rise of the general sense of unhappiness which is known to have come

over Sophia Dorothea during her life at Hanover, and to which—some time

in 1692 or later—she gave _naïve_ expression by the avowal, afterwards,

with cruel ineptness, judicially quoted against her, that she would

rather be a ‘_marquise_ in France’ than Electoral Princess of

Brunswick-Lüneburg. Yet fixed antipathies of this kind are commonly of

gradual growth, and it would have been difficult for a nature like

Sophia Dorothea’s, craving for impulse to meet impulse, and quite

incapable of renunciation, to settle down into the dull acquiescence

which, with so many women, has to do duty for contentment. The restraint

of a monotonous existence and the petty rules of an elaborate etiquette,

imposed upon her among surroundings in which there was so much to annoy

her and so little to sustain her self-respect, must in any case have

made her restive and unhappy. Least of all could she have felt any

inclination to take an interest in the schemes of dynastic ambition to

which she knew herself to have been sacrificed—perhaps against the wish

of her best friend, her mother. The anecdote that it was attempted to

implicate her in the plot hatched by Prince Maximilian—Moltke, who was

to pay the penalty of the discovered design, being offered his release,

if he would charge her with a guilty knowledge,—may be dismissed as

fictitious. And it may be observed, by the way, that, while there is no

authority for connecting Countess Platen with the supposed offer, it

could not possibly have been promoted by the Duchess Sophia, whose

sympathies were on the side of Maximilian’s revolt against the principle

of primogeniture. Sophia Dorothea was, no doubt, on pleasant terms with

her high-spirited but flighty brother-in-law Maximilian, who, indeed,

unmistakably oppressed her with his attentions; but it is quite clear

that, in no sense of the word, can there have been anything ‘serious’

between them. We do not know how Sophia Dorothea was affected by the

rise in the family dignity which procured for her the title of Electoral

Princess. But, in regard to a question of still greater importance for

the future of the House, we have it on excellent authority that she took

a line opposite to that adopted by her husband. Sir William Dutton Colt,

who, as was seen, had entered upon his duties as English Envoy

Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary at Hanover in 1689, while

describing the Duchess Sophia as an incomparable person, full of

charming wit, kindness, and civility, and speaking of the ‘Princess of

Hanover’ (Sophia Dorothea), for whom and her infant son, he says, Duke

Ernest Augustus showed great fondness, as beautiful, accomplished, and

agreeable, notes (in 1691) that the Princess was distinctly anti-English

in her sympathies. Her partiality for France might have found a

sufficient explanation in her descent, and in the associations so long

cherished by her mother at Celle; but Sir William Colt assigns another

reason that cannot be overlooked. The eldest son (George Lewis), the

envoy reported, was not in the least French in his inclinations; and the

French party, discontented with this, paid all the court imaginable to

the Princess—‘and I fear not without success, for she has no great

fondness for the Prince.’

It is, therefore, clear that, by this time (1691), Sophia Dorothea’s

feelings towards her husband had passed into a condition of more or less

active antipathy. And there can no longer be any pretence of doubt that,

whether or not the indifference of her husband towards herself had

hardened into positive unkindness, and whether or not this unkindness

(as there is absolutely nothing to prove) had shown itself in actual

ill-treatment, Sophia Dorothea was already under the influence of a

growing passion for another man. The story of the guilty loves of Sophia

Dorothea and Königsmarck need not be related at length here, since large

portions of their correspondence are generally accessible, at least in a

translation from the French originals, while a supplementary part is for

the first time (with the exception of two letters which have appeared

elsewhere) printed in an Appendix to the present book. The evidence for

the genuineness of this correspondence, in so far as the greater part of

it is concerned, which covers 679 pages, and is now extant in the

University Library at Lund, was practically irresistible as it stood,

and is confirmed beyond the last shadow of doubt by the letters in the

Royal Secret Archives of State at Berlin, which cover 65 pages, and

which are seen at the first glance to belong to the same correspondence.

They agree in the handwritings, and in the use of the same cipher, as

well as in all the distinctive features of style; they refer to numerous

details mentioned in the Lund letters; and to some of these certain of

the Berlin documents stand in the relation of supplements or answers. It

is said—but on no stated authority—that to these letters might be added

others, of contents unknown, in the possession of the present head of

the House of Hanover. No part of Count Königsmarck’s correspondence with

the Princess Sophia Dorothea remains in the possession of the present

representative of his family. As for the Lund documents, their history

can be satisfactorily traced up to the direct descendants of Countess

Lewenhaupt, the elder sister of Count Philip Christopher von

Königsmarck. The younger sister, the famous Countess Aurora, as will be

seen, actively intervened in the transactions that followed on its

discovery, at a time when both the sisters were residing at Hamburg. It

must be supposed that Aurora at some time transferred the letters from

her custody into that of her elder sister; how they came into her own,

must remain matter of conjecture, though it is a not unnatural

supposition that they were entrusted to her by the recipients. On the

other hand, the evidence of handwriting obtained by a comparison of

these documents with others of incontestable genuineness, from the hands

of Sophia Dorothea and Königsmarck respectively, is entirely

satisfactory—though this part of the subject is complicated by the fact

(for as such it may be set down) that the Princess possessed the art of

writing in two different hands, while portions of her part of the love

correspondence were dictated by her to her confidante. (Königsmarck

wrote his own love-letters; but his official letters at Hanover are,

except the signatures, probably in the handwriting of his private

secretary.) But it is the internal evidence contained in the documents

themselves, in face of which the refusal to accept them, though

maintained by at least one historian of high eminence to whom this

period of Brunswick-Lüneburg history and this particular episode were

familiar as to no other among his contemporaries, must be said to have

broken down. The internal evidence in the present case consists mainly

of a number of coincidences of circumstance and date, such as it is

impossible to ascribe either to chance or to design, that have been

proved to exist between incidental statements in these letters and in

contemporary documents of unimpeachable authenticity. The most important

of these are the letters and contemporary despatches of Sir William

Dutton Colt, the envoy to the Courts of Hanover and Celle mentioned

above, now preserved in our Record Office, and extending over the period

from July, 1689, to December, 1692. (To these have, at all events, to be

added passages in the correspondence of the Electress Sophia, and

isolated statements as to the campaign in the Netherlands and the battle

of Steenkirke in particular, in a military list cited by Havemann, and

in a contemporary account of the battle in the _Theatrum Europæum_.) The

credit of placing this investigation on lines which could not but lead

up to an irrefutable issue belongs to the late Mrs. Everett Green, for

whom a careful second transcript had been made of the letters of which a

first, incomplete, transcript had been presented to her by the late

Count Albert von der Schulenburg-Klosterrode. The second, complete,

copy, carefully digested and arranged, was placed by Mrs. Green in the

British Museum, after she had, for prudential reasons, abandoned the

idea of embodying it in a published work. This task was accomplished by

the late Mr. W. H. Wilkins, in his own way, in a book afterwards

republished in a new and revised edition; but he did not live to carry

out his contingent design of some day ‘translating the whole

correspondence at Lund, at Berlin, and at Gmünden, and arranging it in

chronological order with the aid of first-hand documentary evidence

drawn from other sources.’ The corroboration of the genuineness and

authenticity of the Lund documents furnished by those now printed from

the originals in the Berlin Archives is, as observed, complete, and all

the more convincing, inasmuch as they must have been separated from the

rest at a very early date. It is stated in the Register of the Archives

of State at Berlin that they were found among the papers of Frederick

the Great at Sans Souci after his death; and the superscription which

they bear (‘_Lettres d’Amour de la Duchesse D’allen au Comte

Konigsmarc_’) is in the King’s own handwriting. How they came into his

possession must remain a matter of conjecture, which will be more

appropriately discussed elsewhere. It should perhaps be added that the

whole problem of the genuineness of this correspondence is of very

secondary historical significance; but, apart from the human interest of

the letters themselves, their whole story shows how difficult it is to

find, and perhaps also how difficult it is to kill, the truth.[106]

-----

Footnote 106:

For an examination of the whole question of the genuineness of the

Lund letters I must refer the reader to an article on the original

edition of Mr. Wilkins’ book, _The Love of an Uncrowned Queen_,

contributed by me to the _Edinburgh Review_ for January, 1901. I have

since re-examined the cipher with the aid of the key supplied by the

late Count Schulenburg to the late Mrs. Everett Green; and it

certainly fills one with amazement that any rational human beings

should have thought concealment attainable by so perfectly transparent

a disguise. But the miserable folly of the whole business is at least

consistent with itself.—As to the Berlin letters, Mr. Wilkins does not

explicitly say that he had seen them; but it was unnecessary that he

should do so, as an exhaustive account of them (with the text of two

of them) was given by Dr. Robert Geerds in the _Beitlage_ to the

_Allgemeine Zeitung_, No. 77, Friday, April 4th, 1902. The eminent

historian Dr. A. Köcher, after first directing attention to these

letters in the _Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie_, Vol. xxxiv. (art.

_Sophia Dorothea_), and declaring them an audacious forgery (he

repeated this assertion privately to myself), deposited in the Royal

Archives at Berlin a statement of his belief that a comparison of

handwritings left him in no doubt as to the letters being spurious;

but Dr. Geerds’ explanations on this head (see _Appendix B_) are to my

mind perfectly satisfactory.—I should like to add that at my request

Count Königsmarck, in December last, most kindly allowed the

examination of his family archives at Plaue near Berlin on my behalf

by Archivrath Dr. Paczkowski, but that no part of any correspondence

between Sophia Dorothea and her lover was discovered there. Dr.

Paczkowski carried out the task which he was so good as to undertake

with a thoroughness and _savoir faire_ reflecting the highest credit

upon himself and the distinguished official body of which he forms

part.

-----

Nothing indicates that Count Philip Christopher von Königsmarck, the

ill-fated hero of the tragedy of Sophia Dorothea’s life, made his

appearance at Hanover before the month of March, 1688, when his presence

at a court _fête_ is accidentally mentioned—just a twelvemonth after the

birth of the second and last of George Lewis’ and Sophia Dorothea’s

children. Königsmarck was a member of a Swedish family of high position

and great wealth, which had derived lustre from the important services

of Field-Marshal von Königsmarck in the latter part of the Thirty Years’

War, and which had, through him, acquired large estates in northern

Germany. The branch of the family to which Philip Christopher belonged

were citizens of the world; to set them down as adventurers argues an

imperfect apprehension of the spirit of their age, and indeed of that of

a great part of the following century also. Like the rest of them,

Philip Christopher had seen many courts already in his youthful days;

and nothing could be more probable than that he should have found his

way to Celle, especially as he had a family connexion with France, such

as would always have ensured him a welcome at the court of George

William and Eleonora. He may thus very well have formed a boy and girl

acquaintance with their daughter; but the statement said to have been

afterwards made by him, that he had loved her from childhood, is

insufficiently authenticated, and does not recur in any of his

love-letters. He then accompanied his elder brother, Count Charles John,

whose wanderings had been more widely varied than his own (and with whom

he is confounded by Horace Walpole, in his careless way), on a visit to

England. Here the elder brother was the principal figure in a _cause

célèbre_, the trial of himself and others for the murder of the wealthy

Thomas Thynne (‘Tom of Ten Thousand’), of which crime an elaborate

representation may to this day be seen carved in relief on the victim’s

tomb in Westminster Abbey.[107] Fortunately for himself, Count von

Königsmarck escaped the gallows, where the careers of his accomplices

ended; but England was no longer an agreeable place of sojourn for the

two brothers, and their travels recommenced. The elder died in the Morea

in 1686; so that it was the younger who, in 1688, inherited the wealth

of their uncle, on his death after a distinguished career as a commander

in the service of the Venetian Republic. Thus, when Königsmarck, after

visiting France and becoming acquainted with the Saxon Prince afterwards

known as Augustus the Strong, King of Poland, in this same year, 1688,

arrived at Hanover, he was not only a nobleman of much knowledge and

experience of the world, but a personage of great wealth, and an

extremely desirable acquisition for a court such as that of Hanover,

where there were excellent opportunities for spending money as well as

for encouraging its expenditure. On his side, Königsmarck, as the head

of his migratory family, may have wished to further the settlement of

his sisters; and the elder, about this time, married the Swedish Count

Axel Lewenhaupt, who two years later passed into the service of the Duke

of Celle. The younger, Aurora, had not as yet found at Dresden, where

her brother was probably already well known, the sphere in which her

beauty and wit, after liberally diffusing their radiance in many

regions, were for a time established as supreme; at Hanover, so fixed a

constellation as that of the Platen family was sure to regard this

brilliant meteor with much displeasure. But Countess Platen could raise

no objection to Ernest Augustus’ offer of a commission to Königsmarck;

and this offer was certainly made and accepted. For he is soon found

commanding a Hanoverian regiment, in frontier operations and in

Flanders, and afterwards holding, in the same service, a colonelcy of

dragoons.

-----

Footnote 107:

See Evelyn’s _Diary_ as to the scandal which surrounded the trial.

-----

So far we stand on solid ground; but, as to the beginnings of the

intimacy between Sophia Dorothea and Königsmarck, and as to the

incidents that occurred in the period before the commencement of the

extant correspondence between them, we possess no trustworthy account

whatever. There is no evidence even to show the authenticity of the

story, which has been used with much effect in a recent poetic drama

(very different in conception from that imagined by Schiller on the same

theme),[108] that Königsmarck accompanied Prince Charles Philip in the

campaign in which the Duchess Sophia lost her favourite son, and that he

shared the Prince’s dangers, though escaping his doom.

-----

Footnote 108:

See Schiller’s _Dramatischer Nachlass_, ed. G. Kettner, Vol. ii. pp.

220 _sqq._ (Weimar, 1825), and the references there given to articles

by Kettner on the subject.—The play to which allusion is made in the

text is Mrs. Woods’ _The Princess of Hanover_ (1902).

-----

At the time when the correspondence between Sophia Dorothea and

Königsmarck opens—at the beginning of July, 1691—he must at any rate

have been for some time back in Hanover; for he had started at the head

of a regiment of foot in the ducal service on a march towards the Elbe,

undertaken for the purpose of ensuring the safety of Hamburg. A few

weeks later, he was himself sent to that city on a diplomatic mission

for the conclusion of a treaty of alliance with Sweden,—a balancing

operation on the part of Ernest Augustus, before he had made up his mind

to join the Grand Alliance against France. That this charge, for which

of course his Swedish descent rendered him particularly suitable, should

have been given to Königsmarck, proves him to have been at this time in

full favour at the Hanoverian court.

Inasmuch as, already in the earliest of his extant letters to Sophia

Dorothea, Königsmarck describes himself as _in extremis_, though at the

same time assuring her that his respect for her is as great as his love,

we find the pair already on the brink of an abyss of passion, and

understand why their correspondence was a clandestine one. Such, in

fact, it was, from first to last, intended to be and to remain; and all

the usual devices of secrecy at the command of the writers of these

letters were adopted for the purpose. Of course they were all—or nearly

all—written in French, the language ordinarily used at the Hanover as

well as the Celle Court. The communications from Königsmarck, which may

be said to form about two-thirds of the whole series of letters or

portions of letters, are, when they bear any address at all, directed to

Fräulein von dem Knesebeck, either by name or by some kind of

designation under which she is evidently intended. Part of the Princess’

letters are written in a hand differing so much from that which wrote

the remainder, and which a comparison with her undoubtedly genuine

writing seems to identify as her own, that it may be assumed to be the

hand of the confidante. In the actual composition of the letters, the

writers had further agreed to guard themselves by the adoption of a

twofold—or perhaps one should say threefold—system of cipher, which it

needs no Œdipus to unriddle, at all events sufficiently for the purposes

of detection.[109] Under such flimsy safeguards, explicable in Sophia

Dorothea’s case only by her youth and utter inexperience, and in

Königsmarck’s by the habits of a roving life which had led him to cast

himself recklessly into a whirlpool of excitement, the lovers gave full

vent to their feelings of amorous and jealous passion. The voice of

nature is audible in this correspondence, but it is singularly devoid of

charm. Königsmarck’s tone, as could hardly but be expected, has a

general tendency to coarseness, and is at times very gross, calling to

mind Stepney’s description of the unfortunate man, after his

catastrophe, as a loose fish whom he had long known and would always

have avoided. No similar charge is to be brought against the letters of

Sophia Dorothea, which are written in an easy and flowing style. But her

letters, as well as Königsmarck’s, contain passages irreconcilable with

any conclusion except one—that theirs was a guilty love. For the rest,

there is no straining of style in the correspondence, and those who

regarded it as fabricated might well describe it as a ‘clumsy’ forgery;

for it omits to make certain points which a forger could hardly have

missed. In the Lund letters, at all events, Königsmarck, except when

calling up the image of the Electoral Prince George Lewis in his marital

capacity, refers to him with good humour; and Sophia Dorothea gives

quite a matter-of-fact account of a quarrel between her parents.

-----

Footnote 109:

First, they use pseudonyms of a more or less allusive nature in lieu

of proper names. Thus _Don Diego_ and _la Romaine_ signify the Elector

and the Electress (the former is not a flattering nickname in

contemporary English literature; it will be remembered that the eldest

of Sophia’s sisters had in former days been called _la Grecque_ by the

younger); _le Grondeur_, _la Pédagogue_, are farcical names for the

Duke and Duchess of Celle, while the Electoral Prince, Sophia

Dorothea’s husband, is (not quite so intelligibly) called _le

Réformeur_; Countess Platen (query with an allusion to Monplaisir) _la

Perspective_, and Sophia Dorothea herself goes by the appellation of

_la petite louche_, or of _le cœur gauche_, or of _Léonisse_, a

character in a romance of the times. Aurora von Königsmarck is

_l’Avanturière_, and Prince Ernest Augustus _l’Innocent_. Secondly,

the writers of these letters employ a numerical cipher of a tolerably

simple kind. Of this Professor Palmblad, who published a few of the

letters (carefully selecting the worst), and who formed a monstrous

hypothesis upon them, lacked the key; Mrs. Everett Green, who

possessed it, was already able to decipher most of the names; Mr.

Wilkins had not to leave much obscure. Thirdly, names, and

occasionally other words, are spelt in figures, the chief difficulty

of deciphering being in this case the phonetic spelling adopted by

Königsmarck (_biljay_ = _billet_, &c.). Finally, the lovers also

resorted to an occasional cryptogram, which would not deceive a child.

A name, such as Chauvet, is split up and interlarded with the letters

‘_illy_’—thus: ‘_illychauillyvetilly_.’ The farce of insertion might

have gone further. Cf. _Appendix B_ as to the Berlin letters.

-----

It would be unprofitable to attempt here to follow the course of this

unhappy passion, of which many incidents have now been verified as to

time and place, chiefly by means of the despatches of the English envoy,

while the main event of its catastrophe is lost in impenetrable gloom.

Königsmarck—who asserts that, had he proceeded from Hamburg to Sweden,

he would have readily been admitted into the service of that monarchy,

where, on account of his numerous connexions in many lands at many

Courts, he might very possibly have come to play a conspicuous

part—chose, instead, to return to Hanover, probably in consequence of

the favourable reception accorded by the Princess to his still

hesitating written advances. His letters now begin to assume a freer

tone. Temporary separations inevitably ensued. He accompanies Duke

Ernest Augustus to Wolfenbüttel, while she remains behind; she joins in

a visit, in which he is not included, to her father at his hunting-seat

at Epsdorff, or at Wienhausen; and he has to swear eternal fidelity in a

letter signed in his blood, and to protest that he will go to the Morea

(whither Ernest Augustus’ son Christian was at the time intent upon

proceeding), in order to relieve her of his compromising presence. It

seems to have been not long after this that Sophia Dorothea succumbed to

her passion; and, early in 1692, fears were already pressing upon them

of discovery—in the first instance through her mother; for Königsmarck

had followed her to the Court of Celle. At last, in June, 1692, he was

obliged to join the Hanoverian force under the command of Sophia

Dorothea’s husband in Flanders; for Ernest Augustus, resolved on

striking a bargain for the Ninth Electorate, had now openly become a

member of the Grand Alliance. With the opening of the Flemish campaign

(during which Königsmarck took part in the battle of Steenkirke) begins

the series of the Princess’ letters, several of which are dated from

Brockhausen, where Prince Maximilian had taken refuge with the Duke of

Celle after his trouble at Hanover, while others are written from

Wiesbaden, which later in the year she visited with her mother. Many of

these letters contain details that admit of verification from Colt’s

despatches. The intrigue between Sophia Dorothea and Königsmarck had now

passed into a phase in which expressions of love, jealousy, and haunting

apprehensions, breathlessly crowd upon one another; and, after the

Princess had returned to Hanover, it almost seemed as if she must listen

to the advice which he had sent to her from the Low Countries, and cut

the knot of their difficulties by flying with him.