Footnote 131:
She expresses extreme delight with the changes effected by Count
Rochus Quirini zu Lynar, who directed the building operations of the
Hanoverian Court, in the hunting-box of the Göhrde.
Footnote 132:
A copy of a portrait of her nephew, Raugrave Maurice, is attributed to
her.
Footnote 133:
The coverings of the chairs in the presence-chamber at Hanover, as
well as those of the altar in the palace chapel there, were
embroidered by her hands. She also embroidered a chair-cover for
Baroness Kielmannsegg—an attention bearing out the statement as to the
relations between that lady and the Electoral family given above. King
Frederick I of Prussia mentions his mother-in-law’s beautiful cabinet
of china at Herrenhausen.
-----
Sophia had never shown much sympathy with what may be called the
Venetian tastes of her husband; and, after her youth had ebbed away, had
more and more come to live an intellectual life of her own. Perhaps,
before recalling the political incidents of her last thirteen years in
connexion with the question which invested them with an European
significance, we may pause for a moment to summarise our impressions as
to the most important features of her mind and character, as they
present themselves to us more especially in these final years. The
tragic part of her life was now over; but, as has been well said by the
finest of the modern critics of her career, Professor Kuno Fischer, she
had herself never played the part of a tragedy queen. Even a panegyric
like that pronounced upon her by the old Hanoverian historian
Spittler—by no means an undiscerning flatterer—seems too highly strung.
He speaks of the ‘_Teutschgründliche überfürstliche Aufklärung_’—as who
should say, the enlightenment above the ordinary enlightenment of
princes, and one in its depth and thoroughness possible only to the
Germanic mind—that rendered her deserving of the friendship of Leibniz.
Beyond a doubt, Sophia was distinguished by an intellectual curiosity
that was still uncommon, though much less so than is often supposed,
among the women of her age. This curiosity her linguistic attainments
(she was, as has been seen, from her youth up mistress of half a dozen
languages) had long enabled her freely to satisfy. To the excellent
system of education under which she had been trained she owed her
acquaintance with various elements of theology, philosophy, and history.
This knowledge she had improved in the course of a long life, abounding
in (often involuntary) intervals of leisure, and bringing with it not a
few special opportunities of learned intercourse. She had spent some
years at Heidelberg, once more a fountainhead of learning; and, already
at Osnabrück, she had been ambitious of converting that modest episcopal
city into a centre of philosophical speculation, holding colloquies
there with Francis Mercurius von Helmont, the interesting son of the
great physicist.[134] At a later date she read at least one of Spinoza’s
works, towards which she seems to have been drawn by ideas of moral
philosophy in which some resemblance to his has been thought
traceable.[135] Yet it may be doubted whether either here or afterwards
at Hanover and Herrenhausen she was ever a profound student, or even so
much as an ardent reader of books. She was fond of reading memoirs—such
as those of Pierre Chanut, French ambassador at the Court of Christian
of Sweden, or the celebrated autobiography of Marshal de Bassompierre.
She had, also, a _penchant_ for novels, preferring to the fashionable
long-winded romances of her youth works enlivened by a humour congenial
to her own. She asked Leibniz to draw up for her a list of all the
novels she had read; for she had come to an end with _Don Quixote_ and
_Don Guzman d’Alfarache_, of which she preferred the former. Of German
romances, it is almost equally to her credit that she mentions
_Simplicissimus_, while avoiding the stagnant fashionable bombast of her
age.[136] A still more striking testimony to her critical insight may be
found in the remark, which the admiring Duchess of Orleans states to
have been confirmed by the Elector Palatine Charles Lewis, that nobody
in the world better possessed Michel de Montaigne better than her aunt
Sophia. Nor was she afraid of even more potent draughts; for, during her
return journey from Italy, the _Gargantua_ was read to her by Ezechiel
Spanheim, divine and diplomatist. On the other hand, she does not appear
to have greatly cared for historical reading on its own account;
according to Leibniz, the reason why she took pleasure in Clarendon was
‘because she was acquainted with many persons mentioned by him.’ Yet she
had no personal acquaintance with the Emperor Justinian, whom, as known
to her from the Byzantine historian Procopius, she compares with Louis
XIV. She certainly had a liking for moral theology and philosophy, which
were, in general, more in the way of the ladies of the period than the
historical sciences. She had read Boëtius, and was invited by Leibniz to
read the Jesuit Friedrich von Spee, a leader in the crusade against that
long-lived form of bigotry—the persecution of ‘witchcraft.’ Dogmatic
theology had no charms for Sophia; and even the faithful Bishop Burnet’s
book on a theme which ought to have interested her, namely, the
Thirty-nine Articles, she put aside as ‘_bon à feuilleter, mais non pas
à lire_,’ flippantly adding that the good binding of her copy would make
it an ornament to her library. Philosophy, like religion, seems to have
interested her primarily on the ethical side; the stoical maxims of
Seneca and Epictetus had impressed her mind before it had opened itself
to more comprehensive problems under the influence of Spinoza, whom, as
we know, her favourite brother had sought to domesticate at Heidelberg,
and afterwards, and, above all, under the influence of Leibniz. She can
at no time have been very well seen in metaphysics, the study of which
is held to contribute so largely to the formation of ideas on religion;
she shared her eldest son’s somewhat crude notions on the origin of
ideas, and would not—or could not—understand Leibniz’s argument about
monads. Possibly, like many clever people of both sexes, she was rather
too fond of startling her interlocutors; and the excellent Molanus
respectfully shakes his reverend head at ‘_Serenissima nostra, quæ a
paradoxis sibi temperare nunquam potest_.’ On the other hand, the
diplomatist Thomas von Grote, another of her intimates, moved perhaps by
a not unnatural jealousy, opined that the learned companions of her
Herrenhausen walks would in the end take her a little out of her depth,
though he had no fear that for her the consequences would be what they
had been for Queen Christina of Sweden. As for the mathematical and
physical sciences, she took that casual interest in them which, in the
case of great personages, and of great ladies in particular, alternately
makes the delight and the despair of _savants_; Leibniz distinctly
states that works dealing in detail with such subjects are not among
those which the Electress was fond of reading. When, in the last year of
her life, the Czar Peter came to Hanover and talked mathematics to her,
‘she held her tongue.’
-----
Footnote 134:
He seems to have frequented her society up to a late date. In 1696 the
Duchess of Orleans expresses her pleasure that her aunt should have
his philosophy to amuse her—though, for her part, she ‘does not see
how one can understand anything of which one knows nothing.’ The
younger Helmont’s doctrine of metempsychosis was not in the long run
satisfactory to Sophia, who had once said that it might account for
her unlucky son Maximilian’s resemblance to the ‘seven old Dukes of
Brunswick,’ who called all their servants ‘thou’ and occupied
themselves with making nets and drinking warm beer.
Footnote 135:
See H. Forst, _u.s._, p. 378.
Footnote 136:
Of course, she had to read the _Mesopotamian Shepherdess_ of the
interminable Duke Anthony Ulric; but she compendiously set it down as
a burlesque on the Bible.
-----
And yet, though neither a profound philosopher nor a phenomenally
accomplished blue-stocking, Sophia was the very reverse of a commonplace
personage. She was a woman of the world, but a very wise one. In age, as
in youth, she sparkled with wit and intelligence, and in her both these
gifts were interfused with that third and greatest gift of humour, which
is a property of the soul as well as of the intellect.[137] Of her
conversation we can only judge from her letters, of which we fortunately
possess a quite extraordinary quantity; but, if her speech was like her
writing, its style must have been equally far ‘_esloigné de
l’aigreur_,’—to borrow a phrase from Madame de Brinon, to whom she told
not a few home truths. Her letters combine with the supreme charm of
perfect naturalness a pungency in the choice of expressions superior, in
the opinion of the Duchess of Orleans, to any minted by the academies;
‘for to write agreeably is better than to write correctly.’
Occasionally, her wit was singularly incisive, as when she called the
same Madame de Brinon ‘_une religieuse qui passe pour bel esprit_,’ and
her eloquence extraordinary ‘_car elle parle toujours_’; or when, Toland
having _more suo_ taken it upon himself in argument to whitewash the
cannibals, she commended him for his prudence, in that, with all
Christendom against him, he had provided himself with protectors. Not
unfrequently, however, frankness and cynicism did duty for wit. Her
jests spared neither Leibniz, nor the House of Hanover, nor ‘_le bon
lord Winchilsea_,’ whom she found so heavy in hand, nor Queen Anne’s
husband, Prince George of Denmark, of whom, when it was proposed to
create him King Consort, she observed that he would be a King like Jove
among the frogs—and perhaps popular for that very reason. She had, too,
a good deal of fun as well as wit—as when, in acknowledging the courtesy
of an unknown Mr. Smith in sending a descriptive account of England and
the English (among whom she had ‘been brought up till she reached the
age of twenty’), she says that he describes London and St Paul’s and the
‘_pantquitinhouse_’ as if she had never heard a word about them. De
Gourville, whose qualities as a butt possibly remained a secret to his
sublime self-consciousness, suspected her of a natural inclination to
criticising any fellow-mortal brought into her presence, though he
allowed that the person bantered by her was sure to be the first to
laugh. She was a good hater, and could even hate at second hand, as in
the instance of Madame de Maintenon, the bugbear of the Duchess of
Orleans. But her aversions were, like all her feelings, kept in constant
check by the dictates of reason as well as by her care for the interests
of her family and House; and we have seen how even her sentiments
towards Eleonora d’Olbreuze underwent a gradual mitigation which
outsiders judged to be a complete change. It may, too, be doubted
whether sarcasm was really natural to her, though her sense of humour
always responded to the irony of things. She was alike open-minded and
open-handed, and had nothing of the stinginess which sits so ill on high
rank and position. Though towards the close of her life she was desirous
that an income should be granted her by the British Crown and
Parliament, it was only for political purposes that she desired this.
She had quite money enough, she said, to keep up her German
establishment. When she found that the distinguished services of the
Brunswick-Lüneburg officers and men were left unnoticed in the
_Gazette_, she was anxious to pay for a proper mention of them out of
her own pocket. The geniality of her disposition shows itself in an
affability which was the same to both great and small, and in her power
to interest herself with the same readiness in the discourse of
philosophers, the conversation of ministers of State, and the gossip of
country ladies on domestic thoughts intent. It also showed itself in a
hospitality which made everyone welcome at Hanover and Herrenhausen, and
a tact which put all at their ease there; at no court in the world,
wrote the Brandenburg statesman Paul von Fuchs, are _les étrangers et
les gastes_ treated better than at the Hanoverian. Though, during her
later years, she lived chiefly in retirement at Herrenhausen, she by no
means secluded herself, but received a large variety of visitors, both
princely, personages and political and literary celebrities. Above all,
it was always a delight to her to see Englishmen at her Court, as indeed
it had been even before the passing of the Act of Settlement; and in
welcoming them she carefully eschewed any and every distinction between
parties—divided as these were in England with a severity unknown at the
time to any other country. Occasionally, when the Elector was away on
his campaigns, she took his place at Hanover in the reception of
distinguished guests.[138] Amiable to all, she reserved the treasures of
her affection for those who were nearest to her—not only for the
survivors of her own passionately loved brood, but for all the younger
members of her family, in which she included the children of her
favourite brother.[139] The Duchess of Orleans comically avows her
annoyance that everyone who has had the privilege of living with her
aunt should be brought to entertain towards her the very sentiments of
love and affection cherished by Elizabeth Charlotte herself. Yet she was
quite impervious to flattery, and, when told by a diplomatist that the
court of Versailles was full of her daughter’s praises, remarked that
these were the usual talk to which an envoy was treated when there was
nothing else to say to him. In her later years, Sophia seems never to
have indulged herself either in outbursts of temper or in moods of
discontent; although she allows that her vexation about the vagaries of
her son Maximilian had proved to her that her philosophy was only skin
deep.
-----
Footnote 137:
In _The Freeholder_, No. 30, April 2nd, 1716, Addison quotes, _à
propos_ of offensive French criticisms of the English and other
nations, a passage from _Chevreana_, the amusing anthology of Urban
Chevreau mentioned on another page, in which the very sensible
proposition that ‘one ought not to judge well or ill of a nation from
a particular person, nor of a particular person from his nation,’ is
illustrated by the assertion that there are Germans, as there are
Frenchmen, who have no wit, and Germans who are better skilled in
Greek or Hebrew than either Scaliger or the Cardinal du Perron—‘there
is not in all France a person of more wit than the present Duchess of
Hanover, nor more thoroughly knowing in philosophy than was the late
Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia.’ ‘Prejudiced’ witnesses are not always
in the wrong.
Footnote 138:
It seems right to observe that, though the tone of refinement
characteristic of the Hanoverian Court was largely due to the
Electress Sophia, the Elector George Lewis was by no means insensible
to her example. Toland speaks of the liberty of conversation, ‘that
nobody who deserves it will abuse,’ allowed at the Elector’s table.
And (which is a more entirely trustworthy statement, and one which
Toland would hardly have made had there really been no contrast
observable on this score with contemporary English habits) he adds
that the vice of drinking, for which the German nation is so much
branded, is so far from reigning at the Hanoverian court, that he
never knew greater sobriety than is to be found there.
Footnote 139:
I have already touched on her grief at her son Prince Christian’s
death by drowning in 1703; but the passage in which she refers to it
in a letter to the elder Schütz should be read as giving proof not
only of her maternal affection, but of the deep religious feeling at
the bottom of her heart. (See _Briefe an Hannoversche Diplomaten_
(1905), p. 175.)
-----
Those, wrote Elizabeth Charlotte, who thought her aunt incapable of
being of use in affairs of State, could have little knowledge of her
intellectual powers. We have seen, however, that during her husband’s
lifetime she had been allowed little direct interference in state
concerns, though on several occasions Ernest Augustus had benefited both
from listening to her advice and from utilising her personal influence.
Her eldest son was not the kind of man to concede, like a sultan at
Constantinople, a position of acknowledged control over his Government
to his mother, the Electress Dowager. When unable to render to Leibniz a
service solicited by him, she wrote rather bitterly that there were
times when she found silence best. But, apart from the Succession
question, towards which she, of course, occupied a distinct position of
her own, a considerable sphere of political influence remained open to
her in the last period of her life. More especially, she rendered
excellent service by maintaining a good understanding with the court of
Berlin, and by restoring it when the relations between the two courts
had become strained, and her daughter proved unable to manage them. The
influence which had been established over King Frederick I of Prussia by
his ‘_gnädigste Mama_,’ she contrived, though she saw through him, to
exercise even after her daughter’s death.
But even Sophia’s ‘nimbleness of mind,’ to use another expression of her
favourite niece’s, was not so marked a characteristic of her as was the
reasonableness which proceeded in nearly equal proportions from
intellectual enlightenment and from a beneficent disposition towards
humanity. She was, wrote Leibniz about 1701, ‘entirely on the side of
reason; consequently, all measures calculated to make kings and peoples
follow reason, will meet with her approval.’ A rationalist in the
stricter sense of the term she can hardly be called; though her wholly
unembarrassed way of expressing herself on any subject in heaven or
earth at times resembles a want of reverence.[140] She was irritated by
Toland’s restless tongue; but, while thanking Burnet for putting her on
her guard, indicated that she was too old for Toland to give her another
twist (perhaps this may be a coarse translation of ‘_pli_’) in religion
than that to which she had been long accustomed. For the rest, it was
not, she said, her habit to ‘catechise’ English visitors. Anthony
Collins’ plea for ‘Free-thinking’ struck her as both mischievous and
ridiculously superfluous—‘more especially in England, where there was
such a multitude of factions’; ‘Free thinquers,’ she observed, when
complaining of his insolence in sending her the book, ‘are against all
religions.’ All men, she allowed, might like to think as they choose so
long as their conduct was honourable; but in a well-governed State all
men ought not to be free to publish their opinions. Herein her
conscientiousness as a German Princess no doubt counted for something.
Thus, when she was asked to lend her aid towards inducing the East
Frisian Government to proceed against the spreading eccentricities of
the Pietists, she upheld the rights of authority. ‘Lutheran Princes,’
she declared, ‘are the Popes of our Church, and must be obeyed.’ For
herself, she had a thoroughgoing dislike of anything ‘enthusiastic,’ and
would not hear of shoemakers (like Jacob Behmen) becoming inspired
prophets instead of sticking to their lasts.[141] More than this: Kuno
Fischer rightly says that ‘to her clear practical intellect the
mysteries of religion remained obscure and alien’; and, when he asserts
that she was at bottom a deist in her opinions, this is in so far true,
that, while she avowed her belief in a personal Creator, she cannot be
shown to have gone further in any declaration of her convictions. In
1709, Leibniz informed Toland that the Electress ‘was accustomed to
quote and give particular praise to that passage of Scripture which
demands whether it be consistent with reason that He that planted the
ear should not hear, and He that formed the eye should not see?’ At the
same time, her latitudinarianism was perfectly candid. She certainly (in
1702) encouraged the notion which had occurred to her son-in-law, the
King of Prussia, of introducing the English Church liturgy into the
Calvinistic services, telling him that he might then call himself
Defender of the Faith. On the other hand, she had no sympathy with the
views of what in one of her letters she calls ‘_Heyschortz_’ men;[142]
she laughed at an English clergyman who refused to set his foot in a
Calvinist ‘temple,’ and she seriously blamed the early attempts of Queen
Anne, as she interpreted them, to force the Presbyterians into
conformity both in Scotland and in England. It was as a declared
adherent of the Reformed or (as in England alone it was called)
Calvinist confession, in which she had been brought up, that, as Toland
notes, she built a ‘pretty church’ in the New Town of Hanover for the
French Huguenot refugees, to which in his day King William III liberally
contributed; and she seems to have at least intended to build a church
for the German members of the same religious body. ‘You must know,’ she
humorously wrote to Leibniz on this occasion, ‘that I am _une dame fort
zêlée_.’ It was probably no mere commonplace of shortsighted criticism
when, in 1700, about which time the idea of seeking to evangelise the
heathen was first taking root in Germany, she pronounced it ‘a fine
enterprise indeed’ to send out missionaries to India. ‘To me it seems,’
she remarked, ‘that the first thing ought to be to make good Christians
at home in Germany, without going to so great a distance for the purpose
of manufacturing them.’ In a word, she should be credited with genuine
religious feeling; though demonstrativeness, whether on this or on any
other subject, was altogether out of her way. And she hated religious
factiousness, which she thought domesticated in England.[143]
-----
Footnote 140:
Among such passages can hardly be excluded her finding fault with the
Apostles, none of whom had been at the pains of eliciting from Lazarus
his experiences after death. Had anyone brought him to court, her own
natural inquisitiveness would certainly have prompted her to ask him
so obvious a question.
Footnote 141:
It has been seen earlier in this volume how she declined to be edified
by the peculiarities of Labadie and Labadism, and how sceptical she
had proved as to some new method of ‘healing’ imported from Holland at
the time of her husband’s final illness. Both she and Leibniz,
however, showed some interest in the vagaries of Rosemunde von Assing,
a young lady whose pretensions caused a good deal of trouble at
Lüneburg, and whom Molanus and the orthodox clergy proposed to clap
into prison. Leibniz thought the case worth attention, though its
phenomena might be ascribed to natural causes.
Footnote 142:
‘They say,’ she writes in 1711, ‘that the Bishops are busily preaching
Passive Obedience, although they had much better hold their tongues
and not interfere in matters of State.’ Thus, notwithstanding her
Stewart blood and her own protestations of impartiality, she had
something of the Whig in her, after all.
Footnote 143:
‘In all countries of the world,’ she wrote in 1703, ‘religion serves
the ends of morality. It is only in England that religion, I am sorry
to say, serves to create cabals.’
-----
We have spoken of the Electress Sophia’s profession of the Reformed
faith—a fact as to which, although it has been called into question,
there cannot really be any doubt. As we saw, she was, according to her
own account, in her childhood taught the Heidelberg Catechism; and, when
she married the Lutheran Ernest Augustus, it was arranged that, though
she was to take no Calvinist minister with her to Hanover, one should
visit the town three or four times in each year, in order to administer
the Sacrament to her. Toland explicitly states (as de Gourville, who in
1687 had a little scheme of his own for bringing over her husband and
his family to Rome, had also stated at an earlier date) that the
Electress was a Calvinist; but he adds, in illustration of the tolerance
prevailing at the Court of Hanover, that ‘most of her women and other
immediate servants were Lutherans, just as her son the Elector, though
himself a Lutheran, had many Calvinists belonging to him; and both their
Highnesses, to show a good example and their unfeigned charity in these
lesser differences, do often go to church together.’[144] Their only
daughter married a Calvinist,[145] and Sophia herself steadily adhered
to the confession in which she was born, though her latitudinarian
tendencies fell in easily enough with the tolerant principles prevailing
in the Lutheran Church of Hanover, and represented by the head of its
ecclesiastical administration, the worthy ‘Abbot’ Molanus.[146] Nor is
there any reason for supposing that, had she been actually summoned to
ascend the English throne, she would, in the matter of religion, have
failed to do what was expected of her. Early in 1713, she wrote to
Leibniz that Molanus had so well explained to her his Lutheran creed,
that there had been some talk of putting his exposition into print for
publication in England. Clearly, it was not any question of this kind
which would have interfered with her accession to the throne. She had
sufficient confidence in herself to shrink from no step approved by both
her reason and her conscience. Moreover, there are indications that she
by no means regarded the Church of her mother and her brother’s native
land with coldness; and, had Leibniz apprehended any objection on her
part, he would hardly have proposed that the English establishment which
he desired for the Electress should include an Anglican chapel. Indeed,
in 1703, she is found expressing a wish that Queen Anne would carry her
ecclesiastical zeal as far as Hanover, and contribute to the English
church there; ‘in which event we would call it the English Church, and
read the Book of Common Prayer in both tongues.’
-----
Footnote 144:
Perhaps it may be well not to enquire too closely as to their
behaviour when they got there. Sometimes, we are told, the Electress
fell asleep; occasionally, she wrote letters to her brother, taking
care, however, not to disturb her husband when engaged in reading a
play, which he did audibly.
Footnote 145:
Owing, however, to the different forms of faith professed by Court and
people in Prussia, the tolerance practised at Berlin was even ampler
than that prevailing at Hanover; and the subsequent marriage-treaty
between the Prussian Crown Prince Frederick William and Sophia
Dorothea the younger, the only daughter of the Elector George Lewis of
Hanover, provided for her being allowed to adhere to the Lutheran form
of faith.
Footnote 146:
Gerhard Wolter Molanus, who held the Abbacy of the secularised
Cistercian foundation of Loccum, situate in the forest solitude near
Rehburg and the celebrated Steinhuder Lake, plays a considerable part
in Sophia’s correspondence. He exercised a great influence in the
direction of toleration and irenic ideals, more, however, by his
hierarchical position and personality than by his writings. The motto
of his life, ‘_Beati pacifici_,’ admirably accorded with Cistercian
principles. He lived to an advanced age—so advanced, that his mental
powers at last collapsed, and the good old man is said to have fancied
himself a barley-corn. At the small watering-place of Rehburg, the
Hanoverian Court held a _villeggiatura_—or rather a sojourn under
tents—as early as 1691.
-----
The one change, however, to which she would at no time have
consented,—not even, whatever de Gourville may have believed, when her
husband was entertaining some such thought in connexion with his long
effort for the Ninth Electorate[147]—was conversion to the Church of
Rome. In her old age, when Princess Caroline of Ansbach, for whom she
cherished a particular affection, was systematically tempted to qualify
herself by conversion to Rome for the hand of Archduke Charles,
afterwards the Emperor Charles VI, there can be little doubt that the
Princess was encouraged in her resistance by the Electress as well as by
Leibniz.
-----
Footnote 147:
The scheme tempted him, not only as likely to approve itself to the
Emperor and the Catholic Electors, but also as one which would
practically have secured the see of Osnabrück in perpetuity to his
House. It illustrates the popular ignorance in England concerning the
House of Hanover, that, if Toland is to be trusted, a report was
current that this House ‘was so indifferent in point of religion, as
generally to breed up one of their sons a Papist, in order to qualify
him for Bishop of Osnabrug.’
-----
Sophia was no stranger to one of the loftiest among the lofty
conceptions which occupied the great mind of her friend and counsellor,
Leibniz,—that which aimed at the reunion of Christendom. The
correspondence on this topic between Leibniz and Bossuet, which took
place in 1691-5, and after a pause was renewed in 1699, was brought
about through the joint mediation of Sophia and her sister, the Abbess
of Maubuisson. Mixed up in the transaction was Madame de Brinon, who
found a refuge at Maubuisson after the sudden termination of her rule at
Saint-Cyr. This good lady, whose ardent temperament was in glaring
contrast with Bossuet’s imperturbable calm, made repeated attempts to
bring the Electress of Hanover back into the fold, _en attendant_ its
enlargement by means of the Reunion. But Sophia was not at all flattered
by these high-minded efforts. She trusted—so she told Madame de
Brinon—in the goodness of God, who could not have created her in order
that she should be lost; for the rest, she could not reconcile herself
to the persecutions of the Protestants in France.[148] But her aversion
from Roman Catholicism went further than this. Although at times she
spoke of such doctrines of the Church of Rome as the Intercession of
Saints with nothing more than contemptuous indifference, she
occasionally assumed an attitude of open hostility towards a creed
which, as a child, she had been taught to hate. Of all religions, she
told Lord Strafford, there was none that she abhorred so much as the
Popish; for there was none so contrary to Christianity. Other passages
to much the same effect might be cited. For the rest, in an undated
letter to Madame de Brinon, Sophia, with her characteristic humour and
perhaps her characteristic want of external reverence, so clearly
explains her general religious position, that we may conclude our
attempt to indicate it by extracting from this letter the following
passage:—
The tranquillity of mind which God has granted to me on this topic, I
take to be so great a blessing, that He would not have bestowed it
upon any person whom He had not chosen to be among the number of His
elect. David wished to be only a door-keeper in the house of the Lord;
and I lay claim to no more important charge. Those who are more
enlightened than I am will perhaps fill higher places; for we are told
that in the Father’s house there are many mansions. When you are in
yours and I am in mine, I will not fail to pay you the first call; and
I fancy that we shall agree very well; for there will then no longer
be any question of religious controversies.
-----
Footnote 148:
To these persecutions she repeatedly returns. In 1709, we find her
expressing the opinion that the ‘poor’ French ‘galley-slaves’ should
not be forgotten in the peace negotiations then on foot.
-----
Leibniz, whose name has already so often occurred in this chapter and in
this volume, was consulted by the Electress Sophia in other matters
besides religion, philosophy, and science. Both as enjoying her
confidence and on his own account, he was a welcome guest at several
courts, including the Imperial; and to the Houses of Hanover and Celle,
in whose joint employment he stood as historiographer, he rendered
invaluable service, not only in that capacity, but also as a publicist,
on important occasions, demanding a comprehensive as well as effective
treatment of the problems handled by him. But his direct influence upon
the policy of the dynasty seems practically to have been limited to the
question of the English Succession, which, as we have seen, had, up to
the passing of the Act of Settlement, been regarded as more or less
personal to the Electress, and which, after that date, continued to be
largely, though by no means entirely, dealt with in the same way. Thus
his position at the Electoral Court, where there is no sign of his
having been consulted in matters of general politics by either Ernest
Augustus or George Lewis, was perhaps occasionally misunderstood at the
time, and has certainly been misunderstood since. He was never the
Electress’ secretary, or even her quasi-official political adviser; he
was only her trusted personal friend and servant, whose function in such
matters was to suggest rather than to advise, and whose influence upon
the conduct of affairs in which the Electress took an interest
accordingly varied at different times. His exertions as to the English
Succession, before 1701, have been already noticed. After the passing of
the Act of Settlement, the Electress Dowager appointed, as her
confidential agent to England, a diplomatic adventurer of the name of
Falaiseau, who had come over to Hanover in Lord Macclesfield’s suite;
and his reports seem, as a rule, to have passed through the hands of
Leibniz. From 1702 onwards, as will be seen, the conduct of the
relations of the House of Hanover began to fall largely into the hands
of Bothmer; and, in 1705, on the union between Celle and Hanover,
Bernstorff, and with him Robethon, passed out of the service of the late
Duke George William into that of his nephew, the Elector. The more
regular system of diplomatic representation at the Court of St. James of
itself diminished the influence of Leibniz on these relations, more
especially as Sophia never seems to have had much personal liking either
for Bernstorff (perhaps because of his ineradicable ill-will against
Brandenburg-Prussia, perhaps for other reasons) or for Robethon, who
became invaluable to the Elector as his private secretary. The
credentials of the Hanoverian envoys—the Schützes, Bothmer, and
Grote[149]—and residents at the Court of St. James—de Beyrie and
Kreyenberg—were made out in the joint names of the Elector and the
Electress Dowager, and all the official letters sent to England from
this time forward in the name of either were drafted by Robethon. Thus,
notwithstanding the active interest taken by Leibniz in a question the
progress of which had owed much and continued to be indebted to his
assiduity, its threads were no longer continuously in his hands. Whether
this was a misfortune for its ultimate development and solution, need
not be here discussed. From his earlier days onwards he had exhibited
something of the defect habitual to politicians more exclusively
academical than himself, who had a considerable experience of
affairs—the defect of excess, which includes the mistake of not letting
well alone. Not only, however, did the force of his genius enable him to
find out the heart of every political problem to which he addressed
himself, but the universality of his insight made clear to him its
various aspects, and the energy of his mind supplied the impulse which
converts design into action.[150] Finally, his literary skill,[151]
added to his gifts of finding his material and disposing it according to
the leading ideas with which he approached it, made him in the times in
which his lot fell, as it made Gentz, an infinitely inferior
personality, in another period of even deeper national humiliation, the
foremost publicist of his age.[152]
-----
Footnote 149:
Besides these, Count Ernest Augustus von Platen came over on two
ceremonial occasions. (See the _List of Diplomatic Representatives and
Agents, England and North Germany, 1687-1727_, contributed by J. F.
Chance to _Notes on the Diplomatic Relations of England and Germany_;
ed. C. H. Firth. Oxford, 1907.)
Footnote 150:
See E. Pfleiderer, _Leibniz als Patriot, Staatsmann, und
Bildungsträger_ (Leipzig, 1870), and, of course, Kuno Fischer’s great
work.—Perhaps the most signal instance of the way in which in the
political thought of Leibniz past and future came into contact (he
says himself: ‘_le présent est chargé du passé et gros de l’avenir_’)
is, as Ernst Curtius says (_Alterthum und Gegenwart_, pp. 219 _sqq._),
his famous Egyptian plan, of which an account was published in a
pamphlet in London, _à propos_ of the French invasion of 1803, and as
to which see Guhrauer’s _Life_, and K. G. Blumenthal, _Leibnizens
Ægyptischer Plan_ (Leipzig, 1869).
Footnote 151:
Nothing need be said here of his minor literary efforts, such as his
tributes in verse to the Electress Sophia.
Footnote 152:
In 1688, Leibniz prepared the counter-manifesto to Louis XIV’s
declaration of war in that year.
-----
That Leibniz, whose political services to the Electress and her dynasty
were, in any case, highly important, should at the same time have become
her chosen intimate and personal friend, forms one of his titles to the
grateful remembrance of those who believe this pair to have been worthy
of one another. From his conversation and correspondence, which, in her
later years, became more and more of a necessity to Sophia, her active
and receptive mind derived constant stimulus and refreshment; while his
humane as well as lofty wisdom, at no time seeking to avoid contact with
the actualities of life, but neither ever conceding to them a larger
claim than was their due, helped to fortify her character against the
risk of being mastered by the element of frivolity inborn in most of her
mother’s children. Leibniz’ own activity at Hanover, from the time when
(as far back as 1673) he had first entered into the service of Duke John
Frederick, was remarkably varied. He held the offices of librarian,
archivist, and historiographer; fostered, among other activities in the
dominions of his patrons, the endeavours of technical science, as in the
instance of the mining industry of the Harz; and organised both
scientific and literary effort, in connexion with his onerous task as
the historian of the Guelfs, with his work as a philologer and with the
studies in mental and moral philosophy, which were, in 1710, crowned by
the production of his _Théodicée_. His influence upon the foundation of
academies as levers for the advancement of scientific research[153] was
by no means limited to Berlin, where success had attended on his labours
in consequence of the sympathetic support of Sophia’s daughter. The
hopes placed by him on the third of the illustrious ladies of the
Hanoverian dynasty who felt themselves honoured by his intimacy, were,
notwithstanding her loyal efforts at the outset, doomed to
disappointment. The Electoral Princess (Caroline of Ansbach) had been
solaced by his _Théodicée_ in a season of great anxiety; but, when the
political consummation to which Leibniz had so actively helped to
prepare had been actually achieved, he had to remain behind in Germany;
and she found herself unequal to the task either of impressing his
claims upon her impassive father-in-law—or of reconciling his merits
with those of Newton.
-----
Footnote 153:
See L. Keller, _Leibniz u. die Deutschen Sozietäten des 17 Jahrh._, in
Jahrgang x. of _Vorträge u. Aufsätze a. d. Comenius-Gesellschaft_
(Berlin).
-----
During the years of Sophia’s widowhood, to which we must here confine
ourselves, Leibniz was drawn nearer to her, not only by intellectual and
moral sympathy, but also by the discomforts to which she was subjected
by the Elector’s coldness, and by that Prince’s habit of expecting all
services to be absolved as per contract. Sophia was unable to secure the
fulfilment of Leibniz’s wish for a sinecure like that by which his
friend, ‘Abbot’ Molanus, was recompensed for his ecclesiastical
services. But her friendship with Leibniz was not dependent upon favours
given or received. Not only was the encouragement which he derived from
his intimacy with her and from that which through her he enjoyed with
Sophia Charlotte and Caroline, of high value to him in the labours and
in the trials of his life; but in the Electress Sophia’s case, at all
events, her nature was in many respects supplementary to his own. Their
correspondence thus furnishes a memorial of a friendship alike sincere
and productive; and their names will always remain inseparable from one
another.
Sophia Charlotte, though her marriage had long since made it necessary
for her to leave her mother’s side, and though the trials to which she
had since been subjected had greatly added to that mother’s anxieties,
and had often been mitigated by her tact and good-humour rather than by
those of the Queen herself, remained Sophia’s truest joy, till taken
away by death in 1705. Mother and daughter had kept up a continuous
correspondence with one another, besides interchanging visits when
possible; nor could the completeness of the confidence existing between
them be better illustrated than by the treatment which, after Sophia
Charlotte’s death, it was thought judicious to apply to the documents of
their mutual affection. At the instigation of Leibniz, the extant
letters of the Electress Sophia to her daughter were committed to the
flames at Berlin, so that only a small remnant of the series, copied out
by him for his own use, have been preserved. Inasmuch as neither have
any letters from Sophia Charlotte to her mother come down to us, they
may be surmised to have been similarly destroyed by way of precaution.
Possibly, these proceedings may have been in part due to evidence
contained in these letters as to efforts made, in the Hanoverian
interest, at the Court of Berlin by Leibniz or others. The chief trouble
of Sophia Charlotte’s married life—King Frederick I’s infatuation for
the Countess von Wartenberg—had been particularly acute in the period
just preceding the Queen’s death; and her last visit to her mother (in
January, 1705) could only be carried out by her submitting to the
condition that an invitation to Hanover should also be sent to her
detested rival. During this visit Sophia Charlotte died, the victim of a
painful and incurable disease that befell her when her intellectual
abilities were at their full height. Her death, even more impressively
than her life, proved the justice of her grandson Frederick the Great’s
tribute to her strength of soul. The illness of the Queen had been
concealed from her mother, who herself lay ill; and thus, as she wrote,
heart-broken, to her widowed son-in-law, she lost her darling child
without even setting eyes upon her.[154]
-----
Footnote 154:
After Queen Sophia Charlotte’s death there was less love lost than
ever between the King, her husband, and the Elector, her brother. In
1711, the Electress Sophia, speaking of a melancholy journey of her
son-in-law’s, observes that it was a Divine punishment on him that he
should hate the Elector without any reason whatever.
-----
Princess Wilhelmina Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach had, in her
thirteenth year, been left an orphan by the death of her mother, who had
been united to the Elector John George IV of Saxony as her second
husband. In 1696, the child had been placed under the care of her
guardians, afterwards the first King and Queen in Prussia. Thus
Lützenburg became the home of Caroline’s childhood; and here she became
familiar with the intellectual society which Sophia Charlotte loved to
gather around her, and above all with Leibniz. The nature of their
intercourse may be gathered from the letter, sublime in thought, which
he wrote to her on the occasion of Sophia Charlotte’s death. Only a few
months after this event—in September, 1705—Caroline, lovely in person
and richly endowed in intellect, had illustrated the saying of the
Electress Sophia, that ‘nowadays princesses are sacrificial victims.’
After a proper interval had been allowed to elapse upon the breakdown of
the project of marrying Caroline to Archduke Charles, the Electoral
Prince George Augustus, to whom the thoughts of his grandmother, the
Electress, had been directed already during the attempts made in 1704 to
induce Caroline to change her religion, paid a preliminary visit to
Ansbach. The rumour which had arisen in 1702, that the Electoral Prince
was to find a consort in Sweden and Queen Sophia Charlotte’s
counter-suggestion of the Duchess Marie-Elizabeth of Holstein-Gottorp,
had alike come to nothing. On September 2nd, 1705, the marriage between
the Electoral Prince and Caroline of Ansbach was celebrated at Hanover.
Here Caroline spent the following nine years of her life, beyond a doubt
its happiest period; and, during the remainder of Sophia’s own
existence, she in a large measure filled the place in her affections
which her daughter Sophia Charlotte had so long occupied. The
congeniality of their tastes and dispositions made her a delightful
companion at Herrenhausen to her grandmother-in-law; and thus a kindly
fortune granted to Sophia, who was so singularly capable of enjoying it,
the truest joy of old age. The Electress repeatedly speaks of the
happiness of the marriage; nor can there be any doubt as to the genuine
affection on both sides which constituted that happiness. Early in 1707,
the Electoral Princess gave birth to her eldest son (destined afterwards
to disappoint an indulgent world as Frederick, Prince of Wales), upon
whom, a year later, his great-grandmother is found bestowing an
infantine equipment for a fancy ball; and three daughters were
subsequently born to the young pair, before they accompanied King George
I to England. The prospects of a permanent establishment of the
Hanoverian dynasty upon the British throne were thus signally advanced
by this marriage; and to these prospects and their initial realisation
we must now finally turn. They filled Sophia’s last years with anxieties
and uncertainties; yet, on the whole, life flowed more easily for her in
this final period of her existence; although the joyousness of girlhood,
which she so vividly recalls in her _Memoirs_, was a thing of the past,
together with the experiences—some grotesque, some painful, some
tragic—of her married days. The deep agitations of her life were at an
end; and she might pace the Herrenhausen gardens without caring too
deeply even for the chances of the English Succession.
Thus we may imagine this spirited and sensible lady, at any time in
these last thirteen years of her long life, exemplifying the old saw of
‘_mens sana in corpore sano_.’ In the main, she enjoyed excellent
health; and Leibniz’ description of the day of her arrival at Lützenburg
is certainly astonishing for a lady of seventy-four. It included, in
accordance with her usual habits, two hours of walking exercise. Erect
and handsome, with her mother’s aquiline nose and abundant hair, she
was, if not a Gloriana as imagined by poets, a princess worthy to mount
a royal throne—or at least one who, if placed there, would of a
certainty not lose the firmness of her footing by reason of such an
elevation.
After, in 1701, a copy of the Act pledging King and Parliament to the
new limitation of the Succession had been placed in the hands of the
Electress Sophia, thirteen long years of expectancy awaited her, which
might have made a less stout heart grow faint. Or, perhaps, it would be
more correct to say that a nature less happily balanced, and uninured by
experience, both inherited and personal, to the necessity of patience
and resignation, might have fallen into mistake upon mistake, and have
thus courted failure. Sophia, prudently choosing her own path, almost to
the last did nothing to affront the approach of success. To suppose,
however, that either her policy or that of her House was one of masterly
inactivity, would be almost as contrary to fact as the converse
assumption that, either before or after 1701, she was possessed by an
absorbing desire to find herself seated on the English throne. The
former supposition is confuted by the single circumstance that, by way
of furnishing the necessary means in the event of a sudden crisis, a sum
of not less than 300,000 dollars was secretly provided by the Committee
of the Calenberg Estates, and placed in the hands of the Hanoverian
envoy in London—the secret of this expenditure being kept for not less
than seventy years.[155] The other assumption is simply irreconcilable
with the whole tenor of Sophia’s life.
-----
Footnote 155:
In a letter from the Electress to Bothmer (_Briefe an Hannoversche
Diplomaten_, p. 319) she mentions some money of hers in England; but
the passage seems to refer to a private investment.
-----
The festivities at Hanover and Celle, on the occasion of the
transmission of the Act of Settlement, were hardly at an end, when King
William III had a meeting at the Loo with his old friend Duke George
William. The Duke was accompanied by his grandson, the Electoral Prince
George Augustus, whom, according to Toland, the King received as a son.
This Prince certainly seems in his youth to have displayed attractive
qualities, which were afterwards driven into the background by his
master quality, self-conceit; curiously enough, though he was a fair
linguist, it had not been thought necessary to make him well acquainted
with the English tongue. At this interview, the account of which shows
how loyally the old Duke of Celle was working for the interests of the
dynasty, King William promised to use his influence in order to obtain
from Parliament an annual revenue for the Electress Sophia, and
mentioned his intention of inviting her and the Electoral Prince to
visit England in the coming spring. On his sounding his next heir, the
Princess Anne, at all events as to the proposal of summoning the
Electress, she is said to have pretended to be still in hopes of an
heir. The Electress on her side seems to have trusted in the fulfilment
of the King’s promise, not only during the remainder of his reign, but
for a few months afterwards.
But no time was left to the King for carrying out his design. On
September 6th, 1701, nine days after the conclusion of the Grand
Alliance to which William III had set the seal on his visit to Holland,
James II died; and, by recognising his son as King of England, Louis XIV
once again, and more completely by his own act than ever, identified
himself with the Stewart cause. His grandson, King Philip of Spain,
followed his example; and Pope Clement XI publicly extolled the action
of Louis XIV, as entitling him to the gratitude of posterity. In the
final form of the instrument of the Grand Alliance—which William III was
not to live to see actually concluded—a clause was inserted binding the
contracting Powers not to conclude peace with France, until the King of
England should have received satisfaction for the grave insult involved
in the recognition of the ‘pretended Prince of Wales’ as King. In other
words, the War of the Spanish Succession had become a War of the English
Succession also; and, to whatever extent this fact might be overlooked
during the course of the conflict, it was certain to become prominent
again so soon as a settlement began to be seriously discussed. Inasmuch
as the first public suggestion of such a clause had been made by a
prominent Tory politician (Edward Seymour), it can hardly have been
inspired from Hanover, though in a letter to the Electress, written as
early as 1701, Leibniz had stated such a stipulation to be desirable.
In England, the recognition of the Pretender by Louis XIV had an
immediate consequence in the Attainder and Abjuration Acts, passed in
January, 1702, by William III’s sixth Parliament. The Act of Attainder
had been criticised beforehand by the Electress Sophia, who, in October,
1701, told Leibniz that there was an intention of declaring the poor
Prince of Wales a rebel, such as Monmouth had been declared to be before
him, ‘though his personal merit deserved a better fate.’ Why should she
have refused this modicum of sympathy to her kinsman, who, not more
unfortunate in his fate than he was in his infatuation, was about this
very time rejoicing that Pope Clement would manifestly ‘leave no stone
unturned to show how much he favours us’? The Abjuration Act, which led
to long and warm debates in both Houses, provided both for abjuring the
‘pretended Prince of Wales,’ and for swearing fidelity to the ‘rightful
and lawful King’ and ‘his heirs according to the Act of Settlement.’ A
motion in the Commons, carried by a single vote, made these engagements
obligatory; the opposition in the Lords ended in nothing but a protest,
the list of whose signatories, including the names of Craven and
Jeffreys, as it were mirrors the story of the downfall of the Stewart
monarchy in England.
On March 8th, 1702, King William III died, after a fortnight’s illness
following on his fall from his horse. To Portland, the faithful friend
for whom the King had asked, without being able to speak to him
intelligibly, shortly before his death, the Electress Sophia, when the
first shock of the blow had passed over, wrote in unaffected sorrow—
I assure you, Sir, that I have received with much pleasure the proof
of your kind remembrance of me, and that, in the midst of the sad
change which has come upon us, I called to mind that you would weep
with us for the loss which the whole of Christendom has undergone. But
when one does not die oneself, one has to see many others pass away;
and I cannot think that I shall live to see yet another calamity for
England of the same kind; for Queen Anne is much younger than I am,
who have entered my seventy-second year. Nevertheless, I feel much
happier than a Queen; for, God be thanked, I am still in very good
health, and have joined my daughter here, in order to enjoy myself
with her here in her country-seat.[156]
By the death, on March 8th, 1702, of King William III and the accession
of Queen Anne, the prospect which the Act of Settlement seemed to have
once for all thrown open to the House of Hanover was again clouded over.
Queen Anne, indeed, at once sent an assurance to the Electress through
the Hanoverian resident, the elder Schütz, that her sentiments towards
the House of Hanover were the same as those of her predecessor,[157] and
a few days afterwards repeated the message in writing. An Order in
Council directed the Archbishop of Canterbury to insert the name of the
Princess Sophia in the Book of Common Prayer; and, as was usual in such
cases, this Order was in due course sent on to Dublin.[158] It has been
observed, nor is there great exception to be taken to the remark, that
beyond the issue of this Order nothing was done by Queen Anne in the
whole of the earlier period of her reign on behalf of the Hanoverian
Succession. In other words, the proposals discussed at the Loo, which
were to have resulted in the payment of an annuity to the Electress, and
to her or the Electoral Prince residing in England, were not carried
further. Interchanges of civility, however, took place; and the Earl of
Winchelsea arrived at Hanover, in order to return the congratulations
brought thence by Count Platen on the occasion of Queen Anne’s
accession. But, though the special mission was flattering, Sophia’s
wish, that the ambassador might bring with him some money which she
might apply to the necessities of her sons Christian and Maximilian,
remained unfulfilled. For the rest, she told the Raugravine Louisa that,
for all the compliments which had passed, ‘time would show’ whether she
was still wanted in England; and she continued to bear herself calmly,
avoiding the appearance of excessive zeal that some of her partisans
could not deny themselves. She had thought it a piece of impertinence,
when, after his return to England, Toland had, early in this year,
followed up his _Anglia Libera_ by another publication provocatively
entitled _Reasons for addressing His Majesty to invite into England
their Highnesses the Electress Dowager and the Electoral Prince of
Hanover_; which, soon after Queen Anne’s accession, was duly censured by
the House of Lords. The Electress had reasons for disliking a
championship which under King William would have been superfluous and
was now inopportune. She could not consider Toland so ‘_infâme_’ as
Cresset painted him; and she took care that in her presence he should
not say a disrespectful word about Queen Anne. But, when, in 1702,
Toland found it convenient again to quit England for Germany, he left
the court of Hanover unvisited; nor does he seem to have reappeared
there till 1707.
-----
Footnote 156:
This letter is translated from one of the unpublished letters to the
Earl of Portland mentioned in the Preface.
Footnote 157:
She also renewed the assent given by William III to the measures of
force adopted at this time by the Elector of Hanover and the Duke of
Celle against the Dukes of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel.
Footnote 158:
In September, Sophia writes that Lord Stamford has been good enough to
transmit to her a dozen copies of the Prayer-book, with her name
inserted in it; but that there are not a dozen persons in Hanover able
to join her in using them.
-----
The Elector’s instincts as to the doubtfulness of Queen Anne’s real
sentiments on the subject of the Hanoverian Succession were justified by
what ensued. The hope of an immediate grant to the Heiress Presumptive
out of the ample Civil List good Queen Anne frustrated by the highly
popular step of making over to the Exchequer £100,000 towards lightening
the burdens of the nation. The claims upon the national resources were
many and urgent; and Parliament could perhaps hardly be expected to
consider how much a subvention was needed by the Electress, more
especially in view of the presents which, in accordance with the usage
of the times, she as well as the Elector had to make to a succession of
English special ambassadors. There can, however, be no doubt but that,
already in this early part of Queen Anne’s reign, and even before the
Toryism of her first Parliament had encouraged in her the tendency which
her choice of ministers had implied, deliberate attempts had been made
to influence unfavourably her attitude towards the Succession of the
House of Hanover. Moreover, her nature was so peculiarly prone to strong
personal attachments, and her gift of insight into the motives of men
was so unmistakably accompanied by an absence of all real power of
political judgment, that she could hardly but be dominated by a strong
prepossession against the line so likely to succeed her on the throne of
her ancestors. Yet, hitherto, neither the Electress Sophia nor any of
the members of her House—and least of all her impassive eldest son, who
at one time had been supposed to have a chance of the hand of the
Princess Anne—had been on unfriendly terms with the new Queen; nor is
there any reason for supposing her to have imparted to any of them a
share in the wild scheme rumoured to have been set on foot for ousting
her from the Succession. When, however, in May, 1702, the Whig Earl of
Carlisle, the First Lord of the Treasury, carried in the House of Lords
his demand for an enquiry into the scandalous rumour which asserted that
King William had intended by a kind of posthumous _coup d’état_ to raise
the Electoral Prince to the throne, Queen Anne showed no desire for the
vindication of her predecessor’s good faith towards herself, and
pointedly dismissed Carlisle from office. Nor is it probable that, at
this early stage, the Queen was much intent upon the interests of her
half-brother, the Pretender. The favourite advisers by whom she was
swayed—Marlborough and Godolphin—could have no wish to hurry her
intervention on behalf of either of the two sides, with both of which
they desired to stand well; and the Tory majority in the Commons,
typified by the Speaker, Harley, were certainly not prepared to unsettle
the Act of Settlement. The Act for the further Security of the
Protestant Succession passed in December, 1702, which declared it high
treason to seek to defeat the Succession to the Crown as now limited by
law, or to set aside the next Succession, followed the precedent of a
similar Act passed in the previous reign, and accordingly encountered no
resistance. Thus Queen Anne was slow to take up any definite attitude
towards the political problem which overshadowed the whole course of her
reign; and she was consequently all the more unwilling, and remained so
from first to last, to listen to any suggestion of carrying out William
III’s promise and inviting the Electress Dowager and the Electoral
Prince, or either of them, to England. The probability of this plan
being brought forward, either as a practical proposal or by way of
testing the sincerity of her own views on the subject, acted as a
perennial irritant upon the Queen. Neither she nor her advisers are to
be blamed for leaving without response the suggestion, pardonably enough
made by Sophia, that the un-English title of ‘Hereditary Princess’
should be conferred upon her. Other signs were noticeable of the
uncertainty prevailing at the Court of St. James. At Hanover and
Herrenhausen, Cresset watched the Electress with a suspiciousness that
could not escape her attention, though she commented on it with her
usual _insouciance_; and Stepney even left off corresponding with her
and her intimates, in order not to give offence nearer home. In
conversing with the Englishmen and Scotchmen who attended the Court of
Hanover, anxious to promote its fortunes or their own, the Electress
naturally sought to emphasise her confidence in her august relative, the
Queen. But in her intimate correspondence she was fain to strike a
different key. She told the Raugravine Amalia that Queen Anne had no
desire to be survived by her, although (quoting a Dutch proverb which
she has made classical) she allowed that ‘_creaking wagons go on for a
long time_,’ and suggested that the Queen’s real preference was for her
brother.[159] Matters continued very much in this stagnant and
unsatisfactory condition during the first three years (or thereabouts)
of Queen Anne’s reign. In March, 1694, Sophia writes with some
bitterness, that Queen Anne ‘seems to have more friendship for the King
of Prussia than for us, inasmuch as she speaks of the’ [Prussian] ‘and
says nothing of the Brunswick troops, without whom the battle’ [of
Blenheim] ‘could not have been won. This is a sample showing what is to
be expected in that quarter.’ And she adds that the statement in the
_Gazette_ of the great presents sent by the Queen to Hanover is untrue,
whoever caused it to be inserted.
-----
Footnote 159:
This, too, was the impression of Queen Sophia Charlotte at Berlin.
(See her letter to Bothmer, May 27th, 1702, in _Briefe an Hannoversche
Diplomaten_, p. 10.)
-----
It may, at this point, be noted that the violence of public feeling
which about this time disturbed Scotland had very seriously endangered
the prospects of the Succession of the House of Hanover in that kingdom.
Here, it was universally believed that Queen Anne cherished the secret
wish of securing the Succession to her brother; and no declarations to
the contrary exercised the slightest effect upon the stubbornness of
preconceived Scottish opinion. At the same time, a strong belief that
she meditated a Prelatic as well as a Jacobite reaction, led to the
anti-Episcopalian legislation of the last Scottish Parliament, which met
in 1703.[160] The Act of Security brought forward in this Parliament
provided that the Estates of the Realm should meet within twelve days
after the present Queen’s death, and should proceed to name a successor
professing the Protestant religion. A proposal to insert the name of the
Electress Sophia was rejected; but the ministers, besides frustrating an
attempt at inserting a series of limitations calculated to take away the
last vestige of authority from the Crown, also defeated a proposal to
limit the Protestantism of the successor to ‘the true Protestant
religion as by law established within this kingdom,’ which would have
excluded the Lutheranism of the House of Hanover. On the other hand, the
Government could not resist a clause, proposed by the Earl of Roxburghe,
precluding Parliament from naming, as successor to the Crown of
Scotland, the person who was successor to the Crown of England, unless
conditions should have been previously settled securing the interests of
Scotland against English or foreign interference. The Act of Security,
with this clause inserted in it, passed by large majorities; but the
Duke of Queensberry refused to give to it the royal assent. In 1704,
however, the national and religious agitation remaining unalloyed, the
Marquis of Tweeddale touched the Act with the royal sceptre: and a
condition of things was thus legalised which might at any time put an
end to the personal union of the two countries, or actually provoke war
between them. But time often provides its own remedy; and, in January,
1707, the Act of Union became law, whose Second Article, limiting the
Succession to Sophia and her heirs, had met with only a feeble
opposition upholding the provisions of the Act of Security. When the
Union was on the eve of actual accomplishment, the Electress Sophia
expressed herself as well satisfied, adding that, though she had never
supposed the Scottish lords against her, she thought it quite natural
that conditions should be imposed—another illustration of the way in
which she looked upon constitutional questions. In Ireland, the
Succession had already in the previous year been regulated by a measure
modelled upon the English Act of Settlement, but subjecting all
officials and magistrates to a rigid Church of England test.
-----
Footnote 160:
In June, 1702, Sophia had written that Scottish affairs seemed in a
troublesome state, but that she could hardly doubt that the Queen
would be prudent enough to leave the Scotch their _extempore_ prayers
... and that there would be no attempt to impose upon them bishops and
‘common prayer,’ by which means Charles I had spoilt everything.—For
an elucidation of the religious condition of Scotland as affecting the
question of the Hanoverian Succession, see Mr. Rait’s paper in
Appendix C.
-----
Even in this early period of Queen Anne’s reign, the Electress Sophia,
though, according to her wont, she abstained from all restless
manœuvring, was by no means without thought for the future. On June 4th,
1703, she signed three powers for Schütz, the envoy extraordinary in
London, authorising him, in the event of the Queen’s death, to bring
forward her lawful claim to the throne; and she kept up a correspondence
with friends in England, both directly and through Leibniz. In November,
1703, she put it to Schütz that, if Marlborough resigned the command in
the Low Countries, it would be right to appoint the Elector in his
place; ‘for if it is wished that the Elector should have a good opinion
of the English, they ought to do something towards making him entertain
such an opinion and enabling him in any court to support those who were
in his favour.’ As for Leibniz, though indefatigable and full of
initiative as ever, he naturally enough occasionally fell short of the
necessary familiarity with English persons and affairs. Thus, about this
very time, the Electress had to comment on his approval of a scheme for
marrying the Electoral Prince to one of Marlborough’s daughters, by
reminding him that the Duke had no more daughters in the matrimonial
market. Marlborough, however, gained the goodwill of the Elector, above
all by commending the behaviour of the Hanoverian troops at Blenheim;
and, on a visit to Hanover in December, 1704, while the laurels of his
great victory were still green, he completely won over the Electress by
the fascination of his manner. She declared that she had never seen
anyone ‘_plus aisé, plus civil, ny plus obligeant_,’ and that he was as
good a cavalier as he was a captain. The extraordinary civility shown to
him on this occasion, when a special household was provided for him and
other courtesies were multiplied,[161] was not thrown away. His
correspondence with the Electoral court—and with the Elector in
particular, whose admiration for the military genius of the great
commander was genuine—now became continuous.
-----
Footnote 161:
The Duke, we learn _inter alia_, played a game at cards with the
Electress and ‘Madame Bellmont.’ This Lady Bellmont or Bellamont, whom
Leibniz in vain begged the Electress not to admit into her intimacy,
was no other than Frances Bard, who claimed to be the widow of Prince
Rupert, and whose relations with him had certainly been of the most
intimate kind. She justified Leibniz by misusing her position at
Hanover to engage in Jacobite intrigue, thereby giving much trouble to
Cresset and to Edmund Poley, who succeeded him as envoy extraordinary
in 1703; and it is just conceivable that she may have in some measure
influenced the Electress in favour of the Pretender and his cause. She
died in 1708.
-----
The year 1705 marked an epoch in the history of the Succession question,
as we saw that it did in the personal life of the Electress Sophia, who,
during its course, lost not only her beloved daughter, but also her old
admirer and constant friend, Duke George William of Celle. All the
dominions of the Brunswick-Lüneburg line were now at last united under
the single rule of the Elector George Lewis, and into his coffers flowed
most of the great private wealth of his late uncle and father-in-law,
which had materially contributed to the high consideration enjoyed by
George William. About the same time the long-standing quarrel with the
elder (Wolfenbüttel) branch of the House of Brunswick was brought to a
close, and the House of Hanover stood stronger than ever before the
world. No season could have been more opportune for taking up the
question of the Succession with renewed earnestness. Its vigorous
prosecution was further favoured by the circumstance that the late Duke
of Celle’s prime minister, Baron Andreas Gottlieb von Bernstorff, now
passed into the Hanoverian service, and, on the death of Count Platen in
1709, became prime minister at Hanover. He was already a statesman of
proved ability, trained in the school of his father-in-law, Chancellor
Schütz, whom he describes as one of the greatest and most capable
ministers ever known to him. While he always kept his political ends
clearly in view, Bernstorff’s political action was marked by
ruthlessness that is apt to make a statesman of his type cordially hated
where he is not eagerly followed; and his bitter jealousy of
Brandenburg-Prussia in particular was unlikely to commend him to the
goodwill of the Electress Sophia. Her faithful echo at Versailles allows
us to make a guess as to the sentiments of the Electress concerning him;
and they were afterwards reproduced by Queen Caroline, who, like
Elizabeth Charlotte, was unwilling to differ in her opinion of men or
measures from their venerated senior. Bernstorff’s activity in the last
stage of Sophia Dorothea’s catastrophe proves that he had not been
captivated by the influence which had so long been dominant at Celle;
and the Duchess Eleonora doubtless held the same opinion of him as the
other ladies. He devoted himself with indefatigable zeal to advancing
the greatness of the Hanoverian dynasty; but he laboured in no narrow
spirit and with no petty aims, as an adequate survey of his
statesmanship in the earlier years of George I, should it ever be made,
could not fail to show. With Bernstorff (to mention no other name) Jean
de Robethon had passed from the service of Celle into that of Hanover—a
perfect type of the sort of man and the sort of mind whose destiny it is
to be _a secretis_ of those whose grasp is on the wheel of State. After
the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes had driven him, like so many other
capable Frenchmen, into the service of the foes of France, he had served
his apprenticeship under no less a master than William III. During Queen
Anne’s reign he became one of the most assiduous and useful instruments
in the transactions connected with the Succession. For a time, he in
Bothmer’s absence attended to affairs at the Hague; but he then returned
to Hanover, where as confidential secretary he was of infinite service
to both the Elector and the Electress, and played a political part not
the less important because it was to a great extent played behind the
scenes. Bernstorff trusted no man more implicitly than Robethon, who, in
the end, was said to have acquired an unbounded influence over him; and
by Robethon were drafted all, or virtually all, the despatches and
letters sent to England by the Electoral family from the date of his
entrance into their service to that of George I’s landing in England.
All the more important of these documents likewise passed through the
hands of Hans Caspar von Bothmer, whose services to the dynasty had
likewise begun at Celle; whence he had been sent as envoy to Vienna,
passing on, after he had acted as a plenipotentiary at Ryswick, to
Paris. Unlike Bernstorff, and unlike Bernstorff’s master, Bothmer united
political insight of a high order with remarkable diplomatic ability and
tact; and, after he had, when the crisis came, shown perfect prudence in
the supreme moment of success, he was perhaps the only one of the
Hanoverians of the early Georgian period who attained to personal
popularity in London. But this was later. On the accession of Queen
Anne, it had been thought desirable that he should in the first instance
take up a post of observation at the Hague, since the Queen was at
present unlikely to welcome so prominent a Hanoverian diplomatist to her
Court. Thus it was from the Hague that he actively helped to bring about
the English legislative enactments, which we shall immediately notice,
and which signally improved the prospects of the Hanoverian Succession.
We shall see that, though his first and second stay as envoy in London
were but short,[162] he returned thither in time to direct the final
stage in the transactions connected with the Succession, and to apply to
this task a consummate skill and an equally conspicuous courage.
-----
Footnote 162:
He was accredited to London after the death of Schütz in August, 1710,
and remained certainly till March, 1711. He reappeared there in
October, and remained till January, 1711. He came back in June or
July, 1714. (Chance, _u.s._)
-----
The ministerial arrangements made after the death of his uncle by the
Elector George Lewis, who was at no time wont to delegate to others any
part of what he had clearly recognised as his own bounden duty, might
seem to imply that, from 1705 onwards, the conduct of the Succession
question was more and more taken out of the hands of his mother. It is
true that the Elector had, as the head of his dynasty, become more
vigilant; but her interest in the question had remained the same. And,
as a matter of fact, at no previous time had her name been bandied about
between the political parties in England as it was now and during the
remaining years of her life. To the close of the year 1705 belongs that
strange episode in the party history of the reign, the attempt on the
part of a section among the Tories to bring the Electress over to
England.