LIVES
OF THE
QUEENS OF ENGLAND.
SOPHIA DOROTHEA, OF ZELL,
WIFE OF GEORGE I.
CHAPTER I.
GEORGE OF BRUNSWICK-ZELL AND ELEANORE D’OLBREUSE.
Woden, the father of the line of Brunswick—The seven brothers at dice, for a wife—D’Esmiers d’Olbreuse and his daughter Eleonora—Love-passages, and a marriage—A Bishop of Osnaburgh—Birth of Sophia Dorothea.
When George I. ascended the throne of England, the heralds provided him with an ancestry. They pretended that his Majesty, who had few god-like virtues of his own, was descended from that deified hero Woden, whose virtues, according to the bards, were all of a god-like quality. The two had little in common, save lack of true-heartedness toward their wives.
The more modest builders of ancestral pride, who ventured to water genealogical trees for all the branches of Brunswick to bud upon, did not dig deeper for a root, or go farther for a fountain head, than into the Italian soil of the year 1028. Even then, they found nothing more or less noble than a certain Azon d’Este, Marquis of Tuscany, who having little of sovereign about him, except his will, joined the banner of the Emperor Conrad, and hoped to make a fortune in Germany, either by cutting throats, or by subduing hearts whose owners were heiresses of unencumbered lands.
Azon espoused Cunegunda of Guelph, a lady who was not only wealthy, but who was the last of her race. The household was a happy one; and when an heir to its honours appeared in the person of Guelph d’Este the Robust, the court-poet who foretold brilliant fortunes for his house failed to see the culminating brilliancy which awaited it in Britain.
This same Prince ‘Robust,’ when he had come to man’s estate, wooed no maiden heiress as his father had done, but won the widowed sister-in-law of our great Harold, Judith, daughter of Baldwin de Lisle, Count of Flanders, and widow of Tostic, Earl of Kent. He took her by the hand while she was yet seated under the shadow of her great sorrow, and, looking up at Guelph the Robust, she smiled and was comforted.
Guelph was less satisfactorily provided with wealth than the comely Judith; but Guelph and Judith found favour in the eyes of the Emperor Henry IV., who forthwith ejected Otho of Saxony from his possessions in Bavaria, and conferred the same, with a long list of rights and appurtenances, on the newly-married couple.
These possessions were lost to the family by the rebellion of Guelph’s great-grandson against Frederick Barbarossa. The disinherited prince, however, found fortune again, by help of a marriage and an English king. He had been previously united to Maud, the daughter of Henry II., and his royal father-in-law took unwearied pains to find some one who could afford him material assistance. He succeeded, and Guelph received, from another emperor, the gift of the countships of Brunswick and Luneburg. Otho IV. raised them to duchies, and William (Guelph) was the first duke of the united possessions, about the year 1200.
The early dukes were for the most part warlike, but their bravery was rather of a rash and excitable character than heroically, yet calmly firm. Some of them were remarkable for their unhappy tempers, and they acquired names which unpleasantly distinguish them in this respect. Henry was not only called the ‘young,’ from his years, and ‘the black,’ from his swarthiness, but ‘the dog,’ because of his snarling propensities. So Magnus, who was surnamed ‘the collared,’ in allusion to the gold chain which hung from his bull neck, was also known as the ‘insolent’ and the ‘violent,’ from the circumstance that he was ever either insufferably haughty or insanely passionate.
The House of Brunswick has, at various times, been divided into the branches of Brunswick-Luneburg, Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, Brunswick-Zell, Brunswick-Danneberg, &c. These divisions have arisen from marriages, transfers, and interchanges. The first duke who created a division was Duke Bernard, who, early in the fifteenth century, exchanged with a kinsman his duchy of Brunswick for that of Luneburg, and so founded the branch which bears, or bore, that double name.
The sixteenth duke, Otho, was the first who is supposed to have brought a blot upon the ducal scutcheon, by honestly marrying rather according to his heart than his interests. His wife was a simple lady of Brunswick, named Matilda de Campen. It became the common object of all the dukes of the various Brunswick branches to increase the importance of a house which had contributed something to the imperial greatness of Germany. They endeavoured to accomplish this common object by intermarriages; but the desired consummation was not achieved until a comparatively recent period, when the branch of Brunswick-Luneburg became Electors, and subsequently Kings of Hanover, and that of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, Sovereign Dukes of Brunswick.
The grandfather of our George I., William, Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg, had seven sons, and all these were dukes, like their father. On the decease of the latter, they affected to discover that if the seven heirs, each with his little dukedom, were to marry, the greatness of the house would suffer alarming diminution. They accordingly determined that one alone of the brothers should form a legal matrimonial connection, and that the naming of the lucky re-founder of the dignity of Brunswick should be left to chance!
The seven brothers met in the hall of state in their deceased father’s mansion, and there threw dice as to who should live on in single blessedness, and which should gain the prize, not of a wife, but of permission to find one. ‘Double sixes’ were thrown by George, the sixth son. The lady whom he cavalierly wooed and readily won, was Anne Eleanore, daughter of the Landgraf of Hesse-Darmstadt.
The heir-apparent of this marriage was Frederick Ernest Augustus, who, in 1659, married Sophia, the daughter of Frederick and Elizabeth, the short-lived King and Queen of Bohemia; the latter the daughter of James I. The eldest child of this last marriage was George Louis, who ultimately became King of Great Britain.
When Louis XIV. revoked the Edict of Nantes, the French Protestants who refused to be converted were executed or imprisoned. Some found safety, with suffering, in exile; and confiscation made beggars of thousands. When towns, where the Protestants were in the majority, exhibited tardiness in coming over to the king’s way of thinking, dragoons were ordered thither, and this order was of such significance, that when it was made known, the population, to escape massacre, usually professed recantation of error in a mass. This daily accession of thousands who made abjuration under the sword, and walked thence to confession and reception of the Sacrament under an implied form in which they had no faith, was described to the willingly duped king by the ultra-montane bishops as a miracle as astounding as any in Scripture.
Of some few individuals, places at court for themselves, commissions for their sons, or honours which sometimes little deserved the name, for their daughters, made, if not converts, hypocrites. Far greater was the number of the good and faithful servants who left all and followed their Master. Alexander D’Esmiers, Seigneur D’Olbreuse, a gallant Protestant gentleman of Poitou, preferred exile and loss of estate to apostacy. When he crossed the frontier, a banished man, he brought small worldly wealth with him, but therewith one child, a daughter, who was to him above all wealth; and, to uphold his dignity, the memory of being descended from the gallant Fulques D’Esmiers, the valiant and courteous Lord of Lolbroire.
Father and daughter sojourned for a time beyond the northern frontier of the kingdom, having their native country within sight. There they tabernacled in much sorrow, perplexity, and poverty, but friends ultimately supplied them with funds; and M. D’Esmiers, Seigneur D’Olbreuse, found himself in a condition to appear in Brussels without sacrifice of dignity. Into the gay circles of that gay city he led his daughter Eleanora, who was met by warm homage from the gallants, and much criticism at the hands of her intimate friends—the ladies.
The sharpest criticism could not deny her beauty; and her wit and accomplishments won for her the respect and homage of those whose allegiance was better worth having than that of mere petits maîtres with their stereotyped flattery. Eleanora, like the lady in Göthe’s tragedy, loved the society and the good opinion of wise men, while she hardly thought herself worthy of either. She was a Frenchwoman, and consequently she was not out of love with gaiety. She was the fairest and the liveliest in the train of the brilliant Duchess of Tarento, and she was following and eclipsing her noble patroness at a ball, when she was first seen by George William, second son of George, Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg, and heir to the pocket but sovereign dukedom of Zell.
The heir of Zell became an honest wooer. He whose gallantry had been hitherto remarkable for its dragooning tone, was now more subdued than Cymon in the subduing presence of Iphigenia. He had hated conversation, because he was incapable of sustaining it; but now love made him eloquent. He had abhorred study, and knew little of any other language than his own; but now he took to French vocabularies and dictionaries, and long before he had got so far as to ask Eleanora to hear him conjugate the verb aimer ‘to love,’ he applied to her to interpret the difficult passages he met with in books; and throughout long summer days the graceful pair might have been seen sitting together, book in hand, fully as happy and twice as hopeful as Paolo and Francesca.
George William was sorely puzzled as to his proceedings. To marriage he could have condescended with alacrity, but unfortunately there was ‘a promise in bar.’ With the view common to many co-heirs of the family, he had entered into an engagement with his brother Ernest Augustus, of Brunswick-Luneburg, and Bishop of Osnaburgh, never to marry. This concession had been purchased at a certain cost, and the end in view was the further enlargement of the dominions and influence of the House of Brunswick. If George William should not only succeed to Zell, but should leave the same to a legitimate heir, that was a case which Ernest Augustus would be disposed to look upon as a grievous wrong. A price was paid, therefore, for the promised celibacy of his brother, and that brother was now actively engaged in meditating as to how he might, without disgrace, break a promise, and yet retain the money by which it had been purchased. His heart leaped within him as he thought how easily the whole matter might be arranged by a morganatic marriage—a marriage, in other words, with the left hand; an union sanctioned by the church but so far disallowed by the law that the children of such wedlock were, in technical terms, infantes nullius, ‘children of nobody,’ and could of course succeed to nobody’s inheritance.
George William waited on the Seigneur d’Olbreuse with his morganatic offer; the poor refugee noble entertained the terms with much complacency, but left his child to determine on a point which involved such serious considerations for herself. They were accordingly placed with much respect at Eleanora’s feet, but she mused angrily thereon. She would not listen to the offer.
In the meantime, these love-passages of young George William were productive of much unseemly mirth at Hanover, where the Bishop of Osnaburgh was keeping a not very decorous court. He was much more of a dragoon than a bishop, and indeed his flock were more to be pitied than his soldiers. The diocese of Osnaburgh was supplied with bishops by the most curious of rules; the rule was fixed at the period of the peace which followed the religious wars of Germany, and this rule was, that as Osnaburgh was very nearly divided as to the number of those who followed either church, it should have alternately a Protestant and a Romanist bishop. The result has been that Osnaburgh has had sad scapegraces for her prelates, but yet, in spite thereof, has maintained a religious respectability which might be envied by dioceses blessed with two diverse bishops at once, for ever anathematising the flocks of each other and their shepherds.
The Protestant Prince-Bishop of Osnaburgh made merry with his ladies at the wooing of his honest and single-minded brother, whom he wounded to the uttermost by scornfully speaking of Eleanora d’Olbreuse as the duke’s ‘Madame.’ It was a sorry and unmanly joke, for it lacked wit, and insulted a true-hearted woman. But it had the effect also of arousing a true-hearted man.
George William had now succeeded to the little dukedom of Zell, not indeed without difficulty, for as the ducal chair had become vacant while the next heir was absent, paying homage at Brussels to a lady rather than receiving it from his lieges in Zell, his younger brother, John Frederick, had played his lord-suzeraine a shabby trick, by seating himself in that chair, and fixing the ducal parcel-gilt coronet on his own brows.
George William having toppled down the usurper from his ill-earned elevation, and having bought off further treason by pensioning the traitor, returned to Brussels with a renewal of his former offer. He added weight thereto by the intimation, that if a morganatic marriage were consented to now, he had hopes, by the favour of the emperor, to consolidate it at a subsequent period by a legal public union, whereat Eleanora d’Olbreuse should be recognised Duchess of Zell, without chance of that proud title ever being disputed.
Thereupon a family council was holden. The poor father thought a morganatic marriage might be entered upon without ‘derogation;’ au reste, he left all to his daughter’s love, filial and otherwise. Eleanora did not disappoint either sire or suitor by her decision. She made the first happy by her obedience, her lover by her gentle concession; and she espoused the ardent duke, with the left hand, because her father advised it, her lover urged it, and the council and the suit were agreeable to the lady, who professed to be influenced by them to do that for which her own heart was guide and warrant.
The marriage was solemnised in the month of September, 1665, the bride being then in the twenty-sixth year of her age. With her new position, she assumed the name and style of Lady von Harburg, from an estate of the duke’s so called. The Bishop of Osnaburgh was merrier than ever at what he styled the mock marriage, and more unmanly than ever in the coarse jokes he flung at the Lady of Harburg. But even this marriage was not concluded without fresh concessions made by the duke to the bishop, in order to secure to the latter an undivided inheritance of Brunswick, Hanover, and Zell. His mirth was founded on the idea that he had provided for himself and his heirs, and left the children of his brother, should any be born, and these survive him, to nourish their left-handed dignity on the smallest possible means. The first heiress to such dignity, and to much heart-crushing and undeserved sorrow, soon appeared to gladden for a brief season, to sadden for long and weary years, the hearts of her parents. Sophia Dorothea was born on the 15th of September, 1666. Her birth was hailed with more than ordinary joy in the little court of her parents: at that of the bishop it was productive of some mirth and a few bad epigrams. The bishop had taken provident care that neither heir nor heiress should affect his succession to what should have been their own inheritance, and, simply looking upon Sophia Dorothea as a child whose existence did not menace a diminution of the prospective greatness of his house, he tolerated the same with an ineffable, gracious condescension.