The Electress Sophia and the Hanoverian succession

In the burial-vault of the Guelfs, at Hanover, stands a coffin enclosing the remains of the Electress Sophia, and bearing the inscription: Magnæ Britanniæ Hæres. These words sum up her story as that of a great hope, long cherished but never fulfilled. Yet a biography of this Princess, who died, though herself uncrowned, the ‘mother of our Kings to be,’ will, if truthful, be found to treat a nobler theme than a personal ambition born of chance upon chance, vexed by prolonged delays, and doomed to final disappointment. The Electress Sophia was in herself worthy to be the source of a dynasty whose last and most august member left to her successor a throne far securer than that which was mounted by Sophia’s eldest son. But the nation, of whose institutions a limited monarchy has long formed an integral part, also owes a debt to the very fact of the accession of the House of Hanover, and therefore to the insight and self-control exhibited by that House, and conspicuously by the Electress Sophia, during the entire preceding period of uncertainty. At a highly critical date in the course of those years, when the Electress and her family were most anxious to avoid any rash or false step on their own part, she told a correspondent that, at the English Court, it was held indispensable to pretend to wish for the succession of the Electoral line—because of the people. Although there were, in those days, Jacobites enough and to spare in London and other parts of the kingdom, and although the stolidity of our first Hanoverian King, and the self-conceit of his successor, retarded the growth of personal sympathy between monarch and subjects, yet the perception, in both dynasty and nation, of a definite community of interests formed a sufficient beginning for the growth of a close mutual attachment. To this the Electress Sophia contributed, it is not too much to say, both by the circumstances of her birth and by the conduct of her life. She was the daughter of a Stewart Princess, on whose Protestant marriage the nation had set its hopes, and whom it had seen condemned, because of her husband’s youthful venture in the cause of militant ProtestantismProtestantism, to long years of exile and privation. In her own conduct Sophia displayed a prudence, a dignity, and a sincerity, which have rarely, under conditions so trying, been so consistently combined. The legend, indeed, of her having often declared that she would die content if those other words, ‘Sophia, Queen of Great Britain,’ could be inscribed on her tomb, is irreconcileable with the whole tenor of her known private thoughts, as well as of her public acts. She was far from indifferent to the greatness that might be in store for her, or to the necessity, in the interests of her House, of constant vigilance, promptitude, and tact. But she deemed it enough to be found, at no stage of her career, either unequal to her present fortunes or unready for those responsibilities of a greater future which cast their shadow before them. Thus it is largely due to her, and, as it is but just to acknowledge, with her and after her, to the next heir to her expectations, that, so far as the House of Hanover is concerned, the history of its succession to the British throne may be reviewed without the feelings of humiliation too often aroused by narratives of disputed inheritances. At the same time, the essential significance of that history would, in any case, have to be sought deeper than in the vicissitudes of personal ambitions or the machinations of families or factions. The Hanoverian Succession was, in fact, only another name for the Protestant Succession in flesh and blood, and, as such, represented the principal gain which most Englishmen and Scotchmen were intent upon bringing home out of the long struggle against the Stewart monarchy. Not that the disputes and efforts connected with the Hanoverian Succession throughout, or, at times, mainly addressed themselves to the religious issue; but it would be futile to ignore, or to seek to obscure, the origin and basis of the great political transaction in which the Electress Sophia was called upon to play so prominent a part. She was fitted to play it, alike by the circumstances of her descent and marriage, and by the qualities of her character and intellect, and above all by a perfect self-control, joined to a freedom of spirit in which, during the efforts and trials of her life, she found encouragement and consolation.

From the relation in which the Electress Sophia stood to the question of the British Succession, that loomed so large on the political horizon during her later years, the story of her life derives its paramount interest. Even on the experiences of her earlier years, whose memories carry us back to the time of the Thirty Years’ War and of the great Civil Conflict in this island, it is impossible to dwell without thinking of the great destiny reserved for her line, and of the many helps and hindrances which were to facilitate or to impede its accomplishment. But in the semi-obscurity of her youth, as under the gaze of inquisitive eyes to which her maturity was exposed, she remains true to herself; and few biographical records could prove more fascinating than one covering her fourscore years, were it but possible to depict her from first to last in the same life-like colours in which she has portrayed herself in her Memoirs, and in which she reappears on almost every page of her correspondence. Unfortunately, it is difficult to convey by extracts, and impossible to preserve in translation, the constant alertness of thought, and refreshing vivacity of expression, frequently touched by real humour, and, at all times, free from any tinge of affectation, which are not less characteristic of her letters than they must have been of her conversation. As for her autobiography, it breaks off as early as 1681, and thus fails to cover that longer half of her life in which she was to become a figure of importance in European affairs. For it was the ‘abdication’ by flight of King James II and the subsequent passing of the Bill of Rights which brought about and established the restriction of the English Succession to Protestants, and which first placed Sophia and her line, though not as yet by name, in direct relation to that Succession as a question of practical politics.

It is accordingly proposed, in the following pages, to speak, in the first instance, of Sophia’s descent and parentage; of her mother, who, while remaining, even throughout the woful sequel of her Bohemian Queenship, conscious of her position as a Stewart Princess, never faltered in her adherence to the Protestantism for whose sake her husband had cast a long blight upon the fortunes of the Palatine House; and of her brothers and sisters, Princes and Princesses of that House, not one of whom, in spite of their many distinctions and qualities, brilliant or solid, succeeded altogether in rising above the depression which had fastened upon the family, as Sophia herself rose in the eyes both of her contemporaries and of posterity. The task will thus become easier of describing, in turn, the three stages of that part of her life which preceded the acquisition by her and her House of a definite expectation of the succession to the British throne. During her childhood and girlhood she was virtually confined to the refugee Court of her parents, afterwards that of her widowed mother, in the Netherlands. She next passed some years at Heidelberg, in the land of her forefathers, then restored in part to the Palatine rule. The earlier years of her married life, divided between Osnabrück and Hanover, introduced her to new personal relations and to new political interests; but, though these at times conflicted with each other, she learnt how to identify herself more and more with the dynastic policy of the House, to the fortunes of whose future head she had united her own. A second period of her life may be said to open when the question of the British Succession unexpectedly comes into the foreground of European political life; and in this period, again, two stages are very clearly distinguishable. The earlier of these extends from the passing of the Bill of Rights (1689), with its strict limitation of the Crown to Protestants, up to the Act of Settlement (1701). Within these years the House of Hanover, while actually or in prospect consolidating the various territorial interests of the Brunswick-Lüneburg line, firmly established its position as an electorate in the Empire, and began to be taken into account by the ambition of France, the chronic disturber of the peace of Europe. Incidentally, the skilful management and the stern resolution by which this advance of the House was effected, led to unhappy consequences; and no narration of its history in this period can pass by the catastrophe of one of Sophia’s sons, or pretend to ignore the tragic story of her daughter-in-law, Sophia Dorothea. In the second stage of this period we recognise, in the Electress Sophia, a personage of importance in the great theatre of general European history, but calmly standing back herself from the glare of the footlights. By the Act of Settlement the Succession was settled upon her and the heirs of her body, being Protestants. She thus obtained a Parliamentary title for herself and for her descendants.

Before this point is reached in our narrative, it will have shown how largely fortune had contributed to the genesis of this title. Of James I’s two sons, the elder, Henry, had died in the early flower of his youth. Charles I left three sons, of whom the third, another Henry, also died young and unmarried. Since Charles II left no lawful issue, the Crown fell to James II, and, having been transferred from him to his son-in-law, William of Orange, and to his elder Protestant daughter, Mary, passed in turn to his second Protestant daughter, Anne. Mary had left no issue, and her widowed husband, on whose issue by another wife the Crown had been eventually settled, should Anne die childless, declined to marry again. Of Anne’s numerous progeny, none survived their infancy except the Duke of Gloucester, and he died in 1700. Nor could there be any question of the conversion to Protestantism of any child of James II by his second, Catholic, wife except the Prince afterwards known as the Old Pretender; for all the others died in their infancy, with the exception of Marie Louise, who survived into her twelfth year. The chance passed away of finding a Protestant successor to the Crown among the grandchildren of Charles I’s youngest daughter, Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans, in the House of Savoy and it was therefore necessary to turn to the offspring of James I’s only daughter, Elizabeth, the Protestant consort of a Protestant prince. But of the sons born from this union who survived to maturity, the eldest, Charles Lewis, died in 1680; his only legitimate son, Charles, died without issue in 1685; his only daughter, Elizabeth Charlotte, became a Catholic on her marriage to the Duke of Orleans. Of the others who remained Protestants, Rupert persistently refused to marry, and died in 1682; Maurice and Philip, both of them homeless wanderers, had perished in 1654 and 1650 respectively. Edward, alone among the younger brothers, married and became the father of a family; but he had been carried away from the traditions of his House by the wave of Catholic propaganda, of which this biography will repeatedly have to take note; and his three daughters all became the wives of Catholic husbands. Of Sophia’s elder sisters, one, Louisa Hollandina, fell under the same religious influence, and became the Abbess of a Catholic convent; another, the eldest of the sisterhood, who came to hold the same position in a Protestantised foundation, likewise elected to remain the votaress of an unmarried life; a third, Henrietta Maria, died in 1652, soon after she had been wedded to a Transylvanian prince. No other personage possessed a claim of birth equal to Sophia’s, yet even of pretensions palpably inferior to her own on this score, fortune, which seemed in this question always on her side, disposed in her favour.

The Electress Sophia’s later years were chiefly spent in the tranquillity of Herrenhausen, more especially after she had become a widow in 1698; and here she held intellectual intercourse with Leibniz, her own and her daughter’s friend, and with other fit companions of her solitude, while keeping up her voluminous correspondence with her favourites of heart and mind, among them her inimitable niece, the Duchess of Orleans. She lived to see the territorial power of the House of Hanover fully established at home, and its foreign policy completely merged into that of the Grand Alliance against France; and there remained now nothing but the consummation of the British Succession. This she was not destined to see accomplished in her own person; but less than two months after her death, on June 8th, 17141714, her eldest son, the Elector George Lewis of Hanover, was proclaimed King George I of Great Britain and Ireland.