Ernest Augustus of Brunswick-Lüneburg was the youngest son of his House, as Sophia was the youngest daughter of the Palatine family; nor was the scion of the Guelfs, as such, unfitted to mate with one who could boast an ancestry illustrious like hers. Previously to the marriage conferring upon Sophia a right of partnership, of which time only could reveal the significance, in the fortunes of the German branch of the Guelfs, more than one great historic opportunity had occurred to that ancient House. Five centuries had passed since Henry the Lion had held sway over territories reaching from the shores of the German Ocean and the Baltic to those of the Adriatic. He had been the husband of an English princess—Matilda, daughter of King Henry II; nor was Sophia unmindful of this ancestral connexion. We cannot follow here the repeated dynastic changes, or the numberless partitions and transfers that succeeded each other in the hereditary lands between Elbe and Weser, saved out of the shipwreck of the great Guelfic dominion, and granted to Henry’s grandson, Otto the Child, as an imperial fief under the designation of the Duchy of Brunswick.
The severance declared by Otto’s eldest two sons, between the territories of which Brunswick and Lüneburg were respectively the original centres, was—the numerous shiftings of ownership between the representatives of the Old, Middle, and New Brunswick and Lüneburg lines notwithstanding—never undone, and continues in a sense to the present day. Thus, it was only within the limits of each main division that it proved possible in the course of time to assert those two principles upon which, repugnant though they were to the traditions of Germanic life, the political future of the princely Houses of the Empire depended—namely, that of indivisibility of tenure, and, more tardily, that of primogeniture. Nor was there any consistent endeavour to supply the want of a single dominant authority in the Brunswick and Lüneburg Houses (as they were generally called, their various subdivisions being further distinguished for the most part according to the names of their chief ‘residences’) by an identity, or at least by an agreement, of policy. Thus the German Guelfs missed the great dynastic opportunity of the Reformation, although the populations over which they ruled were at one in their ready acceptance of Lutheranism, and although a series of wealthy ecclesiastical foundations fell into the laps of the princes. Duke Henry of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel opposed the Reformation with so much vehemence as to be denounced by Luther in the character of bugbear-in-chief of the supporters of the national movement. Still, with their augmented territorial strength, the Guelfs might have played an important part in the critical period which preceded the long-expected outbreak of the great religious conflict, and perhaps, during its earlier stages, might have done much to resist the inroads of the Reaction. Instead of this, after the ‘evil Harry’s’ accomplished grandson, Duke Henry Julius, had applied his ability as a statesman wholly to the furtherance of the imperial interest, his timorous successor, Frederick Ulric, had failed to avert from the Lower Saxon Circle the fury of war, drawn down upon it by the passionate Protestant partisanship of his brother, Christian of Halberstadt, the champion of Elizabeth of Bohemia. A change of dynasty occurred at a highly critical epoch of the Thirty Years’ War, when nearly all the Protestant estates adhered to the compromise of the Peace of Prague (1634); and the ‘New’ House of Brunswick entered into possession at Wolfenbüttel in the person of Duke Augustus, a cautious ruler and a man of kindly disposition and of bookish tastes. At the Peace of Westphalia the rich see of Hildesheim had to be given up by the elder (Brunswick) branch; and for a time adversity seemed to have impressed upon it the expediency of uniting its policy with that of the younger, which had issued forth in a more advantageous position from the Great War. During this temporary accord between the two branches, the ambitious Duke Rudolf Augustus of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel was assisted by his Brunswick-Lüneburg kinsmen in the important achievement, which the resolute Dukes of the Middle House of Brunswick had essayed in vain, of permanently subjecting to their territorial authority the proud Hanseatic city of Brunswick. And, alike in the war provoked by Louis XIV’s invasion of the United Provinces (in 1672), in the march against the Swedes which was crowned by the victory of Fehrbellin (1675), and in the campaign against the Turks which ended with the recapture of Neuhäusel (1685), the armed forces of the two Guelfic lines fought side by side. But, while the New Lüneburg line was, by consolidation, preparing its future greatness, the advancement of the New Brunswick line, the repartitions of whose territories cannot occupy us here, again came to a standstill. Duke Rudolf Augustus survived till 1704, a prince whose virtues were of the passive kind, and with whom his ambitious younger brother, Antony Ulric, was associated in the government from 1685 onwards. In order to ensure the Succession to the offspring of his brother, the good Duke Rudolf Augustus, after the death of his first wife, contracted a mésalliance with the daughter of a Brunswick barber-surgeon, who, as Madame Rudolfine, led a life of happy obscurity by his side at Brunswick. His brother, Duke Antony Ulric, held his Court at Wolfenbüttel, where he cherished the literary studies in which he had engaged in the University of Helmstedt, and successfully essayed his own powers as an author, both in the favourite contemporary species of historical romances de longue haleine and in psalmody. But the mental activity of Antony Ulric, who in 1704 succeeded to sole ducal authority at Brunswick, was far from being absorbed by his literary pursuits; or rather, as we shall see, he contrived to make them subservient to the influences of dynastic ambition. He kept a jealous watch, now self-interested, now malevolent and revengeful, over the advance of the Lüneburg dynasty, so nearly akin to his own. And, in whatever measure the same jealousy may have been a factor in his own ultimate conversion to the Church of Rome, it certainly contributed to make him press on those splendid marriages of his grand-daughters with Emperor and Tsarevich, whereby he sought to redeem his own political insignificance.
Very different results attended the progress, in and after the latter part of the Thirty Years’ War, of the New House of Lüneburg, as it was called. Duke George was the sixth of seven brothers, of whom it fell in turn to the eldest four to conduct the government of the Lüneburg-Celle dominions. Here the principle of indivisibility had been established in 1592 and confirmed in 1610; but it did not apply to acquisitions by the line accruing after that date. In order to maintain this principle intact, all the brothers, with the exception of Duke George, remained unmarried, and, by a singularly orderly disposition of fate, the second, third, and fourth succeeded in due course, each on the demise of his next elder brother. The fifth and seventh died before the arrival of their respective turns, and thus it was to the progeny of Duke George that the lands and their government descended. He was accounted one of the most capable commanders of the latter part of the war, and an ardent supporter of the Protestant cause, with whose great champion Gustavus Adolphus he had been one of the earliest among the German Princes to enter into an understanding. But he was so unwilling to imperil the immediate interests of the dynasty, that, in 1634, he gave in his adhesion to the Peace of Prague. In 1635 he assumed the government of the principality of Calenberg, which, by the repartition made at that date, was transferred to the Lüneburg line; and in the following year he laid the foundations, in the fortified town of Hanover, of the castle which was to be expanded, in after ages, into the palace of Electors and Kings. He died in 1641; but his principality was preserved to his dynasty in the settlement of the Peace of Westphalia, and they further secured a ‘satisfaction,’ though by no means an adequate one, for the losses or disappointments undergone by them, in the shape of the right of appointing a prince of their family to the see of Osnabrück on every alternate vacancy. Thus, with a territory whose resources seemed to have been hopelessly exhausted by the devastations of the War and by the exactions of both war and peace, whose social system had been dislocated, and whose life had been in various respects demoralised, the sons of Duke George of Lüneburg entered upon a period in the history of their dynasty which was to conduct it from petty beginnings to unforeseen greatness.
The family consisted of four brothers and three sisters, of which latter two died in infancy. The surviving sister, Sophia Amalia, had in 1643 married the future King Frederick III of Denmark, and took a notable part in the defence of Copenhagen against the Swedes (1658), as well as in the few despotic excesses to be charged against the absolute rule with which, at a time when the Danish power had been laid low, her consort had been suddenly entrusted. The Duchess Sophia, who by her marriage had become sister-in-law to Queen Sophia Amalia, met her at Altona in 1671, and paid her a visit at her dower-palace at Nykjöping in 1680. Sophia saw this redoubtable sovereign on her amiable side, and relates how, on the occasion of a battue of hares, the Queen encouraged her to fire the first shot that she, her mother’s degenerate daughter, had ever discharged. Of the four brothers, the eldest, Duke Christian Lewis, had in 1641 succeeded to his father’s principality of Calenberg; but in 1648, when he assumed the government of the Lüneburg-Celle dominions proper and took up his abode at Celle, Calenberg, with its residential town of Hanover, passed to the second brother, Duke George William. The third and fourth, Dukes John Frederick and Ernest Augustus, in accordance with their father’s will, remained without territorial possessions (the reversion of the Osnabrück bishopric had not yet fallen in); and it was arranged that, in the first instance, John Frederick should reside at the Court of Celle, and Ernest Augustus at that of Hanover. The young Brunswick-Lüneburg Dukes were left without paternal control in the very period in their lives when it was most needed by them; for, at the time of his father’s death in 1641, the eldest, Christian Lewis, was only nineteen, and the youngest, Ernest Augustus, eleven years of age. The brothers had been brought into little contact with the old-fashioned academical training, of which the influence is recognisable in the Dukes of the elder branch; and Christian Lewis, whose years of rule at Hanover left behind them the memory of a prince of the Mohocks, was incapable of introducing the refinements of the modern era at Celle. At the same time he, in this larger sphere, did his duty, as he understood it, in both Church and State; staunchly adhering to the Lutheranism of his line, asserting his ducal authority against the recalcitrance of the good town of Lüneburg, and providing himself with the beginnings of a standing army in defiance of his Estates. His best friend and ally was the Great Elector of Brandenburg, who afterwards married, as his second wife, Charles Lewis’ widow, the Dowager Duchess Dorothea. This princess, who by birth belonged to the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Glucksburg, played an important part in the last years of her second husband, and, according to the irreverent expression of his descendant, Frederick the Great, ‘ruled the hero’; but her interference in the interest of her children cannot be proved to have gone the length, or to have produced the effects, frequently attributed to it.[64] The second brother, George William, who was to occupy so prominent a place in the history of his House and in that of the personal life of Sophia, was deficient neither in courage nor in insight, and the constant habit of foreign travel added the charm of agreeable manners to the attractiveness of an open and amiable nature. But, after, in his youth, he had seen some service under Frederick Henry of Orange, he had cast to the winds military ambition and serious purpose of any kind, and, leaving his ministers, as best they might, to carry on his government and manage his Estates, had with his ‘flying Court’ (as Sophia calls it) frittered away his time in a series of visits to Holland and, more especially, to Venice. During the intervals which he spent at home in Hanover, he pursued the same round of frivolous pleasures, intent upon nothing but ‘going a-hunting and making love.’ Announcing a visit from him at Heidelberg to the Elector Palatine Charles Lewis, Sophia bids her brother ‘retail the wicked doings of his own youth in England for the entertainment of his guest, but not touch on matters of State; for, though George William has plenty of wit and judgment, he wastes them on his jests and trifling amusements.’ As he grew older, he came to be extolled both as a ‘mighty Nimrod’ and as a connoisseur in champagne; but he also, as will be seen, subjected himself to influences which had the effect of refining his personal tastes and habits, while his intimacy with King William III could not but impart strength of purpose to his political action. But the moral infirmity of the good easy man remained incurable, and proved a source of sorrow to others besides Sophia.
The third of the brothers, John Frederick, like George William, matured his mental powers by travel rather than by study. But this prince, whose highest honour it is to have introduced Leibniz into the service of the House of Guelf, was not wholly undeserving of the praise lavished on him after death by the courtly philosopher in both German prose and Latin verse.[65] John Frederick was at any rate possessed by an ardent ambition, besides being determined to think out his own salvation. During a visit to Rome, in the year of Jubilee, 1650, he was much impressed by the arguments of Count Christopher von Rantzau, who, after adopting the irenic ideals of the great Helmstedt theologian Calixtus, had at Rome been brought over to Catholicism through the influence of the eminent convert and convert-maker Holstenius. In February, 1651, Duke John Frederick was himself at Assisi received into the Catholic Church; but it was not till several months later that his conversion became known. In December of the same year, at the very time when commissioners sent by his elder brothers had arrived at Rome to dissuade him from such a step, he made a public profession of his change of faith. There is no reason for supposing that the wish for a Cardinal’s hat was one of the motives that actually prompted his conversion, though he certainly was in the course of his life a man of many ambitions—including the High Mastership of the Germanic Order, and the Polish Crown. The Cardinalate desired for, if not by, John Frederick, was bestowed by Pope Innocent X upon a previous convert of Holstenius’, Landgrave Frederick of Hesse-Darmstadt; and, after lengthy negotiations, it was settled that Duke John Frederick’s apanage should be increased on condition of his not returning to Celle. But the good-natured George William gave him quarters at Hanover, and even provided for his private exercise of his religion in the Palace. This in turn alarmed the Calenberg Estates; and further difficulties threatened when the convert, well aware of the vantage-ground which he occupied by reason of these very difficulties, showed himself disposed to marry. It was the fear that, in this event, the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg would become a Catholic House, which impelled George William, after he had made up his mind to remain a bachelor himself, to hasten the marriage of Ernest Augustus. The religious question thus, already at this point, directly affected the determination of the future of the dynasty with whose fortunes Sophia was about to associate her own; nor is it astonishing that John Frederick should have bitterly resented the preferential position conceded to Ernest Augustus, the youngest of the brotherhood.
The future husband of Sophia had, as the youngest of the sons of his mother, the Duchess Anna Eleonora, been kept near home in his boyhood. He had even spent two years at the University of Marburg, where, in accordance with servile academic usage, he had filled the office of Rector Magnificentissimus, and he had afterwards been elected Coadjutor by the (Lutheran) Chapter of Magdeburg. This was a suitable preparation for the succession to the ‘bishopric’ of Osnabrück, which, in accordance with the provision of the Peace of Westphalia, was reserved for Ernest Augustus on the occasion of the next vacancy in the see. The conduct of this prince was, from the first, marked by a circumspection which neglected no opportunity; he was on the best of terms with both the eldest two of his brothers, and was devotedly attached to the second, whose companion he was in a long series of journeys and sojourns on the Lagoons.[66] Thus there established itself between George William and Ernest Augustus a brotherly intimacy—a fratellanza, to use an Italian term of almost technical significance—which goes some way towards explaining how Sophia’s marriage had been finally brought about. Ernest Augustus’ affection for his favourite brother may be regarded as the most attractive feature in his character; on the whole, his personality was a stronger though a less pleasing one than that of George William. Like many of his descendants, Sophia’s husband had an insatiable liking for ceremonial and was a stickler for etiquette, albeit, in the early as well as in the later years of his married life, his manners appear to have been remarkably free from restraint in the privacy of domestic life.
Although Sophia’s marriage had not been exactly a love-match, in the beginning, as she joyfully reported to her brother at Heidelberg, all was roses at Hanover; her husband’s behaviour made her feel assured that he would love her all the days of his life, and she idolised him so sincerely as to think herself lost when deprived of his company. The two good English ladies who had adhered to her since she left the Hague were in all kindness dismissed from her service; one returning to Holland, and the other being provided with a settlement on the spot; henceforth, the life of Sophia’s husband was to be her own life. Unluckily, however, this involved a constant intimate association with his brother George William, of which she soon perceived the inconveniences, and which, but for her sincerity and tact—for she was obliged to give proof of both qualities—might have placed her in the falsest of positions. After she had appeased her husband’s jealous suspicions, the two brothers joined in pressing her to accompany them on one of their Italian journeys; but she was quit for a trip to Holland in the company of her little niece Elizabeth Charlotte, whom, as will be seen, her brother had assigned to her care. After her return to Hanover she gave birth, on May 28th (O.S.), 1660, to her first-born child, George Lewis, afterwards King George I of Great Britain and Ireland. The following winter was spent by her husband in Italy with his brother, according to his custom; but they accompanied her down the Rhine from Heidelberg, where she had been staying with her brother, to Rotterdam, where, as has been seen, she bade a last farewell to her mother, the Queen of Bohemia, then on the point of starting for England. The two Dukes and Sophia soon afterwards returned to Hanover, in time for the birth, on October 2nd, 1661, of her second son, Frederick Augustus. Two months afterwards, the see of Osnabrück at last fell vacant by the death of the Catholic Bishop, Cardinal Francis William von Wartenberg. The event (which had been rumoured to have taken place already two years earlier) must have been welcome to Sophia, as relieving her from a position by no means free from difficulty, although in her letters she makes no reference to her husband’s jealousy of his brother. After Ernest Augustus had held his entry at Osnabrück as Bishop—a ceremony at which, as Sophia remarks, she felt that her presence would be superfluous,—she joined him at the castle of Iburg, which became her residence for many years. The little Court moved about a good deal between Osnabrück and Iburg, besides (after a time) occasionally staying at Celle and at Diepholz, the former seat of the Counts and Edelherren of Diepholz, whose line had become extinct in 1585.
The change from Hanover was a delightful one for the Duchess Sophia; for, apart from the fact that the Old-town of Hanover, within whose walls lay the ducal castle, was a sombre and crowded enclosure very unlike what was destined to become ultimately one of the most cheerful and attractive of German capitals, she and her husband had resided there in a position which, in spite of the excess of affection surrounding them, remained one of dependence. They now for the first time tasted the pleasures, on however small a scale, of sovereignty. She was, in German fashion, ‘the Bishopess’; when she travelled in France, her incognita designation was ‘Madame d’Osnabrück.’ As the old episcopal lodging at Osnabrück was found inadequate to the ample requirements and luxurious tastes of the new Bishop,[67] he at once set about buying land and house property of all kinds with a view to the erection of a suitable episcopal palace. The building of it seems to have been begun in 1665, and seriously taken in hand from 1668; but it was not ready till early in 1673, from which date Ernest Augustus and Sophia continuously resided there for the last five or six years before their removal to Hanover. The palace, which still stands (it was restored with quite unusual success by the last King of Hanover), bears the name of Ernest Augustus on its portal, with the Arcadian motto Sola bona quæ honesta. The building erected by Ernest Augustus seems to have been intended for a direct reminiscence of the Luxembourg, at a time when Versailles and the Louvre were only in course of construction, and was, like its prototype, surrounded by magnificent gardens, designed by the Bishop’s own gardener, Martin Charbonnier, whom he had brought from Paris, and who seems to have been a pupil of Lenôtre. The castle at Iburg was of a similar type of architecture—heavy but not ineffective—and betrayed the same lack of finish, due to the inadequacy of the expenditure upon artistic work.[68] Meanwhile, on the breezy heights of Iburg, as is shown by the evidence of her own letters and those of the incomparable Palatine niece whom she carried thither from Hanover, Sophia spent the happiest if not the most exciting years of her life. After all, she writes in her favourite ironical vein, ‘One cannot live more than once. Why vex one’s soul, if one can eat, drink and sleep, sleep, drink and eat? All is vanity.... Tranquillity of the spirit is lovely, since from it springs our bodily health. Those whom the Lord loves He blesses in their sleep. We play at nine-pins, breed young ducks, amuse ourselves with running at a ring or backgammon, talk every year of paying a visit to Italy; and in the meantime things go quite as well as is to be expected for a petty bishop, who is able to live in peace and, in case of war, can depend upon the help of his brothers.’ In the summer an annual visit was paid to the waters of Pyrmont, and gradually things became more lively at home—in 1663, we find a company of French musicians engaged for the pleasure of the Court. As a matter of fact, Sophia, though she was very far from vegetating in either mental or bodily inactivity, visited Italy but once, crossing the Alps for the first time in April, 1664. Nor is there any better or more convincing proof of her rare powers of observation and insight than that she should have learnt so much—and not only as to the beauty of Italian gardens and the charm of Italian manners—in the course of a sojourn extending over little more than a twelve-month. While by no means irresponsive to the aesthetic attractions of Rome and Florence, she was the last person to give way to the religious influences in readiness to be exerted upon her. Loretto annoyed her; and at Rome, with a spirit which Sir Henry Wotton would have applauded, she refused an offering to the Blessed Mary of Victory, to whom the Emperor Ferdinand II had dedicated his sceptre in grateful remembrance of the battle of Prague. At Venice, amidst whose gaieties and gallantries she found herself altogether ‘depaisée,’ though, nevertheless, by no means incapable of amusing herself, it was brought home to her how largely religion was used as a cloak in a society where the nuns made themselves agreeable to gentlemen and the very churches were used for the purpose of assignations. Much in the cynical tone which became habitual to Sophia and to her intimates is attributable to experiences such as these, rather than to natural irreverence. An attempt made at Rome to ‘save her soul’ by bringing her over to Catholicism was so feeble that she had no difficulty in repelling it; nor could anything have been better calculated to heighten the repugnance with which such overtures inspired her than the want of appreciation of the dignity of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg, which she thought observable in the illustrious convert (almost a bête-noire to some of the Palatines) Queen Christina of Sweden, as well as in Pope Alexander VII.
By none of the family was this indifference more keenly felt than by Sophia’s brother-in-law, Duke John Frederick, who showed no sign of any wish that his conversion should remain its own reward. Sophia was to have reason for congratulating herself on her discretion in abstaining from receiving an incognito visit from him at Rome, before he left the city. For hardly had her husband and she, in the early spring in 1665, once more set foot in Germany on their homeward journey, when they learnt that the eldest of the brothers, Duke Christian Lewis, had died, and that John Frederick, having returned from Rome just in time, had made forcible entry into Celle and Lüneburg, to which he contended that George William, having once made his choice of Calenberg-Göttingen, could no longer claim any right of succession. Inasmuch as the question between George William and John Frederick, which the latter thus proposed to settle by a coup de main, turned on the interpretation of the will of their father, a bitter Bruderstreit seemed to be announcing itself; and John Frederick, in his usual sanguine way, boasted his hopes of both Imperial and French support for his efforts as a Catholic prince. On the other hand, the facile temper of George William, who, moreover, at the time of his more ardent brother’s incursion, was occupied with his own private affairs in Holland, might have given John Frederick a chance, but for the exertions of Count George Frederick of Waldeek, afterwards celebrated as the right hand of William of Orange, and for the intervention of the Elector of Brandenburg. Several Catholic Estates, such as the Elector of Mainz and the Bishop of Münster, favoured John Frederick; on the other hand, Sophia had solicited the diplomatic intervention of her brother, the Elector Charles Lewis. After long and angry negotiations, in which the Scandinavian Powers as well as France took part, John Frederick had to rest satisfied with the addition of Grubenhagen to the territories transferred to his sway from that of George William, who in his turn entered into possession of the eldest brother’s portion of Lüneburg-Celle. The energy of Ernest Augustus, which had been as conspicuous in these transactions as had George William’s want of this quality, was rewarded by the transfer to the Bishop of Osnabrück of the Countship of Diepholz.
We are obliged to refrain from more than touching upon the remaining course of John Frederick’s career, and the régime now established by him at Hanover—one of the most peculiar of the vicissitudes undergone by that capital in the course of its many and changeful experiences. Capuchin friars once more found a home at Hanover, which, in days of old, had been a town full of churches and cloisters; a Vicar Apostolic and Bishop of Morocco in partibus resided there as the centre of a propaganda fostered alike by Pope and Emperor.[69] The Jesuits at the same time had a centre of activity at Hildesheim. But there was no interference either with the rights of the Lutheran establishments, or with the claims of free intellectual enquiry, as represented by those whom John Frederick’s high-minded liberality drew to his Court, and, above all, by his librarian, Leibniz. The political ambition of the Duke, who cherished the design of securing a Ninth Electorate for the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg a generation before it was actually accomplished, ranged him on the side of France in the chief political conflict of his times, and thus led him to stand in opposition, not only to the interests of the Empire, but also to the policy, on which his brothers finally determined, of resisting the action of Louis XIV. On the other hand, it was John Frederick who set his younger brother the example of a firm monarchical administration, and who took the all-important step of providing this administration with the support of a standing army (two-thirds of which he was, however, pledged by a secret treaty to hand over as auxiliaries to France). But, before the issues of the great European contest in which he was prepared to sustain the part chosen by him finally declared themselves, he was overtaken by death, on his last journey towards his beloved Italy, in 1679. Many ambitions, as has been seen, had fretted his (far from pygmy) body. It was natural that, estranged as he was from his brothers, he should have hoped himself to become the founder of a dynasty; and it was equally inevitable that his brother Ernest Augustus and his sister-in-law Sophia, who were already intent upon guarding in every way the interests of their own descendants, should have shown scant sympathy with his matrimonial projects, which were, as a matter of course, directed to securing the hand of a Catholic princess. Towards this end no aid could be more effective, as none was more ready, than that of Sophia’s sister-in-law, the ‘Princesse Palatine’ (Anne of Gonzaga), in whose dexterous hold were successively gathered the threads of so many marriage-schemes calculated to advance the interests of France, and approving themselves to the Church of Rome. The Princesse Palatine accordingly apprised John Frederick, whose ambition was at the time occupied with thoughts of the next vacancy on the Polish throne, that an alliance with one of her and Prince Edward’s daughters might ease the way to such a goal:—‘pour cela, il faut commencer avec le mariage.’ The negotiations for the match were carried on by the busy French diplomatic agent de Gourville, who, during these years and again at a later date, was employed by the Government of Louis XIV in the task of trying to win over the Brunswick Dukes to the interests of France, and whose Memoirs are thus a notable source of information concerning their Courts and their policy.
The danger with which Sophia and her husband found themselves ‘toujours menassés’ was realised, when, in 1667, John Frederick gave his hand to the youngest of Edward’s daughters, Benedicta Henrica. But, though two daughters were born to John Frederick (the elder of whom, Charlotte Felicitas, afterwards became Duchess of Modena, while the second, as the consort of Joseph I, attained to the dignity of Empress), his hopes were not crowned by the birth of a son. Of the Duchess Benedicta, who, as a Catholic, was excluded from the English Succession, to which, in her later years, she had the first claim by birth among the surviving descendants of the Queen of Bohemia, Sophia’s correspondence contains occasional kindly mention; though there was little trace of the high spirit of the Palatines in the gentle and sombre-featured widow of the massive John Frederick. His own soaring ambition and imperious will isolate his memory in the annals of his House, while the shadowy figure of his consort has come to be all but forgotten in the history of the English Succession.
It may be convenient to note in this place that, owing to the attack made by ‘Münster’s prelate,’ as an ally of Charles II of England, upon the United Provinces, the States-General had appealed for aid to George William and Ernest Augustus, who duly arrived in their support. In return, the Bishop of Münster threatened the city of Osnabrück, where Sophia and her children accordingly had to take up their abode during the winter 1665-6, under the protection of the Bishop’s troops, Iburg being too exposed to be safe. It would have been a curious accident if this Bishop’s war had ended in any mischance, by which the future Heiress of Great Britain should have been taken prisoner by the ally of its King. In June, 1666, Sophia was enabled to return to the ‘delightful solitude’ of Iburg. The autumn and winter of 1666 she spent chiefly at Osnabrück, while her husband and his brother were carrying on operations against Sweden in defence of the city of Bremen.
At the time of the negotiations which ended in the establishment of Duke George William at Celle, and of Duke John Frederick at Hanover, their youngest brother, Ernest Augustus, and his faithful Duchess were much exercised in spirit by the beginnings of another family trouble, of which the course was to be more protracted and the consequences far more enduring. For some time George William’s brother and sister-in-law had been disquieted by the attentions paid by the amorous Duke to Mademoiselle Eleonora d’Olbreuze, who, in 1665, when he first made her acquaintance at the Hague, was lady-in-waiting to the Princess (Henry Charles) of Taranto, by birth a Princess of Hesse-Cassel. The animus of Sophia, which renders it necessary to treat with the utmost caution any statement made by her or hers in the present connexion, is evident from her earliest mention of the lady who was to be the object of her long and bitter hatred, as ‘une fille qui estoit à la princesse de Tarente.’ Mademoiselle d’Olbreuze sprang from an ancient Poitevin family which belonged to the minor nobility of a province long full of Huguenot sympathies, and which held a leading position in the oligarchy, as it has been called, that charged itself with the religious and intellectual interests of Protestantism in these regions.[70] That she was exceptionally endowed with an ability including a great deal besides tact, is abundantly clear not only from the success of her manœuvres for raising herself, and afterwards her child, to such greatness as was attainable by them, but also from her living to be chosen as the spokeswoman of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg on a memorable occasion in its history. Nor can there be any doubt but that her intellectual influence was a refining one, while her personality must have possessed a charm which is hardly suggested by such portraiture of her as remains. Sophia, after having, apparently through Mademoiselle d’Olbreuze’s own judicious prudence, been spared her company in Italy, had found herself constrained, by her husband’s anxiety to please his brother, to bring her over almost in state from Hertogenbosch to Iburg; and, though the Memoirs refer with scorn to the Frenchwoman’s real or pretended conquests before that of George William, Sophia is obliged to confess that she found the intruder both modest and pleasant of speech, and altogether very amiable. Thus it is clear that she prepared with consummate skill the first upward step on which so much depended, and which she actually accomplished in November, 1665. On the solemn occasion of the funeral of Duke Christian Lewis, the whole family, including his widow, his brothers George William and Ernest Augustus, and Sophia, met at Celle; and to this august conclave the new ‘Duke of Celle,’ as he was now so usually called, made known what Sophia terms his ‘anti-contract’ of marriage with Eleonora d’Olbreuze, and what, in other words, was his recognition of her as his mistress en titre. In this document, signed by his brother and sister-in-law, as well as by his mistress and himself, George William repeated his promise to remain unmarried, which he declared to have been dictated by his affection for his brother, and by a desire to consult his interests and those of his children. Mademoiselle d’Olbreuze, who had innocently begged that she might henceforth bear the name of Madame de Celle, had instead to put up with that of Madame de Harburg, by which, as Sophia rather savagely adds, she continued to be known for the next ten years.
Sophia and her husband seem at first to have regarded this revised arrangement, which was substantially quite in accordance with German as well as Italian precedents, as on the whole likely to ensure what to them was naturally the main point, the continuance of George William’s bachelorhood. In September, 1666, his mistress bore him a daughter, the ill-fated Sophia Dorothea. From the same year onward, Ernest Augustus and his wife’s own family rapidly increased, by the birth, in December, of their third son, impartially christened Maximilian William after the Catholic Elector of Cologne and the Protestant Elector of Brandenburg, and the births of their daughter Sophia Charlotte, in 1668, and of their sons Charles Philip, Christian, and Ernest Augustus, in 1669, 1671, and 1674 respectively. Sophia’s love for her children forms, perhaps because of the perfectly natural expression which she gives to so natural an affection, a most delightful feature of her personality. This love enveloped alike the more and the less gifted, the successful and the unlucky, the phlegmatic and mild-mannered, though ungainly ‘Brunswicker’ (her eldest son, George Lewis), and the fearless little spitfire of a ‘Palatine’ (her second son, Frederick Augustus)—as she described them in their early days. We shall see how her tenderly loved only daughter’s bright and enquiring spirit also commended her to her mother’s intellectual sympathies; but her motherly heart flowed out towards all her sons, and even the inexpansive nature of the eldest seems to have in a measure warmed towards her. But she could only with difficulty reconcile herself to a policy which made it necessary to sacrifice the interests of his younger brothers to his, or rather to those of the House as a whole; and even among these younger brothers themselves, it would almost seem as if her anxiety, like a true mother’s, had been deepest for those who most needed support. Thus we find her, when both Frederick Augustus and Charles Philip were serving the Emperor in arms, pitifully pointing out to Leibniz how the younger of the pair was not ‘si chiche de ses sollicitations’ nor ‘si misanthrope’ as his brother, and succeeded better accordingly. Yet his prosperity, too, she had at heart; nor could she suppress the thought that the sum spent on the purchase of a regiment for him by his father was less than what the latter had on occasion been known to lose at the basset-table.
In these earlier years, however, before the deeper anxieties of her motherhood had yet come to Sophia, although the happiness of her life was already beginning to centre in her children, it owed much to the presence at Hanover and Iburg of the niece, who had become to all intents and purposes her adopted child. From her fourth to her eleventh year, Elizabeth Charlotte, the Elector Palatine’s only daughter by his unhappy first marriage, was the constant companion of her aunt, to whom this joyous period of intimacy sufficed to bind her heart and soul during a long life of trials. It was in a happy moment that her father resolved upon sending his child, in the company of her governess (afterwards, as Frau von Harling, one of the most favoured recipients of Elizabeth Charlotte’s flow of confidences), to what became the home of her heart, and was, in after days, the perennial refuge of her thoughts. As a child ‘Liselotte’—so she was familiarly called—was the very incarnation of high spirits and natural gaiety, delighting in air and movement like the leaves which the wind drives before its blast; hence the sobriquet, untranslateable but conjuring up a world of fairies and imps of mischief, by which she liked to speak of herself, even when cribbed and confined amidst the royal splendours of Versailles. Rauschenblattenknechtchen never forgot either the homely comforts of Hanover in meat and drink, or the airy freedom of the heights of Iburg; and for its châtelaine, for her virtues and her wisdom, for her high intellectual powers, and for the charm of her style, she conceived a loving admiration, which long outlived its object, and which found expression in many volumes of letters, brimful, from the first to the last, of quick observation, animated comment, and a piquant or pleasantly malicious wit, relieved here and there by touches of an equally irresistible natural pathos. So early as 1663, Liselotte was, to her unfeigned sorrow, summoned back to Heidelberg by her father, whom her mother’s departure to Cassel had at last enabled to arrange his family life after his own fashion. Sophia deeply regretted her niece’s departure from Iburg, where, as she wrote, they had led a vagabond life together; but, with her usual common-sense and self-control, she declared it quite in order that the Infanta of the Palatinate should be brought up at a Court like Heidelberg, rather than down in Westphalia, where her kinsfolk had lived in simple bourgeois condition and seen few people. To her changed home Elizabeth Charlotte’s nature, readily susceptible to kindness, without difficulty accommodated itself during seven further happy years. The moral atmosphere in which they were spent was that of a religious tolerance springing partly from kindliness of disposition and partly from indifference; the epoch of religious strife seemed over, and another at hand, of less fettered thought and philosophic speculation. Into this new movement it was easy to enter superficially, encouraged by the lofty aspirations for a reunion of Christendom that occupied some of the foremost among contemporary thinkers. From these influences, of whose effect upon the Elector Palatine Charles Lewis and his favourite sister Sophia note has already been taken, so receptive a mind as that of his Elizabeth Charlotte was not likely to escape; and they undoubtedly help to account for the process of the conversion which ominously preceded a marriage destined to alter the whole course of her life. To the ‘Princesse Palatine’ (Anne of Gonzaga) and her allies no path seemed impracticable that led to Rome; and, in the case of the niece, no such apparatus of argument was required as had to be set in motion when the attempt was made at a later date to work upon the mind of the Duchess Sophia and her husband through the pertinacious fervour of Madame de Brinon and the swooping condescension of the ‘Eagle of Meaux.’ For Elizabeth Charlotte was constrained by the instinct of filial obedience, her father having persuaded himself that the welfare of the Palatinate necessitated, together with the sacrifice of his daughter’s happiness, the ignoring of her conscience. That in this calculation he, as was indicated above, terribly deceived himself, and that the bond thus knit proved the ruin of the land which it was intended to benefit, only enhances and deepens the cruel irony of the whole transaction. A marriage had been arranged between Elizabeth Charlotte and Louis XIV’s brother, the Duke of Orleans (whose first consort, Charles II’s sister Henrietta, had died in 1670, in circumstances long regarded as suspicious); and, though no mention of the subject of religion had been made in the contract, her conversion to the Church of Rome was regarded as an indispensable preliminary step to its execution, and it was necessary that this step should seem to have been taken spontaneously. She was accordingly prepared for it by her father’s secretary,[71] to the diversity of whose historical and philosophical learning two volumes of Chevreana survive to testify. Hereupon she was taken to Strassburg, whither her aunt the Duchess Sophia also found her way to meet her and her father, but where also appeared the presiding genius of the whole business, the ‘Princesse Palatine.’ After the sojourn at Strassburg—where aunt and niece parted—Elizabeth Charlotte passed on to Metz, where she was received into the Church of Rome, and thence into her new married life. The religious comedy was completed by a letter from her to her father entreating his pardon for her change of faith, and by his reply, the really contemptible part of the process, making pretence of a virtuous indignation. Whatever Elizabeth Charlotte’s feelings may have been at the time, she afterwards made no secret of the matter to her aunt Sophia, and frequently dwelt upon her aunt’s share in the transaction. ‘It was you,’ she says on one occasion, ‘who made me a Catholic’; and, when Duke Antony Ulric had gone over to Rome, ‘Why,’ she asks, ‘should you be so sorry, when you are such a fine convert-maker yourself?’[72] But, though the constraint which had been put upon her never ceased to rankle in her mind, and though her conversion was not consummated without some rubs and some qualms, these feelings perhaps never went very deep. Her real grief, which made her ‘cry all through the night from Strassburg to Chalons,’ was at parting from her German home and its associations, in which her whole heart was wrapped up; and of this parting the enforced change of religious profession was merely an incident. ‘ Between ourselves,’ she afterwards wrote to her aunt, out of her gilded exile, ‘I was stuck here against my will; here I must live and here I must die, whether I like it or not.’
And so the genial daughter of the Palatinate, true of heart and sound in body and mind, became the wife of a feeble and effeminate voluptuary, devoid of all character or will of his own, and by him the mother of a prince who, though neither incapable nor ill-meaning, typified the decadence of that France which he was called to rule as Regent. But with this long second stage of her life we cannot concern ourselves here. About August, 1679, she had the pleasure of a visit from the Duchess Sophia, who, as already noted, came to France at that time to see her sister at Maubuisson. The aunt found her beloved niece stouter, but in excellent spirits. On the invitation of the Duke of Orleans the Duchess Sophia was present at Fontainebleau on the occasion of the wedding of the Duke’s daughter by his first marriage to the King of Spain (Charles II); and, though she kept up her incognito, King Louis XIV called upon her, and charmed her by his conversation, which he magnanimously turned to the success of the Hanoverian arms at the bridge of Conz, mentioned below. For the rest, the sacrifice of which, for all her philosophy of good humour, Elizabeth Charlotte was the conscious victim, was, as we know, not only made in vain, but brought upon her father’s and her own beloved Palatinate, in the shape of the so-called ‘Orleans War’ (1688-90), consequences which were the direct opposite of those intended by him, and which caused her many days and nights of anguish. During the half-century of her exile—for down to the day of her death, in 1722, she never saw the Palatinate again—though she held her head high, with eyes undazzled even by the closest propinquity to the sun, there was hardly an experience of bitterness and disappointment which she was not fated to undergo; and through all she had but one consolation, which was her pen. She wrote because she loved her correspondents, but also because she loved the relief of writing, and the opportunities thus afforded of self-expansion and of free expression for the loves and hatreds of her soul. That—in the days of Louis XIV—her letters would be opened, so as to ascertain the working of her Protestant sympathies, and perhaps of her interest in the English Succession question, troubled her not a whit; if her insults to Madame de Maintenon—apparently quite unprovoked, and certainly, in a large measure, baseless—were made known to their object, this was so much gain to their author. Yet, after every deduction has been made on account of the pride, the jealousy, the personal and other prejudices, and the perennial impatience which weariness of heart had made second nature to the kindly-hearted Palatine, her picture of the Court of Louis XIV, in the latter half of his reign, possesses a historical value which is only surpassed by its general human interest.[73] It is, above all, in Elizabeth Charlotte’s letters to Sophia, and in the references to ma tante in those addressed to her various other correspondents, that the pathetic side of her humour asserts itself, together with the malicious; nor has the whole literature of confidences any second example quite comparable to this, either in volume or in the directness of its derivation from nature’s self.
We return to Osnabrück and Iburg, whither Elizabeth Charlotte longed to fly, tying herself to the end of a ribbon transmitted by her as a sample of the fashions of Versailles. So long as the relations between Duke George William and Madame de Harburg remained unchanged, Ernest Augustus or his descendants were assured of the Succession in Celle and Lüneburg; for it had been finally settled with John Frederick that the right of further option, against which he had formerly protested, had now determined. John Frederick’s marriage, in 1668, seemed to cut off from Ernest Augustus and his line the prospect of succeeding in Hanover likewise, until John Frederick, whose hopes of a son and heir had been repeatedly disappointed, died in 1679 without having seen them fulfilled. Thus, during these years, it was upon the Succession at Celle that the ambition of Ernest Augustus and Sophia was concentrated; nor had they for some time any reason to fear that their wishes would be thwarted by George William. Indeed, his acceptance of the existing situation seemed clear from his endeavours to secure, by means of a series of treaty arrangements, a large private estate in land to his children by Madame de Harburg. The early death of all of these, with the sole exception of the eldest, Sophia Dorothea, born in September, 1666, eventually made her a wealthy heiress; but some time passed before her father abandoned all expectation of a son, and a disquieting rumour reached Osnabrück that, if George William’s mistress were to present him with the desired heir, it was his intention to marry her, his ‘anti-contract’ notwithstanding. As there had been precedents in plenty for the promise,[74] so it might no doubt be possible to find others for setting it aside. Already, Eleonora was tactfully asserting herself at Celle, and her personality was becoming the dominant power in the ducal Court. Some of her Poitevin relations held high office there; and, though the fact that other Frenchmen of family entered the military service both of George William and of his brother the Bishop was, at the time, by no means an exceptional phenomenon, yet it added to the significance of an influence which the policy of Louis XIV might just then deem worth cultivating.[75] For the Brunswick Dukes were, from the time of the Triple Alliance (1668) onwards, political personages of much interest both to France and to her adversaries, and had, two years earlier, even seemed to have some chance of subsidies from a Government more in the habit of receiving than granting them—the Government of Charles II. After John Frederick of Hanover had, as has been seen, decided finally to throw in his lot with France, his brothers George William and Ernest Augustus continued to be solicited by her diplomacy; and it was with the palpable purpose of gaining over the former and more important of the pair, that, in 1671, de Gourville was instructed to question him by presenting a royal ordinance, naturalising his daughter by Madame de Harburg in France as ‘Demoiselle Sophia-Dorothée de Brunswick et de Lunebourg.’ But the bait was too minute.[76] Larger issues were involved, and, though in 1671, apprehensive of the consequences which a bolder policy might have for the safety of his bishopric, Ernest Augustus actually entered into a treaty of neutrality for two years with France, George William was by his far-sighted Chancellor, Baron Lewis Justus von Schütz,[77] prevailed upon to stand firm. When the invasion of the United Provinces of the Netherlands took place in 1672, Duke George William ranged himself on the side of the adversaries of the French invader, and very soon Ernest Augustus followed suit. In 1674, George William, accompanied by Ernest Augustus, was in command of the Brunswick-Lüneburg troops forming part of the imperial army opposed to Marshal Turenne, the devastator of the Palatinate, in Alsace; and, in the following year, the Bishop of Osnabrück and his eldest son George Lewis achieved a brilliant military success at the bridge of Conz, and followed it up by taking part in the recovery of Treves. Before leaving Osnabrück for this campaign, Ernest Augustus had handsomely raised his consort’s dowry to an annual income of 16,000 dollars. ‘I hope,’ she wrote, ‘that I shall never need it, and that the Parcæ will allow him to survive me.’ On this occasion he returned wreathed in laurels. At Osnabrück an imposing triumphal arch was erected by ‘the dancing-master Jemme,’ and all the princes and princesses at the little Court joined in a dance given in his garden by the same public-spirited professor. In 1675, they took part in the war carried on by the Empire against Sweden, which they helped to oust for a time from the duchies of Bremen and Verden. To allies so loyal and so useful as the two Dukes, no reasonable favour could be refused by the Emperor Leopold, who was manifestly unaware of the conflict between the desires of the elder and the interests of the younger brother. (It is interesting, as an illustration of the consistent dynastic policy of Ernest Augustus, that, when in 1674, after some cautious hesitation, he had concluded a ten years’ league with the Emperor, the United Provinces, and Spain, he procured the insertion in the compact of a clause binding the States-General to use their whole influence in the peace negotiations in favour of his bishopric of Osnabrück being turned into a secular principality.) In July, 1674, a patent issued from the Vienna Chancery, granting to Madame de Harburg, for herself and her children, the hereditary title of Countess of the Empire (Reichsgräfin) of Wilhelmsburg—the designation of the landed property between Hamburg and Harburg settled upon her and her descendants by her protector. At the same time, the Empress Eleonora, a scion of the Catholic Neuburg branch of the Palatine House, conferred upon her namesake at Celle the Order of the Female Slaves of Virtue, hitherto reserved for princesses. Soon afterwards, the right was secured to Eleonora’s daughter Sophia Dorothea, in the event of her marrying a prince, of bearing the arms of the House of Brunswick and of being recognised as herself belonging to that House. The name of the prince who was to secure the prize of the heiress’ hand while thus raising her in advance of her mother, to the coveted rank, was no longer a secret: it was Augustus Frederick, the youthful eldest son of Duke Antony Ulric of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. Antony Ulric was at the time, though co-regent with his elder brother, involved in debt and prepared to bring about a rise in the prospects of his family, even by means of a matrimonial connexion in other respects not a little dubious. For the conclusion of this match Sophia Dorothea’s legitimation was indispensable; but her aunt, the Duchess Sophia, indignantly relates that a shorter and readier way of reaching this end was suggested to her brother-in-law by his Chancellor Schütz. He advised the Duke to marry Sophia Dorothea’s mother. Schütz was the most capable politician in his master’s Court, and served him, as his son-in-law Bernstorff afterwards served Ernest Augustus and his son, with equal fidelity and distinction. There is no reason for attributing sordid motives to the advice which this petty Wolsey gave to his easy despot—that he should take the course on which his heart might not unnaturally be supposed to be set. For the moment, the incomplete step of securing a patent of legitimacy for his daughter was deemed sufficient; but, very soon, Eleonora, or Eleonora’s ally, prompted by the restless Antony Ulric, again entered into campaign. At first, a morganatic marriage, with renewed safeguards for Ernest Augustus and his line, was suggested; then, a preliminary attempt was made to place the lady on a level with her lord, by obtaining for her the title of Princess. The Duchess Sophia was on the alert, and cites at length a letter which she wrote to her brother-in-law in order to avert the impending thunderbolt, and his bland reply assuring her that it would prove absolutely harmless to her family. In April, 1676, the marriage of George William and Eleonora, who still remained Countess of Wilhelmsburg only, was celebrated at Celle; and nothing could, on the face of it, be more reassuring than the treaty which followed in May, and which, while guaranteeing the Succession in George William’s dominions to his brother and his brother’s descendants, actually provided that the oaths of allegiance taken by his subjects in future should be sworn to his brother as well as to himself. It seemed to Sophia that this procedure might opportunely have been set on foot when George William’s wife was again expected to present him with a son. Meanwhile Eleonora speedily achieved the remainder of her ascent; in April, 1676, Sophia had to learn that the Frenchwoman—in her intimate correspondence this designation would have been avoided as colourless—was prayed for in church at Celle, as if she were the reigning Duchess; and, soon afterwards, the final blow descended, when it became known that the Emperor’s envoy had saluted her by the title of Highness. Sophia expresses herself, with not undeserved contempt, as to the excuse preferred by George William, that he could not help obliging one whom others called his wife. From the silence which, in the remaining pages of Sophia’s Memoirs, ensues on a topic which cannot fail to have continued to exercise her patience, we infer that, though it was very long before either she, or anyone who cared for her, had a good word for the Duchess of Celle, the common-sense which no kind of emotion ever extinguished in her induced her to abandon the struggle against the inevitable. She consoled herself, as she told her favourite niece, with the reflexion that, whatever title the intruder might herself bear, no son of hers could ever be more than a Count of Wilhelmsburg, and that George William might still be trusted, in the event of a son being born to him, to keep his promise to his brother. The Duchess of Orleans did her best to promulgate this faith to unbelieving or indifferent listeners at Versailles; but it was not in this way that Sophia’s half-pathetic trust in her ci-devantci-devant lover was destined to be put to the proof.[78]
The influence of the Duchess of Celle upon her husband’s mode of life, and upon the tone of his Court, was altogether so excellent that we may without much hesitation discredit her sister-in-law’s insinuations as to the bringing-up of George William and Eleonora’s only surviving child, the ill-fated Sophia Dorothea. The engagement which had actually been concluded between her and the youthful Prince Augustus Frederick of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel came to a sudden end by his death in August, 1676, from wounds received at the siege of Philippsburg; and the attempt of his father Duke Antony Ulric to secure the hand of the heiress for one of his younger sons met with no ready acceptance. Other suitors appeared or were spoken of: the young Hereditary Governor of Friesland, Henry Casimir of Nassau-Dietz, who was recommended to George William by his cousinhood with William III of Orange, and Prince George of Denmark, for whom fate had in store the splendid, if not in all respects enviable, position of consort to an English Queen. Curiously enough, the hand of the Princess Anne had at this time been also thought to be within reach of Ernest Augustus and Sophia’s eldest son George Lewis, who paid a visit to England from December, 1680, to the following March. But for him, too, a different destiny was reserved; nor, if the account of a most sagacious observer and true friend is to be trusted, had this particular honour ever been coveted either by the Prince himself or at Hanover—for this among other reasons, that Princess Anne’s birth on the mother’s side was from a very second-rate family. The Prince had, accordingly, taken very little trouble in the matter; so that, when he left England, it was thought that the marriage would never take place—all of which things Queen Anne never forgot.[79] Before long a project of dynastic ambition ripened, as we must conclude, in the minds of the brothers at Celle and Osnabrück, which, if carried out, besides serving the immediate end of replenishing the resources exhausted by the extravagant life of Ernest Augustus, would go far towards ensuring the ultimate union of all the dominions of the Brunswick-Lüneburg line. As to the former purpose, it probably weighed heavily with Sophia’s husband, whose expenditure on travel abroad and on pomp and ceremony at home had long been excessive, and who had more recently added to his self-indulgences the costly luxury of a mistress en titre, in the person of Clara Elizabeth von Meysenbug, since 1673, by her marriage to one of Ernest Augustus’ chief courtiers, Baroness von Platen.[80] It would not be easy to show from Sophia’s letters how she was affected by a liaison which lasted during her husband’s lifetime; one quite welcomes the late indication afforded by her remark, on the occasion of the visit of the Tsar Peter the Great, in 1697, that in Russia all women paint, and that this was why Countess Platen so much charmed the Muscovites. Of her personal power over Ernest Augustus, and of certain other features in her history and that of her family, something will have to be said below; but it may be as well to point out that there is no satisfactory evidence to show that she played the part ascribed to her in the tragedy to be noticed below. This was not Ernest Augustus’ only infidelity, for about the same date we hear of a relation between him and one ‘Esther,’ a femme de chambre in the service of his wife.[81] Sophia, from whom her husband’s affections were thus being alienated, after she had borne him six children, seems at first to have felt anything but satisfaction at the project of a marriage between her eldest son, George Lewis, and his cousin, Sophia Dorothea; indeed, in a letter of November, 1677, the Duchess of Orleans, as her aunt’s faithful echo, profanely denounces the union of such a creature with so worthy a young prince as a sin against the Holy Ghost. In 1679, Sophia describes the pill as difficult to swallow, though adequately gilded, and adds that, for her part, she would have preferred a daughter of John Frederick of Hanover with a third of the gilding. But, three years later, in 1682, the Duchess of Orleans treats the marriage as an accomplished fact. ‘She will,’ she observes, ‘imitate the discretion of her aunt;’ but ‘like the parrot of the Duke of Savoy, though she holds her tongue, she thinks a great deal.’ A large amount of fiction, the origin of which is traceable to the same tainted source—a ‘historical’ novel published, nearly a generation afterwards, by the ingenious but far from disinterested Duke Antony Ulric[82]—has accumulated round the supposed exertions of Sophia to induce her brother-in-law, despite the reluctance of his wife, to approve the sacrifice of their daughter. All we know is that, by 1681, the tone of Ernest Augustus and Sophia towards Eleonora had entirely changed; and it is clear what had made both the parents of the ‘worthy’ Prince George Lewis intent upon bringing the matter to a conclusion. About this time, Ernest Augustus had conceived the design of obtaining the Emperor’s consent to the postulation of one of his sons as his successor in the bishopric of Osnabrück, notwithstanding the express provision of the Peace of Westphalia that it should be alternately held by a Catholic and a Lutheran. Sophia was quite prepared to drive a coach and four through that settlement, and let the Catholics afterwards appoint two bishops in succession if they chose. But this would have been a merely temporary gain for the House. At the close of the year 1679, as has been seen, John Frederick of Hanover had died without leaving a son; and to Ernest Augustus, on succeeding to his principality, the prospect of an enduring greatness for himself and his dynasty at last clearly opened. If the cordial relations between his surviving brother and himself could be maintained, the actual union in his hands, or in those of his descendants, of the entire territories of the Brunswick-Lüneburg House, was now merely a matter of time; and on the possession of so extensive and solid a dominion his dynastic ambition would be warranted in basing ulterior designs. Already personages of the greatest political consequence in Europe began to interest themselves in the fortunes of the House of Hanover, and in the immediate scheme of a marriage promising results of so high an importance. Hardly had Ernest Augustus and Sophia held their entry at Hanover, when, by the express advice of William of Orange, they at once recognised the ducal title of Eleonora. In the same year the august counsel of Louis XIV, still hopeful of conciliating the goodwill of the Brunswick-Lüneburg Dukes, was bestowed in favour of the match, through his minister at Celle, the Marquis d’Arcy, to whom the Duchess Eleonora spoke with gratification of the civilities of her sister-in-law. The Estates of Celle-Lüneburg, on the one hand, and those of Calenberg (Hanover), on the other, with a docility surprising after their former insistence on continued separation, declared that, if the marriage was actually concluded, they would consent to the establishment of the principle of primogeniture; and a law establishing this principle, the very coping-stone of Ernest Augustus’ dynastic policy, received the Imperial sanction in 1683, though it was only promulgated in the Brunswick-Lüneburg dominions, as part of the will of Ernest Augustus, on his death fifteen years afterwards. This provision was to entail upon Sophia even more personal unhappiness than the marriage of her eldest son itself; but a renunciation of her own wishes had by this time become a law of her life.
In September, 1682, the Duchess Sophia informed her ubiquitous correspondent, the Abbé Balati, that henceforth Hanover and Celle would reckon as a single State—a result so advantageous as to warrant defiance of the German genealogical scruple about being equally grand on both sides of the tree. Prince George Lewis had made up his mind, and his mother trusted that he had done so under a good constellation.[83] On November the 21st following, the wedding of George Lewis and Sophia Dorothea took place at Celle, and was celebrated by Leibniz (such are the vicissitudes of Court life) in indifferent French verse. Nothing is known as to the early married life of a husband and wife who were no better, though perhaps not much worse, assorted than most couples united under similar conditions. Sophia Dorothea’s was an indolent and emotional nature; the habits of George Lewis were active; he was fond of the camp and the chase; and his bearing was characterised by a reserve which afterwards became stolidity. But, in these years, he was much absent from home, continuing his military career in the Imperial service, taking an honourable part in the historic achievement of the rescue of Vienna by Sobiesky, in 1683, and distinguishing himself two years later at the capture of Neuhäusel in the Hungarian campaign of Duke Charles of Lorraine against the Turks. Sophia Dorothea bore her husband two children—George Augustus (afterwards King George II), in 1683, and Sophia Dorothea (afterwards Queen of Prussia and mother of Frederick the Great), in 1685. Some letters of her mother-in-law, in 1684 and the following year, show that Eleonora’s daughter had not been successful in conciliating permanently the sympathies of Sophia, whose politeness towards the mother had not developed into any warm goodwill towards the daughter; but the complaints against Sophia Dorothea are not very serious, and rather suggest a spoilt child in the company of an unsympathetic but by no means stony-hearted relative.
The Memoirs of Sophia break off early in 1681, when, after a visit to the Queen of Denmark in the latter part of the preceding year, she was again left alone by her erratic husband, who had departed on one of his pilgrimages across the Alps, although she was plunged into grief by the news of the death of her beloved brother, the Elector Palatine. Her eldest sister, the good Abbess of Herford, had, as we saw, died a few months before their brother, and, in her solitary sorrow, Sophia wrote that it would not be long before she followed them. When, therefore, these Memoirs are made to serve as a principal source for her biography, the troubled circumstances of the time in which they were actually written should be taken into account. She little knew how soon a new epoch in her life was to begin, destined to impose upon her a responsibility as great as it was unexpected. With however prudent a self-restraint she might meet it, neither in her own eyes nor in those of the numerous observers who henceforth watched every one of her actions or movements, could it fail to add signally to her personal importance. And although, according to modern notions, the Hanover of the later seventeenth century might seem to differ but slightly, in its capacity to become a theatre of political transactions of moment, from the neighbouring city of Osnabrück, yet it should be remembered how strenuously the deceased Duke John Frederick had exerted himself to make his capital one of those secondary centres of political and general intellectual life which, in this age, paid the homage of imitation to Versailles. To him was owing the creation of a library which, if it could not rival that for which Sophia’s paternal ancestors had found a home at Heidelberg, was fostered by the care of Leibniz, whose services were the noblest legacy left by his first Hanoverian patron, John Frederick, to his successor, Ernest Augustus—a legacy of which the value was to be so fully recognised by Sophia. In other respects, too—notably in that of the attention now given at Hanover to the cultivation of the dramatic and musical arts—court and town had been transformed under John Frederick’s liberal régime; and an impulse had been given which his younger brother sought, after his own fashion, to sustain. Leibniz, of course, remained in his service, and was treated with a consideration which he owed to his usefulness both as publicist and historiographer, and which, thanks to the favour of Sophia, was never discontinued during her husband’s reign. Relations with Italy and Italian musical art were certain to be kept up under so constant a lover of Venice as Ernest Augustus; an Italian opera was again established at Hanover under the conduct of the distinguished Venetian composer, Agostino Steffani;[84] and the Abbate Hortensio Mauro, who took up his residence at Hanover about 1681, maintained at the Court of Ernest Augustus and Sophia a lasting interest in the Italian language and in Italian art, while himself becoming a trusted servant and friend of the Electoral family. The Court of Ernest Augustus and France were from the first mainly connected with his love of foreign luxury and elegance of all kinds. So early as 1668, Baron Platen had secured for him a Parisian maître d’hôtel; and, nearly every year, the Duke sent his valet de chambre to Paris, there to consult a resident agent as to the requisites of Sophia and her ladies. The Palace at Hanover was greatly ‘beautified,’ though a great deal more money was spent on decoration of one kind or another than on architecture proper. It is reckoned that on the former Ernest Augustus expended nearly 25,000 dollars at Hanover. Tapestry and pictures were imported from Holland, and particular attention was given to stucco-work, under the direction of an Italian maestro named Sartorio. In course of time, Sophia could summon French artists to conduct the weaving of a great Gobelin tapestry, which was carried out in the Reithaus at Hanover, and which represented scenes from the life of Duke George of Brunswick-Lüneburg, the ancestor of the Hanoverian dynasty, and from that of Sophia’s mother, the Queen of Bohemia. In 1695, the interior of the Schlosskirche was completely gilded. With the exception of the great Rittersaal, however, a very pompous and heavy structure, nearly all the renovated palace buildings were destroyed by fire in 1741. Ernest Augustus also built, in direct connexion with the Palace, a new opera-house.[85] From the year 1684 we have an account—merum mel—of a visit paid to Hanover (following on one to Celle) by the celebrated French traveller Tavernier, whom Duke Ernest Augustus came over (from Herrenhausen?) to welcome, together with visitors so august as the Duchess Dowager of East Frisia and so distinguished as the celebrated Brandenburg diplomatist and statesman, Paul Fuchs. The old gentleman (Tavernier was then over eighty), who mentions that the Duke spent Sunday morning at the ‘temple’ and the afternoon at a performance of his company of French comedians, was delighted both by the agreeable turn which the conversation took at dinner—viz. the subject of his own travels in Persia and India—and by the general urbanity and courteous liberality of his reception.[86] There can be no doubt but that in these respects there were few contemporary courts which outshone those of the Lüneburg Dukes. We shall see how, as time went on, Sophia did what in her lay to maintain around her a culture both higher and wider than would have specially commended itself to the personal tastes of her husband, or of her eldest son.