While all was loose and lively at the court of the bishop, the daily routine of simple pleasures and duties alone marked the course of events at the modest court of the Duke of Zell. The monotony of the latter locality was, however, agreeably interrupted by the arrival there of his Serene Highness Prince Augustus William of Wolfenbüttel. He had just been edified by what he had witnessed during his brief sojourn in the episcopal circle of Osnaburgh, where he had seen two ladies exercising a double influence, Madame von Platen ruling her husband and his master, while her sister Caroline von Busche was equally obeyed by her consort and his Highness George Louis, the bishop’s son.

Prince Augustus of Wolfenbüttel was the brother of that early suitor of the little Sophia Dorothea who had met a soldier’s death at the siege of Philipsburg. He was, like his brother, not so rich in gold pieces as in good qualities, and was more wealthy in virtues than in acres. He was a bachelor prince, with a strong inclination to lay down his bachelorship at the feet of a lady who would, by addition of her dowry, increase the greatness and material comforts of both. Not that Augustus of Wolfenbüttel was mercenary; he was simply prudent. A little princely state in Germany costs a great deal to maintain, and when the errant prince went forth in search of a lady with a dower, his last thought was to offer himself to one who had no heart or could have no place in his own. If there was some system, a little method, and an air of business about the passion and principle of the puissant Prince Augustus, something thereof must be laid to the charge of the times, and a little to the princely matter-of-fact good sense: he is a wise and merciful man who, before he comes to conclusions with a lady on the chapter of matrimony, first weighs prospects, and establishes, as far as in him lies, a security of sunshine.

Augustus Wolfenbüttel had long suspected that the sun of his future home was to be found at Zell, and in the person of his young cousin Sophia Dorothea. Even yet, tradition exists among Brunswick maidens as to the love-passages of this accomplished and handsome young couple. Those passages have been enlarged for the purposes of romance writers, but divested of all exaggeration there remains enough to prove, as touching this pair, that they were well assorted both as to mind and person; that their inclinations were towards each other; and that they were worthy of a better fate than that which fell upon the honest and warm affection which reigned in the hearts of both.

The love of these cousins was not the less ardent for the fact of its being partially discouraged. The Duke of Zell looked upon the purpose of Prince Augustus with an unfavourable eye. The simple-minded duke had an unfeigned superstitious awe of the new lover; and the idea of consenting to a match under the circumstances as they presented themselves, seemed to him tantamount to a species of sacrilege, outraging the manes and memory of the defunct brother. The duke loved his daughter, and the daughter assuredly loved Augustus of Wolfenbüttel; and, added thereto, the good Duchess Eleanora was quite disposed to see the cherished union accomplished, and to bestow her benediction upon the well-favoured pair. The father was influenced, however, by his extensive reading in old legendary ballad-lore, metrical and melancholy German romances, the commonest incident in which is the interruption of a marriage ceremony by a spiritual personage professing priority of right.

The opposition to the marriage was not, however, all surmounted when the antagonism of the duke had been successfully overcome. Madame von Platen has the credit of having carried out her opposition to the match to a very successful issue.

It is asserted of this clever lady, that she was the first who caused the Bishop of Osnaburgh thoroughly to comprehend that Sophia Dorothea would form a very desirable match for his son George Louis. The young lady had lands settled on her which might as well be added to the territory of that electoral Hanover of which the prince-bishop was soon to be the head. Every acre added to the possessions of the chief of the family would be by so much an increase of dignity, and little sacrifices were worth making to effect great and profitable results. The worthy pair, bishop and female prime-minister, immediately proceeded to employ every conceivable engine whereby they might destroy the fortress of the hopes of Sophia Dorothea and Augustus of Wolfenbüttel. They cared for nothing, save that the hand of the former should be conferred upon the bishop’s eldest son, George Louis, who had as little desire to be matched with his cousin, or his cousin with him, as kinsfolk can have who cordially detest each other.

George Louis was not shaped for a lover. He was mean in person and in character. George was brave indeed; to none of the princes of the House of Brunswick can be denied the possession of bravery. In all the bloody and useless wars of the period, he had distinguished himself by his dauntless courage and his cool self-possession. He was not heroic, but he really looked heroic at the head of his squadron, charging across the battle-field, and carrying his sword and his fringed and feathered hat into the very thickest of the fray. He did not fail, it may be added, in one of the characteristics of bravery, humanity on the field. For a wounded foe he had a thorough respect. Out of the field of battle George Louis was an extremely ordinary personage, except in his vices. He was coarsely minded and coarsely spoken, and his profligacy was so extreme of character—it bore about it so little of what Lord Chesterfield recommended when he said a man might be gentlemanlike even in his vices—that the bishop, easy as he was both as parent and prelate, and rich as he was himself in evil example to a son who needed no such warrant to plunge headlong into sin—even the bishop felt uncomfortable for awhile. He thought, however, that marriage would cure profligacy.

George Louis was now in his twenty-second year. He was born in 1660, and he had recently acquired increase of importance from the tact of his sire having succeeded to the estates, grandeur, and expectations of his predecessor, Duke John Frederick. The latter was on his way to Rome, in 1679, a city which he much loved, holding in respect a good portion of what is taught there. He was proceeding thither with a view of a little more of pleasure and something therewith of instruction, when a sudden attack of illness carried him off; and his death excited as much grief in the bishop as it possibly could in one who had little reverence for the duke, by whose death he profited largely.

When the bishop (now Duke Ernest Augustus, of Hanover), as a natural consequence of this death, established a gayer court at Hanover than had ever yet been seen there, and had raised George Louis to the rank of a ‘Crown Prince’—a title given to many heirs who could inherit nothing but coronets—the last-named individual began to consider speculatively as to what royal lady he might, with greatest prospect of advantage to himself, make offer of his hand.

At this time Charles II. was King in England. The King’s brother, James, Duke of York, had a daughter, ‘Lady Anne,’ who is better known to us all by her after-title of ‘good Queen Anne.’ In the year 1680, George of Hanover came over to England with matrimonial views respecting that young princess. He had on his way visited William of Orange, at the Hague; and when that calculating prince was made the confidential depository of the views of George Louis respecting the Princess Anne of England, he listened with much complacency, but is suspected of having forthwith set on foot the series of intrigues which, helped forward by Madame von Platen, ended in the recall of George from England, and in his hapless marriage with the more hapless Sophia Dorothea.

George of Hanover left the Hague with the conviction that he had a friend in William; but William was no abettor of marriages with the Princess Anne, and least of all could he wish success to the hereditary prince of Hanover, whose union with one of the heiresses of the British throne might, under certain contingencies, miserably mar his own prospects. The Sidney Diary fixes the arrival of George Louis at Greenwich on the 6th of December, 1680. On the 29th of the month, Viscount Stafford was beheaded on Tower Hill, and at this lively spectacle George of Hanover was probably present, for on the 30th of the month he sends a long letter to her Serene Highness, his mother, stating that ‘they cut off the head of Lord Stafford yesterday, and made no more ado about it than if they had chopped off the head of a pullet.’ In this letter, the writer enters into details of the incidents of his reception in England. The tenor of his epistle is, that he remained one whole day at anchor at ‘Grunnwitsch’ (which is his reading of Greenwich) while his secretary, Mr. Beck, went ashore to look for a house for him, and find out his uncle Prince Rupert. Scant ceremony was displayed, it would appear, to render hospitable welcome to such a visitor. Hospitality, however, was not altogether lacking. The zealous Beck found out ‘Uncle Robert,’ as the prince ungermanises Rupert, and the uncle, having little of his own to offer to his nephew, straightway announced to Charles II. the circumstance that the princely lover of his niece was lying in the mud off Grunnwitsch. ‘His Majesty,’ says George Louis, ‘immediately ordered them apartments at Writhall’—and he then proceeds to state that he had not been there above two hours when Lord Hamilton arrived to conduct him to the King, who received him most obligingly. He then adds, ‘Prince Robert had preceded me, and was at Court when I saluted King Charles. In making my obeisance to the King, I did not omit to give him the letter of your Serene Highness; after which he spoke of your Highness, and said that he “remembered you very well.” When he had talked with me some time, he went to the Queen, and as soon as I arrived, he made me kiss the hem of her Majesty’s petticoat. The next day I saw the Princess of York (the Lady Anne), and I saluted her by kissing her, with the consent of the King. The day after I went to visit Prince Robert, who received me in bed, for he has a malady in his leg, which makes him very often keep his bed. It appears that it is so, without any pretext, and he has to take care of himself. He had not failed of coming to see me one day. All the lords come to see me, sans prétendre la main chez moi’ (probably, rather meaning without ceremony, without kissing hands, than, as has been suggested, that ‘they came without venturing to shake hands with him’).

Cold and deaf did the Princess Anne remain to the suit of the Hanoverian wooer. The suit, indeed, was not pressed by any sanction of the lady’s father, who, during the three months’ sojourn of George Louis in England, remained in rather secluded state at Holyrood. Neither was the suit opposed by James. James was troubled but little touching the suitor of his daughter. He had personal troubles enough of his own wherewith to be concerned, and therewith sundry annoyances.

Among the ‘celebrations’ of the visit of George Louis to this country, was the pomp of the ceremony which welcomed him to Cambridge. Never had the groves or stream of Cam been made vocal by the echoes of such laudation as was given and taken on this solemnly hilarious occasion. There was much feasting, which included very much drinking, and much expenditure of heavy compliment in very light Latin. George and his trio of followers were made doctors of law by the scholastic authorities. The honour, however, was hardly more appropriate than when a similar one was conferred, in after years, upon Blucher and the celebrated artillery officer, Gneisenau. ‘Ah!’ exclaimed the veteran leader, ‘they are going to make me a doctor; but it was Gneisenau that furnished all the pills.’

That parliament was convened at Oxford whereby there was, as Evelyn remarks, ‘great expectation of his Royal Highness’s cause, as to the succession against which the house was set,’ and therewith there was, according to the same diarist, ‘an extraordinary sharp, cold spring, not yet a leaf upon the trees, frost and snow lying while the whole nation was in the greatest ferment.’ Such was the parliament, and such the spring, when George Louis was suddenly called home. He was highly interested in the bill, which was read a first time at that parliament, as also in the ‘expedients’ which were proposed in lieu of such bill, and rejected. The expedients proposed instead of the Bill of Exclusion in this parliament, were that the whole government, upon the death of Charles II., should be vested in a regent, the Princess of Orange, and if she died without issue, then the Princess Anne should be regent. But if James, Duke of York, should have a son educated a Protestant, then the regency should last no longer than his minority, and that the regent should govern in the name of the father while he lived; but that the father should be obliged to reside five hundred miles from the British dominions; and if the duke should return to these kingdoms, the crown should immediately devolve on the regent, and the duke and his adherents be deemed guilty of high treason.

Here was matter in which the Hanoverian suitor was doubly interested both as man and as lover. Nor was there anything unnatural or unbecoming in such concern. The possible inheritance of such a throne as that of England was not to be contemplated without emotion. An exclusive Protestant succession made such a heritage possible to the House of Brunswick, and if ever the heads of that house, before the object of their hopes was realised, ceased to be active for its realisation, it was when assurance was made doubly sure, and action was unnecessary.

It is not easy to determine what part William of Orange had in the recall of George Louis from England, but the suddenness of that recall was an object of some admiring perplexity to a lover, who left a lady who was by no means inconsolable, and who, two years afterwards, was gaily married at St. James’s to the Prince of Denmark, on the first leisure day between the executions of Russell and of Sidney.

George Louis, however, obeyed the summons of his sovereign and father, but it was not until his arrival in Hanover that he found himself called upon to transfer the prosecution of his matrimonial suit from one object to another. The riding idea in the mind of Ernest Augustus was, that however he might have provided to secure his succession to the dominion of Zell, the marriage of his son with the duke’s only child would add many broad acres to his possessions in Hanover.

Sophia Dorothea was still little more than a child; but that very circumstance was made use of in order to procure the postponement of her marriage with Augustus of Wolfenbüttel. The Duke of Zell did not stand in need of much argument from his brother to understand that the union of the young lovers might more properly be celebrated when the bride was sixteen than a year earlier. The duke was ready to accept any reasoning, the object of which was to enable him to retain his daughter another year at his side.

The sixteenth birthday of Sophia Dorothea had arrived, and George Louis had made no impression on her heart—the image of the absent Augustus still lived there; and the whole plot would have failed, but for the sudden, and active, and efficient energy of one who seemed as if she had allowed matters to proceed to extremity, in order to exhibit the better her own powers when she condescended to interfere personally and remedy the ill-success of others by a triumph of her own. That person was Sophia, the wife of Ernest, a lady who rivalled Griselda in one point of her patience—that which she felt for her husband’s infidelities. In other respects she was crafty, philosophical, and free-thinking; but she was as ambitious as any of her family, and as she had resolved on the marriage of her son, George Louis, with Sophia Dorothea, she at once proceeded to accomplish that upon which she had resolved.

It had suddenly come to her knowledge that Augustus of Wolfenbüttel had made his reappearance at the Court of Zell. Coupling the knowledge of this fact with the remembrance that Sophia Dorothea was now sixteen years of age, and that at such a period her marriage had been fixed, the mother of George Louis addressed herself at once to the task of putting her son in the place of the favoured lover. She ordered out the heavy coach and heavier Mecklenburg horses, by which German potentates were wont to travel stately and leisurely by post some two centuries ago. It was night when she left Hanover; and although she had not further to travel than an ordinary train could now accomplish in an hour, it was broad daylight before this match-making and match-breaking lady reached the portals of the ducal palace of Zell.

There was something delightfully primitive in the method of her proceeding. She did not despise state, except on occasions when serious business was on hand. The present was such an occasion, and she therefore waited for no usher to marshal her way and announce her coming to the duke. She descended from her ponderous coach, pushed aside the sleepy sentinel, who appeared disposed to question her before he made way, and, entering the hall of the mansion, loudly demanded of the few servants who came hurrying to meet her, to be conducted to the duke. It was intimated to her that he was then dressing, but that his Highness would soon be in a condition to descend and wait upon her.

Too impatient to tarry, and too eager to care for ceremony, she mounted the stairs, bade a groom of the chamber point out to her the door of the duke’s room; and, her order having been obeyed, she forthwith pushed open the door, entered the apartment, and discovered the dismayed duke in the most negligé of déshabilles. She neither made apology nor would receive any; but, intimating that she came upon business, at once asked, ‘Where is your wife?’ The flurried Duke of Zell pointed through an open door to a capacious bed in the adjacent room, wherein lay the wondering duchess, lost in eider-down and deep amazement.

The ‘old Sophia’ could have wished, it would seem, that she had been further off. She was not quite rude enough to close the door, and so cut off all communication and listening; but, remembering that the Duchess of Zell was but very indifferently acquainted with German, she ceased to speak in the language then common to the German courts—French—and immediately addressed the duke in hard Teutonic phrase, which was unintelligible to the vexed and suspecting duchess.

Half undressed, the duke occupied a chair close to his toilet-table, while the astute wife of Ernest Augustus, seated near him, unfolded a narrative to which he listened with every moment an increase of complacency and conviction. The Duchess Eleanora, from her bed in the adjacent room, could see the actors, but could not comprehend the dialogue. But, if the narrative was unintelligible to her, she could understand the drift of the argument, as the names of her daughter and lover were being constantly pronounced with that of George Louis.

The case was forcibly put by the mother of George. She showed how union makes strength, how little profit could arise from a match between Sophia Dorothea and Augustus of Wolfenbüttel, and how advantageous must be an union between the heir of Hanover and the heiress of the domains which her provident father had added to Zell, and had bequeathed to his daughter. She spoke of the certainty of Ernest Augustus being created arch-standard-bearer of the empire of Germany, and therewith Elector of Hanover. She hinted at the possibility even of Sophia Dorothea one day sharing with her son the throne of Great Britain. The hint was something premature, but the astute lady may have strengthened her case by reminding her hearer that the crown of England would most probably be reserved only for a Protestant succession, and that her son was, if a distant, yet not a very distant, and certainly a possible heir.

The obsequious Duke of Zell was bewildered by the visions of greatness presented to his mind by his clever sister-in-law. With ready lack of honesty he consented to break off the match between Sophia Dorothea and her lover, and to bestow her hand upon the careless prince for whom it was now demanded by his mother. The latter returned to Hanover perfectly satisfied with the work of that night and morning.

The same satisfaction was not experienced by the Duchess Eleanora. When she came to learn the facts, she burst forth in expressions of grief and indignation. The marriage which had now been definitely broken, had been with her an affair of a mother’s heart. It had not been less an affair of a young girl’s heart with Sophia Dorothea. Duke Anton Ulrich of Wolfenbüttel came in person to Zell, to ask the fulfilment of the promise of her hand to his son. On learning that the alleged promise had been broken, he left Zell with the utmost indignation; and romance, at least, says of Königsmark, that he too, had left it with a feeling of sorrow that Sophia Dorothea was to be sacrificed to such an unworthy person as George Louis. It was a pitiable case! There were three persons who were to be rendered irretrievably wretched, in order, not that any one might be rendered happy, but that a man without a heart might be made a little more rich in the possession of dirt. The acres of Zell were to bring misery on their heiress, and every acre was to purchase its season of sorrow.

No entreaty could move the duke.1 In his dignity he forgot the father: and the prayers and tears of his child failed to touch the parent, who really loved her well, but whose affection was dissolved beneath the fiery heat of his ambition. He was singularly ambitious; for the possible effect of a marriage with George Louis was merely to add his own independent duchy of Luneburg to the dominions of Hanover. His daughter, moreover, detested her cousin, and his wife detested her sister-in-law; above all, the newly accepted bridegroom, if he did not detest, had no shadow, nor affected to have any shadow of respect, regard, or affection for the poor young victim who was to be flung to him with indecent and unnatural disregard of all her feelings as daughter and maiden. Sophia Dorothea’s especial distaste for George Louis was grounded not only in her knowledge of his character, but also of his want of respect for her mother, of whom he always spoke in contemptuous terms. Sophia Dorothea’s inclinations, her father said, he would never constrain; but when this seemed to give her some hope of release, her father observed that a good daughter’s inclinations were always identical with those of her parents. She had a heart to listen to, she thought. She had a father whom she was bound to obey, he said—and said it with terrible iteration. Her aversion is reported to have been so determined that, when the portrait of her future lord was presented to her, she flung it against the wall with such violence that the glass was smashed, and the dismounted diamonds were scattered over the room.

The matter, however, was urged onward by Sophia of Hanover; and in formal testimony of the freedom of inclination with which Sophia Dorothea acted, she was brought to address a formal letter to the mother of her proposed husband, expressive of her obedience to the will of her father, and promissory of the same obedience to the requirements of her future mother-in-law. It is a mere formal document, proving nothing but that it was penned for the assumed writer by a cold-hearted inventor, and that the heart of the copier, subdued by sickness, was far away from her words. This document is in the British Museum. During the time that intervened before George Louis arrived at Zell to take his bride to Hanover, Sophia Dorothea seemed to have passed years instead of weeks. It was only when her mother looked sadly at her that she contrived painfully to smile. She even professed a sort of joyful obedience; but when the bridegroom dismounted at her father’s gate, Sophia Dorothea fainted in her mother’s arms.

After a world of misery and mock wooing, crowded into a few months, the hateful and ill-omened marriage took place at Zell on the 21st of November, 1682. The bride was sixteen, the bridegroom twenty-two. Of the splendour which attended the ceremony court historiographers wrote in loyal ecstasy and large folios, describing every character and dress, every incident and dish, every tableau and trait, with a minuteness almost inconceivable, and a weariness saddening even to think of. They thought of everything but the heart of the principal personage in the ceremony—that of the bride. They could describe the superb lace which veiled it, and prate of its value and workmanship; but of the worth and woe of the heart which beat beneath it, these courtly historians knew no more than they did of honesty. Their flattery was of the grossest, but they had no comprehension of ‘the situation.’ To them all mortals were but as ballet-dancers and pantomimists; and if they were but bravely dressed and picturesquely grouped, the describers thereof thought of nothing beyond. The bride preserved her mournful dignity on that dark and fierce November day. Tradition says that there was a storm without as well as sorrow within; and that the moaning of the wind and strange noises in the old castle seemed as if the elements and the very home of the bride’s youth sympathised with her present and her future destiny.