THE WISDOM OF SERPENTS.
(1676-1681.)
Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.
SHAKSPEARE.
The sun of Eléonore’s triumph had no sooner reached its meridian than
its radiance began to be overcast. The first cloud was the death of the
young Prince Augustus Frederick of Wolfenbüttel, who was killed by a
cannon-ball at the siege of Phillipsburg a few months after his
betrothal to Sophie Dorothea. His death, though it seemed comparatively
unimportant, was destined to exercise an evil influence over the
fortunes of the House of Celle, and it snapped the strongest band of
union between the Celle-Wolfenbüttel party. The child Princess was
happily unconscious of her loss. The betrothal was merely a matter of
policy, to take effect later; the courtship was yet to come; and when
the tidings came to Celle of the death of her betrothed she was too
young to mourn him.
At first the Prince’s death affected but little the _entente_ between
the courts of Celle and Wolfenbüttel. Duke Antony Ulrich continued the
close friend of Eléonore; he had another son, more nearly the age of
Sophie Dorothea, and he held him in reserve; for the hour of a fresh
arrangement was not yet, and other plans were in the air.
Meanwhile the little Princess blossomed into lovely girlhood, the
spoiled darling of her father’s court. She was trained in all the
accomplishments suitable to her rank, but the more solid part of her
education seems to have been neglected, and with the promise of great
beauty she early developed a passion for admiration which lasted all her
life. Now that she was a princess her mother was careful to keep her
away from all suitors not of equal rank. The early intimacy between the
handsome young Königsmarck and Sophie Dorothea was broken off, and
Königsmarck was given a hint to leave Celle. He repaired to England to
finish his education, and he and the Princess did not meet again for
many years, and by that time she was a wife and the mother of two
children. Eléonore was justified of her wisdom, for when Sophie Dorothea
was scarcely more than twelve years old her aunt, the Countess de Reuss,
found in a drawer of the little Princess’s _bonheur du jour_ a
love-letter from a court page. The boy was banished for his audacity
into lifelong exile, and the governess, whose connivance was
responsible, was first imprisoned and then sent away in disgrace. The
news of this affair, which was but a childish folly after all, got
bruited abroad, and reached the ears of the alert Duchess Sophia. That
lady was never tired of tirading against her sister-in-law, the “little
clot of dirt” as she invariably calls her in her letters to her niece,
and she seized on this incident to point her moral. “Is it not a pity,”
she wrote to the Duchess of Orleans, “that Ernest Augustus and myself
should have made such a blunder and called to our court that ‘little
clot of dirt,’ the more so that we had at hand the Biegle, whom William
liked well enough, though she was not so fascinating as his French
vixen, who really is a splendid _Stückfleisch_? She would have done very
well, and at least have remained in her proper place. Never mind, Sophie
Dorothea will avenge us all; she is a little _canaille_, and we shall
see.”
This, to put it mildly, shows a loose moral view on the part of the
Duchess Sophia, to say nothing of the coarseness of expression. Her
prophecy about the little Princess did not seem very likely of
fulfilment then. The death of Augustus Frederick of Wolfenbüttel left
the field open, and an alliance with the great House of Lüneburg-Celle
was eagerly courted. The beauty and wealth of Sophie Dorothea, though
she was only just in her teens, made her a desirable bride, and it was
no longer the sons of the nobility who sought her hand, but princes of
the reigning Houses of Europe. A cousin of William of Orange, Henry
Casimir of Nassau-Dietz, was one of them; for another, the Duke of Celle
had almost arranged a match for his daughter with Prince George of
Denmark (afterwards the husband of Queen Anne of England) when the Queen
of Denmark interposed, and, with much violence and many expletives,
broke off the match. This lady had once received Eléonore at dinner, but
had refused her the kiss of honour. In revenge, Eléonore had commented
on the badness of the Queen’s _cuisine_; so they were far from friends.
Probably the Duchess Sophia, who was very friendly with the Queen of
Denmark, had a hand in bringing about the failure of these negotiations,
for we find her writing: “Well done! Fancy a king’s son for that bit of
a bastard! Upon my word, one has to come from Poitou to be so impudent!”
[Illustration: THE CASTLE OF CELLE.]
The gibe was of course aimed at Eléonore, who found herself on this
occasion outwitted by her sister-in-law. Up to this time Eléonore’s
influence with her husband was not sensibly impaired. His thoughts were
still engrossed with her advancement, and he first made a new treaty, by
which his wife was allowed the title of Duchess of Lüneburg-Celle; and,
secondly, drew up an agreement to further safeguard her rights and those
of her daughter to the rich estates of Wilhelmsburg. Both these
documents were countersigned by the wily Ernest Augustus, whose consent
was necessary, but who was only induced to yield by a high price being
paid for his complaisance.
The Duke of Celle thought his wife worthy of any pecuniary sacrifice at
this time. Her conduct was so irreproachable as a wife and a mother that
she won the esteem even of those who were prejudiced against her. Grave,
dignified, and beautiful, she held her husband’s truant affections much
longer than any one would have supposed, and was careful by her conduct
to make good the position to which she had been raised. Her bitterest
enemies were unable to tarnish her fair name, and this is no mean
tribute to her virtue and prudence when we remember the age in which she
lived and the circumstances surrounding her. Under Eléonore’s rule the
court of Celle became a model of decorum. The jovial Duke, though
wealthy and hospitable, hated display and ostentation, and loved nothing
so much as a quiet life. His tastes were those of an English country
squire. He was a fine judge of wine, and had many rare vintages in his
cellar; he had three hundred and seventy horses in his stables, mostly
English or bred in England; his kennels, too, were largely filled with
dogs of English breed. He was a mighty Nimrod, devoted to out-door
sports. A little business with his Ministers and a good deal of
hunting—that was his programme for the day, and in the evening he loved
nothing better than to share the joys of the domestic hearth with his
wife and child. Eléonore, unlike most ladies who have risen in the
world, seemed equally averse to display for its own sake, and shunned
rather than courted the trappings of state. So the court of Celle was
peaceful and virtuous, perhaps a little dull.
It was far different at the court of Hanover.
The death of Duke John Frederick without issue in 1679 had now brought
Ernest Augustus and Sophia to reign over Hanover as well as Osnabrück.
Duke John Frederick was not greatly mourned, and his reign, though
merry, had been brief. Like his brothers, he was fond of Italy, and
acquired there a love of foreign ways and a liking for the Roman
Catholic religion, to which he became a convert. Louis XIV., who
regarded himself as a defender of the faith, gave this ducal convert a
handsome pension, and treated him with marked favour. John Frederick’s
eyes were dazzled by the glory of the Grand Monarque, whose splendour
was the wonder of Europe, and he tried to turn Hanover into an imitation
Versailles: pseudo-classical statues were erected in the gardens;
fountains were dotted about the terraces; there were fireworks,
masquerades, and pastoral plays, Italian singers and French dancers;
many foreign _monsignori_ flitted about the court, and mass was again
sung in the churches. The honest Hanoverians rubbed their eyes and knew
not what to make of it all. But alien though their Duke was in some
things, he had one taste in common with his long-suffering subjects—he
loved his beer, and, after a prolonged course of hard drinking, he died
from an overspell of it. As the Duchess Sophia wrote, “He died as a true
German should, glass in hand”.
This “true German” being gathered to his fathers, Duke Ernest Augustus
and Duchess Sophia made haste to reign in his stead. Sophia thanked
Heaven for having thus placed her husband out of the reach of his
enemies, “as which the whole court of Celle had now to be regarded”. It
was indeed a notable accession of dignity and wealth. Both were
ambitious and loved money and ostentation; they now had a chance of
gratifying their tastes. In a smaller way Ernest Augustus had also
imitated Louis XIV.’s court, at Osnabrück, and it seemed to that “most
Christian” monarch that the new Duke of Hanover would follow his brother
in matters of religion. He therefore despatched a plenipotentiary, the
complaisant de Gourville, to sound him on the subject and to offer the
same bait in the way of pension as he had dangled before the eyes of
John Frederick. But Ernest Augustus was now not so needy, and he had
other objects in view, so he replied oracularly that though no doubt a
change of religion would be advantageous to his House he himself was too
old to change. All religions were much the same to Sophia; but she
disliked being meddled with in spiritual matters, and had her own
interests, too—her English interests, then remote—which would certainly
be imperilled by a change of faith. So the worthy pair, after taking
counsel together, hit on a compromise by not educating their daughter
Sophia Charlotte in any faith, so that she might marry the most
promising prince who offered himself, whether he were Catholic or
Protestant. When sounded later on the subject of her daughter’s faith,
the Duchess answered, “She is of no religion as yet”. It was lucky that
Sophia turned a deaf ear to the blandishments of the French King and the
Pope, or the House of Hanover and the Protestant succession would never
have reigned in England.
Though under the new _régime_ the court of Hanover differed in religious
ceremonial from that of Versailles, in other respects it was a bad
imitation, and the grafting of spurious French architecture on the
little mediæval German town produced many incongruous effects, as
incongruous as the aping of French manners and French morals. For the
court of Hanover imitated not only the pleasures of Versailles, but also
its vices. Unlike his brother George William, matrimony had effected no
change in the laxities of Ernest Augustus, and the explanation is
probably to be found in the fact that his was a marriage of policy,
while the other’s was a marriage of love. Ernest Augustus was a man of
six times the ability of George William. He was selfish and scheming,
but there was a certain splendid good nature about him, and though his
court was dissolute, it was always brilliant. The money for his
pleasures, for he was as great a spendthrift as his brother was the
reverse of one, he raised either by squeezing George William or by
equipping regiments of his subjects and selling them to foreign service,
as, for instance, to fight the Emperor’s enemies on the Danube. This was
in the approved style of the Grand Monarque, who always had a war on
hand by way of a kingly pastime. Louis, like Solomon of old, had also
his beautiful favourites in great array, who reaped rich rewards of
wealth and influence. This period of European history may be said to
mark the apotheosis of military and political adventurers and royal
mistresses. There was no court without its adventurers, and a king was
hardly a king without a bevy of mistresses. Many of them were women of
noble birth, who embarked on the career with the encouragement of their
parents and guardians, and even of their husbands. Louise de
Querouaille, afterwards Duchess of Portsmouth, went over from France to
England to win the favour of Charles II. In the same way Clara Elizabeth
and Catherine Marie Meisenbug journeyed to Osnabrück in the hope of
capturing the good-will of Ernest Augustus and his son.
Clara Elizabeth and Catherine Marie were of noble birth. Their father,
Count Carl Philip Meisenbug, was a needy military adventurer, and their
faces were their only fortune. Their good looks, combined with much
impudence, a lively wit, and an utter absence of principle, sufficed to
form a very attractive pair in those days. When they were only in their
teens Count Meisenbug took his daughters to Paris with the hope of
seeing them shine at the court of Louis XIV., a sort of Mecca to which
all these worldly pilgrims were then bound. But the established royal
favourites there did not view the fair intruders with favour, and gave
them a hint that it would be better to decamp, or Paris would soon be
too hot to hold them. The Meisenbugs, who were poor and therefore
powerless, needed no second warning. Fear lent them wings; they packed
up with all despatch, and, looking about for a likely spot to push their
fortunes, they hit upon the little court of Ernest Augustus, and set out
thither with all speed.
The court was then at Osnabrück, and it so chanced that the
_demoiselles_ Meisenbug arrived just when the two eldest sons of Ernest
Augustus, George Louis and Frederick Augustus, had returned from their
travels, accompanied by their governors Platen and Bussche. The needy
Count lost no time in presenting his daughters at court, and evidently
they created a favourable impression, for we find them helping at a
_fête_ in honour of the young Princes’ return. The _demoiselles_
Meisenbug, who were fresh from all the graces and amusements of
Versailles, composed a little pastoral play in French, which they craved
permission to perform before the Duke and Duchess, and the performance
was the most successful feature of the festival. It was given at night
in the gardens, which were illuminated for the occasion. The young
ladies appeared, as befitted their pastoral simplicity, in the guise of
shepherdesses, and recited their lines so prettily, and danced and sang
in so charming a way that they delighted their audience and especially
won the hearts of the governors Platen and Bussche. Having made so
favourable an impression, the sisters remained at Osnabrück to follow up
their advantage. It suited them well. It was a cheap town to live in;
they had the _entrée_ of the court, and the free-and-easy air of the
place gave them room to develop their schemes. At that time the young
adventuresses had to moderate their ambitions. Ernest Augustus was far
above them, and Prince George Louis was only a boy, and was sent away
directly on military service. But meantime the Meisenbugs made the best
of their opportunities. Platen and Bussche were both rising men, and
enjoyed the confidence of the court. Failing higher game, the sisters
resolved on making a conquest of them, and they unmasked their batteries
with such success that before long they were comfortably settled in
life, Clara Elizabeth as the wife of Platen, and Catherine Marie as the
wife of Bussche.
Attached now for good or evil to the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg, the
sisters shared in its improved fortunes, and when the court of Ernest
Augustus migrated to Hanover they went there too.
Of the two sisters, Clara Elizabeth, now Madame Platen, was immeasurably
the superior, if not in youth and beauty, in cleverness and audacity.
This woman is one of the worst instances in history of the evil
influence of the court mistress. She had no redeeming qualities; she was
unscrupulous, ambitious, and shamelessly corrupt. She was possessed of
the immense power of one who has a fixed purpose in life, and who will
stick at nothing to obtain it. Having obtained the first object of her
ambition, a safe and respectable position, she was wise enough to
recognise an identity of interest with her husband, and to see that as
he advanced she would advance with him. To this end she sought to obtain
influence over Ernest Augustus. Platen, after his marriage, was promoted
to a confidential position, and when the court went to Hanover he was
raised to the responsible post of Minister. His wife thus found herself
within the charmed circle and within touch of what she most
desired—power. A masterful disposition gave her complete sway over her
husband; she dictated to Platen, who, in turn, advised Ernest Augustus.
But this was too circuitous a method for Madame Platen, who wished to be
next the Duke himself. Before long a post was found for her in the
service of the Duchess Sophia, and thus she came frequently before the
notice of Ernest Augustus. She played her cards very discreetly, and,
with the connivance of her husband, brought all her arts, flatteries,
and fascinations to bear upon the Duke; so that Ernest Augustus was
first astonished at her cleverness, next flattered by her pretended
admiration for himself, and then fascinated by her good looks. In a
short time her influence over him was supreme. Not content with having
won the Duke, Madame Platen determined also to bring the son under her
influence. When Prince George Louis returned from his military service
she threw her sister, Madame Bussche, in his way. Her sister was younger
and prettier than Madame Platen, but much less clever and wholly under
the influence of this imperious woman. The precocious young Prince fell
captive to the charms of Madame Bussche, who also had a complaisant
husband. Thus Madame Platen became all-powerful at the court of Hanover.
It is an ugly chapter in the history of the Hanoverian House, but one
that cannot be ignored.
Some court mistresses have been real politicians, and their influence on
public affairs has been for good and not evil. But Madame Platen was
hardly a political woman of the first rank; she was incapable of taking
a wide view of affairs, and her efforts were directed towards the
immediate aggrandisement of the principality of Hanover, without a
thought of the larger interests outside. Into the family feud between
Celle and Hanover she entered with zest, and made common cause with
Ernest Augustus and Sophia against Eléonore and the Celle-Wolfenbüttel
party. She noted the growing intimacy between George William and Antony
Ulrich, which she shrewdly suspected boded no good to the fortunes of
the court of Hanover. Her methods were essentially those of the
backstairs, and she persuaded Ernest Augustus to employ spies at Celle
to report all that went on there. In this way she acquired a knowledge
of the disposition of the Ministers who held office at Celle. The most
powerful of them all was Bernstorff, the Duke’s Prime Minister.
Bernstorff was an ambitious and avaricious man with little principle,
who had already shown jealousy of the influence which Eléonore exercised
over her husband and resented her interference in affairs of state.
Madame Platen saw in him an instrument for her designs; she approached
him with many promises, and some more substantial pledges from Ernest
Augustus—_item_, a gold snuff-box set with diamonds, and similar tokens
of good-will. Bernstorff was quite willing to listen to these overtures;
he was anxious to become a great landed proprietor, and Ernest Augustus
promised to advance his wishes in this and other respects if he would
carry out his plans. He was opposed to the Celle-Wolfenbüttel party
headed by the Duchess Eléonore, he desired nothing better than her
downfall; so he took the bribe, and confidential communications were
opened up with Hanover. In particular he warned Ernest Augustus of the
schemes of Duke Antony Ulrich, who was now urging the betrothal of his
second son to the little Sophie Dorothea. These communications were not
nominally carried on between responsible Ministers, but between a spy at
Celle and Madame Platen at Hanover, so that if anything transpired they
could both be disowned by the responsible officials; but in reality
Madame Platen was dictating the policy of Hanover.
A pretty picture of moral and political corruption, it must be
confessed. One wonders what the haughty Duchess Sophia thought of it
all, and by what inexplicable means this inscrutable woman was brought
to become a passive witness of the double capture by audacious
adventuresses of her husband and her son. Her policy was always to
ignore anything she could not help; and in this case she seems to have
offered no protest. The key to this riddle is probably to be found in
her character. The moral objection would not appeal to her, for though
the Duchess Sophia in her own personal conduct was absolutely above
reproach, and there is abundant evidence to prove she held that the
virtue of princesses should be above suspicion, yet she had been trained
in a school and an age which did not demand the same standard of
morality from men as from women, least of all from princes. In her day
women of the Platen type were as much a part of the _entourage_ of a
court as the lackeys in the kitchen or the grooms in the stables, and
since this was so, why not Madame Platen as well as another? Sophia had
done her duty to Ernest Augustus in every sense of the word. She had
been a good and faithful wife; she had upheld the dignity of the courts
of Osnabrück and Hanover; she had borne her husband six children, five
sons and a daughter; and though they had never any love in the highest
sense for one another, yet in time affection seems to have sprung up
between this curious couple, and they got on very well together, mainly
on the principle of leaving each other alone. According to his lights,
and possibly her lights also, Ernest Augustus was a good husband; he
always treated his consort with profound respect, and outwardly he
fulfilled the letter of his contract with her, it was only in the spirit
he failed, but Sophia probably did not care about that. She was his
duchess, the mother of his sons, the great lady of the House of
Brunswick-Lüneburg, and that sufficed her. She was fond of her children,
too, especially of the younger boys and her daughter, but for George
Louis, her eldest son, she had very little love. She therefore probably
regarded his affair with Madame Bussche with indifference. Nor did
religious scruples enter to any extent. She was a free-thinking woman,
who, from a philosophic eminence, looked down upon all dogma with
contempt. “The Princess Sophia,” says Dean Lockier, “was a woman of good
sense and excellent conversation. I was very well acquainted with her.
She sat very loose in her religious principles, and used to take a
particular pleasure in setting a heretic (infidel), whenever she could
meet such, and one of her chaplains disputing together.” This is a
quaint characteristic; and we may picture Sophia’s face as she baited
her chaplain with some truculent infidel, and chuckled while they fought
together, finally dismissing them with “A plague on both your
houses”.[16]
-----
Footnote 16:
A similar pastime was frequently indulged in by her
grand-daughter-in-law, Queen Caroline, wife of George II., who was
also most tolerant of her husband’s mistresses. No doubt she learned
both these peculiarities from Sophia.
-----
Hitherto we have viewed this Princess in a somewhat unamiable light—the
side she showed to Eléonore; it is only fair to turn the other side of
the shield. Her failings were the failings of her time, her virtues were
all her own. Reared in a dissolute court, married into a vicious one, no
word of scandal was ever breathed against her moral character. She
remained beyond and apart, a serene and haughty figure, head and
shoulders above the mean, coarse, voluptuous, lying crowd with which she
was surrounded. Whatever was pure and of good repute, whatever made for
the higher and intellectual life, turned to Sophia at the court of
Hanover. She was a woman of great parts, speaking five languages—Low
Dutch, German, French, Italian, and English—fluently, and was learned in
the literature of them all. She attracted to Hanover some of the
choicest intellectual spirits of the age, and among them was the great
and learned Leibniz, whose friend and patron she was. In turn he warmly
respected and admired her: she was the “Serena” of his letters, and
together they discussed those subtle philosophies beside which such
things as court intrigues and court courtesans were as nothing worth.
It was doubtless her communing in these serene altitudes, together with
the considerations before mentioned, which enabled the Duchess Sophia to
ignore Madame Platen and lesser annoyances. Outwardly she received from
the court mistress every mark of respect and homage. However impudent,
brazen, and intriguing Madame Platen might be, she was always submissive
and decorous before the Duchess Sophia, always her very humble
lady-in-waiting. The Duchess was not of a jealous temperament, and in
matters where her rank and her rights were not imperilled her heart did
not enter. Madame Platen would always be Madame Platen; she could never
rise, for instance, to the heights of the upstart Eléonore, and arrogate
to herself the position of an equal of the daughter of kings; and so
long as she kept her place, what matter? Besides, according to her
lights, the woman was working for the greater glory of the House of
Brunswick-Lüneburg and against the hated Eléonore. These seem the
ostensible grounds on which it can be explained why the Duchess Sophia
allowed, without protest, such a power near her throne. But there was
perhaps another reason, too, which overshadowed all the rest.
The great and splendid inheritance of the throne of England already
flitted before Sophia’s dazzled eyes. English events absorbed her to the
exclusion of others, and the affairs of the court of Hanover were mere
village politics beside them. Sophia had one virtue for which every
Englishman will love her. She loved “her country,” as she called
England, with all her heart and soul and strength; “her country,” which
she had never seen, which she was destined never to see; “her country,”
over which her grandfather had reigned a well-nigh absolute monarch;
“her country,” to which her mother had gone back, as to home, to end her
days; “her country,” for which her brother, the dashing Prince Rupert,
had fought on the King’s side throughout the Great Rebellion; “her
country,” over which her son was to reign and her children’s children
from generation to generation. The reproach of being German and alien in
sympathy, later, often urged against the House of Hanover, could never
have been brought against Sophia, for her heart was as “entirely
English” as Queen Anne’s. She early imbibed her love for England and
things English. She spoke the language fluently, far better than many a
Stuart. She was learned in England’s history, its customs, and its laws.
She had an English maid always with her. In her youth she had been
within measurable distance of becoming Queen Consort of England; in her
old age she was within an ace of being Queen Regnant.[17] It is a pity
she was never Queen of England. She would have been another and a wiser
Elizabeth, whom in many ways she strongly resembled—in her love of
statecraft, her broad and liberal view of things, her contempt for
jarring creeds, her wisdom and resource. Yes, it is a thousand pities
she was never Queen of England; she would have made a wiser ruler than
any of her Stuart cousins, and a far better than any of her descendants,
save only the present illustrious occupant of the throne, and his
revered mother, whose long and beneficent reign won for her the first
place among England’s monarchs of any dynasty.
-----
Footnote 17:
She died less than three months before Queen Anne.
-----