The long and eventful life of the Electress Sophia admits of being treated from various points of view, each of which possesses an interest of its own. A Stewart by descent and breeding, and naturally enough in a large measure by sentiment also, she likewise, by reason of her birth and through the traditions and experiences of her youth, had an immediate part in the declining fortunes of the Palatine House. The title acquired by her, for herself and her descendants, to the succession to the throne of her maternal ancestors, was a Parliamentary title; but it rested ultimately on the relation of herself and the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg to the political and religious conflicts—the struggle against France and the resistance to Rome—on whose issue the future of Europe, and that of England in particular, mainly depended. Personally, thanks to the unflagging vivacity and unfailing candour of her mind, fostered by an education carried on by her through life, she became one of the foremost feminine representatives of the intellectual liberalism of her age.

In the succeeding pages, the aspect of the Electress Sophia’s career to which prominence has been designedly given, is the part played by her, on her own behalf and on that of her descendants, in the history of the question of the British Succession. To this one aspect it has been necessary to subordinate the rest, without, it is hoped, unduly neglecting any one of them. It has not been easy to refrain from dwelling at some length on the story, often but never yet quite adequately told, of the Queen of Bohemia, with its alternations of light and shadow. And it would have been an interesting task to seek to put into shape all that we know as to the extraordinarily varied experiences, in Court and camp, and in the contiguous spheres of religious and intellectual activity, of Sophia’s brothers and sisters. But, with her marriage, there opens the period of her life at the close of which, as the ancestress and the source of the Hanoverian dynasty of British sovereigns, she stands forth by herself as an important historical figure; and it was her connexion with the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg that moulded her own future and rendered it propitious for the destinies of Great Britain. In the present narrative, there has accordingly been included an account of so much of the history of that House in the period preceding Sophia’s marriage as might suffice to indicate, not only its main dynastic purposes and principles of policy, but also the share which it had come to take in the general progress of European affairs. On this there follows a more special consideration of the attitude consistently maintained by the Hanoverian family, as the representative branch of the whole House, towards the question of the British Succession, which gradually became one of the chief questions of European politics at large. In these transactions the chief responsibility, on the Hanoverian side, necessarily devolved upon the Electress Sophia, though her eldest son pursued his own course, in general but not in invariable conformity with her own. And thus, both the House of Hanover and Sophia herself contributed directly to a result of high historical significance.

In describing the ambitions, the achievements, and the experiences, good or evil, of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg, in the period more immediately preceding its accession to the British throne, I have not thought it right to draw a veil over episodes which have often been intentionally slurred over or misrepresented. On one of these episodes, the most vexed and the most painful among them, fresh light, but not such as to disturb conclusions already to all intents and purposes established, is thrown, in an Appendix to the present volume, by a supplementary series of documents now (with two exceptions) for the first time made public. Such episodes a truthful narrator cannot pass by; but they should not be allowed to affect his judgment on questions connected with his story which possess a far higher historical interest. In my opinion, the debt of the British nation to the House of Hanover, from the times of the Electress Sophia to those of Queen Victoria, is one to which no conscientious student of the history of the dynasty, in both the one and the other period, ought to refuse to bear witness.

The materials for a history of the Electress Sophia, in its connexion with the Hanoverian Succession, are so abundant that they could only be satisfactorily enumerated in an elaborate bibliography, for which room could hardly be found in the present volume. A succinct bibliography of the history of the Succession, so far as it enters into the general course of European history, will be found in Vols. v. and vi. of the Cambridge Modern History, in connexion with the chapter on Party Government under Queen Anne and the section on the Hanoverian Succession, by Mr. H. W. V. Temperley and by the author of the present work respectively. The materials in question may be summarised as follows. They consist primarily of Sophia’s own Memoirs (which, however, only reach the beginning of the year 1681) and of her voluminous correspondence, preserved in the State Archives at Hanover. Among her letters, the collections of those addressed to her mother, to the Elector Palatine Charles Lewis, to her nephews and nieces, the Raugraves and Raugravines, and to her Mistress of the Robes, Frau von Harling, have been admirably edited by Dr. E. Bodemann, and that of her letters to her son-in-law, King Frederick I. of Prussia, by Professor E. Berner; and to these has recently been added a very interesting collection of her (and her daughter’s) letters to Hanoverian diplomats (more especially the younger Schütz and Bothmer). None of these collections, however, equals in general interest the correspondence of the Electress Sophia with Leibniz, published several years ago by the late Onno Klopp, the author of the monumental Fall of the House of Stuart. Besides her own letters, we have many from the hand of her mother, the Queen of Bohemia. So much of her correspondence as was in her hands at her death, went to her son Prince Rupert, and was published, in whole or in part, by Sir George Bromley, Bart., the great-grandson of Prince Rupert’s illegitimate daughter Ruperta, under the title of A Collection of Original Letters (1787). Some of her letters to Sir Edward Nicholas in 1654-5 were printed by Mr. J. Evans for the Society of Antiquaries, and another set appeared with the private correspondence of Charles I. and Sir Edward Nicholas appended to Wheatley’s edition of Bray’s Diary and Correspondence. Many of the Queen’s letters are, of course, to be found in the late Mrs. Everett Green’s Life of Elizabeth, a work which has long held its own and is on the point of being republished in a new edition, carefully revised by the expert hand of Mrs. Lomas, of the Record Office, and provided by her with an admirable Introduction. In this Mrs. Lomas refers to a very interesting set of Elizabeth’s letters, addressed by the Queen to her son, the Elector Charles Lewis, accompanied by a few drafts of his replies, which was a few years ago edited by Miss Anna Wendland for the Stuttgart Literary Society.^[1] The letters of Charles Lewis himself and his family have been edited by Dr. W. L. Holland for the Stuttgart Literary Society; and there is, in addition, the inimitable and endless series of letters by Charles Lewis’ daughter, Sophia’s beloved niece and second self, Elizabeth Charlotte Duchess of Orleans, among which mention need only be made of the selection of letters to her aunt, edited in two volumes by Dr. Bodemann. The letters addressed by Sophia’s youngest son, Prince Ernest Augustus (afterwards Bishop of Osnabrück and Duke of York), to his friend J. F. D. von Wendt, edited by Count Erich Kielmannsegg, together with the editor’s notes, throw much light on certain passages and personages of Hanoverian history; unfortunately, their continuous sequence breaks off in November, 1713. To these may be added the letters and memoranda of Ilten, Schulenburg and other Hanoverian politicians and courtiers, including Bernstorff’s correspondence and autobiographical fragment; the numerous contributions of Leibniz, in the historical section of Pertz’s edition of his Collected Works, to the politics and later history of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg; and Toland’s account of his visit to Hanover, told well if not too wisely. Of the despatches of our envoys and residents preserved in the Record Office and elsewhere, part only have been given to the world by J. M. Kemble and others; while a vast amount of matter of this kind, especially from the despatches of the Imperial envoys and residents in London, preserved in the Vienna Archives, is embedded in Onno Klopp’s magnum opus. A very useful guide to the personnel of the diplomatic representation of England and the North German Governments at the respective courts is furnished by the List of Diplomatic Representatives and Agents, England and North Germany, 1689-1727, contributed by Mr. J. F. Chance to Professor Firth’s Notes on the Diplomatic Relations of England and Germany. The Memoirs of de Gourville have not been lost sight of; and the records of the court of Hanover, selected for publication by the experienced hand of C. E. von Malortie, and illustrated by him with much additional matter, have been of occasional use.

There seems no necessity for referring in this place to the secondary authorities to which, as a matter of course, I have made more or less frequent reference—from Spittler to Havemann and O. von Heinemann and to the late Professor Adolf Köcher’s standard History of Hanover and Brunswick, from 1648 to 1674, beyond which date the author unfortunately did not live to carry his invaluable work. Häusser’s History of the Rhenish Palatinate, a work which satisfied the requirements of its day, and is most readable into the bargain, has been in constant use. Among earlier biographical sketches of the Electress Sophia I may mention, besides J. G. H. Feder’s and W. Nöldeke’s monographs, Dr. E. Bodemann’s account of her in the Historische Taschenbuch for 1888; H. Forst’s article on Sophie Herzogin von Braunschweig Lüneburg, Frau von Osnabrück, 1661-1679, in the 1889 Jahrgang of the Mittheilungen of the Osnabrück Historical Society (kindly made accessible to me by Mr. S. Jaffé of Sandfort), in which, however, there is little as to her life at Osnabrück and Iburg, of which one would gladly know more, besides what is to be found in her correspondence; and R. Fester’s and H. Schmidt’s biographical essays, to the latter of which is appended a contribution by Professor A. Haupt on Art (plastic and pictorial) at Hanover in the times of the Electress Sophia. The masterly chapters in the late Kuno Fischer’s great book on Leibniz which deal with his political and religious activity, and with his relations to the Electress Sophia and her family, are certain to be consulted by serious students; nor will the late M. Foucher de Careil’s Leibniz et les deux Sophies be overlooked. Of Sophia’s brothers, Charles Lewis has found a careful as well as sympathetic biographer in Dr. K. Hauck, who has printed a large number of the Palatine family letters in the Neue Heidelberger Jahrbücher; and Miss Eva Scott has recently published a useful Life of Prince Rupert. The Princess Palatine Elizabeth would no doubt have preferred to live in her correspondence with her great friend Descartes, which will be found in Victor Cousin’s edition, and in Vols, iii., iv., and v. of the definitive edition of the philosopher’s works by C. Adam and P. Tannery. Several attempts have, however, been made to put the materials for the biography of this fair sage—and saint—into form. Among these are G. E. Guhrauer’s exhaustive essay in the Historische Taschenbuch for 1850 and 1851; the admirable monograph by Foucher de Careil, Descartes et la Princesse Palatine, and M. V. de Swarte’s Descartes Directeur Spirituel, which contains a commentary on his correspondence with both the Princess Elizabeth and Queen Christina. The reader should not fail to consult Miss E. S. Haldane’s Descartes, His Life and Times. I may also mention M. J. Bertrand’s paper Une Amie de Descartes in the Revue des Deux Mondes, Vol. cii., and another contributed by the present writer to Owens College Historical Essays (1901). I have not seen an essay on the Princess by Dr. J. Witte in the Neue Heidelberger Jahrbücher (1901), which is described as very attractive. A biography of the Princess has quite recently been published by Miss Elizabeth Godfrey, under the title of A Sister of Prince Rupert. I am not aware of any attempt to put together in more than outline the curious life’s story of another member of the family—the Princess Louisa Hollandina; the source of most of what I have been able to add to details generally accessible on the subject is acknowledged below. I have, of course, used Guhrauer, Varnhagen, and the later memoir writers for various kinds of collateral information; and on the Succession question I have, besides the works mentioned above, consulted divers essays as to special points by A. Schaumann, O. Meinardus, Reinhold Pauli, and others. It has not been part of my design to trace the way in which the progress of the Succession question was affected by the course of English party history on the one hand, or on the other by the action of the exiled Stewarts, and of the Jacobite interest at home and abroad. But I have endeavoured to keep both influences in view, noticing any Parliamentary transactions of importance, and attempting to utilise such information as is afforded by the Reports of the Royal Historical MSS. Commission, including those on the Stuart Papers at Windsor, and on the Harley MSS. Among recent secondary works on the subject, I am greatly indebted to Dr. F. Salomon’s extremely valuable research relating to the history of the last four years of Queen Anne; I have also referred to Mr. W. Sichel’s Bolingbroke, Mr. E. S. Roscoe’s Oxford, and Mr. Percy M. Thornton’s useful Brunswick Succession. I may take this opportunity of noting the fairness of tone which characterises Mr. Lewis Melville’s now completed book, The First George in Hanover and England. Finally, I have sought to keep abreast of the learning which, I am glad to say, continues to stream into the exemplary Journal of the Historical Society for Lower Saxony. I have to thank Mr. John Murray and Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co., as well as the Editors of the Quarterly, Edinburgh, and English Historical Reviews, and of the Owens College Historical Essays, for allowing me to make use of various articles by me which have appeared in these quarters on subjects treated in this volume. For a remarkably full account of the Abbey of Maubuisson and of the connexion with it of the Princess Louise Hollandina, its twenty-sixth Abbess—many details of which I have reproduced—I am indebted to the excerpts made by M. L. Toyant from the History and Cartulary of the Abbey, edited from original documents by MM. A. Dutilleux and J. Depoin for the Societé Historique du Vexin Français (1882). M. Toyant rendered me this service at the request of Mr. H. Tinson (late of Messrs. Goupil & Co.), without whose skilled assistance, most readily and courteously given, the first (illustrated) edition of the present work could not have been produced. In revising the last chapter of the present edition, I had the advantage of utilising some notes kindly made by Mr. J. F. Chance on the section entitled The Hanoverian Succession contributed by me to Vol. vi. of the Cambridge Modern History, which volume also contains a most valuable section by Mr. Chance on the earlier foreign policy of George I—a subject closely connected with that of his European policy before his accession to the English throne, which is discussed in the present volume. Mr. R. W. Goulding, Librarian to the Duke of Portland, was so kind as to communicate to me in 1903 extracts from three letters from the Electress Sophia to the Earl of Portland, dating from the years 1703-4, preserved, together with eight others, at Welbeck Abbey. Of these extracts I have in my last chapter taken the liberty of translating that which has reference to the death of King William III. I desire also to thank Miss A. D. Greenwood (who has just published a work, based on careful research, dealing with parts of the subject treated in this volume), and Mr. A. T. Bartholomew, M.A., of Peterhouse, and the Cambridge University Library, for aid given in the preparation of one of the Appendices to the present edition.

In this Appendix will, as already indicated, be found, a series of letters between the Electoral Princess Sophia Dorothea and Count Philip Christopher in Königsmarck. This correspondence, which supplements the much longer series deposited in the University of Lund, is preserved in the Royal Secret Archives of State at Berlin, and is now (with the exception of two letters forming part of it) printed for the first time. I have to offer special thanks to the authorities of these Archives for allowing this correspondence to be transcribed for me. I request the eminent historian, Geh. Oberregierungsrath Dr. Koser, who holds the office of Director of the Archives, to accept the expression of my sincere obligations; and I desire very particularly to thank the Second Director, Geh. Archivrath Dr. Bailleu, to whose historical works I owe a debt which the present is not the occasion for recording at length, for his courtesy in arranging for the transcription of these letters and thereby facilitating the execution of my task. For the translation of the letters I am myself responsible, as well as for some elucidatory remarks concerning these documents. The Appendix on the Religious Situation in Scotland, as it affected the Hanoverian Succession, I owe to Mr. R. S. Rait, of New College, Oxford, whose command of Scottish history is well known.

The present edition of this book necessarily appears without the illustrations which adorned the first. In the Preface to that edition I expressed my own gratitude and that of my publishers (Messrs. Goupil & Co.) for services rendered in many quarters both at home and abroad, towards the collection and reproduction of the illustrations in question. More especially, I asked leave to offer the respectful thanks of publishers and author to the present Head of the House of Hanover, His Royal Highness the Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale, K.G.,who had, through Privy Councillor and Chamberlain von der Weise, kindly granted permission for the reproduction of a series of family portraits preserved at Herrenhausen and in the Fideicommiss. Gallery in the Provinzial-Museum at Hanover. I expressed at the same time our gratitude to the Right Hon. the Earl of Craven for allowing the reproduction of several of the pictures forming the unique collection at Combe Abbey, which contains so many of the portraits of the Queen of Bohemia.^[2] Next to the collection of Palatine portraits at Combe Abbey, the most interesting is that at Blair Castle, of the existence of which Miss Haldane, the translator of Descartes, was so good as to apprise me. His Grace the Duke of Athol, whom the Marchioness of Tullibardine had, at the instance of Miss Haldane, informed of my interest in the pictures, kindly wrote to me that there are at present in Blair Castle original portraits in panel by Gerard Honthorst of the Princess Palatine Elizabeth, Louisa Hollandina and Henrietta Maria (married to Prince Sigismund of Transylvania). These portraits, together with two of the Queen of Bohemia and Prince Rupert, likewise by Honthorst, and ‘head and shoulders’ portraits on panel, belonged to John, first Duke of Athol, who probably inherited them from his mother, daughter of James, seventh Earl of Derby. At the Duke’s death in 1724 he left the furniture of Huntingtower to his widow (who had been his second wife); and the last-named two pictures being there, were after her death removed to England by her eldest son, Lord John Murray, from whom they descended to W. H. G. Bagshawe, Esq., of Ford Hall, Chapel-in-the-Frith, Derbyshire; but the portraits of the three Princesses, being at Dunkeld, went to the Duke’s heir and successor. Mr. Bagshawe (who informs me that the portrait of the Queen is extremely like that of her in the National Portrait Gallery) in 1886 allowed copies of these two portraits to be made for the Duke of Athol, which are now with the three originals of the three Princesses at Blair Castle. I recollect seeing a charming portrait of at least one of the Palatine Princes at Ford Castle, Northumberland.

M. Toyant’s researches, communicated to me by Mr. Tinson, showed that, besides the portraits of the Princess Louise Hollandina at Combe Abbey, Hanover, and Herrenhausen (to which has to be added that at Blair Castle), there exists one at Wilton House, the Earl of Pembroke’s seat near Salisbury.

Of the Electress Sophia herself, one of the two portraits by Gerard Honthorst at Combe Abbey served as the frontispiece to the first edition of this book. The other, and a third of her and her daughter, Sophia Charlotte, said to be the work of the Princess Louisa Hollandina, were reproduced at later points in the volume; in which also appeared engravings of Engelhard’s statue of the Electress, in a sitting position, in the gardens at Herrenhausen, and of a gold medal in her honour designed by Lambelet, of which a plaster cast is in the British Museum. Other medals struck in her honour are depicted in Rehtmeier’s Hannöverische Chronik. On the occasion of the serious illness, in October, 1701, of an old and confidential friend, the Electress Sophia wrote that ‘if she was to have her medal made of her portrait, she ought to do it now; for, should Frau von Harling recover, she would not allow me to spend so much on ma vieille trogne.’ Personal vanity, or personal self-consciousness of any kind, was not among the shortcomings traceable in the character of the brave and high-minded Princess of whose life I have attempted to trace the unblemished record.